Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Freedom, Expression, and Danger: Race, Religion, and Politics

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Freedom

In a free country, certain choices are available to all people -- theoretically, at least. In practice, various pressures do limit the choices of many individuals. But the essence of a free country lies in the fact that certain options are legally open to everyone.

In particular, a free country allows a range of political philosophies, and every free citizen has the right to adopt and support the political philosophy of his or her choice -- or to invent a new one!

Similarly, a free country allows a variety of religions, and every free citizen has the right to adopt and practice the religion of his or her choice -- or to create a new one! -- or to choose no religion at all!

Without these rights, no country could ever be truly free. As we are often reminded, the Founding Fathers of the United States could see that this was the case, even though they had never experienced such freedom personally, and they created not only a new and better nation, but a new and better type of nation, which owes its special place in the world to the wisdom of their vision on this very point.

In a free country, there are also people of different races. And in theory a free citizen may have the legal right to change his or her race, but in practice there is no way for anyone to do so. For this reason, we regard race as fundamentally different from religion or politics.

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Expression

In a free country, there are people of many (and vastly different) political philosophies: thus we have Communists, Fascists, Liberals, Conservatives, Socialists, Libertarians, Progressives, Populists, Zionists, Anarchists, and so on. A free citizen can adopt any of these political philosophies, and can openly express his or her opinions of each, identifying as pro- or anti-Communist, pro- or anti-Fascist, and so on, all the way down the list.

Furthermore, we can change our political philosophies, and many people do. Thus we have Liberals who used to be Conservatives, Conservatives who used to be Liberals, Democrats who used to be Republicans, and many others who have changed their political philosophies and/or affiliations over the years, as they learned, or matured, or developed dementia, or whatever.

Similarly, there are people of many (and vastly different) religions: we have Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and so on. Most religions appear in a variety of forms, and a free citizen can adopt any of them, or none at all. People are free to change their religion, and they do, although not as often as they change their politics.

There may be fewer religious converts among us than political converts. But there are still many people who have switched from one religion to another, or abandoned religion entirely, or adopted a religion after having none.

A free citizen can also form opinions on each of the religions, but these opinions are usually trickier to express than opinions about political philosophies. In general, it is considered more acceptable to criticize others over political differences than religious ones. Presumably this is because our culture recognizes that it's easier for most people to change what they think than what they believe.

There are also people of many races, but no one can choose his or her race, let alone change it. So we have no Asians who used to be Latinos, no Blacks who used to be White, and so on. Our ancestors are our ancestors and our DNA is our DNA and there's nothing we can do about it.

Legally, a free citizen has the right to form opinions on the basis of race, and clearly many people do so. But expressing such opinions is almost always considered intolerable, and acting on them in certain ways is illegal. Presumably, this is because our culture recognizes that people cannot change their DNA any more than they can change their ancestors.

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Danger

I think it's stupid to judge other people on the color of their skin, the shape of their eyes, the texture of their hair, or any other physical characteristic. Some of the best people I've ever met looked nothing like me, and I'm grateful to live in a free country where people of different backgrounds and with different physical characteristics can cooperate (most of the time) in peaceful ways (most of the time). But I do wish to point out a potential danger in the suppression of expression about racial matters. Think hypothetically with me for a moment or two, if you will.

What would happen if the people of a free country became so confused that they no longer understood the fundamental differences between race, religion, and politics? What if they knew that political criticism was acceptable, religious criticism was tricky, and racial criticism was intolerable, but they didn't know why?

In such a situation, if a political group -- that is to say: a group organized around a shared political philosophy -- could convince the others that their political philosophy was actually a religion, they would be difficult to criticize, because of the cultural pressure against criticizing people on religious grounds.

And if they could convince the others that their political philosophy was actually a race, they would be impossible to criticize, because of the cultural taboo against criticizing people based on race. So simply by calling their critics "racists," they could obscure the fact that the criticism was political, if they didn't silence the critics altogether.

Of course such a state of affairs could only come about by the merest coincidence, as no one could foresee, let alone engineer, such a situation. But if by some chance it did come about, the political group in question could implement vicious policies, with virtually no public opposition.

And if those policies were not only vicious but also racially motivated, we would have either the most bitter irony in human history or the greatest scam ever devised: a political group implementing vicious racist policies while suppressing political opposition by calling its opponents "racists."

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Lessons We Learn From Our Children: A Five-Legged Stool And A Potato Of Milk

My wife and I have been getting some interesting lessons from our children, two of which stand out as especially relevant. Working together, they form a synergy that explains far too much about the current political situation. And even though they're of no importance in and of themselves, it still might be worthwhile to tell you about them.

When our daughter was learning the alphabet, we gave her a DVD set called "40 Years of Sunny Days: The Best of Sesame Street." It's an excellent compilation of skits, songs (this is my favorite), and art. We had fun watching it with her, she had fun watching it herself, and she learned the alphabet and much more. But some of what she learned was wrong!

One of the older skits was done in simple drawings with a voice track. It shows a mother sending her daughter to the store for "a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter." The daughter recites the list over and over on her way to the store, and although she suffers a momentary lapse once inside, she brings home the right things.

Our daughter loved that skit, but she didn't understand it. We know this because she would walk around the house saying, "a loaf of bread, a potato of milk, and a stick of butter."

Her older brothers challenged her many times, asking questions such as, "How could you have a potato of milk?" and "A potato of milk? What does that even mean?" And every time, she gave them the same response: "a loaf of bread, a potato of milk, and a stick of butter."

Stubborn? Oh my goodness. Where does she get that from?

Meanwhile, our eldest son was involved in a group project in his science class. The assignment was to design and build a stool which would hold as much weight as possible. The teacher offered to provide all the materials, and our son suggested a hollow concrete cube.

It would not have been pretty, but it would have supported everything the class could stack on it. On the other hand, there were three people in the group, and he was the only one who liked his idea. The other two wanted to blow up a balloon, cover it with papier-mâché, and paint it blue with green stripes. So that's what they did.

They made legs out of empty pop cans, also covered in papier-mâché, also painted blue with green stripes, and they papered the legs to the balloon in such odd places that the stool fell over, even without any weight on it. So they added a fifth leg. Then the smallest girl in the class sat on it for about three seconds, and it didn't collapse. So they declared their experiment finished and their stool a success. Our son was mortified.

But this is how democracy works, kids. Two clowns with a bad idea will overrule one serious person with a good idea, every time. That's on a small scale. On a larger scale, the ratio gets worse. N+1 clowns who know nothing will overrule N serious, well-informed people, every time. So 51% is a landslide. 50.1% is a mandate. And so on.

And that's a problem. Meanwhile, most of the people -- at least, most of the people I know -- seem quite content to absorb whatever they hear. If they hear something often enough, and nothing to the contrary, they believe it -- even if it's not supported by any credible evidence, even if it's not remotely plausible, even if the very words don't make any sense at all. And when they're challenged, they'll stick by their nonsense, no matter what. That's another problem.

It's not as if honest people control the voting machines or anything. And it's not as if we control the media either. We don't even have a presence in it. So if there were no volunteer truth-seekers, everyone would hear the same lies all day long, day after day. And nobody would ever hear anything different. Then they wouldn't even need to rig the elections.

It's good to be blogging again. 

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Friday, November 14, 2008

An Embarrassment Of Laundry Lists

I've been feeling a bit embarrassed at the sudden proliferation of laundry lists in the wake of the election: open "Dear Santa" letters to our new president-elect, from people who ought to know better. It's as if they had never seen politics before.

Among writers I still read without knowing why, Bob Parry has been working on one extreme, while Bob Kohler works the other. Parry has been writing in intricate detail about how, in 1993, the incoming Clinton administration refused to hold the outgoing Bush administration accountable for the crimes they committed in office. Parry urges Obama not to make the same "mistake".
Barack Obama seeks a new era of bipartisanship, but he should take heed of what happened to the last Democrat in the White House – Bill Clinton – in 1993 when he sought to appease Republicans by shelving pending investigations into Reagan-Bush-I-era wrongdoing and hoped for some reciprocity.

Instead the Republicans pocketed the Democratic concessions and pressed ahead with possibly the most partisan assault ever directed against a sitting President. The war on Clinton included attacks on his past life in Arkansas, on his wife Hillary, on personnel decisions at the White House, and on key members of his administration.
And so on... and on and on ... until he reaches this conclusion:
Now [...] – with Barack Obama’s victory and with solid Democratic majorities again in the House and Senate – the Democrats are back to a spot very similar to where they were at the start of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

They have all the power they need to initiate serious investigations into the widespread criminality of George W. Bush’s presidency, from torture and other war crimes to war profiteering and other lucrative influence peddling.

But President-elect Obama is receiving nearly the identical advice that greeted Bill Clinton after his election 16 years ago: In the name of bipartisanship, let bygones be bygones.
The problem here, I must point out, is that all through the campaign, Barack Obama made it very clear that he intends to let bygones be bygones. And all through the campaign, Bob Parry supported him anyway. Parry even went so far as to write a condescending column trying to dissuade those who would vote for third-party candidates.

Obama needed your vote, even if your state was safely in his column already, according to Parry, so his popular vote total would give his administration more legitimacy. Or something. The logic is stunning: Vote for a candidate who rejects your position; then once he's in office you can pressure him to support the position he's already rejected.

At the other tactical extreme, Bob Kohler has a list of lists:
The ACLU, for instance, has put forth a transition plan titled: “Ask President-elect Obama to restore the America we believe in.” On day one, it calls on the new president to stop torture, close Guantanamo, restore the rule of law for detainees and end the practice of extraordinary rendition.

Beyond this, the organization has dozens of recommendations to be accomplished during the first 100 days and first year: stop warrantless spying; implement sensible and humane policies toward immigrants, prisoners and many other groups; ban all workplace discrimination against sexual minorities by the federal government and its contractors; and much more.

Jonathan Steele, in an article in The Guardian (U.K.) on Nov. 7, headlined “Now he must declare that the war on terror is over,” wrote: “Obama’s preference for diplomacy can help to forge new, individual relationships with Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Paul Krugman, in the New York Times on Nov. 7, wrote: “Helping the neediest in a time of crisis, through expanded health and unemployment benefits, is the morally right thing to do; it’s also a far more effective form of economic stimulus than cutting the capital gains tax. Providing aid to beleaguered state and local governments, so that they can sustain essential public services, is important for those who depend on those services; it’s also a way to avoid job losses and limit the depth of the economy’s slump.”

My friend Kathy Kelly, a peace activist for decades, is part of a campaign called Camp Hope: Countdown to Change, which plans to maintain a presence in Obama’s Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park from Jan. 1 to Jan. 19 (Martin Luther King Day), urging him to make a number of actions, which are “early steps to more profound policy changes.”

These include: reduction and eventual withdrawal of military forces from Iraq and immediate cessation of offensive combat operations; a 90-day moratorium on all housing foreclosures; submitting the Kyoto Protocol to Congress for ratification; and taking all nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert and beginning negotiations with other leaders of nuclear weapon states to reduce and eliminate all nuclear weapons.
Jonathan Steele can write all he likes in The Guardian about how Obama must declare the War on Terror over; he can write anything at all about what Obama must do; but what does Obama say about the War on Terror?

He has already pledged allegiance to Israel, the clearest beneficiary of the War on Terror and the country that would least like to see it stopped. He has said, as in his highly praised speech in Philadelphia, that our problems in the area are caused by the "perverse and hateful ideologies of Islam". Are these the words, do they represent the thoughts, of a man who is ready to declare the War on Terror over?

The ACLU agenda for transition is lovely; but who is the ACLU to set an agenda? Where was Barack Obama when "the America we believe in" was being plundered? Ah, yes! He was in the Senate, voting for some of Bush's most atrocious "political victories".

Kathy Kelly can plead for the reduction or elimination of nuclear weapons all she likes, but how far will she get with a president who has hinted at wanting to use them against Iran?

All these questions are far too difficult, aren't they? We'd better ignore them.

In a recent sprawling piece, Tom Englehardt summarizes Obama's rejection of truth, common sense, and progress:
Winning an election with an antiwar label, Obama has promised -- kinda -- to end the American war there and bring the troops -- sorta, mostly -- home. But even after his planned 16-month withdrawal of U.S. "combat brigades," which may not be welcomed by his commanders in the field, including former Iraq commander, now Centcom Commander David Petraeus, there are still plenty of combative non-combat forces, which will be labeled "residual" and left behind to fight "al-Qaeda." Then, there are all those "advisors" still there to train Iraqi forces, the guards for the giant bases the Bush administration built in the country, the many thousands of armed private security contractors from companies like Blackwater, and of course, the 1,000 "diplomats" who are to staff the newly opened U.S. embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone, possibly the largest embassy on the planet. Hmmmm.

And while the new president turns to domestic matters, it's quite possible that significant parts of his foreign policy could be left to the oversight of Vice President Joe Biden who, in case anyone has forgotten, proposed a plan for Iraq back in 2007 so filled with imperial hubris that it still startles. In a Caesarian moment, he recommended that the U.S. -- not Iraqis -- functionally divide the country into three parts. Although he preferred to call it a "federal system," it was, for all intents and purposes, a de facto partition plan.

If Iraq remains a sorry tale of American destruction and dysfunction without, as yet, a discernable end in sight, Afghanistan may prove Iraq squared. And there, candidate Obama expressed no desire to wind the war down and withdraw American troops. Quite the opposite, during the election campaign he plunked hard for escalation, something our NATO allies are sure not to be too enthusiastic about. According to the Obama plan, many more American troops (if available, itself an open question) are to be poured into the country in what would essentially be a massive "surge strategy" by yet another occupant of the Oval Office.
Not bad enough? There's more:
President-elect Obama accepted the overall framework of a "Global War on Terror" during his presidential campaign. This "war" lies at the heart of the Bush administration's fantasy world of war that has set all-too-real expanses of the planet aflame. Its dangers were further highlighted this week by the New York Times, which revealed that secret orders in the spring of 2004 gave the U.S. military "new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States."
...

If, however, Obama accepts a War on Terror framework, as he already seems to have, as well as those "residual" forces in Iraq, while pumping up the war in Afghanistan, he may quickly find himself playing by Rumsfeld rules, whether or not he revokes those specific orders. In fact, left alone in Washington, backed by the normal national security types, he may soon find himself locked into all sorts of unpalatable situations...
And then there's all this, too:
We won't know the full cast of characters to come until the president-elect makes the necessary announcements or has a national security press conference with a similar line-up behind him. But it's certainly rumored that Robert Gates, a symbol of continuity from both Bush eras, might be kept on as secretary of defense, or a Republican senator like Richard Lugar of Indiana or, more interestingly, retiring Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel might be appointed to the post. Of course, many Clintonistas are sure to be in this line-up, too.

In addition, among the essential cast of characters will be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Michael Mullen, and Centcom Commander David Petraeus, both late Bush appointees, both seemingly flexible military men, both interested in a military-plus approach to the Afghan and Iraq wars. Petraeus, for instance, reportedly recently asked for, and was denied, permission to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

All these figures will represent a turn away from the particular madness of the early Bush years abroad, one that actually began in the final years of his second term. But such a national security line-up is unlikely to include fresh thinkers, who might truly reimagine an imperial world, or anyone who might genuinely buck the power of the Pentagon. What Obama looks to have are custodians and bureaucrats of empire, far more cautious, far more sane, and certainly far more grown-up than the first-term Bush appointees, but not a cast of characters fit for reshaping American policy in a new world of disorder and unraveling economies, not a crew ready to break new ground and cede much old ground on this still American-garrisoned planet of ours.
What to do? As Englehardt puts it, "Don't Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart"
Let's assume the best: that Barack Obama truly means to bring some form of the people's will, as he imagines it, to Washington after eight years of unconstitutional "commander-in-chief" governance. That -- take my word for it -- he can't do without the people themselves expressing that will.
But why, after all this, would anyone assume the best? And why should you or I take the word of somebody who does so? These are very difficult questions, so difficult that they must be dodged.
It's a natural reaction -- and certainly a commonplace media reaction at the moment -- to want to give Barack Obama a "chance." Back off those critical comments, people now say. Fair's fair. Give the President-elect a little "breathing space." After all, the election is barely over, he's not even in office, he hasn't had his first 100 days, and already the criticism has begun.

But those who say this don't understand Washington -- or, in the case of various media figures and pundits, perhaps understand it all too well.
It's not difficult to understand:

When the telecoms wanted legal immunity for their lawbreaking activities, Barack Obama said he would try to prevent that from happening. Then he voted for a law that made it happen.

When the big banks wanted $700 billion of your money, with public opinion running 100-to-1 against the idea, Barack Obama voted for the bill that gave that money away.

He needed your support then; he slapped you across the head. You voted for him anyway.

Those bills were always going to pass. They didn't need his vote. He could have voted against them, as a token gesture. But he didn't. He didn't even pretend to be on your side, even though he needed your support so very much. And you gave it to him anyway.

And now ... he doesn't need you anymore. He's already made his intentions as clear as day ... and yet here you come with your Dear Santa letters full of free advice -- advice your man has already rejected.

If he didn't even bother pretending to be serious when he needed your support, what makes you think he'll listen now, when he doesn't need you at all?

I guess I just don't understand politics.

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Saturday, October 25, 2008

Desperate Measures For Desperate Times: McCain Panders To Bush's Base

Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe gets it almost right in his editorial, "McCain's blatant pitch to the rich":
JOHN MCCAIN went to New Hampshire this week at a time when voters understand the limits of their state motto "Live Free or Die." They know the economy is dying on fat cats living far too free. Barack Obama leads in state polls by 7-to-13 percentage points.

Undaunted, McCain played the greed card. "Barack Obama wants to, quote, 'spread the wealth around,' " McCain said, with fingers in quotation marks as the audience booed at St. Anselm College in a speech shown on television. "We don't need government 'spreading the wealth. . .' " he said. McCain uttered variations of spreading the wealth 12 times.

He was cheered when he said, "The redistribution of wealth is the last thing America needs right now."

In Ohio, McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, called Obama "Barack the wealth spreader" and continued to drop the S-word: socialism.
There's a problem with the Palin/McCain campaign, and those with eyes can see it easily: there's what they say, and then there's what they do. And what they say makes no sense...
The problem for McCain, Palin, and the Republicans is that the majority of Americans beg to differ. Redistribution in some form is the first thing people want after two decades of runaway pay disparity between CEOs and workers, tax loopholes so wide that two-thirds of American corporations paid no income tax from 1998 to 2005, and the banking system now getting $700 billion from us to bail out its incompetence. All this while healthcare, gasoline, and college tuitions gobble up any raises regular folks get.
... and what they do shows quite clearly that they are our enemies.
These developments are so identified with the Republicans that every tactic McCain uses to escape them ends up with him making a mockery out of the party's claims to values. McCain's Ohio mascot Joe the Plumber turns out to be Joe the Unlicensed Plumber who owes back taxes. Palin is the self-proclaimed pit bull with lipstick, but the Republican National Committee was so freaked that the shtick was that of a hick that they Barbied her up at Nieman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue for $150,000. Talk about spreading wealth around. Not many hockey moms or wives of Joe the Plumber can drop three times the national median household income to look civilized.

Meanwhile, a CNN poll this week shows Obama leading McCain on the question of who would better help the middle class, 60 percent to 36 percent. A Washington Post/ABC News poll has the same question as 59 percent to 31 percent Obama. Obama has pulled away from a virtual tie with McCain on who would better handle taxes, into double-digit leads in some national polls. On who best will handle either the economy or the current fiscal crisis, Obama is beating McCain roughly 53 percent to 39 percent.
Only a miracle can save McCain's campaign now, but miracles are always available. How about a little terrorism?

As Derrick Jackson points out, when
McCain rails against spreading the wealth in America, he runs right back to the man he says he is running away from, President Bush. In 2000, Bush the candidate greeted the well-connected audience at the Alfred E. Smith political roast in New York by acknowledging them as the top 1 percent. "This is an impressive crowd, the haves and the have mores," Bush said. "Some people call you the elite. I call you my base."

McCain is too late to turn that joke into serious political strategy.
Say what?

It wasn't a joke; it is a "serious political strategy", and it has carried the day in America for most of the past 30 years. But it might not be enough to compensate for the other shortcomings that are clearly visible in the Palin/McCain ticket, and in their campaign:
A recent survey by the American Affluence Research Center in Atlanta found the nation's wealthiest 10 percent to be tied at 48 percent each for McCain and Obama. What once was a campaign of a senator who reached across the aisle on campaign financing and global warming is now stoking selfishness into the silly zone.

Well, it would be silly except for the implications. If McCain is telling America's rich that their gains are utterly decoupled from the wealth disparities of fellow Americans, what does that foretell about foreign policy in his administration? The rest of the world has already told us. The Pew Global Attitudes Project found vastly more confidence in Obama than McCain.
That's a very generous way to phrase it. The rest of the world is much more scared of McCain than they are of Obama. But that doesn't mean they have any confidence in the Democrat. Those of us who have been paying attention have no confidence in him at all.
This is, of course, no concern to a campaign whose slogan is "America First." It is rapidly sounding like "Me First." How patriotic. That is too much even for the limited-tax Live Free or Die state.
Wanna talk about patriotic? How about this? (This, too!) Their lying knows no bounds; and it doesn't have to, because they're Republicans.

(Here is one of the biggest differences between the parties, in my view, and it's one of style: Democrats sometimes tell the truth, especially when they're talking about Republicans. But Republicans never tell the truth about anything, even -- especially! -- about the Democrats.

None of this is news; more than 50 years ago, in the midst of another rancid and rancorous campaign, Adlai Stevenson offered a solution to the animosity, saying if the Republicans would stop lying about the Democrats, the Democrats would stop telling the truth about the Republicans.

And to a certain extent -- sadly -- the Democrats have stopped telling the truth about the Republicans. But the Republicans have held fast to their long-established strategy. And it has worked for them. But I digress. The more important point here concerns redistribution of wealth.)

All systems of government redistribute wealth. It's inevitable. Every piece of legislation pertaining to tax law -- or any other aspect of the economy -- steals money from somebody and gives it to somebody else. What matters is the direction in which the money flows.

Some governments steal from the poor to give to the rich. Some do the opposite. In America, the government has been doing the opposite for a long time now. But in our mutant national politics, that's not called "redistribution of wealth"; it's not called anything at all.

It's never even mentioned, except in cliches and with approval. "Money makes money", the supposedly wise men say, and we, the thick-headed paupers, are all supposed to smile and nod -- as if it were perfectly acceptable for all the wealth of a wealthy society to flow to those who don't need it at all.

We're supposed to think it's right and proper, healthy and sane, for our government -- elected by our votes, and spending our money -- to assist that process. But it isn't, and we don't.

If John McCain thinks that appealing to the ultra-wealthy is his only chance, he's right.

With the failure of the Republican party to nominate a candidate who can even pretend to be level-headed, it's going to take a massive hack to deliver the proper result in this election. The inevitable backlash will be dealt with -- but the wealthy have to be onside. And McCain is doing his insane best to make sure they are.

My wife asked me the other day if I thought the weekend after the election would be a good time to travel. I said I didn't think so.

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Friday, October 17, 2008

Sorry, Chump: Your Facts Contradict My Opinions

Dear Sir,

I have received your most recent, and looked it over, briefy.

Unfortunately it seems to contain a number of facts which contradict my opinions.

Therefore, I shall be unable to pay it any further attention.

Please consider yourself dismissed.

Sincerely,

Conn D. Sending
Ignorance/Arrogance Inc.
I was astonished by an incredible piece from the Middle East expert, Professor Juan Cole, at his blog, Informed Comment, a few weeks ago. It's called "A Nation of Masochists" and it starts this way:
I have concluded that Americans, who pretend in public to be straitlaced, are in fact rabid masochists addicted to whips, black leather and the application of fists. It turns out that large numbers of people throughout the world are accidentally asphyxiated every year because they need to be choked for maximum pleasure.
The link provided by Professor Cole clarifies what he means by "large numbers of people":
one or two per million people per year
Methinks he doth exaggerate! One or two per million is far less than a thousandth of a percent! It's a terribly small minority on which to base a political analysis. But this is no ordinary analysis.

Professor Cole continues:
The diagnosis of national masochism is the only thing that can satisfactorily explain the poll numbers in the presidential race.
By this he means that there is no indication of a landslide for Obama. There are many reasons for this, but Professor Cole sees only one:
Let's get this straight.

The Republican Party came to Washington, DC, in 2000 with a solid majority in both houses of Congress and on the Supreme Court, allowing them to steal the presidency, as well. If you wanted to know what a pure Republican-Party government unhindered by the Democrats, Libertarians, Greens or Socialists might look like, this was the moment.

So they came to power when there was a budget surplus bequeathed by a Democratic president.

They immediately ran up a big deficit every year since, doubling the national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. You don't run big deficits of $300 and $400 billion a year in good times according to Keynes. You save the the deficit spending for a recession, when the economy needs a jolt. If you're already racking up a big deficit every year in a good economy, you have no way of making a difference during a significant downturn except by then going for a truly mega-deficit, which risks destroying the value of your currency abroad. In a service economy like that of the US, a dollar with a declining value might not even help the economy via exports very much, since the manufactured goods are being made down in Mexico now, anyway.

Note that Clinton had been talking about using the surplus to pay down the debt or to fix the looming crisis in social security.

With the government encumbered with $5 trillion in new debt before September, and now with another trillion and a half (probably when it is all said and done with), how exactly will social security be fixed?

(Hint: Republican leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich hated social security, because the people are grateful to the Democrats for it. Bush tried to privatize it and McCain would have helped him; you wonder if they are trying deliberately to destroy it. Social security is the main reason for which the elderly are not now, as they were in the 1930s, the poorest and most miserable section of society.)
Professor Cole goes on in the same vein, blaming the Republicans for everything that's gone wrong in the past seven years, without mentioning how much support they have had from key Democrats.

He also manages to summarize all the crimes of the past seven years without once mentioning the attacks of 9/11, or the obviously false cover story that goes along with them, or the ongoing war crime against Afghanistan, or the GWOT, for that matter, although he does describe the war in Iraq as the result of "one of the great criminal conspiracies of modern times."

But despite the obvious fact that the Republican criminals in office have been supported by Democrats in office, all along the way -- and quite heavily in some instances -- Professor Cole lays all the blame at the feet of the Republican Party itself, eventually writing:
The Republican Party conducted a vast illegal spying operation on Americans and on foreign diplomats. We still don't know why exactly, and that the operation had domestic political motivations cannot be ruled out.

They imposed on us this so-called PATRIOT act that gutted the Constitution.
How many Democrats voted for "this so-called PATRIOT act"? Eh? What's that you say? How many Democrats voted for the "bailout"? How many Democrats voted for hundreds of billions of dollars of war-appropriations every year?

If you forget all that, and much else too, you can almost understand Dr. Cole's conclusion:
in the wake of the greatest and most sustained act of systematic plunder since the Mongol hordes appropriated to themselves the riches of everyplace in Asia from Beijing to Isfahan, the reaction of the supine and slave-like American voting public is to scratch their heads and have a hard time deciding if they would like more of the same.

Despite his aristocratic prerogatives and connections in high society, even the Marquis de Sade himself was brought down by a lowly maid, who complained to the police of his cutting her while having his way with her, leading to his arrest.

In contrast to that plucky domestic servant, the American public appears to enjoy being lacerated while being badly used, moaning with delight at each new act of abuse and abasement, while, blue-lipped, gasping for air.

One worries for our children, threatened with the fate of the homeless street children so common in the sort of third world country into which we are being turned by our managing committee.

But, well, if you are determined to bend over on November 4, at least I hope you enjoy pain. In that case, you are going to be ecstatic.
The piece was quite well received by most of Dr. Cole's readers, but a few were moved to object, most notably one Chris Floyd, who contributed the following comment:
Professor Cole, I deeply respect your wisdom and draw on your work constantly, but I have to say that there is a simple answer to your question, and it doesn't involve whips, black leather or the application of fists.

After very effectively laying out the case against the Bush Administration -- a sharp, succinct and true bill of indictment -- you then say:

..."the reaction of the supine and slave-like American voting public [to all this] is to scratch their heads and have a hard time deciding if they would like more of the same."

Why is this? Because in very many, very important respects, "more of the same" is all they are being offered -- by BOTH parties.

You eloquently describe the flagrantly criminal activities of the Bush Administration, each of them crying out for impeachment...so where are the bills of impeachment introduced by Senators Obama and Biden? Where are the high-profile, Watergate-style Senate hearings into the Administration's high crimes launched by the Democratic-controlled Congress? Where are the federal marshals rounding up Administration minions who defy subpoenas and refuse to testify before Congress? When have we seen Obama or Biden leading public crusades denouncing the heinous practice of official torture or aggressive war, putting themselves out in front of these issues? Where are Obama's pledges to relentlessly pursue prosecution of these still-fresh crimes once he comes to office, without fear or favor?

Where, in short, are the indications that the malefactors of the Bush Administration will face even the slightest tincture of justice for their crimes if Obama is elected? And if they do not, then the situation will indeed be "more of the same."

Where was Obama when the time came to stand up against the illegal surveillance of American citizens that you have rightly and eloquently decried? He was standing on the other side, with Bush and Cheney, voting to legitimize tyrannical powers and immunize lawbreakers. More of the same.

What does Obama offer us as his future foreign policy? He will "withdraw combat troops" from Iraq, he says, as long as "conditions on the ground" are right. This is also what Bush and McCain say is their policy, and their ultimate goal. But Obama, like those two, plans to leave an unspecified number of U.S. troops in Iraq, in those impermanent permanent bases. More of the same.

Obama proposes expanding the War on Terror to Pakistan's hinterlands -- a policy already being adopted by Bush and promoted by McCain. More of the same. He also supports expanding the war in Afghanistan itself, with more troops (and more blunderbuss airstrikes to support these troops). More of the same. Obama has declared his fast intent to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, baiting the Russian bear just like Bush and McCain, and reigniting the Cold War. More of the same.

Like Bush and McCain, Obama too rattles the nuclear sword at Iran, vowing in no uncertain terms that he will never take ANY option "off the table" against Iran. More of the same. Like Bush and McCain, Obama has declared his support for the hardest-line Israeli policies against Palestine, and he too refuses to have any truck with the democratically-elected Hamas government. There is virtually no chance whatsoever that an Obama administration would be substantially different in any way from Bush and McCain. It will be, in every important respect, more of the same.

Like McCain, Obama proposes an even larger military machine, one even more ready to strike anytime, anywhere, all over the world, to any perceived "threat" to the ever-unspecified "American interests." More of the same. Like McCain and Bush, Obama says nothing about rolling back America's vast empire of military bases -- those provocative and intrusive imperial outposts that produce so much of the kind of grievous blowback that Chalmers Johnson, among others, has documented so well. More of the same. Like Bush and McCain, Obama has been completely silent about America's direct involvement in the horrific conflict in Somalia -- another botched and murderous job like Iraq. More of the same.

Obama supports the $700 billion theft of American tax money to be ladled out to the cruel and stupid wastrels of the elite, albeit with a few mild caveats about "oversight" -- no doubt the same kind of rigorous "oversight" we have seen from the Democrats throughout the Bush Administration. But the end result will be, yes, more of the same: vast amounts of public money spent to coddle elites and protect them from the consequences of their actions, while millions of ordinary people suffer lasting hardship.

What's more, Obama's own hands as president would be tied by the massive commitment of public funds to the bailout. More money for education, for infrastructure, for affordable health care, for a "Manhattan Project" on global warming? Sorry, can't afford it; we're too busy paying off Wall Street's debts, and expanding the military, and spreading the War on Terror into Pakistan, and maintaining tens of thousands of "non-combat" troops in the hostile environment of a country we destroyed in a criminal act of aggression that no one is going to be held accountable for. But don't worry, there is still enough money left for us to eavesdrop on your emails whenever we feel like it. So that's OK, right?

The Obama campaign has been a massive, historical failure in terms of offering anything like a genuine alternative to the dysfunctional and destructive system we have now. This is not to say that an Obama administration would not be different in numerous and not insignificant ways from a McCain regime. But that is not the issue here. The question is why the election is still in doubt, why McCain may very well win it, even though he represents a continuation of policies that most Americans have thoroughly rejected. And I repeat, this is not because Americans are masochists, or suffer from some other collective character flaw. It is because they see both candidates offering more war, more meddling in the affairs of other nations, much much more of the military-industrial complex, more coddling of the rich, less liberty for our citizens and a bleaker future for our children as they spend decades paying off the debts of the rich and facing the terrible storms of blowback from the imperial adventures that both candidates support.

It is so unreasonable that many people would feel hesitant about such a "choice"? Who should really be castigated here, especially in such harsh and lurid terms? The American people? Or those who failed to offer them a clear and genuine and substantive alternative to "more of the same"?
I thought Chris Floyd's contribution to the discussion was spot-on, and badly needed. But hardly anybody agreed with me; in fact super390 summarized the case against with the astonishingly perceptive:
[blah blah blah] You act as though there was no difference between Bush and Gore. [blah blah blah]
So there you have it: Chris Floyd wasn't talking about Bush or Gore, he was talking about McCain and (especially) Obama. Chris Floyd was talking about positions Obama has taken (or failed to take), about votes Obama has cast, about things Obama himself has said he wants to do ... and none of this made any impact on super390 at all -- because it's unacceptable. It is unacceptable not only to super390 but also to a very large segment of the population, whose position seems to be:
Dear Sir,

I have received your most recent, and looked it over, briefy.

Unfortunately it seems to contain a number of facts which contradict my opinions.

Therefore, I shall be unable to pay it any further attention.

Please consider yourself dismissed.

Sincerely,

Conn D. Sending
Ignorance/Arrogance Inc.


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Wednesday, October 15, 2008

TV Debate Blues

I went down to the vomitorium
thought I'd watch some of the puke-a-thon
yeah I went down to the vomitorium
thought I'd watch some of the puke-a-thon
but my stomach couldn't take it, baby
I switched it off soon as the sound came on

[repeat and fade away]

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Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Late Breaking: Joe Biden Is A Maverick, Too!

One of the lines I was most eager to blog about when I read it -- but couldn't at the time -- came from Mary MacElveen, via Bob Parry's Consortium News.

While arguing that the national news media unfairly pay more attention to Elephant veep candidate Sarah Palin than to Donkey veep candidate Joe Biden [photo], MacElveen also argues that John McCain is not the only "maverick" in the race.

According to MacElveen:
Biden too showed he was a maverick in stating he would buck his own party to continue funding the troops when some opposed it.
He certainly doesn't appear to be the sort of maverick we need at the moment. But thanks for the insight, Mary.

From one point of view, Consortium News, with its 24/7 Obamathon, continues to be one of the hugest craters in the pockmarked landscape formerly known as independent American journalism.

But from another angle, it's remarkable how deeply and fully Bob Parry's site reveals the bankruptcy of American politics -- where even those pulling for the "opposition" are unabashedly despicable.

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Friday, July 4, 2008

Boom Boom Boom: Jesse Helms Is Dead

Jesse Helms is dead.
Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday. He was 86.
...

Mr. Helms was known for taking on anyone, even leaders of his own party, who strayed from his idea of ideological purity.
It's hard to imagine how we'll survive without him.
David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said recently that Mr. Helms’s contribution to the conservative movement was “incredibly important.”

For one thing, he said, Mr. Helms was alert to technological change, especially the importance of direct mail, and readily signed fund-raising letters that helped conservative organizations get started.

Mr. Helms was also instrumental in keeping Mr. Reagan’s presidential campaign alive in 1976 when it was broke and limping after a series of defeats in the Republican primaries.

And in the Senate, Mr. Keene said, Mr. Helms was a rallying point for conservatives. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he supported Mr. Reagan on issues like aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. “Without Jesse, it would have been hard for Reagan to hold the line,” he said.
Who will help the president "hold the line" now?

Who will make sure he retains the power to commit war crimes against foreign countries, even while the law of the land forbids it?

Oh, sorry. That problem's been solved already.

Carry on.
He later led an ill-fated attempt to take over CBS, exhorting conservatives to buy up stock in order to stop what he saw as a liberal bias in its news reporting.

He was also well known for holding up votes on treaties and appointments to win a point. His willingness to block the business of the Senate or the will of Presidents earned him the sobriquet “Senator No” — a label he relished.

In campaigns and in the Senate, Mr. Helms stood out in both his words and his tactics.

He fought bitterly against Federal aid for AIDS research and treatment, saying the disease resulted from “unnatural” and “disgusting” homosexual behavior.
And so on. Nice guy. A really nice guy. And the good citizens of North Carolina just kep' on electin' 'im. Thanks, folks.
Trailing in a tough re-election fight in 1990 against a black opponent, Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte, Mr. Helms unveiled a nakedly racial campaign ad in which a pair of hands belonging to a white job-seeker crumpled a rejection slip as an announcer explained that the job had been given to an unqualified member of a minority. Mr. Helms went on to victory.

In 1994, angered at President Clinton, Mr. Helms suggested in print that if Mr. Clinton was to visit North Carolina, “He’d better bring a bodyguard.” He later said the remark had been “a mistake.”
A more "liberal" Senator wouldn't be allowed to make such "mistakes" without a massive media campaign to smear him. But of course Jesse Helms didn't have to worry about such things because he'd been part of the "conservative" group that had already purchased the services of the national media.
His bruising style and right-wing politics won him many friends in his home state and across the nation, but he also created a legion of enemies. Millions of dollars were raised outside North Carolina both from those who flocked to his ideological banner and from those who ached to see him defeated. He never won more than 55 percent of the vote in five campaigns for the Senate.

“He was a very polarizing politician,” said Ferrell Guillory, a veteran North Carolina journalist. “He was not a consensus builder. He didn’t want everybody to vote for him. He just wanted enough.”
He was the sort of politician who likes to blame the increasing "polarization" of the electorate on others. And he didn't mind telling you who he blamed, either:
“Look carefully into the faces of the people participating,” he said in a 1968 editorial against anti-Vietnam war protests. “What you will see, for the most part, are dirty, unshaven, often crude young men and stringy-haired awkward young women who cannot attract attention any other way.”
You had enough of this? Me too.

Sayonara, Jesse.

Boom, Boom, Boom.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Mike Gravel Joins The Libertarians

Former Senator Mike Gravel is no longer seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, but he's still running for president.

He's quit the Democrats and joined the Libertarian Party.

Gravel says:
the Democratic Party today is no longer the party of FDR. It is a party that continues to sustain war, the military-industrial complex and imperialism -- all of which I find anathema to my views.
...

I look forward to advancing my presidential candidacy within the Libertarian Party, which is considerably closer to my values, my foreign policy views and my domestic views.
Sometimes I wonder whether Mike Gravel has studied any contemporary political history. It's been a long time since the Democratic Party was "the party of FDR", and it should come as no surprise that the Democratic party likes "war, the military-industrial complex and imperialism".

I also have trouble reconciling Gravel's anti-militaristic views with the Libertarian Party's (laissez-faire, "free market") economic policy, since in my view the military industrial complex is both the inevitable result of laissez-faire capitalism and the force which precludes the existence of any "free market".

But perhaps this is a good sign; if Mike Gravel is caught in a bind between what he says he believes and actual verifiable reality, then perhaps the other candidates will begin to see that he has something in common with all of them.

Friday, March 28, 2008

Presenting ... Donkey Candidates For "Drawdown"

The Washington Post says "42 Democrats Vow a Drawdown in Iraq If They Win Seats"
More than three dozen Democratic congressional candidates banded together yesterday to promise that, if elected, they will push for legislation calling for an immediate drawdown of troops in Iraq that would leave only a security force in place to guard the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Of course the Embassy could end up encompassing all of Baghdad and require upwards of a million troops to guard it, but I'm sure the Democrats will cross that bridge when they come to it.
Rejecting their party leaders' assertions that economic troubles have become the top issue on voters' minds, leaders of the coalition of 38 House and four Senate candidates pledged to make immediate withdrawal from Iraq the centerpiece of their campaigns.
They can campaign on whatever platform they like; if and when they get elected it'll be a different story.
"The people inside the Beltway don't seem to get how big an issue this is," said Darcy Burner [photo], a repeat candidate who narrowly lost to Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.) in 2006.
I beg to differ. The people outside the Beltway are still under the mistaken impression that anybody inside the Beltway cares what they think.
The group's 36-page plan does not set a specific deadline for when all combat troops must be out of Iraq. "Begin it now, do it as safely as you can and get everyone out," Burner said.
It's an open-ended statement that sets up all manner of possible contradictions, some of which are already visible. Are they pushing for "a security force in place to guard the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad" or do they really want to "get everyone out"?
The starkest difference between the group's proposal, dubbed a "Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq," and those embraced by many senior Democrats and the party's presidential candidates is that it rejects the idea of leaving U.S. troops on the ground to train Iraqi security forces or engage in anti-terrorism operations. The group instead calls for a dramatic increase in regional diplomacy and the deployment of international peacekeeping forces, if necessary.
Or are we going to have "international peacekeeping forces" guarding the US Embassy? My head hurts!

And it may seem like a contradiction; but in politics there are no contradictions. Watch this and all the others vanish in the wink of an eye:
Democratic leaders said the new candidate coalition does not signal a divide in the party's war policy.

"Democrats are united in our need to bring change in Iraq," said Doug Thornell, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "It's up to the individual candidates to determine how to best do that for their district."
In other words, each candidate can promise whatever it takes to get elected, after which the central committee will tell them to concentrate on the economic troubles that have become the top issue.

You heard a similar song two years ago; in fact the tune was identical but the words went "Just get us elected, and then we'll impeach them."

Then they got majorities in both houses and impeachment was suddenly "off the table".

Go ahead. Vote for more Democrats. See how much good it does.

They may say they want to stop the war in Iraq but they all want to keep fighting the war on terror.

They may say they want to protect us from "another 9/11" but they won't even discuss a truly independent investigation of the actual 9/11.

The party leaders let their candidates say whatever they want when they're campaigning, but they'll be "united" if and when they get to Washington...

... or I'm a small blue fish with big green wings.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Raiding The Vault -- Part III: "Burn"

I almost managed to laugh back in January when I saw that the Washington Post had published a piece called "Democracy Activists Disappointed in Bush", because I knew the democracy activists in question must be foreigners.

Democracy activists in the USA have long been "disappointed" with Bush -- especially with the way in which he was supposedly twice elected -- but the Washington Post has hardly shown any interest in such stories.

As it turned out (mark the calendar!) I was correct; Bush had just ended a tour of the Middle East and some of the people there were none too happy with his failure to bring democracy to their countries.
Hisham Kassem, an Egyptian political activist who last year received a U.S. National Endowment for Democracy award, was left dispirited by Bush's tour. The year 2005 "was the best year in my life, politically. ... Our hopes were way up there," Kassem said. "But -- it was just another story."

Anger grew in his voice. "Bush, as far as American foreign policy vis-a-vis democracy, civil rights, is right back to square one," Kassem added. "This trip marks it."
Hisham Kassem amazes me with his assertion that Bush's pro-democracy rhetoric was "just another story". The amazing part is that it's taken him three years since Bush's second inaugural address to figure it out.

Bush wasn't the only salesman peddling the lies, of course.
In 2005, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice helped create as much of a democratic fervor as the Middle East had ever seen, democracy activists said. Rice vowed support for "the democratic aspirations of all people."
...

Middle East democracy activists these days say they wonder whether the United States has returned to the formula that Rice renounced in 2005: valuing the stability of autocratic Arab governments over the uncertainty of elected ones.
They're still wondering? Terry Jones figured it out three years ago, and he said so in an interview with Mother Jones:
What amazes me about [Bush's second inaugural address] is he’s basically just declared war on the rest of the world. But nobody seemed to really notice. He said it in a very nice way, so maybe they missed what he was talking about. Basically, he said that America can take out any government it doesn’t like and do whatever it likes. It’s stunning. It’s people’s reaction to it that’s been extraordinary to me, that nobody’s taken notice of what he’s actually saying.
Terry Jones was wrong on one point; somebody did notice what he was saying.

Chris Floyd noticed, too -- he noticed that something was very wrong, and saw what it was, and wrote an amazing piece to mark the occasion. Please read all of "Tongues of Flame: Strange Doings at the Inauguration", not just this introduction:
"Keep thee far from a false matter; and the innocent and righteous slay thou not: for I will not justify the wicked." – Exodus 23:7

There was something strange – passing strange – about the sumptuous carnival mounted to celebrate George W. Bush's chokehold on power this week.
Go ahead -- read it all! But don't forget to come back for another piece from the cold vault: a horrified look at exactly what the twice-unelected president said on the occasion of his second inauguration.

"Burn"
It was billed as a giant party. It was presented as a celebration. But in reality it was an act of war. And its centerpiece was a cold-blooded declaration.

George Bush's declaration of war wasn't phrased in conventional terms. But nobody in his administration has ever done anything in conventional terms. They have never said what they meant. We have always been required to read between the lines.

But the meaning of Bush's second inaugural address was crystal-clear, for those who can interpret the code-words. This speech featured two code-words in particular: Freedom and Democracy.
Please read it all, especially all you democracy activists, and don't be disappointed anymore.

It was always just a story.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

No Charges Against Spitzer, But Wingnut Calls For Resignation Or Impeachment

Republicans nationwide are calling for the resignation of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer [photo], following allegations of involvement with a high-priced prostitution ring. The story is generating international attention, even though no criminal charges have been laid.

And, according to the New York Times,
[New York State] Assemblyman James Tedisco, a Republican and the Assembly minority leader, said he would begin moving to have Mr. Spitzer impeached if the governor did not step down within 48 hours.
My, what double standards we keep.

When the offending party is an elephant, such as Arizona Congressman Rick Renzi, it doesn't matter whether he's been charged, indicted, arraigned, whatever ... We get explanations like this:
"There is a presumption of innocence in this country and it applies to congressmen. And Congressman Renzi is fully prepared to continue serving [sic] his [constitutents] while we fight for his rights in court. And there's plenty of rights to be fought for."
But when the offending party is a donkey, all that "presumption of innocence" stuff goes out the window. This is politics, after all; and post-democratic America, too; in other words: There are no rules. There is only power.

Larisa Alexandrovna has more at At-Largely. In "Remember the days when being linked to a straight, female, adult hooker was political suicide?" she mentions a few Republicans who have been caught doing much worse, but who have remained in office; she also mentions some of the sleaziest Republican sex scandals of recent times, all of which go way beyond this one.

Then, in "Spitzer's selective prosecution?", she looks at some of the disturbing indications that this case is personal and political rather than anything else.

Jane Hamsher asks some good questions at Fire Dog Lake, too. See "Some Questions About the Spitzer Incident".

As for me, I merely wish to express my confidence that this incident has nothing to do with the op/ed Spitzer published last month in the New York Times, in which he exposed the fact that the Bush administration had used its power to protect predatory mortgage lenders, over the objection of all 50 state Attorneys General.

I am also confident that it has nothing to do with any of the anti-corruption work he has done on behalf of the people of his state.

How can I be so confident? Because ruining somebody because of a truth he'd told -- or because of good work he had done -- would be dishonest.

That's why.

Now, if he had done something really trivial -- started a war of aggression, or several of them -- and an opposition politician had called for his resignation with the threat of impeachment, I might be singing a different tune. I might say "Aw, come on! This is meaningless; it's all political; they just don't like his attitude."

And then I could be the perfect wingnut.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Bush Affirms His Legacy, Vetoes Ban On Torture

President Bush announced on Saturday that he had vetoed an intelligence authorization bill passed by both houses of Congress.

The mainstream press has focused on one particularly gruesome aspect of his decision: the bill the president vetoed would have restricted the range of interrogation techniques that could be used by the CIA; in particular, it would have banned waterboarding -- simulated drowning which has been recognized as torture and banned by all civilized countries for centuries.

In his weekly radio address to the nation, our first openly pro-torture president said:
The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror — the C.I.A. program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives.
It wouldn't do that, of course. It wouldn't stop the C.I.A. from detaining people. And it wouldn't stop the C.I.A. from questioning them. It would only limit the techniques that could be used during the questioning.

But it would establish a limit. This is one of the crucial points -- and one which has nothing to do with the core issues. The bill would place limits on the president and his administration, and therefore it must be vetoed. Bush will never willingly sign any legislation which limits what he and his administration can do.

Fortunately for the president, this bill concerns terrorism, so it gives him a chance to use his favorite line:
We have no higher responsibility than stopping terrorist attacks.
This is false, of course. The president's neglect, or abdication, or repudiation, of his higher responsibility -- to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, as required by his oath of office -- is sufficient grounds not only for impeachment and removal from office, but also for criminal charges of treason, followed by a trial which could only end in a conviction and a public execution. No person of peace and goodwill could deny this; one could only hope that some "enhanced techniques" would be applied along the way.

But unfortunately much of the American public remains unaware of this, and the president is not about to tell them. Instead he continues to catapult the propaganda. Thus, in keeping with his self-appointed "highest responsibility", Bush listed the "plots" that have been "foiled" by "enhanced" interrogations:
The program helped us stop a plot to strike a U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into Library Tower in Los Angeles, and a plot to crash passenger planes into Heathrow Airport or buildings in downtown London. [...] Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that Al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland.
If you've never heard of any of these claims about how interrogations under torture have led to foiled terrorist plots, don't feel badly about it. Nobody else has ever heard them either -- not even the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller, who said:
"I have heard nothing to suggest that information obtained from enhanced interrogation techniques has prevented an imminent terrorist attack."
In trying to justify his veto to the nation, the president said:
The main reason this program has been effective is that it allows the C.I.A. to use specialized interrogation procedures to question a small number of the most dangerous terrorists under careful supervision.
This statement is potentially misleading on many fronts simultaneously, but it's tough to tell because so much about the detainees and the means by which they have been interrogated is classified, and because so much of what the government has told us about these things has proven to be false.

Of special interest is the assertion -- made continually by the administration and others (including some supposedly dissident journalists) -- that "specialized interrogation procedures" have been used against "a small number of the most dangerous terrorists".

To make sense of this assertion, you have to do some mental gymnastics.

By "specialized interrogation procedures" he means the techniques prohibited by the Army Field Manual. As the AP reports, the Field Manual prohibits
hooding prisoners or putting duct tape across their eyes; stripping prisoners naked; forcing prisoners to perform or mimic sexual acts; beating, burning or physically hurting them in other ways; subjecting prisoners to hypothermia or mock executions; and waterboarding
The president says the "enhanced" techniques are only to be used against "a small number of the most dangerous terrorists". What does he mean by "small"?

According to Reuters,
CIA Director Michael Hayden told Congress last month that government interrogators used waterboarding on three suspects captured after the September 11 attacks.
Elsewhere it has been claimed that "enhanced interrogation techniques have been used against only 14 of the most hardened al Q'aeda terrorists.

But it is very difficult to take these assertions seriously.

When the furore over destroyed interrogation videotapes erupted, we were told the interrogations were taped because "enhanced techniques" were being used and the tapes were meant to provide insurance against potential claims of excessive force or abusive behavior. But if this is so, then why were the tapes destroyed? If they showed no abuse of detainees, they would have provided powerful support for the government's position that only legal techniques were used.

In the absence of those tapes, one can do little more than speculate about the reasons why an additional 24,000 interrogations at Guantanamo were also videotaped. Were "enhanced techniques" used in those interrogations as well? If so, then we've been lied to about the extent of abusive interrogation. And if not, why not? The prisoners at Guantanamo are said to be "the worst of the worst"; the "enhanced techniques" are said to yield crucial information; why wouldn't our interrogators use all the tools available to them? Don't they want us to be safe?

We can only speculate here because the truth is so comprehensively buried. But it's reasonable to assume that torturers don't want us to know much about what they're doing. As Bush explained in his radio address, he vetoed the bill in part because it banned secret techniques.
The bill Congress sent me [...] would restrict the C.I.A.’s range of acceptable interrogation methods to those provided in the Army field manual. [...] Limiting the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods to those in the Army field manual would be dangerous because the manual is publicly available and easily accessible on the Internet. Shortly after 9/11, we learned that key Al Qaeda operatives had been trained to resist the methods outlined in the manual. And this is why we created alternative procedures...
Given the torturers' penchant for secrecy, we must assume that we don't know very much about torture and "enhanced" interrogations -- that what we do know is only the "tip of the iceberg".

But what we already know is enormous and horrific; and the government's justification for its practices have all turned out to be false!

Professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School has been leading a team of researchers through the documentation pertaining to the detainees at Guantanamo, as provided by the government. The research team has been using the government's own data to evaluate the claims made by the administration and has produced a series of reports whose conclusions are eerily similar: the government's assertions which are supposed to justify the policies have been spectacularly untrue.

One report, "The Meaning of Battlefield", provides the following executive summary:
The Department of Defense has continually relied upon the premise of “battlefield capture” to justify the indefinite detention of so-called “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay. The “battlefield capture” proposition -- although proven false in almost all cases -- has been an important proposition for the Government, which has used it to frame detainee status as a military question as to which the Department of Defense should be granted considerable deference.

Further, just as the Government has characterized detainee’s initial captures as “on the battlefield,” Government officials have repeatedly claimed that ex-detainees have “returned to the battlefield,” where they have been re-captured or killed.

Implicit in the Government’s claim that detainees have “returned to the battlefield” is the notion that those detainees had been on a battlefield prior to their detention in Guantánamo. Revealed by the Department of Defense data, however, is that:

• only twenty-one (21)—or four percent (4%)—of 516 Combatant Status Review Tribunal unclassified summaries of the evidence alleged that a detainee had ever been on any battlefield;

• only twenty-four (24)—or five percent (5%)—of unclassified summaries alleged that a detainee had been captured by United States forces;

• and exactly one (1) of 516 unclassified summaries alleged that a detainee was captured by United States forces on a battlefield.

Just as the Government’s claims that the Guantánamo detainees “were picked up on the battlefield, fighting American forces, trying to kill American forces,” do not comport with the Department of Defense’s own data, neither do its claims that former detainees have “returned to the fight.”

The Department of Defense has publicly insisted that “just short of thirty” former Guantánamo detainees have “returned” to the battlefield, where they have been re-captured or killed, but to date the Department has described at most fifteen (15) possible recidivists, and has identified only seven (7) of these individuals by name. According to the data provided by the Department of Defense:

• at least eight (8) of the fifteen (15) individuals alleged by the Government to have “returned to the fight” are accused of nothing more than speaking critically of the Government’s detention policies;

• ten (10) of the individuals have neither been re-captured nor killed by anyone;

• and of the five (5) individuals who are alleged to have been re-captured or killed, the names of two (2) do not appear on the list of individuals who have at any time been detained at Guantánamo, and the remaining three (3) include one (1) individual who was killed in an apartment complex in Russia by local authorities and one (1) who is not listed among former Guantánamo detainees but who, after his death, has been alleged to have been detained under a different name.

Thus, the data provided by the Department of Defense indicates that every public statement made by Department of Defense officials regarding the number of detainees who have been released and thereafter killed or re-captured on the battlefield was false.
We knew it was false all along, didn't we? At least we should have suspected it. There's a tendency for this administration to lie about everything.

Unfortunately, most of our so-called "opposition" politicians haven't caught a whiff of this tendency, or else they've chosen to ignore it in the hope that it will go away. So the political reactions to the veto were interesting.

Senator Ted Kennedy, the "Massachusetts liberal" much derided by "conservatives", suggested that Congress should override the veto, which shows how out of touch with reality he is. As if more than a dozen Republican Senators and more than 50 Republican Congressmen would ever vote with the Democrats, against the president, for a bill he had already vetoed! But Kennedy said:
"Unless Congress overrides the veto, it will go down in history as a flagrant insult to the rule of law and a serious stain on the good name of America in the eyes of the world."
America's "good name" "in the eyes of the world" was gone a long time ago, but Senator Kennedy cannot mention that and remain in national office. Politicians of both parties must maintain the fiction that America is beloved in the eyes of the world, or else they risk being marginalized as "not serious". Forget the truth of the situation; the rhetoric is all that matters.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, one of the key Democratic enablers of the current administration, gets this point, if nothing else; she threw in some sanctimonious manure of her own:
"Failing to legally prohibit the use of waterboarding and other harsh torture techniques undermines our nation's moral authority, puts American military and diplomatic personnel at risk, and undermines the quality of intelligence."
Talk about undermining our nation's moral authority!

Let's talk about failing to initiate impeachment proceedings -- oh no, let's not! Impeachment is off the table!

And once again the story-line has been predictable: a pack of lies from a president who was never legitimately elected in the first place, followed by some ass-covering by the people who should have been standing in his way for years, all wrapped up with a bow by the allegedly liberal New York Times, which headlined this particular story "Bush's Veto of Bill on C.I.A.Tactics Affirms His Legacy".

In one sense, it's impossible to argue: Bush's legacy is now securely more despicable than any two American presidents combined, and he's still counting.

But in another sense, it's impossible not to scream!