You know — the Republican party, the one who hardly ever mentions “smaller government” any more. And they’re wearing a big oversized t-shirt that reads:
Zero-Sum. All … or nothing.
OK, then … let’s go with nothing.
Let’s take this values thing, for instance — it should never have become a political topic. You can’t legislate morality. If your version of morality isn’t represented by the whole, that’s the way life has always been, isn’t it? Isn’t that why we “flock together” with those of like minds into zillions of special interest groups?
The Republicans have driven a couple of elections with their desire to make laws of a social nature rigid enough to satisfy them, while curtailing the civil rights of most everybody else. The abortion question, for instance, is one of those that isn’t anybodies business but the person challenged by the prospect. It’s a legitimate political question about whether we fund such a procedure with public money in this nation — it is NOT a legitimate question about whether or not it’s available. OK, let’s get government entirely out of this process — and birth control as well. The governments lame insistence that abstinence is viable is about as effective as doing nothing anyhow. Even their own oversight agencies are telling them if they don’t start promoting condoms to prevent the raging epidemic of STD’s in youngsters they’ll be Really Sorry.
Gay marriage is similar — what relationship a person establishes is no one’s business but their own. By the Fundamentalists own reckoning, God establishes marriage — if they don’t think God blesses gay marriage, then whatever that union is … it isn’t marriage as they define it. Why they feel threatened is beyond me. And if the Right wants to go hysterical over the prospect of gays marrying that’s their business … it’s not the business of the entire nation. If gay people want to partner with the legal protection of marriage, with its financial benefits, then that does have political implications — and although it has little to do with morality and more with civil liberty, we can’t come to consensus in this nation. Seems to me the only answer to such a problem would be to REMOVE the legal benefits of marriage from the tax base, curtail all other legal protections to the lawfully joined … and level the playing field.
The church doesn’t belong in the business of statute or amendment … people can hold any belief they want and vote any ticket they approve, but to insist that religion holds sway over lawmaking is in direct violation of the First Amendment.
This Republican regime was born and fueled from Gingrich’s value’s harangue and his Contract with America — we’re seeing the results. If a confused nation wants to know why their country has been hijacked by religious cultist’s then they have to look back to 1992 and the arrogance of those who “knew best.”
Below, you’ll find a couple of articles with excellent overview of the current election situation — then a few on uber-chipper Dubby and his poor, patient Pappy … the last one is an excellent piece from FireDogLake’s T-Rex, a gay blogger, with kudos for Barney Frank. I started this collection with two zingers from HuffPo — they set the tone. [And feel free to copy/paste the second article to any Red-Or-Dead-Head's you know.]
Jude
ps — I’m listening to James Dobson on the radio now, telling me that human cloning is on our Missouri ballot [stem cell battle] and what we should vote for … the commercial was sponsored by the Baptist Convention. Isn’t that a tax issue? And if it isn’t … it sure as hell ought to be!
How Bush Rules: And How Sonny Bono Predicted the Downfall of the GOP Congress
Sidney Blumenthal
10.23.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sidney-blumenthal/how-bush-rules-and-how-s_b_32202.html
As the fortunes of the Republican Party in the Congress collapsed, I found myself in the middle of a book tour in Palm Springs, California. Promenading down Palm Canyon Drive, I stopped by the larger than life statute of a smiling mustachioed man with an open collar sitting on the edge of a fountain in the center of town.
Sonny Bono, singer, songwriter and mayor, was perhaps the most unlikely person elected in the self-proclaimed Republican “revolution” of 1994.
To mark his rise to power, the new Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, “held a mad celebration featuring people dressed as the cartoon Power Rangers and Rush Limbaugh,” as I write in “How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime.” “One new Republican member, Sonny Bono, who had fallen from grace as a celebrity, warned Gingrich to guard against hubris.”
Bono was the only one at the beginning to warn Gingrich that his arrogance and unchecked will to power would be his undoing. “You’re a celebrity now,” Bono said. “The rules are different for celebrities. I know it. I’ve been there. I’ve been a celebrity. I used to be a bigger celebrity.
But let me tell you, you’re not being handled right. This is not political news coverage. This is celebrity status. You need handlers. You need to understand what you’re doing.”
Bono saw the dramatic events unfold before him through the prism of his own dimmed star. He had had it all with Cher and lost it, staging a recovery in the Palm Springs oasis as a politician, which to him was a secondary level of celebrity. Yes, the beat went on, but he had heard it before and louder. That was the insight he imparted to the new Speaker that was instantly ignored.
Gingrich gloried in his rhetoric about “the revolution.” He had little use for the experience of the older and wiser song-and-dance man. Instead Gingrich, a failed professor, described himself as a world-historical figure, leader of a universal transformation. It was befitting that one of his closest advisers, the lobbyist Grover Norquist, co-author of Gingrich’s political program, the Contract with America, hung a picture of Lenin on his wall. Gingrich was a self-styled Republican Lenin “determined to annihilate his enemies and extirpate the ‘counterculture,’ as I write in my column in Salon and The Guardian.
This Republican Lenin was followed by the Republican Stalin, “the ruthless consolidator and centralizer,” Tom DeLay, the Sugar Land, Texas exterminator. After Gingrich’s demise, DeLay put into place his puppet as Speaker, Dennis Hastert, the former small-town Illinois wrestling coach. When DeLay was indicted for corrupt campaign practices and resigned, the “revolution” was left in Hastert’s ham-fisted hands. Just as he had tried to cover-up DeLay’s ethical transgressions, he and his aides were implicated in the cover-up of Rep. Mark Foley’s sexual preying on teenaged pages. Hastert, the bewildered party boss, “transmuted from omnipotent Leonid Brezhnev into ghostly Konstantin Chernenko, presiding over the final decrepit stage.”
If only the Republicans had taken Sonny Bono’s advice, gleaned from Hollywood, they might not resemble the Soviet Union today. ++
What Republicans Will Be Voting For on November 7th
Joseph A. Palermo
10.23.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/what-republicans-will-be-_b_32306.html
We have heard endless commentary from main line pundits about how the Democratic Party lacks a coherent program going into the 2006-midterm elections. This criticism may be valid, but Democratic promises are not any more worthy of attention than the actual governing record of the Republican Party. Republicans who plan to go to the polls and sheepishly cast their votes for their party’s standard bearers on November 7th should ask themselves: What are we voting for?
Here are some possible answers:
The “Fiscally Conservative” Republicans will be voting for record budget deficits and a national debt of some $8 trillion.
The “Libertarian” Republicans will be voting for run away government power over individual rights in the form of NSA wiretaps, secret prisons, and the suspension of habeas corpus.
The “Small Government” Republicans will be voting in favor of a greatly expanded federal bureaucracy. (The 2003 changes in Medicare alone will add over $720 billion in government spending; and the “No Child Left Behind” law has infused the federal government into areas that had been previously left to the states.)
The “Ross Perot” Republicans — who warned us about the “great sucking sound” that “free trade” agreements would create by vacuuming up good American jobs and exporting them to Mexico or China — will be voting in favor of tax credits to corporations to encourage such outsourcing.
The “Law and Order” Republicans will be endorsing disgraced GOP officials such as “Duke” Cunningham, Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, Ralph Reed, David Safavian, Michael Scanlon, Curt Weldon, and many others.
The “Strong on National Defense” Republicans will be voting for a party that dragged us into a nearly four-year occupation of Iraq that has weakened the Army and the Reserves, cost the lives of 2,800 American soldiers, (with 20,000 wounded), and has tied down U.S. forces while other crises are developing in the Middle East and Northeast Asia.
The “Personal Responsibility” Republicans will be giving a vote of confidence to an administration and a party that refuse to accept any responsibility for their many missteps or to hold anyone accountable.
The “Family Values” Republicans will be voting for the political party that allowed a pedophile, Representative Mark Foley of Florida, to prey freely on underage male Congressional pages for over a decade.
The “Private Sector” Republicans who seek to bring business “efficiency” to government will be supporting one of the most inefficient and wasteful administrations in U.S. history, illustrated by its dismal response to Hurricane Katrina.
The “Log Cabin” Republicans will be endorsing a party that has consistently singled out gays and lesbians for open attacks on their civil rights.
The “Soccer Mom” Republicans who value education will be voting for under-funded, dilapidated schools. And the “Nascar Dad” Republicans will be voting for a more polluted environment for their hunting and fishing.
Finally, the Republicans who honor decency and fairness in our political discourse will be voting in favor of Karl Rove’s smear tactics, and his underhanded techniques to fool voters and suppress their democratic right to vote. ++
Too Conservative For America
Robert L. Borosage
October 23, 2006
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/10/23/too_conservative_for_america.php
The election is still two weeks off but the recriminations have already begun. Former Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey, a free-market ideologue, trashes James Dobson and the Christian Right as “thugs.” Dobson warns Republicans that the religious right may not turn out, dismayed by the Foley scandals and the lack of progress on their social agenda. Richard Viguerie, the mass mail guru of the far right, suggests that it might be a good thing for these “Big Government Republicans” to lose control and learn once more the power of the movement right.
Democrats tend to be giddy these days, but already signs of preemptive dissatisfaction are murmured on the left, as progressives bemoan the absence of any visible agenda, any big ideas or any bold leader. And Senate leaders are already lining up to chastise progressives for demanding too much, for challenging Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman and pushing too hard on the war, on health care, on cleaning up Congress.
The campaigns have turned into a foul din. Incumbents have defended themselves by raising fears about their rivals. The White House mantra—”taxes and terror”—is echoed in ad buys. Negative ads drive a race to the bottom, a campaign distemper that reflects the foul mood of voters.
Is there any theme to this stew? No matter what voters decide, the campaigns on both sides suggest a sea change in America. For years, Republicans have charged their opponents with being “too liberal for (fill in the state).” This year, the ads of both parties suggest that candidates may suffer more for being “too conservative for America.”
The debate on the Iraq war illustrates the point. As the civil strife in Iraq has escalated, Democrats have escalated their opposition to the current course, and Republicans have grown increasingly uneasy about defending the president. Few call for attacking Iran or North Korea for their nuclear activities. Diplomacy trumps war; multilateralism beats unilateral action. The fiasco in Iraq has chastened the indispensable nation.
Big government no longer seems the “problem, not the solution,” to use Reagan’s formulation. Instead, incumbent Republicans are bragging about the prescription drug plan, the largest entitlement expansion since Medicare. They are advertising not how much they’ve cut government down, but how much pork they’ve brought home. Budget deficits are a challenger’s theme.
Support for privatization of Social Security is a liability, not a strength. And with few exceptions, Republican incumbents change the subject whenever the issue comes up.
Similarly, this big-oil Congress presents itself to voters as the champions of renewable energy and energy efficiency. Gas prices are coming down for the time being, but solar and ethanol futures and are up in the next Congress, no matter who wins.
Similarly, on social issues, conservatives are surprisingly muted. By all accounts, gay marriage initiatives seem to have lost their bite, perhaps dulled by the clamor around the Foley scandal. Instead, challengers have taken the offensive, embracing stem cell research and denouncing the posturing around the Terry Schiavo case. Republicans now worry not only about the enthusiasm of evangelicals soured by the Foley scandal but about losing socially moderate, country club voters turned off by doctrine supplanting science.
And in the wake of Abramoff and Halliburton, corruption and cronyism, candidates in both parties are denouncing pay-to-play politics. The best defense for incumbents is to charge the challenger with being in the pocket of special interest donors. Money is the mother’s milk of politics, but who is feeding whom will get more attention in the future. Cleaning up Congress is back on the agenda.
All this is reinforced by the current polls. Democratic hopes are raised by a new wave of populists—Bernie Sanders in Vermont, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Jon Tester in Montana, Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota. Conservative Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who still champions privatizing Social Security and vouchers for public schools, is lagging behind challenger Bob Casey, who is running on a basic bread-and-butter platform.
The “New Direction” Democratic agenda—raising the minimum wage, cutting drug prices, halving the cost of student loans, investing in alternative energy, protecting Social Security, revoking tax breaks for companies taking jobs abroad—garners such overwhelming public support that much of it will pass the next Congress no matter what happens in the election.
Conservatives outnumber liberals two to one in pre-election polls. And the term conservative still rates much more favorably than liberal. Even liberals like to say they support conservative family values. But the election campaigns of both Republicans and Democrats suggest that the future Congress will avoid being too conservative for America. Americans have decided that the right got it wrong. No matter which party wins in two weeks, conservatives will suffer a rebuke. ++
Robert L. Borosage is co-director of the Campaign For America’s Future.
A Progressive Message Resonates
Isaiah J. Poole, TomPaine
Friday, October 20, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/y645wg
There is more proof in the past 24 hours that a majority of the public is siding with progressives on the war in Iraq and on the economy.
The latest Democracy Corps memo, released Thursday, says that there is a broad rejection of Bush administration policies that will on Election Day take Democrats to levels “unimagined … just a few weeks ago.”
That poll says that Democrats now lead the House congressional horserace by 13 points, a surge in support that takes the Democrats up to 54 percent of the vote and doubles their lead from two weeks ago. In competitive Senate races, Democrats overall are ahead by 10 points, the memo by pollster Stan Greenberg said.
That rejection is also reflected in a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. According to the poll, 57 percent have an unfavorable view of the job President Bush is doing as president, as opposed to 38 percent who approve. Fifty-two percent disapprove of the way he is handling the economy and 63 percent disapprove of his handling of Iraq.
Likewise, 61 percent in the Democracy Corps poll say had negative attitudes toward administration policy in Iraq. “There will be a wave on November 7, with the Iraq issue critical to its strength,” the Democracy Corps memo said.
Greenberg’s assessment is that Republican attempts to nationalize security issues as a way to maintain their hold on the electorate have backfired as conditions in Iraq have deteriorated.
“In open-ended questions about why the country is off track, what they wish the candidates would be saying or doing, why they are supporting candidates, and why they are more enthusiastic to vote, nearly half the electorate mentioned getting out of Iraq in response to one or more of the questions, far outpacing mentions of any other issue,” the memo said.
Democrats, according to the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, remain vulnerable on “dealing with the war on terrorism” and on “promoting strong moral values.” But the poll suggests that voters, more than ever, have rejected Bush’s view of the war on Iraq: Not only are a significant majority pessimistic about the direction the war is going, but a majority now believes that Bush has not given good reasons for keeping troops there.
That poll did not ask the key question of whether troops should withdraw now or withdraw based on some relatively firm, fast timetable.
Greenberg wrote in his memo that comments he has heard during his polling reveal “a lot of frustration with the economy, a middle class squeezed by prices (health care and gas) that are rising and wages falling, jobs that don’t pay as much and are leaving the country. As many voters mention this collection of economic issues as mention Iraq. Indeed, some of the frustration with Iraq is the belief that Iraq keeps the country, the Republican Congress and the president from addressing, or even thinking about, the squeezed middle class. In the survey, a large majority said they wanted this election to be about the financial pressures on people, rather than security and terrorism (55 to 39 percent).”
Of those asked in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll which party they would prefer control Congress, 52 percent said they would prefer Democrats, compared to 38 percent Republicans. Only 39 percent were willing to say their current representative “deserves to be reelected.”
Greenberg concludes that a winning issue for Democrats in the final stretch will be energy independence. “It is the one issue that gives people hope we can be more secure, get beyond Iraq, and also have a stronger economy that creates American jobs,” he writes.
The broader message is that when progressives talk about America being less secure—not simply as a result of rogue terrorists but more significantly because of misguided economic policies and a disastrous occupation of Iraq —they are tapping into the mainstream of voter sentiment. ++
As G.O.P. Mopes, Bush Adds the Duties of Optimist in Chief
October 23, 2006
SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JIM RUTENBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/us/politics/23bush.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 — The capital is filled with Republicans convinced that they will lose the House and maybe the Senate. So last week, the White House and party leaders convened a “friends and allies” teleconference to dispute what Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, considers flawed conventional wisdom.
For 20 minutes, Mr. Mehlman and the White House political director, Sara Taylor, tried to lift the cloak of gloom that has descended on the top ranks of Republican strategists, using what one of the dozens of lobbyists, donors, party aides and other supporters who listened in later called “happy talk.”
President Bush and his political strategists may be the most outwardly optimistic Republicans in Washington these days, and perhaps the only ones. They are doing their best to fend off the sense of impending doom within their party that they fear will become a self-fulfilling prophecy on Nov. 7.
They are enlisting longtime allies for an all-hands-on-deck effort to change the mood for the final push to Election Day, and they are putting out the word for Republicans to keep a lid on any pessimistic talk. They are also planning a travel blitz for Mr. Bush during the final week to 10 days of the campaign.
And though they fully expect to lose seats, they are also keeping their fingers crossed. They are counting on a barrage of last-minute advertising and their 72-hour voter turnout operation to keep Democrats from taking over the House and Senate, even if it means they only eke out a victory.
But those the White House counts on to help raise party morale at such low moments say they are having a hard time of it, when so many polls augur ever-worsening election results and when so many things have gone wrong, including the Mark Foley scandal and grim news from Iraq.
“I’m trying to buck people up, but let’s just say I’m hiding all the sharp objects in my office,” said Rich Bond, a former Republican National Committee chairman who now runs a consulting firm.
Even Mary Matalin, the longtime Bush family aide and confidante, confessed, “I’m in my stoic mode now,” though she said she believed that the party would prove the dire predictions wrong.
Mr. Bush has been saying for months that he believes Republicans will keep control of the House and the Senate, and he is not changing his tune now, even if it means taking the rare step of rebuking his own father.
In an interview shown Sunday on ABC News, Mr. Bush was asked about a comment by the first President Bush, who said this month that he hated to think about life for his son if Democrats took control of Congress. “He shouldn’t be speculating like that, because he should have called me ahead of time,” the president said, “and I’d tell him they’re not going to.”
The president’s professed certainty, shared with outside friends and advisers, is a source of fascination among even his staunchest allies. In lobbying shops and strategy firms around town, the latest Republican parlor game is divining whether the White House optimism is staged, or whether Mr. Bush and his political team really believe what they are saying.
There are hints that the mood is not so upbeat or unremittingly confident in the West Wing. Mr. Bush and his inner circle, people in regular contact with them say, are well aware of the Democratic surge recorded by polls, and of the stakes for the final two years of an administration already burdened with troubles like the deteriorating situation in Iraq.
A strategist close to the White House said Mr. Bush’s own political team had polling that showed as many as 14 House seats were probably already lost to Democrats, just one shy of the 15 seats they need to gain to win control.
Though White House aides said that account was exaggerated, they acknowledged that polls have shown at least that many races with Democrats leading Republicans. “Their attitude is, ‘We’ve got our backs against the wall, but we know how to fight our way out of this,’ ” said Charles Black, a Republican strategist who has been in regular contact with Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s senior adviser. “They’re not unrealistic, but they’re optimistic that we can still win.”
Officials are telling their friends that they believe a final volley of intensive attacks by the White House will return the party to where it was before the Foley scandal, by casting the election as a choice between Democrats and Republicans over national security and taxes.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove are discounting predictions of Republican demise in part because they believe they have turned out wrong before. “I remember 2004,” Mr. Bush said in the interview shown on “This Week.” “I was history as far as the punditry was concerned.”
Mr. Rove has told associates that the party’s turnout machinery, through which the White House will continue to pump an unrelenting message against Democrats on taxes and terrorism, gives Republicans an advantage of four to seven percentage points in any given race. Though Democrats call that too generous, they acknowledge that it accounts for at least a few percentage points.
Mr. Rove and Ms. Taylor are said by associates to have spent hours going through data on volunteer efforts, voter registration tallies and financial matchups between candidates throughout the states, and they see a path to victory.
“You’ve got 452 races this year; many of them are already settled,” Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said in an interview on Sunday. “Our view is fight hard to win the ones you can win. And we think there are enough of those that we will win both houses.”
For all the difficulties this year, Mr. Bush is said to have full confidence in Mr. Rove, Mr. Mehlman and Ms. Taylor.
Mr. Bush has always relished political combat. On the campaign trail, he can be seen slapping backs and clapping hands with coachlike enthusiasm, even as he embraces candidates whose campaigns seem like lost causes.
And far more than he lets on, Mr. Bush is a student of politics, up to speed on the nuances of races and tactics. Meeting with conservative talk radio hosts last month, Mr. Bush expressed optimism that Republicans would win. But he also lamented that victory would come in spite of “stupid moves” by some candidates, according to one host, Michael Medved, who participated in the meeting and wrote about it on his Web site.
Saulius Anuzis, the chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, said that on two recent occasions, Mr. Bush indicated that he understood the minutia of the state’s electorate and how it would affect the Republican candidate for Senate there, Sheriff Michael J. Bouchard of Oakland County. “He knew more than the perfunctory,” Mr. Anuzis said. “He said having the sheriff out of Oakland County, which is a swing county, ought to be a big help.”
In some respects, Mr. Bush has been stuck in the stable this political season, with low approval ratings that have made him less of an asset on the campaign trail, unlike in 2002 when he blitzed through the states giving pep talks and rallies as a far more popular president. White House aides say it has been far more important to have the president helping to raise money, often at closed events, than to have him at rallies that cost money to organize.
His schedule has not seemed as packed as Mr. Snow and other aides predicted last month, when they said he was likely to be on the road almost constantly through October. The president’s schedule for this week shows him campaigning on only two days, Tuesday and Thursday, in Florida, Iowa and Michigan.
But aides said rallies and fund-raisers in the final week of the campaign would keep him front and center, making an increasingly pointed argument against Democrats.
The president’s stump speech is the only place where he publicly contemplates Democratic control, raising it only to motivate Republicans. Mr. Bush’s aides say he has refused to let them even be seen planning for a possible Democratic takeover so as not to give volunteers or donors any reason to doubt that their efforts will pay off.
And he demonstrates annoyance with questions about what his administration is doing to plan for a potential Democratic takeover of the House.
“I don’t buy into that premise,” Mr. Bush told Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. Calling the query a “trick question,” he added: “The minute I start answering your question, the word is ‘Well, Bush anticipates losing.’ I don’t anticipate losing.” ++
Bush chides father for election remarks
Reuters
Sun Oct 22, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/wy84j
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush gently admonished his father for saying he hates to think what life would be like for his son if the Democrats win control of Congress in the November 7 election.
It was the latest sign of possible strain in the relationship between the two men.
“He shouldn’t be speculating like this, because — he should have called me ahead of time and I’d tell him they’re not going to (win),” a smiling Bush told ABC “This Week” in an interview broadcast on Sunday.
It follows the recent release of a book, “State of Denial,” by journalist Bob Woodward, that says the 82-year-old former president was “anguished” over how the Iraq war has played out, although he has dismissed that account.
Earlier this month, the elder Bush was reported to have told a Republican fund-raiser in a Philadelphia suburb that “if we have some of these wild Democrats in charge of these (congressional) committees, it will be a ghastly thing for our country.”
He was also quoted as saying, “I would hate to think … what my son’s life would be like” if their Republican Party lost its majorities.
The two men have rarely appeared together in public in recent years. But they praised each other at the October 7 christening of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, named the USS George H.W. Bush, after the 41st president.
Though the elder Bush has said his job is to stay on the sidelines, that did not stop him from raising a warning about the prospects for a Democratic takeover of Congress.
Asked whether he had thought about the possibility, the president told ABC: “Not really … I’m a person that believes we’ll continue to control the House and the Senate.”
Polls show Democrats running ahead. They must pick up 15 House seats and six Senate seats to take over Congress.
A power shift would create a political nightmare for Bush, whose public approval ratings are below 40 percent. His domestic legislative agenda would be stymied and he would see stepped-up pressure to withdraw from Iraq while possibly facing congressional investigations into the unpopular war. ++
Jerk
digby
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/
One of the most unpleasant facets of Junior Codpiece’s personality is the way he publicly disses his own father. Contrary to this article in the NY Times it isn’t rare at all. This is typical:
Mr. Bush has been saying for months that he believes Republicans will keep control of the House and the Senate, and he is not changing his tune now, even if it means taking the rare step of rebuking his own father.
In an interview shown Sunday on ABC News, Mr. Bush was asked about a comment by the first President Bush, who said this month that he hated to think about life for his son if Democrats took control of Congress. “He shouldn’t be speculating like that, because he should have called me ahead of time,” the president said, “and I’d tell him they’re not going to.”
The whole damned country is speculating about that and he’s talking about his dad like he’s a 12 year old who needs to be given a pep talk — the same father who was president and vice-president himself for 12 years. But then Junior has some issues:
“I can’t remember a moment where I said to myself, maybe he can help me make the decision,” Bush told Woodward.
He’s just a doddering old fool:
WILLIAMS: Is there a palpable tension when you get together with the former president, who happens to be your father? A lot of the guys who worked for him are not happy with the direction of things.
BUSH: Oh no. My relationship is adoring son.
WILLIAMS: You talk shop?
BUSH: Sometimes, yeah, of course we do. But it’s a really interesting question, it’s kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant. My dad means the world to me, as a loving dad. He gave me the greatest gift a father can give a child, which is unconditional love. And yeah, we go out and can float around there trying to catch some fish, and chat and talk, but he understands what it means to be president. He understands that often times I have information that he doesn’t have. And he understands how difficult the world is today. And I explain my strategy to him, I explain exactly what I just explained to you back there how I view the current tensions, and he takes it on board, and leaves me with this thought, “I love you son.”
Can you imagine being lectured about strategy by the idiot son who has put the Bush name in the pantheon of historical leadership failure ? I assume the only way he can get through the day is by living in total denial. But still, he must have to fight back the urge to backhand the little prick when he acts like that. How dare he…
Junior’s daddy complex has had catastrophic implications on this world. It should remind us all why hereditary leadership is such a bad idea. ++
God Bless Barney Frank
TRex
http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/10/22/late-nite-fdl-god-bless-barney-frank/
[open link for video]
“The right to privacy should not be the right to hypocrisy. These people who want to demonize other people shouldn’t be able to go home, close the door, and do it themselves.”
~ Barney Frank on the practice of outing gay Republicans, hat-tip to my secret lovaaaah, Jesus’ General
I remember when I first stumbled into blogging back in 2003, one of the most contentious topics a blogger could raise was gay marriage. To put up a post about it was to instigate a long and seething thread where people would trot out their ugliest and most disturbing prejudices.
At the time, I really sort of wished we’d never brought it up, because it made me realize just how disgustingly obtuse and willfully ignorant people could be. Every time a news story about gay marriage came on the radio or TV, I had to leave the room, because I knew that at any moment, some frothing bigot was going to be on to spout a shit-stream of, like, caveman rhetoric.
It’s different now. Even in the last three years, we’ve seen a fundamental shift in the public’s perception of the issue. Maybe once the issue got some coverage, people started to see the difference in the men and women arguing for equal rights for gays and the people arguing against it. Sometimes I believe that the television has caused a deep and fundamental erosion of people’s ability to know when they are being lied to, but perhaps I am lamenting the death of that cognitive ability prematurely. The Great Reich Wing Stink Machine may finally have thrown a rod or maybe, just maybe, people have decided that since the Republicans have lied about everything else, they must be lying about the threat gay people pose to the fabric of civilization.
(But you know, if I ever want to shoot down a concept permanently, to make absolutely certain that the public will roundly reject it, I will ask an oily reptile like Bill Frist to stump for it. The man could put you off sex and donuts forever just by advocating them. He has a kind of anti-charisma. Whatever quality it is that makes Dr. Frist so irresistable to congregations of Rapture-baiters is the very quality that makes him so deeply repellent to the average citizen.)
On this Bill Maher panel, in under three minutes, Barney Frank manages to completely bitch-slap GOP sock-puppet Stephen Moore and on the way by, fires a well-aimed scud-missile at the bullshit hypocrisy and self-delusion practiced by any gay person who works for the Reich Wing.
“There are fifteen year olds in this country today in high school whose lives are being made miserable because they’re gay and lesbian. And people who are themselves gay adults and are enjoying positions of power in Washington who advance that kind of abusive society, no, it has nothing to do with their economics, I find that contemptible.”
AMEN, Brother Frank, AMEN!!
And that’s the truth of it. Gay Republicans are as bad as Nazi collaborators. They are working with the people who would outlaw and exterminate their own kind. And to any moral person, that would be an untenable position. They are not entitled to privacy. It’s open season. I am going to be front and center enjoying every bit of the excruciating personal agony and political destruction that is going to rain down like fire from heaven on outed Republicans. The only reason that Mark Foley’s sexual orientation is germane to discussion of his being a sexual predator is because secrecy and repression lead to perversion and abuse like rain and sunshine lead to grass growing and flowers blooming. The kind of world the Republicans want where no one talks about what’s really going on is a playground for predators. The more closets there are in the world, the more damage will be done to young people and gay people of all ages. Period. ++
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
October 23rd, 2006
Yesterday on Face the Nation, I saw Elizabeth Dole enumerate all the things wrong with the Left in an air-headed partisan rant that made me shiver — in fact a family member walked through the room and said, “What’s wrong with her.” “She’s senile,” I responded. And if senility is an inability to separate oneself from their illusions about the past combined with a mental glitch that prevents one from thinking rationally, I was right. Bob’s not the only one with dysfunction in that household.
“What it will do, if the Democrats were to-to take over the Senate, it will weaken our security. Because Democrats have-have opposed the Patriot Act, which is a very important tool in fighting the global war against terror. They-they have voted against the missile defense system, which is so important in protecting us from rogue nations. And they’ve voted-they’ve also opposed the terrorist surveillance program. So I think it’s very clear between these two parties which one will provide the stronger tools to fight this global war against terror.”
Elizabeth gets the Presidential Kool Aid Schlepping Award … she’s the Poster Girl for the obtuse — and she’s damned right we oppose all those things! What she forgot to say — and perhaps doesn’t ken — is that so far, all those programs she thinks so highly of have NOT kept us safer as a nation and there IS no GWoT. What they have done is alienate the people from their government, and greased the skids by increments of liberties lost to the point where such a thing as the Torture Bill could pass almost unnoticed and unmourned.
The Only Story. And why do I keep pounding this one? Because as emergencies in this nation go, this is our biggest yet … 9/11 was a blip on the radar compared to the decline of habeas. I read an article the other day that said the fascist movement envisioned by Dubby’s grandfather and great-grand is upon us … there’s precedent for concern in this Bush family history. And we can tell ourselves that we’re not like the Germans, nobody in Germany fought back — but history keeps the count of the academics, the scientists, the intellectuals, the artists, the dissenters that were eliminated first so that the remaining population was plaint.
We’re not there yet — and I don’t believe we’ll go there; but that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a fight to stop the momentum that moves us, daily, closer to that reality. The majority of the nations people are now convinced that George is neither a trustworthy nor effective leader; but we know that it doesn’t take a majority to scoot someone up the ladder of power … we’ve seen that happen here … and when you consider the coup of powers ceded to this Executive, it’s not hard to imagine that once they’re in place they’ll have to be blasted out with dynamite.
The cogs are still turning … and it’s our job to slow them down. Which is why people like Olbermann and Moyers keep talking about imbalance of power and loss of liberty — today, Ralph Nader weighs in, among other excellent reads, below.
Jude
The Messianic Militarist in the White House
Ralph Nader
Saturday, October 21, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1021-20.htm
On October 17th, George W. Bush, signed into law a bill he bulldozed through Congress that, in Senator Patrick Leahy’s prophetic words, would suspend “the writ of habeas corpus, a core value in American law, in order to avoid judicial review that prevents government abuse.” This law, whose constitutionality is in doubt and will be reviewed by the Supreme Court in due time, puts so much arbitrary and secret unilateral power in the hands of the Presidency that the ghost of King George III must be wondering what all the fuss was about in 1776.
If you want more evidence of how obsessively-compulsed George W. Bush is about his wars, their fabrications, budgets and cover-ups, consider his cue card statement on the legislation at the White House signing ceremony. “It is a rare occasion when a president can sign a bill he knows will save American lives,” he declared.
Hello! He has rejected all kinds of occasions to save American lives here at home. He has refused to do anything about the widespread and preventable mayhem known as medical and hospital malpractice, while fanatically pushing for restrictions on the right of such victims or their next of kin to have their full day in court. At least 80,000 Americans die from malpractice just in hospitals every year, according to the Harvard School of Public Health.
The same Presidential pen could have saved thousands of more lives and prevented many more injuries were it to alight on safety legislation and larger budgets for reducing job-related sickness and trauma (58,000 lost lives a year) and air pollution (65,000 lives a year) – to name a few categories of preventable violence. But he signaled from the onset of his Presidency that such bills would be opposed from the getgo.
And once again remember his incompetence in letting U.S. soldiers – hundreds of them die in Iraq from the lack of adequate body armor.
At the signing event, Mr. Bush called the legislation “a way to deliver justice to the terrorists we have captured.” To him all captured subjects are ipso facto convicted terrorists. It is not as if his record gives any credence to such fantasies. But he persists in his deception none the less. Out of nearly 700 prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, he has charged only ten after over four years of detention. Ten! Why? Mostly, as military, civilian lawyers and other monitors have said, because the vast majority of these abused or beaten prisoners were innocent from the day of their apprehension – victims of bounty hunters in Afghanistan and surroundings.
It served Bush political purposes to say to the American people that Guantánamo Bay contained among the most evil of all people, so long as he could deny the innocents any opportunity to challenge their incarceration (habeas corpus) in an impartial tribunal. Until the Supreme Court ordered him to stop denying the “detainees” due process.
Here in the U.S. Bush has imprisoned without charges over 5000 people, as terror suspects. Ninety nine percent turned out to be innocent of accusations that they were engaged in terrorist activities. Given this batting average, it is troubling that Mr. Bush has the unchecked power to deprive those he imprisons, with or without charges and without attorneys, of habeas corpus. In these tribunals established by the new law, the defendants’ have no right to review evidence against them and cannot challenge Bush’s unbridled power to determine the definition of torture.
So vague are the law’s words that what constitutes “terrorist activity” and whether it can be used against U.S. citizens remain with the monarchical power of George W. Bush to decide.
Anyone who doubts the assertion that the new law will be used to remove any boundaries – constitutional, statutory or treaty – from restraining Mr. Bush and his subordinates should read the celebratory article by a former Bush Administration official, law professor John Yoo, in the Wall Street Journal. He reads the law as removing the courts – including the Supreme Court – from any judicial review of Bush’s “war on terror”. Mr. Yoo left out the obvious conclusion, which is that Mr. Bush is now, in this area, the legislative and the judicial authority – the dominator of checks and balances.
To Bush allies, such as Mr. Yoo, the boundless inherent power of the Presidency, does not ever include any recommendation that these poor, innocent souls, swept up by wasteful, boomeranging dragnet practices, be compensated for their brutalization and confinement.
Bush’s belligerent policies after 9/11, which caught him napping in Crawford, have served to provide recruitment grounds for more and more trained terrorists. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan. Pursuing policies against terrorism that create more terrorists have been noted by Bush’s own officials, not to mention scores of ex-military, diplomatic and intelligence officials who served in past Republican and Democratic administrations.
One would think, with such backing, the Congressional Democrats would have moved to block his rampages which have so lowered his public approval to below 40 percent.
None of this fazes or affects the messianic militarist in the White House. He continues his ways of endangering our nation, weakening its moral and political influence abroad, turning off more and more of the American people disgusted with the huge costs in lives and money, and deep-sixing his Republican Party. Even the latter achievement cannot rescue history’s description as an all-purpose, self-inflicted Wrecker-in-Chief. ++
McCarthyism Without Habeas Corpus
A Red Diaper Baby ponders what the 1950s would have been like if the government could have declared his parents ‘enemy combatants.’
Howard A. Rodman
Sunday, October 22, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1022-22.htm
I grew up in Brooklyn, in Red Brooklyn, in the arms of the Henry Wallace campaign and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts. At camp, I learned baseball and folk songs and equality, and instead of color war, we played war of nations, and somehow the Soviet team always won.
My mother was a communist who testified for the defense during the second Smith Act trials. My father served as a front for blacklisted writers. With his pals, my uncle chained himself to the Lincoln Memorial in 1946 to protest the continued incarceration of the remaining Scottsboro Boys. He had a doctorate in English at a time when that would get you a job, but he spent eight years driving a taxicab because every time he’d go for an interview, the FBI showed up the next day to ask, “Do you know who you’re about to hire?”
When my mother had an important phone call to make, she went to the payphone in the drugstore on Nostrand Avenue. When two men rang the doorbell and asked for my mother or my uncle, I was taught to tell them that we had nothing to say to them and that they should go away. They came fairly often, sometimes also asking for my father, who no longer lived with us.
My family and my friends’ families were Reds. In the eyes of the federal government, we were un-American. We were agents of a foreign power, enemies of the state. Some of us fled the country; others were jailed; a friend’s father responded to a subpoena by jumping out a window. The government brought whatever pressure it could to bear.
What do you think the government would have done if, in 1950, Congress had passed the equivalent of the military tribunals bill that President Bush signed into law Tuesday? If this law, which authorizes “trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes,” had then been the law of the land? Do you think my mother, with her Smith Act friends and her secret phone calls, would have been allowed to live the life of a free woman in Brooklyn? Or do you think she might have been classified as an “enemy combatant?” Do you think my uncle, who dreamed of the Spanish Civil War and chained himself to national monuments, would have been driving a cab, or pacing in his jail cell?
Both of them had Names in their heads, Names the government wished to know. If Roy Cohn had been allowed to use what we now call “enhanced interrogation techniques,” do you think he’d have refrained from using them?
If the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee had had the ability to suspend habeas corpus for Reds like us, don’t you think they would have suspended it?
I know many lives that were ruined with the tools the government then had at hand. Had it had bigger, better tools, would it have shown judgment? Tact? Reticence?
My mother always said that in the U.S. you had the right to One Phone Call, and that if the men who rang the doorbell came for her, if something were to happen to her, she would let me know. What if there were no One Phone Call? ++
Bush’s Absolute Power Grab
Carla Binion
Oct 22 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/2108
On October 17, George W. Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This new law gives Bush power similar to that of Stalin or Hitler, and grants agencies within the executive branch powers similar to those of the KGB or Gestapo.
Bush justifies this act by claiming he needs it to fight the “war on terror,” but a number of critics, including former counterterrorism officials, have said the administration has greatly exaggerated the threat and used illogical methods to combat terrorism. (Examples are listed below.)
Except for MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, few television news reporters have bothered to mention that the Military Commissions Act has changed the U.S. justice system and our approach to human rights. As Olbermann said of the new law on his October 17 Countdown program, the new act “does away with habeas corpus, the right of suspected terrorists or anybody else to know why they have been imprisoned.”
Jonathan Turley, George Washington University Constitutional Law Professor, was Olbermann’s guest. Olbermann asked him, “Does this mean that under this law, ultimately the only thing keeping you, I, or the viewer out of Gitmo is the sanity and honesty of the president of the United States?”
Turley responded, “It does. And it’s a huge sea change for our democracy. The framers created a system where we did not have to rely on the good graces or good mood of the president…People have no idea how significant this is. What, really a time of shame this is for the American system. What the Congress did and what the president signed today essentially revokes over 200 years of American principles and values.”
Although we have a free press, rather than follow Olbermann’s good example, most television news reporters have responded to this nullification of America’s fundamental principles by avoiding the subject. News networks which voluntarily relinquish their right and duty to challenge government officials function more as the Soviet Union’s Pravda or Hitler’s Nazi press program than as a genuinely free press.
Just as the mainstream media failed to adequately question the Bush administration’s many shifting rationales for invading Iraq in the lead-up to the war, they’re now failing to challenge Bush’s logic and motives as he justifies eviscerating the Constitution in the name of his ever-expanding “war on terror.” How realistic is this so-called war, and is the Bush administration conducting it effectively?
Robert Dreyfuss covers national security for Rolling Stone. He interviewed nearly a dozen former high-ranking counterterrorism officials about Bush’s approach to the war on terrorism. In his article, “The Phony War,” (Rolling Stone, 9/21/06) Dreyfuss says these officials conclude:
· The war on terror is bogus. Terrorism shouldn’t be treated as if it were a nation to be battled with the military, but should instead be fought with police work and intelligence agencies.
· Terrorism is not an enemy, but a method. Even if the United States were to wipe out every terrorist cell in the world today, terrorism would be back tomorrow.
· Bush lacks a clear understanding of the nature of the “enemy” and has no real strategy for dealing with them.
· The Bush administration confuses the issue by grouping “Al Qaeda” with everything from Iraq’s resistance movement to states such as Syria and Iran.
· Today, there’s virtually no real “Al Qaeda threat” to Americans.
· Bush’s policies have spawned a new generation of “amateur terrorists,” but there are few of them, and they’re not likely to pose a major threat to the U.S.
· Though Bush has said he will fight his “war” until every last terrorist is eliminated, terrorism can never be defeated, merely “contained and reduced.”
Dreyfuss says, “In the short term, the cops and spies can continue to do their best to watch for terrorist threats as they emerge, and occasionally, as in London, they will succeed. But they are the first to admit that stopping a plot before it can unfold involved, more than anything, plain dumb luck.”
Not only has the Bush administration falsely characterized and exaggerated the threat of terrorism; they have gone out of their way to mislead the public by claiming credit for preventing attacks. Dreyfuss points out that although Bush has claimed we’ve fended off 10 terrorist plots since 9/11, “on closer examination all 10 are either bogus or were to take place overseas.”
Dreyfuss also notes that, although in 2002 the Bush administration leaked to the press that Al Qaeda had 5,000 “sleepers” in the U.S., there were, in fact, none. (Or, as Dreyfuss says, not a single one has been found.) If the administration believes the facts bolster their case for a war on terrorism, why do they find it necessary to leak false information?
The administration has done little to secure U.S. borders, ports, airports and nuclear facilities. What could logically explain their inattention to these vulnerabilities if they believe a terrorist threat here is likely? Bush has said he’ll do anything it takes in order to protect the American people. Why hasn’t he secured our nuclear facilities?
Exaggerating the terrorist threat does give the Bush team an excuse to seize more power for the Executive and shred the Constitution. In an article for Foreign Affairs (September/October 2006), political science professor John Mueller supports Dreyfuss’s view that the war on terrorism is bogus.
Mueller points out that not only have there been no terrorist incidents here in the past five years, but there were none in the five years before 9/11. Mueller asks: “If it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could be so easily exploited?”
He also bolsters Dreyfuss’s conclusion that the Bush administration can’t take credit for the fact that we haven’t been attacked again. He says, “the government’s protective measures would have to be nearly perfect to thwart all such plans. Given the monumental imperfection of the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, and the debacle of FBI and National Security Agency programs to upgrade their computers to better coordinate intelligence information, that explanation seems far-fetched.”
Mueller addresses Bush’s irrational argument that we’re “fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here.” He points out that terrorists with Al Qaeda sympathies have managed to carry out attacks in a variety of countries (Egypt, Jordan Turkey, the United Kingdom), not merely in Iraq.
He adds that a reasonable explanation for the fact that no terrorists have attacked since 9/11 is that the terrorist threat “has been massively exaggerated.” He notes that “it is worth remembering that the total number of people killed since 9/11 by Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda-like operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year, and that the lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000 - about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor.”
Although Bush’s justification for the war on terror has been illogical and deceptive, the administration has used it as an excuse to abuse the U.S. military in Iraq, tear down our system of government at home and seize power on his own behalf. As Jonathan Turley told Keith Olbermann on his October 17th program, with the signing of the Military Commissions Act, “Congress just gave the president despotic powers…I think people are fooling themselves if they believe that the courts will once again stop this president from taking - overtaking - almost absolute power.”
Bush’s many power grabs and refusal to submit to usual constitutional checks and balances indicates he prefers monarchy or dictatorship to the government set up by America’s founders. The framers of our Constitution provided checks on tyranny by writing into law separation of powers, granting the legislative and judicial branches of government the ability to curb abuses by the executive. Today, the Congress has abdicated its constitutional obligation and serves only as a rubber stamp for the despotic president, and to date, the courts have done much the same.
Can George W. Bush be trusted with absolute power? Here are some things he has done with his unchecked power:
· Stolen two presidential elections.
· Exaggerated and falsely characterized the terrorist threat.
· Misled the country into war with Iraq.
· Urged the U.S. intelligence agencies to fix the intelligence around the Iraq war policy (as confirmed by the Downing Street Memo and other sources) in order to mislead the Congress and public into supporting war with Iraq.
· Abused human rights by promoting the use of torture and setting up virtual gulags.
· Suspended habeas corpus for some.
· Tried to silence political opposition by pronouncing them “weak on terrorism” or somehow “with the terrorists,” and
· Placed himself above the law by issuing more legislation-challenging signing statements (around 800) than all of his predecessors put together.
Bush’s unnecessary invasion of Iraq alone has cost nearly 3,000 American lives. An October 11, 2006 article by Greg Mitchell at Editor and Publisher says that a new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “suggests that more than 600,000 Iraqis have met a violent or otherwise war-related end since the U.S. arrived in March 2003.” The Mitchell article is here.
The Bush administration’s policies have not only resulted in high death counts, but also in widespread, out of control torture. A September 22, 2006 Christian Science Monitor report says:
“The United Nation’s special investigator on torture said Thursday that torture may now be worse in Iraq than it was during the regime of deposed leader Saddam Hussein. The Associated Press reports that Manfred Nowak, who was making a brief to the United Nations Human Rights Council about the treatment of detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, said the torture situation in Iraq was ‘totally out of hand.’”
The CS Monitor mentions the fact that the recent compromise between the Bush White House and dissident Republicans (including Senator John McCain) allows torture to continue. The article quotes a Washington Post piece:
“The bad news is Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects…It’s hard to credit the statement by [McCain] yesterday that ‘there’s no doubt that the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved.’ In effect, the agreement means that U.S. violations of international human rights law can continue as long as Mr. Bush is president, with Congress’s tacit assent.”
Congress has given Bush a blank check as he’s bulldozed toward an imperial presidency. We have the outward forms of democratic institutions such as Congress and a so-called free press. However, the people currently managing those institutions behave as if they’re being forced to serve a totalitarian dictator.
A perfect example of this surrender to Bush’s virtual despotism is Congress’s and the mainstream media’s compliance regarding Bush’s Military Commissions Act. While Keith Olbermann and Jonathan Turley see the extreme danger posed by Bush’s authoritarian moves, Congress has done little to challenge Bush, and, overall, the press is eerily silent.
In The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, William L. Shirer said the Reich Press Law of October 4, 1933, ordered editors not to publish (among other things) anything which “tends to weaken the strength of the German Reich or offends the honor and dignity of Germany.” According to Shirer, Max Amman, Hitler’s top sergeant during the war and head of the Nazi Party’s publishing firm and financial head of its press said that after the Nazis seized power in 1933, it was “a true statement to say that the basic purpose of the Nazi press program was to eliminate all the press which was in opposition to the party.”
The U.S. mainstream press doesn’t have to be coerced by a government Press Law to avoid publicly opposing Bush’s most egregious policies. Television news networks, in particular, have voluntarily held back serious scrutiny. They have not only failed to discuss the recent Military Commissions Act at length, but in the run-up to the Iraq war, liberal talk show host Phil Donahue and comedian Bill Maher were fired for challenging the White House spin about Iraq and the 9/11 attacks.
Shirer also describes the ease with which the German Reichstag gave Hitler the power to change the nature of Germany’s parliamentary democracy. He writes:
“One by one, Germany’s most powerful institutions now began to surrender to Hitler and to pass quietly, unprotestingly, out of existence…It cannot be said they went down fighting. On May 19, 1933, the Social Democrats - those who were not in jail or in exile - voted in the Reichstag without a dissenting voice to approve Hitler’s foreign policy.”
Shirer concludes: “The one-party totalitarian state had been achieved with scarcely a ripple of opposition or defiance, and within four months after the Reichstag had abdicated its democratic responsibilities.”
The U.S. Congress, like the German Reichstag, has abdicated its democratic responsibilities by granting Bush an inordinate amount of power - “with scarcely a ripple of opposition or defiance.” The U.S. press has abandoned its role as democracy’s watchdog by failing to question this development. Both of these institutions have failed the American people.
Considering Bush is using the war on terror to justify seizing undue power, both Congress and the media should question his reasoning and offer opposition. Just as they didn’t effectively challenge the administration’s shifting excuses for attacking Iraq, these institutions haven’t scrutinized Bush’s claims about the need for the Military Commissions Act and the apparently endless war on terrorism.
Among things Congress and the media should challenge is George W. Bush’s false claim that the United States does not torture. In an article published at the CommonDreams.org site, journalist Molly Ivins reports that in one case of death from torture by Americans, the military at first said the prisoner’s death was caused by a heart attack. Ivins adds that the coroner later said the heart attack occurred after the prisoner “had been beaten so often on his legs that they had ‘basically been pulpified.’”
She adds that the Bush administration’s officially sanctioning torture “throws out legal and moral restraints as the president deems necessary — these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law.” Ivins isn’t inclined to hyperbole, yet she says of Americans’ passive acceptance of this new law: “Do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis.”
As Jonathan Turley said on Olbermann’s program, “I think you can feel the judgment of history. It won’t be kind to President Bush. But frankly, I don’t think that it will be kind to the rest of us. I think that history will ask, ‘Where were you? What did you do when this thing was signed into law?’ There were people that protested the Japanese concentration camps; there were people that protested these other acts. But we are strangely silent in this national yawn as our rights evaporate.”
Future generations will wonder why the U.S. Congress and mainstream press helped Bush build up an imperial presidency and eliminate Constitutional protections. If they’re able to sort through the administration’s fallacies and lies and clearly see what went wrong with America during this time, they’ll wonder why there were so few Molly Ivinses, Keith Olbermanns and Jonathan Turleys.
Coming generations will also ask why by comparison there were so many who failed to notice the obvious holes in Bush’s logic and why so many turned a blind eye to his numerous false assertions and cruel policies. They’ll wonder why so many supported, whether by direct action or by silence, the Bush administration’s changing the fundamental nature of the democratic Republic we were given by America’s founders, based on the flimsy excuse of fighting a war on terrorism - a “war” Bush defines falsely and fights ineffectively.
Generations to come might ask why this president who lied so often, about Iraq and other critical matters, was ever entrusted with enough power to damage this country’s founding principles and wage endless, unprovoked war on other nations. If Congress and the media would ask these questions now, they might prevent Bush from doing further harm. This might save many lives, prevent much unnecessary suffering and possibly steer this country out of its present darkness. ++
The Evening of Empire
Hubris, Bravado and Hypocrisy
WERTHER
October 23, 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/
[open article for footnotes]
Note: Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.
When the admirable Tiberius upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. “Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?” He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: “How eager you are to be slaves.”
~ Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Amid the onrush of Caligulan sex scandals, suspension of the Constitution, depressing bulletins from the Babylonian front, and all manner of bogus “events,” a recent news item has passed with remarkably little public stir, despite being featured above the fold on the front page of The Washington Post, a bulletin board as eagerly read by the capital city’s strivers as Pravda in its day by the fellow-traveler, or Osservatore Romano by the untramontanist Catholic.
The article informs us that the President has signed off on a “National Space Policy.” The cornerstone of this new policy is the administration’s intention to “oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space. Proposed arms control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduct research, development, testing and operations or other activities in space for U.S. national interest.”
The document adds elsewhere that the new policy must “enable unhindered U.S. operations in and through space to defend our interest there.” Note the unctuous use of the modifier “our”–as if the interests of parasitic contractors, government placemen, and neoconservative scribblers constituted the res publica.
If the English language means anything, the plain intent of the policy is to assert that the United States (or rather its governing clique) can do anything it likes, and treaties be damned, including the Outer Space Treaty currently in force. This conclusion would be consistent with the administration’s treatment of other judicial impedimenta, such as the Geneva Convention or the late Constitution. Similar to the Senate’s craven grant of plenary power to the Roman Emperor, a supine legislative branch has encouraged the administration to believe its own whim is law–to make war, to torture, to “unsign” treaties.
Yet the Post journalist, in the idiot-savant manner made famous by Bob Woodward, stenographically quotes a “senior government official who was not authorized to speak on the record” as saying “This policy is not about developing or deploying weapons in space. Period.”
Ah, just as the Military Commissions Act was not about torture! How like the administration to assign one of its “senior” functionaries to pretend to speak without authorization in order to add verisimilitude to an assertion that it plainly wanted to disseminate–an assertion at odds with the plain text of its policy. And the Post’s reporter fell for it like a yokel at the Barnum circus. Thus the rest of the article becomes a fraudulent “debate” between the administration’s allegations and those of its critics; thereby lending weight to the presumption that there are legitimately “two sides” to any issue involving the administration.
While the Establishment press (other than the Post) gave little attention to the space policy story, the blogosphere (to the extent it paid any attention) behaved in a predictable fashion: the usual hand-wringing about the militarization of space, the unilateralism of the Bush administration, and forecasts of dark tidings generally. There is some truth to these assertions, but they are subsidiary to a more significant point.
The space policy document is not so much a blueprint as a symptom. But of what?–of fiendish Machiavells, plotting to storm the very heavens? Perhaps that is the intent of these laptop Flash Gordons, but between the desire and the fulfillment falls the shadow: the shadow of utter incompetence.
What is to be said about an administration which dreams of policing outer space, when for three and a half years its legions have been stalemated in their occupation of a broken-down country with a pre-war GDP less than that of Fairfax County, Virginia? The Iraq war has been such a riot of fecklessness as to take one’s breath away.
One is hard put to find a more badly fought war in our history. The United States, remember, entered the war with its defense expenditure already nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Vastly increasing the regular military budget since then, as well as piling on the $100+ billion annually for Iraq supplemental spending that “doesn’t count” against fictitious Congressional spending limits, has not improved matters.
Since the imperial court, and particularly its War Minister, Donald Rumsfeld, is so fond of World War II analogies, perhaps it is fitting to point out that the tone for the Iraq debacle was set by the establishment in the spring of 2003 of the Coalition Provisional Authority, a repository of more political hacks, shrieking poseurs, and ideological zealots than at any time since Hitler and Goering “cut up the giant cake” of the Ukraine by offering it to the administration of Nazi Party lay-abouts known derisively as “golden pheasants.”
The soldiers are now paying the price. Scanning the casualty lists, one is struck by the number of enlisted reservists over the age of 50. In a past war such hexagenarians would, for example, be cannon fodder for the Volkssturm’s last-ditch defense of Berlin. One also hears of a veteran of one Iraq deployment, who had been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and placed on suicide watch, being ordered back to Iraq.
If this is an imperial army, it smacks of late imperial Rome, plugging the gaps in its vast, ramshackle conquests with too few troops to stem the barbarian hordes. As if on queue, the Post’s op-ed page saw fit to air a solution to the troop dilemma on the day after its space policy story: neocon fanatic Max Boot and Establishment weathervane Michael O’Hanlon teamed up to advocate recruiting foreigners (including undocumented aliens) into the military as a step to citizenship. Shades of the Germanic volunteers in the Legions of Rome!
It is sufficiently ironic that a coterie which dreams of Zeus-like control of the heavens comes a cropper in a minor imperial project on terra firma. But what are we to say about the pretensions of a class that asserts such omnipotence, when the very borders of the country in whose name it rules are as permeable as cheese cloth?
One almost feels sympathy for the dilemma of our rulers. The mob that helped put this clique on the imperial throne is demanding that this southern invasion across the imperial limes be halted forthwith. And the proles know whereof they speak: their living standards are at risk, and while they can be mollified with television entertainment and sports spectacles, they, like the mob at the Circus Maximus, can be fickle in its loyalty to the imperial purple.
At the same time, the money barons who sustain the emperor and his retinue profit handsomely from the chaos on America’s southern border. The hordes who swarm across it work the latifundia of the great, E Coli-ridden corporate farms, pluck the chickens, and construct the houses of the luxuriating class. If one were a betting man one would lay odds the money barons will win and the borders will remain porous, the nascent totalitarianism of Homeland Security and the fury of the mob notwithstanding.
If the geographic situation of the United States, in the sense of the contrast between its far-flung (if futile) imperial ventures and its utter breakdown as a sovereign nation-state, is reminiscent of late Rome, then the economic basis of the empire completes the picture. The United States is no longer a producer, it is a ravenous consumer, now with an annual trade deficit of three-quarters of a trillion dollars (an unimaginable figure even ten years ago).
China, the favorite nation-state “national security threat” of the imperial gang, is a prime beneficiary of our governing class’s addiction to arbitraging labor. A war with China, while not an impossibility, is far-fetched. War would instantly empty the shelves of Wal-Mart; where would the people who earn Wal-Mart wages shop, other than Wal-Mart? One could foresee serious social instability (read: riots) as a result. Even if our rulers were competent enough to construct a space denial program to discomfit the Chinese, they could finance it only if the Chinese Central Bank remained strangely passive, and did not dump U.S. Treasury bills.
Thus it was with Rome:
“Rome lived on its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo.”
Seen in the historical perspective of an Edward Gibbon or a Winwood Reade, the Bush administration’s National Space Policy bears out neither the vain hopes of its authors nor the nagging fears of its critics. Rather, it is a gesture of bravado characteristic of empires in the evening of their existence. Logic might suggest that such empires would hive to the status quo, and avoid adventures that could drain their power. Logic, however, can be deceiving.
Just as the Emperor Valens embarked on a disastrous campaign against the Goths in 376, the Austro-Hungarian Empire rolled the dice in 1914, and the British embarked on the feckless Suez campaign of 1956 (significantly, when their finances were in terrible shape), so the American Empire doubles its bets at the casino of history. It would vault the firmament to bring its purported enemies to heel, when the very basis of its power is ebbing away.
It is the expression of late imperial hubris, not just of a mad emperor, but of a whole governing system. ++
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
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October 23rd, 2006