Summer vacation at the Pond. I figure since the President doesn't work during August, and we pay him $400,000 per year, then Waldenswimmer, who works for nothing, should be afforded at least the same benefit. See you in September.
Henry
An old friend of mine from way, way back, a man who has served this country honorably in several capacities, wonders why I do this. I've often asked myself the same question. Part of it has to do with that quote from Edmund Burke featured on the vertical masthead to the right, the idea that one ought to do something when you think your own country is going down the tubes, however humble, however small scale. I don't think what I'm doing here is very much, frankly. I have done more, in fact. In 2004 I worked in Florida for the Election Protection Coalition as a voting site observer and legal adviser, part of a nationwide effort to reduce the level of illegal crap which had gone on in the 2000 elections in that very state and others. My reactions to that experience were mixed. It felt good to do something so tangible but it was also a window into how very broken our electoral system really is.
Anyway, most of the time I'm just blowing off steam. It doesn't take very long to write the blog because I have a left brain which tends to think in complete sentences, probably a vestigial artifact of the verbal era in which my friend and I were educated in the public schools. Sometimes I research what I'm writing, particularly on legal issues where I want to be certain I never say anything which is clearly inaccurate. I can usually avoid most glaring errors, at least.
A great writer once noted that good writing should sound like refined conversation. That's a good rule of thumb. I try not to write in prose which is stilted or overly complex, and to use colloquial phrases instead of formalisms whenever possible. Most writers unconsciously repeat words in sequential sentences (the power of suggestion), and my editing (which takes about 5 minutes) is directed to that quirk, to avoid monotony. You can usually spot unedited writing in blogs if you pay attention to that tendency.
I got started writing the blog because I just couldn't believe what was happening to the United States, and with the grandiosity of the uninitiated I thought throwing a few more words on the pile could turn things around. Humans are like that; we earnestly believe we can reorder reality by imagining it different. Have you ever sat around a dinner table and completely revamped America's energy regime? Then you wonder why your brilliant idea isn't implemented the next week. Same with all aspects of politics. I thought that if Americans realized that the Bill of Rights was under assault from the very government which they elected, they would immediately do the right thing. It turns out this is not the case. I never thought I would live to see the day when American citizens could be arrested on American soil, thrown in a dungeon, denied access to counsel, and kept in the dark about any charges against them without so much as a word of official protest. It's happened three times since Bush took office. Nor did I believe that the United States would ever implement a program to systematically violate the Geneva Conventions, torturing and killing many prisoners in the process. We've done all that, too.
So we've changed. A lot. A blog is useful for recording your impressions of those changes, as a kind of public diary. I don't think it makes much difference whether you record them publicly or privately anymore, because the concept of "privacy" is also a thing of the past. The details of your entire life are now available on government, credit reporting and mailing list database computers. I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I don't wear a tinfoil hat. Far from it. I'm much less hysterical about all of this than a lot of the "celebrity" bloggers who write about the predations of modern American government.
Once, back in the mid Eighties, I was visiting German friends who live in Heidelberg. A good friend of theirs was an artist who lived in Czechoslovakia (when it was called that, Mr. McCain). I noted in talking to him, and to other people I met subsequently who had lived in police states behind the Iron Curtain, how utterly matter-of-fact they were about the impossibility of progressive change. One would think that a creative mind would be in a state of constant hysteria about the absence of free speech, about informers and arbitrary detention for dissent, the uselessness of the "elections." Quite the contrary. They possessed a wry and ironical detachment from the insanity of the social order. You can't go around in life all worked up and foaming at the mouth when you live in such places. You'll burn yourself completely out. I think, approaching things from the other direction (out-of-control, deregulated capitalism), we have arrived at a similar state. Big Money controls the organs of communication (television, radio and major newspapers) and Congress, through the lobbying system. That's enough to control everything. There is no need to lock up dissenters in the United States because their dissent is useless and unheeded. Seriously, all these Internet commenters and bloggers are just speaking quietly into hurricane-force winds. That's something you learn by writing one of these things. Companies which can write large checks to decision-makers do not need to worry about some guy wearing a pair of hiking shorts tapping away on his keyboard in his den. Similarly, major communications media are owned by a dwindling group of large corporate holding companies, and this has produced a kind of Pravda or Izvestia feel to the dissemination of "free speech" and opinion. Not just anything gets said - it has to fall within certain business-permitted and conventional parameters. These house organs drown out, by a thousand-fold, the whimpering of the Internet writers.
Our wholesale indifference to the huge changes in our government and legal system means that we are not going to return to those halcyon days when our system for maintaining civil liberties and human dignity were the envy of the world. I don't know exactly why we've become such a coarse, loutish and unprincipled country. My guess is that it owes to the deteriorating quality of our educational system. We still produce elites who can excel and make a lot of money, compete on the world stage, but we're growing a huge underclass in place of what was once the middle class, people who lead lives of quiet desperation and don't have time for the lofty musings of the self-styled blogger. That's a shame. The unexamined life, as the great thinker told us, is not worth living.
Philosophically, I think the time has come for the American people to think in terms of cultivating their own garden, perhaps literally as well as figuratively. Voltaire had that part right all along. And then my inspiration, Henry David Thoreau, fills in the rest of the blanks. Lead a principled life of your own and don't concern yourself over much with the stresses and problems of the world at large. Take care of that part of Mother Earth which lies close by you. America will proceed on its path of devolution and will become something else in time, maybe a fragmented regional confederation. As we see every four years or so, the strain of trying to strike balances between parts of the country which really do not see eye-to-eye, which have very little in common other than a collective memory of the way things used to be, has produced a political system which is utterly impotent to solve real problems. The only thing the country seems able to do on a consistent basis is to engage in war, and there's no future in that. Not one we should be interested in, anyway.
I was glad to see this commentary by Joe Klein in his Time magazine blog "Swampland,", analyzed approvingly by Daniel Levy on the TheHuffingtonPost:"There is a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who unsuccessfully tried to get Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and then successfully helped provide the intellectual rationale for George Bush to do it in 2003... Happily, these people represent a very small sliver of the Jewish population in this country...I remain proud of my Jewish heritage, a strong supporter of Israel...But I am not willing to grant these ideologues the anonymity they seek...I believe there are a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who are pushing for war with Iran because they believe it is in America's long-term interests and because they believe Israel's existence is at stake. They are wrong and recent history tells us they are dangerous. They are also bullies and I'm not going to be intimidated by them."
Klein has been viciously attacked by Jewish neoconservatives such as John Podhoretz, Jr. for his apostasy, or more colloquially, for his chutzpah in displaying such a shanda fur die goyim. As one who sympathizes with the plight of Israel, as unorthodox as that may be in modern liberal circles (lay it off to my love of George Gershwin and Philip Roth - I don't care), I have been distressed by the co-opting of right wing Jewish intellectuals such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby and, of course, the Senator from Israel, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, in Bush's scorched earth policies in the Middle East. Co-opting, of course, is too mild a word. They were active participants. I have always considered their influence fundamentally misguided and a near-disaster for Israel's image in the American liberal community. By throwing their lot in with George W. Bush's hamfisted, incompetent, violent approach to his "freedom agenda," they have made it more difficult to discuss rationally what is actually in Israel's long-term strategic (and existential) interest, particularly because Bush, in his monomaniacal focus on stabilizing Iraq by force no matter what the cost, abandoned the peace process in the actual Middle East (Palestine-Israel) in favor of an "Axis of Evil" bellicosity.
The American public, charming folk that they are, are often about as astute in discerning subtle distinctions as a kitten watching a string swinging before its face. Since these big Neocons represent the apparent weight of opinion in the American Jewish community, the tendency is to deduce that all American Jews have become, mutatis mutandis, Right Wing. This is simply not the case, as Klein and Levy point out, neither here nor in Israel. I have had occasion to refer admiringly to the "South Jerusalem" blog, for example, but one can multiply such examples endlessly. The Neocons are Jewish extremists. The identification of American Jewry with the worst aspects of Bush's foreign policy, such as the constant war drumming for a war with Iran, also gives those Americans with anti-Semitic tendencies, who were looking for something to hang their Jewish hatred on anyway, a "rational" hook for their bias. Lieberman, in his transparent cheerleading for yet another use of the American military in a preemptive war in the Middle East, is committing a form of treason, in my book, and the evidence for such a serious charge is supported by his shameless appearance at John Hagee's Christians United for Israel hullabaloo. Does he represent the USA, Israel, or does he just want to see the End Times roll?
Anyway - mazeltov to Joe Klein. I think what he's doing is therapeutic and heroic. Let's not forget that the official position of the U.S. intelligence agencies is that Iran is not working on development of an atomic bomb, and that as signatories to the Nonproliferation Treaty (unlike India or Pakistan, to name two examples without naming the third), they are currently within their rights to enrich unranium. Am I reassured by such legalities? No, I'm not, but it would be a welcome change if the United States operated within the bounds of treaties it has already signed. Bush's habit of ignoring all legalities (his unilateral rejection of the ABM treaty has been a disaster in American-Russian relations, for example) comes into play once again. If it is not permissible for Iran to enrich uranium, then change the damn treaty. It's nuts to threaten war over the legal exercise of an international right. It breeds utter contempt for American actions, which under Bush have become a series of ad hoc, unilateralist, rogue spasms apparently dictated by whatever his Magic 8 Ball tells him to do that morning.
Not an approach that any country, or ethnic group, should want to have anything to do with.
I caught Nancy Pelosi's act on Jon Stewart's Daily Show a couple of nights ago and was reminded yet again how much our elected Reps rely on the dismal state of American civics education to get away with forfeiting their Constitutional duty to rein in a runaway presidency. And was also struck again at how thoroughly out of place Nancy seems as Speaker of the House. She remains the perfect Pacific Heights socialite; all batting eyes, forced laughter, charming chit-chat. I don't say that as a sexist remark -- it's her choice to present herself as an airhead.
Maybe she's appearing on a comedy show but Stewart was asking her serious questions.
Like: did it ever occur to you people just to refuse Bush his allowance for his vanity war in Iraq? I was (somewhat) surprised to hear that the House of Representatives, under her leadership, had tried that very thing. Sure, they had voted the money; but they'd attached "conditions" to its use, like a "timeline." However, when the bill came back from the Senate, the timelines had been stripped out, so then they had no choice but to...And the problem all along was that darn 60 vote rule in the Senate, so poor Mr. Mumbles (Harry Reid) had no choice but to cave in to the wishes of the Republican, er, minority, because he couldn't get a timeline bill to the Senate floor for a vote.
Stewart, leaving behind his comedic persona, simply stared at her in disbelief. They're still using that pathetic excuse? Under Article I of the United States Constitution, no authorization bill for federal spending can originate other than in the House of Representatives. That's what Madison, Hamilton, et al. had in mind when they decided that the People's House should control the People's money. Really, it's the ultimate power; not even George W. Bush can do anything without money. He can rant and rave, hold his breath till he turns blue, blackmail Congress with the threat to expose them as a group of enemy collaborators, anything he wants - but he still can't do anything unless Nancy Pelosi agrees, as the leader of the majority party in the People's House, to give him the money to do it with.
One of the great ironies is that the Democrats, by funding everything in Iraq including the escalation in men and expense known as the "surge," have set the stage for their own unraveling. They have given McCain his best and only argument: I was right about the Surge, Obama was wrong. Let' face it, it resonates. As certain as I am this morning that it is a clear day in July, I am confident that those 30,000 troops were not decisive in bringing about the "progress" in Iraq. The prior ethnic cleansing, the walling off of sectarian neighborhoods, the cease fire called by al-Sadr, and sheer battle fatigue brought about a diminution of mayhem in Iraq, and the violence is far from over. The blood rivalries run so deep that Iraq will remain "fragile" (as the hawks put it) for a very long time, much longer than we can possibly afford to stay there. McCain talks as if what is going on there now is some sort of steady state that will sustain itself on its own momentum in perpetuity. This is crazy nonsense. Let's face it: we vastly underestimated how inherently unstable Iraq really is.
But such an argument, like the even better argument that the war was dumb to begin with, is slightly too nuanced for sound-bite America. Americans want to feel "safe," and the guy who can make you safe is the guy who can explain everything in a sentence -- there were bad people there, we stayed the course and got rid of them. Something along those lines. Never mind reality; we need something that will fit on an adhesive strip on my rear bumper. So La Diva and Mr. Mumbles needed to fulfill that mandate from the American people that was equally simple in its formulation: get this stupid war over with. They didn't do it. They played ball, played it safe, and Nancy, the perfect smiling hostess, is now serving canapes topped with roast crow, all washed down with a snifter of bitter gall.
For Itz Brownstein,
to talk about at dinner (at 4 pm)
To begin with, I won't even pretend that I can appreciate, at an emotional, intellectual or visceral level, what you as a people have been through. Name another people and its genocidal treatment - Armenians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Native Americans - and what you will find is that they were once subjected to an awful pogrom which resonates through history, but that it was a singular experience, the product of specific historical circumstances. Not so the Jews. No, anti-semitism occupies a special place in human history, a blood libel and an institutionalized bigotry drawing its strength and endurance from religious sources, powered by hatred which never completely loses its potency. There are some, like David Irving or Ahmadinejad, whose hatred of the Jews is so complete, so consuming, that they even seek to deny you the dignity of remembering the truth about what happened in the Shoah.
Anti-Semitism is vile, diseased, a sickness which has served as the motive force behind the greatest crimes in history. The Inquisition, the wholesale pogroms and displacement in Russia and so many other places, and the most odious of all offenses against decency and humanity, the Holocaust. And beneath the skin of your supposed historical friends lies many an anti-Semite. Winston Churchill, who even after Kristallnacht in 1938 praised Hitler as a "great man." Charles Lindbergh, who was house hunting in Berlin even after the deportations began, who consulted with the Luftwaffe on their use of planes gladly sold to them by American aircraft companies. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who as a young lawyer in New York proposed a system for reducing the numbers of Jews at Harvard, finding their representation there "excessive." Gandhi, who worked against the establishment of a homeland for Jews except in Tanganyika - there was a brilliant idea from the Mahatma - why not a refuge for the Jews in a former German colony? Churchill and Roosevelt again, who blocked the escape of the Jews from Germany at every turn, refusing to expand immigration quotas even as your parents and grandparents were rounded up and sent to death camps.
So you learned to trust yourselves and only yourselves. You could do without the "help" of such false friends. Jews built a country of their own in Israel. They built a mighty nuclear arsenal, probably the second most powerful in the world with the additional advantage that it probably works. The American nuclear arsenal is run by the same people who managed FEMA's response to Katrina. As your ancestors did, you entered the learned professions in numbers vastly disproportionate to your representation in society, the kind of thing that bothered FDR so much. Yet it was a survival mechanism; corporations, clubs, neighborhoods all could be restricted. You needed a direct means of making a living which did not depend on the solicitude or occasional enlightenment of Gentiles.
You learned to think for yourselves as well. You are not easily persuaded by the reassurances of the goy; you've been down that road too many times, and it has led to tragedy. Even Albert Einstein, still in Germany in 1933, wanted to believe that Nazism was not as bad as it appeared to be. It was exuberance, he said, as the German people shook off the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty. They don't mean it.
Never again. If Albert Einstein could make such a mistake...So now here comes this smooth talking guy with the Muslim middle name running for President, and he sat in a church in Chicago for twenty years, and one of the things that this pastor whom he admired so much did was to confer a lifetime achievement award on the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan. When I lay it out like that, it's pretty heavy. That doesn't look too good at all. It's small surprise that Barack Obama stopped just short of dancing the hora when he visited with AIPAC not long ago. And that prayer he slipped into the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem? I think I know what it said: "Fellas, please - hak mir nisht ken tshaynik with this Reverend Jeremiah shtick."
Here's my sense, from a guy who has searched his own soul for traces of anti-Semitism and has never been able to find anything worse than occasional envy at the professional excellence of some of his legal colleagues: I don't think Barack Obama is an anti-Semite. I just don't think he rolls that way. I think he's spent some time around anti-Semites. So have I. Know how I know I have? I'm not a hermit. So all I ask, as an American who's very concerned about the possibility of an unsuitable, quite possibly unstable candidate like John McCain winning this thing and leading America to ruin, is just give to Barack Obama what you have always asked of the world, but have not always gotten: a fair chance. That's all. If you vote against him, make sure it's for a reason you've thoroughly examined, and that you're convinced your decision against him is not based on the kind of prejudice which you, as a people, have always abhorred. I'm not talking about prejudice against blacks, because Yahweh knows the American Jews, as Barack acknowledged in talking so movingly about the deaths of the Jewish Mississippi Civil Rights workers, have done more for civil liberties than all other American nationalities combined. Even today it is Jewish legal leadership which champions the rights of Muslims detained unfairly at Guantanamo, who represented them, and won, in the historic habeas corpus case just decided. No one can fairly question your commitment to ethics and equal justice. So I draw on that and ask you to exemplify, once again, that spirit of fairness in November. Delve deep, in that peerless intellectual tradition which has always been your hallmark. And then decide. For we're all in this together.
The Boston Massacre occurred in 1770, five years before the shot heard 'round the world at Lexington Green, and three years before the Boston Tea Party. John Adams successfully defended the British soldiers involved in the shooting incident, but the die was effectively cast from that day forward. A revolution was coming, and the act of insurrection in Boston harbor was a violent harbinger of the conflict to follow. Great seismic shifts in public attitudes begin with such small steps, I think. Certain members of the citizenry, "crazier" than others and perhaps more sensitive to perception of tyranny, act first and they embolden the rest.
Not that I advocate the overthrow of the United States Government by force, because I don't. It would be contrary to my sworn duty as an officer of the court to uphold the law of the land, and I take that oath seriously. I write this blog partly in response to what I perceive as a mandatory duty under the legal Canons of Ethics. I think the United States Constitution and the United States Code are routinely and systematically violated by the President of the United States, by Congress and by the Supreme Court. I am far from alone in this perception, especially among the legal community. Indeed, the more you know about law and its processes, the easier it is to see just how arrantly lawless the Bush Administration is, and how completely it has corrupted the Constitutional system of the federal government. I doubt seriously we will ever restore the system fully to its former greatness. When the people and their elected representatives casually countenance official lawbreaking without remark or action, then "extralegal" ways of doing things become the new norm and a kind of arbitrary anarchy descends on the body politic. That's where we are. It is interesting to observe, but only in the sense of the ancient Chinese curse.
Recently, four troublemaking citizens in Iowa, not themselves peace officers or deputized as such, attempted to arrest Karl Rove. For their efforts, they were arrested for trespass and cited to appear. Karl Rove, after all, enjoys the privileges of status and quasi-official protection. So law enforcement sided with Rove and he went on his way. A citizen's arrest is a dangerous thing to do; a citizen taking the law into his own hands is not protected by the police officer's privilege of probable cause. If you're wrong about the guilt of the person detained, you can be held liable for kidnap or assault. Nevetheless, all fifty states have some form of citizen's arrest on their books. Here is California's statute: A private person may arrest another: 1. For a public offense committed or attempted in his presence. 2. When the person arrested has committed a felony, although not in his presence. 3. When a felony has been in fact committed, and he has reasonable cause for believing the person arrested to have committed it. (Cal. Penal Code Sec. 837). This is slightly (but crucially) different from the police standard; for a police officer to be liable for false imprisonment or malicious criminal prosecution, it must be shown that probable cause (a reasonable belief) was lacking both for the commission of a crime and that the person arrested was the one who done it. So if you collar Karl Rove on the suspicion, for example (among many of his possible crimes), that he conspired to blow the cover of an undercover CIA operative, and a court subsequently rules that no such crime was committed, you're in deep trouble.
So it's somewhat reckless to engage in such a citizen's arrest. Why would they do it? I think the answer is simple. Such canaries in the coal mine have come to the realization that no official avenue of redress is available. No one in a position of power is going to do anything about the day-to-day crimes committed by members of the government. When Scooter Libby was tried and convicted, for example, his sentence was quickly overturned as a personal favor from George W. Bush, who barely troubled himself to offer the laughably inadequate excuse of "excessive punishment" (the sentence was briefer than federal guidelines, and Bush had the option of reducing the sentence). This sort of preferential treatment and defiance of the law registers in the psyche of the citizenry. When the federal government tortures human beings, it then passes laws exonerating itself and its agents from the War Crimes Act. If it violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment, it passes a law legalizing the conduct and dismissing all civil actions attempting to find out when and against whom the spying took place.
What is unfortunate is that those of a conservative persuasion, seeing this criminal activity as part of the policy of the party which they favor, argue in favor of sanctioning criminality, and accuse those who simply point out, as calmly and methodically as they can, that crimes have been committed of "disloyalty." Yet these are not "Left/Right" issues. We don't care if a smash-and-grab mugger on the street voted Democratic in the last election; he's a criminal. The bravest of the dissidents are people like Bruce Fein, who served on the legal staff of Ronald Reagan, and yet points out (in my view irrefutably) that the Bush Administration operates outside the bounds of legal conduct.
Hosea 8:7: "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk; the bud shall yield no meal." Citizen's arrests are one step up the legal ladder from mob rule. I don't know whether there will ever be a "Truth & Reconciliation Commission" in the United States, or any kind of organized legal response to what has gone on during the Bush years, but I'm fairly confident of one thing: if there is not, then I think we will be well down the road toward social and legal disintegration.
So I watched Senator McCain this morning on "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, and decided to drop all preconceptions and simply come to terms with the somewhat improbable, but nonetheless existent, possibility that he might become the 44th President of the United States. In which case, I must ask myself, what then? What's he like?
The interview occurred in one of Mr. McCain's many nice homes, this one in Cottonwood, Arizona, where two chairs were arranged before a stone fireplace in a light and airy room. At one point two of McCain's dogs romped into the room, which had a homey, if somewhat contrived, feel to it. I mean, if an interview for national television is in progress, with all the tech and camera people present in and around the house, with electric cable and light stands everywhere, are we really to believe that the dogs were simply running loose? I'll let that go. I was determined to listen with an open mind.
The first thing I noticed was that Senator McCain is enormously proud of his decision to support President Bush's decision to add 30,000 American troops to Iraq in January, 2007. McCain sees this decision as the fulcrum point for the survival of Western Civilization As We Know It. Without his courageous support for a decision which Bush was going to undertake anyway, the opposition be damned, a kind of End Times scenario would be spooling out in Iraq even at this very moment. Genocide, Iranian invasion, Kurdish-Turkey combat, a wider war involving all countries with Arabs or Persians in them - you name it, it would be happening. A kind of Express Down Elevator to Hell. It's somewhat unnerving that Senator McCain recites the grim details of Armageddon in a completely wooden, almost somnambulistic monotone, as if he accidentally doubled up on the Xanax.
Back to the objectivity, the attitude of the day. None of these terrible things happened because John McCain had the courage of his convictions and voiced his support for the introduction of 30,000 additional troops into Baghdad. Since I am so utterly gracious in honoring his victory, the victory of being right, I know I can count on Senator McCain's similar magnanimity in granting the truth of the related observation that Iraq was in a condition to fall completely apart in January 2007 because of the dumb idea of invading the country in the first place. If I think this, Senator McCain has a few words for me, to wit: not so fast, my friend. For this very question was asked and McCain had the following, zinging comeback:
MCCAIN: I said that Saddam Hussein caused a -- imposed a threat to the United States of America and our security. And the Oil for Food scandal, the $12 billion he was skimming, the fact that he had said that he had in operation and he wanted to have weapons of mass destruction, the fact that this society that he ruled in such a brutal fashion was really awful. And he did pose a long-term threat to the security of the United States of America.So let's take a look, objectively, and see what we have here. The first sentence and the last, in my opinion, do not follow from the factual predicates of the other sentences. The conclusion that Iraq posed a threat to the security of the United States needs some sort of empirical support, and that I don't see. In more detail:
Barack Obama's triumphant tour of Europe and our various theaters of war has now come to an end, and he returns to this buzzkill report from the always-respected Quinnipiac poll: Quinnipiac University/Wall Street Journal/ Washingtonpost.Com Poll Finds --- COLORADO: McCain 46 - Obama 44 MICHIGAN: Obama 46 - McCain 42 MINNESOTA: Obama 46 - McCain 44 WISCONSIN: Obama 50 - McCain 39.
Any lead is welcome in the Obama camp, of course, but a different issue is at play in this year's election, namely, the so-called "Bradley Effect," which calls into question the validity of any polling at all, and more on that below.
The above results are for the so-called "swing states," those schizophrenic electorates which bounce between red/blue, Repub/Dem, conservative/liberal. As we all know, we do not actually have a national election, per se; rather, the election of a president essentially boils down to the tallies in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, with a few crucial swing states in play to offset the loss by one of the candidates of one of these decisive states. Almost all the other states (Alabama, Georgia, California, New York, Utah, etc.) really do not need to hold elections at all. A great deal of money could be saved if the two parties would simply stipulate, for example, that California will vote Democratic and Texas will vote Republican. Living in California, I don't think I've ever seen a presidential candidate's ad on TV. I hear about them, if they're especially outrageous, but candidates don't waste their money here. For Obama, California's in the bag and for McCain, he's got less than an ice floe's chance in the Arctic summertime. And despite all the talk of a "50-state" strategy, I doubt seriously that Barack is going to spend a lot of time in Wyoming and Utah.
By doing the sort of superficial research for which bloggers are famous, I have discovered, as I suspected, that all 43 Presidents to date are of just seven nationalities: English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, German and Swiss. I actually don't know who the Swiss is, but I don't think that really counts as a separate "nationality." Whatever. The overwhelming majority are of the first three British derivations, and even some of the "Irish" are no such thing but Scotch-Irish, which is really UK, not Irish. Like John McCain, for example. The Dutch are easy to spot: Van Buren, the two Roosevelts. Eisenhower's the German. There was one Catholic, as we all know, and all the rest were Protestants, which leaves us with an almost unbroken line of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. No Jews, no Italians, no Greeks, no Poles, no Asians, no Hindus, Muslims or Zoroastrians. Mostly just guys from the Northeast with names like Bush, Wilson, Madison, Lincoln and Adams, and a few Southern crackers like Lyndon Johnson, Carter and Clinton.
Then we got Barack Hussein Obama. The Bradley Effect, as I've noted before, refers to the stunning defeat of Tom Bradley in the gubernatorial race against a nonentity named George Deukmejian in the 1982 California election. Bradley was comfortably ahead in the election eve polls but lost by a slim margin. Pollsters hypothesized that voters were reluctant to answer questions honestly where their real criterion for decision was racially based. However, Obama might take solace from this most recent study of the effect:
"A 2008 study of 133 gubernatorial and Senate elections from 1989 to 2006 found that the effect had largely disappeared by the mid-1990s. It concluded that, 'As racialized rhetoric about welfare and crime receded from national prominence in the mid-1990s, so did the gap between polling and performance.'"But as we've been musing, a nationwide study is not really directly germane to the question at hand. If we look at things from a macro-perspective, Obama has a large lead, as big as 9 points, at the national level. This data point, however, is almost meaningless; it takes into account his huge leads in the most populous states of California and New York. As I've said, California and New York could save money which they increasingly don't have by drawing straws and then sending a representative group of 1,128 (Gallup can give us the exact number) of their citizens to the polls on election day to lock up the electoral delegations for Obama.
I watched Barack give his speech in Berlin this morning. He was careful not to pander to his German audience, or to invite comparisons to John F. Kennedy's speech at the Brandenburg Gate, by using German phrases or greetings. Anway, it's not really necessary to speak German to the usually trilingual Berliners, who are in general educated to a level far beyond their American counterparts. This is especially true among German youth, who seemed to dominate the crowd in the Tiergarten.
The speech itself, of course, was mostly content-free. Barack actually seemed a little off his game; the rigors of a long trip were taking their toll. Missing a few words here and there, stumbling, his energy level a little low. It lacked the soaring oratory and accelerating finish his speeches usually feature. Still, it's hard to go too far wrong with anodyne tales of the Berlin airlift or the defeat of Communism when you're speaking to Germans in modern Berlin. Barack reaffirmed his commitment to good things, like international cooperation and an end to oppression. I'll go out on a limb and say I'm for those things too. He took a few swipes at the American unpopularity caused by Bush's intransigence on global warming, the war in Iraq and the torture regime, but they were mild and elliptical. Obama is always a smooth operator; he's more Sugar Ray Robinson than Joe Louis. Beats you on the accumulation of points rather than the knockout punch.
I recall, long ago, an interview with Peter Yarrow, the Peter of Peter Paul & Mary, who has always been a very thoughtful (and talented) singer/songwriter/musician. He was comparing the standing of PP&M to such super-groups as the Stones or the Beatles. "Let's face it," he said, "their magic is bigger than our magic." Gracious and simple in the admission of the obvious. That's the deal with Obama; his magic is bigger than your magic, bigger than John McCain's, bigger than Hillary Clinton's. It doesn't really matter whether he says anything substantial; Bush, with one or two tweaks, could have given the same speech today, or could if it were not inevitable that boos would drown him out. It isn't difficult to be for good things like justice and freedom. You're for 'em, right? Yeah, me too.
I think it's telling that modern campaign honchos use the word "brand" now to talk about candidates and political parties. While it's meant to be hip, I'm sure, it's also a recognition that anything sold by means of mass media winds up subject to the invariant laws of mass marketing. Obama's a product, in this sense, and his style (in some ways connected to his "issue positions," but not essentially) is his "brand." His brand can take a hit when he seems to take a position a little off the public grok of his persona - such as on telecom immunity in the FISA debate, for example. It would be like Pepsi-Cola claiming to be the "Real Thing." Or Avis shouting, "We're No. 1!" A carefully developed marketing campaign can go off the rails with too many variations. Hillary thought she should win by dint of her policy positions and wonkish presentation of detail, and indeed I don't know too many people in American politics with her command of the specifics, or who has such a carefully designed set of solutions to real problems. Thing she never figured out? Her brand's kind of, you know, so '90's, and she never got how much things have changed since 1992 (neither did Bill). That grasping for the job, that trying so hard. Not rico-soave like O.
Obama's brand is cool, hip, smart, young, in touch with the modern world and its problems, connected, multi-cultural, intermarried, integrated, inclusive. That's the way things are moving, in the global village of the Internet and television. That's what his speech was about, this sense of international nexus and breakdown of barriers (his coolest rhetorical flourish was to compare the breaking down of the Berlin Wall to these modern trends). His brand makes a fascinating contrast with John McCain, who is old-fashioned (in fact, old), out-of-touch, unconnected (it's here where his incompetence with a computer is most telling - he really doesn't know what's going on out there), corny, belligerent, fearmongering, us vs. them, reactionary, and with his major issue continuation of a war which most Americans and almost all of the world see as a mistake from the beginning.
One of these two brands will carry the day in November. I suspect that if Obama does not win, it will be simply because he arrived on the scene a little too soon, a bright star who went supernova in a country not ready for him. There is an old, crotchety, out-of-it America which clings desperately to ideas about the country which have come and gone, and there may be enough of them left to determine the outcome: racists, homophobes, religious zealots, xenophobes, those who think the world can still be kept at bay by bombing the hell out of it. Obama represents what the rest of the world hopes America has become. Maybe. There's no question he could be elected Mayor of Berlin, but here on Main Street, USA, it's still very hard to tell.
So did the surge work? How would I know? If a chicken crosses the road on South Padre Island in Texas and Hurricane Dolly hits one hour later, did the chicken cause the hurricane? I assume that all of the major media, the MSM, would assume that the chicken did, for such is their trenchant level of "analysis."
As I followed the war in Iraq, it always seemed to me that there would come a time when Iraqi insurgents would "mature out" of their desire for armed conflict, much as crime rates fall as a population ages. It takes a lot of energy to cause trouble. Let's face it: that's a draggy way to lead your life. Holed up in hovels, hiding ammunition, building bombs, getting blown up by American helicopter attacks or shot down in the street. I suspect that Muqtada al-Sadr reached an accommodation with the Ungrateful Nouri at some point and decided to cool it with his Shia militia brigades. If you look at the casualty count over on the right and scroll down to April, 2008, you'll see that in that month of militia uprising in Basra and elsewhere in Shiite Iraq, American casualties resumed their "pre-surge" levels. I suspect also that General David Petraeus is a crafty tactician and used other means to reduce the incidence of IED violence, such as walling off enclaves at the border of sectarian neighborhoods. And of course that most trusted of American methods: we bought off the Sunni insurgents by putting them on the payroll. Petraeus was hired, after all, because of his record of success up north in Kurd country. He's good at his job. These factors seem more important than 30K/130K = 23% increase of American troop levels, especially if we recall that General Shinseki pegged the correct level of troops to control insurgency in 2003 at somewhere around 300,000, and was fired for his trouble. He was right, and a lot of Americans died because the Bush crew does not like inconvenient disagreement.
Yet Petraeus has obviously done good work. Maybe too good. Now John McCain is fulminating because he thinks Barack Obama is proposing to accept defeat when victory is within our grasp. I doubt that victory is ever going to look more permanent than it does now. As I was saying yesterday, I think the Bushies got punked by al-Maliki. I was amused to read a Maureen Dowd column today in which she continues the MSM trope that Maliki is a marionette. In haec verba: "McCain is hopping mad that the surge that he backed, and Obama resisted, has now set the stage for the Bush puppet Maliki to agree with Obama’s exit strategy." No, Maureen, I don't think Nouri is a "puppet." Haven't you been paying attention? [Dear Readers, you really should write your own blog; the great pleasure is in talking back to these self-appointed know-it-alls, and since their stuff is mainly read on line and for free, you have the same access to the public they do and in the same way.] Why would Maureen Dowd think that a guy with perpetual 11 pm shadow who persists in saying things Bush doesn't want to hear is his "puppet." Doesn't Maureen Dowd even want to try to make sense?
Never mind the "surge" and other phrases devoid of content, like "aspirational goals" within a "time horizon." The simple fact is that the Iraq war played out too fast for John McCain's purposes. He wanted there to be carnage, bloodshed, American casualties, chaos, and political divisions right through the election season. That isn't going to happen, and that's what he's mad about. Maureen Dowd completely misses the point. [Seriously, go to Blogspot and get started. You'll love it.] McCain is now in the same position as the liberals were in the heyday of the insurgency; kinda hoping for another bomb in some Baghdad market area.
Which is the true tragedy of Iraq. It's a cynical exercise in pointlessness, used by political factions for domestic advantage. Bush started the war to assure his reelection in 2004; McCain wanted the war to get worse so he could win in 2008. Bush's defeat comes about because Nouri outflanked him on the oil issue, borrowing our army to solidify his own grip on power long enough to build a police state to take over after we leave, while stalling cleverly on any oil concessions until our departure became inevitable. And now McCain has to run on some other issue. And what the hell would that be? His economic leadership? His gas tax holiday? His sexist jokes? His pledge to pacify the Iraq-Pakistan border?
As I write this, George W. Bush has about 181 days left in his dubious tenure as the 43rd President of the USA. I'm beginning to think that no more terrible things are going to happen while he's in charge, other than the playing out of things which his presidency has already set in motion. For example, the kangaroo court trials in Guantanamo, with their corrupted rules of evidence, admissibility of hearsay and coerced confessions, and juries comprised strictly of military officers who can convict with a 2/3 majority. Oh well. No one ever explained to my satisfaction why Zacarias Moussaoui, who by government account was actually involved in the 9/11 plot as a principal, was tried and convicted in open court in the regular federal court system, using all the normal rules, while Osama bin Laden's chauffeur must be tried under these medieval procedures. It doesn't make the country look particularly good. It is this strange arbitrariness in everything the Bush Administration does that is so unsettling, such as arresting and denying all due process (assistance of counsel, confrontation of accusers, speedy trial) of three American citizens who were placed in solitary confinement in a Navy brig in South Carolina carefully chosen for its location in the most reactionary federal judicial district in America (the Fourth). The British Home Secretary has now issued this great ally's official report stating categorically that President Bush is "not to be trusted" when he states that the United States does not engage in human rights abuses such as the torture of detainees.
We've come a long way, baby. Still, we're miles ahead of such countries as Russia and China when it comes to basic civil liberties. Let there be no doubt about that. Russia has sunk into a kind of fascist oligarchy again in a country ruled by ex-KGB agents. China remains one of the world's most repressive tyrannies. I wouldn't write a blog like this if I lived in either of those places, of that I assure you. Americans are free to express their opinions here, mostly without official hassling other than the enhanced possibility you'll be unable to print your boarding pass at home. Ah hell, the airlines are going out of business anyway.
The truth is, like a lot of amateur socio-political critics on the Internet, I feel an odd kinship with ol' W. We would not exist without him. He is the font from which all satire flows. He is maybe the most intellectually and temperamentally unsuitable man ever to occupy the Oval Office. The irony of his reign is stupendous. At a moment when the country, and the world, most needed a visionary, brilliant, dynamic leader to deal with environmental stresses and an emerging new world order...we came up with him. So we devoted those eight years to one thing, and to one thing only. Not to dealing with the energy crisis, nor dealing with the increasingly terrifying specter of global warming and ocean acidification, nor revitalizing America's declining economic base -- no, none of that. Our goal was, first, last and always, to assure the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. That's it. That's what the last eight years were about.
And in that one project, W painted himself into a corner. Would you like to know how Iraq is going to turn out, what that "victory" John McCain insists upon will actually look like? Okay, here goes. First, there is no one in this country who really has the street-level background of Nouri al-Maliki. All of our guys, like Bush, Cheney, Obama, McCain, are typical American softies. We love our nice cushy life. It's why 95% of the country pays no attention to Iraq; it's a bummer, dude. To play in Nouri's league, you have to live Nouri's life, and that doesn't happen here. So how has Nouri played this situation, and us? Very simple. He's said, "Thank you very much, now get the hell out of here." Bush really has no comeback. Isn't he the one who's insisted Iraq is a "sovereign nation," the "world's newest democracy," where the joyous citizens hold their purple fingers up high? Yes, Bush is the one. So Nouri now says, no long-term deal on a Status of Forces Agreement, and as soon as the U.S. military is gone (along with all of those "permanent" military bases we've spent a fortune building, which will now be expropriated by the Iraqi Army), al-Maliki will do what all the oil-rich countries do: he'll create a "sovereign wealth fund" based on Iraq's oil patrimony. He will nationalize the oil industry. He will cut deals with Russia, China, anyone else who wants to play ball his way. Eventually, he'll be in a position like his Gulf neighbors to buy Manhattan skyscrapers. Will Iraq be a "democracy?" Kind of. A Shiite theocratic regime with "elections," just like Iran. Massive corruption. Sporadic sectarian violence, ruthlessly suppressed, as it is now.
The only uncertainty is the fate of Kurdistan, up north. Their blessing, and curse when it comes to Nouri, is that they also have a lot of oil around Kirkuk. How autonomous will the Baghdad, Shiite government allow them to be? Will they crush the Kurds, as Saddam did before them?
So what did we get out of this? With our 4,100 dead, our multiple tens of thousands of wounded, amputees, blinded, brain-damaged? Our $540 billion spent so far? "The world's a better place without Saddam Hussein." Yep. It would probably also be better without Putin in Russian, the junta in Myanmar, Assad in Syria, Musharraf in Pakistan, Mubarak in Egypt, Quaddafi in Libya, Ahmadinejad in Iran, Kim Jong Il in North Korea. Mugabe, killing squads in Darfur...we could go broke making the world a better place. In fact, maybe we did.
"Asked by ABC's Diane Sawyer Monday morning whether the 'the situation in Afghanistan is precarious and urgent,' McCain responded:
"I think it's serious. . . . It's a serious situation, but there's a lot of things we need to do. We have a lot of work to do and I'm afraid it's a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border," said McCain, R-Ariz., on 'Good Morning America.'"
I agree with Senator McQueeg on one point: it's a serious situation, alright, very serious. It's a very serious situation that McCain is running for President. McCain has now turned his geographical expertise east of modern-day Czechoslovakia to focus on the turmoils in South Asia, or as he calls it, the "Middle East."In the Deep South where I was born and not raised, there were many colorful, pithy aphorisms which neatly summed up that worst of all offenses against the Scots-Irish, white trash ethos: the putting on of airs. Thus, such phrases as "being educated beyond your intelligence" or, more apt for our immediate purposes, "getting above your raising" (you can drop the g's in the gerunds if you like, for more down-home authenticity).
Lately I have noticed a new style of attack against Barack Obama from certain Right Wing pundits that proceeds along just such lines. It is the presumption meme. His tentative plans to give a major address in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin (since dropped) on his current Big Tour afforded an opportunity for another salvo. Take, for example, Charles Krauthammer's column in the Washington Post on Friday:
"Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself. There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?"Well, let me start by answering Mr. Krauthammer's question: Yes, I know of such a candidate. Ronald Reagan, your hero. His prior experience consisted of a career as a B-movie actor and of running California into the ground as its governor. His policies of deregulation and fiscal irresponsibility have brought the U.S. to the brink of economic disaster. But on to Krauthammer's ("cabbage kudgel?") true, snarky point: has Obama gotten above his raisin'? Or, what Charles really wants to ask but can't because he's a serious commentator: is Barack just one of them uppity n----r's?
"What’s striking is that Obama couldn’t resist a grandiose explanation. Obama’s unnecessary and imprudent statement impugns the sincerity or intelligence of those vulgar sorts who still choose to wear a flag pin. But moral vanity prevailed. He wanted to explain that he was too good — too patriotic! — to wear a flag pin on his chest."There it is again. Grandiose. Vanity. Too good. See a pattern? He's talking about a guy wearing a decal, but he was "struck" by Obama's explanation because this stupid-ass issue means so much to Bill. Oh for crying out loud. If Obama hadn't explained it one way or another, if he'd said, "Because I don't feel like it," then Kristol and Krauthammer (they need one more "K" to form their own columnist brigade in that same old Deep South tradition) would write two columns each going on and on about Barack's disdain for the flag.
In some ways it isn't even fair. Barack, of course, has always been an ace student. George W. Bush's approach to scholastics has always been "aspirational," as in the song "Don't Know Much:"
(bridge)
Now I don't claim
to be an A student,
but I'm tryin' to be
I think that maybe by bein'
an A student, baby,
I could win your love - for -me-e...
Thus, George's adult continuing education, reading all those books that more diligent college students read about forty years ago. Such as books on the Middle East, where the fundamental schism between Sunni and Shia branches of Islam, occurring some fourteen hundred years ago, is discussed in depth. Book learnin' is not always completely irrelevant to real life, after all. If you want to assess the probability that sectarian conflict will emerge after you remove the police state mechanism (Saddam Hussein's Baathist Party) which held it in check for a generation or so, you would first have to know that there are Sunni and Shiite sects in Islam. Extra credit on the exam could be earned by booking hard on the topic of where in Iraq you might find concentrations of Iraqis of one religious stripe or the other; say, for example, Karbala and Basra for the Shia and Tikrit and Western Iraq for the Sunni. To nail that 4.33 GPA you need these days for Harvard or Stanford, you could show off by learning that the northern Kurds are an ethnically distinct people within Iraq, non-Arab, with trans-border affiliations in Turkey and Iran, and who consider themselves a state separate from Iraq.
George looked at the map and saw one word: Iraq. In Iraq lived good, decent, hard-workin' people just like us, and they wanted freedom because Freedom is God's gift from the Almighty (slightly redundant, but the point can't be made too strongly). In other words, they wanna be free (hold hands in front of chest, thrust slightly forward). Also, because we're Good, we came with Good intentions, and we would be welcome forever because freedom-lovin' peoples the world over love havin' us around.
If Mr. Bush's historiography and ethnic analysis sound strikingly reminiscent of old ideas of your own, it's probably because such ideas were current in social studies classes in the United States in the 1950's-1960's, when in the fourth grade or so you learned about "the world." George Bush could not be immune from such ideas because at that age you're in class, you hear it, you internalize it, the teacher's an authority figure, quod erat demonstrandum. Since you read this blog from time to time and know its ideological bias, you probably moved on in life to disturb such comforting ideas about your "homeland" by reading seditious tracts by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Scheer, Paul Goodman, Richard Hofstadter, and watched such movies as "Dr. Strangelove," "Born on the Fourth of July," "Seven Days in May," "Network," and "Platoon," and therefore began to develop a more nuanced view of your patrimony. Which is another way of saying that the erstwhile purity of your patriotism became somewhat tainted by contrarian views, and you perhaps emulated Albert Camus in his assessment of France: "I love my country, but I love it in justice."
I don't think this process happened with George W. Bush. It is a somewhat established thesis in the literature of addiction treatment that emotional development is arrested at the point that serious chronic abuse begins. From late adolescence on George drank hard and often and got into other drugs as well and went through the motions of college education and graduate school while under the influence, until finally at the age of forty he gave the stuff up and began to make real progress in his life. For which he is to be commended. At that point, however, he had wasted over half his life and thrown away all the amazing advantages which his rich and powerful birth simply handed him, like all the best schools and a head start in business.
Yet an adult awakening and renaissance is not as good as diligence and perseverance early in life. You will not find many concert pianists, for example, of the very first rank who started playing the instrument at forty. Okay, you won't find any. You simply can't develop the mind-muscle coordination, the sight reading capability, the patience for repetition that are possible at six or seven years old. Ingenious people who are indifferent about school often go on to be great innovative businessmen or artists (maybe most artists, in fact), but George W. Bush is not an ingenious man, not at all. For him competence depended on diligence and discipline and he simply never learned these intellectual habits when they are best acquired. It is often said about Bush that he is not "intellectually curious." Another way of describing this phenomenon is that he never learned how to learn and he is stuck with an old bagful of tired and sterile ideas.
So then comes Barack, the academic superstar, the quick learner, the adaptive genius. Don't underestimate him for a moment. The dude is very, very, very sharp. He does know how to learn. For him reality is a source of new data, all the time, to be assessed, processed and synthesized into new ideas. When he gets back from Afghanistan and Iraq (brilliant move to go there, by the way), he will announce innovative ideas on how to move forward, ideas of his own conception and initiative.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki likes Barack Obama for more than his name. Now he has a guy he can actually work with. George Bush wears people out because of the utter tedium of his cliched approach. Nothing can penetrate his ossified conceptions; he can't see things from your perspective because he doesn't know how to adapt and he's not intellectually interested enough in your problems to think them through. The sad fact remains that, try as he might, Bush simply cannot fake his way through his intellectual inadequacies. It just isn't there, he doesn't have it in him, and more than anything else, this country needs someone who does.
It's not exactly "High Noon," but a showdown of sorts may be in the works between Bush's (true) arch-nemesis, Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Los Angeles) and Bush's legal mouthpiece, Attorney General Michael Mukasey. (I have to say once again: thanks ever so much, Dianne Feinstein, for paving the way for this awful AG appointment. Who says that Californians don't elect Republicans to the Senate?)
The issue concerns Vice President Dick Cheney's FBI interview about the Valerie Plame matter, conducted during its investigation prior to the trial of Scooter Libby. The Bureau put together a report, termed a 302, on the interview. My instinct tells me that the VP probably growled a few lies during that one, and with the extraordinarily complicated matrix of evidence built by Fitzgerald during his thorough investigation (and candy-ass indictment), it seems inconceivable that Cheney could have shucked, jived and "if-you-will" -ed his way through that Q&A without (a) perjury and/or (b) obstruction of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald, the Special Prosecutor, claimed at the end of the Libby trial that "a cloud" hung over the Vice President concerning the Plame outing, but that Libby's many lies kept him from getting at the truth. (Let the record reflect that this cop-out has never made any sense. Fitzgerald proved that Libby lied because he had so much contradictory testimony and documentation demonstrating Libby's inconsistencies and was able to reconstruct a true narrative of events. How, then, could he have not seen plainly what Cheney did or did not do, despite Libby's obfuscations? His reasoning, however, sounded better than saying, "I don't want to go after the Vice President because he's too scary.")
Maybe that's for another day. Back to Cheney's 302: Chairman Pit Bull of the House Oversight Committee feels, like the Rolling Stones feel about love, that pursuit of truth is real and not fade away. He wants that 302. So Michael Mukasey (did I mention that without Feinstein's support we might have forced Bush to appoint an actual independent AG instead of another pocket consigliere for W?) wrote Bush and told him to write back telling Mukasey not to produce the 302 on grounds of "executive privilege." Bush's White House has really worn that concept down to the nub at this point. What, you may ask, is executive privilege? The most definitive statement of the concept was provided by the Supreme Court in Nixon vs. United States in 1974: It recognizes
"the valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in the performance of their manifold duties" and that "[h]uman experience teaches that those who expect public dissemination of their remarks may well temper candor with a concern for appearances and for their own interests to the detriment of the decisionmaking process."Mukasey is obviously familiar with the case; thus, his little jewel of sophistry in his letter to Bush, imploring W to tell Mike to do the right thing, informing Bush that failure to protect Cheney's 302 from Waxman may have a "chilling effect" on future cooperation of the Executive Branch with FBI investigations. You know, how can you be "candid" if what you tell the G-Men may wind up in the hands of a Congressional committee, particularly one headed by the oppo-party?
I try, not always with 100% success, to be a scrupulously honest man when it comes to matters of the intellect (with respect to all other forms of integrity, I concur with those who believe that when a man tells you he is completely honest about everything, immediately feel for your wallet). So when I watched President Bush yesterday at one of his rare press conferences, I had to admit that the man has made strides since his early days as chief executive. True, his eyes still dart about the room, he hunches his shoulders and stares at the podium, he mangles words with the same alacrity as ever, but his diction and even his candor seem to have improved with the passing years. He used the word "conflate" correctly, as one example. I forget the context, but he nailed it.
President Bush even makes sense if you disregard (a) all previous history of what he's talking about and (b) reality. His discussion of the energy crisis yesterday is a good example. To hear him talk, you would be hard put to identify the person who has been president for the last 7.5 years. Apparently, he "warned" us about the coming problem with gasoline and his administration has been "working hard" on alternative fuels because they've always known the remaining fossil fuels (he even used the word "hydrocarbons") are simply a transitional energy source till we get to the next paradigm (he did not use "paradigm;" let us not hope for too much too soon).
It's funny, but I don't remember President Bush, in the period between 2001 and late 2006, when the Republicans owned the government, pushing hard for higher CAFE standards for American auto manufacturers. Or seeking a repeal of the gas-guzzler tax breaks which insanely rewarded purchasers of truck-sized SUVs with accelerated depreciation while enacting enhanced tax credits for high-mpg cars. Or proposing revitalization of America's 177,000 miles of railroad right-of-way (ROW) by proposing mass electrification of freight and passenger lines powered by alternative energy. Man, imagine that! Exciting, huh? What you can do, see, is double up on the ROW (avoiding delays and freight-passenger conflict, as we have now) and then use the corridors themselves for electrical transmission lines, all powered by vast solar arrays and wind energy where conditions are favorable. We don't need to move to high speed rail right away, not yet, just inject lots of money into the rail system, which is so frigging energy-efficient. Creating millions of jobs, tons of high-tech work, transformative research.
Instead of, you know, doing what you did, Bush, and starving Amtrak from the very first days of your administration. Refusing to give it $2 billion as its new CEO requested in order just to bring passenger service up to First World standards. Nah, you'd rather spend ten or twelve billion a month in Iraq. In Iraq. So when Barack Obama gave that speech yesterday right after you finished and talked about the squandering of hundreds of billions of dollars on an unnecessary war against a country with no connection to terrorism, with no connection to any American interest whatsoever except our squandered effort to grab those hydrocarbons you're now so dismissive of -- well, you see -- you got spanked. Because there's no real answer to what Barack is saying, not if you're intellectually honest, too.
History did not actually start yesterday. The President attempts to avoid all blame for the country's predicament by pretending that his very first responsibility as President, the ordering of national priorities, is not in his job description. It doesn't work that way. In modern times, I do not expect a president, any president, actually to be versed in the arcane and sophisticated detail of every scientific, legal and economic discipline which is involved in making decisions. That's impossible and probably not even desirable. But a president does have the responsibility to figure out which few of the thousands of things the government might do with the limited resources at its disposal are actually in the national interest, and to make decisions accordingly. It does not satisfy the criteria of effective job performance to become bogged down in a marginal project somewhere in the Middle East and to spend all your money, and all your time and attention, on this one dumb idea, mainly for the purpose of vindicating yourself politically (while young men die), and to obstinately refuse to admit that it isn't worth it, that it's a mistake, that it's a classic tar baby of throwing more and more good money after bad, and that the country is suffering hugely as a result of this misallocation and colossal misjudgment.
That is Bush's legacy, and it is way too late to change it. My true sense about him is that he allowed his presidency to be hijacked by a group of dedicated ideologues, led by Dick Cheney, who are fundamentally uninterested in what you might call everyday American life. Behind every scandal plaguing the Bush years, you will find them lurking - illegal spying, torture, Valerie Plame, destroyed e-mails, defiance of Congressional subpoenas, and war, war and more war. For all his bluster and feigned overconfidence, I think Bush is a very insecure and fundamentally weak man who allowed a cynical and ruthless cabal bent on military adventures and arrogation of power to achieve a coup d'etat, and it is his weakness that has been our undoing, and his own.
"I was concerned about a couple of steps that the Russian government took in the last several days. One was reducing the energy supplies to Czechoslovakia. Apparently that is in reaction to the Czech's agreement with us concerning missile defense, and again some of the Russian now announcement they are now retargeting new targets, something they abandoned at the end of the Cold War, is also a concern." John McCain, speaking on July 14, 2008.
UPDATED: Don't miss the comment; it's funnier than my post.
I note today that some national polls show Barack Obama's previous 15 point lead over John McCain has shrunk to about 3 points, within the statistical margin of error. Thus, although 90% (± 3%) of the American populace will not understand the concept, this means that statistically the race is now a dead heat. Translated further, this means that the twitchy, confused, borderline-insane, dull-witted senior senator from Arizona with a penchant for making nuclear war jokes has an even chance of becoming the next President of the United States.
While suicidally depressing at first glance, there are always advantages to any development on the American political scene. For those who say I sometimes strike too bitter a note in these posts, I offer this list of advantages to a McCain presidency:
#1: Continuity of shittiness in government: One very confusing recurrent theme in American politics has been the periodic interruption of extremely incompetent and promiscuously over-spending military juntas run by Republican presidents by short spasms of competence and sanity. Thus, the Reagan/Bush years of colossal government debt leading to a deep recession were stopped short, just as they were about to crash the American system, by the presidency of Bill Clinton. By using concepts known as "intelligent management" and "national priorities," Clinton's team reduced defense spending, brought the budget under control, created jobs and ushered in a period of prosperity. Disoriented, the American electorate panicked and voted for George W. Bush in huge numbers, bringing back a reign of idiotic government, unnecessary wars, gigantic deficits, unemployment, exploding defense spending and near collapse of the financial system. In return, the American Right received a veto on the stem cell research bill, thus sparing countless (well, they're easy to count, actually, because they're so few) murder victims and various negative remarks from the president about gay marriage. Given this huge head start by GWB, I think McCain will be able simply to finish us off, the lethal injection of incompetence the country has been waiting for, thus ending the boom/bust cycle and era of false hope.
#2 Eclipse of America as the World's Biggest Polluter: As President Bush left the recent G-8 meeting, he jauntily said goodbye "from the world's biggest polluter," shocking Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Great Britain and Nikolaus Sarkozy of France. Apparently, these two spoilsports don't think destruction of the Earth as a habitat suitable for humanity is all that funny, but maybe they don't get that George's somewhat nervous sense of humor is part of what makes him "special." Our ability to pollute, however, depends in large part on our ability to run an economy, which in turn depends on our ability to import oil. Since we're near the breaking point on that capability, during the McCain presidency we can expect America to fall to a status somewhere around Zimbabwe in terms of environmental impact. Leading to:
#3 Relaxation of America's Self-Image from High Maintenance to Low Maintenance: At some point shortly after McCain's inauguration, it's going to dawn on Americans, however inchoately, from the tract homes of Tustin, California to the trailer parks of Bullhead City to the sprawling megalopolis of Dallas/Fort Worth to the rusting industrial ghost towns of the Midwest and Great Lakes to the cratering financial markets of Manhattan's Wall Street, that electing imbeciles as President of a country such as this, election after election, also perforce says something about the quality of the electorate, which is to say, the American people themselves. While it is psychologically comforting to blame the incumbent dimwit for everything going wrong, a people so uneducated, uninformed, distracted, and maybe just so drunk as to keep putting up large numbers for such cretins on election day has a lot to answer for. When this sinks in, when we realize that although we're in a very, very deep hole, we nevertheless keep hiring excavators to get us out of it, we may come to terms with one of the most disabling of all American delusions, the idea we're "unique" and "exceptional," which is the narcissistic trait that has motivated our tendency to invade other countries and to fix everything so everyone can be just like us. Which has led to our (a) excessive militarization, (b) social backwardness and (c) bankruptcy.
After McCain (just a couple of years of McCain, in fact), we simply will not have the wherewithal to carry on our quixotic and messianic missions. Which will be a good thing, although it will be very painful getting there. So you see - 'tis an ill wind indeed which blows no one any good.
For a couple of minutes there yesterday, I watched President Bush address the nation on the most current, desperate financial crisis in America, the implosion of the two big government-chartered mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie & Freddie sound like a couple of lovable losers in a British sitcom, but they're actually a couple of unlovable losers in the American subprime fiasco. They once played a starring role in Bush's "ownership society," but that was then. They're lucky if they can get a cameo spot in an infomercial now.
I didn't switch Bush off; he only talked for a couple of minutes. He had just met, or at least said he had, with that genial banker-about-town Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury. I've looked but I've been unable to find a transcript of the entirety of Bush's remarks, brief though they were. Here's what was available on the White House website:
"I want to thank you all very much for your briefing. These are tough economic times for the American citizens. There is a way forward to help relieve some of the pressure on their pocketbooks. And I'm looking forward to seeing -- watching this Congress respond in a positive way."
That is indeed the essence of his remarks, although it lacks some of the defining quality of Bush commentary. What I like to call the "descriptive meaningless." We've all heard examples of it. While in China at a G-8 summit, Bush reportedly told the President of China that China and Russia were "big countries." I don't see how any honest person could disagree with Bush's statement. Or why the President of China would need to be told. In his verbatim remarks this morning, Bush did the following:
1. Confirmed that he had just met with Paulson.
2. Stated that Paulson and his team (Bernanke, et al.) were "working the problem very hard" with Fannie & Freddie.
3. Confirmed that Fannie and Freddie were "important."
4. Said what's indicated up above, that these were "tough economic times."
5. Congratulated Secretary Paulson on sending out a lot of stimulus checks, and cited the number of checks, which Paulson must have just told him (in order to demonstrate Paulson was trying to do something to keep the country from unraveling completely.) Bush said consumers were spending this money.
5. Cited the cost of oil as one of the reasons for our troubles, and said the high price was caused by supply and demand.
6. Said that Congress should not go home for the August break until we're drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska's wild life reserve.
He then thanked us all for coming.
It's as if Bush, upon entering a room, would feel the need to name the furniture. Wrinkling his brow and squinting fiercely with those small eyes, Bush looks around the parlor: "That's a couch," he says. "There's some chairs there, by that table, and then there's the table itself. On the floor, down below us, is a rug, which covers the floor. Then there's some lamps, on these, which are end tables. Thank you all for coming out."
Somewhere along the way, Bush was told by one of his image-creators that he needs to stay away from anything remotely abstract, such as using words to express intellectual concepts. Thus, he is reduced to naming the actual events which have just occurred and applying a generic, uninformative adjective to (a) the event and (b) the subject, if any, which was discussed at the event. Let' see how these instructions are actually put into play by the bozo running our government:
Paulson came by to talk to Bush, and Bush confirmed that he did. He thanked his Secretary of the Treasury for telling him about how bad things are in America. Then he said the Secretary had sent out a lot of checks, and recited the number. Then he said the Secretary and the Fed Chairman were working on the problem "very hard." Then he said the two government-backed mortgage companies were "important."
That actually concluded the "briefing." Bush, however, being a mean and vindictive little man who absolutely hates the widespread, completely accurate perception that he's grossly incompetent and has driven the country into an economic ditch, could not resist blaming things on the "Democrat" Congress. Thus, he wanted Americans to know, the ones enduring the "tough economic times" which Bush has been absolutely incapable of alleviating, that the "pressure on their pocketbooks" could be relieved by a "way forward," namely, lifting the ban on drilling off American coasts and in the ANWR. Bush did not mention that the most optimistic estimates of the effect of this effort would not be felt until about 2018, at which point the "pressure on American pocketbooks" would presumably have reached 5,000 lbs. per square inch. And even then, the oil production would have a marginal effect on the price of gasoline in that distant future, when it might cost $1,000 to fill up the family Tercel.
So again, to sum up, because I'm trying to get a handle on this guy: Bush had just been informed that a couple of major pillars in the American financial structure had crumbled and collapsed, rotted out by worthless loans and overwhelming liabilities. Presumably, Paulson had also told him that IndyMac Bank would be seized later that day by federal regulators to stop a bank run (one of many were going to be seeing over the next few months). The Dow Jones is slightly above 11,000, which measured against the Dow Bush inherited, minus the government's own lala-land inflation figure, means it's worth 15% less than when he took the oath in 2001. The euro is just shy of $1.60 American. Oil is at an all-time high, touching $146/bbl at one point on Friday. When the federal budget deficit is honestly tabulated at the end of the year (refusing to count the Social Security surplus as part of general revenue, in other words), and if the "stimulus [bribe] package" is added to the costs of bail-outs of huge financial institutions, and enormous ongoing costs of Bush's twin wars, all financed with borrowed money -- we'll be lucky if it doesn't add up to $1 trillion.
And what Bush proposes doing is drilling offshore. That's it. Stay in Iraq, make the tax cuts permanent, and drill offshore. Just what constituency do you think he might be serving? At this point, I only hope the worst happens before he can sneak out of town. After all, that was the purpose of the Bribe Program; to allow Bush to slither out the back way from the White House just ahead of the roof falling completely in.
