by Andrew Sullivan
Some readers think my continuing attempt to expose all the lies and flim-flam and bizarre behavior of Sarah Palin is now moot. She's history - they argue. Move on. I think she probably is history. Even Bill Kristol and his minions in the McCain-Palin campaign may not be able to resuscitate her political viability now. But even if she is history, she is history that matters.
Let's be real in a way the national media seems incapable of: this person should never have been placed on a national ticket in a mature democracy. She was incapable of running a town in Alaska competently. The impulsive, unvetted selection of a total unknown, with no knowledge of or interest in the wider world, as a replacement president remains one of the most disturbing events in modern American history. That the press felt required to maintain a facade of normalcy for two months - and not to declare the whole thing a farce from start to finish - is a sign of their total loss of nerve. That the Palin absurdity should follow the two-term presidency of another individual utterly out of his depth in national government is particularly troubling. 46 percent of Americans voted for the possibility of this blank slate as president because she somehow echoed their own sense of religious or cultural "identity". Until we figure out how this happened, we will not be able to prevent it from happening again. And we have to find a way to prevent this from recurring.
It happened because John McCain is an incompetent and a cynic and reckless beyond measure. To have picked someone he'd only met once before, without any serious vetting procedure, revealed McCain as an utterly unserious character, a man whose devotion to the shallowest form of political gamesmanship trumped concern for his country's or his party's interest. We need a full accounting of the vetting process: who was responsible for this act of political malpractice? How could a veep not be vetted in any serious way? Why was she not asked to withdraw as soon as the facts of her massive ignorance and delusional psyche were revealed?
The Palin nightmare also happened because a tiny faction of political professionals has far too much sway in the GOP and conservative circles. This was Bill Kristol's achievement.
It was a final product of the now-exhausted strategy of fomenting fundamentalist resentment to elect politicians dedicated to the defense of Israel and the extension of American military hegemony in every corner of the globe. Palin was the reductio ad absurdum of this mindset: a mannequin candidate, easily controlled ideologically, deployed to fool and corral the resentful and the frightened, removed from serious scrutiny and sold on propaganda networks like a food product.
This deluded and delusional woman still doesn't understand what happened to her; still has no self-awareness; and has never been forced to accept her obvious limitations. She cannot keep even the most trivial story straight; she repeats untruths with a ferocity and calm that is reserved only to the clinically unhinged; she has the educational level of a high school drop-out; and regards ignorance as some kind of achievement. It is excruciating to watch her - but more excruciating to watch those who feel obliged to defend her.
Her candidacy, in short, was indefensible. It remains indefensible. Until the mainstream media, the GOP establishment, and the conservative intelligentsia acknowledge the depth of their error, this blog will keep demanding basic accountability.
My point is not to persecute or hound some random person. I wish I had never heard of Sarah Palin. I wish this nightmare had never happened. I wish totally innocent by-standers, like Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston and Heather Bruce and Trig Palin, had not had their lives disrupted by this circus. It's distressing to everyone, which is why most journalists left many aspects of this charade alone. But Palin is claiming vindication, is on every cable show, is at the National Governors Association Conference, and is touted as a future leader of the GOP. There comes a point at which you have to simply call a time out and insist that this farce cease and some basic accountability and transparency be restored to the process. Since no one else seems willing to do so, the Dish will stay on the case. So where are those medical records anyway?
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Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Beware The Obama Hype
What "Change" In America Really Means
By John Pilger
November 12, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" - -My first visit to Texas was in 1968, on the fifth anniversary of the assassination of president John F Kennedy in Dallas. I drove south, following the line of telegraph poles to the small town of Midlothian, where I met Penn Jones Jr, editor of the Midlothian Mirror. Except for his drawl and fine boots, everything about Penn was the antithesis of the Texas stereotype. Having exposed the racists of the John Birch Society, his printing press had been repeatedly firebombed. Week after week, he painstakingly assembled evidence that all but demolished the official version of Kennedy's murder.
This was journalism as it had been before corporate journalism was invented, before the first schools of journalism were set up and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around those whose "professionalism" and "objectivity" carried an unspoken obligation to ensure that news and opinion were in tune with an establishment consensus, regardless of the truth. Journalists such as Penn Jones, independent of vested power, indefatigable and principled, often reflect ordinary American attitudes, which have seldom conformed to the stereotypes promoted by the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic. Read American Dreams: Lost and Found by the masterly Studs Terkel, who died the other day, or scan the surveys that unerringly attribute enlightened views to a majority who believe that "government should care for those who cannot care for themselves" and are prepared to pay higher taxes for universal health care, who support nuclear disarmament and want their troops out of other people's countries.
Returning to Texas, I am struck again by those so unlike the redneck stereotype, in spite of the burden of a form of brainwashing placed on most Americans from a tender age: that theirs is the most superior society in the history of the world, and all means are justified, including the spilling of copious blood, in maintaining that superiority.
That is the subtext of Barack Obama's "oratory". He says he wants to build up US military power; and he threatens to ignite a new war in Pakistan, killing yet more brown-skinned people. That will bring tears, too. Unlike those on election night, these other tears will be unseen in Chicago and London. This is not to doubt the sincerity of much of the response to Obama's election, which happened not because of the unction that has passed for news reporting from America since 4 November (e.g. "liberal Americans smiled and the world smiled with them") but for the same reasons that millions of angry emails were sent to the White House and Congress when the "bailout" of Wall Street was revealed, and because most Americans are fed up with war.
Two years ago, this anti-war vote installed a Democratic majority in Congress, only to watch the Democrats hand over more money to George W Bush to continue his blood fest. For his part, the "anti-war" Obama never said the illegal invasion of Iraq was wrong, merely that it was a "mistake". Thereafter, he voted in to give Bush what he wanted. Yes, Obama's election is historic, a symbol of great change to many. But it is equally true that the American elite has grown adept at using the black middle and management class. The courageous Martin Luther King recognised this when he linked the human rights of black Americans with the human rights of the Vietnamese, then being slaughtered by a liberal Democratic administration. And he was shot. In striking contrast, a young black major serving in Vietnam, Colin Powell, was used to "investigate" and whitewash the infamous My Lai massacre. As Bush's secretary of state, Powell was often described as a "liberal" and was considered ideal to lie to the United Nations about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Condaleezza Rice, lauded as a successful black woman, has worked assiduously to deny the Palestinians justice.
Obama's first two crucial appointments represent a denial of the wishes of his supporters on the principal issues on which they voted. The vice-president-elect, Joe Biden, is a proud warmaker and Zionist. Rahm Emanuel, who is to be the all-important White House chief of staff, is a fervent "neoliberal" devoted to the doctrine that led to the present economic collapse and impoverishment of millions. He is also an "Israel-first" Zionist who served in the Israeli army and opposes meaningful justice for the Palestinians – an injustice that is at the root of Muslim people's loathing of the United States and the spawning of jihadism.
No serious scrutiny of this is permitted within the histrionics of Obamamania, just as no serious scrutiny of the betrayal of the majority of black South Africans was permitted within the "Mandela moment". This is especially marked in Britain, where America's divine right to "lead" is important to elite British interests. The once respected Observer newspaper, which supported Bush's war in Iraq, echoing his fabricated evidence, now announces, without evidence, that "America has restored the world's faith in its ideals". These "ideals", which Obama will swear to uphold, have overseen, since 1945, the destruction of 50 governments, including democracies, and 30 popular liberation movements, causing the deaths of countless men, women and children.
None of this was uttered during the election campaign. Had it been allowed, there might even have been recognition that liberalism as a narrow, supremely arrogant, war-making ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Prior to Blair's criminal warmaking, ideology was denied by him and his media mystics. "Blair can be a beacon to the world," declared the Guardian in 1997. "[He is] turning leadership into an art form."
Today, merely insert "Obama". As for historic moments, there is another that has gone unreported but is well under way – liberal democracy's shift towards a corporate dictatorship, managed by people regardless of ethnicity, with the media as its clichéd façade. "True democracy," wrote Penn Jones Jr, the Texas truth-teller, "is constant vigilance: not thinking the way you're meant to think and keeping your eyes wide open at all times."
www.johnpilger.com
By John Pilger
November 12, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" - -My first visit to Texas was in 1968, on the fifth anniversary of the assassination of president John F Kennedy in Dallas. I drove south, following the line of telegraph poles to the small town of Midlothian, where I met Penn Jones Jr, editor of the Midlothian Mirror. Except for his drawl and fine boots, everything about Penn was the antithesis of the Texas stereotype. Having exposed the racists of the John Birch Society, his printing press had been repeatedly firebombed. Week after week, he painstakingly assembled evidence that all but demolished the official version of Kennedy's murder.
This was journalism as it had been before corporate journalism was invented, before the first schools of journalism were set up and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around those whose "professionalism" and "objectivity" carried an unspoken obligation to ensure that news and opinion were in tune with an establishment consensus, regardless of the truth. Journalists such as Penn Jones, independent of vested power, indefatigable and principled, often reflect ordinary American attitudes, which have seldom conformed to the stereotypes promoted by the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic. Read American Dreams: Lost and Found by the masterly Studs Terkel, who died the other day, or scan the surveys that unerringly attribute enlightened views to a majority who believe that "government should care for those who cannot care for themselves" and are prepared to pay higher taxes for universal health care, who support nuclear disarmament and want their troops out of other people's countries.
Returning to Texas, I am struck again by those so unlike the redneck stereotype, in spite of the burden of a form of brainwashing placed on most Americans from a tender age: that theirs is the most superior society in the history of the world, and all means are justified, including the spilling of copious blood, in maintaining that superiority.
That is the subtext of Barack Obama's "oratory". He says he wants to build up US military power; and he threatens to ignite a new war in Pakistan, killing yet more brown-skinned people. That will bring tears, too. Unlike those on election night, these other tears will be unseen in Chicago and London. This is not to doubt the sincerity of much of the response to Obama's election, which happened not because of the unction that has passed for news reporting from America since 4 November (e.g. "liberal Americans smiled and the world smiled with them") but for the same reasons that millions of angry emails were sent to the White House and Congress when the "bailout" of Wall Street was revealed, and because most Americans are fed up with war.
Two years ago, this anti-war vote installed a Democratic majority in Congress, only to watch the Democrats hand over more money to George W Bush to continue his blood fest. For his part, the "anti-war" Obama never said the illegal invasion of Iraq was wrong, merely that it was a "mistake". Thereafter, he voted in to give Bush what he wanted. Yes, Obama's election is historic, a symbol of great change to many. But it is equally true that the American elite has grown adept at using the black middle and management class. The courageous Martin Luther King recognised this when he linked the human rights of black Americans with the human rights of the Vietnamese, then being slaughtered by a liberal Democratic administration. And he was shot. In striking contrast, a young black major serving in Vietnam, Colin Powell, was used to "investigate" and whitewash the infamous My Lai massacre. As Bush's secretary of state, Powell was often described as a "liberal" and was considered ideal to lie to the United Nations about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Condaleezza Rice, lauded as a successful black woman, has worked assiduously to deny the Palestinians justice.
Obama's first two crucial appointments represent a denial of the wishes of his supporters on the principal issues on which they voted. The vice-president-elect, Joe Biden, is a proud warmaker and Zionist. Rahm Emanuel, who is to be the all-important White House chief of staff, is a fervent "neoliberal" devoted to the doctrine that led to the present economic collapse and impoverishment of millions. He is also an "Israel-first" Zionist who served in the Israeli army and opposes meaningful justice for the Palestinians – an injustice that is at the root of Muslim people's loathing of the United States and the spawning of jihadism.
No serious scrutiny of this is permitted within the histrionics of Obamamania, just as no serious scrutiny of the betrayal of the majority of black South Africans was permitted within the "Mandela moment". This is especially marked in Britain, where America's divine right to "lead" is important to elite British interests. The once respected Observer newspaper, which supported Bush's war in Iraq, echoing his fabricated evidence, now announces, without evidence, that "America has restored the world's faith in its ideals". These "ideals", which Obama will swear to uphold, have overseen, since 1945, the destruction of 50 governments, including democracies, and 30 popular liberation movements, causing the deaths of countless men, women and children.
None of this was uttered during the election campaign. Had it been allowed, there might even have been recognition that liberalism as a narrow, supremely arrogant, war-making ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Prior to Blair's criminal warmaking, ideology was denied by him and his media mystics. "Blair can be a beacon to the world," declared the Guardian in 1997. "[He is] turning leadership into an art form."
Today, merely insert "Obama". As for historic moments, there is another that has gone unreported but is well under way – liberal democracy's shift towards a corporate dictatorship, managed by people regardless of ethnicity, with the media as its clichéd façade. "True democracy," wrote Penn Jones Jr, the Texas truth-teller, "is constant vigilance: not thinking the way you're meant to think and keeping your eyes wide open at all times."
www.johnpilger.com
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
On Veterans Day, Don't Forget About the War
by Aaron Glantz
The War in Iraq has disappeared from the headlines. The ongoing economic crisis has Americans looking inward, wondering if they can keep their homes and their jobs, with little interest in death and destruction half a world away. According to the Pew Research Center, media coverage of the war has plummeted from an average of 15 percent of stories in July 2007, to 3 percent this February, to just 2 percent of stories during the last week of October.
The war also disappeared as an issue in the presidential campaign. Both Barack Obama and John McCain barely mentioned the war in Iraq in their final debate. In his historic victory speech, Obama said "Iraq" only once. Some say the election results show Americans demanding a "change," and in many ways they do. But they also show a collective desire to forget.
Most Americans want to put the war behind them, but this feeling is based not on a coherent critique but on a kind of collective exhaustion. In many ways, we as a country find ourselves in a mood like the one towards the end of the Vietnam War: we are tired and simply want to move on and forget the conflict ever happened.
Yet this feeling can come at a great cost, because it is this same dynamic that led to the betrayal of more than three million Vietnam veterans.
"When I go through airports I see soldiers just sitting up against a wall...by themselves," says therapist and Vietnam veteran Shad Meshad, who heads up the National Veterans Foundation. "No one goes up to them; that positive energy toward them has faded. No one is spitting or shouting, but they're still left with the fact that they're responsible for what they did or didn't do, and they're supposed to think about that alone."
Given the experience of Vietnam vets, Meshad believes that the American people ignore their veterans at their own peril. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, eighteen veterans commit suicide every day and 200,000 sleep homeless on the streets on any given night. By 1986, the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey reported that almost half of all male Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic-stress disorder had been arrested or jailed at least once--34.2 percent had been jailed more than once, and 11.5 percent had been convicted of a felony.
"We're going to repeat that same thing, I can sense it," Meshad says, "if we don't take action and Congress doesn't create services to help these folks over the next ten or fifteen years."
Indeed, there are already many signs that history is repeating itself. Consider the implications of an April 2008 survey by the Rand Corporation; it found that a majority of the 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffering from post-traumatic-stress disorder and of the 320,000 with traumatic brain injury are not receiving help from the Pentagon and VA medical systems. In its study, Rand noted that the federal government fails to care for war veterans at its own peril--noting PTSD and TBI "can have far-reaching and damaging consequences."
"Individuals afflicted with these conditions face higher risks for other psychological problems and for attempting suicide. They have higher rates of unhealthy behaviors--such as smoking, overeating, and unsafe sex--and higher rates of physical health problems and mortality. Individuals with these conditions also tend to miss more work or report being less productive," the report said. "These conditions can impair relationships, disrupt marriages, aggravate the difficulties of parenting, and cause problems in children that may extend the consequences of combat trauma across generations."
"These consequences can have a high economic toll," the report continued. "However, most attempts to measure the costs of these conditions focus only on medical costs to the government. Yet, direct costs of treatment are only a fraction of the total costs related to mental health and cognitive conditions. Far higher are the long-term individual and societal costs stemming from lost productivity, reduced quality of life, homelessness, domestic violence, the strain on families, and suicide. Delivering effective care and restoring veterans to full mental health have the potential to reduce these longer-term costs significantly."
There is hope in this story, though.
When Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, America will have a President who has shown an interest in and commitment to caring for America's veterans. As a senator, Obama supported increased funding for the VA and an expanded GI Bill. His campaign platform sounded all the right notes about increasing the number of mental health providers, reforming the government's bureaucratic disability-claims system, and increasing the number of Vet Centers, where returning veterans can find community as they make the difficult transition from war to civilian life.
But taking those steps will require hard work and support from the public that amounts to more than just lip service to "supporting the troops." We must stay engaged on the issue of Iraq and our government's treatment of its veterans and create an atmosphere where a repeat of the tragedy that followed the Vietnam War will not be tolerated. If we don't, Barack Obama may follow our lead and rush quickly past the veteran who's sleeping homeless on the street.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
Independent journalist Aaron Glantz reported extensively from Iraq from 2003-05 and has been covering the stories of American military veterans since his return. He is author of How America Lost Iraq (Penguin) and the forthcoming War Comes Home (UC Press). He edits the website www.warcomeshome.org, a project of radio station KPFA-FM.
The War in Iraq has disappeared from the headlines. The ongoing economic crisis has Americans looking inward, wondering if they can keep their homes and their jobs, with little interest in death and destruction half a world away. According to the Pew Research Center, media coverage of the war has plummeted from an average of 15 percent of stories in July 2007, to 3 percent this February, to just 2 percent of stories during the last week of October.
The war also disappeared as an issue in the presidential campaign. Both Barack Obama and John McCain barely mentioned the war in Iraq in their final debate. In his historic victory speech, Obama said "Iraq" only once. Some say the election results show Americans demanding a "change," and in many ways they do. But they also show a collective desire to forget.
Most Americans want to put the war behind them, but this feeling is based not on a coherent critique but on a kind of collective exhaustion. In many ways, we as a country find ourselves in a mood like the one towards the end of the Vietnam War: we are tired and simply want to move on and forget the conflict ever happened.
Yet this feeling can come at a great cost, because it is this same dynamic that led to the betrayal of more than three million Vietnam veterans.
"When I go through airports I see soldiers just sitting up against a wall...by themselves," says therapist and Vietnam veteran Shad Meshad, who heads up the National Veterans Foundation. "No one goes up to them; that positive energy toward them has faded. No one is spitting or shouting, but they're still left with the fact that they're responsible for what they did or didn't do, and they're supposed to think about that alone."
Given the experience of Vietnam vets, Meshad believes that the American people ignore their veterans at their own peril. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, eighteen veterans commit suicide every day and 200,000 sleep homeless on the streets on any given night. By 1986, the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey reported that almost half of all male Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic-stress disorder had been arrested or jailed at least once--34.2 percent had been jailed more than once, and 11.5 percent had been convicted of a felony.
"We're going to repeat that same thing, I can sense it," Meshad says, "if we don't take action and Congress doesn't create services to help these folks over the next ten or fifteen years."
Indeed, there are already many signs that history is repeating itself. Consider the implications of an April 2008 survey by the Rand Corporation; it found that a majority of the 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffering from post-traumatic-stress disorder and of the 320,000 with traumatic brain injury are not receiving help from the Pentagon and VA medical systems. In its study, Rand noted that the federal government fails to care for war veterans at its own peril--noting PTSD and TBI "can have far-reaching and damaging consequences."
"Individuals afflicted with these conditions face higher risks for other psychological problems and for attempting suicide. They have higher rates of unhealthy behaviors--such as smoking, overeating, and unsafe sex--and higher rates of physical health problems and mortality. Individuals with these conditions also tend to miss more work or report being less productive," the report said. "These conditions can impair relationships, disrupt marriages, aggravate the difficulties of parenting, and cause problems in children that may extend the consequences of combat trauma across generations."
"These consequences can have a high economic toll," the report continued. "However, most attempts to measure the costs of these conditions focus only on medical costs to the government. Yet, direct costs of treatment are only a fraction of the total costs related to mental health and cognitive conditions. Far higher are the long-term individual and societal costs stemming from lost productivity, reduced quality of life, homelessness, domestic violence, the strain on families, and suicide. Delivering effective care and restoring veterans to full mental health have the potential to reduce these longer-term costs significantly."
There is hope in this story, though.
When Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, America will have a President who has shown an interest in and commitment to caring for America's veterans. As a senator, Obama supported increased funding for the VA and an expanded GI Bill. His campaign platform sounded all the right notes about increasing the number of mental health providers, reforming the government's bureaucratic disability-claims system, and increasing the number of Vet Centers, where returning veterans can find community as they make the difficult transition from war to civilian life.
But taking those steps will require hard work and support from the public that amounts to more than just lip service to "supporting the troops." We must stay engaged on the issue of Iraq and our government's treatment of its veterans and create an atmosphere where a repeat of the tragedy that followed the Vietnam War will not be tolerated. If we don't, Barack Obama may follow our lead and rush quickly past the veteran who's sleeping homeless on the street.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
Independent journalist Aaron Glantz reported extensively from Iraq from 2003-05 and has been covering the stories of American military veterans since his return. He is author of How America Lost Iraq (Penguin) and the forthcoming War Comes Home (UC Press). He edits the website www.warcomeshome.org, a project of radio station KPFA-FM.
For What Did They Die?
by Joseph L. Galloway
It is autumn, and the air is crisp and cool at night at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
It gets very quiet at The Wall around midnight. The tourists have gone home, and are all tucked into bed.
A homeless Vietnam veteran patrols the black granite panels. He tells us that he has cancer and is having a hard time getting any benefits from the Veterans Administration. He lives in a mission that houses those who have nowhere else to go, but the doors don't open until 11 p.m.
He sees my interest in Panel 3-East, the third panel to the east of the apex of the memorial, and he asks if I was there at the Ia Drang Valley battles that contributed 305 of the names that are on that panel. I nod, and he grows animated. "Oh, I know these guys well. Or at least I know their names." He begins calling the roll to prove it: "Henry T. Herrick, John Geoghegan, Willie Godboldt, Travis Poss, Carl Palmer, Wilbur Curry, Thomas C. Metsker . . . ."
Twenty, then 30 of the names trip off his lips. "I tell people about them when they ask."
So do I.
We slip a few bucks into his hand for something to eat and he wanders off into the night, heading for the mission and a cot where he can rest his head until 7 a.m., when he and the other homeless are shooed out to begin another day of waiting for something good, finally, to happen to them.
I hope that he lives long enough to collect some benefits and get some medical help from the VA, although given the 6- 8-month backlog in processing veterans' claims, there's no guarantee that he will.
I stand before Panel 3-East and slowly scan those names, remembering their stories, their hometowns, their wives and children, remembering, too, how and where they died and what it all means.
Did they die so that a brother veteran can die waiting in line for a little help from the nation that sent them all off to war in the prime of their youth?
Did they die so that four decades later, an American president and his cronies could start another needless war in a far-off land, a war that to date has dragged on almost as long as the one they fought in Southeast Asia?
Did they die so that wounded veterans of that war could come home to a lot of "Welcome Home" greetings and a lot of "Support Our Troops" bumper stickers, but facing the same fight that America's veterans have always faced when they try to get treatment and benefits from our Army and our Veterans Administration?
Did they die so that an administration full of draft dodgers and draft avoiders and almost bereft of anyone who ever wore a uniform or heard a shot fired in anger could prance around presenting themselves as wartime leaders?
Did they die so that 10,000 craven politicians could stand on bandstands and make speeches full of empty praise for those who protect and defend this country and make empty promises of how they guarantee that our wounded, our new veterans, will be treated better than their fathers and grandfathers were when they came home from their wars?
The men and women who wear the uniform today are, many of them, on their fourth or fifth combat tours in Afghanistan or Iraq. They and their families do all the suffering and sacrificing for the rest of us.
Meanwhile over in the Pentagon, the bean counters run their computers and come up with the good news: The economic meltdown in America, the growing ranks of the unemployed, the complete lack of work or prospect of a decent future in the rural and urban backwaters of a great nation make for a boom in enlistments in our voluntary military.
If you sign on the bottom line because you have no other alternative, no other way out of nowhereville, are you really a volunteer?
The bands will play, and the old veterans will march proudly and the politicians will run their mouths this Veterans Day, just as they do every Veterans Day.
And the 400,000 dead of World War II and the 40,000 dead of Korea and the 58,260 dead of Vietnam and the 4,500 dead of Iraq and Afghanistan will rest silent and uneasy under the modest white marble tombstones that a grateful nation has provided them free of charge.
Across town, an old and ailing veteran of one of those wars will line up tonight for a cot in a mission and wonder whether he can live long enough to collect from the bureaucrats what we owe him.
On Army posts around the nation, the battalions and brigades and divisions are either just coming home after a year or more at war while other battalions and brigades are just saying their goodbyes and heading back out on their third or fourth or fifth deployments.
"Where have all the flowers gone?
Gone for soldiers, every one.
When will they ever learn?"
© Copyright 2008, The McClatchy Washington Bureau
Joseph L. Galloway, a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers, is the co-author, with Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, of "We Were Soldiers Once... and Young," a story of the first large-scale ground battle of the Vietnam War.
It is autumn, and the air is crisp and cool at night at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
It gets very quiet at The Wall around midnight. The tourists have gone home, and are all tucked into bed.
A homeless Vietnam veteran patrols the black granite panels. He tells us that he has cancer and is having a hard time getting any benefits from the Veterans Administration. He lives in a mission that houses those who have nowhere else to go, but the doors don't open until 11 p.m.
He sees my interest in Panel 3-East, the third panel to the east of the apex of the memorial, and he asks if I was there at the Ia Drang Valley battles that contributed 305 of the names that are on that panel. I nod, and he grows animated. "Oh, I know these guys well. Or at least I know their names." He begins calling the roll to prove it: "Henry T. Herrick, John Geoghegan, Willie Godboldt, Travis Poss, Carl Palmer, Wilbur Curry, Thomas C. Metsker . . . ."
Twenty, then 30 of the names trip off his lips. "I tell people about them when they ask."
So do I.
We slip a few bucks into his hand for something to eat and he wanders off into the night, heading for the mission and a cot where he can rest his head until 7 a.m., when he and the other homeless are shooed out to begin another day of waiting for something good, finally, to happen to them.
I hope that he lives long enough to collect some benefits and get some medical help from the VA, although given the 6- 8-month backlog in processing veterans' claims, there's no guarantee that he will.
I stand before Panel 3-East and slowly scan those names, remembering their stories, their hometowns, their wives and children, remembering, too, how and where they died and what it all means.
Did they die so that a brother veteran can die waiting in line for a little help from the nation that sent them all off to war in the prime of their youth?
Did they die so that four decades later, an American president and his cronies could start another needless war in a far-off land, a war that to date has dragged on almost as long as the one they fought in Southeast Asia?
Did they die so that wounded veterans of that war could come home to a lot of "Welcome Home" greetings and a lot of "Support Our Troops" bumper stickers, but facing the same fight that America's veterans have always faced when they try to get treatment and benefits from our Army and our Veterans Administration?
Did they die so that an administration full of draft dodgers and draft avoiders and almost bereft of anyone who ever wore a uniform or heard a shot fired in anger could prance around presenting themselves as wartime leaders?
Did they die so that 10,000 craven politicians could stand on bandstands and make speeches full of empty praise for those who protect and defend this country and make empty promises of how they guarantee that our wounded, our new veterans, will be treated better than their fathers and grandfathers were when they came home from their wars?
The men and women who wear the uniform today are, many of them, on their fourth or fifth combat tours in Afghanistan or Iraq. They and their families do all the suffering and sacrificing for the rest of us.
Meanwhile over in the Pentagon, the bean counters run their computers and come up with the good news: The economic meltdown in America, the growing ranks of the unemployed, the complete lack of work or prospect of a decent future in the rural and urban backwaters of a great nation make for a boom in enlistments in our voluntary military.
If you sign on the bottom line because you have no other alternative, no other way out of nowhereville, are you really a volunteer?
The bands will play, and the old veterans will march proudly and the politicians will run their mouths this Veterans Day, just as they do every Veterans Day.
And the 400,000 dead of World War II and the 40,000 dead of Korea and the 58,260 dead of Vietnam and the 4,500 dead of Iraq and Afghanistan will rest silent and uneasy under the modest white marble tombstones that a grateful nation has provided them free of charge.
Across town, an old and ailing veteran of one of those wars will line up tonight for a cot in a mission and wonder whether he can live long enough to collect from the bureaucrats what we owe him.
On Army posts around the nation, the battalions and brigades and divisions are either just coming home after a year or more at war while other battalions and brigades are just saying their goodbyes and heading back out on their third or fourth or fifth deployments.
"Where have all the flowers gone?
Gone for soldiers, every one.
When will they ever learn?"
© Copyright 2008, The McClatchy Washington Bureau
Joseph L. Galloway, a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers, is the co-author, with Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, of "We Were Soldiers Once... and Young," a story of the first large-scale ground battle of the Vietnam War.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Obama, Rahm-bo and the End of the New American Century
Conned Again?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
If the change President-elect Obama has promised includes a halt to America’s wars of aggression and an end to the rip-off of taxpayers by powerful financial interests, what explains Obama’s choice of foreign and economic policy advisors? Indeed, Obama’s selection of Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff is a signal that change ended with Obama’s election. The only thing different about the new administration will be the faces.
Rahm Emanuel is a supporter of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Emanuel rose to prominence in the Democratic Party as a result of his fundraising connections to AIPAC. A strong supporter of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, he comes from a terrorist family. His father was a member of Irgun, a Jewish terrorist organization that used violence to drive the British and Palestinians out of Palestine in order to create the Jewish state. During the 1991 Gulf War, Rahm Emanuel volunteered to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. He was a member of the Freddie Mac board of directors and received $231,655 in directors fees in 2001. According to Wikipedia, “during the time Emanuel spent on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandals involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities.”
In “Hail to the Chief of Staff,” Alexander Cockburn describes Emanuel as “a super-Likudnik hawk,” who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 “made great efforts to knock out antiwar Democratic candidates.”
My despondent friends in the Israeli peace movement ask, “What is this man doing in Obama’s administration?”
Obama’s election was necessary as the only means Americans had to hold the Republicans accountable for their crimes against the Constitution and human rights, for their violations of US and international laws, for their lies and deceptions, and for their financial chicanery. As an editorial in Pravda put it, “Only Satan would have been worse than the Bush regime. Therefore it could be argued that the new administration in the USA could never be worse than the one which divorced the hearts and minds of Americans from their brothers in the international community, which appalled the rest of the world with shock and awe tactics that included concentration camps, torture, mass murder and utter disrespect for international law.”
But Obama’s advisers are drawn from the same gang of Washington thugs and Wall Street banksters as Bush’s. Richard Holbrooke, was an assistant secretary of state and ambassador in the Clinton administration. He implemented the policy to enlarge NATO and to place the military alliance on Russia’s border in contravention of Reagan’s promise to Gorbachev. Holbrooke is also associated with the Clinton administration’s illegal bombing of Serbia, a war crime that killed civilians and Chinese diplomats. If not a neocon himself, Holbrooke is closely allied with them.
Madeline Albright is the Clinton era secretary of state who told Leslie Stahl (60 Minutes) that the US policy of Iraq sanctions, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, had goals important enough to justify the children’s deaths. Albright’s infamous words: “we think the price is worth it.” Wikipedia reports that this immoralist served on the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange at the time of Dick Grasso’s $187.5 million compensation scandal.
Dennis Ross has long associations with the Israeli-Palestinian “peace negotiations.” A member of his Clinton era team, Aaron David Miller, wrote that during 1999-2000 the US negotiating team led by Ross acted as Israel’s lawyer: “we had to run everything by Israel first.” This “stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking. If we couldn't put proposals on the table without checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they said no, how effective could our mediation be?” According to Wikipedia, Ross is “chairman of a new Jerusalem-based think tank, the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, funded and founded by the Jewish Agency.”
Clearly, this is not a group of advisors that is going to halt America’s wars against Israel’s enemies or force the Israeli government to accept the necessary conditions for a real peace in the Middle East.
Ralph Nader predicted as much. In his “Open Letter to Barack Obama (November 3, 2008), Nader pointed out to Obama that his “transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights . . . to a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby” puts Obama at odds with “a majority of Jewish-Americans” and “64 per cent of Israelis.” Nader quotes the Israeli writer and peace advocate Uri Avnery’s description of Obama’s appearance before AIPAC as an appearance that “broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning.” Nader damns Obama for his “utter lack of political courage [for] surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention.” Carter, who achieved the only meaningful peace agreement between Israel and the Arabs, has been demonized by the powerful AIPAC lobby for criticizing Israel’s policy of apartheid toward the Palestinians whose territory Israel forcibly occupies.
Obama’s economic team is just as bad. Its star is Robert Rubin, the bankster who was secretary of the treasury in the Clinton administration. Rubin has responsibility for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and, thereby, responsibility for the current financial crisis. In his letter to Obama, Nader points out that Obama received unprecedented campaign contributions from corporate and Wall Street interests. “Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart.”
Obama’s victory speech was magnificent. The TV cameras scanning faces in the audience showed the hope and belief that propelled Obama into the presidency. But Obama cannot bring change to Washington. There is no one in the Washington crowd that he can appoint who is capable of bringing change. If Obama were to reach outside the usual crowd, anyone suspected of being a bringer of change could not get confirmed by the Senate. Powerful interest groups--AIPAC, the military-security complex, Wall Street--use their political influence to block unacceptable appointments.
As Alexander Cockburn said of Obama in a pre-eection column, column “never has the dead hand of the past had a ‘reform’ candidate so firmly by the windpipe.” Obama confirmed Cockburn’s verdict in his first press conference as president-elect. Disregarding the unanimous US National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran stopped working on nuclear weapons five years ago, and ignoring the continued certification by the International Atomic Energy Agency that none of the nuclear material for Iran’s civilian nuclear reactor has been diverted to weapons use, Obama sallied forth with the Israel Lobby’s propaganda and accused Iran of “development of a nuclear weapon” and vowing “to prevent that from happening.”
The change that is coming to America has nothing to do with Obama. Change is coming from the financial crisis brought on by Wall Street greed and irresponsibility, from the eroding role of the US dollar as reserve currency, from countless mortgage foreclosures, from the offshoring of millions of America’s best jobs, from a deepening recession, from pillars of American manufacturing--Ford and GM--begging the government for taxpayers’ money to stay alive, and from budget and trade deficits that are too large to be closed by normal means.
Traditionally, the government relies on monetary and fiscal policy to lift the economy out of recession. But easy money is not working. Interest rates are already low and monetary growth is already high, yet unemployment is rising. The budget deficit is already huge--a world record--and the red ink is not stimulating the economy. Can even lower interest rates and even higher budget deficits help an economy that has moved offshore, leaving behind jobless consumers overburdened with debt?
How much more can the government borrow? America’s foreign creditors are asking this question. An official organ of the Chinese ruling party recently called for Asian and European countries to “banish the US dollar from their direct trade relations, relying only on their own currencies.”
“Why,” asks another Chinese publication, “should China help the US to issue debt without end in the belief that the national credit of the US can expand without limit?”
The world has tired of American hegemony and had its fill of American arrogance. America’s reputation is in tatters: the financial debacle, endless red ink, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, rendition, torture, illegal wars based on lies and deception, disrespect for the sovereignty of other countries, war crimes, disregard for international law and the Geneva Conventions, the assault on habeas corpus and the separation of powers, a domestic police state, constant interference in the internal affairs of other countries, boundless hypocrisy.
The change that is coming is the end of American empire. The hegemon has run out of money and influence. Obama as “America’s First Black President” will lift hopes and, thus, allow the act to be carried on a little longer. But the New American Century is already over.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
If the change President-elect Obama has promised includes a halt to America’s wars of aggression and an end to the rip-off of taxpayers by powerful financial interests, what explains Obama’s choice of foreign and economic policy advisors? Indeed, Obama’s selection of Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff is a signal that change ended with Obama’s election. The only thing different about the new administration will be the faces.
Rahm Emanuel is a supporter of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Emanuel rose to prominence in the Democratic Party as a result of his fundraising connections to AIPAC. A strong supporter of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, he comes from a terrorist family. His father was a member of Irgun, a Jewish terrorist organization that used violence to drive the British and Palestinians out of Palestine in order to create the Jewish state. During the 1991 Gulf War, Rahm Emanuel volunteered to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. He was a member of the Freddie Mac board of directors and received $231,655 in directors fees in 2001. According to Wikipedia, “during the time Emanuel spent on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandals involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities.”
In “Hail to the Chief of Staff,” Alexander Cockburn describes Emanuel as “a super-Likudnik hawk,” who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 “made great efforts to knock out antiwar Democratic candidates.”
My despondent friends in the Israeli peace movement ask, “What is this man doing in Obama’s administration?”
Obama’s election was necessary as the only means Americans had to hold the Republicans accountable for their crimes against the Constitution and human rights, for their violations of US and international laws, for their lies and deceptions, and for their financial chicanery. As an editorial in Pravda put it, “Only Satan would have been worse than the Bush regime. Therefore it could be argued that the new administration in the USA could never be worse than the one which divorced the hearts and minds of Americans from their brothers in the international community, which appalled the rest of the world with shock and awe tactics that included concentration camps, torture, mass murder and utter disrespect for international law.”
But Obama’s advisers are drawn from the same gang of Washington thugs and Wall Street banksters as Bush’s. Richard Holbrooke, was an assistant secretary of state and ambassador in the Clinton administration. He implemented the policy to enlarge NATO and to place the military alliance on Russia’s border in contravention of Reagan’s promise to Gorbachev. Holbrooke is also associated with the Clinton administration’s illegal bombing of Serbia, a war crime that killed civilians and Chinese diplomats. If not a neocon himself, Holbrooke is closely allied with them.
Madeline Albright is the Clinton era secretary of state who told Leslie Stahl (60 Minutes) that the US policy of Iraq sanctions, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, had goals important enough to justify the children’s deaths. Albright’s infamous words: “we think the price is worth it.” Wikipedia reports that this immoralist served on the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange at the time of Dick Grasso’s $187.5 million compensation scandal.
Dennis Ross has long associations with the Israeli-Palestinian “peace negotiations.” A member of his Clinton era team, Aaron David Miller, wrote that during 1999-2000 the US negotiating team led by Ross acted as Israel’s lawyer: “we had to run everything by Israel first.” This “stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking. If we couldn't put proposals on the table without checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they said no, how effective could our mediation be?” According to Wikipedia, Ross is “chairman of a new Jerusalem-based think tank, the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, funded and founded by the Jewish Agency.”
Clearly, this is not a group of advisors that is going to halt America’s wars against Israel’s enemies or force the Israeli government to accept the necessary conditions for a real peace in the Middle East.
Ralph Nader predicted as much. In his “Open Letter to Barack Obama (November 3, 2008), Nader pointed out to Obama that his “transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights . . . to a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby” puts Obama at odds with “a majority of Jewish-Americans” and “64 per cent of Israelis.” Nader quotes the Israeli writer and peace advocate Uri Avnery’s description of Obama’s appearance before AIPAC as an appearance that “broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning.” Nader damns Obama for his “utter lack of political courage [for] surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention.” Carter, who achieved the only meaningful peace agreement between Israel and the Arabs, has been demonized by the powerful AIPAC lobby for criticizing Israel’s policy of apartheid toward the Palestinians whose territory Israel forcibly occupies.
Obama’s economic team is just as bad. Its star is Robert Rubin, the bankster who was secretary of the treasury in the Clinton administration. Rubin has responsibility for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and, thereby, responsibility for the current financial crisis. In his letter to Obama, Nader points out that Obama received unprecedented campaign contributions from corporate and Wall Street interests. “Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart.”
Obama’s victory speech was magnificent. The TV cameras scanning faces in the audience showed the hope and belief that propelled Obama into the presidency. But Obama cannot bring change to Washington. There is no one in the Washington crowd that he can appoint who is capable of bringing change. If Obama were to reach outside the usual crowd, anyone suspected of being a bringer of change could not get confirmed by the Senate. Powerful interest groups--AIPAC, the military-security complex, Wall Street--use their political influence to block unacceptable appointments.
As Alexander Cockburn said of Obama in a pre-eection column, column “never has the dead hand of the past had a ‘reform’ candidate so firmly by the windpipe.” Obama confirmed Cockburn’s verdict in his first press conference as president-elect. Disregarding the unanimous US National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran stopped working on nuclear weapons five years ago, and ignoring the continued certification by the International Atomic Energy Agency that none of the nuclear material for Iran’s civilian nuclear reactor has been diverted to weapons use, Obama sallied forth with the Israel Lobby’s propaganda and accused Iran of “development of a nuclear weapon” and vowing “to prevent that from happening.”
The change that is coming to America has nothing to do with Obama. Change is coming from the financial crisis brought on by Wall Street greed and irresponsibility, from the eroding role of the US dollar as reserve currency, from countless mortgage foreclosures, from the offshoring of millions of America’s best jobs, from a deepening recession, from pillars of American manufacturing--Ford and GM--begging the government for taxpayers’ money to stay alive, and from budget and trade deficits that are too large to be closed by normal means.
Traditionally, the government relies on monetary and fiscal policy to lift the economy out of recession. But easy money is not working. Interest rates are already low and monetary growth is already high, yet unemployment is rising. The budget deficit is already huge--a world record--and the red ink is not stimulating the economy. Can even lower interest rates and even higher budget deficits help an economy that has moved offshore, leaving behind jobless consumers overburdened with debt?
How much more can the government borrow? America’s foreign creditors are asking this question. An official organ of the Chinese ruling party recently called for Asian and European countries to “banish the US dollar from their direct trade relations, relying only on their own currencies.”
“Why,” asks another Chinese publication, “should China help the US to issue debt without end in the belief that the national credit of the US can expand without limit?”
The world has tired of American hegemony and had its fill of American arrogance. America’s reputation is in tatters: the financial debacle, endless red ink, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, rendition, torture, illegal wars based on lies and deception, disrespect for the sovereignty of other countries, war crimes, disregard for international law and the Geneva Conventions, the assault on habeas corpus and the separation of powers, a domestic police state, constant interference in the internal affairs of other countries, boundless hypocrisy.
The change that is coming is the end of American empire. The hegemon has run out of money and influence. Obama as “America’s First Black President” will lift hopes and, thus, allow the act to be carried on a little longer. But the New American Century is already over.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Nuclear smackdown in New Europe
By Mike Whitney
November 09, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" --- "US president-elect Barack Obama has told Polish President Lech Kaczynski he will go ahead with plans to build a missile defense shield in eastern Europe despite threats from Russia, Warsaw said on Saturday" AFP Warsaw
Dmitry Medvedev is a quiet and reflective man who enjoys reading novels, lifting weights and listening to rock and roll music. He has a large collection of vintage vinyl records. His favorite rock bands are Deep Purple, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. His parents were university professors who raised him in a crowded 500 sq ft apartment in Leningrad. He excelled at school and went on to become a lawyer before entering politics. He married his high school sweetheart, Svetlana Linnik, and is a close friend of former president Vladimir Putin.
Medvedev was elected President of Russia on March 2, 2008 in a landslide victory. He won over 70 percent of the vote. As Putin's hand-picked successor, the election was never really in doubt, although critics in the United States have challenged the fairness of the balloting. No one, however, questions Medvedev's public approval ratings, which are nearly as high as Putin's (who usually polls in the 80 percent range) Both leaders are extremely popular among working Russians.
Medvedev is a strong proponent of democracy and is deeply committed to an independent judiciary, private property and free markets. He is an honest and reasonable man who is also fiercely nationalistic.
This biographical information may help readers to form an opinion about a man who the western media has decided to destroy. Medvedev is not Putin's "puppet", a warmonger, or the "new Hitler". In fact, he is precisely the type of leader that the United States should be working with to deal with the critical issues of global poverty, energy depletion, climate change and the ongoing financial crisis. But that is unlikely to happen because Russia has frustrated Washington's ambitions in the Caucasus and is blocking Big Oil's access to vital reserves in the Caspian Basin. That's why Medvedev has been added to Washington's "enemies list".
Medvedev finds himself in the same position as Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--the axis of diesel-- both of who are regularly savaged by the media because they sit on massive oil reserves which are beyond the grasp of the transnational corporations. That's why most of what is written about Medvedev is nonsense. The same corporations that own the politicians own the media as well. Naturally, they want to demonize their rivals. In truth, most Americans would have a lot more in common with Medvedev than they would with Bush, Cheney or any of their "silver spoon" elitist cronies.
US relations with Russia have steadily deteriorated under George Bush. Bush ignored his father's promises not to push NATO into former Soviet territory and now is planning to deploy a nuclear missile system in Eastern Europe. Missile Defense poses a clear danger to Russia's national security. It integrates the United States entire nuclear capability--including space-based operations--with systems that are inside Russia's traditional sphere of influence. Putin summed it up like this in a press conference at the G-8 meetings:
"For the first time in history, there are elements of the US nuclear capability on the European continent. It simply changes the whole configuration of international security ... Of course, we have to respond to that."
The Bush administration is trying to achieve what nuclear weapons specialist, Francis A. Boyle, calls the "longstanding US policy of nuclear first-strike against Russia". By placing weapons systems and radar on Russia's borders the US will have a critical advantage that will disrupt the delicate balance of power. Medvedev cannot allow this to happen. His first responsibility is to ensure the security of the Russian people who are clearly at greater risk by the proposed system. The planned deployment must be stopped. This is not a negotiable point.
Russian/US relations reached a new low following the recent war in Georgia. The aggression was initiated by Georgia President Saakashvili who ordered the invasion of South Ossetia after dropping thousands of cluster bombs on civilian areas and leveling the capital of Tskhinvali. The media has blamed Russia for the conflict, but a new report by Human Rights Watch confirms that Georgia was the real perpetrator. The report, which was presented at the Convention on Conventional Weapons, "adds to a growing body of evidence of Georgian atrocities in the fighting....The group said Tuesday that Georgia...used cluster munitions extensively in the war, which began when Georgia launched a major artillery strike against South Ossetia, a breakaway Georgian enclave, prompting Russia to invade large swaths of Georgian territory." (New York Times)
Another report in the New York Times stated: "The accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on August 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.... The then senior OSCE representative in Georgia, Ryan Grist, said:
“It was clear to me that the attack was completely indiscriminate and disproportionate to any, if indeed there had been any, provocation...The attack was clearly, in my mind, an indiscriminate attack on the town, as a town.”
Mr. Grist has served as a military officer or diplomat in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Kosovo and Yugoslavia.(New York Times)
An unknown number of Russian civilians were killed in the aggression, which has fundamentally changed the political dynamic between Moscow and Washington. Just below the surface of diplomatic civility, a war is underway, which is why Russia is strengthening alliances in Central Asia and Latin America, opening naval bases in the Mediterranean, establishing energy corridors to Europe, and developing new weapons systems. Russia is not Iraq. It will be prepared if hostilities break out.
The war in South Ossetia was a turning point in US/Russo relations, as Medvedev points out:
"Events in the Caucasus dispelled whatever illusions people had remaining from the post-Soviet period. Those illusions were about the world being just and about the current security system being optimal." (Russia Today)
Medvedev also sees the war in South Ossetia as symptomatic of a larger and more deeply-rooted problem.
Medvedev: “A barbaric aggression against South Ossetia and the global financial crisis – two very different problems which nevertheless have common traits and a common origin...A local reckless enterprise provoked a rise of tensions far behind the region’s borders, in the whole of Europe, in the whole world. It called into question the efficiency of international security institutions and practically destabilized the basics of the world order. The lessons of mistakes and crises of 2008 proved to all the responsible nations that it is the time to act, and it is necessary to radically reform the political and economic system."
Medvedev is right. The present architecture for global security needs to be thoroughly revamped as does the global financial system. Unilateralism, preemption and the Bush Doctrine have only made the world a more dangerous place. So, too, Wall Street's disproportionate influence on financial markets has precipitated the worst crisis in the last 80 years. There needs to be a new order based on mutual cooperation and international law which establishes greater parity between the countries (and their currencies) and a renewed commitment to fundamental principles of national sovereignty and self determination. Superpower politics, wherein one nation arbitrarily imposes its will on all the others, has proved to be a failure. Unipolar rule must end for the sake of global security.
Medvedev: “I emphasize; we do not have a problem with the American people, we are not anti-American. We want to be partners with the new U.S. administration, and have good relations with the United States. Together with all countries interested we will create a really democratic model of relations. But the world cannot be ruled from one capital. Those who do not want to understand that will be only creating problems for themselves and for others."
RUSSIAN MISSILES IN EUROPE?
In his first State of the Nation speech on Thursday Medvedev addressed everything from South Ossetia, to terrorism, to Missile Defense, to a plan for global security. He said that he would deploy Iskander missiles in the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad if the US administration went ahead with its plans for a missile shield in Europe.
Obama's foreign policy advisers have taken Medvedev's warning as a "test" of the new president's mettle and persuaded him to publicly announce his commitment to Bush's Missile Defense system.
According to AFP: "US president-elect Barack Obama has told Polish President Lech Kaczynski he will go ahead with plans to build a missile defense shield in eastern Europe despite threats from Russia, Warsaw said on Saturday. The US wants to base 10 interceptor missiles in Poland plus a radar facility in the neighboring Czech Republic by 2011-2013 to complete a system already in place in the United States, Greenland and Britain."
Obama is walking into a trap. He should see that the proposed deployment is needlessly provocative and will only lead to further escalation. He's already facing two unfinished wars and a deepening recession; he doesn't need a nuclear confrontation with Russia. Marching in lockstep with the fanatical neocon agenda is not the "change" the American people were hoping for.
In his State of the Nation speech, Medvedev announced plans to make Russia a global financial center by the end of 2008.
Medvedev: "A package of bills forming the basis for the creation of one of the world's leading financial centers in Russia needs to be passed before the end of this year. This center should serve as the nucleus for an independent and competitive Russian financial system. Practical steps are needed to strengthen the ruble's role as an international settlement currency and to finally achieve the transition to settlements in rubles for gas and oil, over which we have, regrettably, taken a long time." (Russia Today)
Medvedev and Putin blame the United States for the current firestorm in the financial markets. Wall Street's sale of fraudulent subprime mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and other structured investments have pushed the global banking system to the brink of a meltdown. It all could have been avoided with sufficient oversight and regulation. Even so, Medvedev still remains committed to free markets and democracy.
Medvedev: "I want everyone to know: our goals are unchanged. Sharp fluctuations in the political and economic situation, turbulence of the world economy and even forced military and political tensions will not become the ground to dismount democratic institutions, nationalizing industries and the financial system.....Political freedom of citizens and their private property are untouchable....Any infringement of civil rights and freedoms, or any action that worsens the material position of citizens, is immoral and illegal."
While Russia's young president is looking for ways to strengthen a progressive agenda and emerge from the darkness of Soviet-era repression, the United States is still in the clutches of hawkish neocons, recalcitrant cold warriors and self-serving banking elites. Obama has a unique opportunity to reconcile past differences and collaborate on a shared vision of the future with his Kremlin counterpart, or he can put a knife to Moscow's throat and force Medvedev to repond. Which will it be?
From the Associated Press, Saturday Nov 8: "A Kremlin statement says Medvedev and Obama spoke by telephone on Saturday. Both parties 'expressed the determination to create constructive and positive interaction for the good of global stability and development.'"
International security is in everyone's best interest. Bush's Missile Defense System must be stopped.
November 09, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" --- "US president-elect Barack Obama has told Polish President Lech Kaczynski he will go ahead with plans to build a missile defense shield in eastern Europe despite threats from Russia, Warsaw said on Saturday" AFP Warsaw
Dmitry Medvedev is a quiet and reflective man who enjoys reading novels, lifting weights and listening to rock and roll music. He has a large collection of vintage vinyl records. His favorite rock bands are Deep Purple, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. His parents were university professors who raised him in a crowded 500 sq ft apartment in Leningrad. He excelled at school and went on to become a lawyer before entering politics. He married his high school sweetheart, Svetlana Linnik, and is a close friend of former president Vladimir Putin.
Medvedev was elected President of Russia on March 2, 2008 in a landslide victory. He won over 70 percent of the vote. As Putin's hand-picked successor, the election was never really in doubt, although critics in the United States have challenged the fairness of the balloting. No one, however, questions Medvedev's public approval ratings, which are nearly as high as Putin's (who usually polls in the 80 percent range) Both leaders are extremely popular among working Russians.
Medvedev is a strong proponent of democracy and is deeply committed to an independent judiciary, private property and free markets. He is an honest and reasonable man who is also fiercely nationalistic.
This biographical information may help readers to form an opinion about a man who the western media has decided to destroy. Medvedev is not Putin's "puppet", a warmonger, or the "new Hitler". In fact, he is precisely the type of leader that the United States should be working with to deal with the critical issues of global poverty, energy depletion, climate change and the ongoing financial crisis. But that is unlikely to happen because Russia has frustrated Washington's ambitions in the Caucasus and is blocking Big Oil's access to vital reserves in the Caspian Basin. That's why Medvedev has been added to Washington's "enemies list".
Medvedev finds himself in the same position as Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--the axis of diesel-- both of who are regularly savaged by the media because they sit on massive oil reserves which are beyond the grasp of the transnational corporations. That's why most of what is written about Medvedev is nonsense. The same corporations that own the politicians own the media as well. Naturally, they want to demonize their rivals. In truth, most Americans would have a lot more in common with Medvedev than they would with Bush, Cheney or any of their "silver spoon" elitist cronies.
US relations with Russia have steadily deteriorated under George Bush. Bush ignored his father's promises not to push NATO into former Soviet territory and now is planning to deploy a nuclear missile system in Eastern Europe. Missile Defense poses a clear danger to Russia's national security. It integrates the United States entire nuclear capability--including space-based operations--with systems that are inside Russia's traditional sphere of influence. Putin summed it up like this in a press conference at the G-8 meetings:
"For the first time in history, there are elements of the US nuclear capability on the European continent. It simply changes the whole configuration of international security ... Of course, we have to respond to that."
The Bush administration is trying to achieve what nuclear weapons specialist, Francis A. Boyle, calls the "longstanding US policy of nuclear first-strike against Russia". By placing weapons systems and radar on Russia's borders the US will have a critical advantage that will disrupt the delicate balance of power. Medvedev cannot allow this to happen. His first responsibility is to ensure the security of the Russian people who are clearly at greater risk by the proposed system. The planned deployment must be stopped. This is not a negotiable point.
Russian/US relations reached a new low following the recent war in Georgia. The aggression was initiated by Georgia President Saakashvili who ordered the invasion of South Ossetia after dropping thousands of cluster bombs on civilian areas and leveling the capital of Tskhinvali. The media has blamed Russia for the conflict, but a new report by Human Rights Watch confirms that Georgia was the real perpetrator. The report, which was presented at the Convention on Conventional Weapons, "adds to a growing body of evidence of Georgian atrocities in the fighting....The group said Tuesday that Georgia...used cluster munitions extensively in the war, which began when Georgia launched a major artillery strike against South Ossetia, a breakaway Georgian enclave, prompting Russia to invade large swaths of Georgian territory." (New York Times)
Another report in the New York Times stated: "The accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on August 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.... The then senior OSCE representative in Georgia, Ryan Grist, said:
“It was clear to me that the attack was completely indiscriminate and disproportionate to any, if indeed there had been any, provocation...The attack was clearly, in my mind, an indiscriminate attack on the town, as a town.”
Mr. Grist has served as a military officer or diplomat in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Kosovo and Yugoslavia.(New York Times)
An unknown number of Russian civilians were killed in the aggression, which has fundamentally changed the political dynamic between Moscow and Washington. Just below the surface of diplomatic civility, a war is underway, which is why Russia is strengthening alliances in Central Asia and Latin America, opening naval bases in the Mediterranean, establishing energy corridors to Europe, and developing new weapons systems. Russia is not Iraq. It will be prepared if hostilities break out.
The war in South Ossetia was a turning point in US/Russo relations, as Medvedev points out:
"Events in the Caucasus dispelled whatever illusions people had remaining from the post-Soviet period. Those illusions were about the world being just and about the current security system being optimal." (Russia Today)
Medvedev also sees the war in South Ossetia as symptomatic of a larger and more deeply-rooted problem.
Medvedev: “A barbaric aggression against South Ossetia and the global financial crisis – two very different problems which nevertheless have common traits and a common origin...A local reckless enterprise provoked a rise of tensions far behind the region’s borders, in the whole of Europe, in the whole world. It called into question the efficiency of international security institutions and practically destabilized the basics of the world order. The lessons of mistakes and crises of 2008 proved to all the responsible nations that it is the time to act, and it is necessary to radically reform the political and economic system."
Medvedev is right. The present architecture for global security needs to be thoroughly revamped as does the global financial system. Unilateralism, preemption and the Bush Doctrine have only made the world a more dangerous place. So, too, Wall Street's disproportionate influence on financial markets has precipitated the worst crisis in the last 80 years. There needs to be a new order based on mutual cooperation and international law which establishes greater parity between the countries (and their currencies) and a renewed commitment to fundamental principles of national sovereignty and self determination. Superpower politics, wherein one nation arbitrarily imposes its will on all the others, has proved to be a failure. Unipolar rule must end for the sake of global security.
Medvedev: “I emphasize; we do not have a problem with the American people, we are not anti-American. We want to be partners with the new U.S. administration, and have good relations with the United States. Together with all countries interested we will create a really democratic model of relations. But the world cannot be ruled from one capital. Those who do not want to understand that will be only creating problems for themselves and for others."
RUSSIAN MISSILES IN EUROPE?
In his first State of the Nation speech on Thursday Medvedev addressed everything from South Ossetia, to terrorism, to Missile Defense, to a plan for global security. He said that he would deploy Iskander missiles in the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad if the US administration went ahead with its plans for a missile shield in Europe.
Obama's foreign policy advisers have taken Medvedev's warning as a "test" of the new president's mettle and persuaded him to publicly announce his commitment to Bush's Missile Defense system.
According to AFP: "US president-elect Barack Obama has told Polish President Lech Kaczynski he will go ahead with plans to build a missile defense shield in eastern Europe despite threats from Russia, Warsaw said on Saturday. The US wants to base 10 interceptor missiles in Poland plus a radar facility in the neighboring Czech Republic by 2011-2013 to complete a system already in place in the United States, Greenland and Britain."
Obama is walking into a trap. He should see that the proposed deployment is needlessly provocative and will only lead to further escalation. He's already facing two unfinished wars and a deepening recession; he doesn't need a nuclear confrontation with Russia. Marching in lockstep with the fanatical neocon agenda is not the "change" the American people were hoping for.
In his State of the Nation speech, Medvedev announced plans to make Russia a global financial center by the end of 2008.
Medvedev: "A package of bills forming the basis for the creation of one of the world's leading financial centers in Russia needs to be passed before the end of this year. This center should serve as the nucleus for an independent and competitive Russian financial system. Practical steps are needed to strengthen the ruble's role as an international settlement currency and to finally achieve the transition to settlements in rubles for gas and oil, over which we have, regrettably, taken a long time." (Russia Today)
Medvedev and Putin blame the United States for the current firestorm in the financial markets. Wall Street's sale of fraudulent subprime mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and other structured investments have pushed the global banking system to the brink of a meltdown. It all could have been avoided with sufficient oversight and regulation. Even so, Medvedev still remains committed to free markets and democracy.
Medvedev: "I want everyone to know: our goals are unchanged. Sharp fluctuations in the political and economic situation, turbulence of the world economy and even forced military and political tensions will not become the ground to dismount democratic institutions, nationalizing industries and the financial system.....Political freedom of citizens and their private property are untouchable....Any infringement of civil rights and freedoms, or any action that worsens the material position of citizens, is immoral and illegal."
While Russia's young president is looking for ways to strengthen a progressive agenda and emerge from the darkness of Soviet-era repression, the United States is still in the clutches of hawkish neocons, recalcitrant cold warriors and self-serving banking elites. Obama has a unique opportunity to reconcile past differences and collaborate on a shared vision of the future with his Kremlin counterpart, or he can put a knife to Moscow's throat and force Medvedev to repond. Which will it be?
From the Associated Press, Saturday Nov 8: "A Kremlin statement says Medvedev and Obama spoke by telephone on Saturday. Both parties 'expressed the determination to create constructive and positive interaction for the good of global stability and development.'"
International security is in everyone's best interest. Bush's Missile Defense System must be stopped.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Obama, Emanuel and Israel
By JOHN V. WHITBECK
November 07, 2008 -- -- In the first major appointment of his administration, President-elect Barack Obama has named as his chief of staff Congressman Rahm Emanuel, an Israeli citizen and Israeli army veteran whose father, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was a member of Menachem Begin's Irgun forces during the Nakba and named his son after "a Lehi combatant who was killed" -- i.e., a member of Yitzhak Shamir's terrorist Stern Gang, responsible for, in addition to other atrocities against Palestinians, the more famous bombing of the King David Hotel and assassination of the UN peace envoy Count Folke Bernadotte.
In rapid response to this news, the editorial in the next day's Arab News (Jeddah) was entitled "Don't pin much hope on Obama -- Emanuel is his chief of staff and that sends a message". This editorial referred to the Irgun as a "terror organization" (a judgment call) and concluded: "Far from challenging Israel, the new team may turn out to be as pro-Israel as the one it is replacing."
That was always likely. Obama repeatedly pledged unconditional allegiance to Israel during his campaign, most memorably in an address to the AIPAC national convention which Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery characterized as "a speech that broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning", and America's electing a black president has always been more easily imagined than any American president's declaring his country's independence from Israeli domination.
Still, one of the greatest advantages for the United States in electing Barack Hussein Obama was the prospect that the world's billion-plus Muslims, who now view the United States with almost universal loathing and hatred, would be dazzled by the new president's eloquence, life story, skin color and middle name, would think again with open minds and would give America a chance to redeem itself in their eyes and hearts -- not incidently, drastically shortening the long lines of aspiring jihadis eager to sacrifice their lives while striking a blow against the evil empire.
The profound loathing and hatred of the Muslim world toward the United States, which has always had its roots for America's unconditional support for the injustices inflicted and still being inflicted on the Palestinians, can fairly be considered the core of the primary foreign policy and "national security" problems confronting the United States in recent years. Why would Obama, a man of unquested brilliance, have chosen to send such a contemptuous message to the Muslim world with his first major appointment? Why would he wish to disabuse the Muslim world of its hopes (however modest) and slap it across the face at the ealiest opportunity?
A further contemptuous message is widely rumored to be forthcoming -- the naming as "Special Envoy for Middle East Peace" of Dennis Ross, the notorious Israel-Firster who, throughout the 12 years of the Bush the First and Clinton administrations, ensured that American policy toward the Palestinians did not deviate one millimeter from Israeli policy and that no progress toward peace could be made and who has since headed the AIPAC spin-off "think tank", the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Neverthess, since it is almost always constructive to seek a silver lining in the darkest clouds, a silver lining can be found and cited. For decades, the Palestinian leadership has been "waiting for Godot" -- waiting for the U.S. Government to finally do the right thing (if only in its own obvious self-interest) and to force Israel to comply with international law and UN Resolutions and permit them to have a decent mini-state on a tiny portion of the land that once was theirs.
This was never a realistic hope. It has not happened, and it will never happen. So it may well be salutary not to waste eight more days (let alone eight more years) playing along and playing the fool while more Palestinian lands are confiscated and more Jewish colonies and Jews-only bypass roads are built on them, clinging to the delusion that the charming Mr. Obama, admirable though he may be in so many other respects, will eventually (if only in a second term, when he no longer has to worry about reelection) see the light and do the right thing. It is long overdue for the Palestinians themselves to seize the initiative, to reset the agenda and to declare a new "only game in town".
Furthermore, in February, Israel will elect a new Knesset. Bibi Netanyahu, who, most polls and coalition-building calculations suggest, is most likely to emerge as the next prime minister, has one (if only one) great virtue. He is absolutely honest in not professing any desire (however insincere) to see the creation of any Palestinian "state" (whether decent or less-than-a-Bantustan in nature) or to engage in any talks (even never-ending and fraudulent ones) ostensibly about that possibility. His return to power would definitively slam the door on the illusion of a "two-state solution" somewhere over an ever-receding horizon.
This would constitute a blessing and a liberation for Palestinian minds and Palestinian aspirations. Their leadership(s) could then return, after a long, costly and painful diversion, to fundamental principles, to pursuing the goal of a democratic, nonracist and nonsectarian state in all of Israel/Palestine with equal rights for all who live there.
This just goal could and should be pursued by strictly nonviolent means. If the goal is to convince a determined and powerful settler-colonial movement which wishes to seize your land, settle it and keep it (eventually cleansing it of you and your fellow natives) that it should cease, desist and leave, nonviolent forms of resistance are suicidal. If, however, the goal were to be to obtain the full rights of citizenship in a democratic, nonracist state (as was the case in the American civil rights movement and the South African anti-apartheid movement), then nonviolence would be the only viable approach. Violence would be totally inappropriate and counterproductive. The morally impeccable approach would also be the tactically effective approach. The high road would be the only road.
No American president -- least of all Barack Obama -- could easily support racism and apartheid and oppose democracy and equal rights, particularly if democracy and equal rights were being pursued by nonviolent means. No one anywhere could easily do so. The writing would be on the wall, and the clock would be running out on the tired game of using a perpetual "peace process" as an excuse to delay decisions (while building more "facts on the ground") forever.
Democracy and equal rights would not come quickly or easily. Forty years passed between when, on the night before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King cried out that he had been to the mountain top and had seen the promised land and when Barack Obama was elected as president of the United States. (The Bible suggests a similar waiting period in the wilderness for Moses.) Forty-six years passed between the installation of a formal apartheid regime in South Africa and the election of Nelson Mandela as president of a fully democratic and nonracist "rainbow nation".
While it may be be hoped that the transformation would be significantly quicker in Israel/Palestine, it is clear that many who already qualify as "senior citizens" will not live to see the promised land. However, if the promised land of a democratic state with equal rights for all is correctly and clearly perceived and persistently and peacefully pursued, there is ample reason for confidence that Israel/Palestine will one day experience the tearful exaltation of a "Mandela Moment" or an "Obama Moment", restoring hope in the moral potential both of a nation and of mankind, and that the Jews, Muslims and Christians who live there will finally reach their promised land.
John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel, is author of "The World According to Whitbeck".
November 07, 2008 -- -- In the first major appointment of his administration, President-elect Barack Obama has named as his chief of staff Congressman Rahm Emanuel, an Israeli citizen and Israeli army veteran whose father, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was a member of Menachem Begin's Irgun forces during the Nakba and named his son after "a Lehi combatant who was killed" -- i.e., a member of Yitzhak Shamir's terrorist Stern Gang, responsible for, in addition to other atrocities against Palestinians, the more famous bombing of the King David Hotel and assassination of the UN peace envoy Count Folke Bernadotte.
In rapid response to this news, the editorial in the next day's Arab News (Jeddah) was entitled "Don't pin much hope on Obama -- Emanuel is his chief of staff and that sends a message". This editorial referred to the Irgun as a "terror organization" (a judgment call) and concluded: "Far from challenging Israel, the new team may turn out to be as pro-Israel as the one it is replacing."
That was always likely. Obama repeatedly pledged unconditional allegiance to Israel during his campaign, most memorably in an address to the AIPAC national convention which Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery characterized as "a speech that broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning", and America's electing a black president has always been more easily imagined than any American president's declaring his country's independence from Israeli domination.
Still, one of the greatest advantages for the United States in electing Barack Hussein Obama was the prospect that the world's billion-plus Muslims, who now view the United States with almost universal loathing and hatred, would be dazzled by the new president's eloquence, life story, skin color and middle name, would think again with open minds and would give America a chance to redeem itself in their eyes and hearts -- not incidently, drastically shortening the long lines of aspiring jihadis eager to sacrifice their lives while striking a blow against the evil empire.
The profound loathing and hatred of the Muslim world toward the United States, which has always had its roots for America's unconditional support for the injustices inflicted and still being inflicted on the Palestinians, can fairly be considered the core of the primary foreign policy and "national security" problems confronting the United States in recent years. Why would Obama, a man of unquested brilliance, have chosen to send such a contemptuous message to the Muslim world with his first major appointment? Why would he wish to disabuse the Muslim world of its hopes (however modest) and slap it across the face at the ealiest opportunity?
A further contemptuous message is widely rumored to be forthcoming -- the naming as "Special Envoy for Middle East Peace" of Dennis Ross, the notorious Israel-Firster who, throughout the 12 years of the Bush the First and Clinton administrations, ensured that American policy toward the Palestinians did not deviate one millimeter from Israeli policy and that no progress toward peace could be made and who has since headed the AIPAC spin-off "think tank", the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Neverthess, since it is almost always constructive to seek a silver lining in the darkest clouds, a silver lining can be found and cited. For decades, the Palestinian leadership has been "waiting for Godot" -- waiting for the U.S. Government to finally do the right thing (if only in its own obvious self-interest) and to force Israel to comply with international law and UN Resolutions and permit them to have a decent mini-state on a tiny portion of the land that once was theirs.
This was never a realistic hope. It has not happened, and it will never happen. So it may well be salutary not to waste eight more days (let alone eight more years) playing along and playing the fool while more Palestinian lands are confiscated and more Jewish colonies and Jews-only bypass roads are built on them, clinging to the delusion that the charming Mr. Obama, admirable though he may be in so many other respects, will eventually (if only in a second term, when he no longer has to worry about reelection) see the light and do the right thing. It is long overdue for the Palestinians themselves to seize the initiative, to reset the agenda and to declare a new "only game in town".
Furthermore, in February, Israel will elect a new Knesset. Bibi Netanyahu, who, most polls and coalition-building calculations suggest, is most likely to emerge as the next prime minister, has one (if only one) great virtue. He is absolutely honest in not professing any desire (however insincere) to see the creation of any Palestinian "state" (whether decent or less-than-a-Bantustan in nature) or to engage in any talks (even never-ending and fraudulent ones) ostensibly about that possibility. His return to power would definitively slam the door on the illusion of a "two-state solution" somewhere over an ever-receding horizon.
This would constitute a blessing and a liberation for Palestinian minds and Palestinian aspirations. Their leadership(s) could then return, after a long, costly and painful diversion, to fundamental principles, to pursuing the goal of a democratic, nonracist and nonsectarian state in all of Israel/Palestine with equal rights for all who live there.
This just goal could and should be pursued by strictly nonviolent means. If the goal is to convince a determined and powerful settler-colonial movement which wishes to seize your land, settle it and keep it (eventually cleansing it of you and your fellow natives) that it should cease, desist and leave, nonviolent forms of resistance are suicidal. If, however, the goal were to be to obtain the full rights of citizenship in a democratic, nonracist state (as was the case in the American civil rights movement and the South African anti-apartheid movement), then nonviolence would be the only viable approach. Violence would be totally inappropriate and counterproductive. The morally impeccable approach would also be the tactically effective approach. The high road would be the only road.
No American president -- least of all Barack Obama -- could easily support racism and apartheid and oppose democracy and equal rights, particularly if democracy and equal rights were being pursued by nonviolent means. No one anywhere could easily do so. The writing would be on the wall, and the clock would be running out on the tired game of using a perpetual "peace process" as an excuse to delay decisions (while building more "facts on the ground") forever.
Democracy and equal rights would not come quickly or easily. Forty years passed between when, on the night before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King cried out that he had been to the mountain top and had seen the promised land and when Barack Obama was elected as president of the United States. (The Bible suggests a similar waiting period in the wilderness for Moses.) Forty-six years passed between the installation of a formal apartheid regime in South Africa and the election of Nelson Mandela as president of a fully democratic and nonracist "rainbow nation".
While it may be be hoped that the transformation would be significantly quicker in Israel/Palestine, it is clear that many who already qualify as "senior citizens" will not live to see the promised land. However, if the promised land of a democratic state with equal rights for all is correctly and clearly perceived and persistently and peacefully pursued, there is ample reason for confidence that Israel/Palestine will one day experience the tearful exaltation of a "Mandela Moment" or an "Obama Moment", restoring hope in the moral potential both of a nation and of mankind, and that the Jews, Muslims and Christians who live there will finally reach their promised land.
John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel, is author of "The World According to Whitbeck".
Friday, November 7, 2008
Evangelical foreign policy is over
By Andrew J. Bacevich
WITH Barack Obama's election to the presidency, the evangelical moment in US foreign policy has come to an end. The United States remains a nation of believers, with Christianity the tradition to which most Americans adhere. Yet the religious sensibility informing American statecraft will no longer find expression in an urge to launch crusades against evil-doers.
Like our current president, Obama is a professed Christian. Yet whereas George W. Bush once identified Jesus Christ himself as his favorite philosopher, the president-elect is an admirer of Reinhold Niebuhr, the renowned Protestant theologian.
Faced with difficult problems, conservative evangelicals ask WWJD: What would Jesus do? We are now entering an era in which the occupant of the Oval Office will consider a different question: What would Reinhold do?
During the middle third of the last century, Niebuhr thought deeply about the complexities, moral and otherwise, of international politics. Although an eminently quotable writer, his insights do not easily reduce to a sound-bite or bumper sticker.
At the root of Niebuhr's thinking lies an appreciation of original sin, which he views as indelible and omnipresent. In a fallen world, power is necessary, otherwise we lie open to the assaults of the predatory. Yet since we too number among the fallen, our own professions of innocence and altruism are necessarily suspect. Power, wrote Niebuhr, "cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest." Therefore, any nation wielding great power but lacking self-awareness - never an American strong suit - poses an imminent risk not only to others but to itself.
Here lies the statesman's dilemma: You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. To refrain from resisting evil for fear of violating God's laws is irresponsible. Yet for the powerful to pretend to interpret God's will qualifies as presumptuous. To avert evil, action is imperative; so too is self-restraint. Even worthy causes pursued blindly yield morally problematic results.
Niebuhr specialized in precise distinctions. He supported US intervention in World War II - and condemned the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended that war. After 1945, Niebuhr believed it just and necessary to contain the Soviet Union. Yet he forcefully opposed US intervention in Vietnam.
The vast claims of Bush's second inaugural - with the president discerning history's "visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty" - would have appalled Niebuhr, precisely because Bush meant exactly what he said. In international politics, true believers are more dangerous than cynics.
Grandiose undertakings produce monstrous byproducts. In the eyes of critics, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo show that all of Bush's freedom talk is simply a lie. Viewed from a Niebuhrean perspective, they become the predictable if illegitimate offspring of Bush's convictions. Better to forget utopia, leaving it to God to determine history's trajectory.
On the stump, Obama did not sound much like a follower of Niebuhr. Campaigns reward not introspection, but simplistic reassurance: "Yes, we can!" Yet as the dust now settles, we might hope that the victor will sober up and rediscover his Niebuhrean inclinations. Sobriety in this case begins with abrogating what Niebuhr called "our dreams of managing history," triggered by the end of the Cold War and reinforced by Sept. 11. "The course of history," he emphasized, "cannot be coerced."
We've tried having a born-again president intent on eliminating evil. It didn't work. May our next president acknowledge the possibility that, as Niebuhr put it, "the evils against which we contend are frequently the fruits of illusions which are similar to our own." Facing our present predicament requires that we shed illusions about America that would have offended Jesus himself.
Obama has written that he took from reading Niebuhr "the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world" along with the conviction that evil's persistence should not be "an excuse for cynicism and inaction." Yet Niebuhr also taught him that "we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things." As a point of departure for reformulating US foreign policy, we could do a lot worse.
Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, is the author of "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."
© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
WITH Barack Obama's election to the presidency, the evangelical moment in US foreign policy has come to an end. The United States remains a nation of believers, with Christianity the tradition to which most Americans adhere. Yet the religious sensibility informing American statecraft will no longer find expression in an urge to launch crusades against evil-doers.
Like our current president, Obama is a professed Christian. Yet whereas George W. Bush once identified Jesus Christ himself as his favorite philosopher, the president-elect is an admirer of Reinhold Niebuhr, the renowned Protestant theologian.
Faced with difficult problems, conservative evangelicals ask WWJD: What would Jesus do? We are now entering an era in which the occupant of the Oval Office will consider a different question: What would Reinhold do?
During the middle third of the last century, Niebuhr thought deeply about the complexities, moral and otherwise, of international politics. Although an eminently quotable writer, his insights do not easily reduce to a sound-bite or bumper sticker.
At the root of Niebuhr's thinking lies an appreciation of original sin, which he views as indelible and omnipresent. In a fallen world, power is necessary, otherwise we lie open to the assaults of the predatory. Yet since we too number among the fallen, our own professions of innocence and altruism are necessarily suspect. Power, wrote Niebuhr, "cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest." Therefore, any nation wielding great power but lacking self-awareness - never an American strong suit - poses an imminent risk not only to others but to itself.
Here lies the statesman's dilemma: You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. To refrain from resisting evil for fear of violating God's laws is irresponsible. Yet for the powerful to pretend to interpret God's will qualifies as presumptuous. To avert evil, action is imperative; so too is self-restraint. Even worthy causes pursued blindly yield morally problematic results.
Niebuhr specialized in precise distinctions. He supported US intervention in World War II - and condemned the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended that war. After 1945, Niebuhr believed it just and necessary to contain the Soviet Union. Yet he forcefully opposed US intervention in Vietnam.
The vast claims of Bush's second inaugural - with the president discerning history's "visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty" - would have appalled Niebuhr, precisely because Bush meant exactly what he said. In international politics, true believers are more dangerous than cynics.
Grandiose undertakings produce monstrous byproducts. In the eyes of critics, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo show that all of Bush's freedom talk is simply a lie. Viewed from a Niebuhrean perspective, they become the predictable if illegitimate offspring of Bush's convictions. Better to forget utopia, leaving it to God to determine history's trajectory.
On the stump, Obama did not sound much like a follower of Niebuhr. Campaigns reward not introspection, but simplistic reassurance: "Yes, we can!" Yet as the dust now settles, we might hope that the victor will sober up and rediscover his Niebuhrean inclinations. Sobriety in this case begins with abrogating what Niebuhr called "our dreams of managing history," triggered by the end of the Cold War and reinforced by Sept. 11. "The course of history," he emphasized, "cannot be coerced."
We've tried having a born-again president intent on eliminating evil. It didn't work. May our next president acknowledge the possibility that, as Niebuhr put it, "the evils against which we contend are frequently the fruits of illusions which are similar to our own." Facing our present predicament requires that we shed illusions about America that would have offended Jesus himself.
Obama has written that he took from reading Niebuhr "the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world" along with the conviction that evil's persistence should not be "an excuse for cynicism and inaction." Yet Niebuhr also taught him that "we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things." As a point of departure for reformulating US foreign policy, we could do a lot worse.
Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, is the author of "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."
© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Monday, November 3, 2008
They’ve Squandered Lives, Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor
by Joseph L. Galloway
Here’s to the American people, the electorate, for finally coming to their senses and voting for something different, for someone different and for a chance to fix the multitude of man-made disasters that confront us.
By their votes, the Republican revolution and all it's wrought — an economic meltdown, two endless wars, class warfare that’s enriched the very rich and beggared everyone else and a treasury bulging only with IOU's — will be crushed.
That revolution began to take root with the criminality of Richard Nixon's administration, with its paranoid enemies list. It gathered steam in the time of Ronald Reagan and with Newt Gingrich’s seizure of Congress.
To be sure, there have been pauses, first during Jimmy Carter's four years and then during Bill Clinton’s eight, in the GOP's rush to recover — with interest — the presidential power that Nixon lost to a second-rate burglary and assorted other dirty tricks.
High tide arrived with the unlikeliest occupant of the Oval Office in our history, the beady-eyed, smirking, tongue-tied, counterfeit cowboy George W. Bush, and a Congress that after 9-11 was run by runaway Republicans who were too busy enriching themselves and their friends to care what their president was doing to the country, the Constitution and even their own party.
Little wonder, then, that Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin will go down to defeat after a campaign of sheer desperation that’s been nasty, brutish and long.
Bush and his clutch of unindicted co-conspirators will leave Washington at high noon on January 20, 2009, two months and a few wakeups from now, and good riddance to bad rubbish.
Oh, there will be more outrages as they leave. Bush and his gang are busy drafting and issuing Executive Orders and new regulations gutting the last surviving federal rules that bedevil their rich, polluting friends, and no doubt they're just as busy drawing up presidential pardons by the bucketful for themselves and their partners in crime.
These Republicans arrived with a strange combination of contempt for government and hunger for its power, and during their time in the saddle they've done everything they could to destroy the government and the Constitution that our forefathers so carefully constructed to check and balance any self-anointed monarchs' ability to do evil or accumulate dangerous and excessive power.
Where were we the people while this evil was being unleashed on us? Remember the fable of the grasshopper and the ant? We were, with the encouragement of our president, busy playing grasshopper. In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, our president urged us to go to the shopping mall. Go be grasshoppers. Consume everything, save nothing, live like there’s no tomorrow, like winter will never come.
Guess what? Winter has arrived.
In the name of national security, of homeland security, our right to privacy has been whittled away, legally and illegally. Big Brother has been listening, but only for our own good.
With the arrogance common to those who are ignorant of both history and the world, these people threw away our standing in that world, declaring that everyone must either be with us or against us. We hardly noticed as the world paid attention to what we did, not what we said, and then quietly chose the latter option.
In pursuit of our newfound civic duty as consumers, we hardly noticed that nearly everything we bought was marked "Made in China."
Made in China and bought on credit, our credit and our country's. Made in China and made with lead paint and poisonous plastics that threatened the lives of our children and killed our dogs, substances that escaped notice until far too late because the rabid deregulators had pulled our watchdogs' teeth.
They demanded unfettered capitalism, and in the hands of the Wall Street robber barons that was turned into pure evil, pure greed and pure folly. Now millions of Americans are losing their homes in the mortgage meltdown, and millions more have seen their life savings, their 401ks and IRAs, their hopes of a comfortable retirement, blow away like so many leaves on a cruel Texas norther.
They played on our fears like a mighty Wurlitzer Organ, frightening us with lies into an unnecessary war in Iraq. Frightening us into re-electing George Bush, even after we knew that he was anything but presidential, anything but intelligent, anything but a worthy, effective leader.
They frightened us so badly that we voluntarily surrendered the precious rights that a million American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and others bought for us with their lives during two centuries of freedom and democracy.
They used fear to violate international law, to torture and imprison thousands of suspected enemies without charges or trials. They used fear and invoked national security to suspend the right of habeas corpus, the foundation of our freedoms.
For these and far too many other sins and transgressions to list in so short a space as this, we the people have every right, and perhaps a duty, to cast them aside, and with them their only hope of avoiding justice and judgment — John McCain, who voted with them 90 percent of the time.
We're right to toss them all aside, and to hope and pray that it's not too late to start repairing the damage they've done to a nation that once was the last, best hope of mankind.
© Copyright 2008, The McClatchy Washington Bureau
Joseph L. Galloway, a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers, is the co-author, with Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, of "We Were Soldiers Once... and Young," a story of the first large-scale ground battle of the Vietnam War.
Here’s to the American people, the electorate, for finally coming to their senses and voting for something different, for someone different and for a chance to fix the multitude of man-made disasters that confront us.
By their votes, the Republican revolution and all it's wrought — an economic meltdown, two endless wars, class warfare that’s enriched the very rich and beggared everyone else and a treasury bulging only with IOU's — will be crushed.
That revolution began to take root with the criminality of Richard Nixon's administration, with its paranoid enemies list. It gathered steam in the time of Ronald Reagan and with Newt Gingrich’s seizure of Congress.
To be sure, there have been pauses, first during Jimmy Carter's four years and then during Bill Clinton’s eight, in the GOP's rush to recover — with interest — the presidential power that Nixon lost to a second-rate burglary and assorted other dirty tricks.
High tide arrived with the unlikeliest occupant of the Oval Office in our history, the beady-eyed, smirking, tongue-tied, counterfeit cowboy George W. Bush, and a Congress that after 9-11 was run by runaway Republicans who were too busy enriching themselves and their friends to care what their president was doing to the country, the Constitution and even their own party.
Little wonder, then, that Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin will go down to defeat after a campaign of sheer desperation that’s been nasty, brutish and long.
Bush and his clutch of unindicted co-conspirators will leave Washington at high noon on January 20, 2009, two months and a few wakeups from now, and good riddance to bad rubbish.
Oh, there will be more outrages as they leave. Bush and his gang are busy drafting and issuing Executive Orders and new regulations gutting the last surviving federal rules that bedevil their rich, polluting friends, and no doubt they're just as busy drawing up presidential pardons by the bucketful for themselves and their partners in crime.
These Republicans arrived with a strange combination of contempt for government and hunger for its power, and during their time in the saddle they've done everything they could to destroy the government and the Constitution that our forefathers so carefully constructed to check and balance any self-anointed monarchs' ability to do evil or accumulate dangerous and excessive power.
Where were we the people while this evil was being unleashed on us? Remember the fable of the grasshopper and the ant? We were, with the encouragement of our president, busy playing grasshopper. In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, our president urged us to go to the shopping mall. Go be grasshoppers. Consume everything, save nothing, live like there’s no tomorrow, like winter will never come.
Guess what? Winter has arrived.
In the name of national security, of homeland security, our right to privacy has been whittled away, legally and illegally. Big Brother has been listening, but only for our own good.
With the arrogance common to those who are ignorant of both history and the world, these people threw away our standing in that world, declaring that everyone must either be with us or against us. We hardly noticed as the world paid attention to what we did, not what we said, and then quietly chose the latter option.
In pursuit of our newfound civic duty as consumers, we hardly noticed that nearly everything we bought was marked "Made in China."
Made in China and bought on credit, our credit and our country's. Made in China and made with lead paint and poisonous plastics that threatened the lives of our children and killed our dogs, substances that escaped notice until far too late because the rabid deregulators had pulled our watchdogs' teeth.
They demanded unfettered capitalism, and in the hands of the Wall Street robber barons that was turned into pure evil, pure greed and pure folly. Now millions of Americans are losing their homes in the mortgage meltdown, and millions more have seen their life savings, their 401ks and IRAs, their hopes of a comfortable retirement, blow away like so many leaves on a cruel Texas norther.
They played on our fears like a mighty Wurlitzer Organ, frightening us with lies into an unnecessary war in Iraq. Frightening us into re-electing George Bush, even after we knew that he was anything but presidential, anything but intelligent, anything but a worthy, effective leader.
They frightened us so badly that we voluntarily surrendered the precious rights that a million American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and others bought for us with their lives during two centuries of freedom and democracy.
They used fear to violate international law, to torture and imprison thousands of suspected enemies without charges or trials. They used fear and invoked national security to suspend the right of habeas corpus, the foundation of our freedoms.
For these and far too many other sins and transgressions to list in so short a space as this, we the people have every right, and perhaps a duty, to cast them aside, and with them their only hope of avoiding justice and judgment — John McCain, who voted with them 90 percent of the time.
We're right to toss them all aside, and to hope and pray that it's not too late to start repairing the damage they've done to a nation that once was the last, best hope of mankind.
© Copyright 2008, The McClatchy Washington Bureau
Joseph L. Galloway, a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers, is the co-author, with Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, of "We Were Soldiers Once... and Young," a story of the first large-scale ground battle of the Vietnam War.
Between Hope and Reality - An Open Letter to Barack Obama By Ralph Nader
By Ralph Nader
Nov 3, 2008
Dear Senator Obama:
In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words “hope and change,” “change and hope” have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not “hope and change” but the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo.
Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys. Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart. Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?
To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, courage, integrity– not expediency, accommodation and short-range opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation, blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of the Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007 issue of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed by a majority of Jewish-Americans.
You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an “undivided Jerusalem,” and opposed negotiations with Hamas– the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored “direct negotiations with Hamas.” Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote “Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society by the Israeli state.”
During your visit to Israel this summer, you scheduled a mere 45 minutes of your time for Palestinians with no news conference, and no visit to Palestinian refugee camps that would have focused the media on the brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported the illegal, cruel blockade of Gaza in defiance of international law and the United Nations charter. You focused on southern Israeli casualties which during the past year have totaled one civilian casualty to every 400 Palestinian casualties on the Gaza side. Instead of a statesmanship that decried all violence and its replacement with acceptance of the Arab League’s 2002 proposal to permit a viable Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full economic and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you played the role of a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians with the feeling of much shock and little awe.
David Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip succinctly: “There was almost a willful display of indifference to the fact that there are two narratives here. This could serve him well as a candidate, but not as a President.”
Palestinian American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did not utter a single criticism of Israel, “of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians. …Even the Bush administration recently criticized Israeli’s use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians [see www.atfl.org for elaboration]. But Obama defended Israeli’s assault on Lebanon as an exercise of its ‘legitimate right to defend itself.’”
In numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly criticized the Israeli government’s assault on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on “the heart of a crowded refugee camp… with horrible bloodshed” in early 2008.
Israeli writer and peace advocate– Uri Avnery– described Obama’s appearance before AIPAC as one that “broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning, adding that Obama “is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future– if and when he is elected president.,” he said, adding, “Of one thing I am certain: Obama’s declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people.”
A further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you turned your back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused to send surrogates to speak to voters at their events. Having visited numerous churches and synagogues, you refused to visit a single Mosque in America. Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington D.C. after 9/11 to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a frightened major religious group of innocents.
Although the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008 titled “Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama” (by Andrea Elliott), citing examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all walks of life, who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the American dream. Three days earlier the International Herald Tribune published an article by Roger Cohen titled “Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque.” None of these comments and reports change your political bigotry against Muslim-Americans– even though your father was a Muslim from Kenya.
Perhaps nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or even the mildest version of this trait than your surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention. This is a tradition for former presidents and one accorded in prime time to Bill Clinton this year.
Here was a President who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt, but his recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid Apartheid of the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to sideline him. Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy Carter on this critical international problem, he was relegated to a stroll across the stage to “tumultuous applause,” following a showing of a film about the Carter Center’s post-Katrina work. Shame on you, Barack Obama!
But then your shameful behavior has extended to many other areas of American life. (See the factual analysis by my running mate, Matt Gonzalez, on www.votenader.org). You have turned your back on the 100-million poor Americans composed of poor whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. You always mention helping the “middle class” but you omit, repeatedly, mention of the “poor” in America.
Should you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented upward career move following a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that spoke “change” yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration power of the “corporate supremacists.” It must be about shifting the power from the few to the many. It must be a White House presided over by a black man who does not turn his back on the downtrodden here and abroad but challenges the forces of greed, dictatorial control of labor, consumers and taxpayers, and the militarization of foreign policy. It must be a White House that is transforming of American politics– opening it up to the public funding of elections (through voluntary approaches)– and allowing smaller candidates to have a chance to be heard on debates and in the fullness of their now restricted civil liberties. Call it a competitive democracy.
Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly stands. “Hope” some say springs eternal.” But not when “reality” consumes it daily.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
November 3, 2008
Nov 3, 2008
Dear Senator Obama:
In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words “hope and change,” “change and hope” have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not “hope and change” but the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo.
Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys. Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart. Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?
To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, courage, integrity– not expediency, accommodation and short-range opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation, blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of the Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007 issue of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed by a majority of Jewish-Americans.
You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an “undivided Jerusalem,” and opposed negotiations with Hamas– the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored “direct negotiations with Hamas.” Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote “Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society by the Israeli state.”
During your visit to Israel this summer, you scheduled a mere 45 minutes of your time for Palestinians with no news conference, and no visit to Palestinian refugee camps that would have focused the media on the brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported the illegal, cruel blockade of Gaza in defiance of international law and the United Nations charter. You focused on southern Israeli casualties which during the past year have totaled one civilian casualty to every 400 Palestinian casualties on the Gaza side. Instead of a statesmanship that decried all violence and its replacement with acceptance of the Arab League’s 2002 proposal to permit a viable Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full economic and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you played the role of a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians with the feeling of much shock and little awe.
David Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip succinctly: “There was almost a willful display of indifference to the fact that there are two narratives here. This could serve him well as a candidate, but not as a President.”
Palestinian American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did not utter a single criticism of Israel, “of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians. …Even the Bush administration recently criticized Israeli’s use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians [see www.atfl.org for elaboration]. But Obama defended Israeli’s assault on Lebanon as an exercise of its ‘legitimate right to defend itself.’”
In numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly criticized the Israeli government’s assault on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on “the heart of a crowded refugee camp… with horrible bloodshed” in early 2008.
Israeli writer and peace advocate– Uri Avnery– described Obama’s appearance before AIPAC as one that “broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning, adding that Obama “is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future– if and when he is elected president.,” he said, adding, “Of one thing I am certain: Obama’s declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people.”
A further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you turned your back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused to send surrogates to speak to voters at their events. Having visited numerous churches and synagogues, you refused to visit a single Mosque in America. Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington D.C. after 9/11 to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a frightened major religious group of innocents.
Although the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008 titled “Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama” (by Andrea Elliott), citing examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all walks of life, who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the American dream. Three days earlier the International Herald Tribune published an article by Roger Cohen titled “Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque.” None of these comments and reports change your political bigotry against Muslim-Americans– even though your father was a Muslim from Kenya.
Perhaps nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or even the mildest version of this trait than your surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention. This is a tradition for former presidents and one accorded in prime time to Bill Clinton this year.
Here was a President who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt, but his recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid Apartheid of the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to sideline him. Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy Carter on this critical international problem, he was relegated to a stroll across the stage to “tumultuous applause,” following a showing of a film about the Carter Center’s post-Katrina work. Shame on you, Barack Obama!
But then your shameful behavior has extended to many other areas of American life. (See the factual analysis by my running mate, Matt Gonzalez, on www.votenader.org). You have turned your back on the 100-million poor Americans composed of poor whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. You always mention helping the “middle class” but you omit, repeatedly, mention of the “poor” in America.
Should you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented upward career move following a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that spoke “change” yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration power of the “corporate supremacists.” It must be about shifting the power from the few to the many. It must be a White House presided over by a black man who does not turn his back on the downtrodden here and abroad but challenges the forces of greed, dictatorial control of labor, consumers and taxpayers, and the militarization of foreign policy. It must be a White House that is transforming of American politics– opening it up to the public funding of elections (through voluntary approaches)– and allowing smaller candidates to have a chance to be heard on debates and in the fullness of their now restricted civil liberties. Call it a competitive democracy.
Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly stands. “Hope” some say springs eternal.” But not when “reality” consumes it daily.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
November 3, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
McCain Campaign Embraces Support From Celebrity Arrested On Assault Charges On Waitress In 2006
Last week the John McCain Campaign continued to make campaign appearance after appearance with a celebrity endorser who was arrested in 2006 on bizarre assault charges of attempting to force a kiss a 19 year-old waitress and then choking her when she resisted his sexual advances.
On April 4, 2006, "outlaw" country music star, Hank Williams, Jr. surrendered to a police warrant in Memphis, Tennessee, after the incident in which he was apparently accused by a 19 year old waitress, Holly Hornbeak, of coming up from behind the waitress, demanding a kiss and then choking her when she resisted his sexual advance. Lawyers for Williams claimed that lawyers for Hornbreak demanded large damages to settle the case as a defense.
Hank Williams, Jr.'s lawyers were able to eventually get the charges dropped on the grounds of a lack of evidence. However, none of that really clears up in a court of law whether the incident didn't actually take place or not just because of a lack of third party witnesses. And according to reports by hotel and motel staffers over the years, Williams has been known for difficult and demanding behavior before such as in a Portland, Oregon concert appearance when he was a guest at the Red Lion according to some staff members. In the Williams case, District Attorney Bill Gibbons refused to specify to the CMT News whether Williams lawyers made a financial settlement to Hornbeck to drop the misdemeanor assault charge or not.
During several campaign appearances on behalf of John and Sarah Palin, Hank Williams, Jr. performed a new version of his classic , "FAMILY TRADITION" song in which he sometimes used very inflammatory antiObama language including "terrorist friends" in some versions and other inflammatory language. But in other appearances, some of the inflammatory language was sometimes missing. There also appeared to be some sort of racial reference to "Black" people during one campaign appearance of the song as well for some reason. Williams was accused of racism before when he released the song, "IF THE SOUTH WOULDA WON", while others defend the song as merely being a bit on the sardonic side. But it remains controversial. But often his songs seem to carry forth an inciteful and angry message that seem to be a volatile mixture if played anywhere alcohol is served like redneck bars.
Williams was known for early battles with drug and alcohol abuse and a failed 1974 suicide attempt. And his songs often feature some outrageous inflammatory lyrics of some type that appeal to a real redneck audience of fans. Williams has reportedly been divorced four times so far, and hardly seems like any poster boy for the McCain-Palin team to attempt to appeal to Christian "family values" voters.
Yet this millionaire recording artist claims that his fans are just the same as him, even while opposing Obama's tax plans that would slightly raise the taxes for millionaires like Williams while lowering taxes for most who attend the McCain Campaign appearances. Williams shares part of a $1 million dollar a year royalty payments from the the songs of his late father, Hank Williams, Sr., as well as his own concert and recording income.
The McCain Campaign seems to be so hard up for celebrity endorsements that it is even willing to take them from a controversial and inciteful personality like Hank Williams, Jr., where just because criminal charges were dropped in the 2006 assault case is hardly any clean bill of health that he's a wholesome personality for the McCain Campaign to embrace as any sort of role model for campaign appearance after appearance. But the McCain Campaign appears so desperate for support that it will take the support of anyone. Absolutely anyone.
On April 4, 2006, "outlaw" country music star, Hank Williams, Jr. surrendered to a police warrant in Memphis, Tennessee, after the incident in which he was apparently accused by a 19 year old waitress, Holly Hornbeak, of coming up from behind the waitress, demanding a kiss and then choking her when she resisted his sexual advance. Lawyers for Williams claimed that lawyers for Hornbreak demanded large damages to settle the case as a defense.
Hank Williams, Jr.'s lawyers were able to eventually get the charges dropped on the grounds of a lack of evidence. However, none of that really clears up in a court of law whether the incident didn't actually take place or not just because of a lack of third party witnesses. And according to reports by hotel and motel staffers over the years, Williams has been known for difficult and demanding behavior before such as in a Portland, Oregon concert appearance when he was a guest at the Red Lion according to some staff members. In the Williams case, District Attorney Bill Gibbons refused to specify to the CMT News whether Williams lawyers made a financial settlement to Hornbeck to drop the misdemeanor assault charge or not.
During several campaign appearances on behalf of John and Sarah Palin, Hank Williams, Jr. performed a new version of his classic , "FAMILY TRADITION" song in which he sometimes used very inflammatory antiObama language including "terrorist friends" in some versions and other inflammatory language. But in other appearances, some of the inflammatory language was sometimes missing. There also appeared to be some sort of racial reference to "Black" people during one campaign appearance of the song as well for some reason. Williams was accused of racism before when he released the song, "IF THE SOUTH WOULDA WON", while others defend the song as merely being a bit on the sardonic side. But it remains controversial. But often his songs seem to carry forth an inciteful and angry message that seem to be a volatile mixture if played anywhere alcohol is served like redneck bars.
Williams was known for early battles with drug and alcohol abuse and a failed 1974 suicide attempt. And his songs often feature some outrageous inflammatory lyrics of some type that appeal to a real redneck audience of fans. Williams has reportedly been divorced four times so far, and hardly seems like any poster boy for the McCain-Palin team to attempt to appeal to Christian "family values" voters.
Yet this millionaire recording artist claims that his fans are just the same as him, even while opposing Obama's tax plans that would slightly raise the taxes for millionaires like Williams while lowering taxes for most who attend the McCain Campaign appearances. Williams shares part of a $1 million dollar a year royalty payments from the the songs of his late father, Hank Williams, Sr., as well as his own concert and recording income.
The McCain Campaign seems to be so hard up for celebrity endorsements that it is even willing to take them from a controversial and inciteful personality like Hank Williams, Jr., where just because criminal charges were dropped in the 2006 assault case is hardly any clean bill of health that he's a wholesome personality for the McCain Campaign to embrace as any sort of role model for campaign appearance after appearance. But the McCain Campaign appears so desperate for support that it will take the support of anyone. Absolutely anyone.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Who Watches While the US Invades - Again
by: Marcia Mitchell
Has anyone in Washington noticed? The new US raids into Pakistan and Syria are, as was the invasion of Iraq, in blatant violation of international law. But who's keeping track of this sort of thing? Certainly not senior US officials, who apparently have weighed the negative consequences of illegal military operations against their perceived benefits and opted in favor of the latter.
Washington officials apparently reason that relations with Syria, already damaged over the attacks, may well be mended with the arrival of a new occupant in the Oval Office, given that country's desire for an improved relationship with the United States. Possibly, but not certain. And what may work with Syria may not work with Pakistan; further, what may work with leaders of these countries may not work with their enraged citizens. There is no question that US raids launched from Iraqi soil only add to this latest downward spiral into Middle Eastern mud.
It is fair to ask if anyone in Washington has noticed of late that Chapter VII of the UN Charter clearly establishes the rules for one country attacking another, rules to which this country is a signatory. International law provides three reasons for use of arms against an enemy - defense against imminent military attack, an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, or a UN Security Council resolution.
(Regime change, now used as justification for having invaded Iraq, is specifically precluded as a reason for war. But again, no one seems to be noticing that toppling Saddam became a flawed justification once Weapons of Mass Destruction proved to be among the missing.)
Perhaps concern over these new forays across foreign borders is unwarranted. Certainly, selective raids against Syria and Pakistan hardly amount to war. But they are acts of aggression, plain and simple. The fact that this sort of cross-border incident is commonplace around the world is no reason for the United States to continue this sort of operation.
The announced objective for doing so is killing or capturing al-Qaida terrorists; the downside is the possibility of killing innocent civilians - children in schools, families celebrating a wedding, farmers working their fields. Add to the political calculus the certainty, not the possibility, of further infuriating and alienating other countries, both those considered friendly and those not so friendly. At this moment in history, it's hard to imagine a worsening of America's image abroad, but Washington seems determined to do so before the present administration leaves office.
Our recent book, "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War," the story of British secret service officer Katharine Gun's efforts to at least derail the Iraq war, offers two relevant quotes worth thinking about, given these new attacks on Middle Eastern countries.
Richard Perle, sharing bellicose thoughts before the Iraq war, a war he saw as being insufficient to get the job done, said:
"No stages. This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq ... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war ... our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
Most Americans must doubt that Perle's children's choir will perform as he predicted. Instead, they will consider his expectation consistent with a failed political culture, one that finds illegal "total war" preferable to "clever diplomacy."
Another especially relevant quote coming from the Katharine Gun story is attributed to CIA Director Michael Hayden, who was at the NSA helm in 2003 when Gun revealed that agency's illegal spy operation against members of the UN Security Council. It also has to do with a political culture:
"I'm not too uncomfortable with a society that makes its bogeymen secrecy and power ... making secrecy and power the bogeymen of political culture, that's not a bad society."
But it is. At the moment, Hayden-esque bogeymen seem to be making decisions that are turning much of the world against the United States - decisions paid for in the currency of thousands upon thousands of lives lost and maimed, of millions displaced, of America's shattered image abroad, and of new raids of doubtful legality.
There is no question that Perle's position on the Middle East was shared by a significant number of his pro-war colleagues, many still in high places in Washington. After more than five years of war, his words cast an ominous shadow over strategic planning sessions in Washington. And they bring to mind dangerous bogeypersons bent on total war, perhaps not just raids on Syria and Pakistan.
Is anyone noticing?
Marcia Mitchell is co-author with Thomas Mitchell of "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq War" and "The Spy Who Seduced America: Lies and Betrayal in the Heat of the Cold War."
Has anyone in Washington noticed? The new US raids into Pakistan and Syria are, as was the invasion of Iraq, in blatant violation of international law. But who's keeping track of this sort of thing? Certainly not senior US officials, who apparently have weighed the negative consequences of illegal military operations against their perceived benefits and opted in favor of the latter.
Washington officials apparently reason that relations with Syria, already damaged over the attacks, may well be mended with the arrival of a new occupant in the Oval Office, given that country's desire for an improved relationship with the United States. Possibly, but not certain. And what may work with Syria may not work with Pakistan; further, what may work with leaders of these countries may not work with their enraged citizens. There is no question that US raids launched from Iraqi soil only add to this latest downward spiral into Middle Eastern mud.
It is fair to ask if anyone in Washington has noticed of late that Chapter VII of the UN Charter clearly establishes the rules for one country attacking another, rules to which this country is a signatory. International law provides three reasons for use of arms against an enemy - defense against imminent military attack, an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, or a UN Security Council resolution.
(Regime change, now used as justification for having invaded Iraq, is specifically precluded as a reason for war. But again, no one seems to be noticing that toppling Saddam became a flawed justification once Weapons of Mass Destruction proved to be among the missing.)
Perhaps concern over these new forays across foreign borders is unwarranted. Certainly, selective raids against Syria and Pakistan hardly amount to war. But they are acts of aggression, plain and simple. The fact that this sort of cross-border incident is commonplace around the world is no reason for the United States to continue this sort of operation.
The announced objective for doing so is killing or capturing al-Qaida terrorists; the downside is the possibility of killing innocent civilians - children in schools, families celebrating a wedding, farmers working their fields. Add to the political calculus the certainty, not the possibility, of further infuriating and alienating other countries, both those considered friendly and those not so friendly. At this moment in history, it's hard to imagine a worsening of America's image abroad, but Washington seems determined to do so before the present administration leaves office.
Our recent book, "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War," the story of British secret service officer Katharine Gun's efforts to at least derail the Iraq war, offers two relevant quotes worth thinking about, given these new attacks on Middle Eastern countries.
Richard Perle, sharing bellicose thoughts before the Iraq war, a war he saw as being insufficient to get the job done, said:
"No stages. This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq ... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war ... our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
Most Americans must doubt that Perle's children's choir will perform as he predicted. Instead, they will consider his expectation consistent with a failed political culture, one that finds illegal "total war" preferable to "clever diplomacy."
Another especially relevant quote coming from the Katharine Gun story is attributed to CIA Director Michael Hayden, who was at the NSA helm in 2003 when Gun revealed that agency's illegal spy operation against members of the UN Security Council. It also has to do with a political culture:
"I'm not too uncomfortable with a society that makes its bogeymen secrecy and power ... making secrecy and power the bogeymen of political culture, that's not a bad society."
But it is. At the moment, Hayden-esque bogeymen seem to be making decisions that are turning much of the world against the United States - decisions paid for in the currency of thousands upon thousands of lives lost and maimed, of millions displaced, of America's shattered image abroad, and of new raids of doubtful legality.
There is no question that Perle's position on the Middle East was shared by a significant number of his pro-war colleagues, many still in high places in Washington. After more than five years of war, his words cast an ominous shadow over strategic planning sessions in Washington. And they bring to mind dangerous bogeypersons bent on total war, perhaps not just raids on Syria and Pakistan.
Is anyone noticing?
Marcia Mitchell is co-author with Thomas Mitchell of "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq War" and "The Spy Who Seduced America: Lies and Betrayal in the Heat of the Cold War."
Thirty Years Too Late: The Implosion of John McCain and the Demise of the Regressive Right
by David Michael Green
There are lots of good explanations for why John McCain is rapidly swirling down the toilet bowl into the sewer of political ignominy, but my all-time favorite was just published in the New York Times Magazine this week.
The article – "The Making (and Remaking) of McCain", by Robert Draper – gives an explanation for McCain's idiotic-to-the-point-of-embarrassing stunt last month, at the time when the economic meltdown was initially kicking into hyperdrive. McCain's response – to suggest cancelling the debate, ‘suspending' his campaign, and parachuting into Washington to heroically save the empire from the evil capitalist derivative speculators (uh, oops – yeah, that's right – the same ones he's been flacking for his entire career) – marked the beginning of his slide into historical footmarkery, right down there with the likes of Bob Dole and Lil' Danny Quayle.
But that wasn't actually the bit I had in mind for my favorite explanation of McCain's demise. Nor, for that matter, was it even the fact that this great ploy – soon to be enshrined in a place of pride within the Political Buffoonery Hall of Fame – was crafted by none other than Steve Schmidt, McCain's chief strategist. You might have thought that that alone was hysterical enough, given that Schmidt is a protégé of Karl Rove (though he apparently hates being labeled as such), and that these were the very same folks who had ruined McCain himself back in 2000, using the Atwood/Rove/Schmidt character assassination playbook.
So – lemme guess – you're thinking: "Ah, what sweet justice. There is a god, after all!" But it actually gets better. Here's why: according to the article, all this happened because the guy who John McCain picked to run his campaign once got the "smartest bit of political wisdom he ever heard" from – are you ready for this? – really? – wait for it now... none other than that renowned national genius, George W. Bush.
And what did Bush teach him, other than the value of "manning up" and "going all in" (I'm not making this stuff up) with stunts like McCain's little economic crisis bombing run, a sortie in which he managed to crash the sixth aircraft of his career? Now this – this – is the part I really like. Back in 2004, Bush, the only complacent guy in the room, calmly told Schmidt that he shouldn't worry that the boss's campaign appeared at the time to be falling apart. Why? Because, Bush averred, voters have an "accidental genius" by which they can sniff out the true character of a candidate!
Amazing. Of course, W (and who knew that was short for Wise One?) didn't mention the part about how swiftboating the shit out of your opponent, or disenfranchising droves of African American and student voters can also help to put you over the top when that good old voter intuition occasionally goes AWOL – like in 2000 and 2004 – just as W himself did for a couple of years when he was in the National Guard. And then of course there's always that little Supreme Court trick, too, when things get really difficult.
This is the guru to the guru who is running the McCain campaign? Okay. Well that certainly explains a thing or two.
One thing we've clearly learned from the Cringe Decade's nightmare of unmitigated regressive rule is just how incompetent these clowns truly are. It was clear to most folks – at least those still registering some measurable amount of synaptic activity on the monitors – that the right was, of course, lying absurdly about Iraq, about taxes, about Social Security, about prescription drug benefits, and about much, much more. And some people have even caught on to the deeper lie of the entire regressive movement – that it is not simply a misguided ideology whose policy prescriptions were disastrous, but rather that it is actually a deeply pernicious kleptocratic treason conspiracy hiding behind a rag-tag improvisation of ideological hodge-podge (such as, for example, the exquisitely appropriately named Laffer Curve), designed for the sole purpose of pretending to link whatever present conditions might exist to whatever predetermined policy outcome was long ago decided upon.
Clearly, for example, the administration made the decision to invade Iraq first, then went looking for justifications that could be used to market the war later. Paul Wolfowitz even admitted this in his "bureaucratic reasons" explanation for how they all agreed on WMD as the fear factor they'd use to sell the war. Another classic example came from Bush's advocacy, as a candidate during flush times in 2000, of massive tax cuts. By the time he got to the White House, however, the economy was headed in a recessionary direction, and yet he was still advocating the same remedy for the polar opposite economic condition. It was as if the guy had read the first three chapters of John Maynard Keynes in his college macro class, but never bothered to get to the rest. Much more likely, of course, was that he had been too drunk to read any of it, and wouldn't have been so inclined, anyhow, had he somehow miraculously sobered up for a day or two. I mean, why study when you can be practicing your cheerleading routines instead? And anyhow, who needs that academic nonsense, anyhow, either at Yale or in the Oval Office? The economic theory mumbo-jumbo was for Rove to figure out in order to direct the marketing roll-out, just as if it were some sort of plastic Thanksgiving photo-op turkey for the troops. Bush already knew the policy choice in advance, and he sure as hell wasn't going to let some pointy-headed ivory tower ideas or the cold, hard evidence from centuries of real-world experience dissuade him. I mean, what would be the point of a Bush presidency, anyhow, if it wasn't to hoover up every shred of wealth from the public commons, nailed down or (preferably) not? To govern in the public interest, perhaps? Pshaw! Yeah, right. That's a good one, dude.
But even Americans who thought regressives clearly to be liars or thieves might still have believed that they were highly competent, especially if you'd had your brain Luntz-framed long enough to believe that MBA CEO types are tough, skilled, administrative whiz-bangs (you know, like the guys at Lehman Brothers, AIG, General Motors, etc.). It was easy to mistake that sometimes, because normally they're very good at marketing and at winning elections. But this year, the right can't even begin to get that right. The McCain-Palin campaign is a pathetic thing to see these days. Such as it is, even. There hardly seems to be a single campaign anymore, as a candidate so stiff he makes Bob Dole (even the 1996 version) look like James Dean by comparison lurches from embarrassing attack to awkward teleprompter-read, even-more-embarrassing, attack. My friends. There hardly seems to be a single campaign anymore, as insiders scramble to save their reputations, leaking stories claiming that they were off smoking a cigarette somewhere when the campaign debacle hit. And there hardly seems to be a single campaign anymore, as every day McCain's running mate goes increasingly more native, leaving the reservation to begin her presidential campaign for 2012. All this might seem ungracious, but that's only because, in fact, it is. It sure ain't surprising, though. Any movement that builds its core ideology around the worship of an infantilist, developmentally-stunted, self-aggrandizement will inevitably wind up eating its young. It's not a matter of if, but when. And it's no longer even a matter of when, but now.
Politics is rife with ironies, and perhaps never so much as this particular cycle. In many ways, John McCain should actually be winning this race, notwithstanding his daily acts of circus buffoonery and his decision to place his campaign in the hands of someone so sharp he regards George W. Bush as a profound political sage. The public is really nervous these days, and a well-known and well-trusted leader with that m-word (I can't possibly hear it one more time) brand could really have made a case for being the sort of steady rock people crave in a crisis like the current economic meltdown. A different McCain might really have taken this in a run-away. But not this one. Obama has shrewdly tied McCain to Bush, but that isn't really McCain's problem. Rather, it's his being joined at the hip to Bushism, which is at its core Republicanism, which is at its core regressivism. That's McCain's problem.
The irony here is that, while McCain has proven to be a scary monster at many junctures of his life and career, I don't think he is at heart really a regressive in the mold of, say, Dick Cheney or Mitch McConnell. In fact, having been savaged in 2000 by the ‘agents of intolerance' inside and outside of the Bush campaign, he actually really hated the SOBs, and with good cause. But McCain wanted – more than anything and for the entirety of his life – to be president, and he made a calculation that his best strategy for getting there was to make nice to the radical right, support Bush for eight years, and then run again as the heir apparent in 2008. What he evidently didn't consider in this sell-off of his principles to the lowest bidder was the possibility that he was hitching himself to a wagon that was headed over a cliff. Into a bottomless pit. Located on an imploding black hole star. George W. Bush is a human wrecking machine of historical proportions, second only to the likes of Hitler, Stalin or Mao (yet another way in which Bush is a two-bit hack – he couldn't even do genocide right). The good senator was only one of Bush's many victims, though McCain perhaps alone among them has the dubious honor of having been diddled by the Boy King not once, but twice.
Among the great ironies of this election is that had McCain adopted another strategy, he might have had a pretty good shot at the presidency. One possibility would have been to renounce the GOP and become a Democrat. He could certainly have argued, with a straight face, that he wasn't leaving the Republican Party, but that the Republican Party had left him. He might even have captured the Democratic nomination, and almost certainly would have destroyed a Mitt Romney or a Rudy Giuliani in the general election had he done so. Perhaps even more plausibly, he could have become an independent and run a third party campaign for president. McCain – like, say, Colin Powell – was one of the few Americans with the stature and reputation sufficient to pull that off, and it would in fact have suited his politics and temperament much better to have done so.
Instead, he tied himself to Bush, while Bush tied himself to the cement shoes of regressive politics and jumped off the bridge, taking down his own party and his party's presidential nominee with him (not to mention a million Iraqis, 4,200 Americans, Tony Blair, Colin Powell, Bar, Poppy and Jeb, along with many, many more folks foolish enough to allow themselves within his orbit). It's truly astonishing if you think about it. This little twirp's need to redeem himself after a lifetime of failure and insecurity has produced destruction of galactic proportions. In any case, McCain made the wrong choice, put ambition first, above all else (including, with the Palin pick, above country), and gambled that Bush wouldn't wreck the GOP brand before November 2008. Oops. By going to bed with the likes of George Bush, McCain definitely owns his own fate. And there's more than a little delight in watching a practitioner of these debauched politics destroy himself. He's stuck with a base that loves Bush and Bushism, all while trying to attract independents who are ready to hurl at the prospect of either. Every independent vote McCain might acquire – however implausibly, given his voting record (but then this is America, so anything can be sold) – by dissing Bush, means a Republican voter disenchanted. Likewise, every play to keep the base happy with some inane red meat about socialism or terrorism only simultaneously alienates still sentient Americans in the middle. The Palin selection epitomizes this dynamic. Whatever else he thought she might bring to the table (corruption charges, perhaps? shocking idiocy? disloyalty to the guy who made her?), part of the rationale for her selection was to do something John McCain was unable to do himself – namely, to get Republicans interested in the 2008 Republican presidential ticket. And so it did, but it has cost him dearly with just about every other voter, who look upon Palin with dropped-jaw astonishment, and McCain with deeply flawed judgement.
Meanwhile, nowadays George Bush is almost nowhere to be found. He is irrelevant to any policy discussions, and if he is even remotely semi-conscious, would count himself lucky to be off the radar screen of a country and a world filled with an anger and anxiety that is the direct product of his destructive policies. When right-wing commentator – and former press secretary for Newt Gingrich – Tony Blankley describes a Republican leader by noting that "The existing American president is a failed thing", you know it's all very, very far gone down the tubes. But notice how they all adored Bush when he was flying high. The current state of the Republican Party isn't just the product of a one-man demolition derby. This has been a carcinogenic genetic mutation masquerading as a mass ideology, and it's had a lot of adherents.
The great farce of the GOP, which soon became the tragedy of the nation and the world, was to actually govern. They would have been so much better off to retain their natural role as carping cranks, spreading disinformation at every turn, making up scandals for the other guys, proliferating and hiding their own, occasionally impeaching presidents. But they made the mistake of actually seizing power, after which an entire world could see what they're really about, the destructiveness of their policies, their breathtaking arrogance, as well as their astonishing incompetence at providing for the basic functions of governance. I suppose we can't entirely blame them for their own self-destruction. I mean, who knew that imploding economies, drowning cities, oceans of debt, disastrous wars based on lies, alienation of centuries-old allies, dismantling of Social Security, falling worker salaries, rising costs, diminishing healthcare, a massive terrorist attack while the president was on vacation, the national shame of torture, or catastrophic environmental disaster – who knew these would be unpopular policies?
The regressive movement – so deluded that they still like to think of themselves as conservatives – is on death watch now, and yet it doesn't know it, nor does it remotely begin to understand why. But the reasons – both proximate and distant – are plain enough to see. The immediate problem is that they ran a pathetic candidate against a great candidate. More importantly, they ran a slimy, Rovian campaign against a guy who knew how to fight back, and also had the guts to do so, and they presented it all to a national electorate that is frightened enough to no longer be willing to indulge foolery anymore. The proof of this is that John McCain might actually have the best night of any Republican candidate on Tuesday, as Democrats massively increase their majorities in both the House and the Senate, perhaps even gaining a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority, perhaps even giving Senate Minority Leader and major scuzzbucket Mitch McConnnell (from Kentucky no less!) his walking papers. And, as if that weren't proof enough, this comes after a similar blow-out in 2006, when the GOP got a "thumpin'", and lost control of both houses of Congress. And, to top it all off, voters don't even particularly like Democrats, and they sure don't like the current Congress, which is controlled by Democrats. It's rare for an American political party to get stomped two elections in a row, let alone by a generally disliked alternative party. You have to be screwing up really badly to do that, in a collective effort sort of way.
Which, of course, is exactly what we're talking about. Only regressives don't know it. They think their policies and attitudes are popular in America. They think George W. Bush's problem was that he wasn't regressive enough. If only he had invaded Iran as well as Iraq! If only he had deregulated Wall Street even more. If only he had encouraged more oil consumption and more carbon emissions. If only he had eliminated abortion rights. If only he had cut wealthy Americans' tax liabilities down to zero, shifting those burdens to the middle class. If only he had done to all of us what he did to Terri Schiavo's family. If only he had eliminated all government spending on popular programs. If only he had privatized Social Security and let Wall Street handle it. If only he had wasted even more Iraqis and more American GIs. If only he had let Osama bin Laden roam even freer, even longer. If only he had quadrupled the national debt, instead of merely doubling it. If only Exxon/Mobil had made even more than their all-time corporate record-breaking earnings, while the rest of us were unable to buy enough gas to get to work. If only Bush could have appointed more regressive justices to the federal bench, where they could find that we have no constitutional right to privacy, and who would make sure that corporate and presidential power trump the people's and the people's representatives' at every turn. If only there could have been more jobs lost on his watch. If only we could have seen wages fall lower. If only the country could have had its wealth more polarized so we could better emulate rotten banana republics. If only we could have been more divided politically. If only we could have made the world hate us more. If only more of our cities could have drowned. If only we could have hurtled toward planetary destruction even faster.
Hah-hah, right? Guess, what? It's only partly a joke. Most regressives earnestly believe in most of the items on the above wish list, and earnestly believe that they represent majority opinion in America. Seriously. I'm. Not. Kidding.
Fortunately, in this there is great hope for this country's recovery. For as regressives meet to lick their wounds – and I know of three such immediate post-election major summonings to the Council of Darkness already scheduled – they will be as oblivious to the cause of their demise as were their ancestors, the dinosaurs. Which means they will also be oblivious to any meaningful solution. Which, by definition, they would necessarily have to be anyhow, since the only real solution for them would be to pack up their bags, join the ACLU, and become liberals. I mean that quite seriously (and we are, in fact, already beginning to see the leading edge of that coming stampede), because, at the end of the day, the fundamental flaw of regressivism is regressivism itself. Their ideas – now explored in total, now fully tested in practice – don't work, and therefore aren't popular. They never were, in fact, popular, but a healthy dose of marketing genius applied to a narcissistic, selfish and willfully ignorant electorate was nevertheless enough to put regressives over the top time and again, starting with Reagan. Now, even that old black magic has ceased to work.
Thus, the real explanation for the regressive rout we are witnessing runs deeper than George W. Bush, and in fact goes to his very electoral success. People have seen what it means to put these criminals in charge and – despite the fact that the public actually doesn't know the half of it yet – they don't like what they see.
Likewise, the explanation for the regressive train wreck also certainly goes deeper than the pathetic figure of John McCain. But, in so many ways - stylistically and ethically, even more than politically - the McCain of 2008 has become the very living embodiment of the moral cancer hiding behind the sham ideology of free markets, strong national defense and obsessive sexual regulation. And he is being received accordingly.
A recent New York Times article described the senator's sentiments in the wake of his loss in 2000 to that scion of darkness - the ultimate child of privilege, history's all-time greatest legacy admittee to life - the guy who employed Rovian scorched earth techniques to take out not only a war hero opponent, but also a member of his own party. Despite this humiliating defeat at the hands of a patently inferior being, McCain could still hold his head high. "After his loss, he professed himself grateful, at the age of 65, for what might be left of his time. ‘I did not get to be president of the United States. And I doubt I shall have reason or opportunity to try again,' he wrote, but added, ‘I might yet become the man I always wanted to be.'"
Sadly, McCain was wrong on both predictions.
He did have the reason and opportunity to try again, and he seized them vigorously - though from the perspective of his honor and his legacy in history he would have been better off not to.
Because he also didn't become the man that he, or anyone else, would want to be. Instead, he hired the very same assassination team used against him in the 2000 election, and he employed their very same techniques against a decent and honorable opponent, whose great crime was peddling hope and justice to a battered and morally hungry American electorate.
And thus, instead of raising his party and country from the gutter of Bushism, John McCain dove down into it himself, with a literal and figurative vengeance.
He didn't become the man he always wanted to be. Instead, he became George W. Bush.
Whoever wanted to be that?
Not even George W. Bush.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.
There are lots of good explanations for why John McCain is rapidly swirling down the toilet bowl into the sewer of political ignominy, but my all-time favorite was just published in the New York Times Magazine this week.
The article – "The Making (and Remaking) of McCain", by Robert Draper – gives an explanation for McCain's idiotic-to-the-point-of-embarrassing stunt last month, at the time when the economic meltdown was initially kicking into hyperdrive. McCain's response – to suggest cancelling the debate, ‘suspending' his campaign, and parachuting into Washington to heroically save the empire from the evil capitalist derivative speculators (uh, oops – yeah, that's right – the same ones he's been flacking for his entire career) – marked the beginning of his slide into historical footmarkery, right down there with the likes of Bob Dole and Lil' Danny Quayle.
But that wasn't actually the bit I had in mind for my favorite explanation of McCain's demise. Nor, for that matter, was it even the fact that this great ploy – soon to be enshrined in a place of pride within the Political Buffoonery Hall of Fame – was crafted by none other than Steve Schmidt, McCain's chief strategist. You might have thought that that alone was hysterical enough, given that Schmidt is a protégé of Karl Rove (though he apparently hates being labeled as such), and that these were the very same folks who had ruined McCain himself back in 2000, using the Atwood/Rove/Schmidt character assassination playbook.
So – lemme guess – you're thinking: "Ah, what sweet justice. There is a god, after all!" But it actually gets better. Here's why: according to the article, all this happened because the guy who John McCain picked to run his campaign once got the "smartest bit of political wisdom he ever heard" from – are you ready for this? – really? – wait for it now... none other than that renowned national genius, George W. Bush.
And what did Bush teach him, other than the value of "manning up" and "going all in" (I'm not making this stuff up) with stunts like McCain's little economic crisis bombing run, a sortie in which he managed to crash the sixth aircraft of his career? Now this – this – is the part I really like. Back in 2004, Bush, the only complacent guy in the room, calmly told Schmidt that he shouldn't worry that the boss's campaign appeared at the time to be falling apart. Why? Because, Bush averred, voters have an "accidental genius" by which they can sniff out the true character of a candidate!
Amazing. Of course, W (and who knew that was short for Wise One?) didn't mention the part about how swiftboating the shit out of your opponent, or disenfranchising droves of African American and student voters can also help to put you over the top when that good old voter intuition occasionally goes AWOL – like in 2000 and 2004 – just as W himself did for a couple of years when he was in the National Guard. And then of course there's always that little Supreme Court trick, too, when things get really difficult.
This is the guru to the guru who is running the McCain campaign? Okay. Well that certainly explains a thing or two.
One thing we've clearly learned from the Cringe Decade's nightmare of unmitigated regressive rule is just how incompetent these clowns truly are. It was clear to most folks – at least those still registering some measurable amount of synaptic activity on the monitors – that the right was, of course, lying absurdly about Iraq, about taxes, about Social Security, about prescription drug benefits, and about much, much more. And some people have even caught on to the deeper lie of the entire regressive movement – that it is not simply a misguided ideology whose policy prescriptions were disastrous, but rather that it is actually a deeply pernicious kleptocratic treason conspiracy hiding behind a rag-tag improvisation of ideological hodge-podge (such as, for example, the exquisitely appropriately named Laffer Curve), designed for the sole purpose of pretending to link whatever present conditions might exist to whatever predetermined policy outcome was long ago decided upon.
Clearly, for example, the administration made the decision to invade Iraq first, then went looking for justifications that could be used to market the war later. Paul Wolfowitz even admitted this in his "bureaucratic reasons" explanation for how they all agreed on WMD as the fear factor they'd use to sell the war. Another classic example came from Bush's advocacy, as a candidate during flush times in 2000, of massive tax cuts. By the time he got to the White House, however, the economy was headed in a recessionary direction, and yet he was still advocating the same remedy for the polar opposite economic condition. It was as if the guy had read the first three chapters of John Maynard Keynes in his college macro class, but never bothered to get to the rest. Much more likely, of course, was that he had been too drunk to read any of it, and wouldn't have been so inclined, anyhow, had he somehow miraculously sobered up for a day or two. I mean, why study when you can be practicing your cheerleading routines instead? And anyhow, who needs that academic nonsense, anyhow, either at Yale or in the Oval Office? The economic theory mumbo-jumbo was for Rove to figure out in order to direct the marketing roll-out, just as if it were some sort of plastic Thanksgiving photo-op turkey for the troops. Bush already knew the policy choice in advance, and he sure as hell wasn't going to let some pointy-headed ivory tower ideas or the cold, hard evidence from centuries of real-world experience dissuade him. I mean, what would be the point of a Bush presidency, anyhow, if it wasn't to hoover up every shred of wealth from the public commons, nailed down or (preferably) not? To govern in the public interest, perhaps? Pshaw! Yeah, right. That's a good one, dude.
But even Americans who thought regressives clearly to be liars or thieves might still have believed that they were highly competent, especially if you'd had your brain Luntz-framed long enough to believe that MBA CEO types are tough, skilled, administrative whiz-bangs (you know, like the guys at Lehman Brothers, AIG, General Motors, etc.). It was easy to mistake that sometimes, because normally they're very good at marketing and at winning elections. But this year, the right can't even begin to get that right. The McCain-Palin campaign is a pathetic thing to see these days. Such as it is, even. There hardly seems to be a single campaign anymore, as a candidate so stiff he makes Bob Dole (even the 1996 version) look like James Dean by comparison lurches from embarrassing attack to awkward teleprompter-read, even-more-embarrassing, attack. My friends. There hardly seems to be a single campaign anymore, as insiders scramble to save their reputations, leaking stories claiming that they were off smoking a cigarette somewhere when the campaign debacle hit. And there hardly seems to be a single campaign anymore, as every day McCain's running mate goes increasingly more native, leaving the reservation to begin her presidential campaign for 2012. All this might seem ungracious, but that's only because, in fact, it is. It sure ain't surprising, though. Any movement that builds its core ideology around the worship of an infantilist, developmentally-stunted, self-aggrandizement will inevitably wind up eating its young. It's not a matter of if, but when. And it's no longer even a matter of when, but now.
Politics is rife with ironies, and perhaps never so much as this particular cycle. In many ways, John McCain should actually be winning this race, notwithstanding his daily acts of circus buffoonery and his decision to place his campaign in the hands of someone so sharp he regards George W. Bush as a profound political sage. The public is really nervous these days, and a well-known and well-trusted leader with that m-word (I can't possibly hear it one more time) brand could really have made a case for being the sort of steady rock people crave in a crisis like the current economic meltdown. A different McCain might really have taken this in a run-away. But not this one. Obama has shrewdly tied McCain to Bush, but that isn't really McCain's problem. Rather, it's his being joined at the hip to Bushism, which is at its core Republicanism, which is at its core regressivism. That's McCain's problem.
The irony here is that, while McCain has proven to be a scary monster at many junctures of his life and career, I don't think he is at heart really a regressive in the mold of, say, Dick Cheney or Mitch McConnell. In fact, having been savaged in 2000 by the ‘agents of intolerance' inside and outside of the Bush campaign, he actually really hated the SOBs, and with good cause. But McCain wanted – more than anything and for the entirety of his life – to be president, and he made a calculation that his best strategy for getting there was to make nice to the radical right, support Bush for eight years, and then run again as the heir apparent in 2008. What he evidently didn't consider in this sell-off of his principles to the lowest bidder was the possibility that he was hitching himself to a wagon that was headed over a cliff. Into a bottomless pit. Located on an imploding black hole star. George W. Bush is a human wrecking machine of historical proportions, second only to the likes of Hitler, Stalin or Mao (yet another way in which Bush is a two-bit hack – he couldn't even do genocide right). The good senator was only one of Bush's many victims, though McCain perhaps alone among them has the dubious honor of having been diddled by the Boy King not once, but twice.
Among the great ironies of this election is that had McCain adopted another strategy, he might have had a pretty good shot at the presidency. One possibility would have been to renounce the GOP and become a Democrat. He could certainly have argued, with a straight face, that he wasn't leaving the Republican Party, but that the Republican Party had left him. He might even have captured the Democratic nomination, and almost certainly would have destroyed a Mitt Romney or a Rudy Giuliani in the general election had he done so. Perhaps even more plausibly, he could have become an independent and run a third party campaign for president. McCain – like, say, Colin Powell – was one of the few Americans with the stature and reputation sufficient to pull that off, and it would in fact have suited his politics and temperament much better to have done so.
Instead, he tied himself to Bush, while Bush tied himself to the cement shoes of regressive politics and jumped off the bridge, taking down his own party and his party's presidential nominee with him (not to mention a million Iraqis, 4,200 Americans, Tony Blair, Colin Powell, Bar, Poppy and Jeb, along with many, many more folks foolish enough to allow themselves within his orbit). It's truly astonishing if you think about it. This little twirp's need to redeem himself after a lifetime of failure and insecurity has produced destruction of galactic proportions. In any case, McCain made the wrong choice, put ambition first, above all else (including, with the Palin pick, above country), and gambled that Bush wouldn't wreck the GOP brand before November 2008. Oops. By going to bed with the likes of George Bush, McCain definitely owns his own fate. And there's more than a little delight in watching a practitioner of these debauched politics destroy himself. He's stuck with a base that loves Bush and Bushism, all while trying to attract independents who are ready to hurl at the prospect of either. Every independent vote McCain might acquire – however implausibly, given his voting record (but then this is America, so anything can be sold) – by dissing Bush, means a Republican voter disenchanted. Likewise, every play to keep the base happy with some inane red meat about socialism or terrorism only simultaneously alienates still sentient Americans in the middle. The Palin selection epitomizes this dynamic. Whatever else he thought she might bring to the table (corruption charges, perhaps? shocking idiocy? disloyalty to the guy who made her?), part of the rationale for her selection was to do something John McCain was unable to do himself – namely, to get Republicans interested in the 2008 Republican presidential ticket. And so it did, but it has cost him dearly with just about every other voter, who look upon Palin with dropped-jaw astonishment, and McCain with deeply flawed judgement.
Meanwhile, nowadays George Bush is almost nowhere to be found. He is irrelevant to any policy discussions, and if he is even remotely semi-conscious, would count himself lucky to be off the radar screen of a country and a world filled with an anger and anxiety that is the direct product of his destructive policies. When right-wing commentator – and former press secretary for Newt Gingrich – Tony Blankley describes a Republican leader by noting that "The existing American president is a failed thing", you know it's all very, very far gone down the tubes. But notice how they all adored Bush when he was flying high. The current state of the Republican Party isn't just the product of a one-man demolition derby. This has been a carcinogenic genetic mutation masquerading as a mass ideology, and it's had a lot of adherents.
The great farce of the GOP, which soon became the tragedy of the nation and the world, was to actually govern. They would have been so much better off to retain their natural role as carping cranks, spreading disinformation at every turn, making up scandals for the other guys, proliferating and hiding their own, occasionally impeaching presidents. But they made the mistake of actually seizing power, after which an entire world could see what they're really about, the destructiveness of their policies, their breathtaking arrogance, as well as their astonishing incompetence at providing for the basic functions of governance. I suppose we can't entirely blame them for their own self-destruction. I mean, who knew that imploding economies, drowning cities, oceans of debt, disastrous wars based on lies, alienation of centuries-old allies, dismantling of Social Security, falling worker salaries, rising costs, diminishing healthcare, a massive terrorist attack while the president was on vacation, the national shame of torture, or catastrophic environmental disaster – who knew these would be unpopular policies?
The regressive movement – so deluded that they still like to think of themselves as conservatives – is on death watch now, and yet it doesn't know it, nor does it remotely begin to understand why. But the reasons – both proximate and distant – are plain enough to see. The immediate problem is that they ran a pathetic candidate against a great candidate. More importantly, they ran a slimy, Rovian campaign against a guy who knew how to fight back, and also had the guts to do so, and they presented it all to a national electorate that is frightened enough to no longer be willing to indulge foolery anymore. The proof of this is that John McCain might actually have the best night of any Republican candidate on Tuesday, as Democrats massively increase their majorities in both the House and the Senate, perhaps even gaining a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority, perhaps even giving Senate Minority Leader and major scuzzbucket Mitch McConnnell (from Kentucky no less!) his walking papers. And, as if that weren't proof enough, this comes after a similar blow-out in 2006, when the GOP got a "thumpin'", and lost control of both houses of Congress. And, to top it all off, voters don't even particularly like Democrats, and they sure don't like the current Congress, which is controlled by Democrats. It's rare for an American political party to get stomped two elections in a row, let alone by a generally disliked alternative party. You have to be screwing up really badly to do that, in a collective effort sort of way.
Which, of course, is exactly what we're talking about. Only regressives don't know it. They think their policies and attitudes are popular in America. They think George W. Bush's problem was that he wasn't regressive enough. If only he had invaded Iran as well as Iraq! If only he had deregulated Wall Street even more. If only he had encouraged more oil consumption and more carbon emissions. If only he had eliminated abortion rights. If only he had cut wealthy Americans' tax liabilities down to zero, shifting those burdens to the middle class. If only he had done to all of us what he did to Terri Schiavo's family. If only he had eliminated all government spending on popular programs. If only he had privatized Social Security and let Wall Street handle it. If only he had wasted even more Iraqis and more American GIs. If only he had let Osama bin Laden roam even freer, even longer. If only he had quadrupled the national debt, instead of merely doubling it. If only Exxon/Mobil had made even more than their all-time corporate record-breaking earnings, while the rest of us were unable to buy enough gas to get to work. If only Bush could have appointed more regressive justices to the federal bench, where they could find that we have no constitutional right to privacy, and who would make sure that corporate and presidential power trump the people's and the people's representatives' at every turn. If only there could have been more jobs lost on his watch. If only we could have seen wages fall lower. If only the country could have had its wealth more polarized so we could better emulate rotten banana republics. If only we could have been more divided politically. If only we could have made the world hate us more. If only more of our cities could have drowned. If only we could have hurtled toward planetary destruction even faster.
Hah-hah, right? Guess, what? It's only partly a joke. Most regressives earnestly believe in most of the items on the above wish list, and earnestly believe that they represent majority opinion in America. Seriously. I'm. Not. Kidding.
Fortunately, in this there is great hope for this country's recovery. For as regressives meet to lick their wounds – and I know of three such immediate post-election major summonings to the Council of Darkness already scheduled – they will be as oblivious to the cause of their demise as were their ancestors, the dinosaurs. Which means they will also be oblivious to any meaningful solution. Which, by definition, they would necessarily have to be anyhow, since the only real solution for them would be to pack up their bags, join the ACLU, and become liberals. I mean that quite seriously (and we are, in fact, already beginning to see the leading edge of that coming stampede), because, at the end of the day, the fundamental flaw of regressivism is regressivism itself. Their ideas – now explored in total, now fully tested in practice – don't work, and therefore aren't popular. They never were, in fact, popular, but a healthy dose of marketing genius applied to a narcissistic, selfish and willfully ignorant electorate was nevertheless enough to put regressives over the top time and again, starting with Reagan. Now, even that old black magic has ceased to work.
Thus, the real explanation for the regressive rout we are witnessing runs deeper than George W. Bush, and in fact goes to his very electoral success. People have seen what it means to put these criminals in charge and – despite the fact that the public actually doesn't know the half of it yet – they don't like what they see.
Likewise, the explanation for the regressive train wreck also certainly goes deeper than the pathetic figure of John McCain. But, in so many ways - stylistically and ethically, even more than politically - the McCain of 2008 has become the very living embodiment of the moral cancer hiding behind the sham ideology of free markets, strong national defense and obsessive sexual regulation. And he is being received accordingly.
A recent New York Times article described the senator's sentiments in the wake of his loss in 2000 to that scion of darkness - the ultimate child of privilege, history's all-time greatest legacy admittee to life - the guy who employed Rovian scorched earth techniques to take out not only a war hero opponent, but also a member of his own party. Despite this humiliating defeat at the hands of a patently inferior being, McCain could still hold his head high. "After his loss, he professed himself grateful, at the age of 65, for what might be left of his time. ‘I did not get to be president of the United States. And I doubt I shall have reason or opportunity to try again,' he wrote, but added, ‘I might yet become the man I always wanted to be.'"
Sadly, McCain was wrong on both predictions.
He did have the reason and opportunity to try again, and he seized them vigorously - though from the perspective of his honor and his legacy in history he would have been better off not to.
Because he also didn't become the man that he, or anyone else, would want to be. Instead, he hired the very same assassination team used against him in the 2000 election, and he employed their very same techniques against a decent and honorable opponent, whose great crime was peddling hope and justice to a battered and morally hungry American electorate.
And thus, instead of raising his party and country from the gutter of Bushism, John McCain dove down into it himself, with a literal and figurative vengeance.
He didn't become the man he always wanted to be. Instead, he became George W. Bush.
Whoever wanted to be that?
Not even George W. Bush.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.
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