The Lieberman Problem
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 10/28/2009 16:43:35 In: Politics Comments: 0
"I don't think we need it now," a prominent U.S. senator said in a statement yesterday regarding a public health care option, and it wasn't a Republican. Once again, "Democrat" Joe Lieberman has gone rogue. Shortly after the 2008 election, I posited a scenario under which Lieberman, who failed at almost every turn to use his chairmanship on the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs to hold the Bush administration accountable, would become a thorn in the side of the Obama administration. Democrats, led by the new president, refused to strip Lieberman of his title or his seat in the Democratic caucus after the Connecticut senator not only campaigned against his own party during the presidential election, but did so rather unscrupulously.
Senate majority leader Harry Reid said then that he trusted Lieberman, but this new development in the seesawing life of the so-called public option should come as no surprise: Lieberman went on record as being against a filibuster-proof majority months ago, and he's fought against his own party on key issues for years. Until now, it's been his position on foreign policy that has been most troubling (it's disturbing, if not downright dangerous, to have a politician who pals around with a hatemonger like John Hagee simply because—even though Hagee's position on Israel is based on his belief that the preservation of the Jews is integral to the coming Rapture—he supports his Zionist agenda to chair a national security congressional committee), but Lieberman's maverick-y impulses are now poised to kill what could potentially be a transformative piece of domestic legislation. According to Firedoglake, if Lieberman votes against cloture, the process by which Democrats can prevent a filibuster by Republicans, it will be the first time in American history that a member of a super-majority has joined the opposition to filibuster a bill.
So if not now, Joe, when? According to the National Coalition on Health Care, employer-based health insurance premiums have risen 131 percent over the last decade and are projected to double in the next 10 years, and the industry essentially advertised its intent to increase rates via a recent "study" of the Senate Finance Committee's reform bill, which was, in part, written by those very special interests in the first place. With or without government intervention, the insurance industry has no intention of lowering rates, making a robust public option even more essential.
But here's the rub: The public option as it's currently being proposed in the Senate, the one Lieberman is so adamantly against that he would deviate from his party in such an unprecedented way, would not only allow states to opt out (a hurdle overcome by simple shaming; see the stimulus bill), but it would be limited solely to those who are uninsured, rendering it practically impotent for the millions currently paying exorbitant premiums and getting little in return. The watering down of government programs like this is the next best thing to right-wing lobbyist and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist's dream of cutting government down to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub. A public option so limited in scope will surely fail to create fundamental change in the system, thereby allowing Norquist and his ilk to declare that government is indeed a failure. So perhaps Lieberman will be doing the country a favor by preventing such a weak bill from passing in the first place. Joe Lieberman, hero of progressives?
"I don't think we need it now," a prominent U.S. senator said in a statement yesterday regarding a public health care option, and it wasn't a Republican. Once again, "Democrat" Joe Lieberman has gone rogue. Shortly after the 2008 election, I posited a scenario under which Lieberman, who failed at almost every turn to use his chairmanship on the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs to hold the Bush administration accountable, would become a thorn in the side of the Obama administration. Democrats, led by the new president, refused to strip Lieberman of his title or his seat in the Democratic caucus after the Connecticut senator not only campaigned against his own party during the presidential election, but did so rather unscrupulously.
Senate majority leader Harry Reid said then that he trusted Lieberman, but this new development in the seesawing life of the so-called public option should come as no surprise: Lieberman went on record as being against a filibuster-proof majority months ago, and he's fought against his own party on key issues for years. Until now, it's been his position on foreign policy that has been most troubling (it's disturbing, if not downright dangerous, to have a politician who pals around with a hatemonger like John Hagee simply because—even though Hagee's position on Israel is based on his belief that the preservation of the Jews is integral to the coming Rapture—he supports his Zionist agenda to chair a national security congressional committee), but Lieberman's maverick-y impulses are now poised to kill what could potentially be a transformative piece of domestic legislation. According to Firedoglake, if Lieberman votes against cloture, the process by which Democrats can prevent a filibuster by Republicans, it will be the first time in American history that a member of a super-majority has joined the opposition to filibuster a bill.
So if not now, Joe, when? According to the National Coalition on Health Care, employer-based health insurance premiums have risen 131 percent over the last decade and are projected to double in the next 10 years, and the industry essentially advertised its intent to increase rates via a recent "study" of the Senate Finance Committee's reform bill, which was, in part, written by those very special interests in the first place. With or without government intervention, the insurance industry has no intention of lowering rates, making a robust public option even more essential.
But here's the rub: The public option as it's currently being proposed in the Senate, the one Lieberman is so adamantly against that he would deviate from his party in such an unprecedented way, would not only allow states to opt out (a hurdle overcome by simple shaming; see the stimulus bill), but it would be limited solely to those who are uninsured, rendering it practically impotent for the millions currently paying exorbitant premiums and getting little in return. The watering down of government programs like this is the next best thing to right-wing lobbyist and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist's dream of cutting government down to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub. A public option so limited in scope will surely fail to create fundamental change in the system, thereby allowing Norquist and his ilk to declare that government is indeed a failure. So perhaps Lieberman will be doing the country a favor by preventing such a weak bill from passing in the first place. Joe Lieberman, hero of progressives?
Kill Bill: The Right's Commitment to Murdering Health Care Reform
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 09/10/2009 18:03:19 In: Politics Comments: 5
I had intended to write a series of blog entries on health care reform this summer focusing not only on already well-documented problems within the system and challenging illogical, boogeyman arguments against a public option, but also on issues that haven't received enough—or any—mainstream media attention, like the underinsured and the role doctors play in the rising costs of health care. Though perhaps inevitable, but no less unfortunate, the spate of attacks on reform that erupted during Congress's August recess required those in favor of it to go on the defensive instead, spending time combating misinformation and distortions about public opinion when they should have been touting the progress Congress has made in making reform a real possibility for the first time in decades.
I found myself unwilling, if not unable, to comment on the distractions, partly because it was so downright depressing to me—a reminder of the brief period just after Sarah Palin was announced as the vice presidential candidate for the Republican ticket last fall and before she revealed herself to be a perpetual political punchline. At a Labor Day barbeque, a friend and staunch Barack Obama supporter glibly called me "un-American and un-democratic" for suggesting that hecklers shouting down a congressperson until his or her public forum grinded to a halt is not democracy but the ugly face of corporate-sponsored astroturfing. It's a tactic used to stifle progress and send a message. That message, of course, is "Kill the bill!," a slogan brought to you by the same masterminds who crafted last year's "Drill, baby, drill!" and which was chanted ad nauseam at town halls across the nation during the final week of summer.
The Republican talking point has been to insist that those who showed up at town halls across the country last month were ordinary citizens who are unhappy with the changes they see taking place since Obama took office in January, who don't want him interfering in their presumably cozy relationships with their health insurance providers. They just want to express their concerns, Republican officials will tell you. You know, like Heather Blish, former vice-chairman of the Kewaunee County GOP, who showed up at her former boss's opponent's town hall claiming to be "just a mom with no political affiliation" to protest health care reform.
Many of these people, however, are undoubtedly real, law-abiding citizens, but the groups mobilizing this so-called "grassroots" scare campaign are anything but grassroots. And it wasn't just right-wing commentators or the fringe activists who listen to them who disseminated and continue to disseminate misinformation. "Death panel"—a term so repugnant and dripping with mischaracterization used to describe a part of the proposed reform bill that would reimburse Americans who choose to seek medical advice regarding end-of-life care—was hatched in the sickened brain of right-wing think tank fellow and Cantel Medical Corp. board member Betsy McCaughey and was propagated via Facebook by Palin like a 15-year-old mean girl spreading rumors about the popular new kid in class.
So it came as no surprise when, during Obama's address to a joint session of Congress last night, Republicans behaved exactly like the angry mobs of town hall protesters they encouraged, pandered to, and used like political pawns throughout the recess. By the time I post this, Rep. Joe Wilson will likely have already started making the cable-TV rounds, ratcheting up his public profile in the wake of his outburst of "You lie!" when Obama attempted to debunk the rumor that his health care plan would insure illegal immigrants. It was a moment so profoundly revealing, in terms of both Wilson's willful ignorance and his party's cynicism, that it left no doubt about what the Republican strategy (to kill the bill) and the purpose of that strategy (to score political points against the president) has been. Wilson wasn't the only elected official heckling the president—just the loudest and most red-faced. Whether it's Sen. Jim DeMint expressing his desire to "break" Obama by stopping health care reform, or Sen. Chuck Grassley engaging in negotiations with Democrats under the guise of a bipartisan solution and then perpetuating myths about "killing Grandma" at town hall meetings and vowing not to vote for the very bill he's been tasked with helping to form, the Republican Party's objective has been to stifle any forward momentum.
I often hear the argument by those on the right that calling out this kind of behavior is frivolous because there is bad behavior on both sides of the aisle. And while that might be true, there is simply no parity on the left today. The left hated George W. Bush because he was perceived to be a corrupt warmonger; the right is painting toothbrush 'staches on portraits of Obama because he wants to reform health care. Symbolically dissing the commander in chief by denying him an applause line or twittering away while he speaks in the chamber is nothing new, but there was a palpable outward contempt for Obama last night that's unprecedented in modern political history. And one that, exemplified by right-wing parents yanking their children from school so as to shield them from the president's address to K-though-sixth-graders on Tuesday, reeks of something far more dangerous than old-fashioned partisanship.
The party's opposition to the president (reform in any shape) notwithstanding, Republicans were going to reject any idea that was presented to them simply because it's the nature of our two-party system. One should always ask for more than what they want or are willing to settle for when sitting down at the negotiating table, and the biggest problem with Obama's plan has always been that he conceded too much too soon, pitching the compromise (a public option) instead of a single-payer or Medicare-for-all system that would truly represent the kind of universal coverage that has become a pillar of the Democratic platform. A proposal to further dilute the immediate impact of reform by putting a "trigger" on the public option, meaning that that particular part of the bill would only go into effect if and when the insurance industry failed to meet certain coverage criteria laid out by Congress, was even rejected by Republican Governor and likely 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty because, he told CNN's John King, it "simply kicks the can down the road," which, like the conflicting GOP talking points that a public option would both provide inferior coverage and simultaneously be too good for private companies to compete against, is essentially an admission that he knows insurance companies—and Republicans—will never step up to the plate.
Obama ended his speech by evoking Ted Kennedy, reading part of a letter the late senator had written following his cancer diagnosis last year and which he asked to be delivered to the president upon his death. Kennedy's words—"What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country"—are the best and clearest articulation of both broad liberal ideology and the necessity of universal health care I've heard to date. Obama's assessment of those words took Kennedy's legacy of proud 20th-century liberalism into a new era: "[Our predecessors] understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, and the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter—that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves."
I had intended to write a series of blog entries on health care reform this summer focusing not only on already well-documented problems within the system and challenging illogical, boogeyman arguments against a public option, but also on issues that haven't received enough—or any—mainstream media attention, like the underinsured and the role doctors play in the rising costs of health care. Though perhaps inevitable, but no less unfortunate, the spate of attacks on reform that erupted during Congress's August recess required those in favor of it to go on the defensive instead, spending time combating misinformation and distortions about public opinion when they should have been touting the progress Congress has made in making reform a real possibility for the first time in decades.
I found myself unwilling, if not unable, to comment on the distractions, partly because it was so downright depressing to me—a reminder of the brief period just after Sarah Palin was announced as the vice presidential candidate for the Republican ticket last fall and before she revealed herself to be a perpetual political punchline. At a Labor Day barbeque, a friend and staunch Barack Obama supporter glibly called me "un-American and un-democratic" for suggesting that hecklers shouting down a congressperson until his or her public forum grinded to a halt is not democracy but the ugly face of corporate-sponsored astroturfing. It's a tactic used to stifle progress and send a message. That message, of course, is "Kill the bill!," a slogan brought to you by the same masterminds who crafted last year's "Drill, baby, drill!" and which was chanted ad nauseam at town halls across the nation during the final week of summer.
The Republican talking point has been to insist that those who showed up at town halls across the country last month were ordinary citizens who are unhappy with the changes they see taking place since Obama took office in January, who don't want him interfering in their presumably cozy relationships with their health insurance providers. They just want to express their concerns, Republican officials will tell you. You know, like Heather Blish, former vice-chairman of the Kewaunee County GOP, who showed up at her former boss's opponent's town hall claiming to be "just a mom with no political affiliation" to protest health care reform.
Many of these people, however, are undoubtedly real, law-abiding citizens, but the groups mobilizing this so-called "grassroots" scare campaign are anything but grassroots. And it wasn't just right-wing commentators or the fringe activists who listen to them who disseminated and continue to disseminate misinformation. "Death panel"—a term so repugnant and dripping with mischaracterization used to describe a part of the proposed reform bill that would reimburse Americans who choose to seek medical advice regarding end-of-life care—was hatched in the sickened brain of right-wing think tank fellow and Cantel Medical Corp. board member Betsy McCaughey and was propagated via Facebook by Palin like a 15-year-old mean girl spreading rumors about the popular new kid in class.
So it came as no surprise when, during Obama's address to a joint session of Congress last night, Republicans behaved exactly like the angry mobs of town hall protesters they encouraged, pandered to, and used like political pawns throughout the recess. By the time I post this, Rep. Joe Wilson will likely have already started making the cable-TV rounds, ratcheting up his public profile in the wake of his outburst of "You lie!" when Obama attempted to debunk the rumor that his health care plan would insure illegal immigrants. It was a moment so profoundly revealing, in terms of both Wilson's willful ignorance and his party's cynicism, that it left no doubt about what the Republican strategy (to kill the bill) and the purpose of that strategy (to score political points against the president) has been. Wilson wasn't the only elected official heckling the president—just the loudest and most red-faced. Whether it's Sen. Jim DeMint expressing his desire to "break" Obama by stopping health care reform, or Sen. Chuck Grassley engaging in negotiations with Democrats under the guise of a bipartisan solution and then perpetuating myths about "killing Grandma" at town hall meetings and vowing not to vote for the very bill he's been tasked with helping to form, the Republican Party's objective has been to stifle any forward momentum.
I often hear the argument by those on the right that calling out this kind of behavior is frivolous because there is bad behavior on both sides of the aisle. And while that might be true, there is simply no parity on the left today. The left hated George W. Bush because he was perceived to be a corrupt warmonger; the right is painting toothbrush 'staches on portraits of Obama because he wants to reform health care. Symbolically dissing the commander in chief by denying him an applause line or twittering away while he speaks in the chamber is nothing new, but there was a palpable outward contempt for Obama last night that's unprecedented in modern political history. And one that, exemplified by right-wing parents yanking their children from school so as to shield them from the president's address to K-though-sixth-graders on Tuesday, reeks of something far more dangerous than old-fashioned partisanship.
The party's opposition to the president (reform in any shape) notwithstanding, Republicans were going to reject any idea that was presented to them simply because it's the nature of our two-party system. One should always ask for more than what they want or are willing to settle for when sitting down at the negotiating table, and the biggest problem with Obama's plan has always been that he conceded too much too soon, pitching the compromise (a public option) instead of a single-payer or Medicare-for-all system that would truly represent the kind of universal coverage that has become a pillar of the Democratic platform. A proposal to further dilute the immediate impact of reform by putting a "trigger" on the public option, meaning that that particular part of the bill would only go into effect if and when the insurance industry failed to meet certain coverage criteria laid out by Congress, was even rejected by Republican Governor and likely 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty because, he told CNN's John King, it "simply kicks the can down the road," which, like the conflicting GOP talking points that a public option would both provide inferior coverage and simultaneously be too good for private companies to compete against, is essentially an admission that he knows insurance companies—and Republicans—will never step up to the plate.
Obama ended his speech by evoking Ted Kennedy, reading part of a letter the late senator had written following his cancer diagnosis last year and which he asked to be delivered to the president upon his death. Kennedy's words—"What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country"—are the best and clearest articulation of both broad liberal ideology and the necessity of universal health care I've heard to date. Obama's assessment of those words took Kennedy's legacy of proud 20th-century liberalism into a new era: "[Our predecessors] understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, and the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter—that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves."
Barney Frank Refuses to Argue with Dining Room Table
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 08/19/2009 14:43:58 In: Politics Comments: 4
For the past several weeks I've wanted to comment on the industry-organized lobbying efforts masquerading as grass-roots outrage about health care reform, but each time I tried to write something, my head nearly exploded at the futility and nonsensicality of it all. It would be, as Barney Frank generously put it at a town hall meeting in Massachusetts yesterday, like arguing with a dining room table:
For the past several weeks I've wanted to comment on the industry-organized lobbying efforts masquerading as grass-roots outrage about health care reform, but each time I tried to write something, my head nearly exploded at the futility and nonsensicality of it all. It would be, as Barney Frank generously put it at a town hall meeting in Massachusetts yesterday, like arguing with a dining room table:
Meeting of the Mindless
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 08/02/2009 14:00:32 In: Politics Comments: 4
The Republican Party is so bankrupt of new ideas that they've taken to co-opting every criticism that was launched at the Bush administration for eight long years and lobbed them right back at Barack Obama. The Grand Old Party hasn't even bothered to give it the good old college try by paraphrasing their stolen ideas or disguising them with little mustaches. Just find "Bush" and replace-all with "Obama" and you've got the party's current talking points.
According to the right, the "corrupt" Obama administration is attempting a "power grab" that is "fundamentally transforming" the country and "dismantling the Constitution." Corruption isn't partisan, of course, and the new administration deserves as much scrutiny as its predecessor when it comes to presidential powers and constitutionality, but most disturbing and transparent is how the left's claims that Bush's presidency was illegitimate has been countered by a small but increasing—and increasingly vocal—fringe faction of the Republican party who claim that Obama isn't an American citizen and therefore isn't eligible to be president. After getting all the ratings mileage out of bashing Mexicans that he could, even CNN's Lou Dobbs has taken his xenophobia to a new level of parody, giving the Birthers a mainstream platform—and credibility—they hadn't enjoyed previously.
On his show earlier this week, FOX News loon Glenn Beck played a snippet of a speech in which Obama vowed to push Americans to make sacrifices for the greater good and take responsibility for things like climate change (specifically making the point that the U.S. cannot credibly demand developing nations to take steps toward more eco-friendly policies if we do not set an example), and then erupted into a predictably childish rant, the essence of which was basically "You're not the boss of me! I do what I want!" He then, fittingly, introduced blogger Michelle Malkin. Malkin is promoting her new book, Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies, which details corruption that is ostensibly so potent and pervasive that it warranted a book being released six months into Obama's first term, which is probably about as long as it took its coherence-challenged author to write it.
On the show, Malkin struggled to compose her ostensibly planned string of unintelligible buzz words and fear-mongering, warning of "shadow governments," "the Chicago way," "a civilian core," and—my favorite—"a brigade of foot soldiers implanted in neighborhoods across the city who are at the beck and call of Team Obama, um, to, whether it's shaking down banks, forming a housing entitlement mob, um, fostering voter fraud and, uh, census shenanigans." Brigade! Foot soldiers! Implanted! Shaking down! Mob! Fraud! Shenanigans! At least she didn't use the word "gang." Later in the segment, without an ounce of irony, she chirped, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant!"
Beck, in an attempt to plug Malkin's book, provided evidence to his previous claims that he's not a real reporter by declaring that he doesn't "read other people's books when it comes to their political thoughts, et cetera, et cetera." The state of the Republican Party, ladies and gentlemen:
The Republican Party is so bankrupt of new ideas that they've taken to co-opting every criticism that was launched at the Bush administration for eight long years and lobbed them right back at Barack Obama. The Grand Old Party hasn't even bothered to give it the good old college try by paraphrasing their stolen ideas or disguising them with little mustaches. Just find "Bush" and replace-all with "Obama" and you've got the party's current talking points.
According to the right, the "corrupt" Obama administration is attempting a "power grab" that is "fundamentally transforming" the country and "dismantling the Constitution." Corruption isn't partisan, of course, and the new administration deserves as much scrutiny as its predecessor when it comes to presidential powers and constitutionality, but most disturbing and transparent is how the left's claims that Bush's presidency was illegitimate has been countered by a small but increasing—and increasingly vocal—fringe faction of the Republican party who claim that Obama isn't an American citizen and therefore isn't eligible to be president. After getting all the ratings mileage out of bashing Mexicans that he could, even CNN's Lou Dobbs has taken his xenophobia to a new level of parody, giving the Birthers a mainstream platform—and credibility—they hadn't enjoyed previously.
On his show earlier this week, FOX News loon Glenn Beck played a snippet of a speech in which Obama vowed to push Americans to make sacrifices for the greater good and take responsibility for things like climate change (specifically making the point that the U.S. cannot credibly demand developing nations to take steps toward more eco-friendly policies if we do not set an example), and then erupted into a predictably childish rant, the essence of which was basically "You're not the boss of me! I do what I want!" He then, fittingly, introduced blogger Michelle Malkin. Malkin is promoting her new book, Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies, which details corruption that is ostensibly so potent and pervasive that it warranted a book being released six months into Obama's first term, which is probably about as long as it took its coherence-challenged author to write it.
On the show, Malkin struggled to compose her ostensibly planned string of unintelligible buzz words and fear-mongering, warning of "shadow governments," "the Chicago way," "a civilian core," and—my favorite—"a brigade of foot soldiers implanted in neighborhoods across the city who are at the beck and call of Team Obama, um, to, whether it's shaking down banks, forming a housing entitlement mob, um, fostering voter fraud and, uh, census shenanigans." Brigade! Foot soldiers! Implanted! Shaking down! Mob! Fraud! Shenanigans! At least she didn't use the word "gang." Later in the segment, without an ounce of irony, she chirped, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant!"
Beck, in an attempt to plug Malkin's book, provided evidence to his previous claims that he's not a real reporter by declaring that he doesn't "read other people's books when it comes to their political thoughts, et cetera, et cetera." The state of the Republican Party, ladies and gentlemen:
My Health Care Plan Doesn't Cover Wigs...or Chemotherapy
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 07/23/2009 19:33:06 In: Politics Comments: 1
The fear-mongering attempts to "break" Barack Obama and his health care reform agenda, or at least delay it and therefore its momentum, are flimsy at best. Desperate to paint any kind of reform of the wasteful and immoral private health insurance industry as either socialist or inadequate, the right has asserted that a "government option" would result in "rationing" while at the same time saying it would make it impossible for private companies to compete. The government's ability to run a deficit aside, you'd have to be politically dishonest or insane to hold those two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
Another main argument against reform is the fact that universal health care in other countries isn't perfect. Critics often cite long wait lists to see specialists or receive care, and Americans don't wait for anything, damn it. More times than not, these are the very same people who patriotically, if not nationalistically, trumpet the Union's near-perfection and ability to accomplish anything to which it sets its collective mind. I admire that kind of optimism, but it seems to wither at the first sign of a challenge to the status quo. Why can't the U.S. show Canada, France, and all of those other allegedly socialized nations how to do it, and do it right?
The most inane argument against reform, however, is that it will reduce the quality of coverage and access to care. Following last night's presidential news conference on health care reform, Bill O'Reilly quietly and calmly rang the bell of panic about private medical records being kept "on a disk" in Washington, D.C. (Cue scary music.) Government bureaucrats, as he and others on the right who oppose reform claim, will decide who gets care, when, and for what. In the wake of an administration that sanctioned secret spy programs and tapped the phones of its own citizens, privacy is indeed an important issue in 21st century America. But right now the private medical records that O'Reilly is so concerned about are being kept "on a disk" in the offices of a health insurance company, the bureaucrats of which decide who gets care, when, and for what.
I am one of the 253 million Americans who are "insured." A few years ago, a visit to my primary care physician for a simple physical led to nearly two years of those very bureaucrats refusing to make payments based on all sorts of technicalities, after which they claimed to have paid their contractually obliged minimum reimbursement, but which the administrator at my doctor's office said she never received. I spent hours over the course of several months attempting to resolve the situation because communication between the two inept parties was practically nonexistent. It was an arduous, infuriating, and exhausting situation—and I wasn't even sick.
Due to perpetually inflating premiums, I was recently forced to downgrade from what my current insurance company likes to call its "Preferred HMO," a plan that is "preferable" only to their "Basic HMO." There's a small pool of PCPs, hospitals, laboratories, and specialists from which to choose, co-payments are high, and coverage is limited. A quick glance at the summary of exclusions reveals that the plan does not cover ambulances, casts or crutches, hearing aids, infusion therapy (which is, according to the National Home Infusion Association, "prescribed when a patient's condition is so severe that it cannot be treated effectively by oral medications"), preventative care or counseling (an essential element of waste reduction and health care reform), second opinions, and wigs. Yes, wigs. Luckily, that item isn't such a big deal, since the plan doesn't cover chemotherapy either.
The fear-mongering attempts to "break" Barack Obama and his health care reform agenda, or at least delay it and therefore its momentum, are flimsy at best. Desperate to paint any kind of reform of the wasteful and immoral private health insurance industry as either socialist or inadequate, the right has asserted that a "government option" would result in "rationing" while at the same time saying it would make it impossible for private companies to compete. The government's ability to run a deficit aside, you'd have to be politically dishonest or insane to hold those two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
Another main argument against reform is the fact that universal health care in other countries isn't perfect. Critics often cite long wait lists to see specialists or receive care, and Americans don't wait for anything, damn it. More times than not, these are the very same people who patriotically, if not nationalistically, trumpet the Union's near-perfection and ability to accomplish anything to which it sets its collective mind. I admire that kind of optimism, but it seems to wither at the first sign of a challenge to the status quo. Why can't the U.S. show Canada, France, and all of those other allegedly socialized nations how to do it, and do it right?
The most inane argument against reform, however, is that it will reduce the quality of coverage and access to care. Following last night's presidential news conference on health care reform, Bill O'Reilly quietly and calmly rang the bell of panic about private medical records being kept "on a disk" in Washington, D.C. (Cue scary music.) Government bureaucrats, as he and others on the right who oppose reform claim, will decide who gets care, when, and for what. In the wake of an administration that sanctioned secret spy programs and tapped the phones of its own citizens, privacy is indeed an important issue in 21st century America. But right now the private medical records that O'Reilly is so concerned about are being kept "on a disk" in the offices of a health insurance company, the bureaucrats of which decide who gets care, when, and for what.
I am one of the 253 million Americans who are "insured." A few years ago, a visit to my primary care physician for a simple physical led to nearly two years of those very bureaucrats refusing to make payments based on all sorts of technicalities, after which they claimed to have paid their contractually obliged minimum reimbursement, but which the administrator at my doctor's office said she never received. I spent hours over the course of several months attempting to resolve the situation because communication between the two inept parties was practically nonexistent. It was an arduous, infuriating, and exhausting situation—and I wasn't even sick.
Due to perpetually inflating premiums, I was recently forced to downgrade from what my current insurance company likes to call its "Preferred HMO," a plan that is "preferable" only to their "Basic HMO." There's a small pool of PCPs, hospitals, laboratories, and specialists from which to choose, co-payments are high, and coverage is limited. A quick glance at the summary of exclusions reveals that the plan does not cover ambulances, casts or crutches, hearing aids, infusion therapy (which is, according to the National Home Infusion Association, "prescribed when a patient's condition is so severe that it cannot be treated effectively by oral medications"), preventative care or counseling (an essential element of waste reduction and health care reform), second opinions, and wigs. Yes, wigs. Luckily, that item isn't such a big deal, since the plan doesn't cover chemotherapy either.
Health Care Reform: Are Doctors the Real Problem?
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 07/09/2009 15:38:44 In: Politics Comments: 1
The villains in the battle over health care reform in the U.S. are obvious, right? The insurance and pharmaceutical companies are not-so-quietly lining the pockets of their corpulent, greedy CEOs, who sit in corner offices adorned with centuries-old pine wooden desks and golden toilets, while doctors, patients, and businesses small and large are getting squeezed dry. But real reform requires a less one-dimensional examination of the industry, one that reveals a much more systemic assortment of maladies plaguing the system as a whole. President Obama has made prevention a pillar of his health care reform plan, suggesting patients' poor diets and exercise habits are partly responsible for the astronomically rising costs of care. (According to the National Coalition on Health Care, health care spending represented 17 percent of the country's gross domestic product in 2007, and is expected to reach 20 percent or more in the next eight years, and yet U.S. health care is ranked 37th by the World Health Organization.) Rush Limbaugh, he of the beer belly and hunger for prescription drugs, mocked Obama's assertion, inanely postulating that it's not the overweight or physically unfit who are the biggest burden on health care, but the physically active, who, he says, sustain injuries that cost taxpayers millions each year. And they say laughter is the best medicine.
A few months ago I made a rare trip to my primary care physician. His office is a veritable hole in the wall, with a sign on the window of the front desk that reads, "Do not ask how long the wait is or how many people are ahead of you." He overbooks his schedule, no doubt to make as much money as he can; I waited two-and-a-half hours to see the doctor despite having scheduled an appointment. After a tirade about how changes in the system have forced him to refuse patients who don't have coverage or who simply can't afford to make their insurance co-payments, he informed me that it would likely be over a week before my HMO approved his referral for a CT Scan. In the meantime, he sent me for lab work.
When I received my blood results, I noticed that one of the tests my doctor ordered wasn't performed. I called his office to ask him about it, and was told that "everything is fine" and that if I wanted to talk to the doctor, I should make an appointment. I insisted but was again refused, so I hung up.
I eventually went for the CT Scan and received a call from my doctor's office several days later once again telling me that "everything is fine," but that the doctor wanted me to stop by and pick up a new script for additional lab work. After waiting for an hour and a half, he told me that one of the tests he ordered wasn't performed. I informed him that had he taken my call two weeks earlier, he would have known that already, and that perhaps the CT Scan, the necessity of which he fought with my insurance company about, might not have been necessary after all. He explained that he prefers to talk to his patients face to face and told me not to worry about the co-payment, which I had no intention of paying anyway. It occurred to me that, co-payment or not, he was planning to submit this "follow-up visit," consisting of a gratuitous thermometer in my mouth and a brief conversation that should have taken place over the phone, to my insurance company for reimbursement.
Judging by the overall conditions under which my doctor practices, his actions might simply be a necessity of survival—having been fought tooth and nail by the insurance companies to do what he told me loves to do: practice medicine. And as someone who despises how the health insurance industry operates, I can certainly empathize with his plight. But not when it's at the expense of his patients' financial and medical well-being. More importantly, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being made an accessory to insurance fraud.
I've been following the health care reform debate closely since I began paying for my own policy out-of-pocket several years ago, and while I've heard lots of buzz terms being tossed around (efficiency, waste, choice, competition, public option), I've rarely heard anyone in the mainstream media discuss the role health care providers have played in the crisis. Even Obama, who received a tepid response from the American Medical Association last month, has been loathe to criticize doctors. And then I stumbled upon an article in The New Yorker (not exactly a bastion of the mainstream) by Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a professor at Harvard University, that sets out to find an answer to why the health care costs in a poverty-stricken Texas bordertown are some of the highest in the nation despite having state-of-the-art technology and facilities.
One of the factors Gawande examines is the profit motive of providers, who enjoy kickbacks for admitting patients to hospitals and, presumably, referring them to specialists and other agencies. In some cases, doctors are even paid a percentage of the profits from tests and procedures performed at what are called physician-owned hospitals. Doctors in the small town in question were prone to "overutilization," ordering procedures that, among other things, serve as a preemptive defense against malpractice lawsuits, and performing unnecessary surgeries when lifestyle changes and pain management would be just as effective—and cheaper. It's possible that a significant number of "unnecessary" tests would rule out more serious conditions, and therefore reduce the number of more invasive (and expensive) procedures that may have been performed based on less accurate testing. But how many doctors who view their practice as a profit-based business feel compelled to order unnecessary tests simply to pay for the cost of running their business?
Doctors in the U.S. perform more operations than doctors in any other country in the world, and there's no evidence to suggest that we're any better off because of it. (The U.S. ranks 45th in life expectancy, below Cuba.) And the cost of certain procedures—like CT Scans, for instance—is also more expensive, but that doesn't mean the quality of care or the accuracy of the results is any better. Due to subsidies, the equipment required for a CT Scan reportedly costs 40% less in a third-world country like India than it does in the U.S., and the average cost of one contrast scan here could pay for dozens of similar tests in Mumbai. So what accounts for this discrepancy?
The U.S. is a nation filled with the best and brightest physicians and technicians who have attended some of the most respected and expensive universities in the world. The cost to our providers is bound to trickle down to their patients. But radiology isn't brain surgery; the cost of interpreting a CT Scan simply doesn't justify the exponential cost incongruities being shouldered by Americans. Technical and professional fees are part of the problem, but that doesn't explain how the cost of a test like a CT Scan varies so wildly in the U.S. (The fact that one has to "shop" for the best deal when it comes to potentially life-saving tests is obscene, but that's a whole other topic.)
One factor might be that the cost of treating the uninsured—or the underinsured, which was the subject of a front-page article in The New York Times last week—is built into the cost paid by those who can afford to pay. The radiology clinic where I had my CT Scan offered to drop off the contrast fluid I had to drink prior to my test and gave me a ride to and from the clinic on the day of my test. This was a service provided by the clinic and wasn't billed to me or my insurance (I know because I asked—twice). It was generous and helpful, especially since I'd never been there before and don't have a car, but they no doubt offer this "free" service to all of their patients, not just those who are insured. Someone has to pay for it. A country with 45 million uninsured is bound to see its health care costs skyrocket.
Universal coverage isn't feasible if large segments of the population are being priced out of the market. Blatant profligacy within the system, specifically of the variety Gawande has unearthed, means that prices won't be dropping any time soon. But ironically, it also means reform isn't a hopeless venture. Taking care of everyone doesn't mean the country has to go bankrupt or that we have to saddle our grandchildren with even more debt. If we're indeed wasting money, and that's recognized as a reality on both sides of the aisle, that means at least one buzz term, "efficiency," truly is the key to reform. Obama may be pointing one finger at the overweight, but as Gawande shrewdly observes, "the idea that there's plenty of fat in the system is proving deeply attractive." We just need to admit who the fat ones are.
Changing the culture is essential to solving the problem. Defensive medicine costs tens of billions each year. And doctors whose focus is not on patient care but on money—whether it's profit-motivated or simply a matter of survival—might not even realize they're part of the problem. The discussion draft of the House bill provides incentives for accountable care organizations, which are comprised of doctors and specialists who collaborate in networks—not for profit or kickbacks, but for results. These kinds of networks would purportedly discourage profiteering by changing the way doctors get paid through Medicare—paying physicians for results, not the quantity of service. Policymakers close to the bill say the details—how or if those changes are going to happen—haven't been worked out yet, but what Congress seems to have realized is that Medicare is a barometer for the entire health care industry. As Medicare goes, so goes the nation.
It's easy to blame one part of the system for the failure of the entire thing. But like the human body itself, health care is made up of the symbiotic relationship between separate but inextricably bound parts: providers, insurers, and patients. The House bill looks at the issue of reform from both sides: reforming delivery systems—how doctors are paid to create incentives for efficiency and quality—and adding a public plan to keep costs to consumers down. And while those goals might prove to be tricky (The Washington Post reported this week that a panicked health insurance industry is in full-on lobby mode, which means that even if a bill passes, it will likely be watered down), it's still only one part of the solution.
Legislating cultural change is an essential component to reform, and while that's likely to prove even more difficult, there has been some progress. At the beginning of the year, lawmakers introduced the Physician Payments Sunshine Act of 2009, a bipartisan bill that failed to make it through Congress two years ago but which, despite even stricter regulations, stands a better chance in the current economic and reform-happy climate. The legislation would amend the Social Security Act, requiring transparency in the relationship between physicians and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. The bill is currently under review, but even if it fails to pass a second time, the pressure has already forced companies like Pfizer and Merck to voluntarily disclose the amount of money they're spending on things like consulting gigs, speeches, meals, and gifts—and to whom.
Additionally, nonprofit organizations like Area Health Education Centers are taking steps to offset Pharma's influence on physicians. It's a little disturbing to think that your local doctor's office could be serving catered sandwiches for pharmaceutical reps who are hoping to peddle their latest inventions to the community via your family doctor, but that's exactly what's happening across the country. Doctors shouldn't have to choose between what's in the best interest of their patients and what's in the best interest of keeping their practices in business. And we shouldn't have to worry that our doctors aren't on our side.
The villains in the battle over health care reform in the U.S. are obvious, right? The insurance and pharmaceutical companies are not-so-quietly lining the pockets of their corpulent, greedy CEOs, who sit in corner offices adorned with centuries-old pine wooden desks and golden toilets, while doctors, patients, and businesses small and large are getting squeezed dry. But real reform requires a less one-dimensional examination of the industry, one that reveals a much more systemic assortment of maladies plaguing the system as a whole. President Obama has made prevention a pillar of his health care reform plan, suggesting patients' poor diets and exercise habits are partly responsible for the astronomically rising costs of care. (According to the National Coalition on Health Care, health care spending represented 17 percent of the country's gross domestic product in 2007, and is expected to reach 20 percent or more in the next eight years, and yet U.S. health care is ranked 37th by the World Health Organization.) Rush Limbaugh, he of the beer belly and hunger for prescription drugs, mocked Obama's assertion, inanely postulating that it's not the overweight or physically unfit who are the biggest burden on health care, but the physically active, who, he says, sustain injuries that cost taxpayers millions each year. And they say laughter is the best medicine.
A few months ago I made a rare trip to my primary care physician. His office is a veritable hole in the wall, with a sign on the window of the front desk that reads, "Do not ask how long the wait is or how many people are ahead of you." He overbooks his schedule, no doubt to make as much money as he can; I waited two-and-a-half hours to see the doctor despite having scheduled an appointment. After a tirade about how changes in the system have forced him to refuse patients who don't have coverage or who simply can't afford to make their insurance co-payments, he informed me that it would likely be over a week before my HMO approved his referral for a CT Scan. In the meantime, he sent me for lab work.
When I received my blood results, I noticed that one of the tests my doctor ordered wasn't performed. I called his office to ask him about it, and was told that "everything is fine" and that if I wanted to talk to the doctor, I should make an appointment. I insisted but was again refused, so I hung up.
I eventually went for the CT Scan and received a call from my doctor's office several days later once again telling me that "everything is fine," but that the doctor wanted me to stop by and pick up a new script for additional lab work. After waiting for an hour and a half, he told me that one of the tests he ordered wasn't performed. I informed him that had he taken my call two weeks earlier, he would have known that already, and that perhaps the CT Scan, the necessity of which he fought with my insurance company about, might not have been necessary after all. He explained that he prefers to talk to his patients face to face and told me not to worry about the co-payment, which I had no intention of paying anyway. It occurred to me that, co-payment or not, he was planning to submit this "follow-up visit," consisting of a gratuitous thermometer in my mouth and a brief conversation that should have taken place over the phone, to my insurance company for reimbursement.
Judging by the overall conditions under which my doctor practices, his actions might simply be a necessity of survival—having been fought tooth and nail by the insurance companies to do what he told me loves to do: practice medicine. And as someone who despises how the health insurance industry operates, I can certainly empathize with his plight. But not when it's at the expense of his patients' financial and medical well-being. More importantly, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being made an accessory to insurance fraud.
I've been following the health care reform debate closely since I began paying for my own policy out-of-pocket several years ago, and while I've heard lots of buzz terms being tossed around (efficiency, waste, choice, competition, public option), I've rarely heard anyone in the mainstream media discuss the role health care providers have played in the crisis. Even Obama, who received a tepid response from the American Medical Association last month, has been loathe to criticize doctors. And then I stumbled upon an article in The New Yorker (not exactly a bastion of the mainstream) by Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a professor at Harvard University, that sets out to find an answer to why the health care costs in a poverty-stricken Texas bordertown are some of the highest in the nation despite having state-of-the-art technology and facilities.
One of the factors Gawande examines is the profit motive of providers, who enjoy kickbacks for admitting patients to hospitals and, presumably, referring them to specialists and other agencies. In some cases, doctors are even paid a percentage of the profits from tests and procedures performed at what are called physician-owned hospitals. Doctors in the small town in question were prone to "overutilization," ordering procedures that, among other things, serve as a preemptive defense against malpractice lawsuits, and performing unnecessary surgeries when lifestyle changes and pain management would be just as effective—and cheaper. It's possible that a significant number of "unnecessary" tests would rule out more serious conditions, and therefore reduce the number of more invasive (and expensive) procedures that may have been performed based on less accurate testing. But how many doctors who view their practice as a profit-based business feel compelled to order unnecessary tests simply to pay for the cost of running their business?
Doctors in the U.S. perform more operations than doctors in any other country in the world, and there's no evidence to suggest that we're any better off because of it. (The U.S. ranks 45th in life expectancy, below Cuba.) And the cost of certain procedures—like CT Scans, for instance—is also more expensive, but that doesn't mean the quality of care or the accuracy of the results is any better. Due to subsidies, the equipment required for a CT Scan reportedly costs 40% less in a third-world country like India than it does in the U.S., and the average cost of one contrast scan here could pay for dozens of similar tests in Mumbai. So what accounts for this discrepancy?
The U.S. is a nation filled with the best and brightest physicians and technicians who have attended some of the most respected and expensive universities in the world. The cost to our providers is bound to trickle down to their patients. But radiology isn't brain surgery; the cost of interpreting a CT Scan simply doesn't justify the exponential cost incongruities being shouldered by Americans. Technical and professional fees are part of the problem, but that doesn't explain how the cost of a test like a CT Scan varies so wildly in the U.S. (The fact that one has to "shop" for the best deal when it comes to potentially life-saving tests is obscene, but that's a whole other topic.)
One factor might be that the cost of treating the uninsured—or the underinsured, which was the subject of a front-page article in The New York Times last week—is built into the cost paid by those who can afford to pay. The radiology clinic where I had my CT Scan offered to drop off the contrast fluid I had to drink prior to my test and gave me a ride to and from the clinic on the day of my test. This was a service provided by the clinic and wasn't billed to me or my insurance (I know because I asked—twice). It was generous and helpful, especially since I'd never been there before and don't have a car, but they no doubt offer this "free" service to all of their patients, not just those who are insured. Someone has to pay for it. A country with 45 million uninsured is bound to see its health care costs skyrocket.
Universal coverage isn't feasible if large segments of the population are being priced out of the market. Blatant profligacy within the system, specifically of the variety Gawande has unearthed, means that prices won't be dropping any time soon. But ironically, it also means reform isn't a hopeless venture. Taking care of everyone doesn't mean the country has to go bankrupt or that we have to saddle our grandchildren with even more debt. If we're indeed wasting money, and that's recognized as a reality on both sides of the aisle, that means at least one buzz term, "efficiency," truly is the key to reform. Obama may be pointing one finger at the overweight, but as Gawande shrewdly observes, "the idea that there's plenty of fat in the system is proving deeply attractive." We just need to admit who the fat ones are.
Changing the culture is essential to solving the problem. Defensive medicine costs tens of billions each year. And doctors whose focus is not on patient care but on money—whether it's profit-motivated or simply a matter of survival—might not even realize they're part of the problem. The discussion draft of the House bill provides incentives for accountable care organizations, which are comprised of doctors and specialists who collaborate in networks—not for profit or kickbacks, but for results. These kinds of networks would purportedly discourage profiteering by changing the way doctors get paid through Medicare—paying physicians for results, not the quantity of service. Policymakers close to the bill say the details—how or if those changes are going to happen—haven't been worked out yet, but what Congress seems to have realized is that Medicare is a barometer for the entire health care industry. As Medicare goes, so goes the nation.
It's easy to blame one part of the system for the failure of the entire thing. But like the human body itself, health care is made up of the symbiotic relationship between separate but inextricably bound parts: providers, insurers, and patients. The House bill looks at the issue of reform from both sides: reforming delivery systems—how doctors are paid to create incentives for efficiency and quality—and adding a public plan to keep costs to consumers down. And while those goals might prove to be tricky (The Washington Post reported this week that a panicked health insurance industry is in full-on lobby mode, which means that even if a bill passes, it will likely be watered down), it's still only one part of the solution.
Legislating cultural change is an essential component to reform, and while that's likely to prove even more difficult, there has been some progress. At the beginning of the year, lawmakers introduced the Physician Payments Sunshine Act of 2009, a bipartisan bill that failed to make it through Congress two years ago but which, despite even stricter regulations, stands a better chance in the current economic and reform-happy climate. The legislation would amend the Social Security Act, requiring transparency in the relationship between physicians and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. The bill is currently under review, but even if it fails to pass a second time, the pressure has already forced companies like Pfizer and Merck to voluntarily disclose the amount of money they're spending on things like consulting gigs, speeches, meals, and gifts—and to whom.
Additionally, nonprofit organizations like Area Health Education Centers are taking steps to offset Pharma's influence on physicians. It's a little disturbing to think that your local doctor's office could be serving catered sandwiches for pharmaceutical reps who are hoping to peddle their latest inventions to the community via your family doctor, but that's exactly what's happening across the country. Doctors shouldn't have to choose between what's in the best interest of their patients and what's in the best interest of keeping their practices in business. And we shouldn't have to worry that our doctors aren't on our side.
If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try a Gun
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 06/11/2009 19:11:59 In: Politics Comments: 2
A good friend of mine worked at Planned Parenthood on the West Coast a few years ago. Though she was and still is fiercely pro-choice, she eventually left the clinic because administering abortions, even early ones, was too emotionally and mentally taxing for her. It never occurred to me that her job might have put her in physical danger, or that the protesters she encountered daily (it was a conservative town, after all) might have had some sort of impact on her decision to leave. In fact, she never even mentioned the picket lines to me. I spoke to her last night and asked if she'd ever felt at risk while working at the clinic. She told me she always felt safe. She also asked me not to mention her name in this piece.
Of course, my friend worked at Planned Parenthood during the Bush administration, which enacted the first federal law criminalizing second-trimester abortions and which went so far as to define birth control as abortion. The pro-life movement was getting what it wanted, and according to the National Abortion Federation, the number of reported death threats, clinic bombings, and attempted murders of clinic employees decreased between 2001 and 2008.
That all changed when, after losing control of the House in 2006, the right lost both the Senate and the White House last November. Since then, there has been an uptick in rightwing extremist violence. Threats against abortion providers reportedly spiked in January and have continued to increase throughout the first half of the year, coming to national attention less than two weeks ago with the murder of Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas physician who performed legal late abortions and who was gunned down in his own church by Scott Roeder, a known member of the anti-abortion movement. Tiller became the first death at the hands of anti-abortion extremists in 11 years—and the eighth since Roe vs. Wade.
It's important to call Tiller's murder, and the thousands of other acts of violence, vandalism, burglaries, kidnappings, stalkings, threats, and mischief that have taken place in the name of the anti-abortion movement, what they are: acts of domestic terrorism. Indeed, Tiller's murder was a political act, as was the shooting of a security guard at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. yesterday. James von Brunn is a white supremacist, an anti-Semite, and a Holocaust denier; he is also a convicted felon, which means the .22-caliber rifle he used to murder Stephen Tyrone Johns, who had worked at the museum for six years, was obtained illegally.
Both Roeder and von Brunn were seemingly lone wolves, but they are part of a larger movement of rightwing extremism that has emerged from the dark, shadowy corners of this country in recent months and which was accurately and prudently forecasted by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis earlier this year. The report, unambiguously titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," cited a perfect storm of economic hard times, the election of a black president, the promise of social change, and the return of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans susceptible to the recruitment of white-power militias, as grounds for the alert. It was eloquently referred to as a "piece of crap report" by the likes of this piece of crap blogger, and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano was forced to issue an apologia of sorts—despite the fact that the study was started during the previous administration.
That Roeder and von Brunn may have been lone wolves does not absolve others in the ideological groups to which they belong from culpability. Anti-abortion organizations with which Roeder is affiliated are indeed responsible. Operation Rescue—whose founder, Randall Terry, claimed that the anti-abortion movement was not responsible for Tiller's murder and then in the same breath proclaimed that the doctor "reaped what he sowed"—claims that Roeder has never been a member, contributor, or volunteer for their organization. But convicted terrorist and current Operation Rescue senior policy advisor Cheryl Sullenger has admitted to having multiple phone conversations with Roeder about Dr. Tiller. According to Rachel Maddow, who has admirably refused to let the story die while most mainstream news outlets have, Operation Rescue kept tabs on Tiller both on its website and on Sullenger's Twitter account. And as is evidently the practice of many anti-abortion groups, the organization posted the addresses for both Tiller's private home and church on its website. His church. What other purpose would it serve to post that information other than to furnish activists and extremists—that is, would-be assassins—with the necessary information to commit their crimes?
And crimes are exactly what these people are committing. In a piece for Air America, "Dr. George Tiller Didn't Have to Die," Amy Goodman detailed Roeder's offenses, including gluing shut the doors of a nearby clinic twice during the week leading up to Tiller's death, and suggested that simple law enforcement could have prevented the gruesome murder. Both Goodman and Maddow have called attention to the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), which makes blocking or damaging an abortion clinic's entrance a federal crime. FACE went largely unenforced under George W. Bush and clearly remains ineffective today.
Last night, Michigan representative Mike Rogers told Chris Matthews that crimes by fringe extremists like Roeder and von Brunn have "no connection to mainstream politics." But the rhetoric that propels, emboldens, and even creates these monsters comes directly from the mouths of the Republican establishment. Bill O'Reilly made repeated reference to "Tiller the Baby Killer" on his TV show, claiming that the doctor "execut[ed] babies about to be born," and compared his practice to the slaughter of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Von Brunn believes that Barack Obama isn't an American citizen, that—according to his own website—the president was "sent" to the United States to further the "Jew/Negro" agenda. In February, Alabama Senator Richard Shelby questioned Obama's citizenship, telling a local resident "I haven't seen any birth certificate. You have to be born in America to be president." And as recently as this week, the unofficial "Voice of the GOP," Rush Limbaugh, declared that the only thing Obama has in common with God is that "neither of them has a birth certificate."
This kind of incendiary race baiting and hate speech might be good entertainment, but it makes for risky politics. And it puts human lives at risk. Those on the left have been gleeful that the GOP is drumming itself out of the mainstream, but the right has been incessantly drumming a dangerously bigoted beat for months, propagating the kind of myths, lies, and conspiracy theories on which those on the outer fringes feed, breed, and kill.
A good friend of mine worked at Planned Parenthood on the West Coast a few years ago. Though she was and still is fiercely pro-choice, she eventually left the clinic because administering abortions, even early ones, was too emotionally and mentally taxing for her. It never occurred to me that her job might have put her in physical danger, or that the protesters she encountered daily (it was a conservative town, after all) might have had some sort of impact on her decision to leave. In fact, she never even mentioned the picket lines to me. I spoke to her last night and asked if she'd ever felt at risk while working at the clinic. She told me she always felt safe. She also asked me not to mention her name in this piece.
Of course, my friend worked at Planned Parenthood during the Bush administration, which enacted the first federal law criminalizing second-trimester abortions and which went so far as to define birth control as abortion. The pro-life movement was getting what it wanted, and according to the National Abortion Federation, the number of reported death threats, clinic bombings, and attempted murders of clinic employees decreased between 2001 and 2008.
That all changed when, after losing control of the House in 2006, the right lost both the Senate and the White House last November. Since then, there has been an uptick in rightwing extremist violence. Threats against abortion providers reportedly spiked in January and have continued to increase throughout the first half of the year, coming to national attention less than two weeks ago with the murder of Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas physician who performed legal late abortions and who was gunned down in his own church by Scott Roeder, a known member of the anti-abortion movement. Tiller became the first death at the hands of anti-abortion extremists in 11 years—and the eighth since Roe vs. Wade.
It's important to call Tiller's murder, and the thousands of other acts of violence, vandalism, burglaries, kidnappings, stalkings, threats, and mischief that have taken place in the name of the anti-abortion movement, what they are: acts of domestic terrorism. Indeed, Tiller's murder was a political act, as was the shooting of a security guard at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. yesterday. James von Brunn is a white supremacist, an anti-Semite, and a Holocaust denier; he is also a convicted felon, which means the .22-caliber rifle he used to murder Stephen Tyrone Johns, who had worked at the museum for six years, was obtained illegally.
Both Roeder and von Brunn were seemingly lone wolves, but they are part of a larger movement of rightwing extremism that has emerged from the dark, shadowy corners of this country in recent months and which was accurately and prudently forecasted by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis earlier this year. The report, unambiguously titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," cited a perfect storm of economic hard times, the election of a black president, the promise of social change, and the return of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans susceptible to the recruitment of white-power militias, as grounds for the alert. It was eloquently referred to as a "piece of crap report" by the likes of this piece of crap blogger, and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano was forced to issue an apologia of sorts—despite the fact that the study was started during the previous administration.
That Roeder and von Brunn may have been lone wolves does not absolve others in the ideological groups to which they belong from culpability. Anti-abortion organizations with which Roeder is affiliated are indeed responsible. Operation Rescue—whose founder, Randall Terry, claimed that the anti-abortion movement was not responsible for Tiller's murder and then in the same breath proclaimed that the doctor "reaped what he sowed"—claims that Roeder has never been a member, contributor, or volunteer for their organization. But convicted terrorist and current Operation Rescue senior policy advisor Cheryl Sullenger has admitted to having multiple phone conversations with Roeder about Dr. Tiller. According to Rachel Maddow, who has admirably refused to let the story die while most mainstream news outlets have, Operation Rescue kept tabs on Tiller both on its website and on Sullenger's Twitter account. And as is evidently the practice of many anti-abortion groups, the organization posted the addresses for both Tiller's private home and church on its website. His church. What other purpose would it serve to post that information other than to furnish activists and extremists—that is, would-be assassins—with the necessary information to commit their crimes?
And crimes are exactly what these people are committing. In a piece for Air America, "Dr. George Tiller Didn't Have to Die," Amy Goodman detailed Roeder's offenses, including gluing shut the doors of a nearby clinic twice during the week leading up to Tiller's death, and suggested that simple law enforcement could have prevented the gruesome murder. Both Goodman and Maddow have called attention to the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), which makes blocking or damaging an abortion clinic's entrance a federal crime. FACE went largely unenforced under George W. Bush and clearly remains ineffective today.
Last night, Michigan representative Mike Rogers told Chris Matthews that crimes by fringe extremists like Roeder and von Brunn have "no connection to mainstream politics." But the rhetoric that propels, emboldens, and even creates these monsters comes directly from the mouths of the Republican establishment. Bill O'Reilly made repeated reference to "Tiller the Baby Killer" on his TV show, claiming that the doctor "execut[ed] babies about to be born," and compared his practice to the slaughter of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Von Brunn believes that Barack Obama isn't an American citizen, that—according to his own website—the president was "sent" to the United States to further the "Jew/Negro" agenda. In February, Alabama Senator Richard Shelby questioned Obama's citizenship, telling a local resident "I haven't seen any birth certificate. You have to be born in America to be president." And as recently as this week, the unofficial "Voice of the GOP," Rush Limbaugh, declared that the only thing Obama has in common with God is that "neither of them has a birth certificate."
This kind of incendiary race baiting and hate speech might be good entertainment, but it makes for risky politics. And it puts human lives at risk. Those on the left have been gleeful that the GOP is drumming itself out of the mainstream, but the right has been incessantly drumming a dangerously bigoted beat for months, propagating the kind of myths, lies, and conspiracy theories on which those on the outer fringes feed, breed, and kill.
Have Pelosi's Chickens Come Home to Roost?
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 05/18/2009 21:08:19 In: Politics Comments: 0
Rush Limbaugh is calling for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's resignation. On his radio show last week, the right-wing lightning rod babbled something about glass ceilings and equality—the kind of pseudo-progressive logic conservatives like to employ when attempting to disguise their utter contempt for a minority or opposition group (in this case, it's both). In other words, if Pelosi truly wants to prove she's worthy of a man's job, then she ought to act like a man—you know, like Richard Nixon—and resign. It's enough to make me rush to the speaker's defense. But I refuse to take the bait, and I suspect few others will either.
The right has been waiting to take Pelosi down since the Democrats took control of the House in 2006. The Republican Party was quick to pounce on the Speaker's allegation Friday that she was misled by the CIA on the issue of torture, with House Minority Leader John Boehner admonishing his counterpart for questioning the CIA, telling CNN's John King that we ought to instead pat intelligence agents on the back for a "job well done," once again twisting a Democrat's criticism of Bush administration officials into a slandering of the "troops." Not to be outdone, on Meet the Press RNC Chairman Michael Steele attempted to conflate Pelosi's situation with that of the president: "The question for me is does the president support Nancy Pelosi's version of what happened or the CIA director's version of what happened?"
But Pelosi's downfall would just be an added bonus for them. Republicans are betting that Pelosi's—and thereby other Democrats in Congress's—apparent complicity in the Bush administration's torture program will cause Dems to further shy away from pushing for an inquiry into those crimes. At the very least, they want the attention deflected from what the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal today called "a spectacle of demagogic accusation and blame." But the right's gotcha strategy—calling Pelosi out on her apparent hypocrisy—is likely to backfire, the most obvious consequence of this finger-pointing being an even more fervent call by the public for a thorough investigation into who knew what and when.
Republican partisans like Limbaugh continue to make the erroneous assumption that Democrats think like them. Those who voiced outrage over the Bush administration's policies didn't do so because George W. Bush was a Republican, or even because of the nepotism or hanging chad that led him to power. The majority of Americans fundamentally disagree with those policies, and in fact, believe them to be violations of domestic and international law. The biggest miscalculation Republicans have made is that those in the Democratic Party who seek justice and accountability on the issue of torture will blindly defend Pelosi, and by extension the criminal policies for which they're seeking answers.
If Pelosi's claims that the CIA misled Congress on the issue of torture are false, then perhaps Limbaugh is right that she should step down. Simply declassifying the notes from the CIA briefing in question will provide the answer. The larger questions, however, were posed by none other than Karl Rove in the WSJ last week. "If Mrs. Pelosi considers the enhanced interrogation techniques to be torture, didn't she have a responsibility to complain at the time, introduce legislation to end the practices, or attempt to deny funding for the CIA's use of them?" he asked with all of the ersatz incredulity of a trial lawyer. "If she knew what was going on and did nothing, does that make her an accessory to a crime of torture, as many Democrats are calling enhanced interrogation?" Actually, most Democrats are calling it what it is: torture. More importantly, the answer to both of Rove's questions is, unequivocally, YES.
If Pelosi was aware of the program, the fact that she didn't publicly protest doesn't make the chief architects of that program, nor the attorneys who were hired to justify the legality of the program, nor the CIA operatives who carried out the program, nor any other official—Republican or Democrat—who knew about the program, but who didn't attempt to stop it, any less accountable. They should all be investigated for their collusive involvement, tacit or otherwise, in one of the most embarrassing, dangerous, and irresponsible programs in our nation's history. In other words, I say throw Pelosi to the wolves if it means getting to the truth.
Even if Attorney General Eric Holder appoints a special prosecutor to investigate torture, high-level prosecutions are unlikely, so an independent congressional council—i.e. a "truth commission"—would at least shine a light into the dark corners of the Bush administration and Congress, and provide an official record that the U.S. attempted to enforce the law and rectify wrongs. That's exactly the "spectacle" to which the WSJ referred and which the right fears; to them, the pursuit of truth and justice on the issue of torture is a "tempest," with the author of the op-ed describing such a commission as "hearings intended to be little more than bear-baitings of the defeated Bush Administration." Bush was shamed, discredited, and maligned, but defeated? This same piece praises Barack Obama for his "difficult decisions" on reinstating Bush's military tribunals and releasing photos of tortured detainees, an indication that many of the previous administration's policies are continuing.
By colluding with the administration on—or simply turning a blind eye to—a torture program that defied the country's international obligations, many elected officials were attempting to preserve their careers at a time when voicing dissent might have resulted in dire political consequences. During her circus-like press conference on Friday, Pelosi repeatedly and clearly enunciated the same point: that the only way she believed it was possible to change course on issues like terrorism and torture was to focus on regaining congressional majorities and electing a Democratic president—which, she reminded us, she helped achieve. But the consequences of Pelosi's failure to completely drain the swamp, which I detailed in these very pages last summer, are becoming increasingly evident. As Rove said, "Mrs. Pelosi is hip-deep in dangerous waters, and they are rapidly rising."
Rush Limbaugh is calling for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's resignation. On his radio show last week, the right-wing lightning rod babbled something about glass ceilings and equality—the kind of pseudo-progressive logic conservatives like to employ when attempting to disguise their utter contempt for a minority or opposition group (in this case, it's both). In other words, if Pelosi truly wants to prove she's worthy of a man's job, then she ought to act like a man—you know, like Richard Nixon—and resign. It's enough to make me rush to the speaker's defense. But I refuse to take the bait, and I suspect few others will either.
The right has been waiting to take Pelosi down since the Democrats took control of the House in 2006. The Republican Party was quick to pounce on the Speaker's allegation Friday that she was misled by the CIA on the issue of torture, with House Minority Leader John Boehner admonishing his counterpart for questioning the CIA, telling CNN's John King that we ought to instead pat intelligence agents on the back for a "job well done," once again twisting a Democrat's criticism of Bush administration officials into a slandering of the "troops." Not to be outdone, on Meet the Press RNC Chairman Michael Steele attempted to conflate Pelosi's situation with that of the president: "The question for me is does the president support Nancy Pelosi's version of what happened or the CIA director's version of what happened?"
But Pelosi's downfall would just be an added bonus for them. Republicans are betting that Pelosi's—and thereby other Democrats in Congress's—apparent complicity in the Bush administration's torture program will cause Dems to further shy away from pushing for an inquiry into those crimes. At the very least, they want the attention deflected from what the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal today called "a spectacle of demagogic accusation and blame." But the right's gotcha strategy—calling Pelosi out on her apparent hypocrisy—is likely to backfire, the most obvious consequence of this finger-pointing being an even more fervent call by the public for a thorough investigation into who knew what and when.
Republican partisans like Limbaugh continue to make the erroneous assumption that Democrats think like them. Those who voiced outrage over the Bush administration's policies didn't do so because George W. Bush was a Republican, or even because of the nepotism or hanging chad that led him to power. The majority of Americans fundamentally disagree with those policies, and in fact, believe them to be violations of domestic and international law. The biggest miscalculation Republicans have made is that those in the Democratic Party who seek justice and accountability on the issue of torture will blindly defend Pelosi, and by extension the criminal policies for which they're seeking answers.
If Pelosi's claims that the CIA misled Congress on the issue of torture are false, then perhaps Limbaugh is right that she should step down. Simply declassifying the notes from the CIA briefing in question will provide the answer. The larger questions, however, were posed by none other than Karl Rove in the WSJ last week. "If Mrs. Pelosi considers the enhanced interrogation techniques to be torture, didn't she have a responsibility to complain at the time, introduce legislation to end the practices, or attempt to deny funding for the CIA's use of them?" he asked with all of the ersatz incredulity of a trial lawyer. "If she knew what was going on and did nothing, does that make her an accessory to a crime of torture, as many Democrats are calling enhanced interrogation?" Actually, most Democrats are calling it what it is: torture. More importantly, the answer to both of Rove's questions is, unequivocally, YES.
If Pelosi was aware of the program, the fact that she didn't publicly protest doesn't make the chief architects of that program, nor the attorneys who were hired to justify the legality of the program, nor the CIA operatives who carried out the program, nor any other official—Republican or Democrat—who knew about the program, but who didn't attempt to stop it, any less accountable. They should all be investigated for their collusive involvement, tacit or otherwise, in one of the most embarrassing, dangerous, and irresponsible programs in our nation's history. In other words, I say throw Pelosi to the wolves if it means getting to the truth.
Even if Attorney General Eric Holder appoints a special prosecutor to investigate torture, high-level prosecutions are unlikely, so an independent congressional council—i.e. a "truth commission"—would at least shine a light into the dark corners of the Bush administration and Congress, and provide an official record that the U.S. attempted to enforce the law and rectify wrongs. That's exactly the "spectacle" to which the WSJ referred and which the right fears; to them, the pursuit of truth and justice on the issue of torture is a "tempest," with the author of the op-ed describing such a commission as "hearings intended to be little more than bear-baitings of the defeated Bush Administration." Bush was shamed, discredited, and maligned, but defeated? This same piece praises Barack Obama for his "difficult decisions" on reinstating Bush's military tribunals and releasing photos of tortured detainees, an indication that many of the previous administration's policies are continuing.
By colluding with the administration on—or simply turning a blind eye to—a torture program that defied the country's international obligations, many elected officials were attempting to preserve their careers at a time when voicing dissent might have resulted in dire political consequences. During her circus-like press conference on Friday, Pelosi repeatedly and clearly enunciated the same point: that the only way she believed it was possible to change course on issues like terrorism and torture was to focus on regaining congressional majorities and electing a Democratic president—which, she reminded us, she helped achieve. But the consequences of Pelosi's failure to completely drain the swamp, which I detailed in these very pages last summer, are becoming increasingly evident. As Rove said, "Mrs. Pelosi is hip-deep in dangerous waters, and they are rapidly rising."
Breakfast of Progressives: Cheerios and Breast Milk
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 05/14/2009 19:31:00 In: Politics Comments: 0
In 2007, the Department of Health and Human Services toned down an advertising campaign informing the public of the potential health risks of not breastfeeding babies. Naturally, the formula industry had a cow, and they lobbied hard against the ads and won. The campaign was watered down so as to have little impact on the breastfeeding rate in the United States, which, at 30%, lags behind Europe. The agency also decided not to promote a study which found that breastfeeding is, according to The Washington Post, "associated with fewer ear and gastrointestinal infections, as well as lower rates of diabetes, leukemia, obesity, asthma and sudden infant death syndrome." (If this seems like an odd issue for a young, single male to be championing, the HHS has reported that children who aren't breastfed are 40% more likely to suffer from Type 1 diabetes, a disease that afflicts both of my sisters.)
It helped, of course, that formula companies are part of the pharmaceutical industry, and that the administration in office at the time was the most amiable to Big Pharma in history—an administration that, it should be noted, took little to no measures to assist new mothers in its eight-year tenure. The Post described the formula industry's lobbying efforts as "a full-court press to reach top political appointees at HHS, using influential former government officials, now working for the industry, to act as go-betweens," including former chairman of the Republican National Committee Joseph A. Levitt. Political interference into public health and safety pales in comparison to the Bush administration's other known crimes, but the larger issue here sheds light on the right's ideological opposition to the new administration's desire to allow government to function as it was intended.
Right-wing loons like Michelle Malkin have been up in arms this week over the Food and Drug Administration's concerns over Cheerios's claims that it can lower cholesterol by four percent in six weeks, and that it can help fight against cancer. It's bad enough when foods claim to help reduce cholesterol because, as it usually states in tiny print, "a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease" (yes, eating healthy foods is healthy), but there's nothing special about Cheerios. It's like the sidewalk taking credit for the increased health of avid walkers. General Mills might as well encourage parents to serve Cheerios with breast milk and then say the cereal provides children with vital immune system benefits.
The FDA is doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect consumers from misleading or unsubstantiated claims—something David Theroux of The Independent Institute calls one of Obama's "'progressive' (i.e., authoritarian) absurdities." In response to all the media coverage, General Mills has issued a statement saying that their claim that Cheerios can lower cholesterol by a certain percentage in a fixed period of time has been "featured on the box for more than two years," that "the science is not in question," and that the FDA is merely interested in how the information is presented. Critics of the FDA's move think it's silly, but how information is presented is key to good messaging—something the right has clearly forgotten.
In 2007, the Department of Health and Human Services toned down an advertising campaign informing the public of the potential health risks of not breastfeeding babies. Naturally, the formula industry had a cow, and they lobbied hard against the ads and won. The campaign was watered down so as to have little impact on the breastfeeding rate in the United States, which, at 30%, lags behind Europe. The agency also decided not to promote a study which found that breastfeeding is, according to The Washington Post, "associated with fewer ear and gastrointestinal infections, as well as lower rates of diabetes, leukemia, obesity, asthma and sudden infant death syndrome." (If this seems like an odd issue for a young, single male to be championing, the HHS has reported that children who aren't breastfed are 40% more likely to suffer from Type 1 diabetes, a disease that afflicts both of my sisters.)
It helped, of course, that formula companies are part of the pharmaceutical industry, and that the administration in office at the time was the most amiable to Big Pharma in history—an administration that, it should be noted, took little to no measures to assist new mothers in its eight-year tenure. The Post described the formula industry's lobbying efforts as "a full-court press to reach top political appointees at HHS, using influential former government officials, now working for the industry, to act as go-betweens," including former chairman of the Republican National Committee Joseph A. Levitt. Political interference into public health and safety pales in comparison to the Bush administration's other known crimes, but the larger issue here sheds light on the right's ideological opposition to the new administration's desire to allow government to function as it was intended.
Right-wing loons like Michelle Malkin have been up in arms this week over the Food and Drug Administration's concerns over Cheerios's claims that it can lower cholesterol by four percent in six weeks, and that it can help fight against cancer. It's bad enough when foods claim to help reduce cholesterol because, as it usually states in tiny print, "a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease" (yes, eating healthy foods is healthy), but there's nothing special about Cheerios. It's like the sidewalk taking credit for the increased health of avid walkers. General Mills might as well encourage parents to serve Cheerios with breast milk and then say the cereal provides children with vital immune system benefits.
The FDA is doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect consumers from misleading or unsubstantiated claims—something David Theroux of The Independent Institute calls one of Obama's "'progressive' (i.e., authoritarian) absurdities." In response to all the media coverage, General Mills has issued a statement saying that their claim that Cheerios can lower cholesterol by a certain percentage in a fixed period of time has been "featured on the box for more than two years," that "the science is not in question," and that the FDA is merely interested in how the information is presented. Critics of the FDA's move think it's silly, but how information is presented is key to good messaging—something the right has clearly forgotten.
Obama the Obstructionist?
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 04/21/2009 16:42:52 In: Politics Comments: 2
The Republican Party takes its role as the opposition with the same seriousness a white, gun-toting suburbanite protects his or her colonial home. Two weeks ago, a certain talk radio host criticized President Obama for not responding boisterously enough about the Somali pirate hostage crisis. Before launching into an incomprehensible—and incomprehensibly long and sarcastic—monologue about how the pirates couldn't be Muslim because Obama claims we're not at war with Islam ("I suppose they could be a rogue band—a very, very, very tiny, small infinitesimal minority of Islam. But we're not at war with Islam. The president said so. So the Somali pirates—I mean, the story is that they're Muslims, but that can't be, because we're not at war with them. My guess is it's the Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews committing piracy in the open seas off Somalia over there, there's no question in my mind"), Rush Limbaugh claimed that the reason there has been a resurgence of piracy of late is "because idiots like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama think pirates and terrorists—and this is terrorism—are criminals, not enemies."
Never mind that the recent piracy scourge began during the last administration, but if Limbaugh believes that piracy is terrorism and that we're indeed at war with Islam, then why, after Obama approved an operation in which U.S. snipers shot down three of the hijackers and thusly rescued the U.S. hostage, did he say this: "You know what we have learned about the Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers that were wiped out at the order of Barack Obama, you know what we learned about them? They were teenagers. The Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers who took a U.S. merchant captain hostage for five days were inexperienced youths…Now, just imagine the hue and cry had a Republican president ordered the shooting of black teenagers on the high seas"? Yes, the bloated face of the Fringe Party is also, fittingly, the bloated face of hypocrisy.
Subtler, though no less duplicitous, is the daily assessments of Bill O'Reilly, a man who bases the quality of his network's coverage on the number of viewers who saw it. On The O'Reilly Factor last night, Fox News White House Correspondent Jim Angle chided Obama for deeming waterboarding "too harsh," but ordering air strikes on terrorists "in their homes, presumably with their wives and children." When asked by O'Reilly about "some" people—read: "us"—who think Obama is "making a big deal out of [waterboarding]," Angle said: "One could argue that waterboarding isn't nearly as bad as being blown up." He actually said that. Out loud. I suppose he deserves some credit for his transparent attempt to dress it up so that he could later claim that he wasn't the "one" who was arguing that insidious point.
Partisan spin is expected from these political hacks. But if there was ever any question about who was running the country for the last eight years, the recent flood of criticism about the fledgling Obama administration from senior members of the Bush team, and the relative silence of Bush himself, should leave no doubt. "You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the vice president of the United States," Karl Rove said without a hint of irony in regard to an anecdote recalled by Vice President Joe Biden. (Rove's hypocrisy deserves a piece in and of itself—and it's already been written.)
And speaking of vice presidential liars, Dick Cheney has at least exhibited the virtue of consistency by claiming that Obama is putting the country at risk by, among other things, halting the previous administration's torture program. For that, Obama has been praised by both the left and the right. But his disinterest in prosecuting the CIA operatives who committed the crime of torture and those in the Bush administration who sanctioned those acts, though consistent, has angered many of his supporters. Unlike Republicans, who acquiesced to George W. Bush's every war-mongering, Constitution-dismantling, executive power-grabbing whim, it seems that Democrats are unwilling to sit idly by and blindly support a president who seeks to obstruct justice in the name of politics.
Starting a witch hunt at the CIA could result in the kind of mass exodus of seasoned intelligence officers that weakened the agency during the Clinton administration. Obama understandably doesn't want to repeat the mistakes of his Democratic predecessor, and the announcement last week that his administration has no intention of seeking prosecutions of CIA employees who carried out policies ordered by Bush and Cheney is further evidence of that. But Obama's disinterest in pursuing justice extends to even operatives who went beyond what was authorized in the recently released memos regarding those "aggressive interrogation techniques," the top Bush officials who composed those memos, and presumably Bush and Cheney themselves.
Over the weekend, Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told ABC that the president believes that those who devised the torture policies should not be prosecuted. This kind of stance is not simply disappointing or embarrassing, it's downright lawless. The message continues to be that the United States can do whatever it wants, that we can ignore international laws and treaties. More specifically, it signals that the country's politicos and their minions will not be upheld to the same standards of justice as ordinary citizens. As lefty Glenn Greenwald so nonpartisan-ly put it: "Perhaps it's time to begin a FREE BERNIE MADOFF campaign based on Obama's oh-so-moving decree that this is a time for reflection, not retribution, and that we must look forward, not backwards."
This "look forward, not backward" mantra has become as disturbingly pervasive as any of Bush's asinine slogans, with Emanuel, increasingly inept White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, and a chorus of others in Washington employing it ad nauseam. But before I join the ranks of those on the left crying foul, I'd like to examine, briefly, the possibility that Obama is attempting the ultimate have-his-cake-and-eat-it-too political move. In the current issue of Newsweek, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas cite sources inside the Department of Justice who suggest that Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, is still considering investigating the issue of torture, while Democrats in Congress, specifically head of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy, still want a commission to examine the abuses. As president, Obama has an obligation to focus on the country's most pressing issues—the economy, health care, those pesky wars—and to keep the intelligence community on his side, and that's exactly what he's doing. Presidents aren't prosecutors, and, unless you're George W. Bush, the executive office doesn't run the DOJ. That means it's your move, Mr. Holder.
The Republican Party takes its role as the opposition with the same seriousness a white, gun-toting suburbanite protects his or her colonial home. Two weeks ago, a certain talk radio host criticized President Obama for not responding boisterously enough about the Somali pirate hostage crisis. Before launching into an incomprehensible—and incomprehensibly long and sarcastic—monologue about how the pirates couldn't be Muslim because Obama claims we're not at war with Islam ("I suppose they could be a rogue band—a very, very, very tiny, small infinitesimal minority of Islam. But we're not at war with Islam. The president said so. So the Somali pirates—I mean, the story is that they're Muslims, but that can't be, because we're not at war with them. My guess is it's the Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews committing piracy in the open seas off Somalia over there, there's no question in my mind"), Rush Limbaugh claimed that the reason there has been a resurgence of piracy of late is "because idiots like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama think pirates and terrorists—and this is terrorism—are criminals, not enemies."
Never mind that the recent piracy scourge began during the last administration, but if Limbaugh believes that piracy is terrorism and that we're indeed at war with Islam, then why, after Obama approved an operation in which U.S. snipers shot down three of the hijackers and thusly rescued the U.S. hostage, did he say this: "You know what we have learned about the Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers that were wiped out at the order of Barack Obama, you know what we learned about them? They were teenagers. The Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers who took a U.S. merchant captain hostage for five days were inexperienced youths…Now, just imagine the hue and cry had a Republican president ordered the shooting of black teenagers on the high seas"? Yes, the bloated face of the Fringe Party is also, fittingly, the bloated face of hypocrisy.
Subtler, though no less duplicitous, is the daily assessments of Bill O'Reilly, a man who bases the quality of his network's coverage on the number of viewers who saw it. On The O'Reilly Factor last night, Fox News White House Correspondent Jim Angle chided Obama for deeming waterboarding "too harsh," but ordering air strikes on terrorists "in their homes, presumably with their wives and children." When asked by O'Reilly about "some" people—read: "us"—who think Obama is "making a big deal out of [waterboarding]," Angle said: "One could argue that waterboarding isn't nearly as bad as being blown up." He actually said that. Out loud. I suppose he deserves some credit for his transparent attempt to dress it up so that he could later claim that he wasn't the "one" who was arguing that insidious point.
Partisan spin is expected from these political hacks. But if there was ever any question about who was running the country for the last eight years, the recent flood of criticism about the fledgling Obama administration from senior members of the Bush team, and the relative silence of Bush himself, should leave no doubt. "You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the vice president of the United States," Karl Rove said without a hint of irony in regard to an anecdote recalled by Vice President Joe Biden. (Rove's hypocrisy deserves a piece in and of itself—and it's already been written.)
And speaking of vice presidential liars, Dick Cheney has at least exhibited the virtue of consistency by claiming that Obama is putting the country at risk by, among other things, halting the previous administration's torture program. For that, Obama has been praised by both the left and the right. But his disinterest in prosecuting the CIA operatives who committed the crime of torture and those in the Bush administration who sanctioned those acts, though consistent, has angered many of his supporters. Unlike Republicans, who acquiesced to George W. Bush's every war-mongering, Constitution-dismantling, executive power-grabbing whim, it seems that Democrats are unwilling to sit idly by and blindly support a president who seeks to obstruct justice in the name of politics.
Starting a witch hunt at the CIA could result in the kind of mass exodus of seasoned intelligence officers that weakened the agency during the Clinton administration. Obama understandably doesn't want to repeat the mistakes of his Democratic predecessor, and the announcement last week that his administration has no intention of seeking prosecutions of CIA employees who carried out policies ordered by Bush and Cheney is further evidence of that. But Obama's disinterest in pursuing justice extends to even operatives who went beyond what was authorized in the recently released memos regarding those "aggressive interrogation techniques," the top Bush officials who composed those memos, and presumably Bush and Cheney themselves.
Over the weekend, Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told ABC that the president believes that those who devised the torture policies should not be prosecuted. This kind of stance is not simply disappointing or embarrassing, it's downright lawless. The message continues to be that the United States can do whatever it wants, that we can ignore international laws and treaties. More specifically, it signals that the country's politicos and their minions will not be upheld to the same standards of justice as ordinary citizens. As lefty Glenn Greenwald so nonpartisan-ly put it: "Perhaps it's time to begin a FREE BERNIE MADOFF campaign based on Obama's oh-so-moving decree that this is a time for reflection, not retribution, and that we must look forward, not backwards."
This "look forward, not backward" mantra has become as disturbingly pervasive as any of Bush's asinine slogans, with Emanuel, increasingly inept White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, and a chorus of others in Washington employing it ad nauseam. But before I join the ranks of those on the left crying foul, I'd like to examine, briefly, the possibility that Obama is attempting the ultimate have-his-cake-and-eat-it-too political move. In the current issue of Newsweek, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas cite sources inside the Department of Justice who suggest that Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, is still considering investigating the issue of torture, while Democrats in Congress, specifically head of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy, still want a commission to examine the abuses. As president, Obama has an obligation to focus on the country's most pressing issues—the economy, health care, those pesky wars—and to keep the intelligence community on his side, and that's exactly what he's doing. Presidents aren't prosecutors, and, unless you're George W. Bush, the executive office doesn't run the DOJ. That means it's your move, Mr. Holder.
Tongue Control: Guns and the Right
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 04/08/2009 19:34:33 In: Politics Comments: 2
The recent spate of gun violence—the massacre at a Binghamton immigrant aid center on Friday, the slaying of three Pittsburgh police officers on Saturday, and a fatal shooting at a Christian retreat center in California last night—has inspired a lot of finger pointing, with liberal bloggers blaming some on the right for inciting paranoia about gun rights. Specifically, the targets have been Fox News loon Glenn Beck and the NRA's Wayne LaPierre, who, like Pittsburgh cop killer Richard Poplawski, believe that the Obama administration is planning to take away gun ownership rights, among other things. Salon's Alex Coppelman helped put things in perspective, claiming that every time there's a crime committed by a person with a known political grievance, one party "goes on the attack, claiming their opponents are responsible for the deaths, while the other counterattacks, saying their opponents are just exploiting the tragedy."
While this may be an accurate observation, it doesn't mean that nobody bears responsibility for fanning the flames of a few crazies' fires. It may be unfair to blame the entire Republican Party for the ostensibly mentally unstable Poplawski's brutal ambush of three civil servants over the weekend, and the Binghamton shooter was reportedly motivated by the loss of his job and his inability to speak English (shame and humiliation are both known triggers for this kind of violence, and are more frequent during economic downturns), but the right's loudest voices, if not the most lucid or most popular, have been spewing outrageous rhetoric and calling for extreme action since before Barack Obama even took office. To be sure, the smears began before he even won the election.
I asked the question last year, and it bears repeating: What is the right so pissed off about? Republicans ran the country for years—and not just any Republicans, but the most extreme faction of the party. The Bush administration's neocon-designed policies were some of the most radical the country had seen in decades, if ever, and the left was rightfully enraged. But if the left's rage felt immediate, in the form of eggs splattering against the side of the then-newly christened president's limousine, it was because of the nature of his election, not his policies—at least at first. There was early opposition to George W. Bush's policies (and make no mistake, they were radical from the outset), but no one called for a revolution. And it wasn't until Iraq spiraled into uncontainable violence and the administration's corruption and war crimes hit the front pages that the most visible on the left finally started pounding the pavement.
And there's one more important caveat: The right isn't upset about what Obama has done, but what they're afraid he's going to do. So where is this fear coming from? I once jokingly likened Keith Olbermann to Howard Beale, and now Olbermann has taken to likening Beck, who routinely bursts into crying jags, to Harold Hill, the conman from The Music Man. But Beale is probably more like it. Even the abhorrent Michael Savage thinks Beck is a few bricks short of a solid foundation: "I'm afraid the guy's going to have a nervous breakdown on the air," he spat. "This guy's on the edge everyday." Beck defended himself against the assertion that his rhetoric is influencing people like the Pittsburgh gunman by saying that blaming anyone other than Poplawski himself "is like blaming the flight attendant after a terrorist takes down a plane," comparing what he does on the air every night to giving the passengers of a plane "a nice little safety talk to prepare them." Creepy.
For her part, Minnesota representative Michele Bachmann has been disseminating a litany of paranoid nonsense, from the elimination of the U.S. dollar to Senator Edward Kennedy's desire to use "re-education camps" to brainwash the country's youth. She has repeatedly called for a revolution, most recently on Sean Hannity's radio show: "It's like Thomas Jefferson said, a revolution every now and then is a good thing." She followed that cherry bomb by reframing it as an "orderly revolution," but her language—calling for citizens to be "armed and dangerous"—and the urgency with which she and others have been sounding the alarm is disturbing. "We can't let the Democrats achieve their ends any longer!" she warned Hannity, who literally started singing hallelujahs. Evidently Republicans have a much lower threshold of tolerance than Democrats when it comes to not being in power. A whopping two and a half months of policies they don't agree with is apparently just too much to handle.
The DailyKos's Markos Moulitsas put it best when, in 140 characters or less, he offered this: "When [Democrats] were out of power, we organized to win the next election. Conservatives, apparently, prefer to talk 'revolution' and kill cops." For years Olbermann called for Congress, the courts, and the voters to take action against the Bush administration, but even at his most smug, at his most righteously indignant, he simply appealed for legal avenues of action. There was no coded language that could be misinterpreted as a plea for extra-legal action. We have elections in this country, a concept Bachmann, who nearly lost hers last fall after proposing a congressional socialist witch hunt on Hardball with Chris Matthews, clearly doesn't grasp.
You can't ignore these hysterical Chicken Littles because they've been given a national public platform with which they are instilling this paranoia in their audiences and/or solidifying the fears of those who would do exactly what they're advocating: take extreme action. The most dangerous thing about charlatans is the people who follow them. But it's not just the fringe that's propagating fear: Dick Cheney has publicly derided Obama's national security policies, claiming they are weakening the country. How long will it be before one of these guns is pointed at the president or his family in the name of protecting America?
To hear it from the lips of Obama himself, personal responsibility is no longer just a virtue espoused by the right. Coppelman is right to say that it's foolish to point fingers when it comes to gun violence. But when a pattern develops, all of the contributing factors need to be examined. And when the violence runs rampant, policies are worth examining too. No one in the Democratic Party advocates taking people's guns away. Banning weapons altogether is unlikely to stop criminals from getting their hands on them—prohibition and the drug war have taught us that. But reinstating the Federal Assault Weapons Ban along with stricter overall regulation, like closing the gun show loophole and requiring permits for carrying a concealed firearm, might—might—keep guns out of the hands of just a few loose screws. Of course, then there might not be anyone left to lead Bachmann's revolution.
The recent spate of gun violence—the massacre at a Binghamton immigrant aid center on Friday, the slaying of three Pittsburgh police officers on Saturday, and a fatal shooting at a Christian retreat center in California last night—has inspired a lot of finger pointing, with liberal bloggers blaming some on the right for inciting paranoia about gun rights. Specifically, the targets have been Fox News loon Glenn Beck and the NRA's Wayne LaPierre, who, like Pittsburgh cop killer Richard Poplawski, believe that the Obama administration is planning to take away gun ownership rights, among other things. Salon's Alex Coppelman helped put things in perspective, claiming that every time there's a crime committed by a person with a known political grievance, one party "goes on the attack, claiming their opponents are responsible for the deaths, while the other counterattacks, saying their opponents are just exploiting the tragedy."
While this may be an accurate observation, it doesn't mean that nobody bears responsibility for fanning the flames of a few crazies' fires. It may be unfair to blame the entire Republican Party for the ostensibly mentally unstable Poplawski's brutal ambush of three civil servants over the weekend, and the Binghamton shooter was reportedly motivated by the loss of his job and his inability to speak English (shame and humiliation are both known triggers for this kind of violence, and are more frequent during economic downturns), but the right's loudest voices, if not the most lucid or most popular, have been spewing outrageous rhetoric and calling for extreme action since before Barack Obama even took office. To be sure, the smears began before he even won the election.
I asked the question last year, and it bears repeating: What is the right so pissed off about? Republicans ran the country for years—and not just any Republicans, but the most extreme faction of the party. The Bush administration's neocon-designed policies were some of the most radical the country had seen in decades, if ever, and the left was rightfully enraged. But if the left's rage felt immediate, in the form of eggs splattering against the side of the then-newly christened president's limousine, it was because of the nature of his election, not his policies—at least at first. There was early opposition to George W. Bush's policies (and make no mistake, they were radical from the outset), but no one called for a revolution. And it wasn't until Iraq spiraled into uncontainable violence and the administration's corruption and war crimes hit the front pages that the most visible on the left finally started pounding the pavement.
And there's one more important caveat: The right isn't upset about what Obama has done, but what they're afraid he's going to do. So where is this fear coming from? I once jokingly likened Keith Olbermann to Howard Beale, and now Olbermann has taken to likening Beck, who routinely bursts into crying jags, to Harold Hill, the conman from The Music Man. But Beale is probably more like it. Even the abhorrent Michael Savage thinks Beck is a few bricks short of a solid foundation: "I'm afraid the guy's going to have a nervous breakdown on the air," he spat. "This guy's on the edge everyday." Beck defended himself against the assertion that his rhetoric is influencing people like the Pittsburgh gunman by saying that blaming anyone other than Poplawski himself "is like blaming the flight attendant after a terrorist takes down a plane," comparing what he does on the air every night to giving the passengers of a plane "a nice little safety talk to prepare them." Creepy.
For her part, Minnesota representative Michele Bachmann has been disseminating a litany of paranoid nonsense, from the elimination of the U.S. dollar to Senator Edward Kennedy's desire to use "re-education camps" to brainwash the country's youth. She has repeatedly called for a revolution, most recently on Sean Hannity's radio show: "It's like Thomas Jefferson said, a revolution every now and then is a good thing." She followed that cherry bomb by reframing it as an "orderly revolution," but her language—calling for citizens to be "armed and dangerous"—and the urgency with which she and others have been sounding the alarm is disturbing. "We can't let the Democrats achieve their ends any longer!" she warned Hannity, who literally started singing hallelujahs. Evidently Republicans have a much lower threshold of tolerance than Democrats when it comes to not being in power. A whopping two and a half months of policies they don't agree with is apparently just too much to handle.
The DailyKos's Markos Moulitsas put it best when, in 140 characters or less, he offered this: "When [Democrats] were out of power, we organized to win the next election. Conservatives, apparently, prefer to talk 'revolution' and kill cops." For years Olbermann called for Congress, the courts, and the voters to take action against the Bush administration, but even at his most smug, at his most righteously indignant, he simply appealed for legal avenues of action. There was no coded language that could be misinterpreted as a plea for extra-legal action. We have elections in this country, a concept Bachmann, who nearly lost hers last fall after proposing a congressional socialist witch hunt on Hardball with Chris Matthews, clearly doesn't grasp.
You can't ignore these hysterical Chicken Littles because they've been given a national public platform with which they are instilling this paranoia in their audiences and/or solidifying the fears of those who would do exactly what they're advocating: take extreme action. The most dangerous thing about charlatans is the people who follow them. But it's not just the fringe that's propagating fear: Dick Cheney has publicly derided Obama's national security policies, claiming they are weakening the country. How long will it be before one of these guns is pointed at the president or his family in the name of protecting America?
To hear it from the lips of Obama himself, personal responsibility is no longer just a virtue espoused by the right. Coppelman is right to say that it's foolish to point fingers when it comes to gun violence. But when a pattern develops, all of the contributing factors need to be examined. And when the violence runs rampant, policies are worth examining too. No one in the Democratic Party advocates taking people's guns away. Banning weapons altogether is unlikely to stop criminals from getting their hands on them—prohibition and the drug war have taught us that. But reinstating the Federal Assault Weapons Ban along with stricter overall regulation, like closing the gun show loophole and requiring permits for carrying a concealed firearm, might—might—keep guns out of the hands of just a few loose screws. Of course, then there might not be anyone left to lead Bachmann's revolution.
What Sesame Street Taught Me About Wall Street
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 04/04/2009 18:09:06 In: Politics Comments: 0
To quote President Obama, I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak. I took courses in finance, accounting, statistics, and even a class on professional ethics in college, and I have a basic understanding of how Wall Street functions. But the truth is, I learned everything I know about regulation of the financial system from Sesame Street. When I was little I saw a segment on the PBS program about the importance of traffic lights, and the image of cars careening haphazardly through the streets, narrowly escaping collisions and sending pedestrians running for their lives, was indelible—one that repeatedly pops into my head whenever I hear debates about Wall Street regulation:
The particulars of TARP or debt-for-equity swaps are, to quote Obama again, above my pay-grade. I'm more interested in the larger issue of regulation and its role in a capitalist system. As Warren G and Nate Dogg once said, sometimes you have to regulate. Sure, they were talking about shooting pimps and getting high, and not the financial derivatives market, but the suits on Wall Street aren't any less gluttonous than your average hip-hop artist. After all, it's their job to be greedy—just ask Michael Douglas. And in a capitalist system, it's the job of government to ensure that the system doesn't run amok.
Whether it's the financial sector, health care, or taxes, the right cries "Socialism!" anytime someone suggests that putting the interests of the people of America ahead of the interests of corporate America might be a good idea, or that supply-side, trickle-down nonsense is just that: nonsense. But when it comes to lining the pockets of legislators on Capitol Hill, greed doesn't discriminate. In the late 1990s, Phil Gramm, then-Texas senator and future economic advisor to John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, wrote the bill that repealed Glass-Steagall, but Democrats were complicit in—if not outright enthusiastic about—rescinding the Depression-era law that prevented banks from getting their fingers into the insurance and securities industries.
And now the same business interests that helped create the problem are flexing their muscles and using their political influence on the Hill to prevent the very reform that's necessary to fix it. The Washington Post reported today that Larry Summers, one of the president's top economic advisors, was bribed—I mean, paid—handsomely for speaking engagements last year by Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs. To wit, Bill Black, professor and former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention, told Bill Moyers last night just how little change he believes Obama has brought to Washington when it comes to the incestuous, deregulated relationship between Wall Street and the U.S. government.
The French Revolution was sparked by conditions not unlike the ones the U.S. is experiencing today: costly wars, increasing economic disparity, the refusal of the upper class to pay higher taxes, leaders who seem tragically out of touch or downright corrupt. Middle-class wages are stagnant in the U.S., while the top 1% of the country controls exponentially more wealth than it did 25 years ago. Let them eat pie! More precisely, let them eat a third of it!
By default, capitalism allows for the prosperity of big business—and yes, Joe, even for small ones to get big enough to graduate to a new tax bracket. A capitalist system encourages ingenuity, exploitation, and free enterprise. The problem is that instead of creating anything of value, industrious Wall Street traders, with the compliance of Congress, simply used their new capitalist freedoms to invent new ways of creating wealth that were so convoluted that it was impossible to see the forest for the bundles of bad investments that it was. As a result, the giant casino we call the stock market has become even more of a fantasy ride. It's the job of the people we elect to represent us to make sure we don't get run over.
To quote President Obama, I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak. I took courses in finance, accounting, statistics, and even a class on professional ethics in college, and I have a basic understanding of how Wall Street functions. But the truth is, I learned everything I know about regulation of the financial system from Sesame Street. When I was little I saw a segment on the PBS program about the importance of traffic lights, and the image of cars careening haphazardly through the streets, narrowly escaping collisions and sending pedestrians running for their lives, was indelible—one that repeatedly pops into my head whenever I hear debates about Wall Street regulation:
The particulars of TARP or debt-for-equity swaps are, to quote Obama again, above my pay-grade. I'm more interested in the larger issue of regulation and its role in a capitalist system. As Warren G and Nate Dogg once said, sometimes you have to regulate. Sure, they were talking about shooting pimps and getting high, and not the financial derivatives market, but the suits on Wall Street aren't any less gluttonous than your average hip-hop artist. After all, it's their job to be greedy—just ask Michael Douglas. And in a capitalist system, it's the job of government to ensure that the system doesn't run amok.
Whether it's the financial sector, health care, or taxes, the right cries "Socialism!" anytime someone suggests that putting the interests of the people of America ahead of the interests of corporate America might be a good idea, or that supply-side, trickle-down nonsense is just that: nonsense. But when it comes to lining the pockets of legislators on Capitol Hill, greed doesn't discriminate. In the late 1990s, Phil Gramm, then-Texas senator and future economic advisor to John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, wrote the bill that repealed Glass-Steagall, but Democrats were complicit in—if not outright enthusiastic about—rescinding the Depression-era law that prevented banks from getting their fingers into the insurance and securities industries.
And now the same business interests that helped create the problem are flexing their muscles and using their political influence on the Hill to prevent the very reform that's necessary to fix it. The Washington Post reported today that Larry Summers, one of the president's top economic advisors, was bribed—I mean, paid—handsomely for speaking engagements last year by Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs. To wit, Bill Black, professor and former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention, told Bill Moyers last night just how little change he believes Obama has brought to Washington when it comes to the incestuous, deregulated relationship between Wall Street and the U.S. government.
The French Revolution was sparked by conditions not unlike the ones the U.S. is experiencing today: costly wars, increasing economic disparity, the refusal of the upper class to pay higher taxes, leaders who seem tragically out of touch or downright corrupt. Middle-class wages are stagnant in the U.S., while the top 1% of the country controls exponentially more wealth than it did 25 years ago. Let them eat pie! More precisely, let them eat a third of it!
By default, capitalism allows for the prosperity of big business—and yes, Joe, even for small ones to get big enough to graduate to a new tax bracket. A capitalist system encourages ingenuity, exploitation, and free enterprise. The problem is that instead of creating anything of value, industrious Wall Street traders, with the compliance of Congress, simply used their new capitalist freedoms to invent new ways of creating wealth that were so convoluted that it was impossible to see the forest for the bundles of bad investments that it was. As a result, the giant casino we call the stock market has become even more of a fantasy ride. It's the job of the people we elect to represent us to make sure we don't get run over.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
By: Matthew Cole On: 03/11/2009 14:10:21 In: Politics Comments: 5
If the Republican Party was hobbled at the outset of the 2008 election, they were on the floor when it ended. And now Rush Limbaugh is sitting on them. When new party Chair Michael Steele described Limbaugh's hope that President Barack Obama would fail as "ugly" and "incendiary," he quickly apologized. Steele's lack of backbone is not unique. It seems no Republican is up to the challenge of confronting the lunatic fringe's Lunatic-in-Chief: South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Georgia Representative Phil Gringey have also criticized Limbaugh, only to later supplicate themselves. But Steele's apology, in particular, demonstrates the dubious honor of being chosen to play referee in a Republican Party torn apart by internal politics. Moderate conservatives, business elites, neoconservative hawks, and, yes, Limbaugh-loving social reactionaries all want to control the party's reconstruction. And what Limbaugh's recent tantrums demonstrate is that the negotiations will be anything but cordial.
Some might think that understanding the crisis in conservative politics requires a lot of sophisticated analysis. I prefer explanations that mix in a good amount of gloating and some pop culture references. For the Republican Party, the template is Sergio Leone: three contingents are fighting for control—the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—and three possible futures hang in the balance.
Rush Limbaugh speaks for—you guessed it—the Ugly. The Ugly describe Republicans who are hateful toward women and minorities, who believe they've been wronged by the secular leftist establishment and want revenge. All of the participants in the right-wing populist culture wars—zealots who picket outside abortion clinics, Prop 8 pushers, minutemen—get filed under Ugly.
The Bad may not be as passionate as the Ugly, but they are calculating and crassly self-serving. They're the hawks and free-market ideologues who subordinate the common good to narrow agendas for the expansion of the wealth and power of their own kind. They get indicted a lot. Tom Delay and Donald Rumsfeld come to mind as exemplars, but the Bad are often the power behind the party rather than its public face—billionaire campaign donors, lobbyists, etc.
Then there's the Good. Clint Eastwood's character in the The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was a scoundrel but, crucially, his word was his bond and he kept to a personal code of justice. Partisanship aside, Republicans interested in running an opposition party that is socially conservative without being intolerant and fiscally conservative while still concerned with the common good certainly qualify as Good guys. Olympia Snowe and Mitt Romney are Good Republicans. But Good Republicans are mostly marginal to the party today.
In his world, Limbaugh may be the new conservative kingmaker, but he's ultimately only the bloated overseer of the Ugly Right. A recent Newsweek survey found that Limbaugh's positives don't crack the 30% mark; about half of the nation actively dislikes him and the rest can't be bothered to care. He's less a king than a slumlord. His dittoheads are a subspecies of social conservative troglodytes that are trivial in the broad view of American politics. Too bad for the Republicans that getting Ugly has been central to their electoral strategy for over a decade now.
Karl Rove's wager was that conservatives could carry the day without playing to the political center, so long as it reliably mobilized "values" voters: the Evangelicals, the single-issue pro-lifers, the homophobes, and NRA hawks. Under his leadership, the party lunged rightward, but it did so in a way that would be maximally appealing to the party's non-elite base. The neocons and corporate oligarchs might never have relinquished control of the party's economic and foreign policy agenda, but their electoral foot soldiers needed to be purchased with conservative populist concessions. Now that social conservative voters have cohered into a powerful political entity, any vision for a reconstituted Republican Party has to pay their respect.
From that nexus, the Limbaugh problem emerges. Perhaps a pariah to most Americans, Limbaugh gets a 60 percent approval rating among Republicans. And following an electoral cycle in which the party hemorrhaged moderates, the rabid social conservative sect may have grown more powerful. But Limbaugh's unexpected relevance to mainstream politics only gets at part of a much deeper crisis for the Republican Party, one that goes back to Ronald Reagan. The last visionary man of the right, Reagan's leadership forged an alliance between the Bad and the Ugly without ever addressing the serious class antagonisms that prevented a genuine identity of political interests. Working-class social conservatives could mostly ignore an increasingly imperial foreign policy and an economic policy catered to the wants of corporations so long as they felt they were making strides against abortion, gay rights, and secularism. Obama spoke to the same trend with his controversial statement that working-class whites had turned to cultural politics out of frustration and bitterness over a bad economic situation that neither party had much improved.
By and large, social and fiscal conservatives' two divergent agendas have united mostly due to their opposition to the Democratic Party. But in the current economic downturn, issues like health care and social services carry more saliency. Immigration creates a second fissure: social conservatives call for sealed borders and protectionist measures for American jobs, while economic conservatives would prefer a continued steady supply of cheap labor. Final fissure: the war in Iraq. The invasion was a neoconservative experiment, but it's poor and working-class Americans who do the fighting. The recession and the war thus drove moderates from the party starting in 2004, resulting in the Republicans' miserable electoral failures in '06 and '08. The Bad-Ugly alliance is officially broken; the question of how to renegotiate the sharing of power within the party remains.
The party's elites enter the fray at a major disadvantage. Wealthy powerbrokers are hardly a sizeable voting bloc, and in the current economic climate, their anti-regulation, anti-protectionist stances will be a harder sell to moderate Republicans and social conservatives. A fiscally conservative agenda only remains viable if social conservatives can be convinced to stay on board. This is why Steele has to play to Limbaugh's antics. Moderate Republicans must also confront the religious right: Romney, for all of his financial expertise, couldn't get past the anti-Mormon virulence of many conservative Christians. It was an alliance of moderates, corporate types, and hawks that secured John McCain's nomination—the same voters that flinched when Palin joined the ticket. But those voters knew they weren't going to win without the large social conservative turnout that gave Bush the edge in 2004. A party of technocratic fiscal conservatives is a no-go: Ask Ron Paul or the Libertarians.
Possible future #1 is that fiscal conservatives keep paying lip service to extreme social conservatives, and a party much like the one that existed under Bush keeps trudging along. But this is not a winning scenario: As I've pointed out, it's an arrangement that moves class issues off the table, which means that socially-minded Democrats will continue to win over poor Republicans who can't justify Ugly at the expense of their own economic well-being. This incarnation of the Republican Party could get a little more mileage if voters are dissatisfied by Obama's first term, but eventually Republicans will need to renegotiate their unstable combination of elitism and populism.
In possible future #2, Limbaugh's followers seize the reins and the Republican Party evolves toward a nationalist party of social conservatives, anti-immigrant voters, and flag-waving War-on-Ter'-supporting patriots. The electoral performance of this party is uncertain at best. We know that there aren't enough Limbaugh lovers to matter outside the party, that Huckabee might have had an outsider's chance at the nomination, but would have been devastated in the general election, and that for every Ugly who loved Palin, two moderates saw right through her. With few broadly likable candidates and no strong financial base, it's not difficult to imagine a miserable failure for the party. The war and the economic meltdown have made cultural politics far less relevant, and a party with social conservatism as its major precept would have little to offer moderates and independent voters. A viable party in this mold remains improbable absent a major transformation in conservative ideology—one that would require, among other things, a leader far more convincing than Limbaugh.
If that scenario keeps me up at night, then future #3 is what progressive liberals should hope for: It involves a Republican Party that survives by conceding to a general—if temporary—leftward shift in American politics. The Good win by taking the economic plight of Americans seriously. Their economic policy would call for balancing the provision of essential services between free markets and adequately funded state programs. This would all be animated by a concern with fiscal conservatism that tried seriously to get the national debt under control. They would try to absorb some of what currently attracts the wealthy to the party into a responsible economic policy as deregulation and top-down stimulus. Though liberals have good reason to be wary of these policies, they can prove useful in some circumstances, and reasonable people can and should disagree about which circumstances those are. The Ugliness of each candidate would vary based on personal religiosity, but the party could still woo social conservatives through faith-based initiatives, protections for veterans and the elderly, and moderate, sensible compromises in gay rights and abortion legislation.
The loss of the religious right at the polls would be more than compensated for if the new Republicans could gain the support of centrists and moderate Democrats; in fact, their main challenge would be to differentiate themselves from moderate Democrats. Rather than disagreeing in broadly ideological terms, moderate Republicans would make specific, targeted criticisms of Democratic policies and respond with their own proposals which would involve more moderate reforms in the social sphere and less costly adventures in the economic. In a sense, they'd operate much like the opposition parties in Europe's parliamentary democracies. They'd then remain viable as a party, maybe even steal away much of the political center in good years, but the cost would be a permanent leftward shift in American politics. Any GOP visionary who proposes such a shift will have to answer to the party's de facto leader, and as long as Limbaugh's virulent politics maintains its appeal to a core Republican constituency, there's little chance of a party makeover.
If the Republican Party was hobbled at the outset of the 2008 election, they were on the floor when it ended. And now Rush Limbaugh is sitting on them. When new party Chair Michael Steele described Limbaugh's hope that President Barack Obama would fail as "ugly" and "incendiary," he quickly apologized. Steele's lack of backbone is not unique. It seems no Republican is up to the challenge of confronting the lunatic fringe's Lunatic-in-Chief: South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Georgia Representative Phil Gringey have also criticized Limbaugh, only to later supplicate themselves. But Steele's apology, in particular, demonstrates the dubious honor of being chosen to play referee in a Republican Party torn apart by internal politics. Moderate conservatives, business elites, neoconservative hawks, and, yes, Limbaugh-loving social reactionaries all want to control the party's reconstruction. And what Limbaugh's recent tantrums demonstrate is that the negotiations will be anything but cordial.
Some might think that understanding the crisis in conservative politics requires a lot of sophisticated analysis. I prefer explanations that mix in a good amount of gloating and some pop culture references. For the Republican Party, the template is Sergio Leone: three contingents are fighting for control—the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—and three possible futures hang in the balance.
Rush Limbaugh speaks for—you guessed it—the Ugly. The Ugly describe Republicans who are hateful toward women and minorities, who believe they've been wronged by the secular leftist establishment and want revenge. All of the participants in the right-wing populist culture wars—zealots who picket outside abortion clinics, Prop 8 pushers, minutemen—get filed under Ugly.
The Bad may not be as passionate as the Ugly, but they are calculating and crassly self-serving. They're the hawks and free-market ideologues who subordinate the common good to narrow agendas for the expansion of the wealth and power of their own kind. They get indicted a lot. Tom Delay and Donald Rumsfeld come to mind as exemplars, but the Bad are often the power behind the party rather than its public face—billionaire campaign donors, lobbyists, etc.
Then there's the Good. Clint Eastwood's character in the The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was a scoundrel but, crucially, his word was his bond and he kept to a personal code of justice. Partisanship aside, Republicans interested in running an opposition party that is socially conservative without being intolerant and fiscally conservative while still concerned with the common good certainly qualify as Good guys. Olympia Snowe and Mitt Romney are Good Republicans. But Good Republicans are mostly marginal to the party today.
In his world, Limbaugh may be the new conservative kingmaker, but he's ultimately only the bloated overseer of the Ugly Right. A recent Newsweek survey found that Limbaugh's positives don't crack the 30% mark; about half of the nation actively dislikes him and the rest can't be bothered to care. He's less a king than a slumlord. His dittoheads are a subspecies of social conservative troglodytes that are trivial in the broad view of American politics. Too bad for the Republicans that getting Ugly has been central to their electoral strategy for over a decade now.
Karl Rove's wager was that conservatives could carry the day without playing to the political center, so long as it reliably mobilized "values" voters: the Evangelicals, the single-issue pro-lifers, the homophobes, and NRA hawks. Under his leadership, the party lunged rightward, but it did so in a way that would be maximally appealing to the party's non-elite base. The neocons and corporate oligarchs might never have relinquished control of the party's economic and foreign policy agenda, but their electoral foot soldiers needed to be purchased with conservative populist concessions. Now that social conservative voters have cohered into a powerful political entity, any vision for a reconstituted Republican Party has to pay their respect.
From that nexus, the Limbaugh problem emerges. Perhaps a pariah to most Americans, Limbaugh gets a 60 percent approval rating among Republicans. And following an electoral cycle in which the party hemorrhaged moderates, the rabid social conservative sect may have grown more powerful. But Limbaugh's unexpected relevance to mainstream politics only gets at part of a much deeper crisis for the Republican Party, one that goes back to Ronald Reagan. The last visionary man of the right, Reagan's leadership forged an alliance between the Bad and the Ugly without ever addressing the serious class antagonisms that prevented a genuine identity of political interests. Working-class social conservatives could mostly ignore an increasingly imperial foreign policy and an economic policy catered to the wants of corporations so long as they felt they were making strides against abortion, gay rights, and secularism. Obama spoke to the same trend with his controversial statement that working-class whites had turned to cultural politics out of frustration and bitterness over a bad economic situation that neither party had much improved.
By and large, social and fiscal conservatives' two divergent agendas have united mostly due to their opposition to the Democratic Party. But in the current economic downturn, issues like health care and social services carry more saliency. Immigration creates a second fissure: social conservatives call for sealed borders and protectionist measures for American jobs, while economic conservatives would prefer a continued steady supply of cheap labor. Final fissure: the war in Iraq. The invasion was a neoconservative experiment, but it's poor and working-class Americans who do the fighting. The recession and the war thus drove moderates from the party starting in 2004, resulting in the Republicans' miserable electoral failures in '06 and '08. The Bad-Ugly alliance is officially broken; the question of how to renegotiate the sharing of power within the party remains.
The party's elites enter the fray at a major disadvantage. Wealthy powerbrokers are hardly a sizeable voting bloc, and in the current economic climate, their anti-regulation, anti-protectionist stances will be a harder sell to moderate Republicans and social conservatives. A fiscally conservative agenda only remains viable if social conservatives can be convinced to stay on board. This is why Steele has to play to Limbaugh's antics. Moderate Republicans must also confront the religious right: Romney, for all of his financial expertise, couldn't get past the anti-Mormon virulence of many conservative Christians. It was an alliance of moderates, corporate types, and hawks that secured John McCain's nomination—the same voters that flinched when Palin joined the ticket. But those voters knew they weren't going to win without the large social conservative turnout that gave Bush the edge in 2004. A party of technocratic fiscal conservatives is a no-go: Ask Ron Paul or the Libertarians.
Possible future #1 is that fiscal conservatives keep paying lip service to extreme social conservatives, and a party much like the one that existed under Bush keeps trudging along. But this is not a winning scenario: As I've pointed out, it's an arrangement that moves class issues off the table, which means that socially-minded Democrats will continue to win over poor Republicans who can't justify Ugly at the expense of their own economic well-being. This incarnation of the Republican Party could get a little more mileage if voters are dissatisfied by Obama's first term, but eventually Republicans will need to renegotiate their unstable combination of elitism and populism.
In possible future #2, Limbaugh's followers seize the reins and the Republican Party evolves toward a nationalist party of social conservatives, anti-immigrant voters, and flag-waving War-on-Ter'-supporting patriots. The electoral performance of this party is uncertain at best. We know that there aren't enough Limbaugh lovers to matter outside the party, that Huckabee might have had an outsider's chance at the nomination, but would have been devastated in the general election, and that for every Ugly who loved Palin, two moderates saw right through her. With few broadly likable candidates and no strong financial base, it's not difficult to imagine a miserable failure for the party. The war and the economic meltdown have made cultural politics far less relevant, and a party with social conservatism as its major precept would have little to offer moderates and independent voters. A viable party in this mold remains improbable absent a major transformation in conservative ideology—one that would require, among other things, a leader far more convincing than Limbaugh.
If that scenario keeps me up at night, then future #3 is what progressive liberals should hope for: It involves a Republican Party that survives by conceding to a general—if temporary—leftward shift in American politics. The Good win by taking the economic plight of Americans seriously. Their economic policy would call for balancing the provision of essential services between free markets and adequately funded state programs. This would all be animated by a concern with fiscal conservatism that tried seriously to get the national debt under control. They would try to absorb some of what currently attracts the wealthy to the party into a responsible economic policy as deregulation and top-down stimulus. Though liberals have good reason to be wary of these policies, they can prove useful in some circumstances, and reasonable people can and should disagree about which circumstances those are. The Ugliness of each candidate would vary based on personal religiosity, but the party could still woo social conservatives through faith-based initiatives, protections for veterans and the elderly, and moderate, sensible compromises in gay rights and abortion legislation.
The loss of the religious right at the polls would be more than compensated for if the new Republicans could gain the support of centrists and moderate Democrats; in fact, their main challenge would be to differentiate themselves from moderate Democrats. Rather than disagreeing in broadly ideological terms, moderate Republicans would make specific, targeted criticisms of Democratic policies and respond with their own proposals which would involve more moderate reforms in the social sphere and less costly adventures in the economic. In a sense, they'd operate much like the opposition parties in Europe's parliamentary democracies. They'd then remain viable as a party, maybe even steal away much of the political center in good years, but the cost would be a permanent leftward shift in American politics. Any GOP visionary who proposes such a shift will have to answer to the party's de facto leader, and as long as Limbaugh's virulent politics maintains its appeal to a core Republican constituency, there's little chance of a party makeover.
Black and White and Misread All Over
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 02/20/2009 18:21:25 In: Politics Comments: 3
Despite what Slant's own Oscar prognosticators have told you, the profoundly relevant The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306, a recounting of the final hours of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, seems—at least on the surface—like a no-brainer to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. In the film, titular witness Rev. Samuel "Billy" Kyles ardently tells a group of churchgoers that even though the dreamer was killed, the dream continues to live on. That dream coursed through the veins of every voter who pulled a lever or pressed a button for Barack Obama last November. Many heralded the impact his election might have on race relations in this country, while others cynically dismissed all the talk about a post-racial age of hope and change.
Comedians, meanwhile, lamented the replacement of one of the easiest targets in modern history with a man of considerable intelligence, exceptional oratory skills, and, perhaps trickiest of all, a mixed-race background. For eight years George W. Bush was likened to a chimp—the implication being, of course, that he's stupid. (It's the type of lampoon, by the way, that insults the intelligence of our fellow primates while trivializing just how dangerous a "stupid" man like Bush can be.) It's another thing altogether, however, to liken a black man to a chimp, as many believe New York Post satirist Sean Delonas did when he published a cartoon on Wednesday of two police officers shooting a chimpanzee—evoking the killing of a former actor-chimp in Connecticut earlier in the week—accompanied by the caption, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."
While it was clear to me that Delonas was likening the Democratic majority in Congress to a bunch of chimps, the marriage of the image of a dead chimpanzee to a bill Obama has so fervently championed is, to quote Al Sharpton, troubling. That the 'toon has caused a controversy isn't surprising or unwarranted, but that it's been hastily labeled "racist," completely ignoring the possibility that it might not be, is just as troubling. Such knee-jerk accusations prevent real discourse about the issue and perpetuate the general fear articulated by Attorney General Eric Holder, who, in an unrelated speech to the Justice Department that same day, called the U.S. "a nation of cowards" when it comes to talking about race: "Certain subjects are off-limits and [to] explore them risks, at best, embarrassment and, at worst, the questioning of one's character."
Delonas has a well-deserved reputation for being a homophobe and a chauvinist (most recently, he perpetuated the sexist myth of the ideal female figure with a grotesque portrayal of newly curvaceous Jessica Simpson), but in this case it seems like his vitriol had more to do with partisan politics than race or sex. Republicans have wasted no time launching attacks against the new administration, but if there's one thing they hate more than Obama, it's the Democrats in Congress. Presidents do not write bills, legislators do, and if the cartoon is indeed racist, then it's also fundamentally inaccurate. In an "apology" posted on its website last night, the Post concurs: "Wednesday's Page Six cartoon…was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill. Period. But it has been taken as something else—as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism. This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize."
The statement is not so much an apology as it is an admission that the paper should have known better than to print the cartoon in the first place—not because it was racist, but because, given that we have a black president, it could have been interpreted as such. (Echoes of last year's New Yorker cover, in which Obama and his wife were depicted as Islamic fundamentalists, and an Annie Leibowitz-snapped Vogue photograph that portrayed LeBron James as an angry ape and Gisele Bündchen as a lady liberty in distress—both images with poorly executed messages.) The fact that Delonas's chimp cartoon was published points to the continued, though not surprising, lack of judgment on the part of the Post's Editor-in-Chief Col Allan, who allegedly hasn't seen eye-to-eye in recent months with publisher and newly converted Obama fan Rupert Murdoch. Some things, it seems, aren't plainly black and white.
Despite what Slant's own Oscar prognosticators have told you, the profoundly relevant The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306, a recounting of the final hours of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, seems—at least on the surface—like a no-brainer to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. In the film, titular witness Rev. Samuel "Billy" Kyles ardently tells a group of churchgoers that even though the dreamer was killed, the dream continues to live on. That dream coursed through the veins of every voter who pulled a lever or pressed a button for Barack Obama last November. Many heralded the impact his election might have on race relations in this country, while others cynically dismissed all the talk about a post-racial age of hope and change.
Comedians, meanwhile, lamented the replacement of one of the easiest targets in modern history with a man of considerable intelligence, exceptional oratory skills, and, perhaps trickiest of all, a mixed-race background. For eight years George W. Bush was likened to a chimp—the implication being, of course, that he's stupid. (It's the type of lampoon, by the way, that insults the intelligence of our fellow primates while trivializing just how dangerous a "stupid" man like Bush can be.) It's another thing altogether, however, to liken a black man to a chimp, as many believe New York Post satirist Sean Delonas did when he published a cartoon on Wednesday of two police officers shooting a chimpanzee—evoking the killing of a former actor-chimp in Connecticut earlier in the week—accompanied by the caption, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."
While it was clear to me that Delonas was likening the Democratic majority in Congress to a bunch of chimps, the marriage of the image of a dead chimpanzee to a bill Obama has so fervently championed is, to quote Al Sharpton, troubling. That the 'toon has caused a controversy isn't surprising or unwarranted, but that it's been hastily labeled "racist," completely ignoring the possibility that it might not be, is just as troubling. Such knee-jerk accusations prevent real discourse about the issue and perpetuate the general fear articulated by Attorney General Eric Holder, who, in an unrelated speech to the Justice Department that same day, called the U.S. "a nation of cowards" when it comes to talking about race: "Certain subjects are off-limits and [to] explore them risks, at best, embarrassment and, at worst, the questioning of one's character."
Delonas has a well-deserved reputation for being a homophobe and a chauvinist (most recently, he perpetuated the sexist myth of the ideal female figure with a grotesque portrayal of newly curvaceous Jessica Simpson), but in this case it seems like his vitriol had more to do with partisan politics than race or sex. Republicans have wasted no time launching attacks against the new administration, but if there's one thing they hate more than Obama, it's the Democrats in Congress. Presidents do not write bills, legislators do, and if the cartoon is indeed racist, then it's also fundamentally inaccurate. In an "apology" posted on its website last night, the Post concurs: "Wednesday's Page Six cartoon…was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill. Period. But it has been taken as something else—as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism. This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize."
The statement is not so much an apology as it is an admission that the paper should have known better than to print the cartoon in the first place—not because it was racist, but because, given that we have a black president, it could have been interpreted as such. (Echoes of last year's New Yorker cover, in which Obama and his wife were depicted as Islamic fundamentalists, and an Annie Leibowitz-snapped Vogue photograph that portrayed LeBron James as an angry ape and Gisele Bündchen as a lady liberty in distress—both images with poorly executed messages.) The fact that Delonas's chimp cartoon was published points to the continued, though not surprising, lack of judgment on the part of the Post's Editor-in-Chief Col Allan, who allegedly hasn't seen eye-to-eye in recent months with publisher and newly converted Obama fan Rupert Murdoch. Some things, it seems, aren't plainly black and white.
Reinventing the War on Terror
By: Matthew Cole On: 01/23/2009 21:04:16 In: Politics Comments: 1
The executive orders President Barack Obama signed on Thursday are the beginning of a long battle by human rights defenders to reign in an executive branch bloated with power. In conducting his War on Terror, George W. Bush established a shadow network of spies and covert detention sites, one governed by its own secret laws promulgated largely through confidential memos. The prison at Guantanamo Bay was only the most visible part of this network. To thoroughly dismantle this terrible executive inheritance, Obama's legal team in the Department of Justice will need to do much more. And even though the Obama administration has taken the initiative here, it is unlikely that substantive reforms will occur without pressure from Congress.
The person most significant in bringing our wayward executive branch under the rule of law will be incoming Attorney General Eric Holder. Alongside Dawn Johsen, the incoming head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and Obama himself, the heap of memos, executive orders, and other documents authorizing Bush's excesses will be his to confront. Holder will decide, for example, if Gitmo's closure becomes more than a symbolic victory. If his office declares that the enemy combatants detained by the Bush administration were entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions, Obama's defense and justice departments will have to radically revise the Bush strategy for holding and prosecuting enemy combatants. But that's unlikely. Obama's Department of Justice hasn't yet decided how to go about prosecuting these prisoners, as evidenced in their request that all habeus corpus hearings be delayed while a system is put into place. As to whether the detentions were illegal in the first place, Holder has already stated that he does not believe the prisoners in Gitmo were entitled to Geneva protections to begin with. Fighting to have Geneva applied to Gitmo's enemy combatants won't win Obama any further political favor, but having to recognize stricter due process standards for enemy detainees will create headaches for the Department of Justice later on—principally, by forcing the administration to accord enemy combatants the legal privileges and rights enjoyed by prisoners of war.
It's also up to Holder to decide what happens to the Gitmo detainees. One of the options left open by Obama's order is that prisoners be "transferred to another United States detention facility." The intense scrutiny that Gitmo has been subject to has prompted officials to release prisoners and permanently close sections of the prison, but the Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan has only seen more prisoners extradited. For suspects imprisoned there, access and oversight are even scanter than they would have been in Guantanamo Bay.
The order also specifies that untried detainees may be "transferred to a third country," as clear an indicator as any that Obama and Holder intend to continue the controversial renditions program. This is the same program by which the Bush administration oversaw extradition of suspected terrorists: to have their spines extended in Syria, to be electrocuted in Egypt, to be executed in Pakistan. While this program ballooned under Bush, it began quietly during the Clinton administration, and it's likely that Holder and Obama will continue this program. But worse than that, it's going to be almost impossible for anyone to find out whether they do continue the program or not. In this respect, the extent to which Obama's order to end torture makes a practical difference in the way prisoners are interrogated hinges on Holder's future decisions.
If there's a bright spot in all of this, it's Johnsen's appointment to the OLC. Her recent work has thoughtfully confronted the excesses of the "unitary executive" argued for by Bush's legal counsel and, more importantly, has gestured at a way forward. In 2007 she published the article "Faithfully Executing the Laws: Internal Legal Constraints on Executive Power," in which she argued that "enemy combatant designations, extreme interrogation techniques, extraordinary renditions, secret overseas prisons, and warrantless domestic surveillance" were both illegal and unwise. More importantly, she spent time arguing for a set of constraints that could inhibit future abuses from being authorized in the same fashion. Some on the left have already hailed Johnsen as the "anti-Yoo," referring to the head of the OLC under Bush. John Yoo's infamous "torture memos" provided the justifications for the Bush administration's most egregious crimes. But even an anti-Yoo won't be able to undo all of his handiwork.
Among those who will be most disappointed with Obama's ascendancy are those who are hoping to see the lawyers and executive officials responsible for the Bush excesses punished. The problems with trying to hold justice, defense, and White House officials accountable were articulated with disturbing clarity in Jane Myer's The Dark Side, last year's unsettling investigation of the War on Terror. What Myers makes clear in her analysis is that the question of whether Obama's administration wants—or is obligated—to prosecute those who oversaw torture and illegal spying exists quite apart from the question of whether or not he can do so with any success. Even if Obama wanted to take a strict, prosecutorial stance, the fact that torture and detention took place with the blessing of the OLC essentially immunizes the perpetrators. A Supreme Court decision establishing the unconstitutionality of Yoo's interpretations would not place them in any further legal jeopardy, so long as they can claim to have made a good faith effort to follow the OLC's advice. That is, even if Yoo's "laws" turn out to have been illegal, it's unlikely that anyone can be prosecuted for following them.
A better approach, which Jack Balkin of Yale Law School has advocated, would use congressional inquiries to gather information on what exactly occurred inside the Department of Justice, the CIA, and the Department of Defense, then develop reforms and improved constraints on that basis. It's an approach that's more forward-looking in its pursuit of accountability, but it's also more realistic for it. Trying to prosecute executives who have a near-airtight defense would yield few results, and much of the information the public would hope to gain would be confidential or inadmissible.
Holder and Johnsen's best chance to do good—and allay a lot of justified fears—is to work publicly with congressional leaders on the development of new rules to govern, for example, the outlawing of cruel, inhuman, and degrading interrogation tactics, or the future use of FISA-approved surveillance powers. In terms of jurisdiction and oversight, though, Congress can do little if Holder and Johnsen don't take the initiative.
Congress can step forward in revising the most extreme sections of the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act. The former bill became infamous in the aftermath of 9/11 for drastically increasing the federal government's ability to gather information from telephone and email databases, to detain immigrants and terror suspects, and to widen the scope of executive power within the U.S. But it's the latter law that truly demands attention. Parts of the Military Commissions Act, passed in 2006, utterly removed the ability of designated terror suspects to contest their detentions under habeas corpus, allowing them to be kept in an endless legal hell for years at a time. Other sections of the bill allow coerced confessions to be admitted in trials, so that admissions literally beaten out of suspects can be used against them. This kind of barbarism has stayed on the books for too long, and Congress should act swiftly to amend those bills without cue or coordination from the Department of Justice.
The executive orders President Barack Obama signed on Thursday are the beginning of a long battle by human rights defenders to reign in an executive branch bloated with power. In conducting his War on Terror, George W. Bush established a shadow network of spies and covert detention sites, one governed by its own secret laws promulgated largely through confidential memos. The prison at Guantanamo Bay was only the most visible part of this network. To thoroughly dismantle this terrible executive inheritance, Obama's legal team in the Department of Justice will need to do much more. And even though the Obama administration has taken the initiative here, it is unlikely that substantive reforms will occur without pressure from Congress.
The person most significant in bringing our wayward executive branch under the rule of law will be incoming Attorney General Eric Holder. Alongside Dawn Johsen, the incoming head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and Obama himself, the heap of memos, executive orders, and other documents authorizing Bush's excesses will be his to confront. Holder will decide, for example, if Gitmo's closure becomes more than a symbolic victory. If his office declares that the enemy combatants detained by the Bush administration were entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions, Obama's defense and justice departments will have to radically revise the Bush strategy for holding and prosecuting enemy combatants. But that's unlikely. Obama's Department of Justice hasn't yet decided how to go about prosecuting these prisoners, as evidenced in their request that all habeus corpus hearings be delayed while a system is put into place. As to whether the detentions were illegal in the first place, Holder has already stated that he does not believe the prisoners in Gitmo were entitled to Geneva protections to begin with. Fighting to have Geneva applied to Gitmo's enemy combatants won't win Obama any further political favor, but having to recognize stricter due process standards for enemy detainees will create headaches for the Department of Justice later on—principally, by forcing the administration to accord enemy combatants the legal privileges and rights enjoyed by prisoners of war.
It's also up to Holder to decide what happens to the Gitmo detainees. One of the options left open by Obama's order is that prisoners be "transferred to another United States detention facility." The intense scrutiny that Gitmo has been subject to has prompted officials to release prisoners and permanently close sections of the prison, but the Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan has only seen more prisoners extradited. For suspects imprisoned there, access and oversight are even scanter than they would have been in Guantanamo Bay.
The order also specifies that untried detainees may be "transferred to a third country," as clear an indicator as any that Obama and Holder intend to continue the controversial renditions program. This is the same program by which the Bush administration oversaw extradition of suspected terrorists: to have their spines extended in Syria, to be electrocuted in Egypt, to be executed in Pakistan. While this program ballooned under Bush, it began quietly during the Clinton administration, and it's likely that Holder and Obama will continue this program. But worse than that, it's going to be almost impossible for anyone to find out whether they do continue the program or not. In this respect, the extent to which Obama's order to end torture makes a practical difference in the way prisoners are interrogated hinges on Holder's future decisions.
If there's a bright spot in all of this, it's Johnsen's appointment to the OLC. Her recent work has thoughtfully confronted the excesses of the "unitary executive" argued for by Bush's legal counsel and, more importantly, has gestured at a way forward. In 2007 she published the article "Faithfully Executing the Laws: Internal Legal Constraints on Executive Power," in which she argued that "enemy combatant designations, extreme interrogation techniques, extraordinary renditions, secret overseas prisons, and warrantless domestic surveillance" were both illegal and unwise. More importantly, she spent time arguing for a set of constraints that could inhibit future abuses from being authorized in the same fashion. Some on the left have already hailed Johnsen as the "anti-Yoo," referring to the head of the OLC under Bush. John Yoo's infamous "torture memos" provided the justifications for the Bush administration's most egregious crimes. But even an anti-Yoo won't be able to undo all of his handiwork.
Among those who will be most disappointed with Obama's ascendancy are those who are hoping to see the lawyers and executive officials responsible for the Bush excesses punished. The problems with trying to hold justice, defense, and White House officials accountable were articulated with disturbing clarity in Jane Myer's The Dark Side, last year's unsettling investigation of the War on Terror. What Myers makes clear in her analysis is that the question of whether Obama's administration wants—or is obligated—to prosecute those who oversaw torture and illegal spying exists quite apart from the question of whether or not he can do so with any success. Even if Obama wanted to take a strict, prosecutorial stance, the fact that torture and detention took place with the blessing of the OLC essentially immunizes the perpetrators. A Supreme Court decision establishing the unconstitutionality of Yoo's interpretations would not place them in any further legal jeopardy, so long as they can claim to have made a good faith effort to follow the OLC's advice. That is, even if Yoo's "laws" turn out to have been illegal, it's unlikely that anyone can be prosecuted for following them.
A better approach, which Jack Balkin of Yale Law School has advocated, would use congressional inquiries to gather information on what exactly occurred inside the Department of Justice, the CIA, and the Department of Defense, then develop reforms and improved constraints on that basis. It's an approach that's more forward-looking in its pursuit of accountability, but it's also more realistic for it. Trying to prosecute executives who have a near-airtight defense would yield few results, and much of the information the public would hope to gain would be confidential or inadmissible.
Holder and Johnsen's best chance to do good—and allay a lot of justified fears—is to work publicly with congressional leaders on the development of new rules to govern, for example, the outlawing of cruel, inhuman, and degrading interrogation tactics, or the future use of FISA-approved surveillance powers. In terms of jurisdiction and oversight, though, Congress can do little if Holder and Johnsen don't take the initiative.
Congress can step forward in revising the most extreme sections of the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act. The former bill became infamous in the aftermath of 9/11 for drastically increasing the federal government's ability to gather information from telephone and email databases, to detain immigrants and terror suspects, and to widen the scope of executive power within the U.S. But it's the latter law that truly demands attention. Parts of the Military Commissions Act, passed in 2006, utterly removed the ability of designated terror suspects to contest their detentions under habeas corpus, allowing them to be kept in an endless legal hell for years at a time. Other sections of the bill allow coerced confessions to be admitted in trials, so that admissions literally beaten out of suspects can be used against them. This kind of barbarism has stayed on the books for too long, and Congress should act swiftly to amend those bills without cue or coordination from the Department of Justice.
And Gosh Darn It, (Some) People Like Him
By: Matthew Cole On: 01/17/2009 14:07:01 In: Politics Comments: 0
"So you seriously voted for the Franken guy?" It's a question I've been asked before, and one I anticipate I'll continue to hear if Al Franken ever takes his seat in the 111th Congress. I understand the skepticism. If it weren't for the grueling, much-publicized Minnesota recount, most Americans would still know the Democrat as Stuart Smalley of SNL fame, or as the prankster who antagonized the right with books like Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. At that, they might be inclined to view Franken as a dubious celebrity politician in the tradition of Jesse Ventura, the pro-wrestler who became governor after promising Minnesotans he'd "body slam" their tax rates.
I expected Franken to be written off by conservatives. The O'Reillys, Limbaughs, and Coulters have already plunged in to accuse Franken of defrauding Minnesota voters and "stealing" the election (which, as Salon's Joe Conason points out, is essentially accusing him of a felony on the basis of nil evidence). But dismissal hasn't just come from the right. A wide swath of voters, including plenty of loyal Democrats, responded to his campaign announcement with confusion. Was Franken a "serious" candidate? Could a comedian really be expected to know anything about the economic crisis or the war in Iraq?
Those surprised that a funnyman would vie for office clearly hadn't been following his evolution since his all-out brawl with the Fox and Friends crowd. Franken's The Truth (with Jokes), published in 2005, presented meticulously footnoted arguments about the solvency of Social Security, the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, and the below-the-belt electoral tactics that allowed Bush to carry the 2004 election. The arguments were thoroughly partisan in their research and presentation, but the same could be said of The Audacity of Hope. Even before the 2004 election, Franken had returned to Minnesota to promote his political views via Air America Radio.
Before he had even entertained the notion of a senate bid, though, Franken was a participant in one of the proudest traditions in Minnesota politics. The state's progressive movement has a long history, one that bears much in common with the pragmatic brand of Midwestern progressivism that produced figures of national stature such as Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Wisconsin's Russ Feingold. The Land of 10,000 Lakes has the highest voter turnout rate in the country, one of the nation's best public school systems, a thriving bipartisan conservationist movement, and the best healthcare coverage rates in America. Despite being overwhelmingly white, Minnesotans elected the nation's first Muslim Congressman in Representative Keith Ellison. But no part of Minnesota's progressive political history commands more respect than the story of Senator Paul Wellstone.
Wellstone came to prominence not as a politician, but as an organizer of poor rural workers. While a Political Science professor at Carleton College, he galvanized his students to get involved in their communities and, eventually, in his senate campaign. He took on Republican Rudy Boschwitz in 1990 and won, despite being outspent by a 7-to-1 margin. His decidedly leftwing politics were tempered by a pragmatic outlook and a sense of humor that came through in his quirky television ads. Eventually, Wellstone came to be known as "the Conscience of the Senate." He lived up to that title in 2002, when he was the only senator up for reelection to vote against the authorization of the invasion of Iraq. He died in a plane crash 11 days prior to the election, clearing the way for Norm Coleman's victory.
Franken had been a loyal friend and advisor of Wellstone throughout his political career. He was a fixture at Wellstone fundraisers and frequently stumped for the campaign. He played a major role in convincing the progressive establishment that Wellstone's brand of populist, insurgent politics had a place in the Democratic Party. And after Wellstone's death, Franken became an avid supporter of Wellstone Action, an organization which trained community organizers in the techniques of political empowerment innovated by Wellstone's campaigns.
This connection was not lost on Minnesotan voters during the 2008 race. Even as moderate Democrats scratched their heads, those who had been a part of Wellstone's progressive wing understood what Franken's candidacy stood for. A common rallying cry from Franken supporters was to "take back Paul's seat"—expressing their faith in Franken and their dismay that the seat was now occupied by an unimaginative Bush Republican. Franken's connection to the Wellstone legacy goes beyond the symbolic too: Voters who paid attention to his positions discovered a candidate with a passionate commitment to reforming a corrupt government and making life easier for middle-class families. Franken has been a tireless advocate for universal healthcare and a more progressive tax system.
In a year when Americans rallied around the Democratic Party in record numbers, the urgency of renewing Minnesota's progressive commitments was widely felt. The state's progressives failed to unseat Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty in a close 2006 race. Under his administration, social services have faltered and Minnesota's tax system has increasingly burdened the poor and middle class. Just as Barack Obama's victory demonstrated the promise of reform at a national level, Franken's upset—not to mention the now veto-proof majority that Democrats won in the state legislature—signals a resurgence for Minnesota's brand of practical progressivism.
None of this should imply, though, that Franken does not have his work cut out for him in Minnesota. The campaign was noted for the ugly attack ads run on both sides, despite occurring in one of the most bitterly partisan campaign cycles in recent history. Dean Barkley, an Independent candidate, received nearly 15% of the vote as many in the electorate became desperate for a candidate who had stayed out of the increasingly nasty fray. After the exhausting campaign season, followed by the even more exhausting recount, either candidate would have come into office with many voters unconvinced.
Franken will probably begin his term with one of the lowest approval ratings in the Senate. During the campaign season, he convinced voters that he was a serious candidate, with all of the positives and negatives that entails. Next, Franken will need to convince Minnesotans that he is a serious leader, one who is willing to stand up for the progressive principles which have guided his participation in the state's public life for over a decade. Most important, he has the potential to continue the legacy of Paul Wellstone and remake his reputation as an energetic champion for progressive policy.
"So you seriously voted for the Franken guy?" It's a question I've been asked before, and one I anticipate I'll continue to hear if Al Franken ever takes his seat in the 111th Congress. I understand the skepticism. If it weren't for the grueling, much-publicized Minnesota recount, most Americans would still know the Democrat as Stuart Smalley of SNL fame, or as the prankster who antagonized the right with books like Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. At that, they might be inclined to view Franken as a dubious celebrity politician in the tradition of Jesse Ventura, the pro-wrestler who became governor after promising Minnesotans he'd "body slam" their tax rates.
I expected Franken to be written off by conservatives. The O'Reillys, Limbaughs, and Coulters have already plunged in to accuse Franken of defrauding Minnesota voters and "stealing" the election (which, as Salon's Joe Conason points out, is essentially accusing him of a felony on the basis of nil evidence). But dismissal hasn't just come from the right. A wide swath of voters, including plenty of loyal Democrats, responded to his campaign announcement with confusion. Was Franken a "serious" candidate? Could a comedian really be expected to know anything about the economic crisis or the war in Iraq?
Those surprised that a funnyman would vie for office clearly hadn't been following his evolution since his all-out brawl with the Fox and Friends crowd. Franken's The Truth (with Jokes), published in 2005, presented meticulously footnoted arguments about the solvency of Social Security, the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, and the below-the-belt electoral tactics that allowed Bush to carry the 2004 election. The arguments were thoroughly partisan in their research and presentation, but the same could be said of The Audacity of Hope. Even before the 2004 election, Franken had returned to Minnesota to promote his political views via Air America Radio.
Before he had even entertained the notion of a senate bid, though, Franken was a participant in one of the proudest traditions in Minnesota politics. The state's progressive movement has a long history, one that bears much in common with the pragmatic brand of Midwestern progressivism that produced figures of national stature such as Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Wisconsin's Russ Feingold. The Land of 10,000 Lakes has the highest voter turnout rate in the country, one of the nation's best public school systems, a thriving bipartisan conservationist movement, and the best healthcare coverage rates in America. Despite being overwhelmingly white, Minnesotans elected the nation's first Muslim Congressman in Representative Keith Ellison. But no part of Minnesota's progressive political history commands more respect than the story of Senator Paul Wellstone.
Wellstone came to prominence not as a politician, but as an organizer of poor rural workers. While a Political Science professor at Carleton College, he galvanized his students to get involved in their communities and, eventually, in his senate campaign. He took on Republican Rudy Boschwitz in 1990 and won, despite being outspent by a 7-to-1 margin. His decidedly leftwing politics were tempered by a pragmatic outlook and a sense of humor that came through in his quirky television ads. Eventually, Wellstone came to be known as "the Conscience of the Senate." He lived up to that title in 2002, when he was the only senator up for reelection to vote against the authorization of the invasion of Iraq. He died in a plane crash 11 days prior to the election, clearing the way for Norm Coleman's victory.
Franken had been a loyal friend and advisor of Wellstone throughout his political career. He was a fixture at Wellstone fundraisers and frequently stumped for the campaign. He played a major role in convincing the progressive establishment that Wellstone's brand of populist, insurgent politics had a place in the Democratic Party. And after Wellstone's death, Franken became an avid supporter of Wellstone Action, an organization which trained community organizers in the techniques of political empowerment innovated by Wellstone's campaigns.
This connection was not lost on Minnesotan voters during the 2008 race. Even as moderate Democrats scratched their heads, those who had been a part of Wellstone's progressive wing understood what Franken's candidacy stood for. A common rallying cry from Franken supporters was to "take back Paul's seat"—expressing their faith in Franken and their dismay that the seat was now occupied by an unimaginative Bush Republican. Franken's connection to the Wellstone legacy goes beyond the symbolic too: Voters who paid attention to his positions discovered a candidate with a passionate commitment to reforming a corrupt government and making life easier for middle-class families. Franken has been a tireless advocate for universal healthcare and a more progressive tax system.
In a year when Americans rallied around the Democratic Party in record numbers, the urgency of renewing Minnesota's progressive commitments was widely felt. The state's progressives failed to unseat Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty in a close 2006 race. Under his administration, social services have faltered and Minnesota's tax system has increasingly burdened the poor and middle class. Just as Barack Obama's victory demonstrated the promise of reform at a national level, Franken's upset—not to mention the now veto-proof majority that Democrats won in the state legislature—signals a resurgence for Minnesota's brand of practical progressivism.
None of this should imply, though, that Franken does not have his work cut out for him in Minnesota. The campaign was noted for the ugly attack ads run on both sides, despite occurring in one of the most bitterly partisan campaign cycles in recent history. Dean Barkley, an Independent candidate, received nearly 15% of the vote as many in the electorate became desperate for a candidate who had stayed out of the increasingly nasty fray. After the exhausting campaign season, followed by the even more exhausting recount, either candidate would have come into office with many voters unconvinced.
Franken will probably begin his term with one of the lowest approval ratings in the Senate. During the campaign season, he convinced voters that he was a serious candidate, with all of the positives and negatives that entails. Next, Franken will need to convince Minnesotans that he is a serious leader, one who is willing to stand up for the progressive principles which have guided his participation in the state's public life for over a decade. Most important, he has the potential to continue the legacy of Paul Wellstone and remake his reputation as an energetic champion for progressive policy.
Bush Gets Goosed
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 01/16/2009 16:54:28 In: Politics Comments: 1
For a president who has experienced notoriously bad luck over his eight years in office, the water-landing of bird-struck U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River shortly after takeoff yesterday afternoon, which resulted in almost nonstop primetime cable news coverage focusing on the heroism and miraculous lack of fatalities, spared him of an evening that might have been dominated by analysis of his farewell address. Discussion of the problems with the speech—that is to say, his presidency—will undoubtedly resume in full today. Indeed, he began his final address to the nation, which took place at the White House in front of an audience of approximately 250 and which was brief enough to postpone Must See TV by only 15 minutes, by thanking the American people for their trust, even as he has betrayed that trust at every juncture of his presidency.
But it was his more specific statements that were the most problematic. Bush quoted Thomas Jefferson ("I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past," the third president of the United States once wrote), no doubt intending to evoke America's unwavering, centuries-long optimism but instead shining a light on Bush's own dismissive, even contemptuous, view of that history. This isn't the type of man who ever buried his nose in his books back at Yale, and he isn't the type to reflect on the lessons of history either. Hell, he wasn't even willing to learn from the mistakes of his own father.
Bush claimed his administration turned Afghanistan from "a nation where the Taliban harbored al-Qaida and stoned women in the streets, to a young democracy that is fighting terror and encouraging girls to go to school," a statement in direct conflict with reports that have come out of the country over the last few years. On Wednesday, The New York Times painted a picture of Afghanistan that is far different: The Taliban is not only resurgent in the region, bolstered by new recruits in the years since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, but they are specifically targeting female students, attacking schools and trading stones for acid. Young women continue to defiantly attend classes, but it's far from the rosy picture Bush would like us to imagine.
In his speech, Bush said America's air, water, and land is "measurably cleaner" than it was eight years ago, and while that may be statistically accurate (the country's air, water, and land has been steadily improving for the last 30 years, ever since the modern environmental movement began and Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts), but Bush has refused to take almost every important step required to further protect the country's natural resources and wildlife, leasing protected land to oil companies like a subprime mortgage broker in a minority neighborhood and gutting the list of threatened and endangered species. He has failed to lead developing nations like China and India by refusing to further cap carbon emissions or truly encourage clean energy, he has starved environmental protection budgets and altered scientific data, and he has promoted the thinning of national forests under the guise of keeping them "healthy."
When asked about his mistakes at his final press conference on Monday, Bush said the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was "a significant disappointment." It wasn't just a disappointment—it was a disaster. But it's the things Bush doesn't deem disappointments or disasters that could feasibly take several presidencies to undo, if ever. In his farewell address, he said that our "gravest threat" was not the systematic shredding of our Constitution, the suspension of due process, the expansion of executive power and privilege, the discrediting of science, the stifling of dissent, or an economy in tatters, but "another terrorist attack" on American soil. For the coming weeks and months, and probably years, President-elect Barack Obama will be spending most of his time playing cleanup, which means affordable, accessible healthcare and clean energy will likely continue to be the pipedreams of hippies and so-called Marxists. And that might be the outgoing administration's greatest accomplishment of all.
For a president who has experienced notoriously bad luck over his eight years in office, the water-landing of bird-struck U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River shortly after takeoff yesterday afternoon, which resulted in almost nonstop primetime cable news coverage focusing on the heroism and miraculous lack of fatalities, spared him of an evening that might have been dominated by analysis of his farewell address. Discussion of the problems with the speech—that is to say, his presidency—will undoubtedly resume in full today. Indeed, he began his final address to the nation, which took place at the White House in front of an audience of approximately 250 and which was brief enough to postpone Must See TV by only 15 minutes, by thanking the American people for their trust, even as he has betrayed that trust at every juncture of his presidency.
But it was his more specific statements that were the most problematic. Bush quoted Thomas Jefferson ("I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past," the third president of the United States once wrote), no doubt intending to evoke America's unwavering, centuries-long optimism but instead shining a light on Bush's own dismissive, even contemptuous, view of that history. This isn't the type of man who ever buried his nose in his books back at Yale, and he isn't the type to reflect on the lessons of history either. Hell, he wasn't even willing to learn from the mistakes of his own father.
Bush claimed his administration turned Afghanistan from "a nation where the Taliban harbored al-Qaida and stoned women in the streets, to a young democracy that is fighting terror and encouraging girls to go to school," a statement in direct conflict with reports that have come out of the country over the last few years. On Wednesday, The New York Times painted a picture of Afghanistan that is far different: The Taliban is not only resurgent in the region, bolstered by new recruits in the years since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, but they are specifically targeting female students, attacking schools and trading stones for acid. Young women continue to defiantly attend classes, but it's far from the rosy picture Bush would like us to imagine.
In his speech, Bush said America's air, water, and land is "measurably cleaner" than it was eight years ago, and while that may be statistically accurate (the country's air, water, and land has been steadily improving for the last 30 years, ever since the modern environmental movement began and Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts), but Bush has refused to take almost every important step required to further protect the country's natural resources and wildlife, leasing protected land to oil companies like a subprime mortgage broker in a minority neighborhood and gutting the list of threatened and endangered species. He has failed to lead developing nations like China and India by refusing to further cap carbon emissions or truly encourage clean energy, he has starved environmental protection budgets and altered scientific data, and he has promoted the thinning of national forests under the guise of keeping them "healthy."
When asked about his mistakes at his final press conference on Monday, Bush said the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was "a significant disappointment." It wasn't just a disappointment—it was a disaster. But it's the things Bush doesn't deem disappointments or disasters that could feasibly take several presidencies to undo, if ever. In his farewell address, he said that our "gravest threat" was not the systematic shredding of our Constitution, the suspension of due process, the expansion of executive power and privilege, the discrediting of science, the stifling of dissent, or an economy in tatters, but "another terrorist attack" on American soil. For the coming weeks and months, and probably years, President-elect Barack Obama will be spending most of his time playing cleanup, which means affordable, accessible healthcare and clean energy will likely continue to be the pipedreams of hippies and so-called Marxists. And that might be the outgoing administration's greatest accomplishment of all.
Bush Vs. Textbooks
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 01/12/2009 04:43:53 In: Politics Comments: 0
During the final segment of his 1977 interview with Richard Nixon, British TV host David Frost pressed the disgraced 37th president one last time on the issue of his "mistakes." Nixon's face appeared twisted and labored as he answered, in part: "I let down my friends. I let down the country. I let down our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government but think that it's all too corrupt." The interview, dramatized in Peter Morgan's 2006 stage play Frost/Nixon and in Ron Howard's new film adaptation of the same name, shows a man beaten and on the cusp of admitting defeat, if not absolute guilt. Another recent Hollywood film, Oliver Stone's W., depicts the current president's answer to a similar question, albeit in a less historically accurate context, when, during a 2004 press conference, Time's John Dickerson asked George W. Bush what his biggest mistake was following 9/11 and what lessons he had learned from it. Bush couldn't think of one.
It took the world three years to coax a pseudo-confession from the lips of Tricky Dick, and while it's unclear what kind of hindsight Bush might be granted in that amount of time, what is apparent is that the level of self-awareness and pathetic self-deprecation portrayed in Frank Langella's Nixon is absent in Bush and those who have surrounded him during the last eight years. One need look no further than the administration's Legacy Tour, which sounds more like some geriatric rock act's nostalgic traveling stage show than an attempt at an overhaul of his political image. The administration has consistently defaulted to as-yet-unborn high school textbook writers to determine whether or not any of their actions were good or bad, but that hasn't stopped Bush and his cronies from going on a whirlwind publicity tour in an attempt to shape that historical determination.
* * *
In order to fully comprehend the extent to which the administration fails to comprehend—or the extent to which it willfully obscures—its mistakes, it's necessary to recognize just how early in Bush's presidency those mistakes began. I remember being glued to the television in a friend's dorm room on election night in 2000. It was the first time I had participated in our democracy, and a small group of us stayed up into the wee hours of the morning as, one by one, the networks—led by Fox News, whose Election Analysis Division's John Ellis called the statistically too-close-to-call Florida, and thus the election, for his cousin George—declared that our new president would not be Al Gore after all. It would be weeks before all the recounts were completed (or not completed, as was the case) and the Supreme Court handed the presidency to the man who, even sans a proper tally, lost the popular vote by over half a million votes.
The electoral college, a system designed over two hundred years ago by founding fathers who believed the office should seek the man and not the other way around, men who still feared British political influence and who aimed to protect the Union from the encroaching powers of the biggest of its then-13 states, was designed at a time when not everyone could see a candidate up close and personal or quickly gain access to copious amounts of information about the men running for public office at the click of a button. Times have changed, though, and the failure of that system eight years ago had consequences far greater than even the biggest cynic could have imagined.
Legitimate or not, Bush's election was the first profoundly and thoroughly squandered opportunity of his administration. Any other presidential candidate might have been humbled or even embarrassed by the lengths and depths to which he or she had to fight for the office; a more lucid politician might have recognized that a nation divided was not one on which a partisan agenda should be thrust. He or she might have made concessions to the left and reached out in compromise. Instead, Bush defined bipartisanship as the willingness of the opposition to support legislation that bolstered his neoconservative policies.
Bush's biggest missed opportunity, however, came just a few short months later, when, after ignoring warnings that Islamic extremists were intent on using commercial airliners to attack the United States within its own borders and then they did just that, newspapers across the globe declared, "We Are All Americans!" Out of great tragedy came great opportunity, and for a moment in time, even Democrats rallied around the president. But Bush abused the goodwill he was given and, with the aide of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other chief architects of the Iraq invasion, he exploited the events of 9/11 in order to execute a plan that had been in the works for years: removing Saddam Hussein in the quest of creating a larger footprint in the region. The opportunities that the administration saw in the tragedy of the terrorist attacks was not unification or peace but the acquisition of power via the steady and deliberate dismantling of the country's very founding principles.
Out of great tragedy also comes great responsibility. Bush's cabinet appointments alone, from Alberto Gonzales (who presided over the most corrupt, ineffective, politicized, and discriminatory Department of Justice in U.S. history) all the way down to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Edwin G. Foulke Jr. (who is, according to R. Jeffrey Smith at The Washington Post, a lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who used to defend companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations), would tarnish even the most noble of American presidents' legacies, to say nothing of the appointments he attempted, but failed, to make. But it was Michael Brown, who was appointed as director of FEMA despite having little to no experience, who shouldered much of the blame for the administration's biggest domestic blunder: the federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A scapegoat for the administration's failures, Brown would later claim that he warned Bush of the imminent dangers of a levee breach but that those warnings were dismissed and that the decision about whether or not to federalize the region was viewed as a political opportunity by those close to the president.
* * *
This history, of course, has been so well documented and accepted by the American people, finally, that repeating it here serves merely as context for what is, perhaps, the Bush administration's most audacious enterprise to date: the rewriting of that history as orchestrated by Karl Rove via a series "exit interviews." "I think I was unprepared for war," Bush said when asked last month by ABC News's Charlie Gibson what he was most unprepared for during his tenure in the White House. It's a stunning, Nixon-sized admission coming from the man who once proclaimed, "I am a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind." When asked if he would have gone to war with Iraq had the intelligence showed that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, he said he was unsure.
Rove himself launched his Bush Legacy Project by telling a New York audience that the U.S. would not have invaded Iraq if they knew there was no WMD. But he, like Condoleezza Rice, still stubbornly defends the decision to enter into the elective war, even if the reasons continue to be as disparate as the religious, political, and ethnic factions that comprise Iraq's population. Rice thinks it was good for America: "[Hussein] was an implacable enemy of the United States," she reasoned in a recent interview with Tavis Smiley. What's good for America, then, is evidently good for the world, right? In 2005, at the height of the violence in Iraq, Pentagon advisor Richard Perle told The Pittsburgh Tribune Review that the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war was intended to promote democracy throughout the world: "This doesn't mean imposing democracy by force. We can't do that, and we know we can't do that. But sometimes the obstacles to democracy can only be removed by force." To quote Michael Knight from his piece "Empire America – Spreading Freedom, Democracy, Terrorism": "Darling, I would never rape you. I am just tearing your clothes off so we can make love."
This myopic view of the world is manifest in everyone in and surrounding the administration—no surprise considering that its namesake is seemingly incapable of looking inward or backward. Dick Cheney is, maybe, the only one not involved in some daft attempt at political revisionism, proudly telling ABC's Jonathan Karl in early December that he did indeed authorize the use of torture, though he refused to use the word, and generously expressed astonishment on behalf of all of us who witnessed the attacks of 9/11 that there hasn't been another one yet. The implication is, naturally, that the administration is due credit for subsequently preventing an attack like the one it failed to prevent in 2001.
"There can be no debate about the results in keeping America safe," Bush told the U.S. Army War College, ostensibly the only audience he could find that would be unlikely to call him out on his rhetorical challenge. "We'll never know how many lives have been saved," he continued, citing failed attempts to bomb fuel tanks at JFK Airport, a plot to blow up international jets, and a plan to attack a Chicago-area shopping mall—effectively giving himself a hypothetical pat on the back for the hypothetical prevention of attacks that were essentially hypothetical (that is, merely aspirational and not operational). It's like Osama Bin Laden expressing a desire to bomb Smurf Village, realizing he's not an animated cartoon character, and then Papa Smurf taking credit for preventing the attack.
For an even flimsier logic than Bush's, look no further than a recent piece by Peggy Noonan (the title of which, "At Least Bush Kept Us Safe," speaks volumes in and of itself): "It is unknown, and perhaps can't be known, whether [the lack of another domestic terrorist attack] was fully due to the government's efforts, or the luck of the draw, or a combination of luck and effort. And it not only can't be fully known by the public, it can hardly be fully known by the players at all levels of government. They can't know, for instance, of a potential terrorist cell that didn't come together because of their efforts." (The Wall Street Journal apparently now pays writers to talk in circles.)
Three weeks ago, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino released a statement in response to a New York Times article which placed the blame for the financial meltdown of 2008 squarely on Bush's soldiers: "The Times' 'reporting' in this story amounted to finding selected quotes to support a story the reporters fully intended to write from the onset, while disregarding anything that didn't fit their point of view," she said. Ignoring for a moment both the veracity of the Times piece and the thanklessness of Perino's job, one can't help but notice the blatant hypocrisy with which the White House statement smacks. It's reminiscent of Bush's own countless missives, like his second inaugural speech, which was littered with hypocrisies about the "ideologies that feed hatred," the "pretensions of tyrants," and the "force of human freedom," historical inaccuracies about the founding of the republic, and propaganda that summoned all of the most ignoble parts of our nation's history. He was the tyrant of which he spoke.
And, at least starting in 2004, he became a demagogue, obtaining power by appealing to the fears of the people and then claiming it was absolute, first by dubbing himself "the decider" and then by laying claim to a "mandate" after winning reelection. "Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time," Bush said during that second inaugural, apparently unaware that his oath of office requires him to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," not the American people—the pretense under which the administration has waged its wars on sovereign nations and its own citizens' civil liberties.
Addressing an audience at a Holocaust Museum last month without, miraculously, strapping himself to a board and pouring water down his own throat afterward, Attorney General and latest Bush lapdog Michael Mukasey said: "[L]aw without conscience is no guarantee of freedom; that even the seemingly most advanced of nations can be led down the path of evil." Agents of the outgoing administration—both major and minor, direct and tangential—appear utterly oblivious to the self-damning hypocrisies that are falling from their mouths in their attempts at salvaging their legacy. In a recent DOJ court filing in which the U.S. is charging the son of former Liberian president Charles Taylor to 147 years in prison for torturing people in his own country, Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Heck Miller wrote that torture "undermines respect for and trust in authority, government and a rule of law," exposing the tragic comedy behind a U.S. court prosecuting torture in other countries while the administration continues to retroactively redefine the word to mask its own crimes. It is the very definition of hubris, the product of a nation whose government has unequivocally become morally, ethically, and intellectually bankrupt on every level and in every branch. There isn't a textbook big enough to record—nor a cynical political advisor savvy enough to conceal—a legacy as damning as that.
During the final segment of his 1977 interview with Richard Nixon, British TV host David Frost pressed the disgraced 37th president one last time on the issue of his "mistakes." Nixon's face appeared twisted and labored as he answered, in part: "I let down my friends. I let down the country. I let down our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government but think that it's all too corrupt." The interview, dramatized in Peter Morgan's 2006 stage play Frost/Nixon and in Ron Howard's new film adaptation of the same name, shows a man beaten and on the cusp of admitting defeat, if not absolute guilt. Another recent Hollywood film, Oliver Stone's W., depicts the current president's answer to a similar question, albeit in a less historically accurate context, when, during a 2004 press conference, Time's John Dickerson asked George W. Bush what his biggest mistake was following 9/11 and what lessons he had learned from it. Bush couldn't think of one.
It took the world three years to coax a pseudo-confession from the lips of Tricky Dick, and while it's unclear what kind of hindsight Bush might be granted in that amount of time, what is apparent is that the level of self-awareness and pathetic self-deprecation portrayed in Frank Langella's Nixon is absent in Bush and those who have surrounded him during the last eight years. One need look no further than the administration's Legacy Tour, which sounds more like some geriatric rock act's nostalgic traveling stage show than an attempt at an overhaul of his political image. The administration has consistently defaulted to as-yet-unborn high school textbook writers to determine whether or not any of their actions were good or bad, but that hasn't stopped Bush and his cronies from going on a whirlwind publicity tour in an attempt to shape that historical determination.
In order to fully comprehend the extent to which the administration fails to comprehend—or the extent to which it willfully obscures—its mistakes, it's necessary to recognize just how early in Bush's presidency those mistakes began. I remember being glued to the television in a friend's dorm room on election night in 2000. It was the first time I had participated in our democracy, and a small group of us stayed up into the wee hours of the morning as, one by one, the networks—led by Fox News, whose Election Analysis Division's John Ellis called the statistically too-close-to-call Florida, and thus the election, for his cousin George—declared that our new president would not be Al Gore after all. It would be weeks before all the recounts were completed (or not completed, as was the case) and the Supreme Court handed the presidency to the man who, even sans a proper tally, lost the popular vote by over half a million votes.
The electoral college, a system designed over two hundred years ago by founding fathers who believed the office should seek the man and not the other way around, men who still feared British political influence and who aimed to protect the Union from the encroaching powers of the biggest of its then-13 states, was designed at a time when not everyone could see a candidate up close and personal or quickly gain access to copious amounts of information about the men running for public office at the click of a button. Times have changed, though, and the failure of that system eight years ago had consequences far greater than even the biggest cynic could have imagined.
Legitimate or not, Bush's election was the first profoundly and thoroughly squandered opportunity of his administration. Any other presidential candidate might have been humbled or even embarrassed by the lengths and depths to which he or she had to fight for the office; a more lucid politician might have recognized that a nation divided was not one on which a partisan agenda should be thrust. He or she might have made concessions to the left and reached out in compromise. Instead, Bush defined bipartisanship as the willingness of the opposition to support legislation that bolstered his neoconservative policies.
Bush's biggest missed opportunity, however, came just a few short months later, when, after ignoring warnings that Islamic extremists were intent on using commercial airliners to attack the United States within its own borders and then they did just that, newspapers across the globe declared, "We Are All Americans!" Out of great tragedy came great opportunity, and for a moment in time, even Democrats rallied around the president. But Bush abused the goodwill he was given and, with the aide of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other chief architects of the Iraq invasion, he exploited the events of 9/11 in order to execute a plan that had been in the works for years: removing Saddam Hussein in the quest of creating a larger footprint in the region. The opportunities that the administration saw in the tragedy of the terrorist attacks was not unification or peace but the acquisition of power via the steady and deliberate dismantling of the country's very founding principles.
Out of great tragedy also comes great responsibility. Bush's cabinet appointments alone, from Alberto Gonzales (who presided over the most corrupt, ineffective, politicized, and discriminatory Department of Justice in U.S. history) all the way down to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Edwin G. Foulke Jr. (who is, according to R. Jeffrey Smith at The Washington Post, a lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who used to defend companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations), would tarnish even the most noble of American presidents' legacies, to say nothing of the appointments he attempted, but failed, to make. But it was Michael Brown, who was appointed as director of FEMA despite having little to no experience, who shouldered much of the blame for the administration's biggest domestic blunder: the federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A scapegoat for the administration's failures, Brown would later claim that he warned Bush of the imminent dangers of a levee breach but that those warnings were dismissed and that the decision about whether or not to federalize the region was viewed as a political opportunity by those close to the president.
This history, of course, has been so well documented and accepted by the American people, finally, that repeating it here serves merely as context for what is, perhaps, the Bush administration's most audacious enterprise to date: the rewriting of that history as orchestrated by Karl Rove via a series "exit interviews." "I think I was unprepared for war," Bush said when asked last month by ABC News's Charlie Gibson what he was most unprepared for during his tenure in the White House. It's a stunning, Nixon-sized admission coming from the man who once proclaimed, "I am a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind." When asked if he would have gone to war with Iraq had the intelligence showed that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, he said he was unsure.
Rove himself launched his Bush Legacy Project by telling a New York audience that the U.S. would not have invaded Iraq if they knew there was no WMD. But he, like Condoleezza Rice, still stubbornly defends the decision to enter into the elective war, even if the reasons continue to be as disparate as the religious, political, and ethnic factions that comprise Iraq's population. Rice thinks it was good for America: "[Hussein] was an implacable enemy of the United States," she reasoned in a recent interview with Tavis Smiley. What's good for America, then, is evidently good for the world, right? In 2005, at the height of the violence in Iraq, Pentagon advisor Richard Perle told The Pittsburgh Tribune Review that the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war was intended to promote democracy throughout the world: "This doesn't mean imposing democracy by force. We can't do that, and we know we can't do that. But sometimes the obstacles to democracy can only be removed by force." To quote Michael Knight from his piece "Empire America – Spreading Freedom, Democracy, Terrorism": "Darling, I would never rape you. I am just tearing your clothes off so we can make love."
This myopic view of the world is manifest in everyone in and surrounding the administration—no surprise considering that its namesake is seemingly incapable of looking inward or backward. Dick Cheney is, maybe, the only one not involved in some daft attempt at political revisionism, proudly telling ABC's Jonathan Karl in early December that he did indeed authorize the use of torture, though he refused to use the word, and generously expressed astonishment on behalf of all of us who witnessed the attacks of 9/11 that there hasn't been another one yet. The implication is, naturally, that the administration is due credit for subsequently preventing an attack like the one it failed to prevent in 2001.
"There can be no debate about the results in keeping America safe," Bush told the U.S. Army War College, ostensibly the only audience he could find that would be unlikely to call him out on his rhetorical challenge. "We'll never know how many lives have been saved," he continued, citing failed attempts to bomb fuel tanks at JFK Airport, a plot to blow up international jets, and a plan to attack a Chicago-area shopping mall—effectively giving himself a hypothetical pat on the back for the hypothetical prevention of attacks that were essentially hypothetical (that is, merely aspirational and not operational). It's like Osama Bin Laden expressing a desire to bomb Smurf Village, realizing he's not an animated cartoon character, and then Papa Smurf taking credit for preventing the attack.
For an even flimsier logic than Bush's, look no further than a recent piece by Peggy Noonan (the title of which, "At Least Bush Kept Us Safe," speaks volumes in and of itself): "It is unknown, and perhaps can't be known, whether [the lack of another domestic terrorist attack] was fully due to the government's efforts, or the luck of the draw, or a combination of luck and effort. And it not only can't be fully known by the public, it can hardly be fully known by the players at all levels of government. They can't know, for instance, of a potential terrorist cell that didn't come together because of their efforts." (The Wall Street Journal apparently now pays writers to talk in circles.)
Three weeks ago, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino released a statement in response to a New York Times article which placed the blame for the financial meltdown of 2008 squarely on Bush's soldiers: "The Times' 'reporting' in this story amounted to finding selected quotes to support a story the reporters fully intended to write from the onset, while disregarding anything that didn't fit their point of view," she said. Ignoring for a moment both the veracity of the Times piece and the thanklessness of Perino's job, one can't help but notice the blatant hypocrisy with which the White House statement smacks. It's reminiscent of Bush's own countless missives, like his second inaugural speech, which was littered with hypocrisies about the "ideologies that feed hatred," the "pretensions of tyrants," and the "force of human freedom," historical inaccuracies about the founding of the republic, and propaganda that summoned all of the most ignoble parts of our nation's history. He was the tyrant of which he spoke.
And, at least starting in 2004, he became a demagogue, obtaining power by appealing to the fears of the people and then claiming it was absolute, first by dubbing himself "the decider" and then by laying claim to a "mandate" after winning reelection. "Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time," Bush said during that second inaugural, apparently unaware that his oath of office requires him to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," not the American people—the pretense under which the administration has waged its wars on sovereign nations and its own citizens' civil liberties.
Addressing an audience at a Holocaust Museum last month without, miraculously, strapping himself to a board and pouring water down his own throat afterward, Attorney General and latest Bush lapdog Michael Mukasey said: "[L]aw without conscience is no guarantee of freedom; that even the seemingly most advanced of nations can be led down the path of evil." Agents of the outgoing administration—both major and minor, direct and tangential—appear utterly oblivious to the self-damning hypocrisies that are falling from their mouths in their attempts at salvaging their legacy. In a recent DOJ court filing in which the U.S. is charging the son of former Liberian president Charles Taylor to 147 years in prison for torturing people in his own country, Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Heck Miller wrote that torture "undermines respect for and trust in authority, government and a rule of law," exposing the tragic comedy behind a U.S. court prosecuting torture in other countries while the administration continues to retroactively redefine the word to mask its own crimes. It is the very definition of hubris, the product of a nation whose government has unequivocally become morally, ethically, and intellectually bankrupt on every level and in every branch. There isn't a textbook big enough to record—nor a cynical political advisor savvy enough to conceal—a legacy as damning as that.
Meet Depressed
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 12/29/2008 19:42:48 In: Politics Comments: 0
My reaction to the announcement that David Gregory would be the new host of NBC's flagship Sunday morning political hour, Meet the Press, was not unlike my response to the news that he would be replacing Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews for MSNBC's primetime election coverage earlier this year. In short: ugh. It's not that I think an obvious partisan like Olbermann or an aggressive commentator like Matthews should be anchoring straight news, but Gregory's brand of milquetoast reporting is only slightly more incisive and compelling than the giggly, vanilla style of coverage doled out by Anderson Cooper every night on CNN.
Worse, though, is the fact that Gregory is a total toady: He was one of the loudest defenders of the mainstream media in the face of criticism that the White House Press Corps didn't do enough to challenge the Bush administration in the lead-up to the Iraq War, making him an ideal replacement for the late Tim Russert, who, shortly after 9/11, asked a guest (whose identity escapes me now) what he or she thought about the "theory" that United States foreign policy was the impetus behind the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. And as Salon's Glenn Greenwald points out in his latest column, Gregory's handling of an interview with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livini yesterday in the wake of that country's controversial military assault on the Gaza Strip was an insult to objective journalism; no less than three questions in a row seemed like poorly disguised attempts at persuading Livini that Israel should overthrow Hamas. He stopped just short of daring her: "Come on. You know you want to."
Gregory's interview with Livini is not unlike his Q&A with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last summer regarding the Russia-Georgia conflict in which he seemed shocked to discover that Rice warned Georgia, "a close U.S. ally," not to provoke its neighbor. Like most of the American media, Gregory had clearly already made up his mind that Russia was the instigator without even bothering to explore the other side. During Scooter Libby's perjury trial last year, it was revealed that Dick Cheney's office believed that Russert's Meet the Press was an optimal format for the Vice President because he could "control the message"; with Gregory, Dick doesn't even need to make the trip because Gregory will spread the message for him.
My reaction to the announcement that David Gregory would be the new host of NBC's flagship Sunday morning political hour, Meet the Press, was not unlike my response to the news that he would be replacing Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews for MSNBC's primetime election coverage earlier this year. In short: ugh. It's not that I think an obvious partisan like Olbermann or an aggressive commentator like Matthews should be anchoring straight news, but Gregory's brand of milquetoast reporting is only slightly more incisive and compelling than the giggly, vanilla style of coverage doled out by Anderson Cooper every night on CNN.
Worse, though, is the fact that Gregory is a total toady: He was one of the loudest defenders of the mainstream media in the face of criticism that the White House Press Corps didn't do enough to challenge the Bush administration in the lead-up to the Iraq War, making him an ideal replacement for the late Tim Russert, who, shortly after 9/11, asked a guest (whose identity escapes me now) what he or she thought about the "theory" that United States foreign policy was the impetus behind the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. And as Salon's Glenn Greenwald points out in his latest column, Gregory's handling of an interview with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livini yesterday in the wake of that country's controversial military assault on the Gaza Strip was an insult to objective journalism; no less than three questions in a row seemed like poorly disguised attempts at persuading Livini that Israel should overthrow Hamas. He stopped just short of daring her: "Come on. You know you want to."
Gregory's interview with Livini is not unlike his Q&A with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last summer regarding the Russia-Georgia conflict in which he seemed shocked to discover that Rice warned Georgia, "a close U.S. ally," not to provoke its neighbor. Like most of the American media, Gregory had clearly already made up his mind that Russia was the instigator without even bothering to explore the other side. During Scooter Libby's perjury trial last year, it was revealed that Dick Cheney's office believed that Russert's Meet the Press was an optimal format for the Vice President because he could "control the message"; with Gregory, Dick doesn't even need to make the trip because Gregory will spread the message for him.
Obama's New Preacher Problem
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 12/19/2008 13:43:32 In: Politics Comments: 5
Barack Obama—and America—has a preacher problem. First, of course, was Reverend Jeremiah Wright, preaching from the pulpit with an almost gleeful hatred that, even if you empathized with the man and recognized the sources of his profound frustration and anger, felt alienating and counterproductive to the post-racial agenda Obama had so eloquently and sensitively put forward. Another preacher, evangelical pastor Rick Warren, is a man who, after inviting Obama to his church earlier this year for a nationally televised Q&A in a supposed effort to find common ground and then ambushing him with "gotcha" culture-war questions, compared abortion to genocide and Obama to a Holocaust denier. "Oh, I do," was the leader of Saddleback mega-church's hearty response when asked by The Wall Street Journal if he equates gay marriage with polygamy, incest, and pedophilia.
To hear some pundits' dismissive reactions to the outrage of Obama supporters in the hours following the announcement that Warren would be giving the inaugural invocation on January 20th, you'd think that the President-elect had invited Teddy Ruxpin to do it. Gay activists are apparently overreacting. They are evidently "looking for a fight" following the passage of Proposition 8 in California last month. In a video supporting the referendum, Warren said: "We should not let two percent of the population determine to change a definition of marriage that has been supported by every single culture and every single religion for 5,000 years. This is not even just a Christian issue, it's a humanitarian and human issue." And he was right. Civil rights is a "humanitarian" issue, the term being broadly defined as "having concern for or helping to improve the welfare and happiness of people."
The ins and outs of gay rights, though, are irrelevant here. What matters is that the next president of the United States just invited a bigot to launch his administration…right? Or maybe it's the fact that this next president of the United States has done it. Reverend Franklin Graham—who refused to take part in Sudanese peace negotiations in 1994, called Islam "a very evil and a very wicked religion" and condoned the use of WMD to destroy it, and, of course, declared that AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality—presided over George W. Bush's inauguration eight years ago. No shocker there. And had John McCain been elected, he undoubtedly would have been sworn in alongside "agents of intolerance" like John Hagee and Jerry Falwell. Hypocrisy is the name of the game in American politics. But compared to these folks, Warren is something like a cuddly, animatronic teddy bear.
In response to the controversy, Obama reminded us that he has consistently been "a fierce advocate for equality for gay and lesbian Americans," and that the invitation to Warren was an effort to be inclusive. These are the actions of a man who intends to govern as he campaigned, to lead as he orated. Unlike Bush's acquisition of the presidency, Obama's was not simply a power-grab: Rather than spend political capital far greater than Bush ever earned, and rather than exploit the so-called mandate of 53% (essentially a landslide in modern American presidential politics), he is living up to his promise. That is, perhaps, a political move in and of itself, since attaining power means nothing without maintaining it, but inclusiveness is what is going to make Obama a great president, and a stark contrast to Bush.
This issue has magnified something that has irked me about the Democratic Party for a long time. The right never panders to the left, but the left panders to the right almost pathologically. Is it simply proof that the nation is indeed "center-right," as many conservatives would have us believe? Or is it something deeper and more profound within in the collective psyches of Democrats? An attorney friend of mine was told by her superiors recently that she had a character flaw, that she was "too nice," and that if she were a man it would be okay. Perhaps the Democratic Party is afflicted with this same intrinsic flaw—one that makes them more gracious, inclusive, and willing to compromise. Yes, Obama is a bigger, and better, person than Bush. And yes, the country desperately needs a change from the divisive, strict partisanship of the last eight years. But in the twilight of those years, it isn't difficult to see why many Democrats wouldn't be so willing to extend the same invitation of camaraderie that was denied them since 2001.
If Obama's objective is inclusiveness, whom exactly is he going out of his way to include—or exclude, for that matter? So eager to heal the rifts and avoid the mistakes of Bush and even Bill Clinton (during the Human Rights Campaign Forum earlier this year, panel member Melissa Etheridge told presidential nominee Hillary Clinton that the gay community had been heartbroken by her husband's compromise on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and his official endorsement of the Defense of Marriage Act), Obama risks marginalizing his party's victory by aligning himself with the very people who seek to undo what they stand for.
The argument is, then, that in the interest of complete inclusiveness, perhaps Obama should invite a Klansman or an anti-Semite to his inauguration as well. They are, of course, part of America. But if Warren had made derogatory statements about blacks or Jews, he would be removed post haste and likely drummed out of public life entirely—which, it seems, would be the ultimate punishment for a man who simply glows in the national spotlight. Or if, per chance, Warren expressed actual anger from the pulpit, Obama would have thrown him under the bus months ago. The sad reality is that, in 2008, it's still okay to openly bash gays with little consequence.
If the past two years have taught us nothing else, it's that symbolism matters, but it's ultimately policy that will create real change. There is plenty of time to dialogue with people who have opposing ideologies, but how sad that the very first words spoken at this landmark moment for civil rights, and the first words that will officially usher in the first black president's tenure, will not come from Reverend Joseph Lowery, who has devoted his life to civil rights and who will preside over the ceremony's benediction, but from the mouth of a bigot. Warren is supposedly the kinder, gentler face of Christian fundamentalism in the 21st century, but he recites hate speech like a stuffed bear that's got a cassette tape stuck in its back.
Barack Obama—and America—has a preacher problem. First, of course, was Reverend Jeremiah Wright, preaching from the pulpit with an almost gleeful hatred that, even if you empathized with the man and recognized the sources of his profound frustration and anger, felt alienating and counterproductive to the post-racial agenda Obama had so eloquently and sensitively put forward. Another preacher, evangelical pastor Rick Warren, is a man who, after inviting Obama to his church earlier this year for a nationally televised Q&A in a supposed effort to find common ground and then ambushing him with "gotcha" culture-war questions, compared abortion to genocide and Obama to a Holocaust denier. "Oh, I do," was the leader of Saddleback mega-church's hearty response when asked by The Wall Street Journal if he equates gay marriage with polygamy, incest, and pedophilia.
To hear some pundits' dismissive reactions to the outrage of Obama supporters in the hours following the announcement that Warren would be giving the inaugural invocation on January 20th, you'd think that the President-elect had invited Teddy Ruxpin to do it. Gay activists are apparently overreacting. They are evidently "looking for a fight" following the passage of Proposition 8 in California last month. In a video supporting the referendum, Warren said: "We should not let two percent of the population determine to change a definition of marriage that has been supported by every single culture and every single religion for 5,000 years. This is not even just a Christian issue, it's a humanitarian and human issue." And he was right. Civil rights is a "humanitarian" issue, the term being broadly defined as "having concern for or helping to improve the welfare and happiness of people."
The ins and outs of gay rights, though, are irrelevant here. What matters is that the next president of the United States just invited a bigot to launch his administration…right? Or maybe it's the fact that this next president of the United States has done it. Reverend Franklin Graham—who refused to take part in Sudanese peace negotiations in 1994, called Islam "a very evil and a very wicked religion" and condoned the use of WMD to destroy it, and, of course, declared that AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality—presided over George W. Bush's inauguration eight years ago. No shocker there. And had John McCain been elected, he undoubtedly would have been sworn in alongside "agents of intolerance" like John Hagee and Jerry Falwell. Hypocrisy is the name of the game in American politics. But compared to these folks, Warren is something like a cuddly, animatronic teddy bear.
In response to the controversy, Obama reminded us that he has consistently been "a fierce advocate for equality for gay and lesbian Americans," and that the invitation to Warren was an effort to be inclusive. These are the actions of a man who intends to govern as he campaigned, to lead as he orated. Unlike Bush's acquisition of the presidency, Obama's was not simply a power-grab: Rather than spend political capital far greater than Bush ever earned, and rather than exploit the so-called mandate of 53% (essentially a landslide in modern American presidential politics), he is living up to his promise. That is, perhaps, a political move in and of itself, since attaining power means nothing without maintaining it, but inclusiveness is what is going to make Obama a great president, and a stark contrast to Bush.
This issue has magnified something that has irked me about the Democratic Party for a long time. The right never panders to the left, but the left panders to the right almost pathologically. Is it simply proof that the nation is indeed "center-right," as many conservatives would have us believe? Or is it something deeper and more profound within in the collective psyches of Democrats? An attorney friend of mine was told by her superiors recently that she had a character flaw, that she was "too nice," and that if she were a man it would be okay. Perhaps the Democratic Party is afflicted with this same intrinsic flaw—one that makes them more gracious, inclusive, and willing to compromise. Yes, Obama is a bigger, and better, person than Bush. And yes, the country desperately needs a change from the divisive, strict partisanship of the last eight years. But in the twilight of those years, it isn't difficult to see why many Democrats wouldn't be so willing to extend the same invitation of camaraderie that was denied them since 2001.
If Obama's objective is inclusiveness, whom exactly is he going out of his way to include—or exclude, for that matter? So eager to heal the rifts and avoid the mistakes of Bush and even Bill Clinton (during the Human Rights Campaign Forum earlier this year, panel member Melissa Etheridge told presidential nominee Hillary Clinton that the gay community had been heartbroken by her husband's compromise on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and his official endorsement of the Defense of Marriage Act), Obama risks marginalizing his party's victory by aligning himself with the very people who seek to undo what they stand for.
The argument is, then, that in the interest of complete inclusiveness, perhaps Obama should invite a Klansman or an anti-Semite to his inauguration as well. They are, of course, part of America. But if Warren had made derogatory statements about blacks or Jews, he would be removed post haste and likely drummed out of public life entirely—which, it seems, would be the ultimate punishment for a man who simply glows in the national spotlight. Or if, per chance, Warren expressed actual anger from the pulpit, Obama would have thrown him under the bus months ago. The sad reality is that, in 2008, it's still okay to openly bash gays with little consequence.
If the past two years have taught us nothing else, it's that symbolism matters, but it's ultimately policy that will create real change. There is plenty of time to dialogue with people who have opposing ideologies, but how sad that the very first words spoken at this landmark moment for civil rights, and the first words that will officially usher in the first black president's tenure, will not come from Reverend Joseph Lowery, who has devoted his life to civil rights and who will preside over the ceremony's benediction, but from the mouth of a bigot. Warren is supposedly the kinder, gentler face of Christian fundamentalism in the 21st century, but he recites hate speech like a stuffed bear that's got a cassette tape stuck in its back.
Truth and Reconciliation
By: Jessica Loudis On: 12/19/2008 10:28:38 In: Politics Comments: 1
Six months ago, Slate compiled a Venn-diagram of presidential offenses that laid out and color-coded the crimes for which members of the Bush administration could potentially be prosecuted. As an exercise in wishful thinking, the diagram had John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales hitting the criminal jackpot, racking up charges of clandestine wiretapping, illegal Justice Department hiring and firings, involvement in the CIA tapes scandal, and condoning coercive interrogation. On the lesser end of things, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice all kept their hands relatively clean, sanctioning only coercive interrogation, or as those of us unversed in Newspeak like to call it, torture. Looking at the diagram, the administration's ability to normalize the scope of their crimes comes off as nothing short of incredible. While the call to prosecute Bush often seems like a pipe dream promoted in liberal college towns and on blue-state car bumpers, as Scott Horton observed in his December 2008 Harper's cover story, "this administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself."
Last Friday, I was woken by an early morning call from my mother in D.C. vaguely instructing me to read the lead story of the day's newspaper. I pulled up the Times's website only to find articles about the newly uncovered Ponzi scandal splashed across the front page—not, I assumed, what she had called about. A visit to the Washington Post's site clarified matters. On the front page of the December 12th Post I found the article that had been quietly relegated to page A14 of the Times's print edition: "Report on Detainee Abuse Blames Top Bush Officials." According to a report released by the Senate Armed Service Committee, a bipartisan panel of senators headed by none other than John McCain, top Bush officials had been found directly responsible for the illegal treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay: a flat rejection of the administration's contention that "a few bad apples" had spoiled the bunch. "The report," its authors wrote, "is the most direct refutation to date of the administration's rationale for using aggressive interrogation tactics—that inflicting humiliation and pain on detainees was legal and effective, and helped protect the country. The 25-member panel, without one dissent among the 12 Republican members, declared the opposite to be true."
So why was a report of this magnitude, a publicly damning statement issued by a congressional panel and a potential cornerstone for legal action against the administration, generally overlooked in the media? In light of the recent outcry imploring Barack Obama to close Guantanamo before he even sets foot in the Oval Office, why dismiss one of the first real steps in this direction? Perhaps it's political neurasthenia or an unwillingness to entertain the possibility of change with Bush still in office, but as we approach the end of one of the most disastrous political tenures in American history, it seems like the best way to prepare for a brighter political future is to realign ourselves with the values that have been lost.
On December 15th, three days after the report was released, ABC's Jonathan Karl was granted an exclusive interview with Vice-President Dick Cheney, who is fully aware that a month from now he will have to take Henry Kissinger-like precautions whenever he goes on foreign vacations. After a brief discussion about the threat of terrorism, the interview turned to Cheney's opinions about the extent and use of torture:
Karl: Did you authorize the tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? [Mohammed, considered one of the Agency's "toughest" prisoners, was subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, which included sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures, forced standing, and most famously, waterboarding.]
Cheney: I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it.
Karl: In hindsight, do you think any of those tactics that were used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others went too far?
Cheney: I don't.
To raise the same question that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann posed the following night to George Washington University constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, "As overly dramatic as this question will sound, did Dick Cheney just confess to a war crime?"
As Slate, the Washington Post, and Turley make explicitly clear, the actions of this administration have surpassed the realm of defense and entered into that of criminality, raising the kinds of human rights issues associated with the so-called "rogue regimes" that have been so fiercely targeted over the past eight years. But what now? How to begin the process of dealing with the normalized crime of the Bush era? The first thing to do is to call the media to task—Cheney's comment was largely overshadowed in the press by more trivial matters. When the second-in-command of the most powerful country in the world speaks flippantly about committing war crimes, everybody should be paying attention. Beyond this, Horton has proposed the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission—a hydra-headed executive/legislative committee designed to hold the administration accountable to the law that they've worked so effectively to dismantle. While Horton dismisses the possibility of holding trials in an international criminal court, a commission would at least be a symbolic gesture—an on-the-record repudiation of this government's criminal actions.
Six months ago, Slate compiled a Venn-diagram of presidential offenses that laid out and color-coded the crimes for which members of the Bush administration could potentially be prosecuted. As an exercise in wishful thinking, the diagram had John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales hitting the criminal jackpot, racking up charges of clandestine wiretapping, illegal Justice Department hiring and firings, involvement in the CIA tapes scandal, and condoning coercive interrogation. On the lesser end of things, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice all kept their hands relatively clean, sanctioning only coercive interrogation, or as those of us unversed in Newspeak like to call it, torture. Looking at the diagram, the administration's ability to normalize the scope of their crimes comes off as nothing short of incredible. While the call to prosecute Bush often seems like a pipe dream promoted in liberal college towns and on blue-state car bumpers, as Scott Horton observed in his December 2008 Harper's cover story, "this administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself."
Last Friday, I was woken by an early morning call from my mother in D.C. vaguely instructing me to read the lead story of the day's newspaper. I pulled up the Times's website only to find articles about the newly uncovered Ponzi scandal splashed across the front page—not, I assumed, what she had called about. A visit to the Washington Post's site clarified matters. On the front page of the December 12th Post I found the article that had been quietly relegated to page A14 of the Times's print edition: "Report on Detainee Abuse Blames Top Bush Officials." According to a report released by the Senate Armed Service Committee, a bipartisan panel of senators headed by none other than John McCain, top Bush officials had been found directly responsible for the illegal treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay: a flat rejection of the administration's contention that "a few bad apples" had spoiled the bunch. "The report," its authors wrote, "is the most direct refutation to date of the administration's rationale for using aggressive interrogation tactics—that inflicting humiliation and pain on detainees was legal and effective, and helped protect the country. The 25-member panel, without one dissent among the 12 Republican members, declared the opposite to be true."
So why was a report of this magnitude, a publicly damning statement issued by a congressional panel and a potential cornerstone for legal action against the administration, generally overlooked in the media? In light of the recent outcry imploring Barack Obama to close Guantanamo before he even sets foot in the Oval Office, why dismiss one of the first real steps in this direction? Perhaps it's political neurasthenia or an unwillingness to entertain the possibility of change with Bush still in office, but as we approach the end of one of the most disastrous political tenures in American history, it seems like the best way to prepare for a brighter political future is to realign ourselves with the values that have been lost.
On December 15th, three days after the report was released, ABC's Jonathan Karl was granted an exclusive interview with Vice-President Dick Cheney, who is fully aware that a month from now he will have to take Henry Kissinger-like precautions whenever he goes on foreign vacations. After a brief discussion about the threat of terrorism, the interview turned to Cheney's opinions about the extent and use of torture:
Karl: Did you authorize the tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? [Mohammed, considered one of the Agency's "toughest" prisoners, was subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, which included sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures, forced standing, and most famously, waterboarding.]
Cheney: I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it.
Karl: In hindsight, do you think any of those tactics that were used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others went too far?
Cheney: I don't.
To raise the same question that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann posed the following night to George Washington University constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, "As overly dramatic as this question will sound, did Dick Cheney just confess to a war crime?"
As Slate, the Washington Post, and Turley make explicitly clear, the actions of this administration have surpassed the realm of defense and entered into that of criminality, raising the kinds of human rights issues associated with the so-called "rogue regimes" that have been so fiercely targeted over the past eight years. But what now? How to begin the process of dealing with the normalized crime of the Bush era? The first thing to do is to call the media to task—Cheney's comment was largely overshadowed in the press by more trivial matters. When the second-in-command of the most powerful country in the world speaks flippantly about committing war crimes, everybody should be paying attention. Beyond this, Horton has proposed the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission—a hydra-headed executive/legislative committee designed to hold the administration accountable to the law that they've worked so effectively to dismantle. While Horton dismisses the possibility of holding trials in an international criminal court, a commission would at least be a symbolic gesture—an on-the-record repudiation of this government's criminal actions.
Prop 8: What Would MLK Do?
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 11/22/2008 18:20:41 In: Politics Comments: 3
In his Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about the white moderates who sided with him on the issue of civil rights but who were reluctant to act, who told him to have patience and wait: "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." It's something that has stayed with me since I first read the text over a decade ago, and in the wake the passage of Proposition 8 (the California initiative that defines "marriage" in the state constitution as a union between a man and a woman, and which was largely funded by the Mormon Church and disproportionately supported by the African-American community compared to other racial groups), King's words have never felt more prescient.
In the midst of an economic meltdown, and with the moguls of the Big Three automakers arriving in Washington to, as one legislator astutely put it, beg for money like someone showing up for lunch at a soup kitchen in a top hat and tails, the Office of the President-elect has unveiled the details of Barack Obama's agenda for, among other things, civil rights. The plan proposes to expand hate crime statutes, as Obama did as an Illinois State senator, expand federal anti-discrimination employment laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity, repeal the U.S. Military's misguided "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, and expand adoption rights (an important stance considering the precedent set by a new ban on adoption for unmarried couples in Arkansas, a state with a shameful foster-care record).
Obama's position on the issue of gay marriage, however, is mixed at best. He opposes a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and even went on record in opposition of Prop 8, but he also opposes using the word "marriage" for gays and lesbians, preferring the much-ballyhooed institution of "civil unions" instead. Some, including myself, have asserted that civil unions should be enough, that progress takes time and change comes in measured steps. But if he were alive today, where would Martin Luther King stand on the issue? "Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability," he wrote from his jail cell on the margins of newspapers and on toilet paper. "It comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation." Patience, it seems, is not a virtue of those who seek true progress, and the problem with civil unions is that it's akin to being granted your very own water fountain. In short: separate but equal.
There are some who believe that likening the gay rights movement of today with the civil rights movement of the 1960s is inappropriate, even insulting. "Homosexuals have no shame when it comes to exploiting every noble social movement in our culture," Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition belched with stunning bigotry last year in response to a House resolution that cited interracial marriage as a precedent for the legalization of same-sex marriage. No, the plight of the gay couple that wishes to wed or start a family is not analogous to the oppression of the black man who was forbidden to order a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. But hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation have steadily increased in recent years, from 12% of all reported hate crimes in 1996 to 16% last year, and less than half of the states in the union have included sexual orientation as part of their hate-crime legislation. More importantly, the gay liberation movement of the mid-20th century was concurrent with the civil rights movement, if not an integral part of it, and King was cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. The oppression of one group is the oppression of all groups. And what happens in Alabama, or California, or Arkansas, affects the entire country.
White gays and lesbians have both benefited and suffered from living in the shadows. Concealing one's sexuality is a mode of self-preservation, an evasion of the oppression other minority groups have endured out in the open. But the cost of that lack of visibility—whether voluntary or not—has been, perhaps, a delay in progress. There have undoubtedly been a few gay American presidents over the last two centuries, but what is the likelihood that we will see an openly gay commander-in-chief in our lifetime? (To say nothing of the fact that a straight actor like Sean Penn is showered with accolades for portraying Harvey Milk, while his gay colleagues remain stuffed in their closets for fear of losing their jobs.)
As minority group populations continue to surge, with whites likely becoming a minority in the United States by 2050, the gay population will remain more or less the same, meaning progress in the voting booth will only be as swift as the general population's enlightenment is profound. "Lamentably," King wrote, "it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as [American theologian] Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
Courts, then, exist to protect minority groups when ballot initiatives won't. In his examination of the Prop 8 aftermath, The Huffington Post columnist Byron Williams observed: "Imagine if after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0, as they did, in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, officially ending de jure segregation, the Southern region of the United States were allowed to place a pro Jim Crow initiative on the ballot for a vote several months after the ruling." Allowing the masses to rule on the fate of minorities is nonsensical; permitting a state's Constitution to be altered in the voting booth is even more absurd. I suppose there's something to be said for that antiquated idea of elected representation after all.
The Mormon Church, which dumped over $20 million into the campaign for Prop 8 (that's over 60% of the total money spent), has been the primary target of criticism by gay rights advocates, but the leaders of a large number of African-American churches were also active supporters of the measure. The operative word here is "churches," not "African-American." (The raw numbers don't support the theory that blacks were responsible for the passage of Prop 8, but either way, the propaganda and lies that were used to push the agenda—that homosexuality would be taught to young schoolchildren, that priests and pastors would be jailed if they refused to perform gay weddings—is to blame.) King wrote to his fellow clergymen: "Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century."
Or the 21st. Recent polls have revealed a generational gap on the issue of gay marriage, with even religious young voters moving in a more progressive direction. Opponents of gay marriage might look to co-opt the very words in King's letter, just as they have twisted passages from the Bible: "A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God," King wrote. But he also said, "Any law that degrades human personality is unjust." The church, like his country, disappointed King deeply because he loved both deeply, and though he was a proud man of God, it's quite clear where he would stand today—on the side of justice, consciousness, the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. He would refuse to subscribe to the irrational concept that time would inevitably cure all of society's ills and inequities. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall once famously said, "Justice too long delayed is justice denied," and to King, the word "wait" almost always meant "never."
In his Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about the white moderates who sided with him on the issue of civil rights but who were reluctant to act, who told him to have patience and wait: "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." It's something that has stayed with me since I first read the text over a decade ago, and in the wake the passage of Proposition 8 (the California initiative that defines "marriage" in the state constitution as a union between a man and a woman, and which was largely funded by the Mormon Church and disproportionately supported by the African-American community compared to other racial groups), King's words have never felt more prescient.
In the midst of an economic meltdown, and with the moguls of the Big Three automakers arriving in Washington to, as one legislator astutely put it, beg for money like someone showing up for lunch at a soup kitchen in a top hat and tails, the Office of the President-elect has unveiled the details of Barack Obama's agenda for, among other things, civil rights. The plan proposes to expand hate crime statutes, as Obama did as an Illinois State senator, expand federal anti-discrimination employment laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity, repeal the U.S. Military's misguided "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, and expand adoption rights (an important stance considering the precedent set by a new ban on adoption for unmarried couples in Arkansas, a state with a shameful foster-care record).
Obama's position on the issue of gay marriage, however, is mixed at best. He opposes a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and even went on record in opposition of Prop 8, but he also opposes using the word "marriage" for gays and lesbians, preferring the much-ballyhooed institution of "civil unions" instead. Some, including myself, have asserted that civil unions should be enough, that progress takes time and change comes in measured steps. But if he were alive today, where would Martin Luther King stand on the issue? "Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability," he wrote from his jail cell on the margins of newspapers and on toilet paper. "It comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation." Patience, it seems, is not a virtue of those who seek true progress, and the problem with civil unions is that it's akin to being granted your very own water fountain. In short: separate but equal.
There are some who believe that likening the gay rights movement of today with the civil rights movement of the 1960s is inappropriate, even insulting. "Homosexuals have no shame when it comes to exploiting every noble social movement in our culture," Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition belched with stunning bigotry last year in response to a House resolution that cited interracial marriage as a precedent for the legalization of same-sex marriage. No, the plight of the gay couple that wishes to wed or start a family is not analogous to the oppression of the black man who was forbidden to order a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. But hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation have steadily increased in recent years, from 12% of all reported hate crimes in 1996 to 16% last year, and less than half of the states in the union have included sexual orientation as part of their hate-crime legislation. More importantly, the gay liberation movement of the mid-20th century was concurrent with the civil rights movement, if not an integral part of it, and King was cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. The oppression of one group is the oppression of all groups. And what happens in Alabama, or California, or Arkansas, affects the entire country.
White gays and lesbians have both benefited and suffered from living in the shadows. Concealing one's sexuality is a mode of self-preservation, an evasion of the oppression other minority groups have endured out in the open. But the cost of that lack of visibility—whether voluntary or not—has been, perhaps, a delay in progress. There have undoubtedly been a few gay American presidents over the last two centuries, but what is the likelihood that we will see an openly gay commander-in-chief in our lifetime? (To say nothing of the fact that a straight actor like Sean Penn is showered with accolades for portraying Harvey Milk, while his gay colleagues remain stuffed in their closets for fear of losing their jobs.)
As minority group populations continue to surge, with whites likely becoming a minority in the United States by 2050, the gay population will remain more or less the same, meaning progress in the voting booth will only be as swift as the general population's enlightenment is profound. "Lamentably," King wrote, "it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as [American theologian] Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
Courts, then, exist to protect minority groups when ballot initiatives won't. In his examination of the Prop 8 aftermath, The Huffington Post columnist Byron Williams observed: "Imagine if after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0, as they did, in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, officially ending de jure segregation, the Southern region of the United States were allowed to place a pro Jim Crow initiative on the ballot for a vote several months after the ruling." Allowing the masses to rule on the fate of minorities is nonsensical; permitting a state's Constitution to be altered in the voting booth is even more absurd. I suppose there's something to be said for that antiquated idea of elected representation after all.
The Mormon Church, which dumped over $20 million into the campaign for Prop 8 (that's over 60% of the total money spent), has been the primary target of criticism by gay rights advocates, but the leaders of a large number of African-American churches were also active supporters of the measure. The operative word here is "churches," not "African-American." (The raw numbers don't support the theory that blacks were responsible for the passage of Prop 8, but either way, the propaganda and lies that were used to push the agenda—that homosexuality would be taught to young schoolchildren, that priests and pastors would be jailed if they refused to perform gay weddings—is to blame.) King wrote to his fellow clergymen: "Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century."
Or the 21st. Recent polls have revealed a generational gap on the issue of gay marriage, with even religious young voters moving in a more progressive direction. Opponents of gay marriage might look to co-opt the very words in King's letter, just as they have twisted passages from the Bible: "A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God," King wrote. But he also said, "Any law that degrades human personality is unjust." The church, like his country, disappointed King deeply because he loved both deeply, and though he was a proud man of God, it's quite clear where he would stand today—on the side of justice, consciousness, the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. He would refuse to subscribe to the irrational concept that time would inevitably cure all of society's ills and inequities. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall once famously said, "Justice too long delayed is justice denied," and to King, the word "wait" almost always meant "never."
The Real Maverick
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 11/15/2008 18:07:11 In: Politics Comments: 0
While Hillary Clinton once again dominates the headlines, this time as Barack Obama's possible Secretary of State, another one of the President-elect's former rivals is making waves in Washington. It's admirable that Obama has recommended that Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman retain both his seat in the Democratic caucus as well as his chairmanship of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and it certainly jibes with his apparent desire to create a "team of rivals" akin to that of the one described in presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's best-selling book of the same name. After all, Democrats won the election and there's always room in the hearts and minds of the victorious for forgiveness, for letting bygones be bygones. But just as it was with Sarah Palin, all one needs to do is look back on what was said and done, and more importantly, how it was said and done, to understand the lingering bad blood, and in the case of Lieberman, the desire on the part of many in Congress to see him stripped of his title.
When John McCain stumbled over this own made-up multi-syllabic epithet "redistributionist" at a swing-state rally two days before the election, Lieberman could be seen just over the Republican candidate's right shoulder, where he resided for the entirety of the campaign, chuckling and grinning in agreement with every word that fell from McCain's mouth, every attack on Obama's character and patriotism, and every reproach of the Democratic policies on which he sturdily built his career over the last four decades. The one-time vice presidential Democratic candidate's defection from the party—specifically on issues like the Iraq War, national security and torture (he described disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's position on the Geneva Conventions as "reasonable" and "progressive")—were such that he lost the Democratic primary in his own state two years ago and was forced to run as a third-party independent. Next to Lieberman, the original Maverick himself looks like a stubborn party stalwart.
In a year when simply standing up to corruption in one's own party is evidently grounds for being branded a political maverick, Lieberman still deserves respect for fighting for what he believes in, right? Maybe not. His personal allegiance to Israel, nothing new in mainstream American politics but obviously the core motivational force behind his current political stance, has transformed Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, into a hawk when it comes to the Middle East, which not only puts him on the wrong side of history (and on the losing side of political history—admittedly a consequence of being a maverick, as John "I'd rather lose an election than lose a war" McCain repeatedly made clear during the campaign) but which is at direct odds with the national security interests of his country and the people he has pledged to protect. That he would continue to serve as chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security is, at best, troubling.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has made calling attention to the very real dangers of allowing Lieberman to remain chairman of the committee one of her personal crusades, repeatedly accusing the senator of what she believes is a failure to fulfill the position's responsibilities. According to a 2007 Newsweek piece titled "Bush's Best Democratic Buddy," Lieberman became complicit in George W. Bush's interpretation of bipartisanship as a rubberstamp for the administration following his 2006 reelection to the Senate. The hammering the Republican Party received in the midterm elections was a mandate for Congress to finally hold the executive branch accountable on a plethora of domestic and foreign policy issues. Lieberman had vowed to use his chairmanship to subpoena documents related to the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, including a transcript of a meeting in which former Federal Emergency Management Agency fall guy Michael Brown warned of an impending disaster. The warning, of course, was met with "deafening silence." Instead, Lieberman let it go, like floodwaters through an attic—to use Maddow's fitting metaphor. This, if for no other reason, is grounds for his removal.
At the Republican National Convention in September, in the wake of Hurricane Gustav, Lieberman couched his speech in support of the McCain-Palin ticket in rhetoric so profoundly ironic you could almost hear the collective groan of his Democratic colleagues over the roar of the Republican crowd at the Xcel Energy Center: "It shouldn't take a hurricane to bring us together like this," he said before accusing Obama of empty political posturing. For the following 60 days he joined a rightwing chorus that smeared the soon-to-be-former Illinois senator as a Marxist, unpatriotic, even a traitor. Wouldn't that make Lieberman more apt to use his position of power against the new president, whose judgment, policies and integrity he has repeatedly called into question? Say it ain't so, Joe!
The likelihood of Mark Begich, Al Franken and Jim Martin winning their seats in those three still undecided Senate races is improbable, which means keeping Lieberman won't really matter. If the Democratic Party strips him of his chairmanship, it's unlikely Lieberman will resign, which means the chance of Connecticut's governor appointing a fellow Republican to the vacant seat is slim, but he's liable to throw a tantrum and complete his turncoat makeover, which means the Democrats will be one seat farther from their coveted filibuster-proof majority—one that, it should be noted, Lieberman is against. But if he does switch teams, might Connecticut voters give a Republican version of Lieberman the boot in 2012, thereby opening the door for a real Democrat and a real Senate majority? Some might view a revocation of Lieberman's chairmanship as political vengeance, but rewarding him by allowing him to retain it in the interest of maintaining numbers is just as politically motivated, if not more so. This is an opportunity for Democrats to take a principled stand while, in the process, potentially benefiting politically in the long run too.
While Hillary Clinton once again dominates the headlines, this time as Barack Obama's possible Secretary of State, another one of the President-elect's former rivals is making waves in Washington. It's admirable that Obama has recommended that Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman retain both his seat in the Democratic caucus as well as his chairmanship of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and it certainly jibes with his apparent desire to create a "team of rivals" akin to that of the one described in presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's best-selling book of the same name. After all, Democrats won the election and there's always room in the hearts and minds of the victorious for forgiveness, for letting bygones be bygones. But just as it was with Sarah Palin, all one needs to do is look back on what was said and done, and more importantly, how it was said and done, to understand the lingering bad blood, and in the case of Lieberman, the desire on the part of many in Congress to see him stripped of his title.
When John McCain stumbled over this own made-up multi-syllabic epithet "redistributionist" at a swing-state rally two days before the election, Lieberman could be seen just over the Republican candidate's right shoulder, where he resided for the entirety of the campaign, chuckling and grinning in agreement with every word that fell from McCain's mouth, every attack on Obama's character and patriotism, and every reproach of the Democratic policies on which he sturdily built his career over the last four decades. The one-time vice presidential Democratic candidate's defection from the party—specifically on issues like the Iraq War, national security and torture (he described disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's position on the Geneva Conventions as "reasonable" and "progressive")—were such that he lost the Democratic primary in his own state two years ago and was forced to run as a third-party independent. Next to Lieberman, the original Maverick himself looks like a stubborn party stalwart.
In a year when simply standing up to corruption in one's own party is evidently grounds for being branded a political maverick, Lieberman still deserves respect for fighting for what he believes in, right? Maybe not. His personal allegiance to Israel, nothing new in mainstream American politics but obviously the core motivational force behind his current political stance, has transformed Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, into a hawk when it comes to the Middle East, which not only puts him on the wrong side of history (and on the losing side of political history—admittedly a consequence of being a maverick, as John "I'd rather lose an election than lose a war" McCain repeatedly made clear during the campaign) but which is at direct odds with the national security interests of his country and the people he has pledged to protect. That he would continue to serve as chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security is, at best, troubling.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has made calling attention to the very real dangers of allowing Lieberman to remain chairman of the committee one of her personal crusades, repeatedly accusing the senator of what she believes is a failure to fulfill the position's responsibilities. According to a 2007 Newsweek piece titled "Bush's Best Democratic Buddy," Lieberman became complicit in George W. Bush's interpretation of bipartisanship as a rubberstamp for the administration following his 2006 reelection to the Senate. The hammering the Republican Party received in the midterm elections was a mandate for Congress to finally hold the executive branch accountable on a plethora of domestic and foreign policy issues. Lieberman had vowed to use his chairmanship to subpoena documents related to the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, including a transcript of a meeting in which former Federal Emergency Management Agency fall guy Michael Brown warned of an impending disaster. The warning, of course, was met with "deafening silence." Instead, Lieberman let it go, like floodwaters through an attic—to use Maddow's fitting metaphor. This, if for no other reason, is grounds for his removal.
At the Republican National Convention in September, in the wake of Hurricane Gustav, Lieberman couched his speech in support of the McCain-Palin ticket in rhetoric so profoundly ironic you could almost hear the collective groan of his Democratic colleagues over the roar of the Republican crowd at the Xcel Energy Center: "It shouldn't take a hurricane to bring us together like this," he said before accusing Obama of empty political posturing. For the following 60 days he joined a rightwing chorus that smeared the soon-to-be-former Illinois senator as a Marxist, unpatriotic, even a traitor. Wouldn't that make Lieberman more apt to use his position of power against the new president, whose judgment, policies and integrity he has repeatedly called into question? Say it ain't so, Joe!
The likelihood of Mark Begich, Al Franken and Jim Martin winning their seats in those three still undecided Senate races is improbable, which means keeping Lieberman won't really matter. If the Democratic Party strips him of his chairmanship, it's unlikely Lieberman will resign, which means the chance of Connecticut's governor appointing a fellow Republican to the vacant seat is slim, but he's liable to throw a tantrum and complete his turncoat makeover, which means the Democrats will be one seat farther from their coveted filibuster-proof majority—one that, it should be noted, Lieberman is against. But if he does switch teams, might Connecticut voters give a Republican version of Lieberman the boot in 2012, thereby opening the door for a real Democrat and a real Senate majority? Some might view a revocation of Lieberman's chairmanship as political vengeance, but rewarding him by allowing him to retain it in the interest of maintaining numbers is just as politically motivated, if not more so. This is an opportunity for Democrats to take a principled stand while, in the process, potentially benefiting politically in the long run too.
Sour Grapes: The Post-Election W(h)ine
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 11/13/2008 08:49:09 In: Politics Comments: 1
In her latest column for Salon, feminist and cultural critic Camille Paglia describes how she became "increasingly disturbed" in the final weeks of the presidential election by what she believes was the mainstream media's avoidance of both the Bill Ayers controversy and—wait for it—questions about Barack Obama's birth certificate. Disturbing, indeed. The very idea that Obama would rest his entire presidential campaign—to say nothing of his actual presidency—on the premise that he could conceal his non-American citizenship without anyone ever figuring it out is patently absurd. "We don't need another presidency that finds it all too easy to rely on evasion or stonewalling," Paglia explained, suggesting Obama could have ended the entire matter by asking his supposed birth state of Hawaii to "issue a fresh, long-form, stamped certificate and inviting a few high-profile reporters in to examine the document and photograph it." Yes, and he could have settled the issue of his Judeo-Christianity by simply unzipping his pants and inviting a few high-profile reporters to examine and photograph his circumcised penis.
Perhaps inspired by political analyst Michael Barone's statement to the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges yesterday that "the liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby," Paglia goes on to compare the absence of xenophobic inquisition in the media to the treatment of the Alaskan governor, who the writer informs us has been "subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views." Really? The right (and Paglia, apparently) would have us believe that the media's disdain for Sarah Palin is eclipsed only by its hatred for living babies. And here I thought Palin's real problem was her complete and utter incompetence, her inability to construct a coherent position on practically any important issue, her opportunism at the expense of national security, her mean-spirited and divisive fear-mongering, her worrying readiness to put faith before law, and her general disregard for said law. No one in the media has denied the fact that Palin is, to use Paglia's term, a populist phenomenon, but for once they did the right thing by calling a spade a spade—and before that spade got elected.
Paglia suggests that those of us who don't recognize Palin's alleged smarts "are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma." But never has there been a more blatantly partisan statement, nor a purer bit of political hilarity, than Paglia's defense of Palin: "There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist." Good for Paglia for dogmatically standing up for her gender, but the ascension of a woman like Palin to higher office isn't progress for all women—it's progress for one woman (freedom of choice aside, Palin supported McCain's opposition to the Fair Pay Restoration Act and the 180-day limit allowed by law for filing unfair wage disputes)—and good for Palin for standing up to those anonymous McCain campaign insiders who are trying to deflect from their own failure and misjudgment by calling her names like "hillbilly" (maybe now blue-collar America will finally see that the Republican Party has been poaching their votes and then snickering behind their backs). But whatever compassion or pity one might feel for Palin disintegrates the moment you remember the atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation with which she attacked Obama, Vice President-elect Joe Biden and pretty much all of non-Appalachia America.
If Palin weren't on a nonstop media blitz in an apparent attempt at mending her obliterated image, and if she weren't clearly on a quest—God be willin'—for the top of the Republican ticket or a cozy Senate seat next to Hillary Clinton, none of this would even matter anymore. Still, more relevant is the right's continued attacks on our new President-elect. A few weeks ago Michelle Malkin's grape-sized brain hypothesized that if Obama won the election, there would be rioting in the streets. But as I've already pointed out, it seems Republicans have been the ones harboring the most anger and frustration this political season—this, despite Democrats having suffered through eight years of King George II. Just witness how McCain's calls for unity and support for Obama at his concession speech last week were met with angry jeers and protests from the crowd, a stark contrast to the somber acceptance at John Kerry's speech in the wake of a much closer race four years ago. Booing isn't racist, but it's a striking contrast to all of that non-rioting during Obama's acceptance speech at Chicago's Grant Park later that night.
In the days since the election, there has been an inundation of cynical, envious rightwing mouthpieces sounding off on what they see as an empty movement filled with lots of silly optimism and "childish unity." There is no bigger cynic than me, but it all just sounds like so much whining, the sound of a party balloon punctured and shrinking, and you'll have to forgive Americans who endured two much closer losses in 2000 and 2004 and subsequently watched their country be torn apart by neoconservatism for not mustering much sympathy. Though certainly not spokespeople for the Republican Party as a whole, the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity have been the loudest voices in opposition to an Obama presidency, warning of an impending disaster and blaming the country's current economic woes on the man even though, Limbaugh admitted, "he hasn't done anything yet." And it should come as no surprise that actual elected officials are getting in on the action too: Georgia congressman Paul Broun compared Obama's proposed civilian reserve corps to Marxism, Nazi Germany and the former Soviet Union—all in one breath. This isn't meaningful policy debate, or even the kind of angry dissent that finally, thankfully, emerged during George W. Bush's second term; it's partisan dogma of the most hostile and, frankly, transparent kind.
In her latest column for Salon, feminist and cultural critic Camille Paglia describes how she became "increasingly disturbed" in the final weeks of the presidential election by what she believes was the mainstream media's avoidance of both the Bill Ayers controversy and—wait for it—questions about Barack Obama's birth certificate. Disturbing, indeed. The very idea that Obama would rest his entire presidential campaign—to say nothing of his actual presidency—on the premise that he could conceal his non-American citizenship without anyone ever figuring it out is patently absurd. "We don't need another presidency that finds it all too easy to rely on evasion or stonewalling," Paglia explained, suggesting Obama could have ended the entire matter by asking his supposed birth state of Hawaii to "issue a fresh, long-form, stamped certificate and inviting a few high-profile reporters in to examine the document and photograph it." Yes, and he could have settled the issue of his Judeo-Christianity by simply unzipping his pants and inviting a few high-profile reporters to examine and photograph his circumcised penis.
Perhaps inspired by political analyst Michael Barone's statement to the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges yesterday that "the liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby," Paglia goes on to compare the absence of xenophobic inquisition in the media to the treatment of the Alaskan governor, who the writer informs us has been "subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views." Really? The right (and Paglia, apparently) would have us believe that the media's disdain for Sarah Palin is eclipsed only by its hatred for living babies. And here I thought Palin's real problem was her complete and utter incompetence, her inability to construct a coherent position on practically any important issue, her opportunism at the expense of national security, her mean-spirited and divisive fear-mongering, her worrying readiness to put faith before law, and her general disregard for said law. No one in the media has denied the fact that Palin is, to use Paglia's term, a populist phenomenon, but for once they did the right thing by calling a spade a spade—and before that spade got elected.
Paglia suggests that those of us who don't recognize Palin's alleged smarts "are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma." But never has there been a more blatantly partisan statement, nor a purer bit of political hilarity, than Paglia's defense of Palin: "There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist." Good for Paglia for dogmatically standing up for her gender, but the ascension of a woman like Palin to higher office isn't progress for all women—it's progress for one woman (freedom of choice aside, Palin supported McCain's opposition to the Fair Pay Restoration Act and the 180-day limit allowed by law for filing unfair wage disputes)—and good for Palin for standing up to those anonymous McCain campaign insiders who are trying to deflect from their own failure and misjudgment by calling her names like "hillbilly" (maybe now blue-collar America will finally see that the Republican Party has been poaching their votes and then snickering behind their backs). But whatever compassion or pity one might feel for Palin disintegrates the moment you remember the atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation with which she attacked Obama, Vice President-elect Joe Biden and pretty much all of non-Appalachia America.
If Palin weren't on a nonstop media blitz in an apparent attempt at mending her obliterated image, and if she weren't clearly on a quest—God be willin'—for the top of the Republican ticket or a cozy Senate seat next to Hillary Clinton, none of this would even matter anymore. Still, more relevant is the right's continued attacks on our new President-elect. A few weeks ago Michelle Malkin's grape-sized brain hypothesized that if Obama won the election, there would be rioting in the streets. But as I've already pointed out, it seems Republicans have been the ones harboring the most anger and frustration this political season—this, despite Democrats having suffered through eight years of King George II. Just witness how McCain's calls for unity and support for Obama at his concession speech last week were met with angry jeers and protests from the crowd, a stark contrast to the somber acceptance at John Kerry's speech in the wake of a much closer race four years ago. Booing isn't racist, but it's a striking contrast to all of that non-rioting during Obama's acceptance speech at Chicago's Grant Park later that night.
In the days since the election, there has been an inundation of cynical, envious rightwing mouthpieces sounding off on what they see as an empty movement filled with lots of silly optimism and "childish unity." There is no bigger cynic than me, but it all just sounds like so much whining, the sound of a party balloon punctured and shrinking, and you'll have to forgive Americans who endured two much closer losses in 2000 and 2004 and subsequently watched their country be torn apart by neoconservatism for not mustering much sympathy. Though certainly not spokespeople for the Republican Party as a whole, the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity have been the loudest voices in opposition to an Obama presidency, warning of an impending disaster and blaming the country's current economic woes on the man even though, Limbaugh admitted, "he hasn't done anything yet." And it should come as no surprise that actual elected officials are getting in on the action too: Georgia congressman Paul Broun compared Obama's proposed civilian reserve corps to Marxism, Nazi Germany and the former Soviet Union—all in one breath. This isn't meaningful policy debate, or even the kind of angry dissent that finally, thankfully, emerged during George W. Bush's second term; it's partisan dogma of the most hostile and, frankly, transparent kind.
The Future of the GOP
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 11/05/2008 12:37:50 In: Politics Comments: 6
There was a period a few years ago, perhaps felt most potently in the days and weeks following the 2004 presidential election, when Karl Rove's fantasy of a permanent Republican majority seemed less like a pipedream and more like modern political reality—and for many, even a nightmare. That nightmare, of course, began on December 12th, 2000, 19 days before the start of the so-called New American Century, when the Supreme Court effectively handed the presidency to George W. Bush. In an interview during the Democratic primary, Barack Obama declared that Ronald Reagan "changed the trajectory of America," and, with the guidance of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfield, Paul Wolfowitz and others, the same could be said of Bush, who is to neoconservatism what Reagan was to the New Right.
Ronald Reagan has been hailed as a hero by almost every subsection of the conservative movement—isolationists, neocons, libertarians, Christians, Arnold Schwarzenegger—but he was filled with contradictions. He saw government as the enemy but raised taxes to save one of its biggest socialized institutions. He took nationalism to the extreme, likening the United States to something out of Disney or the Bible and its biggest adversary to something out of Star Wars, but somehow did it in a way that united the country even as his traditionally conservative preference for liberty over equality inherently divided it. He was an actor. His greatest gift was convincing people that he spoke to them and represented their interests, that he was a populist instead of an elitist, that he was a libertarian rather than a xenophobe. In many ways, this is what made him a unifier; it's what helped the 1984 electoral map look like the end of days for the left.
Creating a majority isn't difficult. If Reagan was a transformative figure in the 1980s, as Obama has said, it was because he had big ideas that, even if you disagreed with them, inspired people. Reagan and Bush's approaches, however, were quite different. When they weren't flag-waving and fear-mongering in tandem with fundamental Islamic terrorism, Bush and his party's winning formula was to demonize and divide, with a vast, cynically engineered culture war designed to split the country into red and blue, good and evil, moral and immoral, patriotic and unpatriotic, American and un-American, and the two-pronged formula worked wonderfully. The mantra was divide and conquer, and conquer they did. And neither Bush nor Reagan could do it without the religious right.
One of the basic tenets of neoconservatism is the rejection of the belief that moral or ethical truths are not absolute, and the idea that one group or political party could own a monopoly on morality, that God is on its side, is, I think, the most dangerous kind of politics, the kind that pits one group of people against another in its quest for power. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority helped get Reagan elected, and through the 1990s these groups continued to oppose equal rights for women and gays as well as first-amendment rights in the media. These people, and the politicians who court them, aren't moral at all; they are moralistic. What they believe in is beyond examination, and this is the basic ideology of social conservatism, what pushes a traditional conservative who believes in limited government to seek to legislate what Americans can see, read and hear, what they do with their bodies and who they do it with.
Sustaining a majority is, evidently, a more challenging enterprise than creating one. In its attempt to exploit the religious right during the last decade, the Republican Party became enslaved by it. In its attempt to shield the corporate fat cats who lined its pockets and filled its voting booths, the party sold its soul and watched its stock tumble. And in its attempt to create American hegemony abroad, it weakened the country's standing all over the globe. The Bush administration's ideological stance on taxes (and especially taxes during wartime), its constant assault on civil liberties and the Constitution, and its complete disregard of the justice system are patently un-American. The hypocrisies of today's social conservatism as a whole make Reagan's contradictions look quaint. "Reagan Democrat" is a term we've heard in spades this election cycle, but it's unlikely we'll ever hear "Bush Liberal."
The incompetence with which the Bush administration presided over terror, war and weather was astounding, but still party loyalists remained loyal and the left remained impotent. But the tides have turned: Republicans are now being forced to apologize for, or back-peddle on, their unpatriotic accusations of anti-Americanism. And minds are opening. It's tempting to say it's too little, too late, that the damage—to our markets, to our civil liberties, to our reputation, to the environment—is done, but true patriotism, true Americanism is both the ability to acknowledge America's flaws and the willingness to address them.
My father is a Reaganite. He came from very little, worked hard for what he had, wanted to keep what he earned, never got any handouts and didn't think anyone else should either. He did well enough to eventually buy two homes, send his children to college and live comfortably with my mother through retirement. He believed in limited government, the free market, a strong military and war as a final option. He twice voted for both Reagan and George W. Bush. My parents did everything "right," but now, as they approach their twilight years, their government has failed them. They've watched their retirement savings dwindle and their government attempt to flaunt its power with its military muscle rather than with quiet might. My father is disappointed and embarrassed. And for every voter John McCain gained by pandering to the extreme right, he lost a devoted, lifelong Republican like my dad.
It's unclear if it's because there are simply more pressing issues than partisanship, or because, as a wise Republican once said, "you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time," but the tried and true tactics of neoconservatism are no longer working the way they once did. The 2006 election wasn't a fluke or simply a one-time repudiation of Bush's war; the last two elections have been a referendum on the modern conservative movement, the Republican brand as a whole, and the party's failure to protect, enrich, strengthen and unify the country. It's a sea change, and while war fatigue and belated semi-consciousness may have turned the people against the president, it took a financial collapse to turn his most ardent supporters against him in the last 45 days like so many rats jumping ship just as the hull sinks beneath the surface. Whether due to an innate compulsion to be on the side of victory or permission to express one's true feelings granted by the opposition's said victory, right-wingers joined Team Obama in near droves during the final weeks of the campaign. They smelled defeat.
Republicans lustfully watched what they thought was the Democratic Party devouring itself during the primary season. In retrospect, though, Barack Obama was waging his biggest, most important battle: As the late Tim Russert observed, he went toe-to-toe with the Clinton machine, with a former First Lady, with Bill Clinton himself, and emerged victorious. And he handily proved the theory of survival of the fittest in the general election by manning a campaign that, even when it made mistakes, displayed enormous levels of grace and organization. The Democratic Party unified quickly, thanks in no small part to Hillary Clinton herself but more so because the two candidates' platforms were never all that dissimilar: Democrats mobilized to finally eradicate Washington of neoconservative ideology.
So what now? Liberals and many conservatives, like my father, may hope that Sarah Palin will fade into obscurity as quickly as she appeared on the political stage, that her future will consist solely of late-night punchlines and Geraldine Ferraro-esque appearances on Hannity & Colmes, but Dan Quayle never mobilized people the way Palin has, and he certainly couldn't fill an arena. Is it possible that John McCain's legacy will have been that, in the final throes of desperation and political ambition, he helped resurrect the near-dead neoconservative movement by anointing its new patron saint and thrusting upon us a demigod for the religious right—a group he never really supported and who never really supported him? When asked recently if he thinks Palin is the future of the Republican Party, McCain said, "To a large degree, as vice president or, or—," and then stopped himself, for it may have been too horrifying an admission for a man who earned his maverick image by bucking his own party and taking independent, principled stances on the major issues of our time, by standing up to the right-wing "agents of intolerance" that Palin represents.
The depth and breadth of the religious right's chokehold on the Republican Party was evident during the primary, when former frontrunners like the socially moderate Rudy Guiliani and Mitt Romney were drummed out of the race and, for a brief time, it seemed like Arkansas Governor and former Southern Baptist minister Mike Huckabee had invigorated the conservative base in ways none of the other candidates, including McCain, had. Huckabee talked openly about Jesus Christ and boasted of his Christian faith in his campaign ads. And when it was clear he had no path to the nomination aside from, say, divine intervention (he credited his first victory, in Iowa, to God's will), he claimed he would remain in the race to give voice to cultural conservatives across the country, all the while splitting the religious vote with Romney, a Mormon, and effectively handing the election to McCain.
Huckabee, who some in the media speculated could be the future of the Republican Party, moved on to FOX News, but Sarah Palin has picked up the baton. A more moderate voice like Romney might be able to move the party in a more fiscally responsible direction, but his religious background has proven to be an albatross, limiting his reach among Evangelicals and others in the Christian majority. Aside from being suspicious of any politician whose beliefs do not coincide with their faith, this segment of the Republican Party is largely contemptuous of critical thought, nuance, and moral, cultural and intellectual relativism. This rift, between activist conservatives—whose primary objective is not the size of government or national security but legislating morality—and more libertarian, fiscally conservative, small-government Republicans threatens to split the party right down the middle, an improbable but not entirely impossible outcome of the right's very own culture war.
The Republican Party is fracturing and it needs to find a new identity. Following weeks of Rove-esque attacks, the kind that lost him his party's nomination in 2000 at the hands of George W. Bush and which, in a particularly maverick-y move, led him to consider switching parties, McCain attempted to focus on taxes during the final days of his 2008 campaign. Granted, he was handed a gift with Obama's "spread the wealth" comment and he and Palin disseminated their new message with the cynical, boogeyman flair consistent with modern neoconservatism, but cooler heads might view the move as McCain's attempt at preserving the party's traditional platform in the wake of what was clearly going to be a devastating and symbolic defeat for Republicans. Or maybe they had just run out of ideas.
In order to win in recent years, Democrats have had to move to the center, something that Republicans rarely do, so sure they are that the country is center-right. But the demographics are changing, and with Barack Obama as President, America has a new face. Simply finding minority candidates who have conservative values will not diversify and expand the Republican Party any more than picking a vice presidential candidate in a skirt will score them women voters. The ascension of Palin as a national figure and potential leader of the party continues to chip away at the fissures begun by Bush. The challenge for the party is to find Republican solutions for American problems, including health care, energy and the economy, and then hope that in the process a leader who can speak to the entire nation, both red and blue, will emerge. The Republican Party's future requires the expansion and unification of their tent, something that will be nearly impossible for a political group that has built its entire platform on divisiveness rather than inclusiveness.
There was a period a few years ago, perhaps felt most potently in the days and weeks following the 2004 presidential election, when Karl Rove's fantasy of a permanent Republican majority seemed less like a pipedream and more like modern political reality—and for many, even a nightmare. That nightmare, of course, began on December 12th, 2000, 19 days before the start of the so-called New American Century, when the Supreme Court effectively handed the presidency to George W. Bush. In an interview during the Democratic primary, Barack Obama declared that Ronald Reagan "changed the trajectory of America," and, with the guidance of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfield, Paul Wolfowitz and others, the same could be said of Bush, who is to neoconservatism what Reagan was to the New Right.
Ronald Reagan has been hailed as a hero by almost every subsection of the conservative movement—isolationists, neocons, libertarians, Christians, Arnold Schwarzenegger—but he was filled with contradictions. He saw government as the enemy but raised taxes to save one of its biggest socialized institutions. He took nationalism to the extreme, likening the United States to something out of Disney or the Bible and its biggest adversary to something out of Star Wars, but somehow did it in a way that united the country even as his traditionally conservative preference for liberty over equality inherently divided it. He was an actor. His greatest gift was convincing people that he spoke to them and represented their interests, that he was a populist instead of an elitist, that he was a libertarian rather than a xenophobe. In many ways, this is what made him a unifier; it's what helped the 1984 electoral map look like the end of days for the left.
Creating a majority isn't difficult. If Reagan was a transformative figure in the 1980s, as Obama has said, it was because he had big ideas that, even if you disagreed with them, inspired people. Reagan and Bush's approaches, however, were quite different. When they weren't flag-waving and fear-mongering in tandem with fundamental Islamic terrorism, Bush and his party's winning formula was to demonize and divide, with a vast, cynically engineered culture war designed to split the country into red and blue, good and evil, moral and immoral, patriotic and unpatriotic, American and un-American, and the two-pronged formula worked wonderfully. The mantra was divide and conquer, and conquer they did. And neither Bush nor Reagan could do it without the religious right.
One of the basic tenets of neoconservatism is the rejection of the belief that moral or ethical truths are not absolute, and the idea that one group or political party could own a monopoly on morality, that God is on its side, is, I think, the most dangerous kind of politics, the kind that pits one group of people against another in its quest for power. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority helped get Reagan elected, and through the 1990s these groups continued to oppose equal rights for women and gays as well as first-amendment rights in the media. These people, and the politicians who court them, aren't moral at all; they are moralistic. What they believe in is beyond examination, and this is the basic ideology of social conservatism, what pushes a traditional conservative who believes in limited government to seek to legislate what Americans can see, read and hear, what they do with their bodies and who they do it with.
Sustaining a majority is, evidently, a more challenging enterprise than creating one. In its attempt to exploit the religious right during the last decade, the Republican Party became enslaved by it. In its attempt to shield the corporate fat cats who lined its pockets and filled its voting booths, the party sold its soul and watched its stock tumble. And in its attempt to create American hegemony abroad, it weakened the country's standing all over the globe. The Bush administration's ideological stance on taxes (and especially taxes during wartime), its constant assault on civil liberties and the Constitution, and its complete disregard of the justice system are patently un-American. The hypocrisies of today's social conservatism as a whole make Reagan's contradictions look quaint. "Reagan Democrat" is a term we've heard in spades this election cycle, but it's unlikely we'll ever hear "Bush Liberal."
The incompetence with which the Bush administration presided over terror, war and weather was astounding, but still party loyalists remained loyal and the left remained impotent. But the tides have turned: Republicans are now being forced to apologize for, or back-peddle on, their unpatriotic accusations of anti-Americanism. And minds are opening. It's tempting to say it's too little, too late, that the damage—to our markets, to our civil liberties, to our reputation, to the environment—is done, but true patriotism, true Americanism is both the ability to acknowledge America's flaws and the willingness to address them.
My father is a Reaganite. He came from very little, worked hard for what he had, wanted to keep what he earned, never got any handouts and didn't think anyone else should either. He did well enough to eventually buy two homes, send his children to college and live comfortably with my mother through retirement. He believed in limited government, the free market, a strong military and war as a final option. He twice voted for both Reagan and George W. Bush. My parents did everything "right," but now, as they approach their twilight years, their government has failed them. They've watched their retirement savings dwindle and their government attempt to flaunt its power with its military muscle rather than with quiet might. My father is disappointed and embarrassed. And for every voter John McCain gained by pandering to the extreme right, he lost a devoted, lifelong Republican like my dad.
It's unclear if it's because there are simply more pressing issues than partisanship, or because, as a wise Republican once said, "you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time," but the tried and true tactics of neoconservatism are no longer working the way they once did. The 2006 election wasn't a fluke or simply a one-time repudiation of Bush's war; the last two elections have been a referendum on the modern conservative movement, the Republican brand as a whole, and the party's failure to protect, enrich, strengthen and unify the country. It's a sea change, and while war fatigue and belated semi-consciousness may have turned the people against the president, it took a financial collapse to turn his most ardent supporters against him in the last 45 days like so many rats jumping ship just as the hull sinks beneath the surface. Whether due to an innate compulsion to be on the side of victory or permission to express one's true feelings granted by the opposition's said victory, right-wingers joined Team Obama in near droves during the final weeks of the campaign. They smelled defeat.
Republicans lustfully watched what they thought was the Democratic Party devouring itself during the primary season. In retrospect, though, Barack Obama was waging his biggest, most important battle: As the late Tim Russert observed, he went toe-to-toe with the Clinton machine, with a former First Lady, with Bill Clinton himself, and emerged victorious. And he handily proved the theory of survival of the fittest in the general election by manning a campaign that, even when it made mistakes, displayed enormous levels of grace and organization. The Democratic Party unified quickly, thanks in no small part to Hillary Clinton herself but more so because the two candidates' platforms were never all that dissimilar: Democrats mobilized to finally eradicate Washington of neoconservative ideology.
So what now? Liberals and many conservatives, like my father, may hope that Sarah Palin will fade into obscurity as quickly as she appeared on the political stage, that her future will consist solely of late-night punchlines and Geraldine Ferraro-esque appearances on Hannity & Colmes, but Dan Quayle never mobilized people the way Palin has, and he certainly couldn't fill an arena. Is it possible that John McCain's legacy will have been that, in the final throes of desperation and political ambition, he helped resurrect the near-dead neoconservative movement by anointing its new patron saint and thrusting upon us a demigod for the religious right—a group he never really supported and who never really supported him? When asked recently if he thinks Palin is the future of the Republican Party, McCain said, "To a large degree, as vice president or, or—," and then stopped himself, for it may have been too horrifying an admission for a man who earned his maverick image by bucking his own party and taking independent, principled stances on the major issues of our time, by standing up to the right-wing "agents of intolerance" that Palin represents.
The depth and breadth of the religious right's chokehold on the Republican Party was evident during the primary, when former frontrunners like the socially moderate Rudy Guiliani and Mitt Romney were drummed out of the race and, for a brief time, it seemed like Arkansas Governor and former Southern Baptist minister Mike Huckabee had invigorated the conservative base in ways none of the other candidates, including McCain, had. Huckabee talked openly about Jesus Christ and boasted of his Christian faith in his campaign ads. And when it was clear he had no path to the nomination aside from, say, divine intervention (he credited his first victory, in Iowa, to God's will), he claimed he would remain in the race to give voice to cultural conservatives across the country, all the while splitting the religious vote with Romney, a Mormon, and effectively handing the election to McCain.
Huckabee, who some in the media speculated could be the future of the Republican Party, moved on to FOX News, but Sarah Palin has picked up the baton. A more moderate voice like Romney might be able to move the party in a more fiscally responsible direction, but his religious background has proven to be an albatross, limiting his reach among Evangelicals and others in the Christian majority. Aside from being suspicious of any politician whose beliefs do not coincide with their faith, this segment of the Republican Party is largely contemptuous of critical thought, nuance, and moral, cultural and intellectual relativism. This rift, between activist conservatives—whose primary objective is not the size of government or national security but legislating morality—and more libertarian, fiscally conservative, small-government Republicans threatens to split the party right down the middle, an improbable but not entirely impossible outcome of the right's very own culture war.
The Republican Party is fracturing and it needs to find a new identity. Following weeks of Rove-esque attacks, the kind that lost him his party's nomination in 2000 at the hands of George W. Bush and which, in a particularly maverick-y move, led him to consider switching parties, McCain attempted to focus on taxes during the final days of his 2008 campaign. Granted, he was handed a gift with Obama's "spread the wealth" comment and he and Palin disseminated their new message with the cynical, boogeyman flair consistent with modern neoconservatism, but cooler heads might view the move as McCain's attempt at preserving the party's traditional platform in the wake of what was clearly going to be a devastating and symbolic defeat for Republicans. Or maybe they had just run out of ideas.
In order to win in recent years, Democrats have had to move to the center, something that Republicans rarely do, so sure they are that the country is center-right. But the demographics are changing, and with Barack Obama as President, America has a new face. Simply finding minority candidates who have conservative values will not diversify and expand the Republican Party any more than picking a vice presidential candidate in a skirt will score them women voters. The ascension of Palin as a national figure and potential leader of the party continues to chip away at the fissures begun by Bush. The challenge for the party is to find Republican solutions for American problems, including health care, energy and the economy, and then hope that in the process a leader who can speak to the entire nation, both red and blue, will emerge. The Republican Party's future requires the expansion and unification of their tent, something that will be nearly impossible for a political group that has built its entire platform on divisiveness rather than inclusiveness.
The Broad Strokes of Peggy Noonan
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 10/31/2008 16:35:06 In: Politics Comments: 2
Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan has a way with words. She was a Reagan speechwriter, after all. Words slip off her tongue with a thoughtful panache not unlike Barack Obama's and, to paraphrase Salon's always astute Gary Kamiya, a Whitmanesque lyricism. In her latest Wall Street Journal column, Noonan sketches a reasonable portrait of Obama as president. I urge you to read it in full, but in short, she praises Obama's gustiness, steadiness and judgment. She writes: "When the press was hitting hard on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter, he did not respond with a politically shrewd 'I have no comment,' or 'We shouldn't judge.' Instead he said, 'My mother had me when she was 18,' which shamed the press and others into silence. He showed grace when he didn't have to."
On John McCain, she offered a reluctant, perhaps too optimistic, assessment of the Republican nominee's failed campaign. Two former U.S. senators (and McCain adversaries) with which Noonan shared a drink in a hotel last month told the journalist of their admiration for McCain's patriotism. They said he's running for president not because of personal ambition but because he wants to help the country. It's something I, too, believe and have said as much on this very blog. But there are things more important than simply being a patriot. A leader must have the judgment to know who to surround himself with, the temperament to know when to exercise his authority, the organization to win. McCain, it's become apparent, lacks all three. It's unfortunate, really, but more tragic is the lack of control he seems to have over his campaign, as well as his own faculties. The McCain of 2000 seems to have been hijacked by the neoconservative movement, which is now running both his party and his campaign.
Though Noonan's piece is clearly an acquiescence to an Obama victory, it's also a last-ditch scare tactic, published on Halloween no less: "Conservatives must honor prudence, and ask if the circumstances accompanying an Obama victory will encourage the helpful moderation and nonpartisan spirit [Colin Powell, William Weld and Charles Fried, among others] attempt, in their endorsements, to demonstrate." Despite Noonan's gracious assessment of Obama and his campaign, she clearly can't wrap her head around his broad appeal, his unwillingness to attack the Republican party en masse, his awareness that he will, in fact, need them to accomplish his goals. Obama isn't campaigning in Iowa, Indiana, Nevada, Colorado, Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Virginia because he thinks more Democratic voters will suddenly materialize in those traditionally red states; he thinks his message reaches across party lines. It's the epitome of the moderation and nonpartisan spirit of which Noonan espouses and the antithesis of what George W. Bush brought to Washington eight years ago. It's also indicative of how Obama will likely and hopefully lead as president.
I might agree with her on the issue of divided government, on the importance of checks and balances, but it will require an undivided Democratic government to undo the damage—and make no mistake, that's exactly what they have caused: damage, of the most reckless, gratuitous kind—of an undivided Republican government. Two years of a figuratively Democratic-controlled Congress battling—or more accurately, being complicit with—Bush's failed policies has garnered virtually no progress. If a fully Democratic government, created by two landslide elections in a row, doesn't speak to Noonan's delicately conservative sensibilities, she has only her own blessed party to blame.
The remainder of Noonan's article unravels in a blinding puff of archaic, conservative dust, suggesting that Obama's stance on social issues, like abortion, is "suggestive of radical departures. 'That's above my pay grade.' Friend, that is your pay grade, that's where the presidency lives, in issues like that." Ms. Noonan, friend, we clearly disagree on the location in which the presidency dwells, and Obama and the Democrats have routinely stressed that, despite their rivals' attempts to paint them as "pro-abortion," their goal is to reduce the number of abortions. Clinton's "safe, legal and rare" approach to the issue, which Noonan praises, is, along with the "health of the mother," the objective of all pro-choice advocates on both sides of the aisle. Obama's admission that he does not, in fact, presume to know when "life" begins is not, as Noonan says, an abstraction fueled by an "intelligent mind" (there's a reason thinking with your heart or gut is illogical and physiologically impossible), and it's not "cold." It's called humility. The lack of which will likely find Republicans enduring yet another routing at the polls on Tuesday.
In his assessment of the GOP, Kamiya observes: "Noonan believes that conservative Americans have been waging a heroic battle for these Republican-associated virtues for decades. But she never quite reconciles the fact that the last 40-plus years have been dominated by Republican presidents and policies. Apparently 'the age,' like a Spenglerian villain, works its evil, values-corroding magic independently of whatever party is actually in power." What Noonan would like to believe is God's fluctuating influence on history is in actuality called progress. And like her party, she's fighting it with every fiber of her being.
Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan has a way with words. She was a Reagan speechwriter, after all. Words slip off her tongue with a thoughtful panache not unlike Barack Obama's and, to paraphrase Salon's always astute Gary Kamiya, a Whitmanesque lyricism. In her latest Wall Street Journal column, Noonan sketches a reasonable portrait of Obama as president. I urge you to read it in full, but in short, she praises Obama's gustiness, steadiness and judgment. She writes: "When the press was hitting hard on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter, he did not respond with a politically shrewd 'I have no comment,' or 'We shouldn't judge.' Instead he said, 'My mother had me when she was 18,' which shamed the press and others into silence. He showed grace when he didn't have to."
On John McCain, she offered a reluctant, perhaps too optimistic, assessment of the Republican nominee's failed campaign. Two former U.S. senators (and McCain adversaries) with which Noonan shared a drink in a hotel last month told the journalist of their admiration for McCain's patriotism. They said he's running for president not because of personal ambition but because he wants to help the country. It's something I, too, believe and have said as much on this very blog. But there are things more important than simply being a patriot. A leader must have the judgment to know who to surround himself with, the temperament to know when to exercise his authority, the organization to win. McCain, it's become apparent, lacks all three. It's unfortunate, really, but more tragic is the lack of control he seems to have over his campaign, as well as his own faculties. The McCain of 2000 seems to have been hijacked by the neoconservative movement, which is now running both his party and his campaign.
Though Noonan's piece is clearly an acquiescence to an Obama victory, it's also a last-ditch scare tactic, published on Halloween no less: "Conservatives must honor prudence, and ask if the circumstances accompanying an Obama victory will encourage the helpful moderation and nonpartisan spirit [Colin Powell, William Weld and Charles Fried, among others] attempt, in their endorsements, to demonstrate." Despite Noonan's gracious assessment of Obama and his campaign, she clearly can't wrap her head around his broad appeal, his unwillingness to attack the Republican party en masse, his awareness that he will, in fact, need them to accomplish his goals. Obama isn't campaigning in Iowa, Indiana, Nevada, Colorado, Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Virginia because he thinks more Democratic voters will suddenly materialize in those traditionally red states; he thinks his message reaches across party lines. It's the epitome of the moderation and nonpartisan spirit of which Noonan espouses and the antithesis of what George W. Bush brought to Washington eight years ago. It's also indicative of how Obama will likely and hopefully lead as president.
I might agree with her on the issue of divided government, on the importance of checks and balances, but it will require an undivided Democratic government to undo the damage—and make no mistake, that's exactly what they have caused: damage, of the most reckless, gratuitous kind—of an undivided Republican government. Two years of a figuratively Democratic-controlled Congress battling—or more accurately, being complicit with—Bush's failed policies has garnered virtually no progress. If a fully Democratic government, created by two landslide elections in a row, doesn't speak to Noonan's delicately conservative sensibilities, she has only her own blessed party to blame.
The remainder of Noonan's article unravels in a blinding puff of archaic, conservative dust, suggesting that Obama's stance on social issues, like abortion, is "suggestive of radical departures. 'That's above my pay grade.' Friend, that is your pay grade, that's where the presidency lives, in issues like that." Ms. Noonan, friend, we clearly disagree on the location in which the presidency dwells, and Obama and the Democrats have routinely stressed that, despite their rivals' attempts to paint them as "pro-abortion," their goal is to reduce the number of abortions. Clinton's "safe, legal and rare" approach to the issue, which Noonan praises, is, along with the "health of the mother," the objective of all pro-choice advocates on both sides of the aisle. Obama's admission that he does not, in fact, presume to know when "life" begins is not, as Noonan says, an abstraction fueled by an "intelligent mind" (there's a reason thinking with your heart or gut is illogical and physiologically impossible), and it's not "cold." It's called humility. The lack of which will likely find Republicans enduring yet another routing at the polls on Tuesday.
In his assessment of the GOP, Kamiya observes: "Noonan believes that conservative Americans have been waging a heroic battle for these Republican-associated virtues for decades. But she never quite reconciles the fact that the last 40-plus years have been dominated by Republican presidents and policies. Apparently 'the age,' like a Spenglerian villain, works its evil, values-corroding magic independently of whatever party is actually in power." What Noonan would like to believe is God's fluctuating influence on history is in actuality called progress. And like her party, she's fighting it with every fiber of her being.
Proud to be (Un)American
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 10/29/2008 13:40:45 In: Politics Comments: 2
We've entered the final stretch of the presidential election and the drowning McCain campaign has resorted to the oldest playground tactic in the book: name-calling. Last week it was "anti-American," a tack recommended to Hillary Clinton by a top advisor last year but which the senator wisely declined to exercise. This is nothing new, of course: False accusations that Barack Obama doesn't wear a flag pin, that he refuses to pledge allegiance to the American flag, and that he's a Muslim have circulated throughout the Internet and by the mainstream media for over a year. But the candidate managed to escape those scurrilous claims—at least enough to win his party's nomination and take a lead in the latest polls. And so, desperately, deliberately and recklessly, surrogates for John McCain have decided to go whole-hog, with Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann summoning the worst in our country's political history by suggesting Obama is anti-American and calling for a McCarthyite witch hunt in Congress.
At a rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin earlier this month, a McCain supporter took the microphone and declared his uncontainable anger: "I'm mad. I'm really mad, and what may surprise you is it's not the economy," he spat to a roar of cheers. "We've got to have our heads examined," he continued, referring to the prospect of electing Obama as our next president. "It's time to have you two [McCain and Vice Presidential lightning rod Sarah Palin] represent us. So go get 'em." It was a call for the McCain campaign to get tougher—and presumably dirtier—on Obama, and when I first saw a clip of the man's rant on television, I wondered what could possibly have filled him with such anger, hatred and resentment. After all, his party has held the presidency for 20 out of the last 28 years and has had control of Congress for 12 out of the last 14. I thought, "He's angry?"
So what is Joe Angry really peeved about? "It's the socialists taking over our country!" he declared to another round of hearty cheers and chants of "U.S.A.!," as if every election is the fucking Super Bowl and only one side has the country at heart, like each nation in a war believes it has God on its side. Bachmann was repudiated by many in her own party, but Palin has gone one step further with no complaint, implying that not only is the Democratic party's presidential nominee anti-American, that certain geographical regions of America itself are anti-American, that the "real" America and real "patriots" can be found in "small towns," but that Obama is a socialist, a tag that has been repeated ad nauseam by those in and outside the campaign. No longer content to call their Democratic opponents "tax-and-spend liberals," they've reduced a policy criticism to a fear-mongering smear.
Using fear, of course, is the neoconservative movement's modus operandi. On Hannity & Colmes last night, Sean Hannity and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich postulated that the Obama-Biden ticket is lying about their tax policy, which proposes to lower taxes for Americans making less than $200K and raising taxes for those making over $250K. With absolutely no evidence for such a claim, the pair volleyed the idea back and forth, with Hannity proudly showing a montage of dubiously edited clips alleging that the threshold for people who will enjoy a tax cut under Obama has been lowered from $250K to $200K and now $150K. What he and Gingrich are intentionally ignoring is something a six-year-old could understand. Obama has never claimed that those who make $249,999 will get a tax cut. His policy is clear: Those making less than $200K will get a tax break; those making between $200K and $250K won't see a change; those making more than $250K will see a tax increase. It's first-grade math and they're distorting the plan by conflating two different statements to make it seem like Obama is lying when the fact is that they're the liars.
As for that $150K figure: In an interview with a local television station in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden defended the Obama plan by saying that an "$87 billion tax break doesn't need to go to people making an average of $1.4 million. It should go, like it used to, to middle-class people—people making under $150,000 a year." It's unclear whether the discrepancy between $200K and $150K was simply an error on Biden's part or if, as an aide told MSNBC, he was using the figure to arbitrarily represent what he considers the "middle class" (after all, he randomly chose the figure $1.4 million and no one is suggesting that they're only going to increase taxes for those making over that amount), but there's no evidence to suggest that their tax plan has changed at all. And it shouldn't come as a surprise that the right wing is slicing and dicing these figures and quotes. In his misleading piece "Obama, Biden Shift 'Tax Break' Threshold," Rick Pedraza stripped Biden's statement of a key phrase, "like it used to"—four little words that couldn't have possibly affected his word count very much but which conveniently ignores a key component to the Democrats' policy: returning tax rates to what they were under Bill Clinton.
Mainstream and fringe pundits alike have pounced on Obama's use of the phrase "spread the wealth" during his conversation with Joe the Plumber, seizing the opportunity to liken the Senator to a communist, even quoting Karl Marx. After the Drudge Report unearthed an audio interview in which Obama discussed the courts' involvement (or lack thereof) in economic redistribution in the wake of the civil rights movement, the right cried that it was proof of Obama's frightening plan to socialize the United States. Rush Limbaugh—who is so afraid of Obama that he attempted to upset his nomination by encouraging listeners to vote for Clinton during the primary and called for bloodshed in the streets at the Democratic convention—laughably parsed Obama's words, claiming the senator "flatly rejected" the Constitution and thinks it's "flawed." (Limbaugh even recycled the "he doesn't wear a flag pin" myth to hammer his point home.) What Obama was, in fact, referring to was the failure of the Constitution to outlaw slavery and its distinction of African-Americans as three-fifths of a person.
An essential component to realizing Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of racial equality is economic equality. King himself recognized economic parity as not just a product of the civil rights movement but a requirement for it. Last summer, the House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and acknowledged that "the vestiges of Jim Crow continue to this day." Though the resolution did not address reparations, some have called on the U.S. government to provide financial benefits to descendants of slavery, a proposal I personally take issue with but which can and should be addressed within the current progressive tax system—specifically, tax legislation that more broadly helps the middle class and the poor, of which many oppressed groups are largely a part.
The utter absurdity of calling Obama's views on tax policy "socialism" is astounding. The Wall Street bailout is the epitome of socialized government, which is why this latest stream of attacks doesn't seem to be working for Republicans. Most of the country is now in favor of socializing health care—at least to a degree. And Democratic socialism has, for the most part, succeeded in Europe, while much of our country has already been socialized: Medicare, the U.S. Postal Service, Social Security—hell, the patron saint of the Republican party, Ronald Reagan, even increased taxes to save the Social Security system with a $165 bailout back in the early 1980s.
Calling Obama a socialist is, of course, code for—you guessed it—"un-American," which is code for, you know, Muslim…or black…or anything scary to the average white Middle American. So, to Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann and Joe Angry, I ask this: What is "un-American"? Is it un-American to declare a war on a sovereign nation that hasn't attacked you? To defy the Geneva Conventions? To fire U.S. attorneys because they refuse to carry out partisan investigations? To attempt to use the Constitution to limit the rights of U.S. citizens? To suspend habeas corpus? To eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without court approval? To protect big corporations ahead of protecting the people? To neglect U.S. veterans when they've returned maimed or emotionally traumatized? To out a CIA operative as political payback? To encourage war profiteering by offering no-bid contracts to mercenaries and private companies with no oversight or accountability? To let people perish in a hurricane? To neglect the environment, deny global warming and alter scientific data in the interest of big business? To wage war without asking the American people to support it by paying for it? To attempt to bolster one branch of the U.S. government in the name of attaining more power? To ignore over 1,000 provisions of U.S. law in an unprecedented use of "signing statements"? To abuse executive privilege to hide criminal activity and incompetence within an administration?
Lack of self-awareness isn't a monopoly held by politicians, let alone Republicans, but Sarah Palin should hang a plaque alongside her myriad moose heads. She is the latest holy hypocrite to be propped up and exalted by the Republican party: Her husband was, or still is, a secessionist (anti-American—check!) and she runs a state where, to quote her in The New Yorker last month, "Alaskans collectively own the resources, so we share in the wealth when the development of those resources occurs" (socialist—check!). The lady better grab herself a dictionary, a copy of the Constitution and probably a newspaper before she even considers a 2012 run for the White House.
We've entered the final stretch of the presidential election and the drowning McCain campaign has resorted to the oldest playground tactic in the book: name-calling. Last week it was "anti-American," a tack recommended to Hillary Clinton by a top advisor last year but which the senator wisely declined to exercise. This is nothing new, of course: False accusations that Barack Obama doesn't wear a flag pin, that he refuses to pledge allegiance to the American flag, and that he's a Muslim have circulated throughout the Internet and by the mainstream media for over a year. But the candidate managed to escape those scurrilous claims—at least enough to win his party's nomination and take a lead in the latest polls. And so, desperately, deliberately and recklessly, surrogates for John McCain have decided to go whole-hog, with Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann summoning the worst in our country's political history by suggesting Obama is anti-American and calling for a McCarthyite witch hunt in Congress.
At a rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin earlier this month, a McCain supporter took the microphone and declared his uncontainable anger: "I'm mad. I'm really mad, and what may surprise you is it's not the economy," he spat to a roar of cheers. "We've got to have our heads examined," he continued, referring to the prospect of electing Obama as our next president. "It's time to have you two [McCain and Vice Presidential lightning rod Sarah Palin] represent us. So go get 'em." It was a call for the McCain campaign to get tougher—and presumably dirtier—on Obama, and when I first saw a clip of the man's rant on television, I wondered what could possibly have filled him with such anger, hatred and resentment. After all, his party has held the presidency for 20 out of the last 28 years and has had control of Congress for 12 out of the last 14. I thought, "He's angry?"
So what is Joe Angry really peeved about? "It's the socialists taking over our country!" he declared to another round of hearty cheers and chants of "U.S.A.!," as if every election is the fucking Super Bowl and only one side has the country at heart, like each nation in a war believes it has God on its side. Bachmann was repudiated by many in her own party, but Palin has gone one step further with no complaint, implying that not only is the Democratic party's presidential nominee anti-American, that certain geographical regions of America itself are anti-American, that the "real" America and real "patriots" can be found in "small towns," but that Obama is a socialist, a tag that has been repeated ad nauseam by those in and outside the campaign. No longer content to call their Democratic opponents "tax-and-spend liberals," they've reduced a policy criticism to a fear-mongering smear.
Using fear, of course, is the neoconservative movement's modus operandi. On Hannity & Colmes last night, Sean Hannity and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich postulated that the Obama-Biden ticket is lying about their tax policy, which proposes to lower taxes for Americans making less than $200K and raising taxes for those making over $250K. With absolutely no evidence for such a claim, the pair volleyed the idea back and forth, with Hannity proudly showing a montage of dubiously edited clips alleging that the threshold for people who will enjoy a tax cut under Obama has been lowered from $250K to $200K and now $150K. What he and Gingrich are intentionally ignoring is something a six-year-old could understand. Obama has never claimed that those who make $249,999 will get a tax cut. His policy is clear: Those making less than $200K will get a tax break; those making between $200K and $250K won't see a change; those making more than $250K will see a tax increase. It's first-grade math and they're distorting the plan by conflating two different statements to make it seem like Obama is lying when the fact is that they're the liars.
As for that $150K figure: In an interview with a local television station in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden defended the Obama plan by saying that an "$87 billion tax break doesn't need to go to people making an average of $1.4 million. It should go, like it used to, to middle-class people—people making under $150,000 a year." It's unclear whether the discrepancy between $200K and $150K was simply an error on Biden's part or if, as an aide told MSNBC, he was using the figure to arbitrarily represent what he considers the "middle class" (after all, he randomly chose the figure $1.4 million and no one is suggesting that they're only going to increase taxes for those making over that amount), but there's no evidence to suggest that their tax plan has changed at all. And it shouldn't come as a surprise that the right wing is slicing and dicing these figures and quotes. In his misleading piece "Obama, Biden Shift 'Tax Break' Threshold," Rick Pedraza stripped Biden's statement of a key phrase, "like it used to"—four little words that couldn't have possibly affected his word count very much but which conveniently ignores a key component to the Democrats' policy: returning tax rates to what they were under Bill Clinton.
Mainstream and fringe pundits alike have pounced on Obama's use of the phrase "spread the wealth" during his conversation with Joe the Plumber, seizing the opportunity to liken the Senator to a communist, even quoting Karl Marx. After the Drudge Report unearthed an audio interview in which Obama discussed the courts' involvement (or lack thereof) in economic redistribution in the wake of the civil rights movement, the right cried that it was proof of Obama's frightening plan to socialize the United States. Rush Limbaugh—who is so afraid of Obama that he attempted to upset his nomination by encouraging listeners to vote for Clinton during the primary and called for bloodshed in the streets at the Democratic convention—laughably parsed Obama's words, claiming the senator "flatly rejected" the Constitution and thinks it's "flawed." (Limbaugh even recycled the "he doesn't wear a flag pin" myth to hammer his point home.) What Obama was, in fact, referring to was the failure of the Constitution to outlaw slavery and its distinction of African-Americans as three-fifths of a person.
An essential component to realizing Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of racial equality is economic equality. King himself recognized economic parity as not just a product of the civil rights movement but a requirement for it. Last summer, the House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and acknowledged that "the vestiges of Jim Crow continue to this day." Though the resolution did not address reparations, some have called on the U.S. government to provide financial benefits to descendants of slavery, a proposal I personally take issue with but which can and should be addressed within the current progressive tax system—specifically, tax legislation that more broadly helps the middle class and the poor, of which many oppressed groups are largely a part.
The utter absurdity of calling Obama's views on tax policy "socialism" is astounding. The Wall Street bailout is the epitome of socialized government, which is why this latest stream of attacks doesn't seem to be working for Republicans. Most of the country is now in favor of socializing health care—at least to a degree. And Democratic socialism has, for the most part, succeeded in Europe, while much of our country has already been socialized: Medicare, the U.S. Postal Service, Social Security—hell, the patron saint of the Republican party, Ronald Reagan, even increased taxes to save the Social Security system with a $165 bailout back in the early 1980s.
Calling Obama a socialist is, of course, code for—you guessed it—"un-American," which is code for, you know, Muslim…or black…or anything scary to the average white Middle American. So, to Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann and Joe Angry, I ask this: What is "un-American"? Is it un-American to declare a war on a sovereign nation that hasn't attacked you? To defy the Geneva Conventions? To fire U.S. attorneys because they refuse to carry out partisan investigations? To attempt to use the Constitution to limit the rights of U.S. citizens? To suspend habeas corpus? To eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without court approval? To protect big corporations ahead of protecting the people? To neglect U.S. veterans when they've returned maimed or emotionally traumatized? To out a CIA operative as political payback? To encourage war profiteering by offering no-bid contracts to mercenaries and private companies with no oversight or accountability? To let people perish in a hurricane? To neglect the environment, deny global warming and alter scientific data in the interest of big business? To wage war without asking the American people to support it by paying for it? To attempt to bolster one branch of the U.S. government in the name of attaining more power? To ignore over 1,000 provisions of U.S. law in an unprecedented use of "signing statements"? To abuse executive privilege to hide criminal activity and incompetence within an administration?
Lack of self-awareness isn't a monopoly held by politicians, let alone Republicans, but Sarah Palin should hang a plaque alongside her myriad moose heads. She is the latest holy hypocrite to be propped up and exalted by the Republican party: Her husband was, or still is, a secessionist (anti-American—check!) and she runs a state where, to quote her in The New Yorker last month, "Alaskans collectively own the resources, so we share in the wealth when the development of those resources occurs" (socialist—check!). The lady better grab herself a dictionary, a copy of the Constitution and probably a newspaper before she even considers a 2012 run for the White House.
The Black Elephant in the Room
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 10/19/2008 17:56:59 In: Politics Comments: 0
Until a few weeks ago, the elephant in the room during this year's presidential election wasn't red—it was black. Barack Obama's background has been dissected ad nauseam, but no one seemed to want to talk about how his race could affect the polls on November 4th. The Bradley Effect, the discrepancy between the number of white voters who say they're going to vote for a black candidate and the number of white voters who actually do, is historically about 3%, which just so happens to be the net percentage disparity between many of Obama's exit poll numbers and his official tallies during the Democratic primary earlier this year. In a close race, 3% can mean the difference between two vastly different worldviews, but Obama will likely overcome that statistic with scores of first-time voters—many of whom haven't been counted in national polls because they're not considered "likely voters" or because they don't have a landline telephone. And the endorsement of former Secretary of State Colin Powell this morning will likely shore up support for Obama among moderates and independents who may have had some trouble picturing a black man in such a powerful government position.
Obama's concern, then, should not be bashful or latent racism, but overt racism. Employing the same tactics that George W. Bush and Karl Rove successfully used against him in 2000, John McCain and his surrogates have taken to planting the seeds of fear into the American people by attempting to paint Obama as un-American, a foreigner, an "other." It would be a faux pas to call attention to his blackness, so they're doing the next best thing: likening him to a Muslim terrorist. The problem is, the closest thing they could find was a domestic terrorist from 40 years ago—and a white, middle-aged one at that.
Pundits and pollsters, even Obama himself, have claimed that voters are focused on the economy, that spurious accusations against the candidate have failed because people are more concerned about pocketbook issues. While that's certainly valid, there's a more obvious reason why McCain's smears aren't sticking. The goal of the McCain campaign is not to, as they claim, expose Obama as untrustworthy and unforthcoming about his past relationships, but to conflate him with Islamic fundamentalism. The Weather Underground was a revolutionary group whose primary point of contention was American imperialism—specifically, the Vietnam War. Their acts of violence against the U.S. government are difficult to defend, but they represented an extreme reaction to an immensely unpopular war and the group's charge of imperialism is one that has been leveled against our current government for nearly eight years. That the American public, who are largely against the war in Iraq, wouldn't fall for McCain's tactic of trying to tie Obama to the Weather Underground, with or without a recession on the horizon and despite the mainstream media's failure to fully research the topic, shouldn't be surprising—even for the most cynical observer. The Weather Underground is not al Qaeda, and William Ayers—a baby-boomer professor and education reformer who, despite Tom Brokaw's assertion on Meet the Press this morning that he said he wished he'd bombed more, believes that not enough was done to stop the biggest foreign policy blunder in our nation's history…until the Iraq War—is not Osama Bin Laden. Add to that the fact that the association between Ayers and Obama basically amounts to sitting on the same board of a nonprofit charitable organization and the whole thing doesn't sound very scary at all.
Still, there are consequences to this slimy tactic. Invoking fear has been a hallmark of neoconservatism, and in his recent opinion piece "The GOP goes back to its ugly roots," Salon's Gary Kamiya eloquently observed: "The founding success of the modern conservative movement was that it convinced large numbers of Americans to reject 'liberalism' and 'big government,' even if they themselves benefited from both, because they were associated with social programs aimed at helping poor blacks." He went on to detail how the party of Barry Goldwater "was able to conceal the fact that it was the party of the rich beneath a populist, race-tinged appeal to white resentment." McCain has succeeded in conjuring the most dangerous and vile facets of the human psyche: By instilling the fear in his supporters that Obama threatens their way of life and all that the United States represents, and without ever using the word "black," McCain has craftily summoned a lynch-mob mentality. They might as well be brandishing torches and nooses at his increasingly rowdy rallies, or yes, even wearing armbands emblazoned with swastikas.
McCain's attempt to defend Obama during a recent rally in which a campaign volunteer, Gayle Quinnel, called Obama "an Arab" is telling: "No, ma'am," McCain said, "He's a decent family man." It's the same systemic racism, with "Arab" and "Muslim" being viewed as the antithesis of "decent" and "American," that compels Obama to defend his Christianity whenever challenged on the topic. During his interview with Brokaw, Powell said it best: "The really right answer is, 'What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?' The answer is no. That's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president?"
In light of the fact that the public at large doesn't seem to be buying into either the trumped-up Ayers "controversy" or the Muslim paranoia, the McCain campaign is hedging its bets with old-fashioned voter suppression. Obama couldn't contain his laughter during the final presidential debate last week when McCain alleged that the voter registration fraud by community organizing group ACORN, in which employees added bogus registrants like Mickey Mouse to their rolls in an attempt to meet quotas, perpetrated "one of the greatest frauds in voter history" and threatened "the fabric of democracy." The notion is indeed laughable, but McCain's strategy became clear when, on the following day, it was leaked that the FBI is investigating ACORN. The objective is not to stop ACORN from registering Disney characters, but to incite paranoia and clamp down on voter registration logs across key battleground states, the victims of which will likely be minority (read: Democratic) voters. (For much more on this story, check out The Swamp.)
Not only could hundreds of thousands of names be purged from voter logs, but the very idea that that could happen diminishes voter confidence in the exact people Obama needs to win. Three percent of the voting bloc switching their vote to McCain at the last minute is surmountable. So are smear tactics that simply aren't sticking. So is a little bit of voter suppression. Combine them, however, and you've got a recipe for a very long election night, which is exactly what the Republican party wants.
Until a few weeks ago, the elephant in the room during this year's presidential election wasn't red—it was black. Barack Obama's background has been dissected ad nauseam, but no one seemed to want to talk about how his race could affect the polls on November 4th. The Bradley Effect, the discrepancy between the number of white voters who say they're going to vote for a black candidate and the number of white voters who actually do, is historically about 3%, which just so happens to be the net percentage disparity between many of Obama's exit poll numbers and his official tallies during the Democratic primary earlier this year. In a close race, 3% can mean the difference between two vastly different worldviews, but Obama will likely overcome that statistic with scores of first-time voters—many of whom haven't been counted in national polls because they're not considered "likely voters" or because they don't have a landline telephone. And the endorsement of former Secretary of State Colin Powell this morning will likely shore up support for Obama among moderates and independents who may have had some trouble picturing a black man in such a powerful government position.
Obama's concern, then, should not be bashful or latent racism, but overt racism. Employing the same tactics that George W. Bush and Karl Rove successfully used against him in 2000, John McCain and his surrogates have taken to planting the seeds of fear into the American people by attempting to paint Obama as un-American, a foreigner, an "other." It would be a faux pas to call attention to his blackness, so they're doing the next best thing: likening him to a Muslim terrorist. The problem is, the closest thing they could find was a domestic terrorist from 40 years ago—and a white, middle-aged one at that.
Pundits and pollsters, even Obama himself, have claimed that voters are focused on the economy, that spurious accusations against the candidate have failed because people are more concerned about pocketbook issues. While that's certainly valid, there's a more obvious reason why McCain's smears aren't sticking. The goal of the McCain campaign is not to, as they claim, expose Obama as untrustworthy and unforthcoming about his past relationships, but to conflate him with Islamic fundamentalism. The Weather Underground was a revolutionary group whose primary point of contention was American imperialism—specifically, the Vietnam War. Their acts of violence against the U.S. government are difficult to defend, but they represented an extreme reaction to an immensely unpopular war and the group's charge of imperialism is one that has been leveled against our current government for nearly eight years. That the American public, who are largely against the war in Iraq, wouldn't fall for McCain's tactic of trying to tie Obama to the Weather Underground, with or without a recession on the horizon and despite the mainstream media's failure to fully research the topic, shouldn't be surprising—even for the most cynical observer. The Weather Underground is not al Qaeda, and William Ayers—a baby-boomer professor and education reformer who, despite Tom Brokaw's assertion on Meet the Press this morning that he said he wished he'd bombed more, believes that not enough was done to stop the biggest foreign policy blunder in our nation's history…until the Iraq War—is not Osama Bin Laden. Add to that the fact that the association between Ayers and Obama basically amounts to sitting on the same board of a nonprofit charitable organization and the whole thing doesn't sound very scary at all.
Still, there are consequences to this slimy tactic. Invoking fear has been a hallmark of neoconservatism, and in his recent opinion piece "The GOP goes back to its ugly roots," Salon's Gary Kamiya eloquently observed: "The founding success of the modern conservative movement was that it convinced large numbers of Americans to reject 'liberalism' and 'big government,' even if they themselves benefited from both, because they were associated with social programs aimed at helping poor blacks." He went on to detail how the party of Barry Goldwater "was able to conceal the fact that it was the party of the rich beneath a populist, race-tinged appeal to white resentment." McCain has succeeded in conjuring the most dangerous and vile facets of the human psyche: By instilling the fear in his supporters that Obama threatens their way of life and all that the United States represents, and without ever using the word "black," McCain has craftily summoned a lynch-mob mentality. They might as well be brandishing torches and nooses at his increasingly rowdy rallies, or yes, even wearing armbands emblazoned with swastikas.
McCain's attempt to defend Obama during a recent rally in which a campaign volunteer, Gayle Quinnel, called Obama "an Arab" is telling: "No, ma'am," McCain said, "He's a decent family man." It's the same systemic racism, with "Arab" and "Muslim" being viewed as the antithesis of "decent" and "American," that compels Obama to defend his Christianity whenever challenged on the topic. During his interview with Brokaw, Powell said it best: "The really right answer is, 'What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?' The answer is no. That's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president?"
In light of the fact that the public at large doesn't seem to be buying into either the trumped-up Ayers "controversy" or the Muslim paranoia, the McCain campaign is hedging its bets with old-fashioned voter suppression. Obama couldn't contain his laughter during the final presidential debate last week when McCain alleged that the voter registration fraud by community organizing group ACORN, in which employees added bogus registrants like Mickey Mouse to their rolls in an attempt to meet quotas, perpetrated "one of the greatest frauds in voter history" and threatened "the fabric of democracy." The notion is indeed laughable, but McCain's strategy became clear when, on the following day, it was leaked that the FBI is investigating ACORN. The objective is not to stop ACORN from registering Disney characters, but to incite paranoia and clamp down on voter registration logs across key battleground states, the victims of which will likely be minority (read: Democratic) voters. (For much more on this story, check out The Swamp.)
Not only could hundreds of thousands of names be purged from voter logs, but the very idea that that could happen diminishes voter confidence in the exact people Obama needs to win. Three percent of the voting bloc switching their vote to McCain at the last minute is surmountable. So are smear tactics that simply aren't sticking. So is a little bit of voter suppression. Combine them, however, and you've got a recipe for a very long election night, which is exactly what the Republican party wants.
John McCain's Losing Strategy
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 10/06/2008 16:40:42 In: Politics Comments: 0
John McCain's politics have been shifting rightward for a few years now, but due to his lingering reputation as a "maverick" willing to buck party lines and thus appeal to independent voters, he remained the candidate Democrats feared most throughout this year's Republican primary. During his bid for the presidency in 2000, McCain attacked rival George W. Bush's sleazy Rovian attacks by declaring, "The political tactics of division and slander are not our values…Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance." His denunciation of the swiftboating of fellow Vietnam vet John Kerry in 2004, the conviction with which he stood up to the Bush Administration on the issues of torture and the Iraq War, and the promise of a clean campaign made him very dangerous indeed.
Since then, however, McCain compromised on the torture bill, embraced the endorsements of those agents of intolerance he once condemned, employed the same tactics of division and slander he decried in 2000, and has blatantly pandered to the outer reaches of his party. Trying to appeal to the extreme right in an election when Barack Obama is perceived as an extreme liberal was an enormous mistake. Playing politics to win your party's nomination is one thing, but he has only continued to move to the right during the general election. Rather than appeal to independents, undecided voters and Reagan Democrats, and then count on reluctant hard-right conservatives turning out on Election Day to vote against Obama (as they surely will), McCain has done the exact opposite, pushing independents toward Obama and thus neutralizing his biggest asset. It's an opportunity completely and utterly squandered and, more than any other issue, one that has fundamentally damaged his chances in November.
It's the McCain campaign's inability to persuade or transcend the issues most important to Americans, including the economy and the wars in the Middle East, that's got his poll numbers in a tailspin. (Lest we not forget this less-than-savvy campaign move, the Associated Press reported yesterday that at least half a million gallons of crude oil spilled into coastal Gulf of Mexico in the wake of Hurricane Ike last month.) In a move of palpable desperation, the McCain camp has launched a new strategy of distraction this week, and paradoxically, distracting from the issues (namely, the economy and a stock market in continuing decline despite Congress's bailout last week) is what McCain has thus far been unable to do successfully while simultaneously managing to further damage his campaign by even trying.
Smear tactics are nothing new to McCain '08—the candidate himself has routinely questioned Obama's patriotism—but on Saturday, the bottom of his ticket, Sarah Palin, dug to the bottom of the barrel by accusing Obama of palling around with terrorists (I don't think even addressing the specifics is worth my salt, so to find out more about the Obama-Bill Ayers connection, check out Wiki's entry). Palin repeated the accusation yesterday, a sure sign that it's an approved campaign talking point—at least for her. Today, Palin continued her attempts at character assassination, digging up Obama's association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The woman is apparently stupider than we first thought, since she seems unaware of the video clips circulating the Internet and television news programs of her being blessed by a witch doctor in her hometown church. "There's no place for that kind of campaigning, and the American people don't want it," McCain said in April, after condemning an anti-Obama ad that evoked Wright, but simple, old-fashioned political hypocrisy this is not: Palin's comments are one of a string that point to a disconnect between McCain and his fellow "maverick," not to mention the disconnect between McCain '08 and McCain '00, and even McCain and his own campaign.
McCain and Palin have now flung the door open on the Arizona senator's involvement in the savings and loan scandal of the late 1980s. So far Obama and his surrogates have steered clear of mentioning the topic, at least directly, and have focused their attention on McCain's policies and leadership. But that's going to change. In an attempt to link McCain directly to the current crisis on Wall Street, a new website is being devoted to exposing McCain's involvement in the Keating 5 scandal, with a 13-minute documentary of questionable quality titled Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis that was no doubt ready to go for weeks. And by bringing up Ayers, the McCain campaign just gave them a green light.
By all accounts, McCain will go on the attack during tomorrow night's presidential debate—he has no choice. But it will likely only further the public's growing impression of McCain as an old crank. McCain's temper is the stuff of legend on Capitol Hill, leaving many eagerly awaiting the moment when he'll finally explode like a volcano; instead, his temperament (if not his temper) has bubbled to the surface with the slow, steady pace of magma. We've all seen it: In an apparent attempt to contain his anger, his face flushes with blood and his jaw contorts. In his memoir Faith of My Father, McCain admits that he even had a bad case of the terrible twos: he'd throw tantrums by holding his breath until he passed out. His infamous temperament was present and accounted for during a question-and-answer session with the editorial board of Iowa's Des Moines Register a week ago, during which he joked about aspiring to be a dictator before continuing to brazenly contort Obama's stance on sex education and snapping at a reporter who dared to question Palin's qualifications:
Even "former general in the GOP" Mike Murphy, who is firmly on the side of McCain but whose ability to acknowledge his party's mistakes is refreshing in the face of stubbornly partisan mouthpieces on both sides of the aisle, admitted that the interview presented "the wrong tone." McCain practically oozes sarcasm, a trait that goes back to his days as a high school wrestler when his teammates called him "McNasty." He indignantly took issue with another Register journalist who questioned the veracity of his claims and went on to answer a question about Palin's experience handling a major crisis by citing instances in which she stood up to fellow Alaska Republicans.
Handling a crisis is, of course, paramount not just for Palin, but for the commander in chief. The McCain ideology, like that of the Bush administration, is based upon the expansion of the U.S. military to address nonmilitary problems. Diplomacy, which many experts believe is the best course of action in dealing with Iran, North Korea, Russia and others (to say nothing of the fact that, with our military stretched thin, it might be our only course of action in the next few years), requires a calm, cool and collected head. Imagine if Barack Obama had joked about being a dictator or tossed barbs as willingly and erratically as McCain—this election would be over. Then again, with McCain's campaign strategy so fundamentally, perhaps fatally, flawed, it probably already is.
John McCain's politics have been shifting rightward for a few years now, but due to his lingering reputation as a "maverick" willing to buck party lines and thus appeal to independent voters, he remained the candidate Democrats feared most throughout this year's Republican primary. During his bid for the presidency in 2000, McCain attacked rival George W. Bush's sleazy Rovian attacks by declaring, "The political tactics of division and slander are not our values…Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance." His denunciation of the swiftboating of fellow Vietnam vet John Kerry in 2004, the conviction with which he stood up to the Bush Administration on the issues of torture and the Iraq War, and the promise of a clean campaign made him very dangerous indeed.
Since then, however, McCain compromised on the torture bill, embraced the endorsements of those agents of intolerance he once condemned, employed the same tactics of division and slander he decried in 2000, and has blatantly pandered to the outer reaches of his party. Trying to appeal to the extreme right in an election when Barack Obama is perceived as an extreme liberal was an enormous mistake. Playing politics to win your party's nomination is one thing, but he has only continued to move to the right during the general election. Rather than appeal to independents, undecided voters and Reagan Democrats, and then count on reluctant hard-right conservatives turning out on Election Day to vote against Obama (as they surely will), McCain has done the exact opposite, pushing independents toward Obama and thus neutralizing his biggest asset. It's an opportunity completely and utterly squandered and, more than any other issue, one that has fundamentally damaged his chances in November.
It's the McCain campaign's inability to persuade or transcend the issues most important to Americans, including the economy and the wars in the Middle East, that's got his poll numbers in a tailspin. (Lest we not forget this less-than-savvy campaign move, the Associated Press reported yesterday that at least half a million gallons of crude oil spilled into coastal Gulf of Mexico in the wake of Hurricane Ike last month.) In a move of palpable desperation, the McCain camp has launched a new strategy of distraction this week, and paradoxically, distracting from the issues (namely, the economy and a stock market in continuing decline despite Congress's bailout last week) is what McCain has thus far been unable to do successfully while simultaneously managing to further damage his campaign by even trying.
Smear tactics are nothing new to McCain '08—the candidate himself has routinely questioned Obama's patriotism—but on Saturday, the bottom of his ticket, Sarah Palin, dug to the bottom of the barrel by accusing Obama of palling around with terrorists (I don't think even addressing the specifics is worth my salt, so to find out more about the Obama-Bill Ayers connection, check out Wiki's entry). Palin repeated the accusation yesterday, a sure sign that it's an approved campaign talking point—at least for her. Today, Palin continued her attempts at character assassination, digging up Obama's association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The woman is apparently stupider than we first thought, since she seems unaware of the video clips circulating the Internet and television news programs of her being blessed by a witch doctor in her hometown church. "There's no place for that kind of campaigning, and the American people don't want it," McCain said in April, after condemning an anti-Obama ad that evoked Wright, but simple, old-fashioned political hypocrisy this is not: Palin's comments are one of a string that point to a disconnect between McCain and his fellow "maverick," not to mention the disconnect between McCain '08 and McCain '00, and even McCain and his own campaign.
McCain and Palin have now flung the door open on the Arizona senator's involvement in the savings and loan scandal of the late 1980s. So far Obama and his surrogates have steered clear of mentioning the topic, at least directly, and have focused their attention on McCain's policies and leadership. But that's going to change. In an attempt to link McCain directly to the current crisis on Wall Street, a new website is being devoted to exposing McCain's involvement in the Keating 5 scandal, with a 13-minute documentary of questionable quality titled Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis that was no doubt ready to go for weeks. And by bringing up Ayers, the McCain campaign just gave them a green light.
By all accounts, McCain will go on the attack during tomorrow night's presidential debate—he has no choice. But it will likely only further the public's growing impression of McCain as an old crank. McCain's temper is the stuff of legend on Capitol Hill, leaving many eagerly awaiting the moment when he'll finally explode like a volcano; instead, his temperament (if not his temper) has bubbled to the surface with the slow, steady pace of magma. We've all seen it: In an apparent attempt to contain his anger, his face flushes with blood and his jaw contorts. In his memoir Faith of My Father, McCain admits that he even had a bad case of the terrible twos: he'd throw tantrums by holding his breath until he passed out. His infamous temperament was present and accounted for during a question-and-answer session with the editorial board of Iowa's Des Moines Register a week ago, during which he joked about aspiring to be a dictator before continuing to brazenly contort Obama's stance on sex education and snapping at a reporter who dared to question Palin's qualifications:
Even "former general in the GOP" Mike Murphy, who is firmly on the side of McCain but whose ability to acknowledge his party's mistakes is refreshing in the face of stubbornly partisan mouthpieces on both sides of the aisle, admitted that the interview presented "the wrong tone." McCain practically oozes sarcasm, a trait that goes back to his days as a high school wrestler when his teammates called him "McNasty." He indignantly took issue with another Register journalist who questioned the veracity of his claims and went on to answer a question about Palin's experience handling a major crisis by citing instances in which she stood up to fellow Alaska Republicans.
Handling a crisis is, of course, paramount not just for Palin, but for the commander in chief. The McCain ideology, like that of the Bush administration, is based upon the expansion of the U.S. military to address nonmilitary problems. Diplomacy, which many experts believe is the best course of action in dealing with Iran, North Korea, Russia and others (to say nothing of the fact that, with our military stretched thin, it might be our only course of action in the next few years), requires a calm, cool and collected head. Imagine if Barack Obama had joked about being a dictator or tossed barbs as willingly and erratically as McCain—this election would be over. Then again, with McCain's campaign strategy so fundamentally, perhaps fatally, flawed, it probably already is.
The Truth About John McCain's Heath Care Plan
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 10/05/2008 10:33:33 In: Politics Comments: 0
John McCain has repeatedly said that he doesn't want the U.S. government to stand between the American people and their doctors—that is, the American people who actually have doctors. He doesn't think Washington should be involved in people's health care decisions. Apparently, he thinks Wal-Mart should:
There's something ineffable about McCain's suggestion that it's okay for the middle class to get their medical care at the same place they buy their guns, diapers and dog food while Congress and the well-fixed receive the best health care money can buy. A cynic might see a connection between McCain's proposal and a recent Wall Street Journal report about Wal-Mart human resources managers obliquely recommending that employees vote for McCain. My cynicism runs much deeper than that: Republicans have historically received the bulk of Wal-Mart's political contributions (a whopping 85% during the 2004 election cycle), but according to the Rothenberg Political Report, House Democrats have received the majority of contributions this year, pointing to a desire on the part of the country's biggest company to line the pockets of anyone who holds power.
During an August interview, John Goodman, the alleged architect of McCain's health care plan and the "father" of those utterly useless, upper-crust Health Savings Accounts George W. Bush touted during the 2004 election with all the pride of a second grader during Show and Tell, suggested that "anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance" and that the government should "cease and desist from describing any American—even illegal aliens—as uninsured." Now, ignoring for a moment the fact that the man responsible for a presidential candidate's health insurance policy has no understanding of what the word "insurance" actually means, his is a position that is popular among those who benefit, either financially or politically, from the health care industry. A year earlier, Bush proposed a similar solution to the issue of America's uninsured: "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room," a sentiment often repeated verbatim by those who work for insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
To put this view in its proper perspective: the Urban Institute estimates that over 22,000 people died in 2006 because they lacked health insurance, something Goodman would likely deem a "worthless statistic." It's true that the poorest among us won't be denied short-term care if they need it (assuming they even go to a hospital), but there's a fundamental flaw in logic here. If you're destitute or have filed for bankruptcy, the hospital simply can't get any money out of you; if you're just regular-poor, like many Americans, you will indeed eventually have to pay the piper. The last time I went to the ER, the bill amounted to over $6,000. Luckily, there wasn't anything seriously wrong with me and my HMO, which cost me $450 a month at the time, covered most of it while I was left with a simple $100 co-pay, for which I received collection notices for months. Imagine how aggressively that collection agency would have hounded me if I owed the full tab or if there was actually something wrong with me and I had to be hospitalized, and imagine what it would do to my credit if I never paid, and imagine if I eventually wanted to get a loan for a car or a house. This is a system that keeps the poor poor and pushes the middle-class into poverty.
McCain has demonstrated a troubling pattern of hiring people to draft or advise him on his policies and then attempting to distance himself from their controversial statements and philosophies when they become politically inconvenient but still retaining their ideologies in his platform. After Phil Gramm, his campaign co-chair and the chief engineer of his economic plan, called the U.S. "a nation of whiners," he denounced the comments and Gramm ultimately "stepped down." In the case of Goodman, McCain denied the man was ever a paid advisor to the campaign. Even if that's true, Goodman's radical view of health care is still reflected in the McCain plan.
Under McCain, there would be less regulation, which would presumably lead to more choices for policy buyers. Being able to choose your doctor is essential to good health care, but for the 45 million uninsured, not being able to cherry-pick a plan isn't their problem. (And deregulation could create a whole host of new issues.) According to the Center for American Progress, McCain's proposed tax credit would eventually be eclipsed by the rising costs of health care, meaning most taxpayers would see a tax increase over the course of McCain's tenure in the White House. McCain's health care plan also proposes to repeal the tax exclusion for employer-provided insurance, which means that individual health benefits received through employers would be taxed as if it were actual liquid income. Rival Barack Obama has called this a "bait and switch" policy, lowering taxes in one area only to increase them somewhere else, but the truth is that, for middle America, McCain's plan is an across-the-board tax hike.
According to a report released by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center last month, McCain's plan would likely insure only two million additional people, while Obama's would insure 34 million. Obama's health care plan isn't perfect and it isn't "universal" by any means, but I suspect one of his first tasks as president would be to appoint Hillary Clinton as his administration's Health Care Czar. Clinton was right to include a mandate in her plan; with everyone paying into the same system, all Americans, regardless of class, race or health, would receive the same exact care—which would, in turn, create a demand for high quality, accessibility and choice. Health care reform that does not completely eliminate the market-based companies as they currently exist could be tricky: Introducing a government-run health care program as an alternative to the private sector could potentially result in a disparity of quality, with the government plan becoming ghettoized while private health care premiums continue to soar. Again, the poor would get the short end of the stick.
There's a centuries-old proverb that was used in British Parliament by one William Windham—one that legislators in Congress would be wise to employ today: "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link." And speaking of the British, if overall well-being is inextricably tied to the health of your gums and teeth, as self-described "fundit" Joy Behar pointed out on The View last week, why is dental care not an integral part of every health care plan?
John McCain has repeatedly said that he doesn't want the U.S. government to stand between the American people and their doctors—that is, the American people who actually have doctors. He doesn't think Washington should be involved in people's health care decisions. Apparently, he thinks Wal-Mart should:
There's something ineffable about McCain's suggestion that it's okay for the middle class to get their medical care at the same place they buy their guns, diapers and dog food while Congress and the well-fixed receive the best health care money can buy. A cynic might see a connection between McCain's proposal and a recent Wall Street Journal report about Wal-Mart human resources managers obliquely recommending that employees vote for McCain. My cynicism runs much deeper than that: Republicans have historically received the bulk of Wal-Mart's political contributions (a whopping 85% during the 2004 election cycle), but according to the Rothenberg Political Report, House Democrats have received the majority of contributions this year, pointing to a desire on the part of the country's biggest company to line the pockets of anyone who holds power.
During an August interview, John Goodman, the alleged architect of McCain's health care plan and the "father" of those utterly useless, upper-crust Health Savings Accounts George W. Bush touted during the 2004 election with all the pride of a second grader during Show and Tell, suggested that "anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance" and that the government should "cease and desist from describing any American—even illegal aliens—as uninsured." Now, ignoring for a moment the fact that the man responsible for a presidential candidate's health insurance policy has no understanding of what the word "insurance" actually means, his is a position that is popular among those who benefit, either financially or politically, from the health care industry. A year earlier, Bush proposed a similar solution to the issue of America's uninsured: "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room," a sentiment often repeated verbatim by those who work for insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
To put this view in its proper perspective: the Urban Institute estimates that over 22,000 people died in 2006 because they lacked health insurance, something Goodman would likely deem a "worthless statistic." It's true that the poorest among us won't be denied short-term care if they need it (assuming they even go to a hospital), but there's a fundamental flaw in logic here. If you're destitute or have filed for bankruptcy, the hospital simply can't get any money out of you; if you're just regular-poor, like many Americans, you will indeed eventually have to pay the piper. The last time I went to the ER, the bill amounted to over $6,000. Luckily, there wasn't anything seriously wrong with me and my HMO, which cost me $450 a month at the time, covered most of it while I was left with a simple $100 co-pay, for which I received collection notices for months. Imagine how aggressively that collection agency would have hounded me if I owed the full tab or if there was actually something wrong with me and I had to be hospitalized, and imagine what it would do to my credit if I never paid, and imagine if I eventually wanted to get a loan for a car or a house. This is a system that keeps the poor poor and pushes the middle-class into poverty.
McCain has demonstrated a troubling pattern of hiring people to draft or advise him on his policies and then attempting to distance himself from their controversial statements and philosophies when they become politically inconvenient but still retaining their ideologies in his platform. After Phil Gramm, his campaign co-chair and the chief engineer of his economic plan, called the U.S. "a nation of whiners," he denounced the comments and Gramm ultimately "stepped down." In the case of Goodman, McCain denied the man was ever a paid advisor to the campaign. Even if that's true, Goodman's radical view of health care is still reflected in the McCain plan.
Under McCain, there would be less regulation, which would presumably lead to more choices for policy buyers. Being able to choose your doctor is essential to good health care, but for the 45 million uninsured, not being able to cherry-pick a plan isn't their problem. (And deregulation could create a whole host of new issues.) According to the Center for American Progress, McCain's proposed tax credit would eventually be eclipsed by the rising costs of health care, meaning most taxpayers would see a tax increase over the course of McCain's tenure in the White House. McCain's health care plan also proposes to repeal the tax exclusion for employer-provided insurance, which means that individual health benefits received through employers would be taxed as if it were actual liquid income. Rival Barack Obama has called this a "bait and switch" policy, lowering taxes in one area only to increase them somewhere else, but the truth is that, for middle America, McCain's plan is an across-the-board tax hike.
According to a report released by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center last month, McCain's plan would likely insure only two million additional people, while Obama's would insure 34 million. Obama's health care plan isn't perfect and it isn't "universal" by any means, but I suspect one of his first tasks as president would be to appoint Hillary Clinton as his administration's Health Care Czar. Clinton was right to include a mandate in her plan; with everyone paying into the same system, all Americans, regardless of class, race or health, would receive the same exact care—which would, in turn, create a demand for high quality, accessibility and choice. Health care reform that does not completely eliminate the market-based companies as they currently exist could be tricky: Introducing a government-run health care program as an alternative to the private sector could potentially result in a disparity of quality, with the government plan becoming ghettoized while private health care premiums continue to soar. Again, the poor would get the short end of the stick.
There's a centuries-old proverb that was used in British Parliament by one William Windham—one that legislators in Congress would be wise to employ today: "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link." And speaking of the British, if overall well-being is inextricably tied to the health of your gums and teeth, as self-described "fundit" Joy Behar pointed out on The View last week, why is dental care not an integral part of every health care plan?
McCain vs. Obama: Round I
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 09/27/2008 09:32:40 In: Politics Comments: 0
As evidenced by the repugnant "tribute" to the victims of 9/11 at their national convention earlier this month, exploitation has become a cornerstone of the Republican platform in the last seven years. Evoking U.S. troops and claiming that theirs is the party of patriotism has become the standard Republican tack when faced with any kind of political adversity, and John McCain continued that tradition at the first presidential debate last night. When Barack Obama questioned McCain's temperament, lambasting the Republican nominee for cavalierly singing about bombing Iran and threatening the extinction of North Korea, McCain's immediate response was a thinly veiled anecdote about being given a bracelet from the mother of a fallen U.S. soldier. Democrats have routinely failed to deflect or challenge these manipulative appeals to voters' emotions and fears—that is, until Obama rebutted with the grace and skill of a prizefighter: "I have a bracelet too." It was a proud declaration that was a whole lot more than just a statement about who has the fancier bling; it was a direct disavowal of one of the vilest, most cynical political tactics.
Following the week he's had, McCain scored a victory last night simply by not fumbling on the economic issues and navigating the conversation toward the domestic topics with which he's most comfortable: taxes and earmarks. The economy should be, by default, the Democratic candidate's strength in 2008, but in a surprising reversal, where Obama truly excelled was at foreign policy—by all accounts McCain's strong suit. Despite McCain's attempt to paint Obama as ignorant or naïve (he said the Illinois senator "doesn't understand" a whopping seven times), Obama displayed a firm grasp of the issues and presented a clear alternative to both the Bush Doctrine and McCain's nearly identical hawkish positions, even agreeing with McCain on several occasions—rendering Mac's premeditated plan of attack an oblique condemnation of his very own views. Obama went straight for the jugular, not only questioning McCain's temperament, but his judgment on the decision to invade Iraq, looking directly at him and repeatedly saying, "You were wrong."
Obama's biggest missed opportunity came when, during the closing remarks, McCain boasted of his supposed lovey-dovey relationship with war veterans: "I know the veterans. I know them well. And I know that they know that I'll take care of them. And I've been proud of their support and their recognition of my service to the veterans. And I love them. And I'll take care of them. And they know that I'll take care of them." Obama could have balked at such a statement, calling attention to McCain's voting record, or at least stating the obvious: That taking care of the troops means not needlessly, perhaps illegally, putting them in harm's way. Or he could have simply handed McCain a tissue.
McCain continued his campaign's strategy of flagrantly misrepresenting Obama's positions, most egregiously during an exchange where he deliberately tried to miscast Obama's use of the word "preconditions" in the minds of voters, indignantly talking over both his opponent and moderator Jim Lehrer when corrected on the issue. McCain awkwardly boasted of his status as a maverick in the Senate and seemed dismissive, even contemptuous, of Obama, sneering and never once looking him in the eye. The viable candidacy of someone who represents a new, post-racial generation is a direct affront to the Washington establishment that McCain has long been a part of, and perhaps sharing a stage with Obama—at a debate McCain clearly tried to avoid—was difficult for the good ol' boy to swallow. It's this same air of superiority and condescension, this apparent sense of entitlement of power that is inherent in the delusion that he and his party have a monopoly on patriotism, strength and morality. "I have a bracelet too," Obama said, and "I am an American too" is what he meant.
As evidenced by the repugnant "tribute" to the victims of 9/11 at their national convention earlier this month, exploitation has become a cornerstone of the Republican platform in the last seven years. Evoking U.S. troops and claiming that theirs is the party of patriotism has become the standard Republican tack when faced with any kind of political adversity, and John McCain continued that tradition at the first presidential debate last night. When Barack Obama questioned McCain's temperament, lambasting the Republican nominee for cavalierly singing about bombing Iran and threatening the extinction of North Korea, McCain's immediate response was a thinly veiled anecdote about being given a bracelet from the mother of a fallen U.S. soldier. Democrats have routinely failed to deflect or challenge these manipulative appeals to voters' emotions and fears—that is, until Obama rebutted with the grace and skill of a prizefighter: "I have a bracelet too." It was a proud declaration that was a whole lot more than just a statement about who has the fancier bling; it was a direct disavowal of one of the vilest, most cynical political tactics.
Following the week he's had, McCain scored a victory last night simply by not fumbling on the economic issues and navigating the conversation toward the domestic topics with which he's most comfortable: taxes and earmarks. The economy should be, by default, the Democratic candidate's strength in 2008, but in a surprising reversal, where Obama truly excelled was at foreign policy—by all accounts McCain's strong suit. Despite McCain's attempt to paint Obama as ignorant or naïve (he said the Illinois senator "doesn't understand" a whopping seven times), Obama displayed a firm grasp of the issues and presented a clear alternative to both the Bush Doctrine and McCain's nearly identical hawkish positions, even agreeing with McCain on several occasions—rendering Mac's premeditated plan of attack an oblique condemnation of his very own views. Obama went straight for the jugular, not only questioning McCain's temperament, but his judgment on the decision to invade Iraq, looking directly at him and repeatedly saying, "You were wrong."
Obama's biggest missed opportunity came when, during the closing remarks, McCain boasted of his supposed lovey-dovey relationship with war veterans: "I know the veterans. I know them well. And I know that they know that I'll take care of them. And I've been proud of their support and their recognition of my service to the veterans. And I love them. And I'll take care of them. And they know that I'll take care of them." Obama could have balked at such a statement, calling attention to McCain's voting record, or at least stating the obvious: That taking care of the troops means not needlessly, perhaps illegally, putting them in harm's way. Or he could have simply handed McCain a tissue.
McCain continued his campaign's strategy of flagrantly misrepresenting Obama's positions, most egregiously during an exchange where he deliberately tried to miscast Obama's use of the word "preconditions" in the minds of voters, indignantly talking over both his opponent and moderator Jim Lehrer when corrected on the issue. McCain awkwardly boasted of his status as a maverick in the Senate and seemed dismissive, even contemptuous, of Obama, sneering and never once looking him in the eye. The viable candidacy of someone who represents a new, post-racial generation is a direct affront to the Washington establishment that McCain has long been a part of, and perhaps sharing a stage with Obama—at a debate McCain clearly tried to avoid—was difficult for the good ol' boy to swallow. It's this same air of superiority and condescension, this apparent sense of entitlement of power that is inherent in the delusion that he and his party have a monopoly on patriotism, strength and morality. "I have a bracelet too," Obama said, and "I am an American too" is what he meant.
Palin Drone
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 09/25/2008 21:25:54 In: Politics Comments: 0
Apparently I wasn't the only one who noticed John McCain's stroke face during his brief press conference yesterday afternoon in which he announced the inexplicable but temporary suspension of his campaign. I don't think one's age (or skin color or lack of a penis, for that matter) impedes him or her from doing the job of President—in fact, those traits could be viewed as strengths in the 21st century. It's McCain's health, and the fact that the person he chose as his proxy should anything happen to him is completely unqualified—intellectually, principally and otherwise—that is most frightening. This fact is confirmed further each and every time that person, Sarah Palin, opens her mouth and let's out a drone of rehearsed soundbites or an incomprehensible string of improvisations, the latest examples of which can be found in droves in her interview with Katie Couric, which concluded tonight on CBS.
When asked about ties between McCain campaign manager Rick Davis and lobbying firm Freddie Mac, Palin said, "My understanding is Rick Davis recused himself from the dealings in that firm." When pressed, she paused like a broken robot or a telemarketer who's been thrown off her script. She wracked her brain (for what? An answer aside from the ones she was spoon-fed by the campaign? An alternate version of the talking points she was instructed to memorize? Perhaps the reasons she agreed to be McCain's VP pick in the first place?) and then slowly regurgitated the exact same answer, right down to the verb "recuse."
For days, even weeks, I've been feeling small pangs of sadness every time I hear Palin answer a question. It isn't quite pity (she could have said no to the job offer, after all), and it certainly isn't empathy. Simply put: I feel bad for her. I feel bad because of people like me, who harshly but passionately and justifiably pick apart her every move and statement—or lack thereof. She had no idea what she was getting herself into; indeed, she wasn't even sure what the Vice President did, let alone what he or she needed to do to get there. Of course, later in the interview with Couric, she suggested that Barack Obama's position on the current financial crisis is to wait and see which way the political winds blow by licking her finger and wagging it in the air, and my sympathy for the woman was overpowered by a whiff of sarcasm and condescension—the stench of which we first smelled during the Republican National Convention.
Keeping Palin out of the clutches of the lecherous media like overprotective parents locking their virginal daughter away from the horny neighborhood boys could be viewed as sexist, but it's obvious that her gender isn't the issue here. When asked by Couric to explain her citation of Alaska's proximity to Russia as evidence of her foreign policy credentials, she simply restated the obvious: Alaska is close to Russia. (And George W. Bush was apparently qualified to be president because the state he governed is next to Mexico.) The expression on Couric's face was one of a teacher who sees the best even in her most underachieving pupils; she desperately wanted to find a way to give Palin a gold star in geography when the quiz covered foreign policy. And Palin's justification for Congress's $700 million bailout was so thoroughly nonsensical that it needs to be seen to be believed:
Perhaps the McCain campaign's obvious strategy of keeping Palin as far away from reporters as possible is sparing me pangs and whiffs. As Greg Sargent points out: "McCain advisers know that letting her answer even the most elementary questions in an uncontrolled environment is so dangerous that it's worth weathering the current media drubbing they're taking in order to prevent it from happening at all costs." But while I disagree wholesale with almost everything Palin stands for and believes in, what the campaign is doing to her, McCain supporters and the American public at large is, on a purely unbiased political level, inexcusable.
McCain has become increasingly cranky and unpredictable in recent weeks—the downside of a maverick personality, I guess—and his latest stunt of attempting to postpone the first presidential debate is transparent at best. Aside from the fact that in his ostensible attempt to not politicize the financial crisis, he has completely politicized it, throwing the debate schedule out of whack and thereby delaying Palin's face-off with Joe Biden threatens to further paint the Alaskan governor as unable or unwilling to meet with public scrutiny when, in fact, it's Daddy McCain who's keeping her locked up in the attic. So maybe it's time for Palin to let her hair down and allow some knight in shining armor to come rescue her from this farce. Wait, that's not sexist, is it?
Apparently I wasn't the only one who noticed John McCain's stroke face during his brief press conference yesterday afternoon in which he announced the inexplicable but temporary suspension of his campaign. I don't think one's age (or skin color or lack of a penis, for that matter) impedes him or her from doing the job of President—in fact, those traits could be viewed as strengths in the 21st century. It's McCain's health, and the fact that the person he chose as his proxy should anything happen to him is completely unqualified—intellectually, principally and otherwise—that is most frightening. This fact is confirmed further each and every time that person, Sarah Palin, opens her mouth and let's out a drone of rehearsed soundbites or an incomprehensible string of improvisations, the latest examples of which can be found in droves in her interview with Katie Couric, which concluded tonight on CBS.
When asked about ties between McCain campaign manager Rick Davis and lobbying firm Freddie Mac, Palin said, "My understanding is Rick Davis recused himself from the dealings in that firm." When pressed, she paused like a broken robot or a telemarketer who's been thrown off her script. She wracked her brain (for what? An answer aside from the ones she was spoon-fed by the campaign? An alternate version of the talking points she was instructed to memorize? Perhaps the reasons she agreed to be McCain's VP pick in the first place?) and then slowly regurgitated the exact same answer, right down to the verb "recuse."
For days, even weeks, I've been feeling small pangs of sadness every time I hear Palin answer a question. It isn't quite pity (she could have said no to the job offer, after all), and it certainly isn't empathy. Simply put: I feel bad for her. I feel bad because of people like me, who harshly but passionately and justifiably pick apart her every move and statement—or lack thereof. She had no idea what she was getting herself into; indeed, she wasn't even sure what the Vice President did, let alone what he or she needed to do to get there. Of course, later in the interview with Couric, she suggested that Barack Obama's position on the current financial crisis is to wait and see which way the political winds blow by licking her finger and wagging it in the air, and my sympathy for the woman was overpowered by a whiff of sarcasm and condescension—the stench of which we first smelled during the Republican National Convention.
Keeping Palin out of the clutches of the lecherous media like overprotective parents locking their virginal daughter away from the horny neighborhood boys could be viewed as sexist, but it's obvious that her gender isn't the issue here. When asked by Couric to explain her citation of Alaska's proximity to Russia as evidence of her foreign policy credentials, she simply restated the obvious: Alaska is close to Russia. (And George W. Bush was apparently qualified to be president because the state he governed is next to Mexico.) The expression on Couric's face was one of a teacher who sees the best even in her most underachieving pupils; she desperately wanted to find a way to give Palin a gold star in geography when the quiz covered foreign policy. And Palin's justification for Congress's $700 million bailout was so thoroughly nonsensical that it needs to be seen to be believed:
Perhaps the McCain campaign's obvious strategy of keeping Palin as far away from reporters as possible is sparing me pangs and whiffs. As Greg Sargent points out: "McCain advisers know that letting her answer even the most elementary questions in an uncontrolled environment is so dangerous that it's worth weathering the current media drubbing they're taking in order to prevent it from happening at all costs." But while I disagree wholesale with almost everything Palin stands for and believes in, what the campaign is doing to her, McCain supporters and the American public at large is, on a purely unbiased political level, inexcusable.
McCain has become increasingly cranky and unpredictable in recent weeks—the downside of a maverick personality, I guess—and his latest stunt of attempting to postpone the first presidential debate is transparent at best. Aside from the fact that in his ostensible attempt to not politicize the financial crisis, he has completely politicized it, throwing the debate schedule out of whack and thereby delaying Palin's face-off with Joe Biden threatens to further paint the Alaskan governor as unable or unwilling to meet with public scrutiny when, in fact, it's Daddy McCain who's keeping her locked up in the attic. So maybe it's time for Palin to let her hair down and allow some knight in shining armor to come rescue her from this farce. Wait, that's not sexist, is it?
Sarah Palin Makes Me Yell Things at My TV
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 09/13/2008 11:33:12 In: Politics Comments: 1
I admit it: Sarah Palin is making me go as batshit crazy as a Young Earth Creationist. While watching Real Time with Bill Maher by myself last night, I actually yelled out loud…at the TV. When Maher and his panel—which included Salman Rushdie, Janeane Garofalo and Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund—didn't hear me the first time (or, rather, when they didn't finally make the same obvious observation I did), I yelled louder. In defense of Palin's indefensible lack of knowledge about the Bush Doctrine (or if you want to get technical, the biggest fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy in 200 years) during her interview with Charles Gibson this week, a smug Fund cited a Democratic primary debate in which candidates were asked a similar question but were given a definition of what the doctrine entails, the implication being that no politician running for president, even those in the incumbent party, should be expected to know the basic tenets of the current administration's foreign policy. The reality is that moderators of nationally televised debates provide information about the topic being discussed partly to avoid publicly embarrassing the candidates but mostly for the benefit of laymen viewers. The Bush Doctrine was simply not one of the topics, buzz phrases or talking points Palin was told to commit to her short-term memory prior to the interview.
Semi-related, Matt Damon had this to say about Palin recently, and somebody needs to turn his final query ("I need to know if she really thinks that dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago…because she's gonna have the nuclear codes") into a bumper sticker because, frankly, it even beats Pam Anderson's "I can't stand her. She can suck it. Quote me":
I admit it: Sarah Palin is making me go as batshit crazy as a Young Earth Creationist. While watching Real Time with Bill Maher by myself last night, I actually yelled out loud…at the TV. When Maher and his panel—which included Salman Rushdie, Janeane Garofalo and Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund—didn't hear me the first time (or, rather, when they didn't finally make the same obvious observation I did), I yelled louder. In defense of Palin's indefensible lack of knowledge about the Bush Doctrine (or if you want to get technical, the biggest fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy in 200 years) during her interview with Charles Gibson this week, a smug Fund cited a Democratic primary debate in which candidates were asked a similar question but were given a definition of what the doctrine entails, the implication being that no politician running for president, even those in the incumbent party, should be expected to know the basic tenets of the current administration's foreign policy. The reality is that moderators of nationally televised debates provide information about the topic being discussed partly to avoid publicly embarrassing the candidates but mostly for the benefit of laymen viewers. The Bush Doctrine was simply not one of the topics, buzz phrases or talking points Palin was told to commit to her short-term memory prior to the interview.
Semi-related, Matt Damon had this to say about Palin recently, and somebody needs to turn his final query ("I need to know if she really thinks that dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago…because she's gonna have the nuclear codes") into a bumper sticker because, frankly, it even beats Pam Anderson's "I can't stand her. She can suck it. Quote me":
Palin Comparison
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 09/12/2008 15:27:18 In: Politics Comments: 0
There have been several variants of the same joke floating around the blog and talk show circuits regarding Sarah Palin's tightly wound persona. Palin is doing quite well with middle-class men and that should come as no surprise to anyone who's ever seen a Van Halen video. I personally prefer the dominatrix-by-night analogy, but sexist or not, the point remains the same: There's a sense that there's more than meets the eye to the Republican vice presidential candidate and it's not very surprising that, as her record has gradually come to light, concerns have swiftly turned from Palin's lack of experience to specifics about her questionable policies and beliefs. The hullabaloo surrounding Palin's nomination has muted the Barack Obama campaign's main credo: that John McCain represents four more years of George W. Bush. Some have speculated that the Palin pick changes that equation, but it actually renders the ticket even Bushier—maybe even Bushier than Bush himself. During her exclusive interview with Charles Gibson last night, Palin echoed the Bush Doctrine of hasty, preemptive war: "We must not blink."
Despite the current administration's fervent pandering to the religious right, and despite Bush's own personal spiritual beliefs (and even some disturbing but only passing allusions to divine military intervention), there was never a real sense that Bush—and especially Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice or former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—believed that their policies in Iraq were "God's will." You've no doubt heard by now what Palin told the Wasilla Assembly of God: "Our national leaders are sending [the U.S. Military] out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan." Nebulous at best, but regarding the $500 million natural gas pipeline she has lobbied to have built in her state, Palin made her views clear: "God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that."
Harnessing the power of Evangelicals and conservative ideologues was simply a means to an end for the Bush administration—that end being the acquisition and maintenance of power. It's hard to imagine any administration being worse than Bush's (McCain might be a hawk but I truly believe it when he claims his goal is to protect the country, not simply attain personal power), but the installment of Palin—by many accounts not McCain's first choice, and certainly not the "maverick" pick many on the right would have us believe—into the campaign brought the religious right one step closer to achieving their goal of legislating Christian fundamentalist beliefs into American law.
Earlier this week, Juan Cole of Salon wrote the best assessment (read: most frightening condemnation) of Palin's beliefs in his article "What's the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick." To paraphrase Obama…and McCain…and countless other politicians and non-politicians throughout the last century who have used the "lipstick on a pig" colloquialism, you can put lipstick, glasses, a below-the-knee skirt and a bun on a religious fundamentalist, but it's still a religious fundamentalist. Since 9/11, the party in power has chosen to fight religious extremism by adopting its practices and ideologies, limiting the freedoms of its people, claiming to have God on its side, and attempting to eliminate the division between church and state. Whether it's being done by a genuine theocrat or a politician or party simply willing to exploit its devout base to obtain power, the result is the same: the transformation of the United States government into a vehicle for an extreme religious agenda.
Palin's similarities to Bush don't end there. Even if you think the Alaska governor's brother-in-law, Michael Wooten, is a scumbag (Palin allegedly dismissed Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan because he refused to fire Wooten, a state trooper), and even if the real abuses of power didn't involve trying to get Monegan fired but simply attempting to usurp the investigation and quash subpoenas, the misuse of authority to settle a personal family vendetta is something Bush, whose father was the target of an assassination plot by Saddam Hussein following the first Gulf War, knows all too well.
According to an ABC News investigation into the firing of a Wasilla librarian, Palin and fellow Christian conservatives began focusing on the availability of certain books in local bookstores and libraries, including Pastor, I'm Gay, written by Howard Bess, a retired reverend of the Church of the Covenant. Bess told ABC: "It wasn't just simply a matter of her using the religious right to get elected. She was one of them." Bush, too, has fancied himself an editor: It's been well documented that his administration has edited or blatantly altered congressional reports to fit the perception of reality (of terrorism, the Iraq War, climate change, etc.) that they'd like to sell to the American public.
Palin's record on the environment is even more damning. Though she cracked down on ethical violations related to oil companies after taking office as governor, her positions on drilling and climate change are patently anti-environment and put her in lockstep with the oilmen currently running the country. She has repeatedly placed the economy and oil companies before the environment and wildlife, questioning the validity of climate change science and even challenging the listing of polar bears as threatened. The Bush administration reluctantly added the species to the list only after massive pressure from scientists and environmentalists, and by suing the administration, Palin superficially appears in opposition to Bush when in fact she and the President are in agreement on the issue. Palin expanded Alaska's speciously named "aerial predator control" program, in which wolves and bears are hunted from aircrafts. According to the Anchorage Daily News, her state's biologists killed 14 newborn wolf pups by shooting them in the head. The killings were "humane," but only in the sense that their parents had already been killed and they would have had to fend for themselves. Palin's administration illegally offered a $150 bounty for each wolf killed despite the fact that the state hasn't had the legal authority to implement such bounties since 1984. The woman who would be vice president also aggressively opposed her state's Clean Water Initiative, favoring mining companies over protecting salmon.
Palin is a staunch supporter of teaching creationism in publicly funded schools, a clear violation of the separation of church and state, a legal doctrine that was put in place by the original framers of the Constitution not to protect the government's secularism but the freedom of religious exercise. And though admittedly irrelevant to Palin's candidacy, her 17-year-old daughter's pregnancy is exemplary of the flaws in abstinence-only education, which Palin supports. We know little about the vice presidential nominee's parenting skills, nor do we know whether or not her daughter used contraception, but even a young woman whose mother publicly espouses the virtues of said training is capable of getting pregnant and the hypocrisy inherent in such a tabloid-ready tale only points to the failure of the religious right's antiquated ignorance-first approach to sex education.
The pregnancy scandal also spotlights the McCain-Palin campaign's duplicitous rules of media engagement. Family is off limits, unless it can be used to exploit both 9/11 and the Iraq War (her son left for Iraq yesterday, the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington). And after CNN's Campbell Brown questioned McCain strategist Tucker Bounds about Palin's foreign policy experience during the Republican National Convention, calling him out on an obvious double standard (Palin herself dismissed the importance of "a big fat resume" during her interview with Gibson) and asking for an example of one decision Palin made as commander of the Alaskan National Guard, McCain cancelled his own appearances on the network in a huff. His campaign claimed Brown went "over the line," that line apparently having been moved from questions about her family to questions related to anything that attempts to examine her qualifications or policies. It's this kind of Bush-Cheney obstinateness and lack of transparency that renders the Bush-Palin, err McCain-Palin, ticket a Democratic strategist's wet dream.
There have been several variants of the same joke floating around the blog and talk show circuits regarding Sarah Palin's tightly wound persona. Palin is doing quite well with middle-class men and that should come as no surprise to anyone who's ever seen a Van Halen video. I personally prefer the dominatrix-by-night analogy, but sexist or not, the point remains the same: There's a sense that there's more than meets the eye to the Republican vice presidential candidate and it's not very surprising that, as her record has gradually come to light, concerns have swiftly turned from Palin's lack of experience to specifics about her questionable policies and beliefs. The hullabaloo surrounding Palin's nomination has muted the Barack Obama campaign's main credo: that John McCain represents four more years of George W. Bush. Some have speculated that the Palin pick changes that equation, but it actually renders the ticket even Bushier—maybe even Bushier than Bush himself. During her exclusive interview with Charles Gibson last night, Palin echoed the Bush Doctrine of hasty, preemptive war: "We must not blink."
Despite the current administration's fervent pandering to the religious right, and despite Bush's own personal spiritual beliefs (and even some disturbing but only passing allusions to divine military intervention), there was never a real sense that Bush—and especially Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice or former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—believed that their policies in Iraq were "God's will." You've no doubt heard by now what Palin told the Wasilla Assembly of God: "Our national leaders are sending [the U.S. Military] out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan." Nebulous at best, but regarding the $500 million natural gas pipeline she has lobbied to have built in her state, Palin made her views clear: "God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that."
Harnessing the power of Evangelicals and conservative ideologues was simply a means to an end for the Bush administration—that end being the acquisition and maintenance of power. It's hard to imagine any administration being worse than Bush's (McCain might be a hawk but I truly believe it when he claims his goal is to protect the country, not simply attain personal power), but the installment of Palin—by many accounts not McCain's first choice, and certainly not the "maverick" pick many on the right would have us believe—into the campaign brought the religious right one step closer to achieving their goal of legislating Christian fundamentalist beliefs into American law.
Earlier this week, Juan Cole of Salon wrote the best assessment (read: most frightening condemnation) of Palin's beliefs in his article "What's the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick." To paraphrase Obama…and McCain…and countless other politicians and non-politicians throughout the last century who have used the "lipstick on a pig" colloquialism, you can put lipstick, glasses, a below-the-knee skirt and a bun on a religious fundamentalist, but it's still a religious fundamentalist. Since 9/11, the party in power has chosen to fight religious extremism by adopting its practices and ideologies, limiting the freedoms of its people, claiming to have God on its side, and attempting to eliminate the division between church and state. Whether it's being done by a genuine theocrat or a politician or party simply willing to exploit its devout base to obtain power, the result is the same: the transformation of the United States government into a vehicle for an extreme religious agenda.
Palin's similarities to Bush don't end there. Even if you think the Alaska governor's brother-in-law, Michael Wooten, is a scumbag (Palin allegedly dismissed Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan because he refused to fire Wooten, a state trooper), and even if the real abuses of power didn't involve trying to get Monegan fired but simply attempting to usurp the investigation and quash subpoenas, the misuse of authority to settle a personal family vendetta is something Bush, whose father was the target of an assassination plot by Saddam Hussein following the first Gulf War, knows all too well.
According to an ABC News investigation into the firing of a Wasilla librarian, Palin and fellow Christian conservatives began focusing on the availability of certain books in local bookstores and libraries, including Pastor, I'm Gay, written by Howard Bess, a retired reverend of the Church of the Covenant. Bess told ABC: "It wasn't just simply a matter of her using the religious right to get elected. She was one of them." Bush, too, has fancied himself an editor: It's been well documented that his administration has edited or blatantly altered congressional reports to fit the perception of reality (of terrorism, the Iraq War, climate change, etc.) that they'd like to sell to the American public.
Palin's record on the environment is even more damning. Though she cracked down on ethical violations related to oil companies after taking office as governor, her positions on drilling and climate change are patently anti-environment and put her in lockstep with the oilmen currently running the country. She has repeatedly placed the economy and oil companies before the environment and wildlife, questioning the validity of climate change science and even challenging the listing of polar bears as threatened. The Bush administration reluctantly added the species to the list only after massive pressure from scientists and environmentalists, and by suing the administration, Palin superficially appears in opposition to Bush when in fact she and the President are in agreement on the issue. Palin expanded Alaska's speciously named "aerial predator control" program, in which wolves and bears are hunted from aircrafts. According to the Anchorage Daily News, her state's biologists killed 14 newborn wolf pups by shooting them in the head. The killings were "humane," but only in the sense that their parents had already been killed and they would have had to fend for themselves. Palin's administration illegally offered a $150 bounty for each wolf killed despite the fact that the state hasn't had the legal authority to implement such bounties since 1984. The woman who would be vice president also aggressively opposed her state's Clean Water Initiative, favoring mining companies over protecting salmon.
Palin is a staunch supporter of teaching creationism in publicly funded schools, a clear violation of the separation of church and state, a legal doctrine that was put in place by the original framers of the Constitution not to protect the government's secularism but the freedom of religious exercise. And though admittedly irrelevant to Palin's candidacy, her 17-year-old daughter's pregnancy is exemplary of the flaws in abstinence-only education, which Palin supports. We know little about the vice presidential nominee's parenting skills, nor do we know whether or not her daughter used contraception, but even a young woman whose mother publicly espouses the virtues of said training is capable of getting pregnant and the hypocrisy inherent in such a tabloid-ready tale only points to the failure of the religious right's antiquated ignorance-first approach to sex education.
The pregnancy scandal also spotlights the McCain-Palin campaign's duplicitous rules of media engagement. Family is off limits, unless it can be used to exploit both 9/11 and the Iraq War (her son left for Iraq yesterday, the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington). And after CNN's Campbell Brown questioned McCain strategist Tucker Bounds about Palin's foreign policy experience during the Republican National Convention, calling him out on an obvious double standard (Palin herself dismissed the importance of "a big fat resume" during her interview with Gibson) and asking for an example of one decision Palin made as commander of the Alaskan National Guard, McCain cancelled his own appearances on the network in a huff. His campaign claimed Brown went "over the line," that line apparently having been moved from questions about her family to questions related to anything that attempts to examine her qualifications or policies. It's this kind of Bush-Cheney obstinateness and lack of transparency that renders the Bush-Palin, err McCain-Palin, ticket a Democratic strategist's wet dream.
Fear Factor: The Right vs. MSNBC
By: Sal Cinquemani On: 09/10/2008 08:52:02 In: Politics Comments: 2
There were two moments during MSNBC's coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions when I changed the channel to CNN (or Fox News, out of curiosity): once when protesters with handmade signs calling for the "truth about 9/11" were inexplicably allowed to stand around and scream behind the cable network's outdoor news-anchor desk, and once after Barack Obama finished his acceptance speech and commentator Keith Olbermann proceeded to have an on-air orgasm. On the season premiere of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher the following night, Maher joked that Olbermann (and presumably co-host Chris Matthews) wanted to have sex with the Democratic presidential nominee. The suspicion that Olbermann and Matthews have man-crushes (or at the very least, biases) led to the announcement on Monday that NBC News is replacing the pair with MSNBC host David Gregory during the forthcoming presidential debates and election night.
Olbermann's bias toward Obama was made clear during the Democratic primary, and both he and Matthews were criticized for their comments about Sen. Hillary Clinton. Olbermann's political views (and, unlike his Fox News contemporaries, his acknowledgement of those views) made him an odd pick for primetime news coverage: If you wanted an objective opinion during the Democratic convention in particular, you had to switch to CNN or network TV or wait for—gasp!—Pat Buchanan to toss in his (usually fair and balanced) two cents.
One of the so-called controversial moments reported by The New York Times occurred on the final night of the Republican convention, when Olbermann apologized to viewers after airing an RNC video billed as "a tribute to the victims of 9/11." Atop images of the World Trade Center in flames, a foreboding voiceover reminded us of "buildings burning," "bodies falling" and "beautiful faces and those loving voices, now gone forever." Anything but a tribute to those who died on that day, it was the politicization and exploitation of the deaths of thousands of people in order to win an election, and it was clear that the RNC hoped to stir up the specter of fear and loss that helped George W. Bush win the 2004 election:
During the convention, Republicans repeatedly, amusingly spoke about taking Washington back, attempting to squash efforts by Democrats to paint John McCain's policies as a continuation of Bush's, but the 9/11 "tribute" only confirmed those associations. Since September 12, 2001, Bush and his party have used fear to move their domestic and foreign political agendas forward. Our patriotism and unity were exploited for political gain, and Olbermann spoke for those of us who watched the video with mouths agape and stomachs turning.
While I don't agree with Salon's Glenn Greenwald that MSNBC is removing Olbermann and Matthews solely because of right-wing pressure (is it not possible that complaints confirmed what they, like I, already felt?), his take on the Liberal Media Myth is spot-on, particularly his observation that cable news panels typically balance out their right-wing guests with neutral correspondents—perpetuating the right-wing lie that neutral equals "liberal" and therefore the media must be liberal. (This myth is most effectively debunked by so-called liberal papers like The New York Times, who practically rolled out a red carpet for the U.S. military's invasion of Iraq.) By instilling the fear that a news outlet will be painted blue (and thus see its perceived objectivity diminished), the right has found a way to control the media. Anchors are forced to bite their tongues or remain "neutral" even in the face of hard facts, giving the same weight to both sides of an argument when one side doesn't deserve it. Climate change skeptics, for example, are given equal time when the science simply doesn't support their views. The Equal Time Rule might be fair and balanced for presidential candidates, but not for news.
In his New York Times article about the NBC News shakeup, Brian Stelter referred to both Olbermann and Matthews as "politically incendiary." Matthews is undoubtedly incendiary, but politically? Though much of the Hardball host's positive commentary about Republican politicos could be interpreted as old-fashioned sexism (he likes 'em tough and stopped just short of calling Hillary Clinton a bitch during the primary), Matthews is one of the most passionate, evenhanded commentators on cable news today. If he seems biased in a 2008 snapshot, it's because he's disappointed by the way the Bush administration—an administration, it should be noted, for which he voted in 2000—has conducted itself over the last eight years and has behaved as any news reporter should: as a watchdog. Perhaps the NBC brass was trying to spare Olbermann's ego by taking Matthews down with him. Both men will still be opining as "political analysts" through November 4th, and Gregory is competent (at least we're not getting more Dan Abrams), but Matthews is MSNBC's most undervalued asset.
UPDATE: I can't bring myself to write anything substantial about this whole "lipstick on a pig" ridiculousness (Greenwald said it all in his column today), but note the poll question posted on MSNBC's website today for further proof that either a) the myth that the media, and specifically MSNBC, is "liberal" is just that—a myth, or b) the right is succeeding at shaping the tone and political bias of said liberal media, specifically MSNBC. It asks, "Do you think Sen. Barack Obama went too far with his 'lipstick on a pig' remark?" and then offers three options, none of which are "No, the right wing wants you to pay attention to shallow sideshows to make you forget what they've done to the country over the last 8 years":
1. Yes, he has crossed the line this time.
2. No, this is just part of the rough-and-tumble of political campaigning.
3. I don't know.
There were two moments during MSNBC's coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions when I changed the channel to CNN (or Fox News, out of curiosity): once when protesters with handmade signs calling for the "truth about 9/11" were inexplicably allowed to stand around and scream behind the cable network's outdoor news-anchor desk, and once after Barack Obama finished his acceptance speech and commentator Keith Olbermann proceeded to have an on-air orgasm. On the season premiere of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher the following night, Maher joked that Olbermann (and presumably co-host Chris Matthews) wanted to have sex with the Democratic presidential nominee. The suspicion that Olbermann and Matthews have man-crushes (or at the very least, biases) led to the announcement on Monday that NBC News is replacing the pair with MSNBC host David Gregory during the forthcoming presidential debates and election night.
Olbermann's bias toward Obama was made clear during the Democratic primary, and both he and Matthews were criticized for their comments about Sen. Hillary Clinton. Olbermann's political views (and, unlike his Fox News contemporaries, his acknowledgement of those views) made him an odd pick for primetime news coverage: If you wanted an objective opinion during the Democratic convention in particular, you had to switch to CNN or network TV or wait for—gasp!—Pat Buchanan to toss in his (usually fair and balanced) two cents.
One of the so-called controversial moments reported by The New York Times occurred on the final night of the Republican convention, when Olbermann apologized to viewers after airing an RNC video billed as "a tribute to the victims of 9/11." Atop images of the World Trade Center in flames, a foreboding voiceover reminded us of "buildings burning," "bodies falling" and "beautiful faces and those loving voices, now gone forever." Anything but a tribute to those who died on that day, it was the politicization and exploitation of the deaths of thousands of people in order to win an election, and it was clear that the RNC hoped to stir up the specter of fear and loss that helped George W. Bush win the 2004 election:
During the convention, Republicans repeatedly, amusingly spoke about taking Washington back, attempting to squash efforts by Democrats to paint John McCain's policies as a continuation of Bush's, but the 9/11 "tribute" only confirmed those associations. Since September 12, 2001, Bush and his party have used fear to move their domestic and foreign political agendas forward. Our patriotism and unity were exploited for political gain, and Olbermann spoke for those of us who watched the video with mouths agape and stomachs turning.
While I don't agree with Salon's Glenn Greenwald that MSNBC is removing Olbermann and Matthews solely because of right-wing pressure (is it not possible that complaints confirmed what they, like I, already felt?), his take on the Liberal Media Myth is spot-on, particularly his observation that cable news panels typically balance out their right-wing guests with neutral correspondents—perpetuating the right-wing lie that neutral equals "liberal" and therefore the media must be liberal. (This myth is most effectively debunked by so-called liberal papers like The New York Times, who practically rolled out a red carpet for the U.S. military's invasion of Iraq.) By instilling the fear that a news outlet will be painted blue (and thus see its perceived objectivity diminished), the right has found a way to control the media. Anchors are forced to bite their tongues or remain "neutral" even in the face of hard facts, giving the same weight to both sides of an argument when one side doesn't deserve it. Climate change skeptics, for example, are given equal time when the science simply doesn't support their views. The Equal Time Rule might be fair and balanced for presidential candidates, but not for news.
In his New York Times article about the NBC News shakeup, Brian Stelter referred to both Olbermann and Matthews as "politically incendiary." Matthews is undoubtedly incendiary, but politically? Though much of the Hardball host's positive commentary about Republican politicos could be interpreted as old-fashioned sexism (he likes 'em tough and stopped just short of calling Hillary Clinton a bitch during the primary), Matthews is one of the most passionate, evenhanded commentators on cable news today. If he seems biased in a 2008 snapshot, it's because he's disappointed by the way the Bush administration—an administration, it should be noted, for which he voted in 2000—has conducted itself over the last eight years and has behaved as any news reporter should: as a watchdog. Perhaps the NBC brass was trying to spare Olbermann's ego by taking Matthews down with him. Both men will still be opining as "political analysts" through November 4th, and Gregory is competent (at least we're not getting more Dan Abrams), but Matthews is MSNBC's most undervalued asset.
UPDATE: I can't bring myself to write anything substantial about this whole "lipstick on a pig" ridiculousness (Greenwald said it all in his column today), but note the poll question posted on MSNBC's website today for further proof that either a) the myth that the media, and specifically MSNBC, is "liberal" is just that—a myth, or b) the right is succeeding at shaping the tone and political bias of said liberal media, specifically MSNBC. It asks, "Do you think Sen. Barack Obama went too far with his 'lipstick on a pig' remark?" and then offers three options, none of which are "No, the right wing wants you to pay attention to shallow sideshows to make you forget what they've done to the country over the last 8 years":
1. Yes, he has crossed the line this time.
2. No, this is just part of the rough-and-tumble of political campaigning.
3. I don't know.
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