In his address to the nation Tuesday night about Iraq and Afghanistan, President Obama took a refreshingly frank approach: “Today we mark the end of our nation’s military commitment in Iraq. Our foolish adventure there has been a catastrophe, a nightmare inflicted on us by a past president whose stupidity was exceeded only by his arrogance. Iraq was a disaster that cost thousands of American lives, God knows how many Iraqi lives, and increased our national debt by an amount that is almost beyond counting. What did we get for this immeasurable investment? Nothing.

“Here’s where things stand now. The Iraqi government, if that’s what you’d call it, is a shambles. The economy is wrecked, and life in Iraq is still so dangerous and unstable that nobody wants to be there anymore. And neither do we, baby. We’re outta there.

“Now we can turn our full military attention to Afghanistan where we’ve been fighting for ten years without any success whatsoever. We’ll be putting lots more troops and treasure into the effort, which will result in many more American casualties and plenty more dead Afghanis, including lots of hapless women and children who keep getting in the way of our smart bombs and missiles. But, hey, don’t look at me. I didn’t start this and there’s no way, politically speaking, that I can just pull out of it. Which would be the smart thing to do.” The President had some other things to say about bravery and sacrifice, etc. etc., but nobody bothered to write it down or record it.

Meanwhile, down the road at the Capitol, Democrats and Republicans in both houses of Congress adopted a resolution to stop acting like willful little brats. Rep. John Boehner, the Republican obstructionist from Ohio and minority leader in the House, said, “We thought it might be interesting to pass some laws that would actually be good for the country.”
Boehner’s counterpart in the Senate, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky obfuscator, announced that from now on he would work with senators from both parties to respond to the needs of the American people. “Tantrums will no longer be tolerated,” McConnell said. “We are also going to try to keep lying to a minimum. We want the Senate to be a kinder, gentler place where work actually gets done.”

Cynical observers of the Senate noted the timing and language of McConnell’s statement, which closely followed a threat by his fellow senators to stone him to death if he didn’t stop acting like a five-year-old with a skin rash.

Many Democrats of dubious standing also clamored to partake of this new Era of Good Feeling. So-called Blue Dog Democrats in the House, who have been trying for many months to play both sides of the fence while also sitting on it, came out in favor of the resolution. The Blue Dogs issued a statement that said in part, “The American people do not want…” Nobody bothered to record the rest of the statement because everybody knows that the Blue Dogs haven’t the slightest idea what the American people want or don’t want. And also, because nobody cares what the Blue Dogs think or don’t think, say or don’t say, stand for or don’t stand for.

Glenn Beck issued a refreshing statement in which he apologized for being a contemptible scumbag and announced that he was retiring from broadcasting to raise pigs. “I’m going to quit while I’m ahead,” said the now wealthy conservative ranter. “I sense that people are about to catch on that I am the worst kind of hate-mongering, lying phony. Even my mother thinks I’m disgusting and I kind of agree with her.”

Over at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, the liberal blabber, announced that she was not going to be cute anymore. And her colleague, Keith Olbermann, said that while he intended to continue his arch ways, he was giving up his insufferable “special comments,” having recognized that what was special about them was that they were pompous and embarrassing.

Rush Limbaugh issued a one-sentence statement. It said, “Who the hell is Glenn Beck and who cares if he’s retiring?”

Bill O’Reilly also issued a statement that said, in part, “Who cares what Rush Limbaugh says on the radio? Doesn’t he know that nobody listens to the radio anymore. Hey, Rush, get a life. Join the parade. This is the twenty-first century and you’re just a fat loudmouth with bad breath.”

Limbaugh is said to have issued a response but nobody heard it.

Joe Barton, a Republican Congressman from Texas, had the right idea when he apologized to BP for what he said was a shakedown of the nice British oil company. He said Obama’s demand for a $20-billion restitution fund amounted to extortion. Barton later apologized for his apology and then he retracted the apology for the apology and then he…oh, never mind. The important thing is that he showed that sense of fair play for which we Americans are famous. Maybe now that this important precedent has been established by a stand-up Congressman we can start making amends to others who have been harshly judged and roughly handled down through the years.

So before one more minute goes by let me apologize to Adolf Hitler. And Dick Cheney.

These men were natural born leaders who had flaws that got blown out of proportion. Hitler still gets bad notices in the press sixty-five years after he gave up the ghost. Just because Dick Nixon always looked like he needed a shave didn’t make him a bad guy, did it? What about beauty being only skin deep? Dick Cheney has lips twisted into a permanent snarl. Does that necessarily mean he’s an arrogant, reckless, power-crazed, ruthless, lying, slimy son of a bitch?

I think it’s high time we apologized to Hirohito and Tojo and lots of other perfectly civilized Japanese for calling them sneaky, murderous devils. Just because of some unpleasantness at Pearl Harbor and Bataan we seem to think we have the right to vilify them. Let’s not remember Pearl Harbor. Most of those ships that sank there were obsolete anyway.

Now it’s the Arabs’ turn in the barrel. Every time you turn on the TV to get the straight dope from Sean or Rush or Glenn or Bill, our thought leaders, another Arab is getting bashed for some alleged outrage. Poor Bin Laden got so much bad publicity he dropped out of sight and went into hiding. I think we should follow Joe Barton’s example and extend a sincere apology to Osama for making him live in a cave. Nobody should have to live in a cave.

As for Hitler, it’s just about impossible to have a quiet, rational conversation about the charismatic German leader. People can’t seem to discuss the eloquent architect of the autobahns without taking extreme positions on one side or the other. Of course he had his faults — who doesn’t? But how many politicians these days could get up and talk for a couple of hours without the aid of a teleprompter? And those autobahns are still fun to drive on.

Can we talk about Dick Cheney for a minute? Now here’s a guy who can’t catch a break from the media. The former vice president has been involved with the oil industry in one way or another for quite a long time, and, if you listen to the insinuations coming from the left, there was something unpatriotic and self-serving in this involvement. I guess vice presidents are supposed to be poor — is that the idea? Do you think Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are poor? Was Ted Kennedy poor? How about Jay Rockefeller, Democrat from the hardscrabble, coal-mining state of West Virginia. Think he’s poor?

What all this adds up to is one big, very good reason to apologize to Dick Cheney. All Cheney ever wanted to do was to do his best for his country. And what did he get in return? A lot of grief, that’s what he got. Well, maybe when Joe Barton gets finished apologizing to BP we can get him to apologize to Dick Cheney. And Bernie Madoff. And Goldman Sachs. And AIG. And General Motors. And Joe Stalin. And Vlad the Impaler.

Are you surprised at the story below? Of course not. You knew all along that the United States Congress is no more capable of controlling its urges than is Wall Street or Big Oil. Once the NRA carved out its own little exemption, you knew with mathematical certainty that everybody else would try to crowd through the door. And that only the lobbies with the shallowest pockets would be left outside, forced to identify their top five sugar daddies.

The purpose of this legislation was to undo some of the damage done done to free speech by the Supreme Court when it gutted the McCain-Feingold Act in January. But the result is likely to be even greater damage to democracy: one (or several) of the smaller lobbies will certainly protest its exclusion in court, complaining reasonably enough of discrimination based on size and wealth.

And then the Roberts court, snickering up its sleeve, will hurry to protect the little fellow — by declaring unconstitutional the bill currently being debated that attempts, however pitifully, to keep corporations from drowning out the rest of us at election time.

And then it will be a long time, perhaps forever, before Congress bothers to tilt again at this particular windmill.

WASHINGTON — House Democrats agreed to exempt an unspecified number of large, well-known interest groups from proposed new disclosure requirements on political advertising on Thursday, seeking to quell charges they were giving special treatment to the powerful National Rifle Association.

The bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said that under the last-minute change, “well-established organizations on the right and left” engaging in campaign activity, the NRA among them, would not be required to identify their top donors.

Democratic leaders announced plans for the legislation to come to a vote on Thursday, but that schedule appeared less than firm after rank and file moderates and members of the Congressional Black Caucus raised fresh objections. The leadership arranged afternoon meetings with representatives of both groups, and other changes were possible in the measure.

Under the bill, labor unions, corporations and nonprofit organizations that air political ads or conduct campaign activity would have to disclose their top five donors.

The bill also requires any individual or group paying for independent campaign activities to report any expenditure of at least $10,000 made more than 20 days before an election. Expenditures greater than $1,000 would have to be disclosed within 24 hours in the final 20 days of a campaign.

Who could have guessed, only a short year ago, that mid-term elections would be so darn much fun? Yet here we are, five months away from elections that are usually a major snooze, enjoying all the political melodrama of a high school election for Prom King and Queen — and we’re only at the Primaries.

Some credit is due, of course, to the Tea Party’s transformative pseudo-populism that has turned garden variety conservatives into political contortionists trying to fit themselves into the Tea Party’s anti-establishment agenda — at least long enough to bag some of their votes. The Tea Party’s major contribution to electoral politicking, however, has been to legitimize the prospects of some seriously inexperienced, quasi-anarchic radical demagogues that couldn’t have won the proverbial office of dog-catcher in more rational times. But “the times, they are a-changin’…”

Just as we don’t have a clue how to fix the man-made disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, neither do we have any idea how to right our seriously listing “Ship of State,” in which our fearless leaders have decided to fire the cannons continuously over the bow, instead of bailing and plugging the leaks, to keep the ship from going down.

If one listens carefully to the campaigning of mid-term candidates (I know, I know, it can be quite disturbing) it becomes very clear that we no longer care very much what our political candidates think (or don’t think) about issues that theoretically impact life in America because, clearly, they don’t live in the same America that we do. Neither do candidates care very much about the general electorate’s thoughts on the issues because the general electorate doesn’t contribute enough to finance 21st century political campaigns — corporations and PACs do that.

The conundrum, for politicians, is that ordinary voters still provide the grease (tax dollars) they need to quiet the “squeaky wheels” that finance their political careers; so ordinary voters must still be courted. And it takes large amounts of money, and political capital, to persuade blocs of taxpayers/voters that the interests of corporate donors coincide with their own public interest.

Voting in America has become very much like playing the lottery — if you are extraordinarily lucky and beat all of the odds, it might pay off in a material way — but no one really expects to win. Meanwhile, for the losers, life goes on very much as usual, without any fortuitous assistance from the gods. Win or lose, millions of people will pony up for lottery tickets, week after week (whether they can afford it or not), because “you have to play to win.”

Politics, like lotteries, depend on a certain predictable level of participation and a great deal of hope and trust. Lotteries take your small contributions, which add up to huge amounts of money, and guarantee that someone will win big; all of those contributors who don’t “win big” can be comforted by the fact that their money has provided some amount of feel-good commonwealth, like better schools or assistance for the elderly.

Those are, I believe, some contributing factors to some of the more sophomoric campaign performances we are currently being treated to and, ultimately, the deadly voter apathy that can only make a bad situation worse; but then who cares to carve out a portion of their Tuesdays to go to the polls and choose between Dumb and Dumber?

Whether you choose to vote with a ballot or vote with your feet, it’s quite educational to take a look at the candidates and their efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of American voters…

Whether you choose to vote with a ballot or vote with your feet, it’s quite educational to take a look at the candidates and their efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of American voters…

Rand Paul, who recently won the Kentucky Republican primary for a Senate seat, gave us our first taste of a true Tea Party candidate floundering for a solid platform as spectacularly as the party that he aligns with. Paul came out of the gate, politicking like a pro running for President, à la Scott Brown; national media were only too happy to provide ample high-profile opportunities for Paul to trot out his half-baked ideological ramblings, committing political hari-kari in the process.

If the Tea Party, whose passion is for installing “newbies” in public office, had any misgivings about Rand Paul being the offspring of Congressman, ex-presidential candidate and Libertarian standard-bearer Ron Paul, Rand’s post-Primary victory-lap performance should dispel any notion that he knows what he’s doing in the political arena.

In the span of a few short days of peddling his “ideology” on national television Rand Paul has managed to be: unceremoniously excommunicated by orthodox Libertarians; publicly eviscerated by a reluctant Rachel Maddow for his stated support of business owners who have been stripped of their “right to discriminate,” by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, against clientele that they deem “undesirable”; mercilessly lampooned for his “accidents do happen” position on the Deepwater Horizon disaster along with his judgment that President Obama was treating BP in an “un-American” way by holding them accountable; excoriated for his view that the Americans with Disabilities Act is unfair to small business owners; and, last but not least, sued by the Canadian rock band Rush for copyright infringement for misappropriating one of their tunes as his during his campaign.

Someone with a little more political savvy than “The Candidate” finally pulled the plug on the Rand Paul Gaffe Machine and there was a brief quiet spell during which it is easy to imagine Paul being trained, by political handlers, to think before he speaks, because the American public is not as forgiving as loving parents or fraternity brothers who are inclined to indulge and, indeed, provide standing ovations for every pearl of pastoral wisdom that drips from the favored son’s honeyed lips.

Paul’s most recent tentative step back into the limelight is a little Op-Ed apologia that he penned for the Bowling Green Daily News that basically begs the public’s pardon for his excess of wonderfulness and pronouncing himself on an equal footing with Martin Luther King, Jr. That should dispel any rumors that Rand might be racist as well as casting himself in the role of the terribly misunderstood, but no less monumental, idealistic intellectual. Which, according to Rand Paul, is exactly what we’re lacking in American government today.

Paul’s “Ode to Himself” Op-Ed starts out like this:

“Kundera writes of a balcony scene in the winter snow of 1948 Prague. Clementis offers his fur cap to the new leader Gottwald. Later Clementis is purged by the Communists and airbrushed from all the photos. All that remains of Clementis is the fur cap on Gottwald’s head.”

Anyone who’s ever attended a pretentious, country club cocktail party knows this guy and also knows how his story ends whether he wins or loses elections. He’s right when he says that he’s not a pragmatist, but wrong when he defines himself as an idealist. He’s a narcissist — pure and simple, and professional politicians are poised to eat his lunch — if he gets a foot in the door.

A recurrent theme that is emerging out of Team Paul is that no matter what cockamamie thing comes out of the candidate’s mouth it’s tangential to the real issues which, I have to assume, he’s keeping “closer to the vest.” Jesse Benton who holds the unenviable position of serving as Paul’s campaign manager made this statement to USA Today regarding the Rush lawsuit:

“The background music Dr. Paul has played at events is a non-issue. The issues that matter in this campaign are cutting out-of-control deficits, repealing Obama Care and opposing cap and trade.”

But, wait a minute Jesse, aren’t Libertarians supposed to be all about respecting others’ property rights?

Then again, at the head of Paul’s Op-Ed piece he reminded readers that:

“I support the Civil Rights Act, but 2010 battles are about government overreach in lives.”

I vaguely remember hearing similar rhetoric, back in the day, from members of my generation who joined the SDS and who subsequently learned (the hard way) that the real world chews up and spits out ideologues for kicks.

The World According to Kirk

In an entirely different vein we have Mark Kirk, candidate for an Illinois Senate seat. Mark Kirk is one of those guys that believe that all you need to be a successful politician is good people skills like the ability to weave a good story — something along the lines of Mark Twain or Will Rogers. And so it is that Mark Kirk’s strategy for connecting with voters is to make stuff up. As a matter of fact, I think it’s safe to say that Mark Kirk finds the truth rather lackluster and lacking in political appeal which is why he doesn’t bother much with it as source material.

Rachel Maddow just did a pretty comprehensive (and entertaining) rundown of those areas in which Kirk has taken some “political license” that is well worth watching.

In the meantime, here’s a summary:

Kirk is now famous for “misremembering” the fact that he did not win the U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award (Instead, Kirk’s entire unit won a privately sponsored, not a Navy, merit award). Undaunted by the need to publicly retract that “mis-rembrance,” Kirk went on to “mis-remember” that it was his staff that caught the error in his official bio, when, actually it was the Department of the Navy that demanded that he correct his record.

Other notable Kirk “mis-remembrances” include having served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, as well as Operation Desert Storm. And then there was the time that Kirk came under fire while flying a plane over Iraq not to mention his stint at “commanding the war room” at the Pentagon. All Flights of Fancy…

Clearly, Kirk believes that one’s military service is an important distinction when running for office so he has spared no embellishment in distinguishing his own military record. But Kirk’s “gift of gab” doesn’t stop there. As Maddow says: “He also makes stuff up about the world at large…”

Like Kirk’s rationalization that, of course the US should be drilling off its shores for oil, because, after all, the Chinese are drilling off the coast of Cuba and sucking up all the oil that could be ours (which assertion, of course, has no basis in actual fact). And while we’re on the topic of oil, Kirk promises to do his best to persuade the US government to stop getting oil from Iran — he even gives figures of 80 million barrels a day — which should be an easy sell, since the U.S. doesn’t get oil from Iran. Finally there’s the entirely fabricated story regarding the relationship between Somali pirates and France that is so convoluted that it makes me weary to think about it, so you’ll just have to watch the Rachel Maddow clip to hear it in all of its “fabulous” detail.

So. If Rand Paul is “simply a narcissist,” Mark Kirk is simply a liar.

What Happens in Vegas…

And, finally, there’s the three-ring Republican primary circus in Nevada, featuring party-backed casino owner Sue Lowden, a former Nevada GOP Party Chair; business executive and ex-UNLV basketball star, Dan Tarkanian; and Tea Party Express-endorsed candidate, Sharron Angle in a three-way extravaganza of Republican-on-Republican disunity. I have to assume that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid must be quite delighted by the entire production especially now that the Tea Party’s Sharron Angle is leading the pack and favored to win the primary in voting today.

Of the three Republicans, no one has been behaving particularly like an establishment politician, but then again we have to keep in mind that this is Nevada. The primary campaign has essentially broken down into a catfight with a detached bystander.

According to Brian Seitchik, Danny Tarkanian’s campaign manager, “Danny’s the only one who’s talking about issues, while Sharron and Sue club each other.”

I guess that’s why Danny was not doing as well in the polls.

Sue Lowden has snagged national attention for comments at a recent town hall meeting in Nevada in which she said that patients could barter with their doctors for health care — she suggested chickens as a once acceptable remittance for medical services. Easy for Sue Lowden to say since I’m sure that health care coverage is not an issue for her now and certainly wouldn’t be if she wins the November election and lands in the US Senate.

Sharron Angle, on the other hand, is of a more generous spirit, as Sue Lowden pointed out in her now-viral ad claiming that Angle had supported a program designed to use taxpayer dollars to provide prisoners with massages and spa treatments — a program of “detoxification protocols” attributed to the founder of the Church of Scientology.

Angle, who campaigned as a morally driven Christian crusader all about cracking down on government spending (and thereby securing the blessing of outfits like Tea Party Express and the Government is not God PAC), decided it might be best to purge her website of any whiffs of Scientology, like her fundraising work with celebrity Scientologist Jenna Elfman.

Elsewhere we have similar shenanigans in what has become known as the Polygraph Primary in South Carolina where Republican Nikki Haley is seeking to replace sex-scandalized Mark Sanford as candidate for Governor. As soon as Haley appeared to “show some legs” in the contest, rumors started to swirl about Haley’s own sex life. Not one, but two, men came forward to allege that they had known the otherwise married Haley “in the biblical sense.”

Both civic-minded champions came forward armed with evidence of the veracity of their claims: one provided text messages and phone logs to make his case; the other brought along polygraph results. Not to be outdone, another of Haley’s Republican opponents, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer jumped on the polygraph bandwagon to prove he had nothing to do with any of it.

According to Alex Pereene, covering the story for Salon, one of the purported lovers is, “Larry Marchant, a local lobbyist and former strategist for Haley opponent (and dimbulb bigot) Andre Bauer, says he had a one-night stand with Haley at a ‘school choice convention’ in 2008.”

The local Fox affiliate was happy to administer a polygraph test to confirm Marchant’s story; the results — inconclusive.

Pereene goes on to note that, “Marchant, suspiciously, ‘admitted’ to the indiscretion the day he was fired from the Bauer campaign, less than a week before today’s election.”

“Haley told the local media that all these allegations happened as soon as polls showed her with a lead over her rivals.”

I don’t know about you, but I have no interest in seeing any of these Yahoos in high office. As parents, most of us wouldn’t want them teaching in our schools so why, in God’s name, would we let them run the country? Maybe it’s a lack of viable alternatives…?

The Rude Pundit straightens Sarah Palin out on why the President shouldn’t do a sit-down with Tony Hayward, the silver-tongued CEO of British Petroleum:

In her latest Facebook posting (which is exactly where Thomas Paine would write Common Sense today so he could only reach people who “like” him), Palin takes Barack Obama to task for not having spoken to BP CEO Tony Hayward directly: “The current administration may be unaware that it’s the President’s duty, meeting on a CEO-to-CEO level with Hayward, to verify what BP reports.” She says that she was “a CEO” when she was governor of Alaska.

Now, while Palin may look at the words “chief executive” in reference to a governor or president and think it’s the same thing as “Chief Executive Officer” in a corporation, it’s that very analogy that has fucked us over. The government ain’t a company. The president ain’t a CEO…

See, a CEO’s job is to make money for the corporation. That’s it. Shit like laws and taxes and safety are impediments that must be dealt with on the way to making money. A CEO has to be a greedy bastard, a cuntish conqueror who doesn’t give a fuck what has to be done to get more money. The second you say that the President of the United States is on an equivalent level with a CEO is the second you reveal that you don’t know fuck-all about government and you degrade the presidency. The logical leap to President-as-CEO is a callous manipulation of the expectations of the governed, and it turns citizens into selfish shareholders…

Couldn’t have said it better myself, and therefore won’t. Here’s The Economist.

Maureen Dowd doinked Mr Obama Saturday with her silly-straw-like wit, faulting his “inability to encapsulate Americans’ feelings.” Yeah, you know who would’ve killed as the president facing a deep-sea oil blowout? Philip Seymour Hoffman. Or maybe Meryl Streep. Did you see them in “Doubt?”

Ms Dowd’s involvement is fitting, as this may be the sorriest spectacle of content-free public hyperventilation since Al Gore’s earth tones. The difference is that in this case the issue is deadly serious; it’s the public discourse that is puerile. There is plenty of room for substantive critique of the flaws in governance and policy uncovered by the Deepwater Horizon blowout. You could talk about regulatory failure. You could talk about corporate impunity. You could talk about blithely ignoring the tail-end risk of going ahead with deepwater drilling without any capacity to cope with catastrophic blowouts. Precisely none of these subjects are evident in the arguments our pundit class is having. Instead we have empty-headed squawking over what the catastrophe is doing to Barack Obama's image…

Below is the revenge of Lance Baxter. He’s the actor who drunk-dialed the freedom lovers at Freedom Works, who got him fired from his voice-over gig in the Geico ads. Probably everybody in the world has already seen this clip, but since I hadn’t, maybe you haven’t.

The real, immutable core concern of the Republican Party is, and has forever been, to shift taxes from the very rich to the rest of us. Everything else — abortion, immigration, creationism, small government, law and order, gay rights — is just bait to lure the suckers into the net. Here’s Daniel Larison at The American Conservative, cutting to the chase:

On the other point, it is not all that remarkable that Republican officeholders are being punished entirely for their fiscal errors. It is difficult to think of incumbent Republicans abandoning their party because of a backlash against their social liberalism, but it is fairly easy in recent years to find examples of fiscal moderates and liberals in the party that the rank-and-file have turned against or liberal Republican incumbents who switched parties at least partly because of disagreements over fiscal policy (e.g., Jeffords).

Indeed, we can look at Arlen Specter’s recent political career as proof that social conservative litmus tests frequently count for a lot less than fiscal conservative tests in the modern GOP. In 2004, the party establishment rallied around Specter on the grounds that the party supported incumbents against primary challengers. To his lasting embarrassment and discredit, Santorum endorsed Specter over Toomey.

Pro-lifers’ objections to Specter’s position on abortion weren’t important enough to Santorum or to the administration to risk losing that seat to the Democrats, and in the end they weren’t quite important enough to the primary voters, either. Five years later, one vote Specter cast for the stimulus made him persona non grata in the Pennsylvania GOP. Had Specter not cast that vote, it is questionable whether Toomey’s challenge would have still driven Specter to switch parties.

In practice, fiscal issues tend to be more important to more Republican activists and primary voters than social issues in almost every contest, except perhaps presidential primaries, and even in these contests it depends. Huckabee translated his strong social conservative record and evangelical Christianity into a sizeable following by the end of the primaries, but he never won outside the South and he was widely loathed in the conservative movement for his fiscal record as governor. His combination of social conservatism and economic pseudo-populism went over very badly with party and movement leaders generally, even though there is some reason to think that socially conservative and economically populist candidates could tap into a much broader base of support nationally.

For party and movement leaders, Romney had become sufficiently conservative on social issues to pass muster, despite having zero credibility on these issues, and what really mattered to them was his position on fiscal and economic issues. McCain took a lot of grief from activists and conservative voters for several reasons, but his opposition to Bush’s tax cuts earlier in the decade was always high on the list of McCain’s errors.

Back when I worked for the United States Information Agency, manning freedom’s ramparts in Casablanca during the Vietnam war, I had a poster in my office that read, “Fuck Communism.” Those were the days, my friend… And in those days, my friend, another popular bumper sticker said, “Fuck Hate.”

This rant from today’s BLCKDGRD is along similar lines:

I remember our time in Deale [Maryland], when we had our friends Henry and Donna to the marina house for a weekend, being told the minute they drove out of the parking lot by four cracker boat owners that if I ever let that nigger and his white skank race traitor bitch back they’d lynch my ass too. I told them to fuck off; my tires were slashed that night.

It’s obvious with my constant cracker this christer that I’m a stone bigot, but I’ve never said I was tolerant. I try to be intolerant to everyone, but I’m not large enough, I’m weak, I haven’t a reservoir of endless hate, I haven’t endless time to hate, I need to focus what hate I can summon on a few select targets — Arcade Fire, Raymond Carver, Terry Fucking Vaughn — that don’t affect the quality of anyone’s life but my own, and on a few large targets that affect the quality of my selfish insignificant life as a happily complicit home-owning, tax-paying, law-abiding, bloody-handed cog in capital’s race to ingest everything, and motherfucking crackers nostalgic for 1920’s Alabama and motherfucking christers jonesing for white jeebus, well, it’s delicious to hate them, it’s delicious to demonize them, it’s delicious to organize to keep them out of our schools, out of our state houses, to keep their hands off our wives’ and daughters’ uteruses, to keep them as marginalized and mocked and furious and ugly as possible.

And yes, I know crackers are funded and encouraged to be ugly to keep rubes like me busy hating them rather than hating what needs hating more, to keep me nostalgic for an America that will never be. I’m working to make my hate more copious, more all encompassing.

One of Gandalf’s nicknames was Stormcrow, “a reference to his arrival being associated with times of trouble, often used by his detractors to mean he was a troublesome meddler in the affairs of others.”

Indeed, Gandalf did meddle in the affairs of others, to the benefit of the good guys and the detriment of the bad ones. He brought information whether it was wanted or not, and forced people to look at it. Some people called that egotistical.

Noam Chomsky hears that a lot too, though Norman Finkelstein has a simple demonstration that it ain’t so. What upsets people so much about Chomsky? Well, establishment figures don’t like the kind of reading on our democracy he gave Chris Hedges of TruthDig from a leading intellectual, even one who’s been blacklisted by commercial media.

“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”

“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”

“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”

This certainly fits with what I’ve read in recent polls. Many of the reasonable people are disillusioned, and the crazies are locked and loaded, prodded by Murdoch but not requiring his provocations to engage in criminal acts that will seriously undermine the fabric of trust in society. The crazies are very likely to win in November because the Democrats are unenthused, the independents are turned off by both parties, and the only really active folks are the Tea Partiers.

We needed an FDR and we got a Carter. But as Chomsky would say, no FDR could be elected or even nominated today, and what FDR did, after all, was bring a corrupt and failing system back to life, when it might have better to replace large portions of it.

I tried to paraphrase Finkelstein’s defense of Chomsky but I couldn’t come up with anything as good as what he said.

“Most intellectuals have a self-understanding of themselves as the conscience of humanity,” said the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein. “They revel in and admire someone like Vaclav Havel. Chomsky is contemptuous of Havel. Chomsky embraces the Julien Benda view of the world. There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice. Benda says that the credo of any true intellectual has to be, as Christ said, ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’ Chomsky exposes the pretenses of those who claim to be the bearers of truth and justice. He shows that in fact these intellectuals are the bearers of power and privilege and all the evil that attends it.”

“Some of Chomsky’s books will consist of things like analyzing the misrepresentations of the Arias plan in Central America, and he will devote 200 pages to it,” Finkelstein said. “And two years later, who will have heard of Oscar Arias? It causes you to wonder would Chomsky have been wiser to write things on a grander scale, things with a more enduring quality so that you read them forty or sixty years later. This is what Russell did in books like ‘Marriage and Morals.’ Can you even read any longer what Chomsky wrote on Vietnam and Central America? The answer has to often be no. This tells you something about him. He is not writing for ego. If he were writing for ego he would have written in a grand style that would have buttressed his legacy. He is writing because he wants to effect political change. He cares about the lives of people and there the details count. He is trying to refute the daily lies spewed out by the establishment media. He could have devoted his time to writing philosophical treatises that would have endured like Kant or Russell. But he invested in the tiny details which make a difference to win a political battle.”

The times they are a-changing, so sooner or later it was bound to happen. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Veteran Rep. Babette Josephs (D., Phila.) last Thursday accused her primary opponent, Gregg Kravitz [pictured below], of pretending to be bisexual in order to pander to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender voters, a powerful bloc in the district.

“I outed him as a straight person,” Josephs said during a fund-raiser at the Black Sheep Pub & Restaurant, as some in the audience gasped or laughed, “and now he goes around telling people, quote, ‘I swing both ways.’ That’s quite a respectful way to talk about sexuality. This guy’s a gem.”

Kravitz, 29, said that he is sexually attracted to both men and women and called Josephs’ comments offensive.

Republican consultant Ed Rollins has spent much of his life working for monsters, but that doesn’t make him stupid. He just fell in with the wrong crowd at a young age. After a talk he gave years ago at the Kennedy School, I came away hoping he’d change sides some day.

He was too smart for the 1980s GOP, and he’s way too smart for the malformed creature it has now become. Which I’m sure he knows. This is from a piece he did today for CNN. Goldman Sachs should hire him, but won’t. He’s too smart for them, too.

…Goldman denied the charges, and its sympathizers accused President Obama — who got nearly $1 million in campaign contributions from Goldman employees — of orchestrating the SEC lawsuit to sell his banking reform package. And then, it turns out that Goldman has done something else dumb — by hiring Obama’s recently departed White House lawyer, Gregory Craig, to help handle its legal strategy.

Craig is an extremely competent and respected lawyer. He knows the town and the players. But Washington is full of competent lawyers and people who know the game. Obama said his administration was going to be different and the revolving door of government service and back to the private sector was going to stop. It hasn’t. This is not the president’s mistake. It is another Goldman Sachs mistake.

And then Monday, Goldman announced its “good news.” In the first quarter of this year, the bank’s earnings of $3.46 billion were 91 percent higher than a year ago. It also announced it has set aside $5.5 billion (up 17 percent) to pay salaries and bonuses to employees…

Here is Ezra Klein, the Great Explicator, explaining why Br’er Mitch is hollering so hard for Br’er Barack not to throw him in dat brier patch:

A bank is judged failing. The FDIC submits a plan for the bank’s liquidation — which includes firing management, wiping out shareholders, handing losses to creditors, and selling off the firm — and gets it approved by the Treasury secretary. Then the FDIC takes over the banks. The $50 billion fund is used to keep the lights on while all this happens. It’s there to prevent taxpayers from having to foot the bill for the chaos that will occur between when we recognize a bank is failing and when we shut it down.

Whatever you want to call this, it isn’t a bailout. It’s the death of the company. And the fund is way of forcing too-big-to-fail banks to pay for the execution. But stung by Republican criticisms, the administration is telling Democrats to let the fund go. And they’re not all that unhappy to see it die. “The fund isn’t a priority for the Obama administration,” reported Business Week, “which instead proposed having the financial industry repay the government for the cost of disassembling a failed firm, an approach preferred by the industry.”

So let’s just be clear: The alternative to the liquidation fund is Wall Street’s preference. That should tell you pretty much all you need to know about whether the industry really views this as a bailout.

So what’s the deal, I’m asked these days, with Pelosi and me, are we still in love or what?

Well, lemme assure you that “what” continues to be the answer. Is she the most powerful Speaker in a century, as lots of people are saying right now? There’s even a Guardian article asking if she’s the most powerful woman in US history.

Admittedly this is not as high a standard here, where we’ve yet to have a female Chief Executive. And if you think about powerful women in US history, at least those who were politically powerful independent of their husbands, the vast majority of them are still alive. Women couldn’t even vote in most states until 1920. Eleanor Roosevelt, to take an example, was powerful in many ways, not nearly all of them based on her husband; but her influence was not that of a Speaker of the House. Governors like Sebelius and Palin are surely powerful — in their states. Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton? Secretary of State reports to somebody, in fact serves at his, underline his, discretion. Speaker of the House is #3 to the football. So, yes, I think by process of elimination she’s the most powerful woman in American political history.

Most powerful Speaker in a hundred years? I’m not a historian of the Congress, so I don’t know how much my opinion counts on this topic. But it seems to me that power involves more than reacting, it involves acting with some purpose. Other than self-maintenance, which of course all power is about. To me a powerful Speaker would convince, or perhaps I should say “convince”, other Representatives to act to change things, to move the ball down the field.

What I see Pelosi as doing is realizing that the Reid blows with the wind, and Obama’s never fought for anything. Her job title will change later this year, she’ll become The Woman Who Used to Be The Most Powerful Woman in US History, if she doesn’t get a bill passed. This gives her just as much leverage as Obama bought himself by making clear that he needed a bill, any bill: namely, none. It does, however, provide two vital items: desperation, and a clear goal. Or, put another way, I’m walking into a jewelry store with my girlfriend wearing a sign that says, “I have to buy a ring today.”

Given the clear goal, and the fact that she’s the Democrat with the most personal status, not to say power, to lose, she was able to coerce a reluctant administration and a weak Majority Leader to engage fully in passing a large bill. Their alternative was a Republican Speaker. Now she’s hoping that the size of the bill, its complexity and time-release nature, will get her over the November hump.

It’s a big gamble, because it’s easier to attack the bill ideologically than to point to immediate benefits for most people. And then there’s the gamble that the substance of the bill will turn out to be to peoples’ liking, which I personally doubt.

But the thing is, she had no choice. In chess terms, she’s not acting with the initiative in hand, she’s responding to threats. I don’t think of that as powerful, though in a sense it is. Being able to organize a successful defense of your citadel indicates prowess, no doubt. But what she defended was her personal situation.

Unless you see the bill as a big advance. There’s the rub. Pelosi would probably argue in essence that although it’s a big giveaway to the insurance and drug companies, she’s created something to build on. She’s not stupid enough to think the bill “covers” a single new person, regardless of her press releases.

The bill mandates the buying of insurance, but it does not, as far as I can tell, require insurance to cover the medical procedures you will need. And notice I say will, because it’s a dead stone lock that you will need them. So how can a business bet that you won’t need them, and still turn a profit? By goosing expenses, of course, but mainly by denying coverage. The bill lists reasons you can’t be denied coverage, and anyone who’s ever dealt with an insurance company knows what that means: the company will find a different reason when it stops being profitable to cover you.

So it seems to me that the overall effect of the bill is basically a negative one. Rather than attempting to fix the problem that we agree is likely to destroy the economy, we’re handing the whole mess over to the people who caused the problem and continue to profit from its existence. That’ll help.

I suspect the Speaker might argue in private that the bill has a chance of making things better precisely because it fails so utterly to make a difference in how we do things. Now that we’re criminalizing those who don’t buy insurance, it’ll be even more obvious how much we needed a public option, that watered-down version of what two-thirds of Americans have supported in polls for decades, single-payer. So Pelosi can claim to have put the inquiry to the country: do we need a public option? Thank God someone had the courage to state that question.

It’s certainly not leadership. Whether it’s power depends on whether your definition of power requires something other than self-preservation. Mine does, so I don’t think of Pelosi as a particularly powerful Speaker. Undoubtedly she’s an astute political player, she grew up in a political family; but she’s also working against the backdrop of the milquetoasts the Democrats have become.

To me the health care bill, despite having some positive features, seems like a failure, overall worse than no bill at all. But it could turn out that it’s only an initial failure which we’ll work to remedy for the next several decades, gradually producing some approximation of a reasonable system. Certainly we’ll be stuck trying to fix the problems Pelosi’s members forced her to insert for a long time. So she’s definitely made a mark on society, and that’s one definition of power.

…or so says former Bush speechwriter David Frum. Myself, I would never impute ulterior motives to the fat freak.

When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say — but what is equally true — is that he also wants Republicans to fail.

If Republicans succeed — if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office — Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less and hear fewer ads for Sleep Number beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished.

For the cause they purport to represent, however, the “Waterloo” threatened by GOP Sen. Jim DeMint last year regarding Obama and health care has finally arrived all right: Only it turns out to be our own.

From Politico:

Pelosi’s great advantage is she has played her cards early and is a proven, aggressive political operative … Yet going forward, Pelosi will have to answer herself for some of the legislative shortcuts taken in her fierce “damn the torpedoes” march toward final passage. “She’s impressive, horrifying at times, but impressive,” said one person who observed the speaker closely in weeks of backroom meetings.

Well, Washington, DC hosted “Armey’s Last Stand” yesterday. About two weeks ago Health Care Reform was officially designated a Tea Party “Code Red situation” calling for urgent mobilization; forthwith a couple hundred TPers dutifully shaped up at the Capitol in their signature Tea Party regalia, carrying their signature “down with everything” posters and placards.

This group has evolved, since their first appearance last year around this time, in ways that would have been impossible to predict. Yesterday’s street theater successfully demonstrated that evolution, if not much else. Over time, Republican Party outpourings of solidarity and support for Tea Party activism have dwindled, coincident with the Tea Party’s repudiation of Republican apparatchiks as just as undesirable as any other target “government-as-usual” group which the TP has singled out for extinction.

Signs of strain were not that difficult to sniff out. By now, everyone has probably seen pictures of the TP placards that were supplied by the RNC earlier in the game. This time around, RNC was still distributing the things but had gone to the trouble of placing “blackout” stickers over their endorsement. Then, too, GOP notables were conspicuously absent from yesterday’s pep rally, signaling Republicans’ wariness of how truly the Tea Party actually speaks for the “silent majority” they profess to represent…

Dramatis Personae

A few die-hard Washington wing-nuts still turned out for Code Red — Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Steve King (R-IA) and Joe “You Lie” Wilson (R-SC) were there to incite hundreds to new levels of insanity. Fox News, doing the best with what they had, described the Code Red Rally as featuring “a host of Republican speakers, including Reps. Mike Pence (R-IN), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Tom Price (R-GA) and Marsha Blackburn, (R-TN).”

Notably missing from that lineup was Sen. Jim DeMint who has been working assiduously at being the Tea Party’s Best Friend in Washington, according to a recent article in Politico. And while DeMint’s efforts might be scoring him points with the Tea Party (although there’s not a lot of evidence of that yet) it’s definitely not making him any more popular with his own party, which appears to have decided to give the TP a wide berth, for now at least.

So, it appears that the past year has brought evolution, some contraction as well as greater “clarity” (if you can call it that) to both the Tea Party and the Republican Party platforms. The Tea Party, despite its astro-turf beginnings, has gelled into what looks like a fairly adamant anti-government movement, strong on fear and loathing and short on solid facts – but, then, in the Tea Party world, facts and people who deal in facts are not to be trusted; history, like the Bible, is meant to validate their views and effectively rubber stamp their agenda “best for everyone involved.”

The Tea Party has morphed into a conservative populist movement willing to take conservatism to new extremes to represent the wishes of a (largely mythical) “silent majority.” I think that the “silent majority” notion is part and parcel of a mythology of fear and imagined oppression; freedom and liberty, in this mythology, are freedom “from anything I don’t like or agree with” and the liberty “to do as I please” without regard to how it affects the common good. Proponents of this mythology populate their world with like-minded fellow travelers who are too meek to speak up – but they’re out there. There also seems to be that Christian Conservative, homespun American Puritan influence that says “this is right and this wrong for all God’s children, end of argument” substantiation not required. And so it is that the Tea Party quickly gets to a place where facts are subordinate to ideology and the ends always justify the means.

If you think I overstate, here are a few samplings of yesterday’s commentary coming from the Tea Party itself:

The following “sentiments” appeared on the America’s News Online website which describes itself thus:

“As a company, AmericasNewsOnline.com is a dedicated group of writers covering the topics that are making a difference in people’s lives. Our goal is to give the reader a balanced perspective of both sides of the news. In our opinion, it should be up to the reader to decide the real truth.

“We have a team of 6 researchers submitting breaking news everyday. With our team’s diverse background, we are able to cover news from different points of view.”

This from contributor Susan Thompson:

“The Tea Party Movement along with a little help from Rush Limbaugh turned the face of Washington red today. Even Barrack Obama is coming with his tail between his legs and is to appear for an interview with Fox News.

“There are members of the Tea Party Movement, in fact all of the Tea Party, that are outraged on the way that the Obama administration and the Dems in Congress are trying to find the sneakiest ways imaginable to pass the healthcare bill. Americans are very much in shock that the Dems would try to ram this bill through with an 80% disapproval rating.”

“Pelosi was heard to be paraphrased saying, ‘Americans aren’t smart enough to figure out how we’re doing this and aren’t interested in the process.’ She went on to same (sic) we will pass this bill for the good of American citizens. The Tea Party is holding strongly to ‘kill the bill.’”

Really, really awful writing aside, this stuff is pure propaganda, not to mention poppycock; but it is emotionally appealing to a crowd that believes that all of their ills have been caused by government and that, furthermore, they don’t need or want anything that government provides. It’s not that they have conflicting views on how the government should operate, no alternative methods are ever promoted beyond “sending Obama’s socialism ‘back to Russia.’”

Speaking to a CNS News interviewer, a woman who would only identify herself as “Jamie” said congressional arrogance is the main reason she came to the rally.

“I’m here, because I’m really concerned about how the legislative process is being bastardized to push this through. Whether you’re for it or against it, if they can bastardize our legislative process like this, what’s to stop them for anything? Why do we even have elected officials?”

Russ Cote of New Jersey told CNS this is the third event he has attended to protest a proposed health care system that he said is unsustainable and unconstitutional: “It’s simple economics. We’re going to go broke. We’re going to go broke fast.”

What these people seem to be saying is that they are afraid – afraid that something is terribly wrong with the day-to-day operation of government that they have, by and large, chosen to ignore lo these many years. They are afraid of “bastardized legislative processes,” the passage of unconstitutional legislation, death panels and socialism — now; despite the fact that extrajudicial renditions, assassinations, the use of torture, and warrant-less wiretapping caused barely ripple in their deeply-running still waters.

Neither do these emotional, impressionable people seem to care a fig about unsustainable health care costs in the status quo, or rampant US global militarization, or rapacious defense corporations defrauding the US government as a matter of course. They don’t even seem to worry much about the erosion of their constitutional rights to privacy and due process or the loss of America’s moral standing in the world due to high officials condoning, even expressing pride in having committed war crimes.

Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid

Why do you suppose that is? My theory is that it’s all in the packaging. People enjoy a good scare, sometimes. Generally, when things are not going so well, it helps to believe that the problem is “larger than life” and that we’re “all in this together.” Anyone with “I told you so, on their lips” is cruisin’ for a bruisin’ and it’s human nature to try to deflect blame and shame.

Republicans have suffered some electoral humiliations over the pickle we find ourselves in and they are more than ready for that to change. The trick is to make enough people believe that the Democrats are even worse or that Republicans, having made the mess in the first place, are the only ones who can effectively clean it up. Clumsiness over this messaging, so far, has engendered some pretty entertaining political positions on both sides of the aisle. For a while the large number of uncommitted Tea Partiers looked pretty attractive to the GOP with its 28% approval rating. In order to come roaring back, Republicans needed some fresh voters. From the beginning, it was pretty obvious what the TP hot buttons were and, in an effort to court them, the GOP made the Tea Party causes their causes.

A year later, clearly Republican leadership is rethinking that one. Appealing to the Tea Party is a lot like herding cats…

Nevertheless, a few stalwarts are still banging that drum for lack of anything better to do. One of those is Rep. Steve King from Iowa who has always had a lot to say that made little sense. The problem with King’s embrace of the Tea Party is that clearly, these Tea Partiers either can’t or don’t want to distinguish between fact and fiction and to them King represents a voice of authority (telling them it’s quite all right to be crazy).

King’s contribution, this time around, was to whip the Tea Partiers into an anarchic frenzy to paralyze the Capitol. He said, “Fill this city up, fill this city, jam this place full so that they can’t get in, they can’t get out and they will have to capitulate to the will of the American people.”

Elsewhere in his speech, he spouted his usual disinformation about the health care bill funding abortion as well as care for 6.1 million illegal immigrants, winding up with an impassioned plea for concerned citizens to “continue to rise up.”

I haven’t yet decided whether I think King is just simple-minded or whether he’s a world-class demagogue – either way, King has spent his years in Washington filling the air with a giant load of misleading crap – below are some samples of King’s wit and wisdom, taken from Wikipedia, which lists links for all comments.

On Joseph McCarthy:

In 2005, King whipped up a group to oppose honoring a Berkeley, California councilwomen because of her “affiliation” with the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Berkeley. Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee claimed that King’s “campaign of innuendo and unsubstantiated ‘concern’ is better suited to the era of Joseph McCarthy than today’s House of Representatives,” King claimed that history showed McCarthy to be “a hero for America.”

On the May 1, 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” rallies, King offered his opinion to the Op-Ed editor of the Des Moines Register:

“What would that May 1st look like without illegal immigration? There would be no one to smuggle across our southern border the heroin, marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines that plague the United States, reducing the U.S. supply of meth that day by 80%. The lives of 12 U.S. citizens would be saved who otherwise die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day. Another 13 Americans would survive who are otherwise killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals. Our hospital emergency rooms would not be flooded with everything from gunshot wounds, to anchor babies, to imported diseases to hangnails, giving American citizens the day off from standing in line behind illegals. Eight American children would not suffer the horror as a victim of a sex crime.”

[Critics immediately argued that King's daily numbers in the editorial are inflated, based on the incorrect premise that 28% of all prisoners in all American jails and prisons are illegal aliens. King cited an April, 2005 GAO report as the source of that statistic; that report actually says that 27% of federal prisoners were "criminal aliens," a term that includes both legal and illegal aliens. "Criminal aliens" doesn't mean "illegal aliens". State prisons and local jails together hold 92% of US prisoners. The actual percentage of illegal aliens held at the time in state prisons and local jails can be determined by comparing figures for SCAAP federal compensation to states and localities with federal Bureau of Justice Statistics prisoner censuses. Such a comparison reveals that the accurate illegal alien percentage being held was less than 4%, rather than the 28% claimed by King.

In May 2008, King downgraded his original claims about the contents and reliability of the GAO report from which he "extrapolated" them saying: “ . . . that report came back not quite apples to apples.”]

On Washington, D.C.:

“My wife lives here with me, and I can tell you… she’s at far greater risk being a civilian in Washington, D.C., than an average civilian in Iraq.”

King said that there were 45 violent deaths per 100,000 in Washington, D.C., in 2003 while he calculated that there were 27.51 per 100,000 in Iraq as a whole.

The Iraqi Health Ministry casualty survey, however, estimated 151,000 violent deaths in Iraq due to the war from 2003 to 2006, or roughly 162.37 per 100,000 per year. The Lancet survey published in 2006 estimated that 2.5% of the population of Iraq had died from the war as of June 2006.

On State Department appropriations:

On June 21, 2007, King introduced an amendment to the $34 billion State and Foreign Operations bill to prohibit funds from being used by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to travel to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan or Syria. When asked why the measure did not apply to Republican House members who had also made trips to the countries in question, King’s spokesman replied that he was unsure whether that had been considered, or why it might not have been.

UPDATE: At the end of 2009, Rep. King went on his own “fact-finding” junket to Afghanistan. Upon his return he reported that he met with President Muhammad (sic) Karzai and found him to be “human.”

On Barack Obama:

On March 7, 2008, during his press engagements to announce his reelection campaign, King made his now famous remarks about Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and his middle name, saying:

“ … if he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al-Qaida, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they will declare victory in this War on Terror.”

[At the time, Obama said he did not take the comments too seriously, describing King as “an individual who thrives on making controversial statements to get media coverage.” The McCain campaign disavowed King's comments, saying "John McCain rejects the type of politics that degrades our civics…and obviously that extends to Congressman King's statement.”

On the Iowa Supreme Court:

In April, 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a state ban on same-sex marriage violated the Iowa constitution. King opined that the judges "should resign from their position" and the state legislature "must also enact marriage license residency requirements so that Iowa does not become the gay marriage Mecca."

On the IRS building bombing in Austin, Texas:

Last month, in his closing remarks at CPAC, King said he could “empathize” with the man who flew a plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and an IRS employee.

On Washington lobbyists:

On the House floor in February 2010, King made remarks defending and supporting lobbyists as a source of “valuable information”:

“Lobbyists do a very effective and useful job on this Hill, and if anyone gave me information that wasn’t accurate or honest, if they found out about it they would bring it back and correct it to me first. If I thought they were doing so intentionally, they would not come back to talk to me ever. There is credibility there, in that arena, that I think somebody needs to stand up for the lobby. It is a matter of providing a lot of valuable information.”

One might reasonably ask whether Rep. King would recognize “valuable information” if it bit him in the ass …

After King’s latest outing a Huffington Post reporter asked him about his comparison of the Tea Party protest with the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Prague. Here’s how that went:

HuffPo: “So this is just like Prague under communist rule?” the Huffington Post asked.

King: “Oh yeah, it is very, very close,” King replied. “It is the nationalization of our liberty and the federal government taking our liberty over. So there are a lot of similarities there.”

“I look back 20 years ago in the square in Prague ... when tens of thousands showed up there and they shook their keys peacefully and they took over their country and they achieved their freedom back again,” he said. “If you can keep coming to this city, fill up the congressional offices across the country but jam this city. If you can get on your cell phones, and get on your Blackberries and your email, and ask people to keep coming to this town. Storm this city, fill up Washington D.C., jam this capital so they can’t move. And if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of you show up, we will win. We will defeat this bill and you will have your liberty back.”

Of course, part of the reason that Prague is so idyllic is because they have government-sponsored health care — just like you do, Rep. King…

From the Washington Independent:

Kathy Ropte — like Jackson, a member of the Harris County, Ga. Tea Party, had started to move beyond lobbying. As cameras snapped away, she stood in front of the Cannon Building and announced the termination, “to take effect in November,” of pro-health care reform members. One activist chided her for the display, which included a massive sign reading “Waterboard Congress.” Jackson didn’t care. She was in the fight, whether or not health care reform passed.

“One day I turned off American Idol,” Ropte told TWI, “and I turned on Fox News. Before this year I’d never voted in my life.”

Bart Stupak might want to beef up his obstructionism by weighing down the health care bill with the language William Blum suggests below. Go for it, Bart. There are innocent lives to be saved!

About half the states in the US require that a woman seeking an abortion be told certain things before she can obtain the medical procedure. In South Dakota, for example, until a few months ago, staff was required to tell women: “The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being”; the pregnant woman has “an existing relationship with that unborn human being,” a relationship protected by the U.S. Constitution and the laws of South Dakota; and a “known medical risk” of abortion is an “increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide.”

…I'd like to suggest that before a young American man or woman can enlist in the armed forces s/he must be told the following by the staff of the military recruitment office:

“The United States is at war [this statement is always factually correct]. You will likely be sent to a battlefield where you will be expected to do your best to terminate the lives of whole, separate, unique, living human beings you know nothing about and who have never done you or your country any harm. You may in the process lose an arm or a leg. Or your life. If you come home alive and with all your body parts intact there’s a good chance you will be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Do not expect the government to provide you particularly good care for that, or any care at all. In any case, you may wind up physically abusing your spouse and children and/or others, killing various individuals, abusing drugs and/or alcohol, and having an increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide.

“No matter how bad a condition you may be in, the Pentagon may send you back to the battlefield for another tour of duty. They call this ‘stop-loss’. Your only alternative may be to go AWOL. Do you have any friends in Canada? And don’t ever ask any of your officers what we’re fighting for. Even the generals don’t know. In fact, the generals especially don’t know. They would never have reached their high position if they had been able to go beyond the propaganda we’re all fed, the same propaganda that has influenced you to come to this office.”

Unlike most of us who have been sounding off on the matter, Papa Bonk actually knows the man who recently became his former congressman: Eric Massa. Therefore attention must be paid:

The real tragedy of Eric Massa (who I know personally) is that he was a damn good congressman, a hard working Progressive who took principled stands on tough issues… like Afghanistan and single payer health care. He, like Larry Craig, is in many ways a victim of a culture that causes many citizens to suppress their true selves. If Eric Massa ran again as a gay man I would be there running with him.

Eric made a few big mistakes in bowing out … pointing fingers at Nancy and Rahm, for example. But he also pulled off a major coup … getting on Glennn’s Moron Show for an entire hour. Once inside the viper’s nest, he gave Beck nothing useful and managed to score a couple of points.

He said a good first step towards fixing Washington’s problems would be for the GOOP to stop lying about the facts. He also suggested there would be no real solutions until we had real campaign finance reform. No one has ever been able to say anything quite so true on Fox News without being censored or shouted down. Beck, who is preprogrammed by his handlers to spew fascist silliness for hours at a time … was left speechless.

From Bette Noir’s blog, The Frump Gazette. Which I have just discovered, and recommend. I agree with her about President Obama’s political strategy; I hope we’re both right.

Well, frumps, things are definitely starting to look up for Democrats and the Obama administration if my Lunatic Fringe barometer can still be trusted. I’ve discovered, over the past year, that there is a quantifiable inverse relation between the fortunes of the Obama White House and threats of violence from the far-right reaches of the blogosphere. None too stable at the best of times, these folks have a tendency to fly around the room backwards whenever Obama shows signs of succeeding at advancing his domestic social policy agenda.

Obama has an interesting way of achieving his ends. He allows debate to rage unbridled, allows people to act out and vent melodramatically until we are all simply exhausted by the topic. Then, as we mentally move on, he quietly administers CPR and, next thing you know, dead-in-the-water issues are moving apace toward realization. It’s a pretty impressive strategy, to me, at least.

Just think about the health care reform battle. A year went by while we raged and fumed on our various sides of the issue. As Obama put it in his Health Care Summit, last week, “everything that could be said, had been said.” Gray-haired grannies duked it out with the local teamsters in Town Halls. Conspiracy theorists pumped up the volume and warned us all of The New World Order and/or Socialism/Fascism that lie just around the corner…

Steve Clemons is a bit of a character. It’s really important to him that we realize what high-ranking folks he hangs out with. On the other hand, hanging out with high-ranking folks means you hear a lot of inside takes, and he points us to a particularly important one today.

Surprisingly, the Obama administration is portrayed as failing in its first year because it continues to operate on the principles derived from campaigning, despite their being inappropriate for governing.

According to the Edward Luce article at the Financial Times website, the decision-makers in this administration are basically four politicians in a tightly knit group. These folks accomplished what everyone (except me) considered impossible in winning the White House, and are thus somewhat reluctant to accommodate themselves to outside complaints that their plans are impossible.

This White House-centric structure has generated one overriding — and unexpected — failure. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr Emanuel managed the legislative aspect of the healthcare bill quite skilfully, say observers. The weak link was the failure to carry public opinion — not Capitol Hill. But for the setback in Massachusetts, which deprived the Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate, Mr Obama would by now almost certainly have signed healthcare into law — and with it would have become a historic president.

You gotta love that. The weak link was the failure to carry public opinion. The weak link wasn’t the failure to follow through on campaign promises, no one’s naïve enough to expect that; nor was it the failure to do what two-thirds of the public consistently demanded in polls, namely some sort of Medicaid-like program available to everyone. No, that couldn’t have had anything to do with the failure to produce a bill, just because there was no consistuency other than the insurance and drug companies.

President Obama chose a signature issue for his first year in which he’d taken the only reasonable solution off the table before he began to negotiate. Apparently he and his advisors really saw him as The One, Neo Incarnate, the being whose perfection of purpose could save us all.

I say “surprisingly” because, of course, it isn’t surprising at all. My personal memory tends toward the theory that the permanent campaign came in with Ronald Reagan and Michael Deaver, but Jerry would have a better informed opinion on that score. This was my complaint about the Clinton White House. Bush II was the same, and Bush I only differed by employing smoother thievery.

It’s so hard to campaign nationally that the most productive years of several top-flight talents are required to reach the White House, at which point there’s no time left to learn how to govern. An entirely different skill from that of campaigning, let’s just leave it there.

Hopefully, though I’m not holding my breath, Obama will realize that the reason health care reform failed was not that it was too bold, but that it was nowhere near bold enough. Taking single-payer off the table gave away the game: the President would do anything for a success, which left the most recalcitrant members of Congress in the catbirds’ seats.

And they sure took advantage of that. And that sure was predictable.

Get a new chief of staff, start fighting for the lower and middle classes against the big-money interests, and aim for a great two-term Presidency; or continue to speak like a progressive Democrat while acting like a hawkish Republican, alienate your base, and be as successful in 2012 as your Superbowl pick in 2010. That, Mr. President, is my prognostication, for what it’s worth.

Does anyone know how the Democrats’ health care reform package proposes to prevent the insurance companies from pulling a similar scam?

The largest homeowners insurer in Florida is canceling the policies of 125,000 of its most vulnerable customers beginning Aug. 1, halfway through the 2010 hurricane season.

The company, State Farm Florida, began sending out cancellation notices this week to nearly a fifth of its 714,000 customers, most of them in the state’s hurricane-prone coastal regions.

A spokesman for State Farm said the decision was the direct result of its failure to win a 47.1 percent rate increase from state regulators.

State Farm stopped writing new policies and sought the increase a year ago, saying severe losses from a series of devastating hurricanes in recent years had rendered its business model unworkable. It said that without the large increase, it would be insolvent by the end of 2011.

Suppose there’s a couple of bad flu seasons. Then the next year the insurance companies, one by one, no collusion here, begin demanding 50% rate increases for health care insurance policies, and end up negotiating a deal with the relevant government merely to cancel the insurance of a fifth of their customers. As long as they don’t cancel you for pre-existing conditions or because you’ve hit some lifetime limit, they’re good, right? We can’t force the companies to stay in business, at least in the current environment.

And of course there’s about three-quarters of a million Americans going bankrupt each year at least in part because of medical bills despite having health insurance. What do the Democrats propose to do about this?

They appear to have failed entirely at the one project they set themselves for this year, thus yielding what the Village Voice called a 41-59 majority for the Republicans.

But there’s a positive side, it appears.

David Miller, president of Brightway Insurance in Orlando and Jacksonville, saw a silver lining to the announcement. Spreading State Farm’s customers around to other companies will make the homeowners insurance market more competitive, and the canceled State Farm customers will likely get a better deal from their new insurers, he said.

“I think when they go to shop … they’re going to find that there are actually some tremendous savings, and this could end up being a blessing in disguise for many people,” Miller said.

Which makes sense. Insurance salesfolk are known to lend a sympathetic ear and policy to people in need.

One of the great pleasures of a new article by William Greider is his hopefulness. He still believes we can change the country into something we want it to be, something more like the original promises we made to ourselves at the founding, which we’ve never lived up to. Yet, Greider would probably add.

In the newest, “Political Fever”, he argues that the current discomfiture of the Democrats is a good thing in that it provides an opening for the people to pressure the government.

The Washington Post calls it a “populist brushfire,” and pundits explain why our sudden rowdiness is irrational, possibly dangerous if not swiftly contained. What a rare moment to behold — we’ve got their attention! Events that the major media see as illness are actually the first small signs of revival in our moribund democracy. The rebellions are like early tremors in what could be a deep shift in the tectonic plates of power. If so, the first waves are going to be followed by more waves — lots of them emanating from unexpected quarters — new voices and new ideas intruding on the exclusive parlor talk that passes for political dialogue.

I think Greider finds the whole spectacle fun and exciting because he’s identified with what a lifetime as a reporter has taught him is important to regular folks. He’s worked for the Post and Rolling Stone before his current gig as national affairs honcho for The Nation, and he knows Washington fairly well. But he hasn’t let familiarity kill hope, in part, I think, because he has a better sense of history than most politicians, or reporters for that matter. And he hasn’t identified his hopes and dreams with a particular political party, but with what his sense of history and his experience with people tell him are the big-picture trends.

Right now we’re buffeted by several of those, among them climate change, peak oil, and imperial overstretch. Politicians as a social class ignore these and others for as long as they can, since any viable solutions involve radical shifts in wealth and power from the current outrageously top-heavy structure.

But when a Republican in a pickup truck can take Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, you know it’s a moment at which we’ve got their attention.

This is where liberal-labor progressives can make a difference by exerting “tough love” on the Democratic Party. Do not be subtle about the electoral threat to comfortable incumbents. By refusing to fall into line and instead encouraging voters to talk back, activist groups can scare the bejesus out of Democrats (maybe even the president). People should demand, not beg, that Obama endorse the $154 billion jobs bill the House has already passed. Or blister Democratic senators who refuse to take up labor-law reforms needed to help workers organize. There is a long list of potential targets, if progressives are willing to assert themselves.

Usually, of course, Democrats in Washington do not take this sort of pressure seriously, and Obama’s White House has been dismissive of its liberal base, especially organized labor. Politicians can count, and they typically regard threats from left of center as toothless. But activists in Washington might change that if they reach out and develop alliances with the broad ranks of ordinary people across the country, including unorganized independents and renegade Republicans. Turn away from the policy culture of Washington. Instead, learn how to listen to everyday people, their concerns and aspirations — then learn to talk like them. The right does an ugly, fear-driven version of this. The left can speak for a more honest and optimistic vision of what Americans need. Mobilizing the anger is necessary to sustaining democracy.

We can take control of this country if we choose; the forms of democracy are still in place. The deck has been stacked against us, and the odds are long. But there are so many of us who recognize the actual need for real change, not just belief, that the question isn’t whether we could succeed, but whether we’ll put in the effort required. It’ll take democratic action; but as Greider says in Come Home, America, the easiest and least scary thing you can to do advance democracy is talk with the people around you about what’s going on. Generate conversation, get people thinking, even riled up. When enough people are angry, and willing to call their representatives to express that anger, the system will respond surprisingly quickly. Not necessarily efficiently, or even correctly at first. But it’ll respond, one way or another. As long as we can vote out the incumbents, we can scare them into doing what we want.

Henry Adams quoted a Cabinet member who was his superior responding to an Adams request for patience and tact in dealing with a Representative. The unnamed Cabinet member burst out: “You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!”

If we take up our political sticks, Congress will respond. This is not a faith thing, it’s an observation based on the desperation of members of Congress to hold onto that designation. Credibly threaten the Democrats with abandonment, in which case they’ll return to minority status, and see if they don’t respond.

I wonder if the bad news the Democrats have received over the past few weeks isn’t a blessing in disguise.

No, I’m not claiming they’ll learn from their mistakes, pick themselves up, and climb back into the fight. No attentive observer would be that silly.

But consider this. Had Scott Brown not been elected during, and thus after, the debacle the Democrats made of health-care reform, forcing the President to rebrand so hastily that the newly adopted persona is not even vaguely credible, the Democratic leadership would have been forced to deal with their collective nightmare, also known as their constitutional duty.

Fat chance, you say? Who’s gonna force Pelosi and Reid to do what the highest law of the land requires of them?

Well, with all that’s going on right now, how much have you heard about the Chilcot inquiry in Britain? There’s a lot of fascinating testimony being given, admittedly to a bunch of pretty conservative inquirers, but in public nonetheless. As a result, we know publicly and for sure that the UK government was being told before the Iraq invasion in 2003 that the action would be illegal under international law. And not by a voice crying in the wilderness.

While Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, was roundly dismissing the unanimous advice of his top lawyers that an invasion of Iraq would be illegal, officials in Downing Street were strongly resisting similar unwelcome advice, this time from Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general.

Previously classified documents released today at the Chilcot inquiry offer a rare, perhaps unprecedented, insight into manoeuvring at the heart of government about one of the most serious issues to confront ministers — whether to go to war, and the lawfulness of it.

The documents reveal Goldsmith expressed concern to Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, that he was said to have had an “optimistic view” of the legality of an invasion without fresh UN backing. Goldsmith made it clear that was not his view. That was in November 2002 when Goldsmith had been struggling to get his voice heard, the inquiry was told. “Was the attorney general discouraged from giving advice?” David Brummell, the former attorney’s legal secretary was asked. “ Yes,” Brummell replied.

That’s just from today, there’s been lots of other fascinating stuff. What, for instance, have you heard about the Hutton report on David Kelly, who supposedly committed suicide after a BBC report casting doubt on the government’s case that Iraq had WMDs was traced to him? Did you know that Lord Hutton is attempting to impose a 70-year gag order on the records from which his inquiry concluded that the death was by suicide? (Why? To protect the feelings of the bereaved. Where have we heard that one before?) Hutton’s inquiry interrupted an inquest, which was never restarted. Now five doctors are considering a legal challenge to force the government to show them the information on which the inquiry’s judgment was based.

So here’s my point:

• The Guardian has gathered its voluminous reporting on the inquiry into an easily accessible form.
• A search at the New York Times website turns up two articles in the last month that mention the inquiry, published Jan. 12 and 18.
• A similar search at the Washington Post found four articles over the same period, two from AP and two from Reuters, published between Jan. 18 and 22.

If there weren’t so many wild and heavy things happening on this side of the pond, a lot of bloggers — if no one else — would be bouncing these reports around the net, and that would turn into news.

Interrupting an inquest, then hiding the information on which a determination of cause of death was made, looks like something you’d expect in Dallas or Los Angeles.

Public testimony from a former Foreign Office lawyer who resigned in protest days before the invasion provided some excitement for those who believe citizenship is still possible.

The Iraq inquiry burst into life yesterday, thanks to a quiet, thoughtful yet furious woman who ripped into the government like a genteel but very hungry lioness. Elizabeth Wilmshurst was the first witness to get a round of applause from the public.

Although she wasn’t happy about the attorney general Lord Goldsmith giving a legal blessing to the war, she noted the position the Labor government left him in by asking for a legal opinion less than two weeks before the invasion began.

For the attorney to have advised that the conflict would have been unlawful without a second resolution would have been very difficult at that stage, I would have thought handing Saddam Hussein a massive public relations advantage. It was extraordinary, frankly, to leave asking him so late in the day. I think the process that was followed in this case was lamentable.

In the old days, American politics included a certain amount of theater on the grand scale such as the British are now engaged in, much to their credit in my opinion. If only we here in the US can find it in ourselves to grow up enough to examine ourselves and our actions in a similar fashion, we can follow in the footsteps of declining empires of the past toward a reconciliation with the world around us, rather than scrambling for every last resource to exploit on our way down, leaving us both desperate and hated.

But as long as we can debate why Bernanke only needs 51 votes while health care needs 60, we don’t have to worry about the war crimes our government has committed in the immediate past.

What the hell are the Obama people thinking? A spending freeze in the middle of a recession??? This is the evidence of what they’re selling as a new focus on jobs?

It’s good that the Scott Brown election freaked them; they needed to be awakened. Unfortunately but predictably, they learned the wrong lesson. But even my cynicism appears to have misunderestimated the political ineptitude of this administration. I knew I wouldn’t be happy with its policies, but I expected a political machine at least as good as Clinton’s. Come to think of it, a lot of it is Clinton’s. That might explain things…

But after giving three-quarters of a trillion communal taxpayer dollars to the very folks whose Ponzi schemes robbed the taxpayers individually, then cozying up to the drug and insurance companies over health care, then getting beat up in polls and losing Ted Kennedy’s seat, then announcing that the new Obama brand is The Fighting Populist, they come up with one of the dumbest and most anti-populist moves you can imagine.

Obama was fine with $787 billion to Wall Street. He tripled the official US military force in Afghanistan and the increase in contractors is at least as great. And of course the misnamed Defense Department is exempted from the freeze, as the pet projects of the major corporate contributors will no doubt soon be.

Now, at last, the administration turns its concentration to helping the other 90% of Americans, the ones who are being foreclosed on, or struggling under ever-mounting debt caused by usurious interest rates that were illegal a couple decades ago; and everyone who still has a job is worried that it’ll be outsourced to a different continent. What sort of helping hand does the Democratic President offer?

A freeze on spending, except for feeding the war machine.

I guess Richard Nixon was wrong when he postulated that we’re all Keynesians now, because it would be hard to imagine a more wrong-headed move according to the model that made John Maynard Keynes an advisor of governments in the mid-twentieth century. Exactly the opposite of everything Obama’s done was what was called for.

It was easy to figure out what to do, but doing it would have required courage, and Obama appears to have none.

The fight to confirm Ben Bernanke for a second term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve has unfortunately exposed the true nature of Chris Dodd.

Publicly admitting that he was likely to lose if he ran again, because he was seen as being in bed with the worst actors in what Krugman calls the Great Recession, Dodd dropped out in favor of a Democrat who was likely to win.

Now that he’s freed from the restrictions of having to be re-elected, does he act purely on his own view of right and wrong?

Apparently he does.

In voting for Bernanke, the panel’s chairman, Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said Bernanke’s “wise leadership” will mean “better days do lie ahead.”

Although Bernanke, 56, appears to have enough votes in the Senate to win a second term, six Republicans and one Democrat on the committee did line up against him. They blame him for not spotting problems that led to the financial crisis, failing to protect consumers and supporting Wall Street bailouts.

Even a stopped watch is right twice a day. It takes someone who’s given up to shill for the worst interests on his way out when he has nothing to lose. Dodd has stood for liberal causes lots of times, occasionally even when it mattered. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

President Obama is back!

“Let me tell you, so long as I have the privilege of serving as your president, I’ll never stop fighting for you,” Obama said at the beginning of a town hall meeting with voters Friday.

This is encouraging news. The question now is, When will you start fighting for us?

I expected Obama to be casting about for scapegoats, but I never thought he was foolish enough to claim that Massachusetts replaced Jack and Ted Kennedy with a Republican because people are still angry at George Bush.

Democrats, from Mr. Obama on down… made a concerted effort to portray the results in Massachusetts as a reflection of long-simmering populist anger, and not a referendum on the health care legislation or on the year-old administration, which came into office facing steep challenges.

“Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country: the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” Mr. Obama said in the interview on ABC. “People are angry, they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Update: Wait a minute! Is Obama calling himself a Tea Partier???

Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, John Dewey said, and there’s a great truth in that statement.

But politics is also the shadow cast on society by psychology. Of course an aspiring clinical psychologist would say that, but I think I can support the claim. In fact it’s probably self-evident.

In something resembling a democracy, individual psychology clearly influences, and usually determines, personal voting patterns. If you see yourself as weak, helpless, and in need of outside forces to keep you from doing bad stuff, as the Southern Baptists I grew up around apparently do, then you’ll gravitate to strong leaders and forceful foreign policy and anything that makes you feel less insecure. Whereas if you feel confidant, capable, and self-directed, you’re more likely to vote to help others, and to have some compassion for people on the other side of whatever divide is being confronted.

At a higher level, what you think is going on in the world determines how you understand new information and what you think about events that take place. If, for example, you see the Republicans as just this side of evil, and the Democrats as disappointing but noticeably better, then your mental model of how things work involves the ideological necessity of keeping the Democrats in power pretty much all the time. The problem soon becomes apparent, and you realize that, but you still can’t see it.

People don’t like politicians who are weak and don’t know what they believe. If the [Senate health care] bill was worth passing yesterday, it’s just as worth passing tomorrow. All the meta-politics about being for something before you were against it, knowing what you believe or not knowing, being able to get something done. It all comes down to stuff like this.

Late Update: Here’s an unnamed “presidential advisor” quoted in Politico who should get a promotion: “The response will not be to do incremental things and try to salvage a few seats in the fall,” a presidential adviser said. “The best political route also happens to be the boldest rhetorical route, which is to go out and fight and let the chips fall where they may. We can say, ‘At least we fought for these things, and the Republicans said no.’”

I cannot say this enough. The policy front speaks for itself. But the meta-politics is real. It’s a big. But it’s something Democrats have great difficulty with. For a whole variety of reasons voters clearly have a lot of hesitation about this reform. I think the polls make clear that the public is not against it. But the reticence is real. If Dems decide to run from the whole project in the face of a single reverse, what are voters supposed to draw from that? What conclusion would you draw about an individual in an analogous situation in your own life? Think about it.

To me, Josh comes across here as completely bereft of a clue; it’s hard to know where to start. With “politicians who are weak and don’t know what they believe” — recognize any current President in that? Or how much the current Democratic dilemma arises directly from the complete absence of evidence of the President “fight[ing] and lett[ing] the chips fall where they may”, so that it’s now way too late? Or “run[ning] from the whole project in the face of a single reverse” — this is the only negative indicator the Democrats have seen for completely caving on health care reform? What about Obama’s sliding popularity? What about the polls on the bill itself — will the Democrats in general follow the lead of Martha Coakley and claim they didn’t have enough money for tracking polls?

Such a viewpoint leads to frustration, to telling people to just STFU, because it conflicts with reality. Cognitive psychology tells us that emotions are a reaction to the difference between what actually happens and what we expected would happen. Thus we can control our future emotional reactions by setting our expectations appropriately.

If we expect something unrealistic, we can call ourselves realists but events will not meet our expectations. When that happens, people get frantic.

“If it’s the end of health care, it’s the end of the Democratic majority.”

That’s Paul Begala from a few moments ago on CNN when asked whether a Brown win meant the end of health care reform. So true. It really is nothing to fear but fear itself. The Dems have no choice but to finish the job. No choice.

And I strongly suspect that means the House has to pass the senate bill.

One cannot even imagine anything more horrible than the end of the Democratic majority. Therefore, passing a terrible bill that everyone knows is only being enacted as a political ploy to keep the Democrats in power is the best, in fact only, move, because it keeps the Democrats in power.

Witness Massachusetts.

And I just have to point out one more time, there is no health care in this bill. It mandates the purchase of insurance, but does not mandate that insurance companies pay for whatever care you need. Who’s gonna come out ahead in such a transaction?

What lessons will the Democrats learn from losing Ted Kennedy’s seat, as it appears they’re about to? What should they learn?

I suspect they’ll take as a lesson that they should never try to do anything the Republicans don’t want. “But a child could see that’ll fail,” do you say? I admit it. Since the Republicans want to concentrate power and wealth even more, and are willing to tear down as much of the country as necessary to make it happen, the list of things the Democrats would still be able to do would be empty. Which, after all, isn’t that different from what they actually do in practice.

The DLC Democrats will start talking about how silly the left is to want what all other developed countries have. They’ll rattle sabers about Iran, and pal around with the Liebermans, Joe and Avigdor. They’ll find an excuse to confront Russia and China politically, but without disturbing the profits of their corporate owners. In short, they’ll imitate the antics of the losing candidate in the last Presidential election.

Why? Well, that’s the point: it’s what the Democrats want to do, but they need an excuse. They’ve sold their souls to the same sectors of society that have long owned the Republican party; but unlike the Senator from my original home state, Mitch McConnell, and most of those he leads, the Democrats are still shy about letting their constituents know that. Probably because they’d lose their seats in the next election.

Sure, there are a few like Kucinich who don’t fit the mold, and some like Waxman who seem to be chomping at the bit to fight but are restrained by my Representative, the Speaker. But in general, the Democrats are the party of compromise, while the Republicans continue to use the tactic they learned in Reagan’s time of demanding eight times what they want. The Democrats agree to split the difference (again); the Republicans walk away with four times what they wanted, and the Democrats feel good about themselves. Or as Robert Reich put it, the discussion moves to the right because the Democrats keep meeting the Republicans half-way while the Republicans stay put.

The country hasn’t moved to the right, as the polls make clear; but the political conversation moves ever farther from what real people know is happening. The empire is ending; we’ve allowed corporations to ship our economic pre-eminence overseas to the lowest bidder; and as a result, as Greider says, the good times we recently thought would roll forever will never come back. They’re gone for good, and our job is to adjust, not to waltz around the world destroying other countries in a futile attempt to prove we’re still BMOC.

In that light, the lesson the Democrats should learn from Coakley’s apparently imminent loss is that they should have followed through on the promises they made. If Obama had ever even looked like he was making an effort to fight for at least one of the things he told us he’d do, the Democrats would not be in danger of losing Congress again like they did in 1994; but they caved to the corporations and the super-rich far too obviously and quickly. They needed at least to stage a credible fight that played out over time in which they pretended to confront the corporations everyone knows are causing the problems. As it was, Obama made back-room deals with the worst actors, then left Congress to take the blame.

Obama’s above-the-fray strategy got him what he was going for — a bill, no matter what it includes — but it lost him his base. He might get some of the votes back later if he does something they value, but he’s lost the glow of adoration that followed him through his introduction to the national consciousness. That can’t be recouped, and he’ll never again have the momentum he had on entering office. A great opportunity wasted, at a time when we won’t have many more.

At the recent BARBARian gathering the subject of politics arose, as it tends to do. This group originally got together to bitch about Bush in person rather than virtually.

There was, therefore, a good deal of excitement during the 2008 election, and not a little dissension about which Democrat to support. I was one of the few, possibly the only one, who wasn’t used to voting for Democrats at the national level.

Once Obama was elected, the mood ranged from imminent utopia to relief and reasonably high expectations. Plus my cynicism, which never felt unwelcome but was certainly out of place for several meetings.

So it’s both depressing and validating to find that the first meeting in several months exhibited little enthusiasm for the Obama administration or the current Democratic leadership in general. I wish I’d been wrong in predicting that Obama would be no better than Clinton, but you surround yourself with Rubinites and you don’t have a prayer of doing anything that doesn’t destroy the country in economic terms. You believe the hawks in the military and the punditocracy and you lose any chance of ramping down the empire consciously and intelligently, rather than perforce. I.F. Stone quotes Lord Salisbury:

If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome;
if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent;
if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.

And if you believe the historians, nothing is new.

What surprises and depresses me is not the bad policies that Obama has adopted, nor his unwillingness to fight for anything but the interests of the worst corporations and the super-rich; that’s what he’s always done. I mean, this guy converted to Christianity as an adult, the same year he entered Harvard Business School. I gave up on Pelosi years ago, before she was Speaker, and haven’t voted for her for decades. And Harry Reid has an impressive life story but I can’t imagine how he ended up as the leader of anything. My guess is that he was the milquetoast to whom the fewest Democrats objected; and if that’s how you’re choosing leaders you’re not headed anywhere, you’re just trying to stay in power.

No, what surprises me is the abject ineptitude of the political calculations. Obama took off the table the single-payer idea that would have carried him through if he’d been what people thought he was. Congressional Democrats went along because they remembered the lesson they mis-took from 1994. Entering a negotiation with the express purpose of passing something, any bill at all, leaves you with no leverage. You’ve already agreed to fail, all you need is some face-saving band-aid. Who wins a negotiation? The party who can walk away.

Imagine for a moment that President Obama had made one of his best speeches on national television, like he’s done for major issues in the past. In this speech he’d called for universal health care like other developed countries have. Not universal insurance mandates, but universal health care, government-managed like other countries’. Single payer, which a majority of Americans have favored for decades. What would his poll numbers look like? He wouldn’t actually have to achieve such a lofty goal; but if he took the lead in negotiations, and he entered with that position, he’d get something close to it if he wanted such an outcome. Clearly he didn’t.

It’s particularly sad because Obama had a rare chance to do something historic and game-changing. It’s the classic Greek tragedy, in which the hero’s character flaws lead directly to the denouement. If only he really was the progressive community organizer people thought of him as being. Of course such a person wouldn’t be nominated by the Democrats, or allowed entry to a Republican gathering.

What would have gotten at least something done was a fighter in the mold of LBJ, someone willing to go into a caucus and threaten to cut peoples’s genitals off politically if they didn’t go along. We needed Obama to say, Here’s what I’m going for philosophically: a public option. I might fail and it would end my career to do so, but I have enormous public support. Those who get in my way will feel my wrath, and I will make sure the public knows which side everyone is on. We needed the modern equivalent of FDR welcoming their hatred. Instead we got what Obama’d always been, a intermediary between the corporate Democrats and the progressives they want to co-opt, to offset the wingnuts and fundamentalists the Republicans depend on.

Imagine what a President might accomplish in this magical time we inhabit were he willing to say, as FDR said about the Citigroups and AIGs of his time,

They have begun to see the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. And we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.

What the country needs, as Nader’s said for decades, and reports that his father said to him, is a not a third political party but a second one. I would denominate it the Anti-Corporate party. Wealth would not be the target per se, but the concentration of unaccountable power that corporate wealth brings definitely would be. No corporation should ever be able to dictate to the community, yet today many Americans can’t imagine it otherwise. As Bill Greider says in his newest, Come Home, America:

More important than all the other losses is that people are also denied another great intangible — the dignity of self-directed lives. At work, at home, and in the public sphere, most people lack the right to exercise much of a voice in the decisions governing their daily lives. Most people (not all) are subject to a system of command and control over their personal destinies. They know the risk of ignoring the orders from above. Not surprisingly, many citizens are resigned to this condition and accept subservience as “the way things are,” and their lives are smaller as a result. Many find it hard to imagine that these confinements could be lessened, even substantially removed, if economic organizations were informed by democratic principles.

We find it hard to imagine that democratic principles could inform our lives because television and cinema fail to show that happening. It happens in real life, as Greider has talked about at length, especially in Who Will Tell the People? and The Soul of Capitalism. But anything that needs corporate media to create, distribute, or promote it will be filtered through the idea that corporations naturally control the sources of everything, water, air, algorithms, genetic codes, and all. We need to free our minds.

But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached — their fundamental faith in human progress — that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

For if we lose that faith — if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace — then we lose what’s best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.

Like generations have before us, we must reject that future. As Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago, “I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘isness’ of man’s present condition makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts him.”

Let us reach for the world that ought to be — that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.

Can someone explain to me why the repeated invocation of Martin Luther King in a speech designed to justify policies he would have wholeheartedly condemned is not hypocritical in the extreme?

If you want to grab some of Martin’s mantle, you have to take his policies along with it. You can’t triple the size of the war machine’s effort in a poor remote country that did nothing to us and still claim to have inherited the tradition of a person who never saw a war he liked. Own up, Mr. Nobel Prize Winner.

More change that defies belief.

The plan, called Option 2A, was presented to the president on Nov. 11. Mr. Obama complained that the bell curve would take 18 months to get all the troops in place.

He turned to General Petraeus and asked him how long it took to get the so-called surge troops he commanded in Iraq in 2007. That was six months.

“What I'm looking for is a surge,” Mr. Obama said. “This has to be a surge.”

Another in a series of war criminals. At least he can form complete sentences.

You probably know the old joke, how many psychotherapists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: only one, but the bulb has to want to change.

I find myself wondering how those who believed Obama would change things are explaining the current situation to themselves. Hopefully we’re all learning about the limits of the American system, and thinking about how we might change it. But the real question is, do we want to change? If not, we’re likely to repeat the same behavior.

In his new book Come Home, America, William Greider opines that

One damaging myth Americans ought to abandon is the naive notion that the celebrity power of the presidency can somehow solve our problems. That faith has been disappointed again and again in recent decades. First, the new leader is built up with miraculous powers, then cast down when he fails to prevail.

Then we search for a new one.

The one we’ve got has finally turned his attention to the problem of finding jobs for the millions of Americans without one. With the official unemployment estimate topping ten percent, the real figure is widely considered to be about twice that, possibly even more. Unfortunately for our purposes, but fortunately for those who made the changes, the methods of calculating unemployment have changed a lot since the Depression, so we can’t readily compare our unemployment figures with theirs. Certainly our general economic situation is dire but not as bad as theirs was. Many people now are in as bad shape as people were then, it’s true; all we can say is that not as many are that badly off now. But it ain’t pretty.

First order of business, naturally, was buying off the bankers. Then the drug companies, then the insurance companies, then the so-called defense industry. That was $787 billion for Wall Street, untold billions throughout the foreseeable future for the insurance and drug companies, and tens, probably hundreds, of billions more for the weapons and logistics required to support the Peace Prize-winner’s war. So now that jobs are finally front and center, the rest of us will get an equally large slice of pie. Right?

Speaking at a White House forum to a panel of business and labor leaders, economists, and others,

Mr. Obama said he would entertain “every demonstrably good idea” for creating jobs, but he cautioned that “our resources are limited.”

The Times article talks about a House initiative to spend some real money on real people. The enormous sum of $70 billion was proposed to ameliorate the suffering of tens of millions, presumably with a straight face. No White House reaction to that plan at print time.

Mr. Obama’s jobs event captured the political and policy vise now squeezing the president and his party at the end of his first year. It came on the eve of a government report that is expected to show unemployment remaining in double digits, and two days after Mr. Obama stressed as he ordered 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan that he did not want the financial burdens of the war to overwhelm his domestic agenda.

Fortunately, the administration has devised a plan, based on one that worked in the recent past.

…a program of weatherization incentives for homeowners and small businesses… [c]alled “cash for caulkers,” it would enlist contractors and home-improvement companies like Home Depot — whose chief executive was on the panel — to advertise the benefits, much as car dealers did for the clunkers trade-ins this year.

Yet that relatively modest proposal underscores the limits of the government’s ability to affect a jobless recovery with the highest unemployment rate in 26 years — and Mr. Obama acknowledged as much. Just as he said in Tuesday’s Afghanistan speech that the nation could not afford an open-ended commitment there, especially when the economy is so weak and deficits so high, Mr. Obama emphasized at the jobs forum that the government had already done a lot with his $787 billion economic stimulus package and the $700 billion financial bailout that he inherited.

“I want to be clear: While I believe the government has a critical role in creating the conditions for economic growth, ultimately true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector,” he told his audience, which included executives and some critics from American Airlines, Boeing, Nucor, Google, Walt Disney and FedEx.

Yeah, that’ll work. The booming airline and steel businesses, plus search engines, cartoons, and package delivery. That’s the kind of thinking that made America great. Greider again:

We live in a country where telling the hard truth with clarity has become taboo. Its implications are too alarming. Any politician who says aloud what some of them know or feel in their guts is vilified as defeatist or unpatriotic. Many are clueless, of course, and others are too scared to raise forbidden subjects. I understand their silence and I do not forgive them.

As usual, Scott Ritter tells the straight truth, and as usual, it ain’t pretty.

In short, Saddam had been found guilty of possessing WMD, and his sentence had been passed down by Washington and London void of any hard evidence that such weapons, or even related programmes, even existed. The sentence meted out — regime termination — mandated such a massive deployment of troops and material that all but the wilfully blind or intentionally ignorant had to know by the early autumn of 2002 that war with Iraq was inevitable. One simply does not initiate the movement of hundreds of thousands of troops, thousands of armoured vehicles and aircraft, and dozens of ships on a whim or to reinforce an idle threat.

President George Bush was able to disguise his blatant militarism behind the false sincerity of his ally Blair and his own secretary of state, Colin Powell. The president’s task was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain, where reporters and editors alike dutifully repeated both the hyped-up charges levied against Iraq and the false pretensions that a diplomatic solution was being sought.

The tragic final act of the farce directed by Bush and Blair was the theatre of war justification known as UN weapons inspections. Having played the WMD card so forcefully in an effort to justify war with Iraq, the US (and by extension, Britain) were compelled once again to revisit the issue of disarmament. But the reality was that disarming Iraq was the furthest thing from the mind of either Bush or Blair. The decision to use military force to overthrow Saddam was made by these two leaders independent of any proof that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Having found Iraq guilty, the last thing those who were positioning themselves for war wanted was to re-engage a process that not only had failed to uncover any evidence Iraq’s retention of WMD in the past, but was actually positioned to produce fact-based evidence that would either contradict or significantly weaken the case for war already endorsed by Bush and Blair.

So, does this mean that Bush and Blair and their associates are war criminals like McNamara?

Having played the WMD card so forcefully in an effort to justify war with Iraq, the US (and by extension, Britain) were compelled once again to revisit the issue of disarmament. But the reality was that disarming Iraq was the furthest thing from the mind of either Bush or Blair. The decision to use military force to overthrow Saddam was made by these two leaders independent of any proof that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Having found Iraq guilty, the last thing those who were positioning themselves for war wanted was to re-engage a process that not only had failed to uncover any evidence Iraq’s retention of WMD in the past, but was actually positioned to produce fact-based evidence that would either contradict or significantly weaken the case for war already endorsed by Bush and Blair.

In other words, yes.

For the first time in history, the entire world contemporaneously saw the blatant hypocrisy of war. The best PR money could buy was unable to convince the global audience that even a shred of legitimacy existed in the imperial invasion of Iraq. Only the most fearful Americans even bought it, though as usual that’s more than a majority. Plus of course Israel, to give credit where it’s due.

Historically, it seems to me, legitimacy is the single most important attribute of a government. Lacking that, it falls, just as a President whose motorcade lacks normal military escorts is prey to the most extreme elements of society. When legitimacy falters, public confidance in society stumbles with it, and the polls seem to indicate such movement now. Obama entered office with the promise to change things, and surprise, compromising has failed to make a difference once again.

The Obama administration is of course not losing legitimacy to the extent of falling to a 1963-style coup; realistically, fight is not what you expect from Obama. But the Democrats have shown no reason why they should be given control of Congress again in 2010.

Doing the same thing and expecting a different result might be a definition of crazy, but it also seems to define the Democratic party since the Second World War. Here we go again.

When the United States went into Iraq in 2003, it had a handful of pilotless planes, or drones; it now has over 7,000. The invasion force had no unmanned ground vehicles; the U.S. armed forces now employ more than 12,000. …

Since taking office, President Obama has shown a quiet predilection for drone warfare. He’s been vacuuming up targets. There are two programs in operation: a publicly acknowledged military one in Iraq and Afghanistan and a covert C.I.A. program targeting terror suspects in countries including Pakistan.

This foreign-assassination thing has always worked to our advantage in the past. Consider, just to take a couple examples, Lumumba and Allende, assassinations for which we’re as widely admired as the Israelis are for theirs.

According to a just-completed study by the New America Foundation, quoted in [Jane] Mayer’s [New Yorker] piece, Obama has authorized as many drone strikes in Pakistan in nine and a half months as George W. Bush did in his last three years in office — at least 41 C.I.A. missile strikes, or about one a week, that may have killed more than 500 people.

The dead have included high-value targets like Osama bin Laden’s oldest son and Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader in Pakistan — as well as bystanders. Circling drones have struck panic. But as Mayer notes, “The embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force.”

Well, at least we now have a transparently scummy administration rather than a covertly scummy one.

JFK and LBJ were seduced by the availability of a plausibly deniable option. These days, with half the world’s weapons budget supplied by American taxpayers, deniability is a phantom, an invisibility cloak American politicians cling to as if someone actually bought the illusion. Somebody somewhere must, right? Sure, they’re all Americans, but who else gets surveyed? Pollsters are not roaming the mountains of Afghanistan.

The question, as always, is whether the situation improves or deteriorates when we kill a bunch of folks in some distant land, some of whom may or may not be guilty of something we don’t like. I mean, suppose Afghanistan killed a certain number of random Americans because we as a nation failed to buy enough opium products; how would we react? Oh, we’d say, it’s just collateral damage.

On the other hand, the Obama administration has moved with alacrity to confront the growing threat of insufficient health care. As if! Let’s check in with

…Dr. Gilbert Friedell, a crusty 82-year-old who taught at Harvard and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and ran the University of Kentucky’s Markey Cancer Center. He is a doctor’s doctor. He thinks, however, that too often doctors are a major problem in creating healthy communities. “Health care,” Friedell argues, “has to be a joint enterprise between patients, families and physicians.”

Nationally, Friedell believes, the health care debate has to be transformed.

“Currently the issues are framed as insurance or not insurance,” he says. “Having insurance gives you financial access to a system, assuming there is a system. It gives you nothing more than that. And getting into the system, if there is one, doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of care, the availability of services, the way the patients and families are treated.”

Kentucky’s fifth congressional district, which includes Harlan and Perry counties, has the lowest life expectancy of any district in America: 72.6 years for men and 76.4 for women. Those numbers would be little changed, Friedell says, by either a government-run system or a requirement that all people have insurance. Substantive change, he says, will only arrive built on a basis of re-ordered health values founded on programs like the ones in Hazard.

The same stupid-shit foreign policy. The same wimp-ass Republican social-values garbage. We need a second political party in this country.

Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman, in full smarm mode, has lately been congratulating himself for having the courage to follow his conscience. That poor, wizened little organ has apparently been urging the senator to block passage of the health reform bill by any means possible.

To make it perfectly clear that you can’t blame me for my state’s junior senator, I’m resurrecting this Golden Oldie from last March:

In 2000 a Republican no-hoper named Philip Giordano was running against Lieberman for the senate seat that Holy Joe was clinging to for dear life while simultaneously dragging down the national Democratic ticket as the vice presidential candidate.

I only knew two things about Giordano. One was that he was mayor of Waterbury, which is significant in Connecticut politics. It signifies that you haven’t been indicted yet, but hold your horses. You’ll get there soon enough.

The second thing I knew was that Giordano wasn’t Joe Lieberman, which left me with no option but to cast the first vote of my life for a Republican.

Meanwhile the FBI had already been quietly investigating Giordano for corruption, a process which is more or less automatic when it comes to Waterbury mayors.

During “Operation LandPhil,” as the Bureau called it, the wiretappers snapped to attention one day when they overheard Giordano making arrangements with a local prostitute to bring two girls, aged nine and ten, to his office for oral sex. Now the former Marine is doing 37 years in federal prison.

And still I don’t regret my vote. I’d rather be represented in the Senate by a pedophile than by a whiny, smarmy, sanctimonious warmonger with the blood of innumerable nine- and ten-year-old girls on his hands.

It’s a good thing Change has happened. If it hadn’t, we’d be spending ungodly amounts of money trying vainly to control the world through armaments.

Nonpartisan budget and security monitors report in Government Executive that the “administration’s request for $538 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal 2010 and its stated intention to maintain a high level of funding in the coming years put the president on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II. And that’s not counting the additional $130 billion the administration is requesting to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, with even more war spending slated for future years.”

The flurry of stories about finally putting the health insurance under the antitrust laws like everybody else have left me puzzled. How could such an outrage have been going on since 1945 without anybody noticing? And by anybody, I mean me.

Here’s the answer, taken from an excellent story by Matthew Perrone of the Associated Press:

But industry analysts say courts have long limited the scope of the exemption to allow federal regulators to intervene in instances where competition could be jeopardized. They note the law has never stopped regulators at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission from intervening in a merger or acquisition.

In practice, the exemption from federal antitrust laws mainly allows insurers to share data on payments and risk ratings — a useful collaboration among life and casualty insurers. But Wall Street analysts point out that giant health insurance companies like Humana, Wellpoint Inc. and UnitedHealth Group have little need to share data, thanks to their national size and scope.

“While the threat to repeal the exemption makes for good headlines, we can’t really see how it alters the business for the established publicly traded players,” wrote JPMorgan analyst John Rex in a note to investors.

With 94 percent of U.S. health insurance markets meeting the Justice Department standards for “highly concentrated” — meaning dominant insurers face little competition — most academics agree reform is needed. But they point out that federal regulators could have prevented much of that concentration under existing law.

Since 1996, the federal government has cleared 400 mergers in the health insurance field, according to the American Medical Association.

The Washington attorney who brought this to my attention was full of admiration. “Terrific politically,” he said. “Scores major PR points without the need to risk any substantive change. Bill Clinton would have loved it.”

As much as I’ve ragged on Nancy, it’s incumbent on me to praise her when she takes on the villains as directly as this: “…it is well known to the public that the health insurance companies are the problem”. Of course, the drug companies are a big part of the problem too, and Obama’s already folded his hand in that game. But this is something.

The insurance industry may find that it has made a mistake in attempting to rig the debate like it did the last around.

“There is tremendous interest in our caucus, and, in fact, the Judiciary Committee has had a hearing on ending the exemption to McCarran-Ferguson, the antitrust bill,” Pelosi said, unprompted, at her weekly press conference.

The insurance industry gained the exemption in 1945; in most parts of the country, a single insurer has monopolistic dominance and the ability to set prices.

On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) gave rare testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, speaking in favor of ending the anti-trust exemption. Reid is considering removing the exemption in the merged health care bill he is currently writing with other Senate leaders.

I don’t often cheer on Reid or Pelosi, but in this case I’m making a loud exception. Right on, Madame Speaker and Mr. Majority Leader! Take away their antitrust exemption and make them act like the capitalists they claim to be.

The upcoming race for governor of California looks likely to supply our reputation with a new stash of wacky. (Sorry, I’m reading Pynchon’s Inherent Vice and I’m finding myself imitating him.)

We have the classic California Republican in Meg Whitman, a person so obsessed with politics that she first registered to vote at the tender age of 46. She’s recently explained that she was focused on her family and her husband’s job. Apparently being CEO of eBay didn’t take up much of her attention; in any case she seems rarely to have found time to vote even after registering. This might be an issue.

Her positions are infused with a signature combination of naivete and calculation, smarter and more polished than Sarah Palin, who bested her in McCain’s VP sweepstakes, but about the same level of emotional development. Since she once worked for Bain & Co., Mitt Romney’s hideout, it’s not surprising that she’s against gay marriage and supported Prop. 8, though her fans would probably point out that she does support civil unions. Her positions on environment and energy are difficult to determine from her website, which contains the kind of slurpy gobbledygook shifty marketers use to bamboozle the unwary.

For example, on a website that seems to omit any links named Positions or Issues such as most politicians revel in, she promises as Governor to

• Make California the global model for promoting energy efficiency and new energy technologies for worldwide export
• Increase the state’s own energy supply and production by further diversifying our energy sources, including nuclear, biomass, wind and solar
• Modernize our infrastructure to distribute our energy sources more economically and efficiently

Hard to point to anything to disagree with there, or even to pick out any solid point at all. But we might expect to get a sense of her position by noting the three sources her website links to for news about energy issues: the liberal beacon Orange County Register, the friend of the working man Entreprenuer.com, and the oft-quoted Riverside Press-Enterprise. On the environment page, there are two links: another to the Press-Enterprise, and one to a San Jose Mercury News article titled “Meg Whitman: To create jobs, curb environmental regulation”. Claiming that job creation is her overall top priority, she proposes to do so by cutting taxes and reducing regulation. In other words, it’s the same old redistribution from the poor to the rich that the business wing of the Republican party has been hawking for decades.

Whitman’s likely opponents are the current insurance commissioner aptly named Steve Poizner, who apparently has a shot because the industry he regulates will back him to the hilt, with former Congressman Tom Campbell representing the occasionally-rational branch of the Republican party, whose campaign appears quixotic for exactly that reason.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats are stoked about running against anyone from that group. They’re still high from the last election, in which Obama more than doubled Kerry’s margin over the Republicans, 24% to 10%. So the big names are already circling.

San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is strongly supported by the Clinton wing, without whose assistance he probably would have lost to his Green opponent Matt Gonzales (as it was, Newsom won 53%-47%, about 11,000 votes). Newsom’s probably best known for marrying gay couples on the steps of city hall because he decided it should be legal, a judgement with which the courts in the end disagreed. Such notoriety would seem to guarantee him a certain base of support, and an equally solid base of opposition. He also has a bit of a weight to carry among the family-values crowd, having divorced his first wife two years into his mayoralty, and had an affair with his secretary who was also the wife of his campaign chairman and good friend, before marrying an actress, who delivered their first child less than a month ago. In San Francisco that kind of lifestyle costs you nothing. But statewide you face quite a different electorate, and calling yourself a Diane Feinstein-style Democrat isn’t likely to make up for the sexual peccadillos and the gay-marriage thing. Or the lack of experience.

The other announced candidate is current attorney general Jerry Brown, former governor, mayor of Oakland, and failed candidate for Senate and President, as well as son of a governor and brother of a state treasurer. He’s not term-limited like Schwarzeneger because the term-limits law took effect later.

I’d love to see a debate between Brown and Whitman. Brown is a smooth politician, but he’s much more than that. I voted for him in 1976, and I would have voted for a Democrat in 1992 if Brown had been the nominee. As a politician he’s quirky, generally socially liberal and fiscally conservative, but not always. He has a long record of actions that progressives and liberals generally applaud, from opposition to the Vietnam War and capital punishment to prosecuting Standard Oil of California, ITT, Gulf Oil, and Mobil for breaking campaign-finance laws, to repealing the state’s oil depletion allowance (essentially a tax break for taking oil out of the ground), to appointing the first black, female, and Latino judges to the California Supreme Court. Although the sentiment is by no means universal, Brown is widely credited with leading a turn-around in Oakland.

He’s also taken some contrary paths, such as inviting the Marines to stage “Urban Warrior” war games in the defunct Oakland Army Base, and offering some support to charter schools, one of which was military. It’s not unknown for progressives to complain that he’s too pro-business, though his record as attorney general has somewhat calmed those waters.

In San Francisco and the Bay Area there’s a sizable gay vote, and California is fairly similar. So Newsom should be able to get a big chunk of that bloc, right? Not necessarily. As attorney general, Brown took the unusual decision not to defend Prop. 8; normally the AG argues in support of laws passed by the voters. That was a relatively courageous act; he took a stand when he could easily have argued that his office required him to defend the peoples’ law. After all, he makes a somewhat similar argument about the death penalty: despite his strong opposition to it — as governor he vetoed a death-penalty law but was overridden — his office requires him to follow the law. But with Prop. 8, he decided that the peoples’ law was bullshit, and he officially refused to back it. Like Newsom, his actions were made moot by the state Supreme Court, but like Newsom, he made his political point.

All in all, Brown has a record of acting on real social problems, whatever one thinks of those acts, and of being willing to consider different paradigms. Both are rare in these declining days of empire when it’s easier to kick the can down the road. Nor were these merely symbolic actions, as a result of which they generated real constituencies. Which is probably why Brown is currently favored to take the Democratic nomination and the governership. I’ve figured for decades that if he lived long enough for the pendulum to swing back toward the left he’d be perfectly positioned. Maybe now’s the time.

What kind of official portrait would he choose this time?

I give the Obama administration credit for trying to learn from the past. But I wonder if the right lessons are being learned.

As Garry Wills discusses in the New York Review of Books, the new President and his principal advisers have largely adopted the methods and strategies of the Bush administration, which Obama campaigned strongly against. Wills explains this as the adjustment a President makes when he learns what any informed citizen would already know, namely the vast extent of the American empire.

Now a new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is largely invisible to the citizenry. The United States maintains an estimated one thousand military bases in other countries. I say “estimated” because the exact number, location, and size of the bases are either partly or entirely cloaked in secrecy, among other things to protect nuclear installations. The secrecy involved is such that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy did not even know, at first, that we had nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey.

An example of this imperial system is the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.^[5] In the 1960s, to secure a military outpost without fear of any interference from indigenous peoples, the two thousand Chagossian inhabitants were forcibly expelled, deprived of their native land, and sent a thousand miles away. (It is the same ploy we had used in removing native peoples from the Bikini and Enewetak atolls and Lib Island, so that we could conduct our sixty-eight atomic and hydrogen bomb tests there.) Though technically Diego Garcia is leased from the British, it is entirely run by the United States. It was the United States that expelled the Chagossians and confiscated their property. Diego Garcia has become a vast armory, as well as a storage and staging area and harbor and launch site, from which supplies and air strikes are fanned out over the Middle East, especially to the Persian Gulf and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. No journalists are allowed to visit it. It was funded on a vast scale by various deceptions of Congress. Even the leasing terms with Great Britain were kept secret, to avoid congressional oversight.

So far the man whose campaign told us that we were the ones to make those changes we’d been waiting for has made very little in the way of substantial change. Certainly the tone is different, and it’s pleasing to see the President appear as the adult in a group of squabbling politicians. It’s even possible that Obama will have the guts to make a popular decision and reduce the commitment to Afghanistan now that Gen. McChrystal has supposedly projected a need for half a million troops to stabilize that country.

Right now the omens are muddy. Consider for example the administration’s recent statements about Iran and the traditional media’s reaction.

Mr. Obama’s disclosure of Iran’s uranium enrichment facility, hidden deep inside a mountain, was a calculated move by the United States and its European allies to gain leverage over Tehran, by exposing it as dishonest. It was a far cry from Mr. Obama’s warm New Year’s greeting to the Iranian people early in his presidency.

When Obama says that “Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow”, he knows that his statement is, as Scott Ritter says, “technically and legally wrong.” In fact Iran has followed its commitments to the letter. The United States, on the other hand, has consistently and blatantly violated its stated commitments in the NPT, as have the other nuclear nations. No one’s fooled any longer about the real purpose of the NPT: to restrict the number of nations who can act as they choose without fear of retaliation. No one’s fooled, that is, except for American citizens, whose religion of paranoia waxes in strength as the empire wanes. “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion”, Gibbon wrote, and history folds back on itself.

In fact, as Ritter describes in detail, Iran itself brought the new facility that Obama’s complaining about to the attention of the IAEA. The US knew about the facility but had hidden that knowledge from the world body. As a result, when the IAEA learned of it and said so, the US had to react publicly.

Obama’s first response was to talk about harsh sanctions alongside Britain and France. Perhaps he’s upping the ante on the negative side while offering, in his weekly Saturday address, “a serious, meaningful dialog” on the positive. We can hope; but so far Obama has proven more adept at the classic political maneuver of kicking the can down the road than at bringing about the kind of change his supporters expected.

For me, on the other hand, his foreign policies have been a tad better than I expected. He canceled that moronic missile-defense bullshit, though I expect that was at least in part a strategic move aimed at appeasing Russia in expectation of future conflicts over resources. His domestic policies have differed from Bush’s only slightly less than I predicted. So on the whole, I’m far from pleased but happier than I expected.

These variations on a theme are all excerpted from today’s New York Times:

‘Athens’ on the Net

During the transition, the administration created an online “Citizen’s Briefing Book” for people to submit ideas to the president. “The best-rated ones will rise to the top, and after the Inauguration, we’ll print them out and gather them into a binder like the ones the president receives every day from experts and advisors,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, wrote to supporters.

They received 44,000 proposals and 1.4 million votes for those proposals. The results were quietly published, but they were embarrassing — not so much to the administration as to us, the ones we’ve been waiting for.

In the middle of two wars and an economic meltdown, the highest-ranking idea was to legalize marijuana, an idea nearly twice as popular as repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy.

Politics and the Age Gap

The latest CBS News poll found that 51 percent of those over 64 said health care reform would hurt senior citizens, compared with 36 percent of all adults surveyed. Just 31 percent of respondents over 64 said they approved of Mr. Obama’s handling of health care, compared with 40 percent over all.

The Recession’s Racial Divide

What do you get when you combine the worst economic downturn since the Depression with the first black president? A surge of white racial resentment, loosely disguised as a populist revolt. An article on the Fox News Web site has put forth the theory that health reform is a stealth version of reparations for slavery: whites will foot the bill and, by some undisclosed mechanism, blacks will get all the care. President Obama, in such fantasies, is a dictator and, in one image circulated among the anti-tax, anti-health reform “tea parties,” he is depicted as a befeathered African witch doctor with little tusks coming out of his nostrils. When you’re going down, as the white middle class has been doing for several years now, it’s all too easy to imagine that it’s because someone else is climbing up over your back.

Boy, Oh, Boy

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

The Body Count at Home

As Mr. Reid recounts, Nikki tried everything to get medical care, but no insurance company would accept someone with her pre-existing condition…

“When Nikki showed up at the emergency room, she received the best of care, and the hospital spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her,” her step-father, Tony Deal, told me. “But that’s not when she needed the care.”

By then it was too late. In 2006, Nikki White died at age 32. “Nikki didn’t die from lupus,” her doctor, Amylyn Crawford, told Mr. Reid. “Nikki died from complications of the failing American health care system.”

Complex arguments are being batted around in this health care debate, but the central issue isn’t technical but moral. The first question is simply this: Do we wish to be the only rich nation in the world that lets a 32-year-old woman die because she can’t get health insurance? Is that really us?

Actually, yes. It really is.

From Stephen Talbot’s letter to the editor in the current issue of The Nation:

I interviewed both men in 2001 for a PBS documentary, The Sixties: The Years That Shaped a Generation. McNamara told me that he’d come to realize the war was a tragedy that could have been avoided…

But Kissinger was unreconstructed, unapologetic. “If you are going to ask whether I feel guilty about Vietnam, the interview is over,” Kissinger said before I asked my first question. “I’ll walk out.”

I told him I had just interviewed McNamara. That got his attention. And then he did something I’ll never forget: he began to cry. Actually, he pretended to cry.

“Boohoo, boohoo,” Kissinger blubbered, rubbing his eyes. “He’s still beating his breast, right? Still feeling guilty.” He spoke in a mocking, singsong voice and patted his heart for emphasis.

It was one of those moments, before the camera rolls, when you get a rare glimpse into someone’s character and it’s even darker than you ever dreamed.

From Politico:

George F. Will, the elite conservative commentator, will call in his next column for U.S. ground troops to leave Afghanistan, according to publishing sources.

“[F]orces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters,” Will writes in the column, scheduled for publication later this week.

One wonder why this sage policy guidance never occurred to the tweety-bird of the right while George W. Bush was wandering around Afghanistan’s plains for all those years.

Alas, a lack, one supposes, of balls. One didn’t want to lose one’s access to the very best soirées, did one? But now that the albatross is around the other guy’s neck, Will’s equation has changed.

Pulling out of Afghanistan begins to look like a win-win proposition for the Party of No. It would give the chickenhawk patriots of the GOP a chance to holler surrender monkey at Obama in 2012 — an act akin to handing Jascha Heifetz a Stradivarius.

And not pulling out would be even more certain to defeat Obama’s reelection bid, since he would be hip-deep in his very own Big Muddy by 2012. And Mitt Romney could win just as Eisenhower did against Stevenson, on a promise to get us out of Afghanistan.

Whether Romney actually kept his word once in office would depend on whether he’d rather be remembered as Eisenhower or Nixon.

Now that I’m a certified bachelor in the art of integrating stuff, or more precisely studying how to integrate it, there’s time to re-integrate myself into the civic life I’ve been reading about for the last several months. A big-picture question jumps out at me: is Obama in the midst of a long-term plan to demonstrate that he needs to make big changes? Or is he failing to realize the dire necessity thereof? As Spock might say, insufficient evidence to make a judgment at this point.

Three viewpoints I connected with recently were Dan Froomkin, who discussed the decision point Obama’s approaching on health care, Frank Rich’s “Guns of August” about the gun-toting wackos at the town halls, and Kevin Baker’s “Barack Hoover Obama”, which Harper’s has made freely available. I can’t help quoting gratuitously from Baker, whose flavor throughout is sardonic but measured, overall a really enjoyable and thought-provoking article even by Harper’s standards.

Instead [of imaginative liberal initiatives], we have seen a parade of aged satraps from vast, windy places stepping forward to tell us what is off the table. Every week, there is another Max Baucus of Montana, another Kent Conrad of North Dakota, another Ben Nelson of Nebraska, huffing and puffing and harrumphing that we had better forget about single-payer health care, a carbon tax, nationalizing the banks, funding for mass transit, closing tax loopholes for the rich. These are men with tiny constituencies who sat for decades in the Senate without doing or saying anything of note, who acquiesced shamelessly to the worst abuses of the Bush Administration and who come forward now to chide the president for not concentrating enough on reducing the budget deficit, or for “trying to do too much,” as if he were as old and as indolent as they are.

The common thread of discussion goes that current events are putting the question to Obama. Will he show what believers think is his true self and become a new progressive hero? Will he shed what they think of as his protective coating of connections to the rich and powerful to emerge as a populist, defiantly leading the vast majority of us against the ramparts of established privilege? Or will he be, in fact has he already been, co-opted?

If you’ve read Ryan Lizza’s article in The New Yorker as you should, you know that this question didn’t arise for the first time as Obama came onto the national stage. Early on he showed a talent for gaining support from established money for a candidate with a funny name, a big smile, a great jump shot, and impeccable academics. He made non-obsequious overtures to the right people, he presented a different yet non-threatening face, he made people feel good about themselves, and he managed to goose along a bit of progress by doing so. A Great Black Hope for whom at least some rich white folks could root. If a few wondered whether he was leaving behind where he came from, it’s hard to imagine how it could be otherwise when someone rises as far as quickly as Obama’s talents took him.

The moment approaches, however, so the thread goes, and rapidly, at which Obama will have to decide whether he goes with what believers think his gut tells him, or with the forces he rode into office. As Baker puts it in Harper’s:

President Obama, with a laudable respect for the separation of powers, has left the details and even the main tenets of his agenda to be worked out by these same congressional Democrats. This approach looks like an exercise in democracy drawn from his days as a community organizer, the sort of strategy that helps a neighborhood to decide whether it wants, say, a health clinic or a youth center. What he doesn’t care to acknowledge is that, in the case of the U.S. Congress, he’s dealing with a neighborhood where maybe half want a health clinic and the rest are holding out for grenade launchers and crystal meth.

Which brings me, oddly enough, to my old friend Machiavelli. As I’ve repeated here and elsewhere past the limit of polite excess, Old Nick did not advocate the kind of behavior he described in his most famous work The Prince; rather he described the behavior required of one who would be a prince, speaking with the experience of being tortured after the republic of which he was a part was overthrown by the returning Medicis.

The more you read Machiavelli the more you appreciate his wit. Sure, he sounds ruthless in a realpolitik fashion.

Whenever those states which have been acquired as stated have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom, there are three courses for those who wish to hold them: the first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you. Because such a government, being created by the prince, knows that it cannot stand without his friendship and interest, and does it utmost to support him; and therefore he who would keep a city accustomed to freedom will hold it more easily by the means of its own citizens than in any other way.

I’m flashing on the British in the Middle East…

But he had a sense of humor too, or at least I see one two paragraphs later in prose I imagine Hunter Thompson admiring.

But to come to those who, by their own ability and not through fortune, have risen to be princes, I say that Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and such like are the most excellent examples. And although one may not discuss Moses, he having been a mere executor of the will of God, yet he ought to be admired, if only for that favour which made him worthy to speak with God. But in considering Cyrus and others who have acquired or founded kingdoms, all will be found admirable; and if their particular deeds and conduct shall be considered, they will not be found inferior to those of Moses, although he had so great a preceptor. And in examining their actions and lives one cannot see that they owed anything to fortune beyond opportunity, which brought them the material to mould into the form which seemed best to them. Without that opportunity their powers of mind would have been extinguished, and without those powers the opportunity would have come in vain.

What brings Old Nick to mind is an idea that puzzled me for a long time, but is becoming clearer as years advance. He postulated the existence of three basic entities in social life, the crown, the nobles, and the people, a division I imeediately objected to on several grounds. With consideration, I’ve come to think that Machiavelli is, as usual in The Prince, not telling us what ought to be, but what is, attempting to help us deal with it.

Since arriving at this conclusion, I’ve been seeing applications of the tripartite social scheme everywhere. In the current socio-economic atmosphere of struggle, some recommend fixing the economy before undertaking something as big as health care; others say health care reform helps the economy; and historians point out how many times this argument has happened before.

With businesss/labor/government replacing nobles/peasants/crown, I find myself in the modern equivalent of the peasant petitioning the king for relief, a petition that grants the de facto if not the de jure legitimacy of the king’s superior position. In this sense I understand the rebellion of the militia types and anti-government folks in general. I don’t want the Queen of England marching into my house and telling me what to do; and I don’t get my legitimacy from the government, rather the reverse.

Centrally, though, much of the health care debate seems to me to lack awareness of the corporate influence on the situation; and this is especially true among those most vociferously warning that government hands be kept off their Medicare. Quite obviously we already have the death panels they fear so much, in the private unaccountable hands of insurance and drug companies. Thirty minutes with a decent search engine should demonstrate in detail that the issue with health care is quite straightforwardly corporations versus the rest of us.

Who will bring into the political arena the basic idea, that corporations are destroying us all? And how long before they’re shot?

Mostly I don’t read David Brooks, for a number of reasons. To begin with, I don’t trust the Times, though on the other hand I’ve removed the Post from my bookmark list and speed dial since the Froomkin affair made plain how committed Hiatt is to the neocon/neolib agenda.

But if there’s anything to be said for poor clueless Dave, it’s that he’s a reliable bellwether for the neocon equivalent of the wimpy liberals I’ve ragged on so often. Now that Obama appears to be putting actual political capital behind the push for some sort of public option, the right wing is in full dress alarmitude. Omigod, people who aren’t rich might have health care! What is this country coming to…

Who’s going to stop this leftward surge? Months ago, it seemed as if Obama would lead a center-left coalition. Instead, he has deferred to the Old Bulls on Capitol Hill on issue after issue.

Machiavelli said a leader should be feared as well as loved. Obama is loved by the Democratic chairmen, but he is not feared. On health care, Obama has emphasized cost control. The chairmen flouted his priorities because they don’t fear him. On cap and trade, Obama campaigned against giving away pollution offsets. The chairmen wrote their bill to do precisely that because they don’t fear him. On taxes, Obama promised that top tax rates would not go above Clinton-era levels. The chairmen flouted that promise because they don’t fear him.

One of the joys of reading Old Nick is realizing what a small proportion of his promoters have read anything he wrote. Does Brooks, for example, realize that Machiavelli was tortured for his participation in a republican government after the Medicis’ mercenary army retook Florence?

For his significant role in the republic’s anti-Medici government, Niccolò Machiavelli was deposed from office, and, in 1513, was accused of conspiracy, and arrested. Despite torture “with the rope” (the prisoner is hanged from his bound wrists, from the back, forcing the arms to bear the body’s weight, thus dislocating the shoulders), he denied involvement and was released; then, retiring to his estate, at Santa Andrea in Percussina, near Florence, he wrote the political treatises that earned his intellectual place in the development of political philosophy and political conduct.

In the interpretation of Machiavelli, it’s difficult to find an appropriate terminology. Intellectually the flower of two millennia of Italian political maneuvering, he came to be associated with Satan because he told the truth about power politics.

Just for the hell of it, what say we check in on the actual text? It’s Chapter 17 (or XVII if you like) of The Prince:

Returning to the question of being loved or feared, I sum up by saying, that since his being loved depends upon his subjects, while his being feared depends upon himself, a wise Prince should build only upon what is his own, and not on what rests with others. Only, as I have said, he must do his utmost to escape hatred.

Interestingly, if you actually read Machiavelli and know his personal history, you can easily discern what many others have seen, that in The Prince he is by no means advocating the behavior necessary to become and remain a prince; rather, he’s pointing out what a sleazy business princing is. This impression is heavily reinforced by The Discourses, wherein his preference for the republic is clearly expressed.

In the just-quoted passage, for example, note that the issue throughout is the maintenance by the prince of his power and privilege. The welfare of the people in his domain is a relatively trivial thing; it reflects on his character, but has no separate importance.

Oddly enough, in those days the prince was probably more likely to pay for what health care was available than he is now, because his long-term interest lay with having enough hands to bring in the harvest. Everyone who can work needs to be kept alive is the theory, still, though it be dressed up in fancy garb.

Obama might try to rein in the insurance leeches, for example, but Mr. Brooks is having none of it, because the President has lost his scary mojo.

It’s a good idea, and it might lead to real cost savings. But there’s no reason to think that it will be incorporated into the final law. The chairmen will never surrender power to an administration they can override.

That leaves matters in the hands of the Blue Dog Democrats. These brave moderates are trying to restrain the fiscal explosion. But moderates inherently lack seniority (they are from swing districts). They are usually bought off by leadership at the end of the day.

Ya gotta love this image of the brave moderate, soldiering on in the face of an unending ocean of radicalism that so clearly dominates US politics. (And we let these people vote!)

Like any sensible person I read Doonesbury daily on Slate. Daily, I paid no attention to a little ad-like thingy at the bottom of the page called “Duke’s Video Dump.” Huge, huge mistake.

Today I clicked on it and discovered dozens of videos made during Duke’s doomed 2000 Presidential race. Go here and see for yourself. Hours of good, clean fun for the whole family. Sample topics:

LITTLE CUBAN BOY

Duke proposes formal adoption by the media as a way to resolve the case of Elian Gonzales: “You guys created him, so you should raise him.”

EXPLODING OPPORTUNITIES

Addressing the impending health care crisis, Duke proposes telemarketing for the elderly: “You just strap on a headset, plop a manual in your lap, and boom — you’re earning.”

Father knows best, except, just maybe, when he’s sold us out to his campaign contributors in the insurance industry. Robert Parry at Consortium News:

As the health insurance industry and its defenders in Congress lay out their case against permitting a public option in a reform bill, perhaps their most curious argument is that some 119 million Americans are ready to dump their private plans and jump to something more like Medicare – and that’s why the choice can’t be permitted.

In other words, the industry and its backers are acknowledging that more than one-third of the American people are so dissatisfied with their private health insurance that they trust the U.S. government to give them a fairer shake on health care. The industry says its allies in Congress must prevent that.

The peculiar argument that 119 million Americans must be denied the public option that they prefer has been made most notably by Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which is one of two panels that has jurisdiction over the health insurance bill…

Talk about your great bumper stickers, huh? Here’s one Pennsylvania Democrat’s welcome to her party’s newest senator:

Pam Janvey, a Democratic committeewoman from Bucks County, found Specter’s presence at the gathering more than a little odd. “Am I in a dream?” she asked.

Janvey said that Specter hit all the right notes in his speech on Saturday and that although she had worked to defeat Specter in the past and never voted for him, she would back him this time around.

“Even when I have worked against Arlen over the years,” Janvey said, “I never felt the kind of fear that I did when I worked against Santorum…”

Here’s Rush Limbaugh again, still scribbling away on the walls of America’s toilets:

They don’t like Gitmo, we have to shut it down. They don’t like what we’ve done, fine, Obama will run around and apologize. I’m telling you, folks, it is not the United States of America that serves as Barack Obama’s role model. It’s other socialist nations that have failed and the concept of socialism that is his role model. I’ll tell you what, stupid little community organizer, organize this.

Sparky Satori at Shorts and Pants reminds us of a former racist activist on the Supreme Court — Chief Justice William Rehnquist. A superior work of snark, found in its entirety here.

November of last year, it was assumed that the USofA had finally vanquished the lingering ghosts of racism and was poised on the cusp of a new post-racial dawn. The long dark night of lynching and discrimination was finally over. “Huzzah!” bleated the media, smugly self-congratulatory.

But that was then. This is worse. And leave it to the hyper-sensitive Republicans to sniff out whiffs of the new racism being foisted upon the nation by its first black President. GOP stalwarts Newt Gringrich and Rush Limbaugh were quick to alert the country to a leading practitioner of this new racism, Sonia “Maria” Sotomayor ["SoSo" to her non-friends]. But she’s not your average garden-variety racist, according to the GOP braintrust. Per Newt and Rush, she is a “reverse racist,” rarer than even the “Albino Negro.” This alone should disqualify her from sitting on the Supreme Court, which has never, ever had any benchers who suffered from an iota of racial insensitivity…

Here’s a snippet from the Nixon tapes to give you an idea of the vetting process from which Rehnquist emerged. Full transcript here. As always with Nixon, fascinating stuff. Sure he was evil, but nobody ever called him dumb.

RMN: Yeah, all right, call me back when you get it. But remember, let’s figure on the Rehnquist thing. The political mileage basically is the same kind of mileage if we were to go with Smith. The idea being that we are appointing a highly qualified man. That’s really what it gets down to.

[Attorney General] John Mitchell: Yeah.

RMN: And also he doesn’t smack of the corporate lawyer as much as Smith.

JM: No, he’s more of a general practitioner.

RMN: Incidentally, what is Rehnquist? I suppose he’s a damn Protestant?

JM: I’m sure of that. He’s just as WASPish as WASPish can be.

RMN: Yeah, well, that’s too damn bad. Tell him to change his religion.

JM: All right, I’ll get him baptized this afternoon.

RMN: Well, get him baptized and castrated, no, they don’t do that, I mean they circumcise— no, that’s the Jews. Well anyway, whatever he is, get him changed.

That rancid rust-bucket that is the Republican Party sits ever lower in the water and appears to be foundering. Should we attempt a rescue or let the wretched old tub sink to the bottom? The vote here is for the coup de grâce. Put a torpedo into her amidships and let her go down without further ado. Glub, glub, GOP; it’ll be a far better world without you.

There was a time when the Republican Party stood for something, or at least appeared to stand for something. It took its name and founding philosophy from the Jeffersonian republican ideal, although the party would soon enough make a mockery of its idealistic name by becoming the champion of short-sighted greed and selfishness, the party of business.

But it started out as the party of the antislavery activists in the 1850s and came to power with the election of Lincoln in 1860. It was the party of the Tafts, dull, toothy Ohioans, who championed a conservative philosophy of self-reliance and fiscal responsibility, a credo now honored mostly in the breach. For reckless economic policy, no party has ever come close to the modern GOP. And it started with Reagan and his supply-side shenanigans. You may recall that Bush Senior referred to this nonsense as “voodoo economics.”

It was the party of Teddy Roosevelt, who took on the big corporate monopolies and, when he wasn’t starting wars or shooting beautiful animals, upheld a certain maverick standard of governmental integrity. It was the party of Grant and Eisenhower, successful warriors, each of whom served two terms in the White House without ever quite getting the hang of the job or looking like they really wanted it.

Then there was handsome, hapless Warren Harding, another Ohioan, and his equally inspiring successor, Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge famously said, “The chief business of the American people is business.” He is remembered mostly for wearing an Indian headdress. And don’t forget Hoover, who said, after the great Wall Street crash, that the markets would restore financial order if given the chance.

And, of course, there was Nixon and his infamous Committee to Reelect the President, aptly shortened to CREEP. And Reagan, who played the part so well many people believed he actually knew what he was doing. And Bush Two. And Bush Two again.

Somehow the country survived two terms of W., but will his party? How can any self-respecting Republican even whisper words of fiscal integrity in the mountainous shadow of a Bush-incurred debt so high it blots out the sun? Well, silly question. Of course they can, have, and will again, but the difference is that now nobody takes them seriously. When Newt Gingrich emerges from under his troll’s bridge to test the presidential waters, is this not a sign that the party is in its death throes?

Meanwhile, all those Wall Street banks, those bastions of fiscal discipline and Republican virtue, have lined up for billion-dollar hand-outs from a Democratic administration. Whether or not the big bailouts were a good idea is debatable. What is not debatable is the spectacular hypocrisy of the big shots that flew down to Washington in private jets to beg Congress for public money. How many of them were not Republicans?

Sure it’s like kicking a cripple, but let’s explore the crossed synapses of the Newt brain anyway. Here’s Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal’s house liberal:

…As an example of this habit of mind, consider the essay that Mr. Gingrich published in Human Events last week. “The current liberal bloodlust over interrogations,” he wrote, referring to the Nancy Pelosi-CIA flap, is merely “the Left’s attempt to hunt down and purge its political opponents.” And yet, in a different essay he published on the very same day (this one in the Washington Times), Mr. Gingrich regretted that, in all the years of Republican rule, “there was a strategic failure to root out the left and the special interests of the left.”

Mr. Gingrich’s side failed to “root out” and destroy their opponents; now he imagines that this is what is being done to his team.

Psychotherapists might call this “projection,” and something similar pervades the essay the remarkable Mr. Gingrich published only two days later in the Washington Post. Here the former speaker can be found calling for a populist revolt in the “great tradition of political movements rising against arrogant, corrupt elites.”

A healthy sentiment, to be sure, except for the fact that “elites” are exactly what decades of conservative rule gave us by unleashing the banks, smashing the unions, and funneling the economy’s gains into the hands of the rich…

Brady Bonk already wrote it, so I don’t have to. Read his full post here:

The timeline in my head: President Bill Clinton is pursued on a variety of trumped up charges by insane people who clinch their teeth whenever they speak his name, mostly probably because President Bill Clinton gets more pussy than any of them could ever imagine. I am just speculating. One ridiculous charge sticks: He lied about sex. On that one silly charge they can hang a million silly hats. To this day, say “Bill Clinton” in front of a conservative. I guarantee you he will not be able to resist joking about Clinton and women and cigars and the blue dress.

Based on Monigate, the newly-appointed Bush administration could declare it opposite day in America. They are warned by transition team officials that international terrorism might be their biggest dread. The warnings are largely ignored in favor of a general consensus to fight the Cold War all over again and, as was likely discussed though we’ll never know in Chaney’s super-duper top-secret energy meetin’s, to go get all of that frickin’ oil. But the Bush Administration could turn its back on the Israeli peace process, could abrogate treaties, could and should, according to their wisdom, do everything the opposite of how that dumb bubba did it, because, you know … he got a blow job…

From Paul Krugman’s blog:

So I see Richard Posner has decided that modern conservatism is intellectually bankrupt. And Bruce Bartlett has a new book saying it’s time to let go of Reagan.

At one level it’s good to see decent people showing some intellectual flexibility (Bartlett, in particular, has always come across as someone with whom one can have honest disagreements.) And yet — why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? I mean, anyone who actually listened to what Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey were saying in 1994, let alone what passed for thought in the Bush administration, should have realized long ago that if there ever was an intellectual basis for modern conservatism, it was long gone.

And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

I’ve always loved the South Carolina accent, especially when employed by women. And we owe ’em for Colbert. But those folks have sure elected some doozies to public office. Exhibit 1: Senator Jim DeMint.

“I don’t think many Americans are going to agree that the Republican party has become too conservative,” he said. “If you look at our record of spending, our record on every issue, the problem I think we have is Americans no longer believe that we believe what we say we do.”

I dunno, perhaps I’m an outlier, but I continue to believe that the Republican party sticks by its guns: torture, corruption, pre-emptive war, and imperial presidencies. Oh, and racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and anti-intellectualism. They’re defined by what they hate, which is why the party does so well among fundamentalists. As far as I can tell, they’ve been pretty consistent on those issues my whole life.

DeMint says he isn’t worried. He denied that the GOP has become a southern party, attributing Republican losses in the northeast to some northern voters who have left the region and moved south hoping to avoid labor unions and “forced unionization.” He said Americans will eventually come back into the Republican fold because of growing alarm about the size of government and President Obama’s fiscal policies.

“I think you’ll see this next election to be totally different,” DeMint predicted. “Pat Toomey, who is running in Pennsylvania, is one of the most mainstream Americans I know.”

I think forced unionization should be applied to Wall Street, then we might have something. And the software biz, as well. But if Republicans have been wiped out in the Northeast because they left for the South, doesn’t that make them a southern party? Oh, no, I forgot: you can only be truly Southern if you’re born there. So moving from the northeast is by definition temporary; you’ll never be a Southerner, though you live in the South for fifty years and die there.

It’ll be a hoot to see what DeMint says when Toomey gets landslided.

The conversion of Senator Magic Bullet may turn Mitch to mulch; at least we can hope. And Specter may not be the only one to move. Consider this quote from the Times report:

“On the national level of the Republican Party, we haven’t certainly heard warm, encouraging words about how they view moderates, either you are with us or against us,” [Maine Senator Olympia] Snowe said. She said national Republican leaders were not grasping that “political diversity makes a party stronger and ultimately we are heading to having the smallest political tent in history for any political party the way things are unfolding.”

Scott Horton over at Harper’s No Comment Blog is rightly agonizing over the fact that we have a torture enabler and what some have seriously referred to as a monster sitting on the Federal Bench. This “subject” ( I use the term here to properly refer to this individual as a prosecutor or police offer would do when an accused is referred to in court) sits on a federal bench judging others who are guilty of much lesser crimes. After all, torturers and torture enablers were routinely hanged by Allied Courts at Nuremburg and in the Pacific Theater after World War II. American court officials routinely participated in these proceedings.

Some may think all of this is quite complicated, but I find it simple since the solution to resolving the problem is quite simple. I am of the opinion that simple problems can be resolved with simple solutions.

Therefore I propose a remedy to the Bybee problem, a problem that every decent lawyer knows is a black eye on the Federal Judiciary and will remain so for years to come if not remedied. I am therefore making an extremely modest proposal which I propose should be taken seriously, despite my labeling this post as partly snark.

The US needs an official representative from our esteemed judiciary to view the proceedings in Spain to ensure that they are carried out in a fair manner. I am sure the Spanish courts would be happy to oblige us if we were to choose the proper emissary. If I were the presiding judge or court official who could carry out the task of assigning the court official to engage in this duty, I would immediately assign this task to a new judge. Since Judge Bybee would have intimate knowledge of what the proceedings were about, he should be sent immediately to Spain to fulfill his judicial duties.

Of course, this might involve the devil and the deep blue sea, rocks and hard places, frying pans and fires and dozens of other things and places that go together like crude oil mixes with water. However, those are individual problems that at least one individual will have to deal with.

However this proposal is not without precedent. Robert Houghwout Jackson was sent to participate in the Nuremberg trials. Why should Judge Bybee not likewise be assigned a task in another country along the same lines? Younger judges should be given the traveling assignments in my opinion and Judge Bybee fills the bill for this assignment perfectly.

I am of the opinion that Judge Jay S. Bybee should be given this assignment forthwith, with Hillary Clinton at the State Department making proper accommodations for his stay, preferably in a five star hotel, for as long as those fine accommodations last. And if free accommodations are given by the Spaniards to one of our own, the Federal Budget would be that much better off. Allowing such an emissary diplomatic immunity is beyond the scope of this modest assignment of course, so that should definitely not be given as it is definitely not needed due to our emissary’s somewhat limited assigned duties. A few select CIA agents might be assigned the task of ensuring the judge’s security.

This assignment should be a mandatory assignment. Refusal to do one’s duty as a judge would of course mean impeachment.

Or Judge Bybee could spare himself and everyone else great embarrassment for years to come by doing the right thing. And he and all right thinking Americans know exactly what that is.

Mr. Obama, are you listening? Some of your former supporters are getting the opinion that you are going to end up letting the Europeans take care of American problems. If we don’t deal with letting the rule of law determine what happens to the torturers and their enablers, then we can expect the pattern and the behavior to repeat itself.

I hope to be dead by then and I don’t and won’t have any children to worry about what they may have to endure when the cycle repeats. Others are not so lucky.

You gotta hand it to the old piece of garbage, he never lets up. Probably that’s related to all the heart attacks.

“One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort,” Cheney said.

Cheney said he’s asked that the documents be declassified because he has remained silent on the confidential information, but he knows how successful the interrogation process was and wants the rest of the country to understand.

It’s a fine gambit from a true player. He certainly knows that no such memos exist, because everyone knows torture is not successful at obtaining information. In fact that’s not its purpose, as Cheney is well aware. It is purely and simply a terror weapon. You attempt to terrorize your enemy by letting him know he’ll be tortured if you capture him. Of course this is moronic at a higher level; if he knows he’ll be tortured, he’s more likely to fight to the death, or to operate in a guerrilla fashion and disappear at the first sign of engagement; thus success is placed further down the road when torture intervenes.

The real reason for torture is simply the joy of it. Those who torture, and who order torture, enjoy the thought, though some apparently don’t have the stomach for the practice. But no one’s stupid enough to think it works. I know at least one person who does claim that, but he has no argument to make; he simply repeats his contention that it works, and that everyone knows it. No facts, no instances, no proof necessary. Clearly he loves violence and wants to engage in it; therefore I see him as the enemy. As, in short, a potential torturer.

Cheney thinks he has the steel cojones necessary to operate in what he thinks is the real world, but I wonder. Often, people like Cheney or Hoover are deep down scared shitless; so they bring out all the worst parts of themselves and project those nasty items onto other people, thus proving to themselves that all that bad stuff really is out there. You create your own reality.

And you try to create others’ realities as well. So Cheney’s latest lie is a fine one, because he knows Obama can’t call him on it. There’s no way to prove there are no memos showing the efficacy of torture, so those who want to torture, and it seems to be a large constituency, can continue to believe there’s proof hidden away.

Smooth as shit, and just as smelly.

Interesting development. Maybe we’ll find out if my theory (two posts down) has anything to it. Judge Sullivan is an old friend and former colleague of Attorney General Holder, who is by today’s announcement taken off the spot.

Holder no longer has to investigate his own department — a job which, if vigorously done, might alienate DOJ’s career bureaucrats and would certainly bring charges of partisanship from the GOP. If the investigation turned into a whitewash, on the other hand, the attacks would come from the Democratic left.

But if done by Judge Sullivan, tough noogies. He’s got life tenure.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge today set aside a jury’s guilty verdict and the indictment against former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, then announced he was appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the government attorneys in the case for failing their constitutional duties to ensure a fair trial…

Holder said an internal investigation had been launched into the matter, but Judge Sullivan said he was not content to allow the Justice Department’s probe to serve as punishment for the lawyers involved in the case. He said he had asked a former military judge, Henry Schulke III of Washington D.C., to investigate the conduct of five prosecutors in the case for potential obstruction of justice.

They are: the head of the Justice Deparment’s Public Integrity Section, William Welch; the lead trial attorney, Brenda Morris; two trial attorneys in the Public Integrity Section, Nicholas Marsh and Edward Sullivan; and two assistant U.S. Attorneys in Alaska, Joseph Bottini and James Goeke…

Is it the television, or the weak beer, or the movies aimed at 19-year-olds, or what?

In the face of a recession that has destroyed billions in family savings and home values, Americans remain convinced that personal initiative and hard work are the key to big rewards, and they continue to repudiate the idea of government intervention to alleviate economic inequality, according to two Pew-sponsored reports.

Not only do voters continue to be convinced, by large majorities, that they, and not government or big corporations, control their own destinies in the midst of the current recession, but they do so despite more long-term evidence suggesting that there is less class mobility in the United States than in most Northern European countries, or in Canada, and that U.S. wages have not kept up with productivity gains for the past three decades.

It’s the attitude of everyone for themselves, and the devil take the hindmost, that makes us Americans. That leaves us far behind the rest of the world as it adapts to conditions that require coöperation instead of the old ethic of competition.

A survey of 2119 respondents conducted by the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies for the Pew Economic Mobility Project asked: “Currently the country is in a recession. Do you believe it is still possible for people to improve their economic standing?”

Eighty percent answered “yes,” including 56 percent answering “strongly” in the affirmative. Only 16 percent said “no.”

African Americans, Hispanics and persons under 40 were even more affirmative than the public as a whole, with “yes” to “no” ratios respectively 83-15, 86-11, and 85-13.

Makes sense. African-Americans, Hispanics, and young people hardly ever encounter the kind of discrimination that would make you think government action could help. And everyone knows big corporations are blameless by definition.

The new federal government is fast taking shape. Here’s a look at some of the new departments and agencies.

What’s the use of worrying?—that’s the idea behind this arm of the federal government. This department will be led by a cabinet-level official with a fanciful and deeply ignorant view of the world. Several prominent Republicans from the previous administration have been proposed for the job. One in particular seems especially well-qualified.

This is an attempt to recognize and perpetuate the traditions of recent presidencies. Nothing this department does makes much sense. He who forgets history is bound to repeat it, or some such foolishness, is the bugaboo against which this heroically chaotic agency struggles.

Similar to the Optimism Department in outlook, this office, which is run by some of the goofiest veterans of the Obama campaign wars, will consider any and all government initiatives through technologically advanced rose-colored glasses. ‘Nothing is impossible if you throw enough money at it’ is the operating slogan.

Lest the pie in the sky be too tempting to too many, this organization is designed to offset the reckless tendencies of its similarly named sister agency. It will oppose everything anybody in Washington wants to do.

Nothing this updated CIA does will be open to public scrutiny or any other kind of meddlesome interference. Nobody within this comically secretive organization will have the slightest idea what anyone else is doing or why they are doing it. Nobody in the agency will answer to anyone. Everything the agency attempts is expected to fail, just as in the old days, but nobody will know about it.

This much-needed agency will be responsible for keeping Republicans and other regressive types on their reservations, far from any hope of meddling with the elected officials who are actually trying to accomplish something.

The former Federal Communications Commission, today known simply as Gassy Mae, will now devote itself exclusively to this undertaking. The idea behind the project is to find some way, possibly including all-out violence, to silence the TV and radio talking heads whose incessant yammering clogs the airwaves and threatens our sanity. Most of these so-called pundits are ignorant fascist thugs who have grown too fat to get into brown shirts and jackboots. Nobody believes Gassy Mae is up to the job, but it should distract the commission from its usual business of pandering to the media conglomerates.

Designed to assist the Treasury Department in throwing money away, this agency will be responsible for identifying those financial companies that are the most arrogant and badly run and therefore most in need of federal financial assistance. Airline and car companies will also be considered.

Despite its permanent-sounding name, this enterprise is really an ad hoc operation whose only purpose is to make Dick Cheney’s already miserable life even more so. So many qualified people have applied for the job of running this department that the nomination has been set back indefinitely. So far more than a million candidates have submitted their résumés.

Carried over from the Bush Administration, this body was assembled to find a fitting tribute to the heroes of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq who successfully demonstrated that human decency has no place in the war on terror. The commission is expected to continue its dithering and hand-wringing well into the future.

This could turn out to be the granddaddy of all federal government departments. If it ever gets its very large ace off the ground, this baby will show the world what a real bureaucracy is all about. Once the bugs are worked out, you’ll be able to call All Things and arrange to have your boss forced out in your favor, or a hated neighbor’s house bombed, or your children’s teachers disciplined. Doctor kept you waiting? Have the sucker’s license revoked. Covet that big house on the corner? Have the owner dispossessed. Can’t sleep the way you used to? Want new friends? Fed up with the way of the world? Call the Department of All Things and make it right. Your government is here to serve you.

…when it comes to political jiu-jitsu. From medieval Saudi Arabia:

It would be bizarre in any country to find that its lingerie shops are staffed entirely by men. But in Saudi Arabia — an ultra-conservative nation where unmarried men and women cannot even be alone in a room together if they are not related — it is strange in the extreme…

“The way that underwear is being sold in Saudi Arabia is simply not acceptable to any population living anywhere in the modern world,” says Reem Asaad, a finance lecturer at Dar al-Hikma Women’s College in Jeddah, who is leading a campaign to get women working in lingerie shops rather than men…

Rana Jad is a 20-year-old student at Dar al-Hikma Women’s College, and one of Reem Asaad’s pupils and campaign supporters.

“Girls don’t feel very comfortable when males are selling them lingerie, telling them what size they need, and saying ‘I think this is small on you, I think this is large on you’,” she says. “He’s totally checking the girls out! It’s just not appropriate, especially here in our culture.”

Campaigners are calling for a boycott of all lingerie stores that are staffed by men.… “The concept is flawless,” says Ms Asaad. “The concept of women selling women’s underwear to other women is so natural that any other option is just invalid.”

And from medieval Louisiana, as reported by A.J. Liebling in The Earl of Louisiana, his 1961 biography of Governor Earl Long:

“Earl is like Huey on Negroes,” Tom said, “When the new Charity Hospital was built here, some Negro politicians came to Huey and said it was a shame there were no Negro nurses, when more than half the patients were colored. Huey said he’d fix it for them, but they wouldn’t like his method.

He went around to visit the hospital and pretended to be surprised when he found white nurses waiting on colored men. He blew high as a buzzard can fly, saying it wasn’t fit for white women to be so humiliated. It was the most racist talk you ever heard, but the result was he got the white nurses out and the colored nurses in, and they’ve had the jobs ever since.”

This, by Rick Hertzberg a while back, is looking better by the day:

…Centrism sometimes makes sense as a tactic or a strategy — in other words, when it’s a synonym for compromise. But it has no merits as a tool for policy analysis. I suppose you could argue that good ideas occur on a sort of left-right bell curve and that, therefore, an idea is statistically more likely to be located at the top of the curve, i.e., in the middle. But evaluating the merits of an idea on that basis would be like evaluating the literary merits of a novel based on how close its number of pages is to the average for all works of fiction.

Dogmatic centrism not only puts you at the gravitational mercy of whichever side is prepared to move furthest toward its own extreme, it also obliges you to reject certain ideas automatically, without any analysis except spectrum analyses. That’s brainless, and the point holds whether or not you agree with Matt [Yglesias] on this particular issue…

When friends shake their heads in disbelief at the goings-on among the new New Democrats, I commiserate. Fortunately, I got everything I expected from my vote the day after election day.

For almost two decades now, the Democrats have blazed up every joint in sight, only to freeze at the crucial moment of inhalation. Clinton kicked off two excruciating terms of Solomon-esque waffling by splitting gays in the military right down the middle and ended by only half-admitting to being swallowed whole by an intern named Monica Lewinsky. Then came history’s first three-base balk in Florida (with James Baker waving Bush around to score), followed by a senseless war in Iraq that Democrats thought to oppose only once it became inexpedient to support.

All this bullshit, we hoped, might end with Barack Obama. But then came Blagojevich, a sleazeball whose massively publicized success in scheming a way to drop turd in the new president’s inaugural punch bowl is a gate-crashing leap above station on the order of Paris Hilton screwing her way into a speaking role in Gandhi or Amadeus. It’s a political disaster that happened only after Democrats once again froze in the headlights at the crucial moment, trying to flee in two different directions at once while a third-rate bookie in a tracksuit seized control of the U.S. Senate.

We owe George W. Bush a huge debt for making possible the election of our first African-American president — and, of somewhat lesser importance — for giving Jimmy Carter’s once-derided presidency a welcome and well-deserved boost.

The first excerpt comes from The Rude Pundit, embedded yesterday deep within the huge crowd shown in my last post. Read the rest of his description, too. Those familiar with his œuvre will see a new side of the man revealed.

The second passage is from The Atlantic’s Jim Fallows, like myself a former Carter speechwriter.

R.P. — Everyone released purgative, cathartic boos at George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The television coverage may have muted it, but it was there. A young woman half-heartedly said, “Oh, c’mon, ya’ll, that’s mean,” but she cracked up when the Rude Pundit said, “Sometimes a man deserves to be booed by a couple of million people.” The most touchingly surprising crowd reaction was the cheer that went up for Jimmy Carter.

J.F. — In keeping with earlier testimony to the basic good will of the crowd — as I witnessed it as one of the 2 million or so (my crowd here) — the “boos” when George Bush or Dick Cheney appeared on the screen seemed almost perfunctory. People felt they had to do it, but their hearts weren’t in it. To me, the most spontaneous-sounding and surprising cheers were for (a) Colin Powell, and (b) Jimmy Carter, and the most spontaneous surplus-hostility boos were for ... Joe Lieberman. Just reporting on my part of the crowd.

The following piece ran May 17, 2006 under the heading, “Mission Almost Accomplished.” Now that Bush’s awful mission is completely accomplished, I put it up again. No updating seems necessary.

It’s been nearly four years since I first posted my analysis of the nasty psychopathology that has forced George W. Bush to fail all his life, and is causing him to fail so spectacularly now. Consider this from the Washington Post (emphasis added):

Bush’s job approval rating now stands at 33 percent, down five percentage points in barely a month and a new low for him in Post-ABC polls. His current standing with the public is identical to President George H.W. Bush’s worst showing in the Post-ABC poll before he lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton in 1992.

The younger Bush’s career can only be understood as a lifelong obsession with disappointing the father he so plainly hates.

He follows his father’s footsteps in school, as a pilot, as a businessman, and finally as a politician. Unable to fill those footprints, he makes each one seem unimportant by pretending contempt for it. He gets C’s where his father got A’s; he ducks the combat flying that made his father a hero; he burns through the seed money his father’s friends gave him, failing in the oil business which had made his father rich.

Then at last he was taken in hand by a sleazy political op who realized that the father’s name and money would be enough to elect the wayward son governor of Texas. (Polls at the time showed that a significant portion of the voters thought that W. actually was his father.)

Then Rove set out to hand-carry his meal ticket into the White House itself.

Take that, you old fart, junior must have thought as he took the oath of office. Any asshole can get to be president. But even that wasn’t enough. Deep inside, where the Oedipal snakes writhed in his subconscious, there was still work to do.

What better to way to humiliate his father than to degrade the supreme office the old man had spent his life to reach? What sweeter revenge than to slime, like a slug, the presidency itself? And so he enlisted Rumsfeld and Cheney, his father’s ancient enemies, to help in the work of patricide.

Outdoing his father as president, the junior Bush must have known in his heart, was beyond his limited capacities. But his whole life offered proof of his ability to fail, and so he took the only path remaining. He would become, God help the rest of us, the worst president in history.

ß

And speaking of Howard Dean, as I was last night, here’s a clue to why he was frozen out (as if the identity of the incoming White House chief of staff wasn’t enough). It’s by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, writing in the London Review of Books:

Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.

When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers … are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning — without much evidence — that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’

This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.

This is by Ross Mackenzie, retired editor of the editorial page at the Richmond Times Dispatch. I know you will feel, as I did after reading it through, deeply ashamed:

The left and the media and the ever-expanding blogosphere, and of course the Democrats, never permitted George Bush to recover from the circumstances of his 2000 election.

They deemed him unacceptable, accidental, illegitimate, likely a conniver in the national outcome — and so took to lobbing their hateful commentaries one after another without end.

On issue after issue they rejected his appeals for bipartisanship, especially in his second term. In his 2004 victory speech, Bush said: “Today, I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. ... We have one country, one Constitution, and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America.”

Yet from Social Security and judges to the surge and terror and continuation of the tax cuts, malign leftists dug in and sought to foil him on every front — to deny him any victory, any success, anywhere.

“Malign” is too harsh? Consider: Television, blogospheric, and newspaper commentaries slammed President Bush 24/7. Nicholson Baker wrote Checkpoint, whose protagonists weigh whether to assassinate him. Twelve thousand San Franciscans signed a petition to rename an Oceanside sewage plant for him—

Hollywood went apoplectic, with Oliver Stone — director of the detestable October-released flick “W” — declaring: “We are a poorer and less secure nation for having elected (Bush) as our president. ... America finds itself fighting unnecessary and costly wars and engaging in dangerous and counterproductive efforts to fight extremism. Even more significant and troubling, I believe, is his legacy of immorality.”

Despite this vicious stream, George Bush persevered and prevailed. The events of 9/11 changed him. Mistakes abounded, but no subsequent domestic jihadist strike ensued. As he noted at the Army War College last month, this staggering security success was “not a matter of luck.” Against islamo-fascism pre-emption (described by the all-knowing as naive, idealistic and wrong) was — as it remains — the right policy for spreading liberty and democracy, particularly in a Middle East that boasts so little of either.

The enterprise in Iraq, following the surge, now approaches victory — the great Osama bin Laden himself having declared Iraq “the central front” in his war against the United States.

Barack Obama repeatedly pronounced Iraq a distraction and - from beginning to end — a mistake. Yet a resolute Bush was true to his values, to his nation, and to mankind’s ultimate cause. Last month he told The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel that liberty can be extended beyond Iraq as long as America continues to believe “in the universality of freedom.”

His early tax cuts helped the country out of the recession Bill Clinton left him. The budget exploded, as did deficits — largely a result of expanded defense spending for the war on terror. (Said Bush in the Strassel interview: “I refused to compromise on the military” — for which thank heaven, given that the first obligation of every administration is the people’s protection.)

Bush was correct about Social Security, despite a spineless, risk-averse Congress unwilling to get its game together. While vastly more nominations would have been better, he managed against obstructionist Senate Democrats to gain approval of 61 federal appellate judges (compare Clinton’s 65), now constituting majorities on 10 of the 13 appellate courts. And he gave us the estimable Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

Yes, spending blew out of control — albeit with congressional concurrence.

Problems plagued the war’s conduct in Iraq. Post-Katrina New Orleans was mishandled. Still, Bush can boast hefty tax cuts, major assistance for HIV-infected areas of Africa, significant gains in health care and in education accountability, a multi-ethnic Cabinet (including the first two black secretaries of state), and massive improvements from surveillance to strategic policy.

We invest our presidents with greatly too many expectations. It happened with George Bush and his predecessors, as it is happening with Barack Obama — the latest secular savior. Few mortals can deliver on more than a small percentage of their promises and hopes.

Yet Bush carried two added burdens: (1) difficulty in articulating his goals and (2) relentless hammering by leftists hostile to his values and his success. Then, perceiving him harmful to the Republican brand, many conservatives abandoned him as well. Still and all, his favorable ratings never descended to the ratings for Congress — particularly the Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

George Bush a perfect president? Hardly. The worst president of the past half-century, as too many with ideological axes to grind would have us believe? Compare, oh, Carter and Clinton. A more prudent categorization: The most consequential president since Reagan.

To those cognoscenti who argue such an appraisal is preposterous, remind them of this: The most recent conventional wisdom — the consensus of the best minds and analysts — was (remember?) that because the fundamentals were so sound the stock market could not crash, the economy could not possibly collapse.

Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson — a man of laconic, perceptive humor — noted that “those who travel the high road of humility in Washington are not bothered by heavy traffic.”

George Bush concludes his presidency with abundant accomplishments, not least a safer nation — and still, despite a tsunami of hateful coverage, commendably humble. When the tumult and the shouting die, an appreciative people would escort him down to robust and lingering applause.

In the virtual public houses I frequent, there’s a significant buzz about Tom Geoghehan, who’s running for the House seat being vacated by Rahm Emanuel.

Certified FOBA (Friend Of Bad Attitudes) Mr. Fallows of The Atlantic pointed out this opportunity.

The remarkable thing is that in Geoghegan’s case writing has been a sideline. Day by day for several decades he has been a lawyer in a small Chicago law firm representing steel workers, truckers, nurses, and others employees whose travails are the reality covered by abstractions like “the polarization of America” and “the disappearing middle class.” Geoghegan’s skill as a writer and an intellectual are assets but in themselves might not recommend him for a Congressional job. His consistent and canny record of organizing, representing, and defending people who are the natural Democratic (and American) base is the relevant point.

The people of Chicago would have to look elsewhere for Blago-style ethics entertainment. Tom Geoghegan is honest and almost ascetic. Because it’s an important part of his makeup, I mention too that he is a serious, Jesuit-trained Catholic.

Mr. Frank, late of the Wall Street Journal but known as well for the hilarious One Market, Under God and the right-on What’s the Matter With Kansas?, has weighed in as well.

…Mr. Geoghegan thinks big while Democrats in Washington tend to think small, proposing a stimulus package here and better oversight there. The government’s goal, as he explained it to me a few days ago, should not merely be “to pump up demand again.” It should be to enact sweeping, structural change, “to get in a position where we’re not bleeding jobs out of the country.”

For the view that working people have no business with retirement and health care in the lean, mean, inevitable future, Mr. Geoghegan has a certain contempt. He wants to increase Social Security payments to make up for the destruction of private pension plans and expand Medicare with the goal of arriving, eventually, at single-payer health care. The $700 billion bank bailout, he says, proves that such expenses can be borne. What’s more, they’re necessary.

“Economic security is not only compatible with being competitive globally,” he tells me; “it’s crucial to it.”

It’s a little difficult to imagine a sane person lasting through a session of Congress. But it would be an interesting gambit.

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In re: Caroline Kennedy and Roland Burris, Dracomicron has said it for me at MyDD. So go over there and read it. Brief excerpt:

What I’m saying is, we need to stop being such outrage addicts. This election season was the most dramatic in modern memory, and there was a lot of stuff that we got outraged over, both legitimate and specious... I get that it will take some time for us to chill the hell out, but we need to do it. Barack Obama needs a functional legislative branch that can work on tackling the huge challenges he faces right away, and whether an appointee can effectively and honestly work at implementing his agenda is a bigger concern to me than if an appointee was selected in the dying throes of a corrupt governor’s career.

I guess this is what happens when you cheat and lie so consistently that even the Traditional Media have to admit they know what’s going on.

Of course, the Republicans walk right into the trap, “only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air”. They’ve got a bumper crop of candidates vying to become the Howard Dean of the racist, homophobic, xenophobic creationist party. (If only we could add “the war party.”)

Leading the pack in a certain sense is Chip Saltsman, formerly Mike Huckabee’s campaign manager, who famously distributed a music CD to party members that included comedian Rush Limbaugh’s parody song “Barack the Magic Negro”.

Some Republicans considered this in bad taste; a larger percentage considered it bad PR. Mike Duncan, the current RNC chairman who hails from the enlightened state of Kentucky and is running for re-election, said:

The 2008 election was a wake-up call for Republicans to reach out and bring more people into our party. I am shocked and appalled that anyone would think this is appropriate, as it clearly does not move us in the right direction…

Ken Blackwell is another candidate for RNC chair. You’ll probably remember him best, or worst, as the Ohio Secretary of State who rigged Bush into the White House in 2004. Lately he’s been in the news as an African-American asked to comment on Saltsman’s CD. Predictably, Blackwell, who’s reached the semifinals of the Ward Connerly Imitators Championship while simultaneously racing for the RNC chair, blamed the media for the to-do over the CD.

Unfortunately, there is hypersensitivity in the press regarding matters of race. This is in large measure due to President-elect Obama being the first African American elected president…

Absolutely. There were no racial issues, no hypersensitivity, before the country made the mistake of electing Obama. Now we’ve gotta deal with this extra layer of stuff. If only we’d elected Strom Thurmond back in ’48, none of this would have happend, eh?

Presumably the complete lack of African-American faces among the Republicans in Congress is balanced by the big-tent inclusion of two black contenders for RNC chair. Along with Blackwell, whose loyalties have been proven under fire, there’s Michael Steele, former lieutenant governor of Maryland, who you kinda figure doesn’t have a real chance. Consider, for example, his statement on the Saltsman CD.

…we must be mindful that self-inflicted wounds not only distract us from regaining our strength as a Party, but further diminish our credibility with an increasingly diverse community of voters. As RNC Chairman, I want us to be a lot smarter about such things and more appreciative that our actions always speak louder than our words.

Smarter? You’re running on making the Republican party smarter?? And reality-based??? Okay, well, good luck with that endeavor. It seems a little out of step to me, but what do I know about Republicans?

But all this is the kind of stuff the TM has traditonally lapped up, the horse-race aspect. No need to insert any information or analyze a statement’s truth or falsehood; just report speculation passed in a cab or a bar and call it a day. What’s really encouraging, for a normal citizen at least, though some Republicans will be unhappy, is to see the media reporting critical information, putting copies of contested ballots on the web in a standard format in case claims of impropriety arise.

No longer do we assume that our fellow citizens are as committed to democracy as we are. This is an advance, because it brings our internal models closer to reality. In The Temple and the Lodge, Baigent and Leigh remark:

One has attained a measure of wisdom when, instead of exclaiming “Et tu, Brute!”, one nods ruefully and says, “Yes, it figures.”

Yep, it’s time for ole Dubya to mosey on down the trail, droppin’ his “g’s” as he goes. Be headin’ back to the Lone Star State where it all began, where the legend was born. After all he’s done, that boy needs a good long rest. Kickin’ back in boots and jeans, him ’n Laura, kids comin’ by now and then, all helpin’ put books on the shelves of the Dubya Liberry. Catchin’ them Rangers on the TV and shootin’ some birds when the mood takes him. Nothin’ like killin’ things to make you know you’re livin’.

Cheney liked to shoot birds, too, until he found out it was even more fun to shoot people. “What’s all the fuss about?” he kept saying. “Only shot him in the face.” Admit it now, is Dick Cheney some kind of hoot, or what? There’s another boy knows how to have a good time.

Dubya’s hopin’ for visits from Donny and Condi and the Rover once things settle down, though Condi’s been actin’ a little funny lately. Actin’ like she wouldn’t mind seein’ the back of Li’l Georgie once and for all so’s she can concentrate on rehabilitatin’ her sorry ace. Which is not in the best of shape after years of consortin’ with a war-makin,’ law-breakin’ moron…

So maybe Condi won’t be stoppin’ by, after all. And you know Colin Powell won’t be comin’ by, not after he came out for the skinny guy from Chicago with that long-winded speech on the TV. God Amighty! Didja think maybe he’d never get to the point? Mr. Holier Than Thou. Doesn’t like waterboardin’. Doesn’t like this. Doesn’t like that. Man has no sense of humor, that’s the problem.

Seems like Donny’s a little frosty these days, too. ’Course, Donny’s never forgiven Dubya for bein’ president when everybody knew Donny was smarter and tougher and meaner and had a better plan. Now he’s busy rehabilitatin’ hisself, too, though most people think his raggedy ace is beyond savin’. Should have got it out of town a long time before he did.

Li’l Donny wrote a article not long ago in the New York Times of all places. Covered most of a page and seemed to be about the Surge and how we have won the war in I-Rack but just don’t know it. Donny’s still a little haired off at Dubya for makin’ him take the fall for all the money’s been wasted and all the people’s got killed.

But, hell, Donny’s always been haired off at somebody. Been that way since he was a rasslin’ champ down at Tiger Town. Look funny at him, he’ll take you to the mat with a triple half-nelson and a double headlock. Break your legs, arms. Break your neck. Then he’ll stick your head under water ’til you cry “uncle.”

Dubya could get lonely down there in Big D, with all these people not showin’ up like they said they would. They was like a nuke-you-lar family, you know. Thick as thieves. Peas in a pod. Bugs in a rug. Tight as ticks. Gonna be tough goin’ it alone with just Laura. You can see from her pictures she’s nice but no fun.

’Course, if there’s one thing Dubya knows how to do it’s have fun. Not like Donny and Condi. They’re too busy tryin’ to get they aces out of the fryin’ pan of history. Worried about they legacy or somethin’.

Not Cheney, though. Not him. You can take your legacy and put it… well, you know where. That’s what he seems to be sayin’. You don’t like it, sue me. Indict me. Get too close, I’ll have a heart attack. Cheney’s tough. They’ll never lay a glove on him.

Or Dubya either, come to think of it. Not that anybody’d want to. He did his best and you can’t ask more’n that from a man. People say, Yeah, but his best wasn’t good enough. In fact, they say, his best was the worst we’ve ever seen. People say he lied to us and listened to our phone calls and opened our mail and screwed around with the Constitution and got us into a crazy war and screwed up the economy and generally behaved like a despot — if only a junior varsity kind of despot.

Well, maybe. But let’s not be churlish. We were always told we lived in a country where anybody could become president. And anybody did.

Here’s a brief excerpt from a speech the admirable and usually correct Noam Chomsky gave in Boston last week. In it he explains the difference between a democracy and whatever it is we have.

Certainly not a democracy, if by that you mean a government responsive to the people. Every poll shows beyond question that a huge chasm exists between what we want and what our unitary form of government allows us. Unitary meaning that we only have, effectively, one party.

The goal of advertising is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices. Those of you who suffered through an economics course know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. But industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to undermine markets and to ensure, you know, to get uninformed consumers making irrational choices.

And when they turn to selling a candidate they do the same thing. They want uninformed consumers, you know, uninformed voters to make irrational choices based on the success of illusion, slander, and effective body language or whatever else is supposed to be significant. So you undermine democracy pretty much the same way you undermine markets. Well, that’s the nature of an election when it’s run by the business world, and you’d expect it to be like that. There should be no surprise there.

This clip, courtesy of Outta the Cornfield, was made at a GOP rally in Denver.

How much is it worth to wake ourselves from this Republican nightmare? Well, the $700 billion we’ve already ponied up seems to be a good down payment, because a lot of people are pissed.

In Kentucky, where I grew up, people tend to feel economic pressure more deeply, because many of them struggle even in normal times to keep their families at subsistence levels of income. They may be strongly culturally conservative, but they also strongly resent the rich East Coast elites who have controlled much of Kentucky for much of its history.

This has made Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s balancing act a tricky one at times, because McConnell leads his colleagues in being in the pocket of exactly those interests. These are not Kentucky interests, though some may keep their horses on Kentucky farms. They’re the super-rich who don’t want to be taxed, the corporations who don’t want to be regulated, those who think we should consider money as speech and corporations as people.

Unfortunately for Uncle Mitch, this is a sub-prime moment to make that case. Kentuckians may not be ready to vote for a black President, but they’re damn well ready to express displeasure at continuing economic distress. They may even manage to replace the worst member of the Senate with Bruce Lunsford, who’s bound to be a least a little better, will caucus with the Democrats, and has been running the kind of ad the Democrats would win big with.

Lunsford’s ad, his first of the race that homes in on the economy, cites McConnell’s vote in 1999 for legislation that rolled back government regulation of Wall Street banking and investment firms. It also highlights the amount of campaign contributions McConnell has received from the financial sector, as tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics.

“McConnell took more than $4 million from the Wall Street financial industry, got rid of the government regulations they didn’t like and let the billionaires and CEOs stuff their pockets with cash,” the ad’s announcer says. “Now Wall Street is in trouble and taxpayers are getting the bill.”

Another ad from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee that’s airing in Louisville reinforces those same points using an old-time Wild West theme. At one point, the announcer says “McConnell opened the gate and Wall Street went wild.”

Need to hear more of that.

A dispatch from Michigan, the state McCain forgot but my sister Pat Shure didn’t. She is an honest-to-God hockey mom who knew Bill Ayers slightly back in the 60s when he ran the Children’s Community PreSchool in Ann Arbor.

Lots of things can happen when you’re registering voters in the blue collar suburbs of southeastern Michigan.

Going from one little house to the next past the occasional American flag or tattered Red Wings banner or UAW emblem or “For Sale” sign, most people were friendly. Maybe they just weren’t afraid to open their door to a grandmotherly-looking person in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.

When I asked if anybody in the house needed to register, most said “Nope, we already are,” and as always a few answered, “Nah, they’re all crooks.” (Actually, a bit hard to dispute.) Obama supporters said so right away and seemed to know instinctively that I was one of them, maybe because I was THERE.

I was a little hesitant as I knocked on a door with a Police Officers Association decal:

“Sir, are you registered to vote?”

“Un, hah, but I’m not gonna, never do.”

“Have you ever voted?”

“Sure, I voted for Nixon.”

“How’d that go”?

He chuckled. “Not so good.”

An angry dog barking at the window of another house and the sign on the door persuaded me to move on. The sign read, “My shitty opinion is none of your *!#! ing business.”

Sometimes you get to end the day with something really sweet. I was standing outside a Dollar Store in downriver Detroit late one rainy evening, smiling and holding a clipboard that read REGISTER WITH ME, LAST CHANCE. I approached a woman and asked if she was registered to vote yet. Standing ramrod straight she replied, “Chile, I voted for Truman!”

Sarah Palin’s M.O. during her brief political life has been to cozy up to some unsuspecting mentor, then knife him in the back and step over him. Now she’s at it again. Colin McEnroe spells it out:

Palin is pretty clearly running a double campaign these days — one for Nov. 4 and the other for her future position as a leading Republican voice during the Obama era.

It was most noticeable when she openly questioned McCain’s decision to pull out of Michigan. What kind of language do you think McCain used when he heard about that one? This is not a guy who reacts well to being crossed or second-guessed, especially by a woman he yanked out of obscurity five weeks ago.

Since then Palin has announced a bare-knuckles strategy of denouncing Obama as a strange guy with terrorist pals and Stokely Carmichael attitudes. She has again questioned McCain’s tactics — this time his reluctance to brawl and spill blood and bring up Rev. Wright — and openly announced that she will advise him to follow her lead.

Do you not see a little needle directed at her boss in the way Palin worded this? Particularly the phrase “I guess”:

“I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more,” Palin said, “because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character.”

“I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up,” Palin added.

You guess? That, my friends, is classic passive-ag[g]ressive criticism…

So that’s at least twice that Wilderness Woman has told her boss to man up. First she called him on the cut-and-run from Michigan. Then she told him to knock off the soft stuff. My guess is that McCain is steaming. He’d send her home if he could. No wonder he renewed his vows to Joe [Lieberman] last night.

Meanwhile, Palin’s no dummy. She can read polls, and she knows that a loss is more likely than a win. She has become a favorite Republican of Republicans…

If they lose this election, the GOP will probably want to get her out of Alaska and into a Senate seat where she can be closer to the limelight and more able to speak out for the loyal opposition. She knows this, and that’s why she’s running two races. McCain may go down, and, if so, she’s not going down with him.

Noam Chomsky may well be right about the former president’s conspicuous and repeated mispronounciments:

The focus is on personalities, on Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, Sarah Palin’s pregnant daughter, or whatever it may be. In that terrain, the Republicans have a big advantage. They also have a formidable slander and vilification machine which has yet to go into full operation. They can appeal to latent racism, as they are already doing. They can construct a class issue. Obama is the elite Harvard liberal; McCain is the down to earth ordinary American, and it so happens that he is one of the richest people in the Senate.

Same thing they pulled for Bush. You have to vote for Bush because he is the kind of guy you would like to meet in a bar and have a beer with; he wants to go back to his ranch in Texas and cut brush. In reality he was a spoiled fraternity boy who went to an elite university and joined a secret society where the future rulers of the world are trained, and was able to succeed in politics because his family had wealthy friends.

I am convinced, personally, that Bush was trained to mispronounce words to say things like “mis-underestimate” or “nu-cu-ler”, so liberal intellectuals would make jokes about it; then the Republican propaganda machine could say see these elitist liberals who run the world are making fun of us ordinary guys who did not go to Harvard (but he did go to Yale, but forget it).

One thing about the Brits, they know their snark. A self-described “liberal European elitist journalist” — Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian — live-blogs last night’s performances in St. Paul:

8.18pm: [Quoting Romney] “I know what makes jobs come, and I know what makes them go.” What made jobs come and go often enough in the past, as Ezra Klein points out, has been the noted private equity firm chief executive Mitt Romney.

8.32pm: Mike Huckabee actually just said this: “My Dad lifted heavy things”. And this: “I was in college before I found out it wasn’t supposed to hurt to take a shower.” It’s something to do with having to clean himself with stones, because he grew up so poor. But this is an almost entirely crazy speech, I’m afraid to say. That’s an unbiased opinion.

8.50pm: Themes of the evening so far: xenophobia, “anti-elitist” rabble-rousing, media-bashing, smalltown boosterism versus liberal city people. Pretty unpleasant, all told.

9.05pm: Wait, wait, wait, WHAT? John McCain was a prisoner of war. He has proved his commitment with his blood. On the other hand, Obama worked as a “community organizer”. “What?” says Giuliani, pretending not to understand. He laughs unpleasantly. The crowd laughs. “Then he ran for the state legislature — where nearly 130 times he was unable to make a decision yes or no. It was too tough. He voted ‘present.’ I didn’t know about this ‘vote present’ when I was mayor of New York City. Sarah Palin didn’t get to vote present when she was mayor or governor.”

“Barack Obama has never led anything. Nothing. Nada. Nada. Nothing.” This is real, jeering anti-Obama stuff, the nastiest we’ve heard, and the delegates are loving it — yelping and whooping.

9.18pm: If you say the war in Iraq is lost, you are saying that Osama bin Laden has won, and that makes you a terrorist. Or something like that.

There’s something rather troubling about the way in which Giuliani enjoys the roiling up the audience. He claps softly to himself, and chuckles.

10.12pm And in a parallel to Obama’s surprise arrival at the end of Joe Biden’s speech, here’s John McCain. “Tremendous, tremendous, fantastic, tremendous,” he says, vaguely hugging the Palins. “Don’t you think we made the right choice for the next vice-president of the United States? And what a beautiful family!” Militaristic music. McCain and Palin are both doing an awful Republican version of Hillary Clinton’s already sufficiently awful pointing-and-smiling thing.

Shortly, these psyched-up delegates will hold a roll-call vote officially to nominate McCain. First, three country singers including John Rich are reading out random bits of famous American speeches and documents, in between lines of the national anthem. Extremely strange.

Brilliant, now Rich is singing his criminally stupid song Raising McCain.

If you’re like many rank and file Democrats, you actually loathe the DLC. In this Real News Network interview, Ralph Nader talks about theDemocratic Party as represented by the DLC. I’m actually watching television again - but only on the net. I check the Real News Network every day for a rundown on current issues in video format. Since their funding model is strictly from viewers and no one else, I made a small donation, I hope you will too. I'm not a fan of some of the things Nader’s groups have been involved in in the past, but I do have respect for Nader and he makes some valid points in this video interview.

It is a little ironic.

The attack dogs will eagerly embrace formerly hated targets. All last week Republicans lauded the achievements and brilliance of Hillary Clinton, seeking to exploit divisions in the Democratic Party. It has rounded up former Clinton supporters who now back McCain and paraded them like captured prisoners of war. “[McCain] really does admire and respect her and honours the campaign that she ran,” said Carly Fiorina, a top McCain adviser. Those are astonishing words from a senior figure in a party which spent two decades demonising Clinton as a left-wing uber-feminist. But that is the key to the success of the Republican attack machine: the past does not exist. What matters is what works now. Democrats know more of the same is coming. “This is going to be the most vicious campaign we have ever faced,” said Terry McAuliffe, Clinton’s former campaign chairman.

How vicious?

There is an industry devoted to publishing anti-Obama screeds. The most popular has been The Obama Nation, by conservative polemicist Jerome Corsi. The book paints a radical picture of Obama as having a secret Islamic past — but critics say the book can be proven to be wrong. Corsi has also called for Obama to take a drugs test and warned that he might create a “department of hate crimes” if elected. The Obama Nation has been a bestseller, relentlessly promoted by sympathetic media figures such as Fox News’s conservative host Sean Hannity. On his show, Hannity allowed Corsi to claim Obama wanted to allow women to have “abortions” even after their child was born. Instead of refuting the ridiculous claim, Hannity merely expressed shock. The incident forced a liberal media watchdog to issue an analysis showing Obama had never actually supported the murder of newborn children.

Though some speakers at the Democratic convention have had their speeches edited by the Obama campaign to the point that the original was scrapped, Kucinich’s speech lost only one sentence: “They’re asking for another four years — in a just world, they’d get 10 to 20.”

A Smirking Chimp commenter by the handle of genboomxer hits us where it hurts.

There is a hypocritical duality in our American culture. We want a saint for president; we want someone with confidence and experience. We want the “Daddy” ideal. On the other hand we want someone who’s not afraid to play dirty to give us what we want. We are the children who idolize “Daddy” as long as we don’t know he’s cheating.

Politically we are one of the most immature countries. We run our domestic and foreign policies like an amoral adolescent with a car, a shotgun and a case of beer on a Saturday night who goes on a rampage, who then shows up for church on Sunday to repent our sins to show everyone that deep-down we’re really good.

A more concise statement of the American character is hard to find. When we’re disappointed in our leadership we blame it on them, as if we had no part in making it happen.

So I guess you wouldn’t be surprised to find the same person pointing to an old Bill Moyers show called “The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis”. It’s just as true now, and just as relevant, as when it was made. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Moyers remains unsurpassed. You kinda get the feeling he’s still trying to make up for the whole LBJ thing, though it’s hard to imagine that he had the power to fix it. Probably LBJ was just smart enough to make him the front man, because Moyers is so clearly a moral person in the best sense of the term.

Froomkin titles today’s post “Bush’s Eternal Sunshine”.

Bush’s approval ratings are in the toilet and there are ample signs that the nation is hungering for a new direction. Yet Bush’s aides say they believe the public’s attitude has improved — apparently because he sees less hostility on his increasingly furtive trips outside the White House — and in a meeting yesterday with a group of sycophantic journalists, Bush insisted that he’s in a great mood.

Emerging from the meeting, National Review’s Larry Kudlow captured the central personality.

Mr. Bush reiterated what he has said in a number of these meetings, that in the office of the president, character matters a lot. He said you have to have clear principles and strong beliefs to execute all the responsibilities that are part of the job.

…I would say as someone who has been privileged to attend these gatherings in the past, not only did the president show the inner strength he always has, but when he does reflect on the tumultuous events of his tenure, he is completely at peace with himself and his decisions.

As if that were praiseworthy.

For Bush supporters, of course, it is: as Colbert said, with Bush you know he believes the same things on Wednesday that he did on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Bush has managed to continue to believe strongly in something that’s blatantly false, and there’s nothing more admirable to people like those I grew up around. They’re disdainful of the personal impurity that accompanies information, which, after all, is of this world, and therefore matters not. It’s such fine folks who’ve been known to decide that all the real books written before a mythical event should be burned, thus creating their own darkness. In which, truth be told, they were probably happy as pigs in their normal environment.

It’s not cleanliness, in other words, but ignorance that’s next to Godliness, according to this view. All you need to know is right there in the handbook He gave us; patience and exegesis will extract whatever meaning you need. If He didn’t find dinosaurs worthy of mention, they must not have been relevant to the plan. After all, you know, it’s possible that dinosaur bones were put here to test our faith, as someone argued to Bill Hicks. Then we find ourselves in the same spot Bush is in: we need to believe in something we know is untrue.

Such a feat of believing requires compartmentalization on a grand scale. If there’s any significant amount of knowledge floating around, keeping those compartments separate becomes prohibitively difficult (as Bob Altemeyer’s studies have shown). Thus the bubble surrounding Bush is intended to accomplish the same goal that heads the list of most everyone still living in my old hometown: the avoidance, or more precisely intentionally maintained ignorance, of facts about the world, in particular facts that don’t fit with existing beliefs.

I blame this all on a guy named Paul. Who can honestly argue that belief matters more than action? Wouldn’t that imply that human beings probably numbering in the billions were created without a chance to believe, thus doomed to torment with no path to redemption?

The New York Times reports that the White House and the Democrats have agreed on a rewrite of the wiretapping rules. It’s not entirely clear why anyone cares to take the trouble. Everyone knows the administration has been ignoring the existing rules; why would a rewrite make a difference?

Perhaps the most important concession that Democratic leaders claimed in the proposal was a reaffirmation that the intelligence protocols are the “exclusive” means for the executive branch to conduct wiretapping operations in terrorism and espionage cases. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had insisted on that element, and Democratic staff members asserted that the language would prevent Mr. Bush, or any future president, from circumventing the law. The proposal asserts that “that the law is the exclusive authority and not the whim of the president of the United States,“ Ms. Pelosi said.

In general, rewriting the law to emphasize to those who knowingly violated it in the past that the law must be obeyed is an ineffective means of making the point.

The Democrats are letting the telecoms off the hook for activities the companies knew were illegal; the precedents were clear. In exchange for this immunity the Democratic, I hesitate to say leadership in this context, can depart grasping the idea that this reaffirmation will constrain a President when the first affirmation did not. It seems to be a textbook case of doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

Or alternatively, perhaps the Democrats have no problem with warrantless wiretapping and torture and illegal wars as long as it’s the Democrats in power at the time. All power corrupts, said John Emerich Edward Dahlberg, and he was right.

If you worked long hard hours and years to reach the upper atmosphere of Congressional leadership for your party, it’d be hard to think in terms of the American empire ending. It’d be hard to realize that there is an American empire to begin with; as Chomsky says, you can’t reach a position of power in the US government without believing that the country is unique in history in acting purely from altruistic motives.

That’s abroad, of course; domestically, it’s devil take the hindmost. In the current case, as so often in recent years, the hindmost is the American public. This is somehow more grating now that we have Democrats controlling Congress. In 2006 we took the reins from the Republicans, too corrupt, incompetent, and downright evil to live with any more, and handed them to the Democrats, who promised, as all parties do in such circumstances, to restore dignity and truth to the institution and to assert the rule of law.

Hah! In fact, they’ve repeatedly capitulated. As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the only real accomplishment the Democrats had to show for taking control of Congress was refusing to cave on telecom immunity. Now they’re caving on that too.

I just bought a couple Cindy Sheehan for Congress buttons.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is Not Alex. It’s the antiMcCain, antiwar ad from MoveOn.org which is being called tasteless by the conservative punditry. Being called tasteless by it/them is of course like being called ugly by a frog.

Personally I thought the ad was (1) tasteful, (2) fair, (3) well-produced, and (4) effective. What’s more, (1) the baby was cute, and (2) I fell in love with the young mother.

So, as Thomas L. Friedman might say, and did, Suck on this, okay?

The Obama campaign has put up a web page to rebut the smears, calumnies, false rumors and innuendos, anonymous charges, viral emails, libels, defamation, slurs, sleaze and slander that are standard in GOP presidential campaigns.

In fact the Swift Boat operation is already humming along nicely in high gear. Slime-lovers will find prime specimens at Obama’s new site, Fight the Smears.

In which I thread some beads of the corruption nibbling at the American dream, nay, inhabiting it with a vengeance. In fact, it’s looking more and more like the approach of Nemesis, who you’ll recall is the goddess who brings havoc to you and your plans in payment for your hubris.

Among chessplayers you often hear that chess is life. In many ways this analogy holds up. In fact it’s really closer than an analogy: chess isn’t like life, it is life.

Life involves making decisions about what to do and what not to do, in situations where you can’t possibly gather all the information. In chess there are estimated to be around 10⁵⁰ legal positions, with a game-tree size of 10¹²³ (game-tree size is the total number of legal games, counting different move orders arriving at the same position as different games).

For comparison, estimates for the number of atoms in the universe are around 10⁸⁰.

So you can’t possibly gather all the relevant information; yet you have to make a choice, there’s a clock ticking, and you’ll be stuck with that choice for the rest of the game. You need principles, plus the technique to execute them against resistance.

The decision-making process in chess is so similar to life that it’s a bit scary to consider the implications of machines beating the crap out of the best humanity has produced. But at least it’s a game of rules. Without ignoring the occasional accusations of cheating (by, for example, Kasparov against the Deep Blue team, or by Topalov against Kramnik in the famous World Championship Bathroom Controversy), we expect the outcome of the game to be determined by who played better.

If only life were like chess, and the winners were those who made the best decisions! If we chose our leaders on that basis, our quality of life would be much improved. We’d rid ourselves of servants of the dark side such as Cheney and Greenspan and Kissinger and Albright, and replace them with others like Feingold and Conyers and Kucinich and Waxman, people who find representation of the type envisioned in the Constitution more honorable than playing for Team America in the game of geostrategy.

But no. Corruption and war are profitable; and the war-maker rarely fails to draw greater praise. As Gibbon says:

…as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.

Perhaps this is another gift George Bush will leave us with: the realization that war has become a business, and not just any business but one central to our way of life; that the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about has taken control of our government by holding the economy hostage.

Perhaps we’ll decide, like the folks in Iain Banks’s Culture novels, that money’s just holding us up. When scarcity is the main problem, money provides a huge leg up. When you could feed everyone if you chose, but it’s not profitable enough so you don’t, you’re in essence killing people for money. And even from the purely economic point of view, if every individual were fed, clothed, housed, educated, and provided with transportation and medical care, how much more productive would we be as a group?

What keeps us from doing this? It’s not exactly corruption; bribes aren’t being paid, either explicitly or implicitly, to those who enforce the status quo. Unless you count the money spent on police, and the more numerous private security folks. Not to mention the various methods of enforcing that unusual system of economic class that Americans have evolved. It’s universal and not at all subtle, yet we often manage to ignore it.

To take a single example: I teach in six elementary schools in four districts each week of the school year. The educational opportunities presented to children differ significantly based on the cost of the house their families live in. That’s rational in our world, but I submit that nearly everyone would be much better off if we educated everyone to the highest standard we can manage. Rather than bombing some Asian village, for example. As Eisenhower said, every bomber we build is a school we don’t build. And bombers were dirt cheap back then.

I claim our socio-economic situation waxes and wanes as our ideas veer now toward and now away from a course parallel to reality. The corollary is that our current troubles are precipitated by a hole in our world-watching filters.

Americans are famous, or perhaps infamous, for their go-it-alone every-man-for-himself attitude. As Lisa said, how rebellious, in a conformist sort of way.

In reality everyone knows Americans love a winner. People who’ve never been to Los Angeles root for the Lakers because they think the Lakers will win (as if). Many people here in northern California root for the Patriots (once the 49ers have safely folded) despite not owning a single garment capable of withstanding the weather on a nice day at a Patriots game.

So when fans learn that their team’s best player is a rapist, or that their team taped competitors’ signals, reactions tend to fall into two groups. Some fans feel they’ve been let down by their stars or teams. Others prefer to ignore the revelations and blame the whole emotional mess on the media, or the InterTubes, or whatever: it’s all lies. This second group, one assumes, votes disproportionately for Bush.

Fortunately, there aren’t enough such people to elect him. Unfortunately, that doesn’t control who wins the elections. And corruption at the highest level of civic life sets a standard. Each new world chess champion initiates a fad for certain openings; each new administration has ripple effects throughout society.

So anyone who’s spent much time watching NBA games cannot be surprised to learn that former referee Tim Donaghy has accused the league of rigging games. Donaghy’s already been convicted of manipulating outcomes and is facing sentencing. In the plea letter his lawyer writes:

“Tim learned from Referee A that Referees A and F wanted to extend the series to seven games. Tim knew Referees A and F to be ‘company men,’ always acting in the interest of the N.B.A., and that night, it was in the N.B.A.’s interest to add another game to the series.”

The game was refereed by three tenured veterans: Dick Bavetta, Ted Bernhardt and Bob Delaney. Bernhardt has retired from the league. Under N.B.A. rules, Bavetta and Delaney are not permitted to speak to the news media. However, Delaney, a former New Jersey state trooper, cast doubt on Donaghy’s claims in an interview with ESPN.

“This is not the first time a known or convicted criminal has lied about me before the judicial system,” Delaney said Wednesday. “I have an extensive law enforcement background, and still train police officers. I have dealt with criminals and informants, and I know full well they are capable of doing and saying anything.”

I’m assuming Delany means this to be reassuring, but somehow I don’t find it so. Are we to consider that NBA referees are no more corrupt than your hometown police force would be if it dealt constantly with the amount of money that circulates in professional sports?

Back in 2001 Milwaukee was playing Philadelphia in the Eastern Conference finals. George Karl, coach of the Bucks, later expressed the view that the league had decided Alan Iverson and his Philly teammates would be a better draw for the finals than the Bucks, so they arranged the calls to make that happen. He was fined $85,000, if memory serves, and got calls from several prominent players stating their agreement. (One of them was Kevin Garnett, as of this writing the best player in the NBA finals.)

The FBI has made inquiries about Bavetta, according to a former N.B.A. referee who was interviewed by federal agents last year.

Hue Hollins, who retired in 2003 and has been outspoken about the N.B.A.’s treatment of referees, said he met for about an hour with two agents from New York before last season.

In addition to asking questions about Donaghy, Hollins said the agents inquired extensively about Bavetta. They asked if he ever noticed that Bavetta “was making sure that the home team would win, and I told them I had no idea because I didn’t work with him a lot.”

Well, try watching a game. Bavetta is not the only one, but he’s one.

The most hilarious comment comes from perennial favorite Mark Cuban, who must know something about basketball; after all, he bought a team.

Mark Cuban, the outspoken Dallas Mavericks owner, who has been a leading critic of the N.B.A.’s officiating program, cast doubt on Donaghy’s claim that league officials had orchestrated anything.

“There’s no way on God’s green Earth that David Stern has ever done anything to influence the outcome of a game,“ Cuban told ESPN.com.

Spoken like a man still hoping to be admitted to the country club, and thus continuing to speak well of it even after being rejected. Nixon would have appreciated the number of outs left in that sentence. Suppose this particular earth isn’t God’s, for example? And besides, did anyone accuse Stern of rigging the games? No, it was the referees who did that; Stern orchestrated it. It’s like Bush and Cheney didn’t actually do the torture themselves, they had other people do it, but they ordered it. They’re not complicit, they’re responsible. Same with Stern, though there was no torture or killing involved (as far as I know).

This, to me, is what makes college basketball preferable, though in principle it shouldn’t be. There are few more amazing athletes in the world than NBA players, and the game they play involves much more useful civic virtues than, say, American football. College teams can reach the NCAA tournament with one or two players who’ll definitely make the NBA; three, and you’re an odds-on favorite for the whole thing. But look at the last four NBA teams standing: Los Angeles, San Antonio, Boston, and Detroit: three great teams and one great media market. The league admitted that the decisive call in the fourth game of the Western Conference final was wrong, but they figured that a Lakers-Celtics series would draw a much larger audience than Spurs-Celtics.

It’s the American way.

Just finished listening to Hillary’s speech, which struck me as graceful and useful. And from as much of the subsequent pundibabble as I could endure, this seemed to be the consensus.

So I’ll only bother to add two things that are unlikely to come up in everybody else’s instant analysis.

First, both Hillary and Chelsea clapped back at the audience. New rule, as Bill Maher says: Keep your hands to yourself. Otherwise you look as stupid as every show biz jackass who bounds into camera range clapping for — well, for whom?

If for your own wonderful self, it amounts to an unattractive act of public masturbation. If for the audience, it is the gesture of a desperate suck-up.

The second thing was Hillary’s juxtaposition of two words that I doubt have been uttered in sequence by any major presidential candidate, Democrat or Republican, for 30 years. They are “promoting” and “unionization,” presented as a desirable goal.

Not “recognizing the importance of” unionization. ” Not “backing” or “championing” or “defending” it. Promoting it. Maybe the word was carelessly chosen or insincerely spoken. But if not — if the active promoting of unionization by government has become mentionable once more in mainstream Democratic rhetoric — this could turn out to be huge.

Having written for a president who was terrific at town meetings and terrible at prepared speeches, this Gail Collins op-ed made me feel a tiny — barely perceptible actually — twinge of sympathy for McCain’s speechwriters. McCain, you’ll remember, wants to do a sort of buddy road flick with Obama, the two of them spending the summer together doing weekly town hall appearances:

But for all the talk about McCain wanting a “higher level of discourse,” the bottom line is that he is begging to be rescued from the big problem his campaign has encountered: which is that the only thing their candidate is good at is town-hall meetings.

This was driven home Tuesday night when the Republicans decided to try to insert a McCain speech into the Democrats’ final primary night. They were hoping to steal thunder from the moment when Obama clinched the nomination. The actual effect was to offer viewers a chance to compare the skills of the greatest orator in modern American politics with a guy who has never really learned how to read a teleprompter…

Pixie writes:

I think women who believe a woman in the White House would mean someone who would keep us out of military confrontations, someone nurturing and sensitive who would respond to the people, someone who is less testosterone-driven are crazy. When I see women say that, I think, “Honey, any woman who gets to the White House isn’t going to be like you — isn’t going to be a soft-spoken, nurturing type. That’s not the personality that wants to be President. The gender is irrelevant. That’s why Hillary got so far.”

So what happens now? Is Obama totally screwed? Would he ever choose Hagel as a running mate? Or would that actually drive most Republicans away from the ticket?

And I add:

Indira Gandhi, Gold Meir, Maggie Thatcher…

Here’s a picture of Inflatable George I took during the demonstrations at the 2004 GOP convention in New York City. The little fellow is seen wearing his make-believe flight suit.

Want to remove all slime from the election this fall and limit debate strictly to the issues? Rick Hertzberg knows how:

The solution is obvious. Obama should ask McCain to be his running mate. McCain should ask Obama to be his. And both should say yes.

A campaign pitting an Obama-McCain ticket against a McCain-Obama ticket would absolutely guarantee a general-election campaign that would be about The Issues and nothing but The Issues…

Confused by all the blabber last night from Tim and Keith and Chris and Pat? Want to find out what actually happened in Indiana and North Carolina? Go here for your reality pill from Jay Cost, Doctor of Politics. Excerpt:

As you can see, North Carolina performed roughly as we might expect, falling in between Virginia and Tennessee. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the results were closer to the Virginia end (i.e. Obama +29) than the Tennessee end (i.e. Clinton +13). What might explain the difference?

Unlike Indiana, it doesn’t come from Clinton’s core voting group. She did extremely well among white voters in North Carolina. Obviously, she didn’t do as well with them as she did in Tennessee. However, she still trounced Obama among white men and white women, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Clinton’s problem was with the African American vote, which came in at about 33%. Her trouble in North Carolina, as well as the South in general, is that white voters are more likely to be Republican than in decades past. This has given Obama a demographic edge in the region — one that has actually grown in the past few months. Note that African Americans in North Carolina went for Obama more strongly than they did in either Tennessee or Virginia. In fact, we can see a general trend in the African American vote toward Obama — not just in these states, but nationwide. It has not been much commented upon — most likely because African Americans have been supporting Obama more strongly than any other group. Nevertheless, as time has gone on, the African American vote has clustered around Obama much more tightly.

This piece of mine ran several days ago in Salon. com. To see it in its original home, go here. One of the commenters, Blueturtle, made a point that hadn’t occurred to me, but seems aesthetically solid:

Beyond the Left's often correct belief that wearing the flag is facile posturing, there is a larger, deeper problem with the lapel pin.

Isn't it the great unspoken truth that the American flag is simply ugly? Bold, primary colors parceled out in too small stripes and indeterminant stars. It has always paled in comparison to the understated tricolor of France, the composite crosses of the Union Jack, or the beautiful exoticism of any number of developing nations' standards.

The stars and bars speaks for a nation that never could really figure out what it stood for. In response, states' rights and muddled federalism left us with a compromise guidon of cobbled together symbols.

Obama knows that will clash with any outfit that is not made for preschoolers in their bold jumpers.

Flag Pins are for Losers — Literally

Is a man fit to be commander-in-chief if he won't even fly the flag from his buttonhole?

Does that man, Barack Obama, think he's "too good — too patriotic! — to wear a flag pin on his chest?" Because that's what William Kristol believes.

Grow up, the Chicago Sun-Times advises: "Oh for Pete's sake, Senator Obama, pin the darnn American flag to your chest. Otherwise, the poor dope will "catch a world of hurt for ... polarizing comments [that] make him sound like a hardened leftist."

Has Obama's failure to wear a flag pin really done "more damage to his White House hopes than a bomb bursting in air?" The New York Daily News thinks so.

Or is it just possible that Barack Obama knows more about getting to be president than all of these pundits laid end to end, as they probably should be? Is it possible that an empty buttonhole might actually help a candidate of either party, now that the nation's number one flag-wearer is circling the bowl with the lowest presidential approval ratings ever recorded?

Let's go beyond the Beltway and take a look. Out there on the campaign trail, who's actually been wearing lapel flags in this race and who hasn't -- and how's that been working out for you guys anyway?

On April 26 of last year in Orangeburg, South Carolina, the Democrats held the first debate in the campaign that never ends. First thing that morning the candidates were all in a hurry to throw on their clothes, grabbing any old thing that came to hand. Yeah, right.

It was the most important day of their political lives to date, and they agonized over each tiny sartorial decision. Windsor knot or four-in-hand? Blue or red?

Here's where everybody came out on lapel flags. The photo coverage of the debate shows that only Joe Biden decided to wear one. The other seven -- Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd — went without.

Of course you'd expect that from a bunch of surrender monkeys, wouldn't you? So let's turn to the Republicans, tough-talking patriots to a man. Their first debate came a week later in Simi Valley, California. And sure enough, Tommy Thompson, Tom Tancredo and Rudy Giuliani, nonveterans all, were careful to pin on their flags.

Wait a minute, though. Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Sam Brownback, Jim Gilmore, Duncan Hunter, and Mike Huckabee all left their little flags back home on the bureau. And so did John McCain. Hmm.

By May 15, at the Columbia, South Carolina Republican debate, Tancredo had stopped wearing his flag. By June, Democratic candidate Joe Biden had deflagged as well.

The only candidate of either party who chose to add a flag in the course of the campaign was Bill Richardson, who flagged up toward the end of the summer. With Biden's flag gone by then, Richardson had become the only Democratic candidate to wear a flag in the debates.

On the Republican side Tommy Thompson continued to wear his flag till the bitter end, which came in August when he placed sixth in the Iowa straw polls. The empty Thompson slot was filled the following month by Fred. The lobbyist/actor picked up Tommy's banner, so to speak, and was still wearing it in January when he, too, dropped out.

Rudy Giuliani, who probably wears a flag to bed, dropped out a week later after racking up a pathetic 15 percent of the vote in the Florida Republican primary.

Do we see a subtle pattern emerging here? Every presidential candidate of both parties who ever wore a lapel flag during the debates, even as briefly as Biden, bought himself a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

And every major party candidate who remains viable today — John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — has seldom if ever been spotted with a flag in his or her lapel.

Don't think the press hasn't been noticing, either. To this day there has been a steady drumbeat of silence in the media over the flagless-ness of Huckabee's, Clinton's and McCain's lapels.

Nor would Obama's disrespect have made news if only he had thought to point the finger at everyone else still in the race when a TV reporter posed his trivia question back in October. But instead he gave an honest if incomplete answer.

Obama said he had worn a pin after 9/11 but stopped once he began to notice, and here I paraphrase wildly but no doubt accurately, that most of the people still wearing lapel flags were assholes.

On the evidence of the campaign so far, Obama wasn't the only one who noticed.

Clinton, Huckabee and McCain, we may say with confidence, would wear anything or even nothing at all if they thought it would help them win the nomination. Then why, when it came to miniature flags, did the three join Obama in opting for nothing?

Dosed with Pentothal, each would most likely come up with a variant of the answer Obama had hinted at: that lapel flags no longer signify simple patriotism, but something that you don't want sticking to your fingers these days..

For these past six years and more, men with those bright little flags apparently riveted to their lapels have fed the voters a daily diet of fear, secrecy, lies, and a cruel war with neither point nor end.

No sensible politician would want to march under this tiny, metallic banner. Just look at all the fallen stars who did.

Waiting for Dorothy offers us a glimpse into the mind of the Invisible Hand. (Sorry no pictures this time, you’ll have to go take a look for yourself.)

One of the enjoyable aspects of the current election campaign is watching the antics of the wingnuts as they’re forced to choose between John McCain and a firing squad.

Over the past month a new Axis of Evil has emerged — not one based in Damascus, Tehran or Pyongyang — but instead in Cedar Rapids, Charleston, South Carolina, Derry, New Hampshire and Boca Raton, Florida. It is the liberal and “independent” voters in these 4 states that have nearly completed a deed that makes Kim Jong Il envious — the near crippling of the American Electoral System.

These four states have combined their native liberal populism with an imported liberal electorate and have forced the GOP to accept a nominee so distasteful that in more than one poll — the numbers of voters choosing not to vote and those choosing to vote third party actually exceed those who will hold their nose and vote for Maverick, War Hero, Amnesty Supporter, John McCain.

I admit, I’ve always known that South Carolina and Florida were secret hotbeds of liberalism. But I was hoping no one would notice.

I’m not interested in sending any more traffic to the wackos at Human Events Online, but if you really must read the article Steve Thomma, who’s been filing some excellent stuff for McClatchy, links to it.

You don’t have to love Robert Novak to respect his political smarts. Here he is on the fall election and on the South Carolina Democratic debate Monday night:

While both the Republican and Democratic presidential races are undecided going into the massive array of February 5 primaries (which amounts to nearly a national primary), a Hillary Clinton vs. John McCain contest in November looms as the most likely prospect.

That is the match-up that offers the highest likelihood of Republican success despite the continued sniping at McCain by certain right-wing activists…

Clinton and Obama both took good digs at one another, but the heightened negativity is in itself a boon to Clinton. By going negative, Hillary does not hurt her image, but Obama hurts his.

Clinton is already the knife-fighting candidate, and that is part of her appeal. Obama is supposed to represent a new era, hope, and a change in tone. However well-placed his jabs at Clinton, they tarnish his chief virtue. Also, voters still react negatively to attacks on a woman.

This evening, through another in a series of “no duh!” moments, I realized that the Democratic Presidential candidates are arguing over two separate types of discord.

The first began subtly but unmistakably creeping toward center stage after the Iowa caucuses, when Clinton supporters found themselves in a real race and began to say things to the press that caused them to be reassigned to duties out of the public eye. I do not imply that the Clinton machine is the only flinger of mud; but I do assert that, with regard to mud and the flinging of it, the Clintons’ assembly far outguns the combined strength of its Democratic opponents. They have the organization, the campaign experience, the government-related connections, and some knowledge of what it’s like to be in the public eye constantly. Plus memories of just how low politics can really go.

Many Americans find this disgusting. The Democrats haven’t yet begun accusing each other of experimenting on unborn kids. No sirree; Democratic barbs are less direct, more substantial, credible across a larger range of educational backgrounds. You know, things like aggravating racial divides with inept remarks about the sainted Dr. King. Or occasionally slipping in inadvertent drug references:

“To me, as an African American, I am frankly insulted the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues — when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood; I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book — when they have been involved,” he said.

Leaving aside the structural deficiencies of that sentence — what, in fact, is the Obama campaign supposed to have implied about the Clintons? — this seems to me a coach-class insult hurled by an operative of moderate skills and fiery temperament. The motivation such people bring to the table only partially compensates for the disarray their manic activity can generate.

In this case, the incident is unlikely to have lasting significance. Mr. BET, Bob Johnson — the only black American billionaire other than Oprah — has apologized for his remark, and the Obama campaign has accepted the apology. But there’ve been a number of these not-too-subtle low blows since Iowa; and my guess is that if Obama wins South Carolina, especially if he wins handily, he can expect a fuller taste of Rovian tactics from the crowd around his main competitor.

I further guess that absent something both real and serious — unlikely but not beyond imagining — throwing dirt at Obama will only make him stronger. This is precisely the kind of politics Obama is making his name in opposition to. Taking mudballs and holding his position, fuzzy though it be, he appears to stand tall, a man who can rise above the fray, climb the mountain, and bring back the Princesses of Rhyme and Reason.

Many Obama voters no doubt agree with his policies. Many more agree with what they believe his policies are, basing their beliefs on how they feel about him personally. And it’s undeniable that he’s a tremendously charismatic figure, the best set-piece speaker I’ve ever heard, and the sort of person we wish the American system tended to produce, though in fact he’s more of a fortunate anomaly.

Mike Huckabee benefits similarly by coming across as a likable person. Anyone who can hold his own with Colbert twice has proved himself quick-witted and comfortable in his own skin; he gives you the feeling that he’d be a good decision-maker in the sense that he’d make decisions based on what he really thought, felt, and believed was going on. Of course he’s totally bonkers in several areas with respect to what actually is going on, but that’s a separate issue.

But many Obamaniacs, it appears to me, support him because they think he’ll make politics friendlier, less critical and demanding and more harmonious. More like television and less like in-laws. It’s a beautiful dream and a worthwhile goal, though a reader of history might be forgiven for considering it something of a long-term prospect.

I’m all for aiming the society at the flag of coöperation. But at this point in the evolution and training of human consciousness; at this stage in the development of the nation-state; at this historical tipping point between a modern feudalism and a renewed commitment to the path of democracy, with all its surprises, Americans are neither psychologically prepared nor sufficiently informed to participate in creating global harmony. As Bertrand Russell put it, our ethic compels competition, but our situation requires coöperation. We’d better get our minds right or we’ll be spending more than one night in The Box.

To do that, we have to work on making society more just; and to do that we have to confront the powers in our own country. We cannot expect to achive measurable success toward our goals by compromising with those who are gorging themselves at the public trough. Unfortunately the very act of exploitation creates a zero-sum game, where Player One loses to the exact extent Player Two gains.

The corporations that are the current bane of democracy in America, particularly the weapons, insurance, and drug companies, can logically expect a reduction in profits as a result of increasing public control over public things. If the US stopped bombing other countries, spent half the money we send to Iraq on nationwide infrastructure and Japanese-level trains and the other half on developing new energy sources and saving the environment, and developed some sort of universal health-care plan like all the other so-called industrialized countries, we could free ourselves from the necessity to invade other countries for profit or resources. We could once again bid to lead the world in technologies of the future (and the future-tech niche tends to have unusually high profit margins). We could regain some of our international moral stature.

But this would damage the corporate profit sheets beyond the power of spin, reducing the value of stock options held by literally hundreds of board members across the country. They are likely to oppose any such plan, and to have significant resources available to invest in agreeable candidates and initiatives.

The battle to decide whether the early 21st-century United States will be a corporate or a popular state is underway. To the extent that popular sovereignty succeeds (or a populist monomaniac arises), powerful interests will suffer a decline in superlativeness. They will resist the individual depredations with every available tactic. It’s worth spending a hundred million in advertising and campaign contributions to preserve thirty billion a year in profits, eh what?

Like the vast majority of Americans, I would like to see the vicious, low-down, lying, dirty politics of the last few decades evolve into a mutual realization of mutual dependency. But that’s not on the horizon. Rove, and the Republican oppo research tanks now recycling classic baby-vivisection stories, will soon be aimed at the Democratic nominee, and no victory in November, no matter how convincing, will silence them. If the next President wants to return some control over the government to the people, that project will meet resistance, not only from the Republicans now hypocritically filibustering everything, but also from the Republican wing of the Democratic party, the DLC. Such a project is bound to fail without the exhibition of significant public interest. Therein, of course, lies the danger.

But I’m afraid there’s no escaping it: this is a fight we either take on or cower from. We cannot rise above it. We can succeed, but if we run, hide, or ignore it, we lose.

Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics has an interesting take on the generally overlooked Democratic portion of the Michigan primary:

As for the Democratic side — the big story is Hillary Clinton losing the African American vote to “uncommitted.” The exit poll pegged African Americans going against Clinton, 68% to 30%. It appears that opposition by African Americans induced a split in Wayne County (where Detroit is), 50% to Hillary, 45% to uncommitted. People in the media are going to connect these results to the racial kerfuffle of the last few days — and they are partially right to do so. But I think there is more to it than this.

Since his Iowa victory, Obama’s numbers among African American voters have been trending upward. Tonight’s results are another indication that African Americans are breaking his way. The Clinton campaign should be worried about this. It appears as if Obama might be able to take an important part of the traditional Democratic coalition. He is thus moving beyond the relatively narrow appeal of previous “insurgent” Democratic candidates like Bill Bradley and Gary Hart. This is bad news for Clinton.

Why has politics in America become so trivial, so superficial and lacking in real substance? And why do we persist in such a harmful habit when the world’s problems so desperately require our attention?

Naturally such complex phenomena have multiple causes. Americans have been conditioned by ads and television to have the attention spans and memories of children. Kids are so much easier to sell stuff to than adults, who remember what happened last time they bought something from that corporation. All in all, nobody’s been as heavily propagandized as Americans. As far as I know there isn’t much data about how such propaganda affects society over time; but it’s hard to imagine any positives, while situations where the negative effects are obvious happen all the time.

In this downward spiral of public discussion in the good ole USA, I want to nominate two inter-related items as contributing causes. First there’s the psychologically uncomfortable point that many, perhaps most, of our difficulties are direct results of our own decisions, often made long ago and never questioned, and policies, many followed well past their natural lifespans.

Certainly global warming is a problem that demands immediate focus around the globe. Ideology often being a cover for self-interest, there are some who remain unconvinced; but finding a skeptic with no financial interest in fossil fuels is difficult. Could there be a clearer demonstration of Bertrand Russell’s maxim that our ethic values competition, but our situation requires coöperation?

The war in Iraq is even more obviously of our own creation. In this light, Clinton’s vote for the war was clearly based on politics. But Obama’s careful avoidance of any criticism of the party nominees over the issue, which Bill Clinton seems to be bending a bit, was also political. The way I heard the story, Bob Shrum was telling potential Democratic Presidential candidates at the time of the vote (e.g., Kerry, Edwards, Clinton) that the White House would not be occupied by someone who voted against the war. (Why they listened, given his record in Presidential elections, remains a bit of a mystery.)

If Obama had been in the Senate at the time, he would have received the same advice from Shrum. Like the other Senators, he would have been subjected to a huge and dishonest administration campaign, replete with intelligence-community briefers, announcing a real threat. Many Senators who were skeptical encountered what they considered dispositive evidence. Given Obama’s party loyalty, and his actual voting record in the Senate on matters foreign and domestic, I’m not convinced that with his kindergarten ambition in sight he would have ignored Shrum’s advice. He believes in the system, which is why he doesn’t scare white folks.

My point, though, is not about individual candidates. We get the candidates our system tends to produce. That doesn’t mean we deserve them; it means we haven’t done what’s needed to upgrade our system to one that produces better discussions, candidates, and outcomes. But we find it hard to confront sacred cows, to get past dearly held illusions about the world and our place in it, and thus we’re reluctant to confront the present evidence of past neglect.

One of the problems we Americans try to not to look at is the vast increase in economic inequality. This is not confined to the Bush/Cheney years, of course, but they certainly goosed things along, and the gaps have reached historic proportions. In the past, such conditions have usually been followed by serious economic and political upheaval. What Chomsky called the attempt to roll back the twentieth century is in full swing, with Democrats joining Republicans against the unions, the unemployed, and others who need help and wish they had the old bleeding-heart liberals back.

These days it’s cool to stand up for the civil rights of minorities if the minority individuals in question are Americans who have not yet been accused of any terrorism-related acts, contributions, or secret thoughts. But standing up for social policies that might give them a fair shot in life by providing them with reasonable economic opportunities indicates the onset of the degenerative delusion of class warfare. Nonsense! We’re all in this together, war profiteers, oilmen, drug and insurance execs, reporters, NASCAR dads, and soccer moms. (Won’t somebody please think of the children?)

We’re designing the near future along the lines of our hallowed one-person, one-car tradition, in defiance of the widespread belief that we must act soon on climate change, or prepare to leave the planet. We can’t wean ourselves off the black stuff because the oil companies manipulate us so effectively, raising prices when we’re driving a lot and reducing them just before elections, crying for tax breaks and posting record profits. Private enterprise, the jewel of Western civilization!

We can’t even consider a plan to regain our national edge in technological innovation: collectivism, ugh! We’ve already lost most of our manufacturing base, and are now engaged in an attempt to disprove Paul Kennedy’s thesis (in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) that military might depends on industrial might. We offer sacrifices to the Gods of the Market, but as yet they’re unappeased.

Such strategies we’ve long expected from the every-rich-man-for-himself Republicans. But time was when Democrats would do more than speechify on the opposite side of the question, they would act to change reality. They would create government programs, many of which would fail utterly, but not all; they would modify existing laws and methods, and at least attempt to address the problems at hand. The resistance Bush found to privatizing Social Security indicates a general realization that some government programs have worked, and belong among the tools we use to mitigate the worst effects of capitalism.

Government, in a nutshell, is certainly not the answer, but it’s not the main problem either. In theory we own it, and could get off our asses and go fix it once this show’s over and we’ve finished our beers.

What we don’t even potentially control has vastly greater implications for each of our lives. Insurance corporations have a death grip on our health-care debate; oil companies drive our foreign policy; the biggest chunk of our economy is based on war; the second biggest is finance, much of it dealing in companies and commodities with no connection to the US other than the money made and spent by the American financiers.

We’re no longer the industrial powerhouse whose entry into the conflict ended the Second World War. And indications are plentiful that our financial house of power is morphing into a house of cards.

Observers of world politics and economics are fascinated with China for good reason. Probably not fortuitously, we’re lucky to have James Fallows blogging in situ, providing us with pictures of the air (and the cats) in Beijing to go with — I don’t say “match” — the official descriptions. (And some nostalgia-inducing small-plane shots as well.)

Fallows is in my top category of writers, because he attacks important, difficult, and complex subjects, explains them clearly, and leaves you with frameworks that help you understand information that arrives later. Even on those occasions when I don’t happen to agree with his stance on an issue, my viewpoint is widened and clarified by what he’s written, and I feel more capable of addressing the issue rationally, and of understanding what I feel about it. He helps me think better.

I particularly recommend his latest article, abnormally available free from The Atlantic, in which his concerns intersect with another of my favorites, William Greider. Those interested in the effects China Rising might be expected to exert, plus any confused xenophobes reading BA who want to know what’s coming in the US economy, might find it enlightening.

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus — $1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day — that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China. Like so many imbalances in economics, this one can’ t go on indefinitely, and therefore won’t. But the way it ends — suddenly versus gradually, for predictable reasons versus during a panic — will make an enormous difference to the U.S. and Chinese economies over the next few years, to say nothing of bystanders in Europe and elsewhere.

Any economist will say that Americans have been living better than they should — which is by definition the case when a nation’s total consumption is greater than its total production, as America’s now is. Economists will also point out that, despite the glitter of China’s big cities and the rise of its billionaire class, China’s people have been living far worse than they could. That’s what it means when a nation consumes only half of what it produces, as China does.

In six paragraphs he follows your dollar from CVS, where you purchased an Oral-B toothbrush, through the banks and governments of the US and China, and back into the US economy.

This is the bargain China has made — rather, the one its leaders have imposed on its people. They’ll keep creating new factory jobs, and thus reduce China’s own social tensions and create opportunities for its rural poor. The Chinese will live better year by year, though not as well as they could. And they’ll be protected from the risk of potentially catastrophic hyperinflation, which might undo what the nation’s decades of growth have built. In exchange, the government will hold much of the nation’s wealth in paper assets in the United States, thereby preventing a run on the dollar, shoring up relations between China and America, and sluicing enough cash back into Americans’ hands to let the spending go on.

…what the Clinton administration was really like, here’s David Morris of Alternet to remind us of such Leaden Oldies as welfare “reform,” NAFTA. the gutting of New Deal controls on Wall Street greed, a green light for telecommunications monopolies, deregulation that permitted Enron’s thefts, and the ruinous (to us, not the power companies) deregulation of Big Electric.

For eight years, Bill Clinton was a Profile in Cowardice.

Read Gloria Steinem’s op-ed in today’s New York Times, excerpted below.

That’s why the Iowa primary was following our historical pattern of making change. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).

I’ve known all that forever, of course. But it only hit me just now that black men born into slavery had been voting for 50 years before my mother was allowed to. Which makes me just another sublimely unconscious sexist pig, no doubt. Maybe that’s why I find this next bit from Ms. Steinem spectacularly wrong — not the whole excerpt, just the highlighted part.

I’m supporting Senator Clinton because like Senator Obama she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate, an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House, no masculinity to prove, the potential to tap a huge reservoir of this country’s talent by her example, and now even the courage to break the no-tears rule.

I have no more idea than Gloria Steinem what may be inside Senator Clinton’s head and heart, but only two things can explain her stubborn support of Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Either she supported Bush’s idiocy because she agreed with him and still does, or she pretended to support him because of a fatal miscalculation that to do otherwise would keep her out of the White House.

The first would make her a fool, which she plainly is not. The second can only have grown out of a desperately felt need to, yes, prove her masculinity. If she loses the nomination, it will be to the man who has most successfully proven his femininity.

I haven’t bothered to track down this Bush quote on the White House site, but I trust the Doonesbury site, from which it came:

“It’s what I do during my presidency. I go around spreading good will and talking about the importance of spreading freedom and peace.”

If Nixon had said something like this, we could be vaguely comforted by the knowledge that at least he knew what a load of crap he was handing out, and was sniggering in the darkness of his soul at the suckers who were dumb enough to believe it.

But this White House is an irony free zone, and Bush, God help us, is one of those suckers.

Taken at the mass peace demonstration in Washington on March 20, 2003, four days before the idiot attacked Baghdad.

Is there any government in the world more despicable than that of Cuba? I mean, what kind of scumbag government would provide everyone with medical care and guarantee them food? You can’t really sink much below that.

Jean Ziegler, who has been the United Nations’ independent investigator on “the right to food” since 2000, spent 11 days in Cuba on a fact-finding mission, meeting with top officials and chatting up farmers, state managers and ordinary Cubans waiting in line for food allotted by ration cards.

“We haven’t seen even one malnourished person” — a rare feat in much of poverty-stricken Latin America, Ziegler said Tuesday. “The right to being fed is the priority, without a doubt.”

Cuba is one of 32 countries that include the “right to food” in their constitutions, and fewer still — including Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy — meet pledges to provide food to all their citizens, he said.

If only the US were as rich as Brazil and Cuba, we wouldn’t have hungry people…

You really can’t make this stuff up. The wingnuts, normally the soul of insulation from reality, have awakened and are becoming conscious of just how completely screwed they are. Hopefully one day they’ll realize how many innocent deaths they’ve caused and do the honorable thing. (I’m not holding my breath. If they want to, I encourage that undertaking.)

Meanwhile, they’re impossible to satirize, even for The Onion. Sean Hannity apparently believes that Halloween is a liberal holiday not because of the pagan origins, about which he’s doubtless ignorant anyway, or because of the associations with The Dark Side, to which he long ago sold out, but because of the symbolism of the handout, an obvious pinko attempt to convince kids to expect help from a young age. How scummy can you get?

But really, they’re desperate at this point to salvage some scrap of power, the only truth they appreciate. I met a guy at a bar in Belmont tonight who seriously maintained that we’re better off fighting them in Iraq than in Belmont. Naturally it turns out he believes in torture, just on GP, plus it might actually produce actionable intelligence. He also claimed that the Iraqis won’t be angry at us for killing a million of their former fellow citizens because they understand that we’re good, and acting from good motives. Flattening Fallujah was just something we had to do, and they get it. Those who lived, at least.

What is about American life that produces this level of fear and hate? Is it television, or Christianity, or football, or beer? Maybe it’s the educational system being starved so we can build more prisons? Or just having to argue with, and share a bar with, people who believe they can get information from Fox? Probably there’s just not enough sex happening, with which I can identify.

Thankfully it seems that those American citizens who want to torture as long as they know they won’t suffer any consequences are hitting their high notes because they realize they’re on the way out. They’ve been discovered, the world understands how childish and foolish they are, and has moved on.

Still, we see those kids showing up at the door and wonder, will they be able to fight off the terrorists, and torture anyone who looks different, if we give them candy now? A student in one of my chess classes this week wore a t-shirt saying "No questions, just put the candy in the bag". The only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization along the way…

Why is it that San Francisco, by any measure among the most progressive constituencies in the country, continues to elect do-nothings like Pelosi, right-wingers like Feinstein, and embarrassments like Lantos?

Dutch lawmakers who visited the Guantanamo Bay military prison this week said they were offended by a testy exchange in Washington with a senior congressional Democrat.

The lawmakers said that Tom Lantos, chairman of the House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee, told them that “Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.”

[…]

“You have to help us, because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany,” Lantos said, according to the Dutch lawmakers.

“The comments killed the debate,” said Harry van Bommel, a member of the Socialist Party. “It was insulting and counterproductive.”

Not to mention typical.

Is there any thread that ties these atypical San Franciscans? Anything they can agree on, other than a rejection of San Francisco values?

Hopefully we’re talking darkness before the dawn, rather than darkness before the fall.

For decades, progressive activists have been hocking their agenda as though at a fire sale. The Bush years have been so disastrous they have forgotten that many of the things they are campaigning against now — Nafta, the gay marriage amendment, greater economic inequality, the ban on photographing soldiers’ coffins coming home — were introduced under Bill Clinton. Their fears that things could get worse overrides any confidence that they could improve. So they settle for candidates who will make things get worse at a slower pace and on a less dramatic scale. Sometimes, as in 2004, these low expectations make sense. But as an overriding strategy it is a recipe for perennial disappointment and disaffection.

Realistically, Democrats who think they’ll end the war by voting for Clinton are in the same position as evangelicals who thought Bush cared about abortion and school prayer.

John McKay, the former US attorney for western Washington who was fired along with eight colleagues, thinks the upcoming report from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General will recommend criminal prosecution of Alberto Gonzalez. Apparently Gonzalez does too: he’s hired a high-profile defense attorney and is refusing to answer questions from the Inspector General.

Speaking to a Federal Bar Association meeting, McKay said:

“There was a conspiracy to politicize the Justice Department, and they did not get away with it.”

We can hope. But it’s not yet clear that they failed to get away with it. Even if the IG report recommends criminal prosecution, what’s the chance it’ll happen? The Republicans will call it a political witch hunt and claim racism if their stooge is prosecuted (perhaps I should omit “will”). There was no underlying crime — no one was fired for unjust cause — or at least you can’t prove there was one, absent honest testimony from the former Attorney General; therefore his lying under oath in a Congressional hearing about his performance of his legal duties isn’t a problem. Hey, it’s not like he had sex, OMG!

The problem the leisure class has with the present administration is that its corruption is so overt that it’s roused the population. People are learning that they can act in groups, and that if they do so it sometimes makes a difference.

Immediately after his firing, McKay said he thought about “going quietly,” but then he began comparing notes with the seven other U.S. attorneys dumped at the same time in a historically unprecedented move by the White House.

“They led each one of us to believe we were the only one told to resign,” he said. “None of us particularly sought the spotlight.”

This is obviously not the kind of lesson the American oligarchy wants taught. It’s much happier with the message of American Idol: voting is meaningless fun, something that makes us feel involved but without responsibility, or lets us feel superior to those who aren’t hip to the news. From this viewpoint, Bush/Cheney has been a disaster.

In need of a new Soporifier in Chief, the leisure class is turning to Clinton. For example, she’s getting large contributions from the two industries that are at the base of our problems.

The US arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican party. Mrs Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street’s favourite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favourite, Barack Obama.

Mrs Clinton’s wooing of the defence industry is all the more remarkable given the frosty relations between Bill Clinton and the military during his presidency. An analysis of campaign contributions shows senior defence industry employees are pouring money into her war chest in the belief that their generosity will be repaid many times over with future defence contracts.

Isn’t it clear that if we elect Clinton we can look forward to more war? I’d be willing to place a decent-sized wager against her having the troops out of Iraq by the end of her first term. That’s what she’s been saying she’ll do, but she’s also given about a dozen reasons that she might be forced to change plan. Her lifelong Republican bent, a political need to prove toughness, and financial ties to arms manufacturers and mercenaries all bode ill.

In Building Red America Tom Edsall shows how the demographics of the Democratic party have changed over the last few decades. Much of the middle class, which used to be largely Democratic, switched parties to vote for the Great Teleprompter Reader, and remained enthralled by the television-level PR, sets, and camera angles of Michael Deaver and his ilk.

But now they’re turning away from the Republican war, looking for another round of political comfort food. Weren’t the Clinton times good? Yes, if you like economic bubbles, but Clinton had nothing to do with that other than staying out of the way. Wouldn’t we have another round of Clintonism with Hillary, without having to worry about sex with interns? Yes, and if you love your country you’ll do what’s in your power to prevent that. If the DLC folks once again force the Democratic party to do what harms it, they will have succeeded in destroying the party that once represented working people. And these days, that means nearly everyone.

Clinton and Giuliani? Like kryptonite to Superman, or sex to a Republican.

Homer: America, take a good look at your beloved candidates. They’re nothing but hideous space reptiles. [unmasks them]

[audience gasps in terror]

Kodos: It’s true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It’s a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us.

[murmurs]

Man1: He’s right, this is a two-party system.

Man2: Well, I believe I’ll vote for a third-party candidate.

Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away.

[Kang and Kodos laugh out loud]
[Ross Perot smashes his “Perot 96” hat]

Is the Speaker of the House really serious about genocide, or is she simply involved in a standard Washington power play?

Suppose we assume that a million and a half Armenians died between 1915 and 1923 in a systematic and deliberate campaign; personally I know of no reason to doubt that, but I’m not a historian of the Ottoman Empire.

Now suppose the House of Representatives, 92 years later, decides to label that systematic and deliberate campaign “genocide”.

What, exactly, is the difference between a systematic and deliberate campaign by Ottomans that killed a million and a half Armenians, and a systematic and deliberate campaign by Americans that killed a million-plus Iraqis?

Is it that last half-million deaths? Or the religion of the killers? Can the wingnuts come up with some defense based on intent, or will they, as usual, escape the dilemma by denying the facts?

And what’s the difference between wingnuts denying facts, and House Speakers choosing to spend time on century-old genocides to distract attention from an equal number of deaths the Speaker’s party funded? I mean, they’re different, but do they differ in levels of culpability?

[ Update: I don’t really understand what evidence TeddySanFran considers in thinking that Pelosi is trying to stop the war in Iraq with a semantic resolution about Armenians. The argument seems a bit far-fetched. I wish it were true, but I see no reason to think so. ]

[ Update 2: It has been pointed to me that a semantic non-wingnut argument holds up against my original statement. If we define genocide as the attacker trying to exterminate a group of people, then intent, and ratio of killed to spared, are critical. By those measures, American involvement in Iraq has not been genocidal.

My original point, poorly stated, was this: what is the moral difference between killing a million and a half people in an attempt to eliminate Armenians, and killing a million-plus people in an attempt to run off with the resources they live on top of? Is it less moral if one intends to kill a million people than if one does so unintentionally? In other words, what is the moral difference between the Ottoman actions the House condemns and the war in Iraq it funds? ]

Strange and evil days, beloveds. People one admired seem to be wimping out on impeachment, illegal surveillance, funding an imperial war, and handing everything available to the corporations, then promising more.

Michigan Rep. John Conyers was one bright spot during the Dark Ages from 2000 to 2006; now he’s ragging on us for opposing the RESTORE bill.

To those who say that the bill is too weak on civil liberties, I say that if you trust an independent court and have faith in congressional oversight, those liberties will not be jeopardized. That is the premise our democracy was founded on, and that is exactly what this bill does.

I agree, our republic was founded on that premise. But how does that apply to our situation today?

The Cheney administration has packed the courts with relatively young right-wing authoritarians; they’re anything but independent. Congressional oversight hit its lowest point in our history during the first six years of the current administration; unfortunately it has improved only a little since then. Congress’s actions don’t seem to be such as would deserve my faith.

It is possible, I suppose, that this is a gambit by the Democratic leadership. Here’s what I’d like to think.

Suppose the White House were to relate the Adventures of the Telecoms in Surveillance Land, which I believe is what the Democrats demanded in return for a two-year extension of the hateful and unconstitutional law that’s expiring. If that information came out, it would probably show that most of our phone calls and emails have been surveilled since (at least) 9/11. People like Charlie Savage, Dana Priest, Warren Strobel, and Jonathan Landay would quickly find links to other disquieting data, and demands for actual Congressional oversight would surge. Thus, I argue that the chance of the administration telling Congress the story of the telecoms approaches zero.

The original bill was a Constitutional abomination, which the Democrats passed — let’s not forget it was the Democrats who decided to make that bill the law of the land — as they huddled in fear of the Imperial President and his 30% approval ratings. The right thing to do is clearly and unambiguously to let it lapse and spend the money and effort on something useful.

If there are any Democrats who feel that way, but are unsure about the public reaction if they say it overtly, they might find it convenient to support a bill they know the White House will find unacceptable. In such a case the bill would probably die in the Senate, where McConnell’s crew would make sure the President wasn’t forced to veto it. The Democrats would be able to say they’d offered the President what he wanted and he turned it down.

The strategy might work. But I’m pretty sure it’s not the Democrats’ actual strategy, because it would take some courage and some foresight, the ability to withstand a rhetorical onslaught from a bunch of incompetent warmongers.

And the only thing the Democrats complain about is the incompetent part.

The race for the Democratic Presidential nomination is a pretty depressing sight right now. It appears that Senator Clinton has it in the bag; but history cautions against early wagers, even in normal circumstances, which these are not.

I see Rove attacking Clinton on his way out the door, and Bush anointing her the nominee and quietly advising her to leave some wiggle room on Iraq. And I think, they really seem to want to run against Hillary.

Yeah, it’s true that they’re incompetent, ideological, moronic, thieving war criminals. But how’d they get where they are today? I’m neither talking about nor omitting the blatant cheating in the 2000 and 2004 elections. How did they get with Diebold range to begin with? The only great skill the Bush administration exhibited was in politics, in particular the divisive Rovian sort.

Of course Rove was disastrously wrong in his predictions about the 2006 election, but his official position required him to make sunny statements. It’s impossible, for me at least, to tell whether he was really wrong, or just saying what he knew he had to say. I tend to suspect he was wrong, but I don’t think that’s been proven.

At this point in the previous cycle, Rove was attacking Kerry. As Matthew Dowd, a political strategist formerly in the Bush camp, said:

Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters’ minds. So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards.

I don’t think Rove was afraid of Edwards because he thought the trial lawyers could beat the insurance companies and oil companies on a level playing field (much less an actual election). I agree with the purists who claim we should support Kucinich because his proposals are the most progressive of the available candidates. I except Gravel here; I’m proud to call him a fellow citizen, and I’m happy he’s at the debates to call bullshit on the spectacle; we need more of that. He reminds us of our civic duties. But Kucinich has clearer and more detailed proposals, and indeed a more detailed understanding, than Gravel. In Rome the proper office for Gravel would have been Censor, a former Consul essentially in emeritus status, still called upon to resolve thorny civic disputes, and beyond veto, or at least some vetos, if I remember correctly.

The problem I have with Kucinich is that I don’t think he can sell the US on his policies in the 2008 election. I love him, I think he did great things as mayor of Cleveland, I re-registered as a Democrat to vote for him in the primaries last time around. I was very disappointed with what seemed to me to be his capitulation to being a nobody at the convention; but in exchange he does seem to have been granted a seat at the table, the ability occasionally to be asked a question in the debates, and to sit beside Al Sharpton as a commentator after the convention. It’s not nothing, and I give him full marks for determination, principle, and ability to accomplish something over the long term when most people would have given up. I would happily vote for him if I didn’t think anyone with a realistic chance was acceptable. Which in most years would be my position, but not this year. (Notice I made it all the way through the paragraph on Kucinich without mentioning his wife.)

So far, Edwards is taking enough of my positions that I can vote for someone who’s got a ghost of a chance of selling the country on progressive ideas. He’s good but not perfect on Iraq. His health care proposal won’t pass as is, but I love the touch of having the insurance companies compete with single payer in the marketplace, and let the most efficient approach win. A lot of people have a visceral distaste for him I only partly understand but encounter often enough to know it’s real. And he’s raised lots of money, but that’s lots less than Hillary and Barack. All of which makes him an outside shot in the race for the nomination. And even that probably depends on making a good showing in Iowa.

But he’s been a driving force in the conversation that takes place at the beginning of the process, which determines in large part what the themes of the full campaign will be. He was, for instance, the first major candidate to come out with a health plan, and to my mind his is still the best; it’s the only truly universal one. In fact most of what I like (that I know of) about the plans of Clinton and Obama seems to have been lifted from Edwards’s. Edwards has said that in the negotiations over how to set up universal health care, the insurance and drug companies should not have a seat at the table. And that statement got lots of media coverage — in some alternate universe where the mega-corporations don’t control our news.

Personally I have two worries about Clinton. First, I don’t really trust her, given her Republican past and the Republican policies of her husband. She’s peeling away a progressive here and there, in a sort of Rovian style, probably folks who have calculated that she’ll win and they may as well get on her good side early. But she’s still a Goldwater Girl at heart.

Second, I think the Democrats can only fail to win the White House if they nominate Clinton. I’m not saying she can’t win, only that she could lose when Edwards or Obama wouldn’t. Rove et.al. seem to be salivating over a campaign against her, so they’ll be well prepared. And my guess is that they wouldn’t have to make as much stuff up as they did against McCain. Take Norman Hsu, for example: not just pushing the envelope of the fund-raising laws, but psychologically unstable. Or Mark Penn, whose firm’s connection to Blackwater the Clinton campaign is busy spinning, but whose union-busting past is unspinnable. The Clinton campaign’s people seem about as likely to deliver to progressives as Bush’s were to evangelicals.

Sure, she kicked ass in her Senate campaign in a relatively wealthy, relatively liberal state, spending something like $35 million against token opposition. Some Democrats apparently complain that some of that money could have been passed to candidates in close races, but there it is. All along her best strategy has been to seem inevitable. Which might be effective in the primary. Come next fall, the Clinton haters are not likely to be intimidated; for one thing, what Altemeyer calls the high RWAs, right-wing authoritarian personalities, are less reality-based, and don’t calculate inevitability the same way as the rest of us. Many of them are quite used to believing three impossible things before breakfast.

Then there’s the polarizing effect of the name Clinton.

If Giuliani convinces Republicans that only he can defeat Clinton, the right wing may overlook his less-than-conservative views on such issues as abortion and gun control, experts say.

“The specter of Hillary Clinton is enough to have Republicans overlook things,” said [Marist College pollster Lee] Miringoff. “That buys him some leeway in their estimates.”

President George W. Bush added fuel to the fire recently when he predicted Clinton would win her party’s presidential nomination but lose the November 2008 election.

“She’s got a national presence, and this is becoming a national primary,” Bush said.

Then there’s the possibility of the Clinton backlash hurting down-ticket Democrats. And the non-trivial possibility that Rove has some valuable oppo on her, or her husband, that will remind people of the sleaze factor the rose-colored glasses of hindsight have endowed us with.

And the fact that if she wins the nomination the Democratic wing of the Democratic party will have lost, or caved, causing some to vote with their feet.

The war machine grinds on. This primary is, so far, an object lesson in how it operates at the mundane level; but we can still change the outcome…

I don’t think Rove is afraid of Edwards because he fears a groundswell of opinion like mine. Not in this universe, at least. I think it’s because he sees Edwards as the potential opponent who’s most capable of selling the progressive policies that Rove’s people fear more than anything, a sort of New New Deal. They failed to keep FDR out, and once he got in he became an American demi-god. Hopefully we’ll never have another one. But the progressive movement has seen peaks and valleys before; it seems to me a good time for a resurgence.

The current primary season stars the Republican party as the gift that keeps on giving. Center stage right now, of course, is Larry Craig announcing that, yes, he promised to resign, but hey, he lied. He had to, to preserve his honor and fight the scurrilous charges leveled at him, if I might so put it.

I particularly enjoyed this bit from Paul Kane’s Washington Post article:

“The defendant chose to not appear [in court] and to enter his plea by mail just so he could avoid any such [publicity], of record, inquiry into his conduct,” Porter wrote, underlining the last portion of his sentence for emphasis. “He kept many of the facts out of the record in so doing. He cannot now complain that he should not have been allowed to take advantage of an approved method to enter a misdemeanor plea.”

Is the judge implying that the many facts kept out of the record would be embarrassing to the Senator, that he’s doing Craig a favor by not letting him re-open the case? Most likely it’s simply the obvious legal argument that you can’t turn down an option on purpose to keep facts out of the record, then complain later that you didn’t get the option.

In a lot of ways you have to feel sorry for Larry Craig. He’s obviously repressed parts so deeply he can’t even admit to himself that they’re there. He prefers to prolong the public humiliation rather than look inside himself.

If you’ve been reading John Dean’s articles about the sociological studies of authoritarian personalities, you might recall that the main studier is Bob Altemeyer. Turns out he and a recently deceased friend did a study of atheists, apparently the first of its kind, and produced a book called, appropriately, Atheists. I’ve got it out of the library and will probably be blogging about it more soon. There’s a lot of interesting material, and the writing is lively and fun.

You know how when you’re reading a book about how people think or act, you notice certain behaviors that normally fade into the background? What I’m learning from this book, and from the background he’s giving about his work with right-wing authoritarian personalities, is like that. These folks have developed survey methods to measure attitudes: dogmatism, religious ethnocentrism, zealotry, and so on, and compared their samples along many different axes. They have data on whether subjects were raised in a religion, at what age atheists began to question their faith if they grew up in one, and so on.

The reason I bring this up now is that Larry Craig has several attitudes and contradictions that remind me of the people who scored high on the fundamentalism scale. They tend to have more inner doubts about their beliefs. If you offer them a chance to learn something disturbing about themselves, they often run. (Atheists tend to respond with something like, “Show me the evidence.”) They tend to believe in majority rights when they find themselves in the majority, and they’re all about protecting minority rights when they’re in that group. They favor education about Christianity in public schools; but if they were in an Islamic country they would object to Islam being taught in the schools. It’s not really inconsistent if you start from the premise of knowing the ultimate truth.

So Senator Craig will continue to work both sides of the law, remaining in the Senate because the Republicans have no legal way to get rid of him other than the ethics investigation, and the Democrats are overjoyed each time they see him in the chamber.

The White House loves it because it gets the SCHIP debacle off the front page, which itself was preferable to the Iraq debacle.

Clinton loves it because it gives her a chance to pretend she’s a liberal. Obama’s in his element, declaiming in his beautiful voice and offering the bold idea of tolerance. Which has worked great so far. As far as I can tell, Edwards hasn’t been forced to take any sort of stance, wide or narrow, with respect to the Craig phenomenon.

Unfortunately the main benefactors of the Republican sit-com are the spineless, calculating Democrats, who can’t pick up a chance to demonstrate true patriotism when it’s dropped in front of them. They seem to think that the do-nothing strategy of 2006 will stand them in good stead in 2008. (Maybe we need a progressive version of the threat by the evangelicals to vote third-party if the Republicans nominate Giuliani.)

All this self-regard and self-promotion, this focus on profit and efficiency as values rather than tools, cannot but lead where it has led in the past, to decline and fall.

Meanwhile, the Republicans continue to entertain. Ron Paul raised nearly as much John McCain, which indicates that some Republicans, or at least some people with access to the net, are not Bob Altemeyer’s authoritarian personalities. Democrats continue to rank Clinton as the most liberal of the big three and Edwards as the most conservative, in other words to have it exactly backwards. Some people think Clinton benefits most from this, others believe it’s Edwards. Romney doesn’t care that Giuliani raised $11 million to his $10 million; he just lobs $8 million of his own into the pot.

What a group!

In a recent post, Josh Marshall mentions discussions with his readers about reactions to the President of Iran’s request to visit Ground Zero.

Apparently most readers felt that we shouldn’t allow him the propaganda victory. Josh asks if he’s alone in supporting the idea that we should ignore him, that we’re bigger than that. “Why should we care what he says?” is Josh’s view, and I think there’s a lot to that.

In fact, I’d go beyond that to say that we should escort him there, and give him access to the press. Make sure he gets a good view of our gaping national wound.

If we were strong and proud and sure of ourselves, that’s what we’d do. In fact, we’re a nation scared stiff, not unlike our Congressional representatives, strutting and puffing ourselves up but secretly afraid that we’re about to lose it all. We’ve got an incurious faith-based windshield cowboy at our head, our general’s an ass-kissing little chickenshit, and most of the rest of us watch the soap opera on TV, seemingly unaffected except that our economy is ruined as our liberties disappear and our representatives cower.

Ironically, here’s where the argument against letting Ahmadinejad make a propaganda point holds up best. If we allow him to see our national wound, for which some of us seem to bear him ill will, what’s to keep him from pointing to one of Iran’s most grievous wounds, the destruction of the elected government of Mossadeq and its replacement with the brutal Shah and his secret police? And where did Savak learn its “interrogation” techniques?

A case can be made that the United States has wounded Iran more than Iran has wounded us. And we don’t want to think about that. That’s the propaganda victory that would hurt, because it would break the spell of American exceptionalism, which we’ve tried so hard to re-weave after the revelations of Abu Ghraib.

We used to be brave because we were sure we were good. Lots of times we weren’t, but we were sure we were anyway. Now we know we’re not, and we’re frightened.

As Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan was perhaps despicable but certainly not stupid: “I think Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we’ve had in a while”.

He retired only a year ago, but is already trying to revise the history. To explain away blunders that are now a financial crisis facing his successor. To rearrange the facts in exculpatory ways. To deny his right-wing ideological bias and his raw partisanship in behalf of the Bush Republicans.

The man is shrewd. He can see the conservative era he celebrated and helped to impose upon the American economy is in utter ruin. He is trying to get some distance from it before the blood splashes all over his reputation.

Old arguments are perhaps not as attractive as old wine, but they don’t have an “Enjoy by” date either; and unlike a new bottle for the wine, a new context may do no violence to the idea. Sometimes, indeed, ideas can enter the foundation of a theoretical structure and cause ripples of change.

So indulge me if you please as I re-remake my argument.

Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose a society like ours in every particular but one: they’re so disillusioned they want to change things, and they begin voting for the candidates, laws, and propositions they think are the best on the ballot.

Take a moment before you say, That’s what I always do.

Many of us, myself included, employ voting strategies. We pick the main opponent of the person we detest the most, or the most likely to win of those we can stomach. This is precisely the thought experiment: suppose we dumped those strategies, and voted for what we really want, given the limited choices on the ballot, for three straight elections. For convenience, I designate those elections with numbers: 2008, 2010, and 2012.

First let me define my terms. Suppose you completely agree with Mike Gravel’s analysis of the Democratic establishment; fine, vote for him. Pick the choice that’s closest to yours. If you think John McCain has the soberest plan for victory, vote for him. If you detest triangulation, don’t vote for anyone who does it. If you respect anyone who’d spend $400 on a haircut, vote for them; if you think that’s equivalent to warmongering, vote against them.

In this hypothetical society, no one votes based on a calculation about winning or losing. We’re not talking about Nebraskans rooting for the Lakers because the Lakers are likely to win. We’re talking about doing what our innermost selves tell us is right. The only legitimate criticism of a vote would be insincerity.

Imagine the possible results.

Maybe there’s a movement, with a website where people pledge to vote their conscience, organized like those for people pledging not to do so. Froomkin raises the issue, Broder disses it, the Times ignores it, Olbermann approves, O’Reilly’s frantic.

In other words, there’s no effect. The talking heads do so, and the deciders do so. Moderate Democrats win the election we’ve designated “2008”, and by “2009” the US still hasn’t figured out how to get out of Iraq.

In the America we know, that’s the end of it; the experiment has failed, politics is a one-armed bandit. We go back to football or beer or Xanax.

But in our hypothetical society, they want change. In fact they want Jefferson’s generational revolution, but they’ve decided to try the non-violent path before deciding whether they’re miserable enough to erect barricades in the streets of Paris, Kentucky.

When the vote tallies come in, the head-scratching starts. An unprecented level of protest votes! Eight percent of Paris, Kentucky, votes Green? Peace and Freedom beats the Democrats in San Francisco for second place? Five percent of the country voting for what TV ridicules? What’s this?

Fox Noise makes a living on the meaninglessness of the vote. MSNBC combines the honesty of Microsoft with the environmentalism of General Electric and gives both sides: the vote was meaningless, but the voters in question made a costly mistake.

A section of the blogosphere trumpets the size of the vote as a measure of discontent, but the Times reminds us how unreliable bloggers are. Why, look at what this one said…

By the run-up to the election we’re calling “2010”, candidates on the political fringe are courting the Disillusioned, and Time is using initial uppercase for the word. Despite some warnings from the punditry, no real playa takes them seriously.

In the election, those who voted their true beliefs the first time do so again, and are joined by a number of others: some driven over the edge by the unresponsive system; some first-time voters who get the vision of their vote actually pissing someone off; some who decide that this is really a viable strategy for change. Perhaps the total increases by half, or maybe goes as high as twice the “2008” election, say eight to ten percent.

In the weeks immediately following the election, a number of media executives decide to spend more time with their families. Politicians try not to look like they’re scrambling to retool their messages and organizations. Congress finds that Iraq can really do just fine without our presence. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t even proposed; education and health care are front and center.

Proposals for proportional representation and better voting methods like Condorcet are tabled countrywide, and pass in all college towns and a few heartland places.

Like the year we’re living through, “2011” would see a lot of Presidential politicking. But in the hypothetical society, Presidential candidates have changed. Unable to assume the majority will be silent, they’re confronting a new job: trying to reconcile the conflicting interests in our society, rather than representing the satisfied against the disillusioned.

Democrats bring up FDR a lot; Republicans mention Kennedy, and talk about their empathy for LBJ. Two Democratic candidates for President promise to name Dennis Kucinich the first Secretary of the Peace Department. Union leaders play important roles in planning domestic policy. Average hourly wages begin to keep pace with the increase in productivity of American workers, nearly matching the increase in profit margins of the companies they work for.

When, in the “2012” election, the Disillusioned persist, whoever’s elected will face enormous pressure to find accommodations with them. With fifteen percent of the votes, they’ll have non-symbolic presences in real campaigns and government offices.

Sounds delusional, eh what? I admit that asking Americans with their famously short attention spans to consider a five-year plan is an unlikely proposition. Probably, too, we’d have to choose a period that didn’t have the Communist overtones. But would it work?

Of course it would, and of course it wouldn’t.

World hunger would not be a thing of the past. Wars would still break out. Given the havoc our corporations and our intelligence agencies — increasingly difficult to distinguish — have wrought around the world, blowback might once again bring violence to our shores.

But if the world saw us choosing democracy over empire, we’d regain some of the esteem our military adventurism over the past half-century has lost us. We’d have real friends and allies again.

At home, we probably wouldn’t break the two-party monopoly, but we’d sure become the object of its toadying, the use of which could allieviate many social ills.

As an experienced government bureaucrat is said to have instructed a new one, you can’t use tact with a Congressman. A Congressman is a hog. You must take a stick and hit him over the snout.

Anyone for pick-up-sticks? How about a bumper sticker, “I’m Disillusioned and I Vote!”?

Iraq is certainly not Vietnam.

Gen. Petraeus is nowhere near as crazy as Gen. Westmoreland was, for example. Nor is Ambassador Crocker a Henry Cabot Lodge.

Men always, but not always with good reason, praise bygone days and criticize the present, and so partial are they to the past that they not only admire past ages the knowledge of which has come down to them in written records, but also, when they grow old, what they remember having seen in their youth. And, when this view is wrong, as it usually is, there are, I am convinced, various causes to which the mistake may be due.

The first of them is, I think, this. The whole truth about olden times is not grasped, since what redounds to their discredit is often passed over in silence, whereas what is likely to make them appear glorious is pompously recounted in all its details. For so obsequious are most writers to the fortune of conquerors that, in order to make their victories seem glorious, they not only exaggerate their own valorous deeds, but also magnify the exploits of the enemy, so that anyone born afterwards either in the conquering or in the conquered province may find cause to marvel at such men and such times, and is bound, in short, to admire them and to feel affection for them.

Before God made Stephen Colbert, she made Niccolo Machiavelli. Old Nick knew his shtick.

In the present, as Josh Marshall said today, "Opposition to the Iraq War is a profoundly mainstream position." Which it certainly was not for the vast majority of the war in Vietnam. That war went on for a long time, with lots of proclamations of progress and hopeful signs and light at the end of the tunnel. And it was very much an act of leaving the comfort of the culture and moving in counter-cultural directions to admit to being against the war. Kind of a gateway drug in itself.

For many years it was nearly an admission of mental incompetence to join an actual protest. Academics like Chomsky were among the few adults who could afford to be involved. It’s not that people were afraid to be against the war, or that they could ignore it like we can today. They were used to believing that the country was involved in an existential struggle with the Dark Lord in Moscow. They were enjoying the benefits of being the only industrial power left standing after the Second World War, owed money by everyone, with the homeland nearly untouched and far fewer casualties than the other major participants. And they worked for companies that were doing well because the economy was humming along because there was a war because it seemed necessary. (Or maybe it’s the other way around.) Plus there was that matter of Communist plants in the government, convincing folks they should be careful. It’s good that so many TV shows from that time exist in the original black-and-white so we can see what it was like to live that way.

Pressure for change in the Vietnam policy built very slowly. Pressure to change the Bush policy against Iraq existed before he began to execute it. But in both cases, the American establishment closed ranks around the policy and held off all attempts to stop the war. A good deal of this is certainly political calculation, and some is spinelessness.

There’s also a role for Chomksy’s formulation: you can’t reach a position of power in the government unless you believe that the United States is unique in history in acting purely from altruistic motives. As with many Chomsky statements, it’s a challenge, often initially difficult to credit. But it’s stated very precisely by someone who knows something about language, and he means what he says. I’ve gone through lists of political leaders in my head, trying to find exceptions to Chomsky’s rule. There are very few, and I have doubts about them.

We’re good, so we can’t be acting from bad motives. We wouldn’t be planning, building, and occupying permanent bases in Iraq, because that would mean we invaded to steal the oil. Certainly we plan to turn those immense bases over to the Iraqis, just as soon as we can get them ready to accept the transfer. Right now, though, wouldn’t be prudent. Plus, they don’t have any aircraft that require 14,000-foot runways.

This kind of thinking is a natural defense system in many cases. A decent person cannot but feel sympathy when disaster befalls others. When that disaster results from a human source, we’re angry with whoever caused the distress. If that turns out to be us, we’ve got a problem. So we look away if we can. If not, we invent a reason to decide that it’s all for the best in this best of all possible worlds. We rationalize, somehow. Even if it leaves us believing something as patently silly as O’Reilly’s stuff, it allows our brains to get past that uncomfortable feeling of being undecided.

It’s not really that we’re pro-empire. We just consistently make pro-imperial decisions at critical junctures. It’s an honest mistake in a certain sense: that most of the people who contribute to those decisions really believe in American exceptionalism. Even looking back, they can only figure that mistakes are continually being made in the implementation of foreign policy decisions. It couldn’t really be the pattern it appears to be, that foreign policy decisions are consistently imperial. Better stop looking now.

All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

If, like me, you don’t carry one of those little pocket versions of the Constitution, that is the entire first paragraph of Article I, Section 7. After the one-sentence Preamble (“We the People…”), the first six sections of the first article define Congress and tell how it’s constituted, how they’re elected, when and where they meet, and how they decide who’s seated and who’s expelled.

Thus the very first statement in the Constitution assigning any responsibility of any sort to any person or group is the quoted sentence. This appears to indicate that the Democrats in the House could end the war if they chose. The reasons they choose for not taking this path vary, but underlying them all is an unspoken belief in American empire. Ideology is, indeed, often a cover for self-interest.

The Democratic party leadership, so called, seems to me to be selling us two false premises, and we need to call them on both.

First, they keep saying that there’s nothing they can do to stop the war because of the thin margin in the Senate. Assuming that they’ve read the Constitution, or at least been advised by lawyers who have, they know this isn’t true. The House could end funding for anything but withdrawal, and within a couple months the administration would be forced to respond to the lack of money. But the Democrats, as usual, react fearfully, aware, as Paul Krugman recently said, that the Republicans will attack their patriotism no matter they do, and taking precisly the wrong lesson from that.

Second, they continue to claim that there are no good choices in the current situation, for example as George Packer presents it. This, it seems to me, is also false. In fact, the plan detailed by George McGovern and William Roe Polk last year in Harper’s was quite viable. Naturally a year-old plan might need a bit of updating, but the thrust was the important thing. The reason it didn’t get more of a hearing was that it didn’t validate the military-industrial model. Instead, it considered that the war was a mistake (except for the part about dumping a dictator), and that we should attempt to compensate Iraq for the damage. It envisioned the Iraqis doing the reconstruction, paid for largely with American dollars, with a total cost estimated at $17.5 billion, about what we spend on two months’ worth of occupation. Corruption, waste, danger, would all sap the buying power of our contribution, sure; but money would enter the Iraqi enconomy in a lot of ways, they could set up their country as they choose, and they’d learn from the experience of community involvement, which Saddam always prohibited.

What these two falsehoods share at base, I think, is either debilitating fear or complicity in imperial design. We’ve generally assumed the former, but as time passes it becomes harder to maintain that position. It’s harder to believe that we’ve made a long string of mistakes than that we’ve done what we intended but haven’t been honest about stating that.

George Packer has another thoughtful and well-written article about Iraq. His discussion of the remaining options draws this comment from Josh Marshall:

If our options before ranged from bad to worse, they now range from worse to horrible.

Packer, of course, was originally a war supporter, and as far as I know has never repudiated that position. Thus he seems to me to be continually engaged in explaining his reasoning, to put it euphemistically.

To his credit he does not shy away from the responsibility of the US for the disaster we’ve created.

The inability of Iraq’s communities to reconcile doesn’t absolve the United States of responsibility. Instead, it raises a new set of moral and strategic questions that are, in their way, more painful than at any other phase of the war. Facing these questions requires American leaders to do what they have not yet done — to look beyond the next three or six months, to the next two or three years. When America prepares, inevitably, to leave, what can we do to limit the damage that will follow our departure, not just for Iraq’s sake but for our own?

In this article, in fact, he attempts to turn that responsibility in favor of his argument, which I take to be that a continued presence will be necessary for at least five years. But he doesn’t explicitly state that or any other position as his own, so I may be projecting.

He’s naturally quite willing to allocate blame to the Bush administration’s faith-based foreign policy, quoting one former official as saying “What happens if, at the eleventh hour, we’re witnessing one of the most remarkable feats in American history on the part of a general? … If that’s the case, why do you want to give up now?” Suppose some magical situation came along, then assume it’s currently true and act on that.

But Packer seems to me to be in the thrall of illusions that are just as destructive in the long term. His views are vastly more sophisticated, and they attempt to shoulder the obvious responsibility of the US to help the country we destroyed. Though it’s impossible to know for sure he thinks from the article, it’s telling that in his discussion of the proposal of Senators Reed and Levin (begin withdrawing troops within four months, leaving only a “limited presence”) he notes the agreement of Senators Clinton, Obama, Biden, and Warner, but the only person he quotes is Lamar Alexander: “You have the President being inflexible and the Democrats playing politics”. Certainly that’s a fair statement of an argument made by the moderate Republicans and the wimpy liberals, but why is that the only position worthy of a quote from a Senator?

The point I most agree with in the article is that Americans need to start thinking ahead, considering the results of our policies and actions. Fat chance, but an excellent recommendation. Our television-and-fast-food society is all about immediate gratification, an infantile approach but one we’re hooked on. We don’t want to think about the effects on others of our own actions, or indeed the effects on ourselves in the future. Packer’s article, above all, attempts to take on this task and contribute to this discussion. We need more people doing that, especially those like him who write well and think deeply.

Discussing our options is an unpleasant business, because they’re all bad. As far as I know, no one anywhere on the spectrum denies this. To me it seems that one’s view of what we should do arises in large part from what one thinks about the role of the United States in the world.

For example, Packer quotes Colin Kahl, a professor of security studies at Georgetown: “If Bush keeps the pedal on the surge until the end of his Presidency, we will rocket off the cliff, and it guarantees that the next President will get elected on a pledge to get us out of Iraq now.” The context seems to indicate that Packer and Kahl agree this would be a bad move.

One way in which Iraq and Vietnam — two wars doomed to be endlessly compared — are not the same is in the implications of America’s departure. Contrary to Bush’s recent claim, the American exit from Vietnam didn’t lead to the Cambodian genocide (U.S. actions during the war did), and, for all the bloodiness of the aftermath in Vietnam, it was not a strategic disaster. America’s prestige was damaged, but the dominoes did not fall, and the civil wars in Southeast Asia did not affect the larger history of the Cold War. But Iraq, sitting in the geographical heart of the Middle East, on top of all that oil and radicalism, is unlikely to become marginal. In 1966, Senator George Aiken gave Lyndon Johnson some memorable advice about what to do in Vietnam: Declare victory and get out. In contemplating a change in American policy on Iraq, one former Bush Administration official turned the advice around: “Declare defeat and stay in.”

In a nutshell, I take that to be Packer’s position. He talks about the necessity of engaging the rest of the world in the stabilization of Iraq, postulates that the world would be willing to help if we acknowleded our failure while remaining engaged, and reiterates the argument that a bloody civil war will be the result of a rapid American withdrawal.

The spectacle, televised around the world, would deepen the feeling that America is indifferent to human, especially Muslim, life. It would brand the U.S. as untrustworthy to potential allies and feckless to potential enemies. And it would destroy what’s left of American prestige. Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Queen Mary College of the University of London, who also served on the strategic-assessment team, told me, “What has defeated America in Iraq, apart from the failure of the state and its own incompetence, are a bunch of radicals with nothing more sophisticated than reëngineered artillery shells and rocket-propelled grenades. That is a loss of cataclysmic proportions.”

My view is that the historical record strongly supports these contentions:

1. The US is indifferent to human life unless it happens to be American, white, and middle-class or above.
2. The US is untrustworthy as a potential ally.
3. Another defeat of the American military by technologically unsophisticated radicals will merely reinforce the accurate perception that nationalist insurgencies nearly always win.

Packer does a great service by attempting to focus our attention on the implications of our actions.

David Kilcullen, an Australian counter-insurgency adviser who served on Petraeus’s staff in the first half of the year, said, “The real question is not withdrawal dates or troop numbers. The real question is: What do we want Iraq to look like once we don’t have a hundred and sixty thousand troops there? And is what we want achievable?”

My question is, why is it up to us to decide what Iraq should look like — isn’t that what got us into this situation to begin with?

I would argue that, once we follow Packer’s lead, transcend our short-term thinking, and assume our adult responsibilities, the central question is our role in the world. The assumption underlying the various positions that converge on maintaining an American military presence in Iraq for five to ten years is, I think, that it’s our responsibility to decide what the world should look like, to offer everyone a chance to be like us. A empire of soft power, backed up by the largest military in history.

In short, a kinder, gentler empire. The liberal interventionists seem to me to be as entranced by American military might as the neo-cons, and to entertain illusions that are less blithe but equally incorrect.

At the other of the question are those who maintain that the US cannot and should not attempt to determine the shape of the world, that we should stop trying to dominate and start leading by example. That means no bombing anywhere, unless we’re attacked first and we can prove who did it. That means no invasions. That means not selling arms to the worst actors in the world, indeed not basing our economy on arms sales; not supporting countries that engage in ethnic separation of populations, by arms or by fence; not refusing to talk to anyone who wants a dialog; not threatening people with force. We can change the world for the better by helping people around the world, by offering assistance rather than requiring coöperation. As long as we act through our military, while China negotiates contracts in Africa and Asia, and Cuba sends doctors to the poorest, we will appear to be what we are: a military empire, in it for ourselves, unable to provide even for our own because we’re so busy making money on war.

Well, as Billie said, God bless the child that’s got his own.

It’s not news that

• The total income Americans list on tax returns failed to grow from year to year only once in the post-World War II period. Until 2001, when it declined four years straight. In 2005, the latest year for which data was published, the total went up slightly but was still lower than in 2001; the average actually declined because there were more taxpayers.
• Less than a quarter of one percent of taxpayers — those reporting a million dollars or more — got almost 47% of the total income gains in 2005 compared to 2001.
• The same folks got 62% of the benefits of the Bush tax cuts on capital gains and dividends.
• Of the 134 million taxpayers, 11,433, reporting $10 million or more each, got tax breaks of nearly $1.9 million each, for a total of $21.7 billion. The 90% reporting under $100,000 in income averaged $318 in tax savings on their investments.

So who does the White House blame it on? Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

That’s right, Clinton:

The White House said the fact that average incomes were smaller five years after the Internet bubble burst “should not surprise anyone.”

And 9/11:

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, attributed the drop in average incomes to “the significant wrenching hits that our economy took in 2001 and 2002, so no one should be surprised that what a bubble economy created in the late 1990s and 2000, where economic data were skewed, would take some time to recover.”

Mr. Fratto said the fact that nearly all of the growth in incomes was among those in the upper reaches of the income ladder and that the majority of investment tax breaks went to those making more than $1 million “is not a very interesting story.”

[…]

He said the more significant issue was the reduction in taxes for middle-class Americans that Mr. Bush won from Congress.

You gotta admire their consistency if nothing else.

Happily, the Times injected a small note of sanity in the midst of all this.

The fact that average incomes remained lower in 2005 than five years earlier helps explain why so many Americans report feeling economic stress despite overall growth in the economy. Many Americans are also paying a larger share of their health care costs and have had their retirement benefits reduced, adding to their out-of-pocket costs.

I’m tempted to make a snide comment but I think I’ll refrain.

You no doubt heard the reports, mostly but not entirely snarky, about Cindy Sheehan’s arrest in the office of John Conyers. I admire her commitment, but it seems to me that her view of the problem is the reverse of reality.

I certainly believe that the current situation calls for, indeed requires, that both the President and the Vice President be impeached. No one can honestly question whether they have committed impeachable offenses. The question is what to do about it, and in this regard the leading Democrats in Congress are proving to be as spineless a majority as they were a minority.

But Conyers is not the problem. It seems clear that he favors impeachment, but to overcome opposition from the Speaker, he needs an overwhelming number of colleagues to back him. Which, in my view, makes Nancy Pelosi the problem. Her office would be a better place to get arrested to make a political point.

As Nader says, what we need is not a third party, but a second one. The Democrats, following the Clinton pattern, talk progressive but act DLC. They need the progressive votes (usually, though in 2008 not so much), but they’re mostly corporatist. The wide-spread recognition of that fact might explain some of the high fives that Edwards got for his two best lines in the recent debate:

Do you believe that compromise, triangulation will bring about big change? I don’t. I think the people who are powerful in Washington — big insurance companies, big drug companies, big oil companies — they are not going to negotiate. They are not going to give away their power! The only way that they are going to give away their power is if we take it away from them!

and

We can’t trade our insiders for their insiders.

Which of course is why the media hates him: they’re insiders whose employers are owned by the big corporations that currently exercise the real power. It’ll be interesting to see if any changes come from the video his campaign released, showing clips of important stuff happening in the world while playing the song “Hair”. Will they get it? (Will they be allowed to?)

In the end, I think Ruth Conniff is on the money with her observations at The Progressive. She mentions Russ Feingold’s proposal to censure Bush and Cheney, the classic wimpy-liberal response to the difference between reality and what the wingnuts demand. This is why the right wing is powerful and the left wing gormless: the right fights and the left compromises.

Conniff talked with John Nichols of The Nation about Feingold’s comment at Kos: “The history books will show we were vocal in condemning the President’s abuses of power.” (That won’t keep the next President from doing the same things, though; do we care?)

While Democrats give voice to public discontent with the Bush administration, the leadership is still operating on the theory that as Bush and the Republicans head off the cliff, the best course of action is to get out of the way. Politically, Nichols concedes, they might be right: “They should just stand up and say if we abdicate our constitutional responsibilities and don’t do our job, we’ll reap the benefits. It will allow us to do good things. They might be right. Standing by and letting a crash occur might benefit you. That’s a credible case.”

Immoral, but credible. That’s the real problem the Democratic leadership faces: they know their strategy is immoral, so they can no more afford to state it than Bush can be honest about imperialism and oil.

Witness the recent Democratic meme that impeachment would keep them from getting useful work done.

“The idea that taking up impeachment will keep us from acting on health care, gay rights, etc., is ahistoric,” Nichols says. “The fact of the matter is that during the impeachment of Nixon back in the 70s, the reason Congress was so effective and got so much done was that Nixon was scared and, in a calculated move, started cooperating with Congress to avoid impeachment. So the right thing to do is move immediately — see what you can get out of Bush.”

For that theory to win the day, the pressure on Congress from voters has to continue to grow.

That means us. Have you contacted your Representative?

California has well over 35 million people. And who’s more connected than we are?

I just went to Senator Diane Feinstein’s web site and entered a comment from a constitutent. The site says “The total number of e-mails sent to Senator Feinstein through this web page”, before the one I sent, was 114,864.

Where the hell is everybody? Californians: Senator Feinstein is on the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Patrick “Go Fuck Yourself” Leahy, currently attempting to extract information from Sara Taylor, Harriet Meirs, and the White House over the US attorney firings. Got anything to say to her?

Here’s what I said.

---

I believe the Senate should hold Ms. Sara Taylor, Ms. Harriet Meirs, and the President in contempt of Congress absent full testimony in the matter of the firing of the US attorneys.

My understanding is that Ms. Taylor and Ms. Meirs no longer work for the White House, and are therefore not under its direction. If the President is claiming that his executive privilege allows him to prevent former aides from testifying about possible illegal actions, I don’t believe such a claim would hold up even in today’s Supreme Court.

If the Congress does not act to restrain this President, he will cause even more harm to the country.

But the greatest harm, an irreparable one, would occur if the Congress fails to enact legal punishment for this administration’s illegal actions.

This President and, most especially, this Vice President have acted as if they are above the law. Congress must show them that they are not, most vigorously, or future Presidents will be completely unaccountable, and the Republic will fade away, like Rome’s did.

It’s not enough to pass resolutions that call President Bush a bad guy. He’s a war criminal; he should be in the dock in The Hague along with his Vice President. In addition, he’s a domestic criminal: he’s violated our civil rights with abandon, and he’s made us less secure, breaking all kinds of laws in the process, and ignoring many more through signing statements.

There are so many reasons to impeach both the President and the Vice President that it appears to me to be the Constitutional responsibility of this Congress to proceed along that path.

Sincerely,
Chuck Dupree

There’s a lot of buzz about the editorial in the New York Times today calling for what loyal Bushies would term precipitate withdrawal.

Indeed, there are some striking statements from this organ of pre-war lies.

At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs — after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

The editorial lists some of the harms the US has suffered as a result of what it calls “this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war”, and accuses the President and Vice President of using demagoguery and fear as weapons against American public opinion. It ends with a call to action.

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.

Executive summary: we thought it would be a cakewalk securing Iraq’s oil, but it wasn’t. So our advice is to cut bait; just don’t let it hurt Israel.

But the Times is ready to give up on the occupation, not the oil.

The bottom line: the Pentagon needs enough force to stage effective raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq, but not enough to resume large-scale combat.

This seems to me patently silly, totally PR, and the colors aren’t even particularly happenin’.

How can one tell whether a given number of ground troops and a fleet of bombers, fighters, and support craft constitute a force whose size is sufficient for effective raiding but not for large-scale combat? Is there a UN agency that does such surveys, or is it an NGO? Sounds like rhetorical cover is being sought.

Plus, there’s an argument to be made that the force we now have in Iraq is not a large-scale combat force; we didn’t expect to see large-scale combat except for a brief period during the invasion. If that argument held up, the Times would presumably be happy simply to remove US troops to bases in Kuwait and the budding Kurdistan. Bringing them home, and getting the hell out of Iraq, does not seem to be the primary goal.

Most importantly, why does our military need to “stage … raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq” if we’re no longer bogged down there militarily? Are we claiming that we have vital interests in Iraq?

Which is really the point. Whether true believer (Bush, Wolfowitz) or shameless profiteer (Cheney, Perle) or lying propagandist (most of the MSM, including the Times), it’s clear that for establishment types in the US, the war in Iraq is subtitled “Oil! And Israel”. The question is not whether the interests are vital, but how best to secure them.

To me, on the other hand, it seems that there are two points to securing the oil in Iraq. One is imperial: to have, as Chomsky says, our hand on the spigot that dispenses an ever more precious resource. The other is corporate: the profits being made in the oil business are nothing short of criminal, and should be treated as such.

We could use the billions we’d collect in fines to fund research into alternative energy and transportation.

Our relationship with Israel has a strong imperial tint as well; as Kissinger said, Israel is our lieutenant in the Middle East. And, given our actions in that area over the past few decades, damn near our only friend. Sure, our military might reinforces some monarchies that wouldn’t last a year without our support; but that’s a different sort of friendship.

Clearly we need a new plan for our forces in Iraq. But we can only make an intelligent one if we state our premises and assumptions. The problem is that my premises and those of the New York Times editorial board don’t match.

Seems to me there are three kinds of problems in Iraq.

• Resistance to foreign occupation
• Sectarian conflict
• Jockeying for government power and oil money

The last two overlap, of course, but it doesn’t matter, because we can’t solve either of them. All we’ve tried to do is buy the Iraqi government some time to get its act together and begin running the country.

Problem is, we know this isn’t going to happen. The Iraqi government did not win an election like those we (used to?) have in the US. Let’s not forget that candidates were often afraid to place their names on the ballot lest they be abducted, tortured, and killed. Campaigning was so dangerous that there was little of it, leaving people to vote for parties rather than individuals or clear positions on issues. As a result, the final tallies closely followed confessional lines.

Not to mention that the Saddam years provided a suboptimal training ground for up-and-coming Iraqi leaders.

In any case the Iraqi government has little real power to wield. It doesn’t control, in the classic sense, any territory at all in its own country. The US has the Green Zone, but even that receives mortar fire (which I don’t think is supposed to happen in an area you control).

The government cannot dispense those oil billions we were told to expect because of sabotage, part of the resistance to the occupation as well as the Sunni-Shia conflict.

It can’t even provide water and electricity — we’ve made sure of that by bombing the crap out of the infrastructure. And by creating a situation that killed or displaced many of the professionals needed to start anew.

Thus it seems that Cheney has succeeded in his plan: the establishment believes that to leave now would be to abandon our friends and give up on all that oil.

In the end, don’t you admire a man who persists in his plan in the teeth of resistance?

“He takes a range of medications that he and his doctors decline to detail. The extent of his atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries, which, if it extends beyond the heart to the brain, can cause hard-to-recognize changes in cognition) is unknown. Bypass surgery itself has long been associated with subtle changes in neurological function.

”At age 65, Cheney is easily 30 or more pounds overweight, seems to have slacked off on what was once a more rigorous diet, and appears to suffer from recurrent bouts of gout. At a roundtable lunch with reporters a couple of years ago, two who were present say, he cut his buffalo steak in bite-size pieces the moment it arrived, then proceeded to salt each side of each piece.“

If four heart attacks (that we know of) aren’t gonna teach him to avoid salt, it’s unlikely that he’s capable of learning anything.

Is it Cheney’s hope to tie us down in Iraq for many years to come, giving no-bid contracts to Halliburton, consuming lives in a perpetual war, and allowing enterprising young men to have other priorities than serving in it?

News reports have for some time shown the Iraqi resistance growing in size and in public acceptance. It’s increasingly clear that the US presence is aggravating the resistance problem to the point that it’s dominating the stage.

Without the US military, Iraq may well descend into a nightmare of bloodshed. Power struggles often go that way, especially among populations whose previous regimes have left them ill-prepared for self-government. But we can’t stop that.

Some of those who supported the war are now cloaking their imperial aims in humanitarian rhetoric. Others use similar rhetoric to cloak their interest in what they think is best for Israel.

We won’t make effective plans until we state our goals honestly. And we can’t do that because we don’t agree on whether the US should be an empire with a lieutenant in the Middle East.

How bad do your prospects have to look before you can get excited about Ted Nugent’s friend Fred Thompson?

Chants of “Fred” and “Run, Fred, Run,” greeted the actor and former GOP senator from Tennessee from many among the 350 people at the Young Republicans National Convention. The crowd interrupted his nine-minute speech with wild applause and mobbed him when he left.

[…]

Kevin Fickert, a 22-year-old college student in Los Angeles who originally is from Massachusetts, said he liked Romney’s leadership as governor but thinks Thompson has more appeal. “Thompson has this star power about him that I really like,” Fickert said.

Hey, I’ve seen that guy on TV! Oh yeah, he’s, like, an actor, or President. Or something.

Why is it that only crappy actors make it in politics? Or perhaps I’m drawing an unwarranted line from Reagan through Schwarzenegger to Thompson. What kind of childhood generates this immense need for the overwhelming father figure? I thought it was about competition.

Thompson’s pro-abortion lobbying effort, directed at Bush I, appears to have caused barely a ripple among his supporters.

“Whatever choice do we have? Mitt Romney has been on both sides of the issue,” said Paul Boyd, 26, of Memphis, Tenn. “Rudy Giuliani is 100 percent pro-choice. John McCain, at least for the first four years of the Bush term, was against whatever the president was for. Everybody has their flaws.”

Good point (but who says, “Whatever choice…?”). Aim low, keep your expectations within reason, or failing that at least the realm of possibility. And you can see what he means when you read that

[Romney] said he would like to use the country’s leading marketing minds to help sell the idea of American values in the Middle East.

“People will give up half a day’s salary to get a Coca-Cola in some parts of the world. We market Coke well. We market McDonald’s well. We market our rap music, our movies, our jeans,” Romney said. “We market everything America sells brilliantly, but when it comes to marketing ourselves and what we stand for, we don’t do a very good job of it.”

Damn, marketing, of course! Why didn’t I think of that? That’s what we haven’t been doing enough of! If people will give up half a day’s salary for a bottle of sugar water, we can surely get away with torturing them and stealing their oil. We just have to market it appropriately, with a certain amount of local sensitivity and some happenin’ colors.

So you can see why Republicans are turning to the man Nixon called “dumb as hell“. (“But he’s friendly,” Nixon allowed.)

Thompson had his supporters. His mentor, for example, Howard Baker, defended him in no uncertain terms: “He’s tough. He’s six feet five inches, a big mean fella”. What he thought that would buy Thompson as re: his career remains uncertain at this point. A starring role, perhaps.

What does appear certain from the established record is that Thompson was keeping the Nixon White House informed of certain key events.

Publicly, Baker and Thompson presented themselves as dedicated to uncovering the truth. But Baker had secret meetings and conversations with Nixon and his top aides, while Thompson worked cooperatively with the White House and accepted coaching from Nixon’s lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt, the tapes and transcripts show.

Thompson made his place in history on Monday, July 16, 1973, by asking former White House aide Alexander Butterfield, “…are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?” Butterfield said, yes, as a matter of fact I am, setting in motion the final act of the Nixon drama, as the tapes proved to be his downfall. Thus, no doubt, Cheney’s passion for secrecy.

But though this was news to the public, it was not to the committee. Thompson was allowed to ask the critical question because he was the lead counsel for the Republicans, whose leader was Baker, and the information had been obtained by a Republican interrogator (which probably didn’t mean the same thing in those days that it would now).

This was a, perhaps the, turning point in the Watergate investigation. Republicans had rallied around their wartime President, a simple, cloth-coated patriot with a dog, who would never stoop to burglarizing an opponent’s office. In fact Baker’s famous “What did the President know and when did he know it?” was, according to historian Stanley Kutler, originally an attempt to show that the evidence hinged on the word of a single person, John Dean, a disgruntled employee if there ever was one, against that of the President of the United States, Leader of the Free World and Political Ass-Kicker Extraordinaire. (I mean, dude, he was friends with J. Edgar; you don’t fuck with those people.)

Unfortunately for Baker et. al., it turned not to be the case. Butterfield revealed the existence of the tapes, and it reached the point where only a Nobel Prize-winning spinner could deal with today’s headlines alone, leaving aside last week’s. It became necessary to look like you supported basic justice, even for Nixon’s moles inside the Watergate committee.

Thompson called Buzhardt over the weekend [before the Monday question] to tip off the White House that the committee knew about the tapes.

“Legalisms aside, it was inconceivable to me that the White House could withhold the tapes once their existence was made known. I believed it would be in everyone’s interest if the White House realized, before making any public statements, the probable position of both the majority and the minority of the Watergate committee,” Thompson wrote in his book.

Scott Armstrong, a Democratic investigator for the committee who was part of the Butterfield questioning, said he was outraged by Thompson’s tip-off.

“When the prosecutor discovers the smoking gun, he’s going to be shocked to find that the deputy prosecutor called the defendant and said, ‘You’d better get rid of that gun,’” Armstrong said in an interview.

Law and Order, that’s what it’s all about. Or is it image, I can’t remember…

Josh has been following the spread of the meme connecting universal health care with terrorism. Seems to have started on Fox Noise, then moved to MSNBC, and now to the New York Sun.

Are these folks really that stupid, or is this propaganda from a desperate position?

The fact that the Al Qaeda plot to detonate car bombs in London and Glasgow was carried out by doctors working for the National Health Service has shocked the British public far more than the fact that they were Muslims.

The notion that the NHS might have been infiltrated by jihadists from the Middle East is as disturbing as the emergence two years ago of young British Muslim suicide bombers.

In fact, it is more disturbing, not just because doctors are meant to save lives rather than commit mass murder, but because the violation of this inner sanctum of the British way of life threatens the whole idea of integration — which is meant to be the answer to Islamism. The line between integration and infiltration is a thin one.

The NHS is the nearest thing to a religion that the British now have. For half a century the British have convinced themselves that the NHS is the envy of the world. It is — for the third world. And it is the third world’s doctors and nurses who keep alive this socialist cult of security from cradle to grave.

Administrations come and, though it sometimes takes forever, they go. Individuals last a bit longer; but arguments outlive us all.

Consider, for example, the argument between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists that caused the English Civil War in 1642, leading to the execution of King Charles I and the exile of his son, later Charles II. Apparently the historical knowledge required to make useful comparisons was insufficiently widely distributed. (Unfortunately Decline and Fall would not be published for 135 years.) What were they thinking, not killing the kid? Mercy and regicide don’t mix. Not that the alternative always succeeds, mind you; but you gotta start somewhere.

In American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips talks about the connections between the English Civil War and the American one. New England, after all, was favored with lots of Puritans, who were generally sympathetic to Cromwell’s Roundheads. Many New Englanders shipped back to England to fight against Charles I.

Big Men in the Southern states, on the other hand, expected the privileges their patrons back in England had of owning and ordering, and basically living in a Cavalier fashion (how else?). The Province of Carolina, for example, was named after the headless king. It was granted to eight supporters by Charles II when he regained the throne. (One of whom, Lord Shaftesbury, employed a secretary named John Locke.) Most of the Southerners who returned to England to fight in the Civil War were Royalists. They tended to believe in centralization of power, since they were in the center. Unfortunately we’re not able to do a controlled experiment in this regard, but had their quarters been swapped for those of their slaves, they might have thought differently.

The conflict, in other words, was inherent in the soul of the United States from long before it became an independent political entity. Monarchy or Parliamentarianism? You’re either with us or against us.

Which adds a bit of back story to the current conflicts between Congress and the White House over whether, despite Tony Snow’s ruling, Congress has, and will execute, Constitutional oversight responsibilities with respect to the executive branch.

Kanye West might be right, though it seems to me that Shrub cares more about money than skin color; he and Snoop seem to be cool with each other, for example. But I can name one black person George Bush does care about: John Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and the only member who was involved in the Congressional fight to get documents from the Nixon White House. Then there’s Henry Waxman, neither the most beautiful Representative nor the most riveting speaker, but something of a progressive Javert. John Dean says Waxman “may be the nation’s most diligent and vigilant member of Congress”. That, beloveds, is truly what the Founding Fathers intended, Federalist Society be damned.

In the Senate, the White House faces Patrick “Go Fuck Yourself” Leahy, who just might harbor a bit of resentment against the Cheney administration’s imperial style. And Leahy, like Waxman, was elected to Congress for the first time in November, 1974, three months after Nixon resigned.

“This is a further shift by the Bush administration into Nixonian stonewalling and more evidence of their disdain for our system of checks and balances,” said [Leahy]. “Increasingly, the president and vice president feel they are above the law — in America no one is above law.”

The question now is what to do about the obvious facts — namely, that the President and the Vice President, among others, have committed serious crimes, in my view including war crimes and crimes against humanity, and violated their Constitutional responsibilities.

There’s an X-Files episode about Mulder and Scully going to Texas on an investigation, and filing reports afterward. Their reports are quite different, and the episode shows flashbacks from both points of view. It’s one of their silliest; the scene with Mulder explaining that it’s surprisingly difficult to shoot out the tires on an RV making circles in a parking lot is great. It’s filmed in black-and-white, and includes a sheriff who Mulder recalls as a country bumpkin with buck teeth and Scully recalls as a southern gentleman of whom Mulder is jealous.

Turns out the town is infested with the undead. Our heros realize this when, as a result of ordering pizza, they wake up with their shoelaces tied and the pizza uneaten. Aha, says Mulder, vampires.

When they finally get the scoop, they realize the sheriff is also a vampire. The vampires, it seems, have learned to live in relative peace with the surrounding community by keeping their heads down and only feeding in ways that the locals can dismiss as religious visions or alcohol-induced fantasies. The sheriff, realizing he’s got a sympathetic audience in the FBI agents, confesses, and apologizes for the pizza-delivery boy: “He never got the concept of low-profile.”

Which, I assert, is a metaphor for government. Like vampiring, government resembles typography and refereeing; when it’s done well, it’s unnoticeable. In a basketball game, where calls make much more difference than in baseball, football, soccer, or tennis, the best referees are quiet: they call all the blatant stuff and let the dinky stuff go, and they do so in a relatively even manner. This is what people want when they petition for referees to “let the players decide the game”.

Problems arise when one side adopts a consistent strategy of not simply pushing the envelope of the rules but openly flaunting its refusal to obey them. How then can a fair referee “let the players decide the game”? Inadvertent rule violations are one thing; cheating is another, and the nature of things in such cases is that the “activist” referees control the outcome. And we saw how well that worked in 2000.

The question now is, God help us, what the Supreme Court will do if the dispute over subpoenas arrives there. I doubt there’s any pro-Monarchist position that couldn’t attract Scalia and Thomas, and probably Alito. But I think, for now, that the rule of law might hope to get five votes. We’re very likely to get Kennedy, who’s often called The Swing Vote; and we might even get Roberts on the issue of separation of powers, an area in which the Court has historically guarded its prerogatives, and where the Chief Justice’s own power and prestige are affected.

Thorsten Veblen describes another kind of vampire in his Theory of the Leisure Class. The Wikipedia entry notes, among other things, that Veblen’s critique is more radical than that of Marx, who grants the superiority of capitalism over feudalism. Veblen doesn’t; he considers capitalism to be the modern manifestation of primitive tribal behavior, in which status is the highest value.

In Veblen’s view, the development of human society grew from the prehistoric search for necessities, specifically food. At first, everyone brought back what they found, and everyone ate. Then some people realized that they could intimidate others, or attack them and steal their take, and avoid the hard work of gathering.

Over time, this “leisure class” did less and less real work. They preferred hunting to gathering. Hunting generates food when it’s successful, but it burns a lot of calories with uncertain results. They might occasionally raid neighbor tribes and bring back booty that was useful to everyone, thus provoking Paleolithic blowback. Which in turn creates the requirement for a constant vigil to protect the home land.

The leisure class concentrated on two things:

• Warfare, manufacture of the associated weapons and propaganda, and rules to restrict the knowledge of weapons
• The development of various forms of status to differentiate the two classes

There are several natural results of this social structure, such as endemic warfare and lies, and the endless struggle for alpha-dog status. (“Think I’ll buy me a football team.”)

Veblen argues that status quickly dissociated itself from utility, to the point that one can now determine the status of an activity largely by judging its usefulness: the more useful it is, the lower its status. Think farming versus bond trading. Even activities that might seem to have useful side effects, such as the physical fitness required to play football, can be masquerades, according to Veblen, who considers that the “relation of football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight to agriculture”.

Thus he derives the concept of conspicuous consumption, consuming more than you need: if you can waste, you must have a lot, so waste indicates high status. Once you’re consuming as much as you can, you want people to know it, otherwise you don’t get the status points.

Next there’s conspicuous leisure. If you can sit on the porch and wave as the neighbors leave for work, you’re higher status than they are. Then comes vicarious consumption — your dependents are also wasteful — and vicarious leisure — your servants sit on the porch and wave.

Veblen proceeds to apply this viewpoint to a variety of society’s oddities, often with comic effect. You can tell, he says, that society affords God very high status by looking at the number of people employed for his vicarious leisure. He has a stretch of about two pages on why dogs are higher status than cats that is hilarious. In his view, hunting is an expression of the right of the leisure class to do whatever useless thing strikes its fancy. The fox hunt, for example, is certainly not done for the sake of calories, and that inefficiency is a hallmark of status. The more useless, the higher the status.

He must have been pretty popular at cocktail parties back in 1899 with that kind of line.

So when I catch myself having Nixon flashbacks, I remind myself: yes, this is really a new version of the same battle. Yes, this is a battle that’s apparently endemic to American life. Yes, it even goes back three and half centuries to the English Civil War. And, okay, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s what humans have always done. We’ve also always killed each other. Doesn’t mean we can’t stop.

We’re not seeing replays from the Nixon years randomly. This struggle’s been going on for centuries. Should the United States have an all-powerful executive, kinda like a pope or, here’s an idea, a king? Or should we elect, say, a legislature or a parliament to make the rules?

It comes down — surprise! — to the rich and powerful few against the meek and voiceless many. And the rich are way richer now, compared to the rest of us, than they were only a decade or two ago. Maybe, after all, we should just return to a feudal society and admit the rich will always control us. Feudal serfs, after all, were assured food, clothing, and health care, such as it was, by the lord’s need for laborers at the next harvest. We peasants had some value. (Especially after the Black Death, when the number of laborers dropped in Europe dropped by about a third in a year and a half. Good times!)

Alternatively, we could shoulder our burdens as citizens and try to emulate the founders, or rather to realize their highest statements of ideal. We are many, and we have recently found new ways to organize and to make ourselves heard.

There is much to do. War still rages in Iraq, there is still great poverty in the richest nation in history, and many of our citizens are without health care. Past generations of Americans have surmounted obstacles more difficult than these. It is our turn.

It’s possible that we’re on the verge of a new flowering of democracy in America — of all places! — arising from the abuses of the Cheney administration.

But if so, the first step is to confront the abuses and the lawbreaking head-on. I don’t mean that we’re ready to confront our own national nature as couch-potato bullies; that’ll have to be put off. At a minimum, though, we must accept that our government can be hijacked by people whose actions, whatever their statements or even intentions, are destructive to the point of criminality.

And that this affects us all.

The President and the Vice President command, and to some extent control, the entire federal bureaucracy, including what amounts to a private army in the CIA, and a huge and nearly unaccountable intelligence community with an unknown budget. I haven’t read everything written by the founders, but I have yet to encounter anything I could interpret as countenancing a President’s private army or an unaccountable spy network. This, it seems to me, is exactly what they were rebelling against. And exactly how things happened in Rome.

In this continuing argument, I’m reminded of the judgement of Lazarus Long:

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

I’m basically a libertarian in that I don’t want government to tell me what to do. But I also think we can do things collectively that we can’t do alone: schools, roads, hospitals, moon shots, cures for cancer. What do we call the entity that executes our wishes in this collective fashion? I think the word is government, but I’m not stuck on that.

I’m also a socialist in that I think our collective actions should have the goal of increasing the common wealth. And it seems to me that a big part of our common wealth is our heritage of participatory government.

If we fail to confront the blatant law-breaking by the President and the Vice President in some institutional way, we will take a big step down Rome’s path. Probably we can’t impeach both Bush and Cheney before the 2008 election. But we should try.

And there’s no statute of limitations on war crimes.

In a long rant at the Smirking Chimp David Michael Green attempts to implant Karl Rove’s spine in Harry Reid. Probably Reid’s immune system will reject the foreign tissue, but Green’s masterful fulminations are still right on the mark, and fun to read. So go do it.

The Author of Authenticity is at it again. He understands where the real netroots lie. He just doesn’t get immigration. Or maybe he hasn’t processed having been exposed in the US Attorney scandal.

Anyway, it’s more fun in some ways to see the Cheney administration fall than was the case with Nixon, mainly because you can see this one coming a mile away; back then I’d given up.

Launching the blog offensive

Aides said it was Rove’s idea to focus on blogs. After vetting by policy experts, responses have been posted on a wide range of blogs under the names of Kerrie Rushton and Nicholas Thompson, both associate directors in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, which falls under Rove’s domain.

“We had to be nimble,” said White House Communications Director Kevin Sullivan, who is coordinating the administration’s public relations strategy. “The idea was to not let inaccurate or misleading statements become part of the conventional wisdom.”

Two problems: they don’t have much experience with distributing accurate information, and the most irate part of the audience isn’t known for its listening skills.

Erick-Woods Erickson, the managing editor of Redstate.com, which is the largest right-of-center community on the Internet, praised the White House for an aggressive effort to get out its points and corrections to opponents’ postings.

“In my four years of active participation in blogs, I have never seen anything like this on any issue, including the president’s reelection,” Erickson said in an e-mail. “Had the White House been as aggressive on the war, Social Security reform, health care reform, etc., it might be winning on those issues. Somehow, though, it chose to pick the one issue least popular with the base to claim as their hill to die on.”

I’ve had some fun and enlightening conversations with Russians who’ve moved to the Bay Area. We have a decent contingent of people who speak Russian in San Francisco, enough that certain parts of town have a few billboards with Cyrillic characters. Of course our ballots and our instructions for pumping gas have only English, Chinese, and Spanish. But everyone other than Americans speaks more than one language, right? So they can get by.

I always try to ask people who lived in the USSR about this: I’ve read that Americans who visited found the citizens surprisingly well informed about events in the outside world, despite government censorship. Westerners were flattered to learn that our radio broadcasts had helped, at least for some locations. But folks would also say, “You just have to learn how to read Pravda.” Simple example: if some big event is coming up, then they say nothing about it in the press, you know it went badly, and you can figure out why. If they trumpet it, you know it went well, and it’s probably being overblown, so you discount it a bit.

That sort of thing is pretty simple. We do it with the Cheney administration all the time. Now. I mean, you and I did it from before the beginning, but our leaders, and thus our media, are just starting to catch on.

Determined exegesis can sometimes extract useful information even from those whose points of view prevent from seeing the obvious meaning of the events they report. Reporters who don’t get it can still pass along data to their readers; it’s just more effort for the readers to sift it out. The government may classify stuff and lie with abandon, but it doesn’t openly censor.

Our media are not controlled like the Soviet media were; ours are controlled by corporations, which control the government. And, as Chomsky says, propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism. Our system is propaganda at home coupled with violence abroad. And realistically, it’s been that way for as long as we’ve had the capability to “project force”. The Monroe Doctrine — back off, Europe and Asia, we own this hemisphere — was imperialistic in nature, but it understood the limits of American power at the time.

We gained on the rest of the world, as Paul Kennedy describes in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, with the First World War, which cost the European powers dearly but didn’t touch our homeland; we lost people, but we didn’t have to rebuild our houses. The Second World War left us in an even better relative position: not merely the strongest militarily, but more importantly, says Kennedy, by far the strongest industrially, which means the strongest financially. That industrial, and therefore financial, strength is necessary to project military might.

If, in fact, that’s what you want to do. That was America’s method as long as its imperialism was, on its face at least, mainly economic. Original conquest was generally done by corporations and advertising rather than armies and bombing. In some ways this method was preferable to Rome’s: fewer people died as a direct result of invasion.

Rome’s heavy hand was felt mostly in taxes. Sure, they took some of the best artwork from your temples back to Rome; but they handled it with care and displayed it honorably, and left you to worship whatever was left in Pax Romana. In the main, they didn’t go around smashing stuff just for fun. Carthage, of course, was an exception, but that wasn’t for fun. Julius Caesar’s army burned the first library of Alexandria, but he claimed it was accidental, and that seems reasonable. Only later, with the merger of Christianity and Imperial government, did anti-intellectual currents reach the point of getting rid of impure knowledge.

If our conquests feel the heavy hand of America, the cost is more often paid these days in resources and in culture. Once we have you in our orbit, our extraction companies sign sweetheart deals — even, somehow, now that there’s a law against bribing foreign officials — after which we garrison in your country only the troops we need to protect our investment. (Chalmers Johnson counts 737 US bases around the world.) Then there’s our banks, our drug companies, our agricultural behemoths, and so on.

The barrage of “information” we project is equally imperialistic: it’s a true culture war. Americans are said to be subjected to a trillion ads per lifetime, and the folks represented by Madison Avenue want access to the new overseas markets as well; otherwise what’s the point of having an empire? We think we’ve grown inured to the ads by now, but they’re designed to prevent that, and to work with the subconscious of an increasingly sophisticated target audience. We get the message without meaning to.

Propaganda is to democracy…

In some ways, having a bunch of soldiers slaughtered on a battlefield, after which you had to pay taxes and your temples lost some artifacts, was a better deal. Your king was probably pretty awful anyway. Oh, and if you didn’t have written laws, or even an alphabet, well, you do now. Hail, Caesar!

If the functional goal is not empire, but concentration of wealth in the hands of your friends, then the projection of military power doesn’t require industrial might, except in the area of weapons. (And, what ho, that’s the only remaining industry in which we excel.) All it requires is that the war end with your friends in control of the major assets. If your country’s industrial might has moved offshore during the process, that will only put your friends farther ahead of the pack. How much of that will they be willing to spend on your library, eh?

At some level all administrations are motivated to concentrate wealth in certain hands as opposed to others. Every candidate receives contributions of money, time, and influence. Once elected, most of their programs have the effect of redistributing wealth in some fashion; government can’t do much without money, and that money comes from somewhere and goes somewhere.

But with the Cheney administration, the motivation couldn’t be more obvious (to the point where it’s beginning to be noticed by reporters and pundits in the remote highlands within the Beltway). For example, what do administration spokesfolks want the Iraqi “government” to do more than anything? Pass the bill that allocates oil revenues among the various sections of Iraqis. And gives the force of law, whatever that turns out to mean, to the sweetheart contracts for American oil companies. They seriously need that baby passed before January 20, 2009.

As long as they end up holding the wealth of Iraq, the common wealth of the United States can go to hell. Or China, or Brazil, or Venezuela even. Just not Cuba.

The problem with the current workings of the American political system is that Presidents nearly always represent the rich, or they wouldn’t have been able to raise enough money. (By my definition, you’re not rich if you answer your own door.) As Internet contributions broadened the available base, new possibilities open for candidates to raise money in small chunks from huge numbers of people. At this point, though, we’re still in the era of small numbers of big contributors to many politicians — I think saw a report that three-quarters of Clinton’s contributions come from about 5,000 sources.

There are clearly still politicians who represent industries, or particular corporate interests, or a group of extremely wealthy families, ahead of everything else. Of course any viable candidate has contributors with deep pockets. The question is, who are they and what do they want? We need to keep checking those donor lists…

In American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips talks about industrial flight and the rise of financialism in the context of what previous empires have done. Toynbee says dying civilizations tend to spawn religions near the end; Phillips notes the turn from manufacture to finance that accompanied the last stage of imperial power in Rome, Spain, the Netherlands, and Britain.

Ours appears at this point to be an extreme example of the type. Phillips, if memory serves (my copy’s loaned out), lists manufacturing at about 12% of the current US economy, and finance at about 44%, a startling reversal from a couple of decades back when we led the world in making damn near everything, more and better.

Nowadays, we’re borrowing a couple billion every day from banks in China and Japan and elsewhere to keep ourselves in the style to which we’ve become accustomed. Our savings rate is holding near zero, sometimes slightly below that. We’re working more hours for the same income — real wages are about what they were in 1973 — while corporate profits seem to set new records every year. And these aren’t five or ten percent increases, either. CEOs’ retirement packages alone dwarf the total income a normal family could hope to put together in their collective lifetimes. Come to that, Paris Hilton probably pays her publicist more than I make in five years. (On the other hand, I’m not in jail.)

Overall, we’ve got an economy whose base has narrowed significantly in the past half century. We now specialize in weapons, finance, drugs, and industrial-strength agriculture. We might yet make a prophet of Neal Stephenson; in his near-future Snow Crash, the US leads the world in only three areas: movies, software, and pizza delivery. (The hero, Hiro Protagonist, the Deliverator, works for Uncle Enzo’s Pizza, where if the pizza doesn’t arrive within thirty minutes, Uncle Enzo helicopters in to apologize in person. After which he’ll visit with the local franchise.)

To some extent the damage done to the US economy as we lose our manufacturing base has positive effects in the new host countries. Bill Greider, in One World, Ready or Not, provides his usual combination: lots of relevant detail, extraordinary ability to put it all in perspective, and the skill to explain it clearly and to show why it matters and what it means. Some countries are poor enough that even Nike and Reebok factories are a win.

The market explanation would be that, as soon as the poorest countries catch up with the rest of the world, things will even out and Utopia will bloom. As far as I’m aware, though, they’re unable to come up with any (historically accurate) examples of this type of plan succeeding. The so-called Asian Tiger economies have done quite well employing many forms of government interference in the market. The US refuses on principle to coördinate activities among private ventures (though of course that’s only a principle, we don’t always have to go by it; laws, after all, are only advisory in nature for those whose accountability moments are past). Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, for example, has no such qualms.

Our biggest industry is finance, which in principle doesn’t care where the jobs are located as long as production costs are minimized and profits maximized. This is what existing financial theory takes to be a basic tenet of capitalism. But, beloveds, I ask you: what kind of basis for a decent and just society is this transfer of wealth from poor to rich, here or there?

I suspect the best hope for maintaining the current structure of power and privilege (if that’s your goal) is to allow the insertion of a soul into the juggernaut of capitalism. Otherwise, our trajectory seems headed for something between another Depression and another Paris Commune.

McCain drew loud applause from the partisan debate audience when he turned a question about the war in Iraq into criticism of the leading Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

“When Senator Clinton says this is Mr. Bush’s war, President Bush’s war,” she is wrong, he said. “When President Clinton was in power, I didn’t say Bosnia was President Clinton’s war,” the Arizona senator said.

Which is not to say it wouldn’t have been true. Besides, despite the illegality, immorality, and stupidity of Clinton’s war, you can’t really say he lied to get the country behind him. At least, not nearly as blatantly as Bush. Sure, he had reasons that weren’t related to national security, or even to altruism; but those interests weren’t so baldly money-oriented. Like his predecessor, Clinton needed to prove he was tough, and he needed some public distractions from his problems. This probably made it easier to convince him to bomb the Chinese embassy. For example.

“Presidents don’t lose wars. Political parties don’t lose wars. Nations lose wars,” he added.

One outta three ain’t bad for an old warhorse like the Senator. Presidents and political parties who forge documents and lie about weapons systems and rig intelligence (and out agents for political gain) to convince a skeptical public to buy into a war that then fails, as it was obviously bound to, do indeed lose wars. And this generation of Americans is unlikely to forget that, no matter how much re-branding Boehner does.

What I think will stick with people most of all are the Bushies’ blatant distaste for the truth, the overt corruption that pervades not only the administration but the hierarchy of the Republican party, and the attempt, most visible in the US attorney scandal, to turn the executive branch into an arm of that party. Rebranding, or finding kinder, gentler candidates, is not gonna save the Republicans in 2008.

The problem with that is, of course, that we’ll then be stuck with the Democrats, and we’ve already seen the strength of their commitment to what we voted for in 2006.

I’ve already predicted that Obama will win the Democratic nomination as a compromise between the DLC (Clinton, Biden, the money) and the anti-war wing (Edwards, Dodd, Richardson, Gravel, Kucinich). It’s a battle for the soul of the Democratic party, at a moment in history where the Democratic nominee is extremely likely to cruise into the White House with a comfortable (i.e., unriggable) margin. That gives people who vote in the Democratic primary a lot of voice.

Which means the Rove machine will try to rig the Democratic primaries. The 2008 Republican presidential candidates look like a lost cause; but Karl might try an old Nixon trick, tying the opposition in knots. Nixon, of course, did it when he probably would have won anyway. But Rove et. al. would have a slightly different motive: electing an incompetent. And given that it’ll be a Democrat, this is not an insubstantial threat.

What we need, I love to quote Bob Kerrey saying, is not a little more of the same thing, but a lot more of something completely different. Particularly as regards