That Was The Week That Was … damned entertaining, if you dismiss the lies and ignorance and disturbing bits and pieces, and of course the whole of it doesn’t say anything flattering about humankind, but we’re used to that. A couple of laughs are buried in here, one that has to do with the cannibal [you KNEW there’d be one!] and another regarding the new Australian prime minister … after you find that last, I’d like you to consider this — if not his own, then whose?
Got a bonus for you today — I watched Karl Rove interviewed by Charlie Rose the other night and … by cracky … that Karl is slicker ‘n snot. If Dubby got the entirety of his world view from Cousin Karl, then I finally get why we are where we are today. Below, you’ll find some commentary on Karl’s allegation that Dubby was PUSHED into the Iraq War before he was ready. And who was the dastardly perp that would do such an evil thing? Why CONGRESS, of course, and all against George W’s wishes.
Pathological, ain’t it?
TW3 and a bonus, of the day.
Jude
HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
November 27, 2007
Teams of biologists in Japan and Wisconsin discovered
new methods for transforming human skin cells into
“induced pluripotent stem cells.” Both techniques employ a
retrovirus to inject the cells with four “master regulator”
genes that reprogram the cells’ function. The Wisconsin
team, directed by James A. Thompson, who pioneered
the harvesting of embryonic stem cells, culled its
skin cells from foreskins. The Japanese team conducted
their preliminary research on mice, with a cancer gene
among the regulators, and created in the process a
mischief of clone mice, 20 percent of which developed
cancer. President George W. Bush was said to be “very
pleased” that the innovation might render the use of
embryonic stem cells obsolete, but critics said it was
too soon to tell whether the synthesized stem cells would
prove as versatile as those from embryos. An American
nuclear scientist projected that the number of deaths
caused by depleted uranium in ammunition fired on Iraq
would exceed those caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. “The environment is now completely radioactive,”
said Leuren Moret. “The genetic future of the Iraqi people,
for the most part, is destroyed.” Ian Smith, the Rhodesian
prime minister who promised 1,000 years of white rule in
Africa, died, and authorities in Zimbabwe were arresting
satirists. Australian voters elected the Labor Party’s
Kevin Rudd prime minister, replacing conservative John
Howard, a Bush ally who failed to retain his own seat in
Parliament. Rudd, who has been videotaped eating his own
earwax, said he would push for Australia to ratify the
Kyoto Protocol on climate change, leaving the United States
the lone holdout. Fourteen thousand refugees fled wildfires
in Malibu, California, and the British government admitted
that it had lost computer disks containing the personal
information of more than one third of its citizens.
Exiled prime minister Nawaz Sharif returned to Pakistan. “I
have come,” he said, “to save this country.” There was
a power vacuum in Lebanon after the Parliament failed
to elect a new president, and in Annapolis, Maryland,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice convened a meeting of
Middle Eastern leaders, excluding Iran and Hamas, which
controls the Gaza Strip. “We must not view Annapolis as
a failure,” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said before
the summit started. “Nothing good will come out of it,”
said Riham Abu Khater, a 17-year-old Gazan woman attending
a protest march. “Good will only come from the language
of fighting, and from force.” Hamas pledged to pack
more explosives in its homemade rockets, and Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, “Participation in
this summit is an indication of the lack of intelligence
of some so-called politicians.” The Interfaith Rainbow
Coalition Against Homosexuality in Uganda protested a
summit of British Commonwealth leaders in Kampala. “I asked
President Museveni to get us an island on Lake Victoria
and we take these homosexuals and they die out there,”
said Sheikh Ramathan Shaban Mubajje of an earlier meeting
he had with Uganda’s head of state. “If they die there,
then we shall have no more homosexuals in the country.”
Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan released an
excerpt of his forthcoming memoir. The passage states that
he “unknowingly” lied when he denied that White House aides
Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby participated in
the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. McClellan vaguely
confesses that “Rove, Libby, the vice president [Dick
Cheney], the president’s chief of staff [Andrew Card],
and the President himself” were “involved” in his relaying
“false information,” but he stops short of saying that
Bush and Cheney knew they were telling him to lie. Al
Gore visited the White House, and amateur investigators
in Russia found the charred bones of two teenage children
of Tsar Nicholas II murdered along with their father,
mother, and three siblings by Bolshevik agents in 1918,
dispelling the rumor that a Romanov prince or princess
had escaped execution. Abraham Bolden, a former Secret
Service agent, told reporters that a plot by Cuban
exiles to kill President John F. Kennedy in Chicago
was uncovered three weeks before his assassination in
Dallas. The would-be assailants, who had allegedly rented a
motel room overlooking Kennedy’s motorcade route and were
said to possess automatic rifles with telescopic sights,
were never caught, and the investigation, Bolden claimed,
was covered up. Kennedy’s 86-year-old sister Eunice was
hospitalized with an undisclosed illness, and UNAIDS,
the United Nations agency that fights AIDS, lowered
its estimate of the number of people infected with the
disease worldwide, from 39.5 million to 33.2 million. Armin
Meiwes, a convicted German cannibal, was elected leader
of his prison’s Green Party chapter and announced that
he had become a vegetarian. Citing Schrodinger’s cat,
cosmologists speculated that humans’ observation of dark
matter, beginning in 1998, might bring about the premature
destruction of the universe.
– Christian Lorentzen
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/11/WeeklyReview2007-11-27
Rove: “Congress Pushed Bush to War in Iraq Prematurely”
Paul Abrams, HuffPo
November 25, 2007
You are not going to believe this, well, actually you will… According to Karl Rove (on Charlie Rose), the Bush Administration did not want Congress to vote on the Iraq War resolution in the fall of 2002, because they thought it should not be done within the context of an election. Rove, you see, did not think the war vote should be “political”.
Moreover, according to Rove, that “premature vote” led to many of the problems that cropped up in the Iraq War. Had Congress not pushed, he says, Bush could have spent more time assembling a coalition, and provided more time to the inspectors.
If you are like me, you have stopped reading/listening, and are rushing to get your anti-emetic.
It is worth remembering that the Senate in the fall of 2002 was controlled, barely, by Democrats. Get it? George Bush, we are being told, wanted to delay, wanted to hold back, wanted to take the time to build a coalition and let the inspectors finish their job, but that damn Congress just pushed him into it. George Bush, you see, is a careful, prudent, leader, deeply concerned about the consequences of premature.
Get it? If Biden, Clinton, Dodd or Edwards is part of the Democratic ticket, the Republicans will run a campaign charging the Senate Democrats with rushing to judgment, of pushing the poor President to premature…(well, you fill in the blank)….
Not that Iraq is that big of an issue. Rove claims that, if Iraq had been a big issue, that Joe Lieberman, who was pro-war, could not have won in Connecticut, defeating receiving more Democratic, Independent and Republican votes than any of his opponents.
I have purposefully NOT provided the (obvious) answers to his claims because to answer is to give him control of the argument. That’s Rove’s tactic, and I have written about that many times in these pages.
Instead, this should be used as a trigger to talk about Rove’s history of dissembling, how that is reflected in the Bush Administration’s entire approach to public policy and public information. Bush, through Rove, should be attacked for trying to escape responsibility and accountability. And, it will help to make some historical references to rulers whose tenure was so dismal that they could not allow historians to provide objective analyses, and thus try to write the history themselves.
As might have been predicted, Rove raises “historical revisionism” to new depths, what may become known as “hysterical Rovisionism.”
Reminder to Rove: There’s no memory hole to hide your lies on Iraq
David Edwards and Nick Juliano, Raw Story
Wednesday November 28, 2007
The latest claim from the onetime “Mayberry Machiavelli Karl Rove” so closely mirrors a discarded chapter from a George Orwell novel that his estate should sue for “copyright violation,” MSNBC host Keith Olbermann said Tuesday.
What is President Bush’s former political brain-trust trying to sell the American people now?
The architect of Bush’s rise to power made the outrageous assertion last week that the Iraq invasion was the fault of Congress, not the White House. The Bush administration — according to Rove’s revisionism — was simply aghast that a critical and controversial vote to let the president unleash US troops against Saddam Hussein came just weeks before lawmakers were to stand for re-election.
“One of the untold stories about the war is … this administration was opposed to voting on (the authorization the use of military force) in the Fall of 2002,” Rove claimed with a straight face and apparently uncrossed fingers in a pre-Thanksgiving appearance on PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show.
Of course, as Olbermann notes, “It’s an untold story because it isn’t true.”
Using a “rogue Web site called WhiteHouse.gov,” Olbermann quickly undercuts Rove’s assertion.
“Despite Rove’s claim that the White House opposed voting on Iraq in the Fall of 2002,” Olbermann said, “on the first full day of Fall that year, the president urged Congress to pass an Iraq resolution, quote, ‘promptly.’ A week later, the president and the House Republicans agreed on an Iraq resoulution. A week after that President Bush was ‘pleased’ with the House vote on Iraq, and a week after that Mr. Bush signed the authorization for the use of military force in Iraq.”
Olbermann, and his guest Arianna Huffington, noted the similarity of Rove’s apparent attempt to rewrite history to the dystopian role played by the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s classic 1984.
“We’ve all used George Orwell references and 1984 references so much that the estate of Eric Blair ought to be suing us for copyright violations,” Olbermann said. “But this really is that book, isn’t it? Can’t you just see John Hurt [who played lead character Winston Smith in a film version of the book] talking into the dictaphone rewriting the old newspapers with Karl Rove over his shoulder to eliminate inconvenient facts? Is this not the practical application of he who controls the past controls the future.”
Huffington reminder her guest that technology in the 21st century makes it much harder to shuffle inconvenient facts down the memory hole.
“The only problem is when 1984 was written, Google and Lexis Nexis did not exist, and now they do,” she said.
“I don’t think there is any possibility that what Karl Rove is saying has any connection to the truth,” Huffington said later. “There is just too much evidence. … We have the Downing Street Memo that shows that they were already fixing the intel. They were determined to use 9/11, to use the president’s incredible popularity at the time, to use the spinelessness of the Democrats to take us to war as fast as possible. It doesn’t matter what Karl Rove says. The truth is the truth. It exists. It’s real. And he can’t change it.”
Wednesday morning, hosts on MSNBC’s Morning Joe found Karl Rove’s rewritten history equally unbelievable.
This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown and MSNBC’s Morning Joe, broadcast on November 27 and 28, 2007 [open link for video.]
Karl Rove’s Shameless, Remorseless, Soulless Attempt to Rewrite History
Arianna Huffington, HuffPo
November 28, 2007
I went on Countdown last night to talk about what Keith Olbermann called Karl Rove’s “attack on history.”
During an interview with Charlie Rose, the erstwhile Boy Genius pulled out his bucket of whitewash and audaciously claimed that “one of the untold stories” about the war in Iraq is that the Bush administration had been “opposed’ to Congress holding the vote authorizing the president to use military force in Iraq just a few weeks prior to the 2002 elections because “we thought it made it too political.”
Too political? For Karl Rove? That’s like saying something was too bloody for Count Dracula.
He went on to paint a picture of a White House pushed into war, and laid the blame for much of what has happened since on a Congress that had “made things move too fast.”
If not for Congress, you see, there would have been more time for weapons inspections, and to build a broader coalition.
It was a satiric tour de force worthy of Jonathan Swift or Stephen Colbert — but Rove wasn’t joking. He actually expected us to buy his load of b.s. Watching Rove, two things were perfectly clear: his disdain for the truth and his contempt for the American people know no bounds.
Rove’s appearance was the work of a shameless, remorseless, soulless political animal taking the first steps on what will no doubt be a high profile and lucrative march toward historical revisionism. He knows that he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the fanatics responsible for the worst foreign policy disaster in American history — not exactly the best thing to put on your post-government resume — so he is hell-bent on replacing reality with the latest incarnation of The Big Lie.
A student of history, Rove is obviously also up on his Orwell: “Who controls the past, controls the future.”
Unfortunately for Rove, this isn’t 1984; we now live in the Age of Google, and YouTube, and Lexis-Nexis searches. So the refutation of his lies is just a click away.
The evidence that it was President Bush and Vice President Cheney — and not Congress — who were hungry for war is overwhelming. For starters, we have Bush’s own words before the vote, when he explicitly told Congress that “it’s in our national interest” to get the vote “done as quickly as possible.” And the insistence of then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld that “delaying a vote in Congress would send the wrong message.” And the words of then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle who says that when he asked Bush in September 2002 why there was such a rush for a vote on Iraq the president “looked at Cheney and he looked at me, and there was a half-smile on his face. And he said: ‘We just have to do this now.’”
And there is the insider evidence provided by Richard Clarke, who wrote that within hours of the 9/11 attacks, this administration had its heart set on heading into Iraq. And from Paul O’Neill, who made it clear that invading Iraq had been Bush’s goal before he had even learned where the Oval Office supply closet was.
Even now, with his approval ratings scraping the bottom of the historical barrel, Bush still dominates the Congressional agenda on the war. And Rove wants us to buy that back in the heady days of 2002, when the president was still riding a wave of support forged by 9/11, his desire for caution and reasoned action were overridden by a war hungry Congress? “We don’t determine when the Congress votes on things,” Rove told Rose.
“The Congress does.” I guess he and Bush landed on the whole “I’m the Decider” thing later (maybe after they orchestrated that triumphal landing on the Abraham Lincoln).
The truth is that the zealots in the White House were not about to allow their desires to invade Iraq — which had been laid out years earlier by the Project for a New American Century — be quashed by anything as piddling as the facts or the evidence or reasoned debate or Congress. Especially a Congress populated with Democratic leaders so rattled and timid that to call them spineless would be an insult to invertebrates everywhere.
Indeed, it was the perfect political environment for an administration intent on shoving a war down the throats of Congress and the American people.
Let’s remember, this was the time when the administration had pulled together the White House Study Group (which included Rove himself) with the express mission of marketing the war. These people weren’t in the mood to wait, they were in the mood to sell, sell, sell. The Downing Street Memo showed that by July of 2002 they were already fixing the intel to sell the war. By August 2002 the White House was already using Judy Miller and the New York Times as prime advertising space. And by September 2002, Condi Rice was already warning of smoking guns turning out to be mushroom clouds, and Cheney was using aluminum tubes to make the case that Saddam was “actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.”
So the record is irrefutable: the drumbeat of war coming from the White House couldn’t have been louder. And no amount of 5-years-down the road spinning by Karl Rove is going to change that truth.
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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.
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November 28th, 2007
Former GOP House Speaker Denny Hastart is scooting out of Congress early, as you probably know — he joins a long list of retirees from the GOP, who see the handwriting on the wall. Now he’s joined by Minority Whip Trent Lott who was recently reelected until 2012 — scuttlebutt has it that Trent wants to bypass the new lobbying rules that make you wait two years to join their ranks. Funny — I thought being elected to a post was “public service” and you served your term, barring extraordinary circumstances. We aren’t even a pimple on the butt of who we used to be, are we!?!
Other news is buzzing about Georgie’s attempt to bring peace to the table with Israel and Palestine at his pending summit … I’m still laughing. “Peace” is hardly Dubby’s forte … and likely not his goal. This is apparently performance art to keep the little woman happy [Condi.] Dan Froomkin calls it an “indolent approach” — I call it a bad joke.
Rather than do a MSM roundup, I thought I’d give you some great reads, collected over the last couple of days. The first two include suggestions for activism — the third is by national treasure Bill Moyers. Then you’ll find a Krugman and other interesting articles, all a pleasure to read.
The last two amuse me … the race for prez “officially” began a few days ago and we’re already in sticker shock; but at least we’ve had a good look at what we’re supposed to be buying. The Huckabee article is spot on — and a Kucinich/Paul ticket just makes me scratch my head as I ponder the possibilities.
Happy reading!
Jude
SIGN THE PLEDGE!
Trim Bush from American History
Ted Rall, Yahoo
Mon Nov 26
PROVINCETOWN, MASSACHUSETTS–A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column that resonated with a lot of people.
Since 2001, I noted, “We’ve lost our right to see an attorney, to confront our accusers, even to get a fair trial. Government agents have kidnapped thousands of people, most of whom have never been heard from again. Bush even signed an edict claiming the right to assassinate anyone, including you and me, based solely on his whims. Torture, the ultimate sign that civilized society has been replaced by a police state,” has been legalized.
None of the major presidential candidates are currently promising to do what it would take to restore democracy: close Gitmo and the CIA torture chambers, get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, revoke the protofascist USA-Patriot and Military Commissions Acts, obey the Geneva Conventions and turn over Bush, his torturers, his Congressional allies and his top civilian and military officials to an international war crimes tribunal for their role in the murders of more than one million Afghans and Iraqis.
The politicians are too timid to do what’s right. But we can bully them into it. Let’s begin America’s long slog toward moral and political redemption by demanding that our next president’s first act be to declare the Bush Administration null and void. Every law and act carried out between 12 noon on January 20, 2001 and January 20, 2009 should just…go…poof.
My readers are cranky, distrustful and smart. (You can read their comments at tedrall.com.) Rallblog readers are all over the place politically: old-school Democrats, Goldwater Republicans, libertarians, socialists, anarchists, even neoconservatives. But they’re speaking out as one about my call to expunge the legacy of the Bush Administration: Yes. Yes. Hell, yes!
Let’s make it happen!
Now is the time. Write (an actual letter, not email) to your favorite presidential candidate and declare that you are a single-issue voter. Swear that, if he or she agrees to sign the following Pledge, your vote is assured. If not, promise to stay home or vote for someone else.
“I, ______________, hereby solemnly pledge that my first act upon assuming the office of President shall be to sign an American Renewal Act of 2009, which shall declare all laws, regulations, executive orders, treaties and actions undertaken by the federal government during the illegitimate and unlawful administration of George W. Bush to be null, void and without effect.”
Sound crazy? So did Thomas Paine in 1775. As a practical and legal matter, however, consigning Bush to the dung heap of history makes more sense than revolting against the British.
First, the law.
George W. Bush’s January 20, 2001 inauguration was unconstitutional. This isn’t because Bush lost the popular vote. Nor is it because he lost Florida and thus the electoral vote. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Florida recount lawsuit, Bush v. Gore, violated the U.S. Constitution. It’s a states’ rights issue. Elections fall under state law; the highest court that may resolve a legal challenge about an election is a state supreme court. The U.S. Supreme Court–a federal body–didn’t have jurisdiction in the case.
An American Renewal Act is merely a confirmation of two centuries of standard practice.
There are precedents. After France was liberated in 1944, incoming president Charles de Gaulle declared the collaborationist government of Marshall Henri-Philippe PĆ©tain null and void. (It was a stretch. Unlike Bush, who carried out a judicial coup, PĆ©tain came to power legally.) In any case, PĆ©tain vanished from textbooks. Numerous laws passed between 1940 and 1944, dealing with matters like taxes and construction projects, had to be debated and passed all over again.
The Southern secession of 1860 was perfectly legal, yet laws and currency issued by the Confederate government in the South were invalidated by the victorious Union in 1865.
The main argument for erasing Bush and his nefarious deeds is a legal one: official acknowledgement that the 2000 election was stolen gets the U.S. back on the path to democracy. (Should Al Gore should be allowed to serve the term he won in 2000? I don’t know.)
There’s also an ethical principle at stake. As de Gaulle said about PĆ©tain’s partnership with the Nazis, the Bush Administration so disgraced itself and our nation that we have to renounce it in order to restore our moral authority, to be able to face citizens of other, less despicable, countries in the eye.
Another argument is based on power. Imagine that Gore had seized power in 2000 instead. Now imagine that he had turned as rabid as Bush, that he had ruled as far to the left as Bush has to the right. Businesses would have been nationalized. Healthcare would have been socialized; doctors would be federal employees. Taxes on the rich would have soared while the poor got off scot-free. Republican protesters at the Democratic National Convention would have gotten beaten up and thrown into filthy internment facilities for days on end. Crazy Gore would have apologized for foreign policies that provoked the 9/11 attacks. To prove he meant it, he would have sent troops to overthrow the world’s most heinous dictators, all U.S. allies, in Uzbekistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.
Now imagine that, over the years, Gore’s policies had ruined the economy and mired the military in endless, losing wars. That people had turned again him to the same degree that they’ve rejected Bush. As Frank Rich writes in The New York Times, only 24 percent of Americans approve of the Bush Administration–almost as bad as the image of the U.S. in Pakistan.
You can bet that the Republicans, after they took back power, would carry out the mother of all rollbacks. Gore, the rogue president, would probably wind up in prison. There’s no reason to treat Bush and his policies any more gently.
“We are a people in clinical depression,” writes Rich. “Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.” Anyone who reads Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA” knows the U.S. was damned far from perfect before Bush came along. But Rich’s broader point is correct. Falling short of lofty ideals is better than forgetting about them.
Demand that the major presidential candidates sign the Pledge for American Renewal.
We know the woman and half-dozen men who are leading in the polls want to rule us.
But will they lead? ++
If Bush Attacks Iran, He Won’t Get My Taxes
Chris Hedges, Truthdig via Alternet
November 27, 2007
I will not pay my income tax if we go to war with Iran. I realize this is a desperate and perhaps futile gesture. But an attack on Iran — which appears increasingly likely before the coming presidential election — will unleash a regional conflict of catastrophic proportions. This war, and especially Iranian retaliatory strikes on American targets, will be used to silence domestic dissent and abolish what is left of our civil liberties. It will solidify the slow-motion coup d’Ć©tat that has been under way since the 9/11 attacks. It could mean the death of the Republic.
Let us hope sanity prevails. But sanity is a rare commodity in a White House that has twisted Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution into a policy of permanent war with nefarious aims — to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to strip citizens of their constitutional rights.
A war with Iran is doomed. It will be no more successful than the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon in 2006, which failed to break Hezbollah and united most Lebanese behind that militant group. The Israeli bombing did not pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen when we begin to pound a country of 65 million people whose land mass is three times the size of France?
Once you begin an air campaign it is only a matter of time before you have to put troops on the ground or accept defeat, as the Israelis had to do in Lebanon. And if we begin dropping bunker busters and cruise missiles on Iran, this is the choice that must be faced: either send US forces into Iran to fight a protracted and futile guerrilla war, or walk away in humiliation.
But more ominous, an attack on Iran will ignite the Middle East. The loss of Iranian oil, coupled with possible Silkworm missile attacks by Iran against oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, could send the price of oil soaring to somewhere around $200 a barrel. The effect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating, very possibly triggering a global depression. The Middle East has two-thirds of the world’s proven petroleum reserves and nearly half its natural gas. A disruption in the supply will be felt immediately.
This attack will be interpreted by many Shiites in the Middle East as a religious war. The two million Shiites in Saudi Arabia (heavily concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern Province), the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey could turn in rage on us and our dwindling allies. We could see a combination of increased terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and widespread sabotage of oil production in the Persian Gulf. Iraq, as bad as it looks now, will become a death pit for US troops.
The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which has so far not joined the insurgency, has strong ties to Iran. It could begin full-scale guerrilla resistance, possibly uniting for the first time with Sunnis against the occupation. Iran, in retaliation, will fire its missiles, some with a range of 1,100 miles, at US installations, including Baghdad’s Green Zone. Expect substantial casualties, especially with Iranian agents and their Iraqi allies calling in precise coordinates. Iranian missiles could be launched at Israel. The Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, will become treacherous, perhaps unnavigable. Chinese-supplied antiship missiles, mines and coastal artillery, along with speedboats packed with explosives and suicide bombers, will target US shipping, along with Saudi oil production and oil export centers.
Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon, closely allied with Iran, may in solidarity fire rockets into northern Israel. Israel, already struck by missiles from Tehran, could then carry out retaliatory raids against both Lebanon and Iran. Pakistan, with its huge Shiite minority, will become even more unstable. Unrest could result in the overthrow of the already weakened Pervez Musharraf and usher Islamic radicals into power. Pakistan, rather than Iran, would then become the first radical Islamic state to possess a nuclear weapon. The neat little war with Iran, which many Democrats do not oppose, has the potential to ignite an inferno.
George W. Bush has shredded, violated or absented America from its obligations under international law. He has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, backed out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International Criminal Court, walked out on negotiations on chemical and biological weapons and defied the Geneva Conventions and human rights law in the treatment of detainees. Most egregious, he launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public. He seeks to do the same in Iran.
This President is guilty, in short, of what in legal circles is known as the “crime of aggression.” And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for this crime, if we do not actively defy this government, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have terrifying consequences. For a world without treaties, statutes and laws is a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, will be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. This new order will undo five decades of international cooperation — largely put in place by the United States — and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. We must as citizens make sacrifices to defend a world where diplomacy, broad cooperation and the law are respected. If we allow these international legal systems to unravel, we will destroy the possibility of cooperation between nation-states, including our closest allies.
The strongest institutional barrier standing between us and a war with Iran is being mounted by Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Adm. William Fallon, head of the Central Command; and Gen. George Casey, the Army’s new chief of staff. These three men have informed Bush and Congress that the military is too depleted to take on another conflict and may not be able to contain or cope effectively with a regional conflagration resulting from strikes on Iran. This line of defense, however, is tenuous. Not only can Gates, Fallon and Casey easily be replaced but a provocation by Iran could be used by war propagandists here to stoke a public clamor for revenge.
A country that exists in a state of permanent war cannot exist as a democracy. Our long row of candles is being snuffed out. We may soon be in darkness. Any resistance, however symbolic, is essential. There are ways to resist without being jailed. If you owe money on your federal tax return, refuse to pay some or all of it, should Bush attack Iran. If you have a telephone, do not pay the 3 percent excise tax. If you do not owe federal taxes, reduce what is withheld by claiming at least one additional allowance on your W-4 form — and write to the IRS to explain the reasons for your protest. Many of the details and their legal ramifications are available on the War Resisters League’s website.
I will put the taxes I owe in an escrow account. I will go to court to challenge the legality of the war. Maybe a courageous judge will rule that the Constitution has been usurped and the government is guilty of what the postwar Nuremberg tribunal defined as a criminal war of aggression. Maybe not. I do not know. But I do know this: I have friends in Tehran, Gaza, Beirut, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Cairo. They will endure far greater suffering and deprivation. I want to be able, once the slaughter is over, to at least earn the right to ask for their forgiveness. ++
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. He spent seven years in the Middle East and reported frequently from Iran. His latest book is American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.
My Father and FDR
Bill Moyers, The Nation
Wednesday 21 November 2007
Bill Moyers gave the following remarks at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute’s twentieth-anniversary Four Freedoms ceremony, where he received the Freedom of Speech award.
Thank you for this recognition and the spirit of the evening. Thanks especially for giving me the chance to sit here awhile thinking about my father. Henry Moyers was an ordinary man who dropped out of the fourth grade because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make ends meet.
The Depression knocked him off the farm and flat on his back. When I was born he was making two dollars a day working on the highway to Oklahoma City. He never made over $100 a week in the whole of his working life, and he made that only when he joined the union on the last job he held. He voted for Franklin Roosevelt in four straight elections, and he would have gone on voting for him until kingdom come if both had lived that long. I once asked him why, and he said, “Because the President’s my friend.”
Now, my father never met FDR. No politician ever paid him much note, but he was sure he had a friend in the White House during the worst years of his life. When by pure chance I wound up working there many years later, and my parents came for a visit, my father wanted to see the Roosevelt Room. I don’t know quite how to explain it, except that my father knew who was on his side and who wasn’t, and for twelve years he had no doubt where FDR stood. The first time I remember him with tears in his eyes was when Roosevelt died. He had lost his friend.
We can’t revive the man and certainly we wouldn’t want to revisit the times, but we can rekindle the spirit. There are 37 million people in this country who are poor; there are 57 million who are near poor, making $20,000 to $40,000 a year - one divorce, one pink slip, one illness away from a free fall. That’s almost one-third of America still living on the edge. They need a friend in the White House. My father, with his fourth-grade education and two fingers with the missing tips from the mix-up at the cotton gin, got it when Roosevelt spoke. “I can’t talk like him,” he said, “but I sure do think like him.” My father might not have had the words for it, but he said amen when FDR talked about economic royalism. Sitting in front of our console radio, he got it when Roosevelt said that private power no less than public power can bring America to ruin in the absence of democratic controls.
Don’t think for a moment he didn’t get it when Roosevelt said that a government by money was as much to be feared as a government by mob, or when he said that the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. My father got it when he heard his friend in the White House talk about how “a small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor - other people’s lives.” My father knew FDR was talking for him when he said life was no longer free, liberty no longer real, men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness - against economic tyranny such as this. And my father listened raptly when his friend the President said, “The American citizen” - my father knew the President was speaking of him - “could appeal only to the organized power of government.”
So thank you for reminding us that liberalism is less about ideology and doctrine than about friendship and faith - the bond between a patrician in the White House and a working man on the Texas-Oklahoma border and their mutual belief in America as a shared project. Thank you for this reminder of how we might yet turn the listing ship of state. My father thanks you, too. ++
Republicans and Race
Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Monday 19 November 2007
Over the past few weeks there have been a number of commentaries about Ronald Reagan’s legacy, specifically about whether he exploited the white backlash against the civil rights movement.
The controversy unfortunately obscures the larger point, which should be undeniable: the central role of this backlash in the rise of the modern conservative movement.
The centrality of race - and, in particular, of the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support of Democrats to overwhelming support of Republicans - is obvious from voting data.
For example, everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.
More than 40 years have passed since the Voting Rights Act, which Reagan described in 1980 as “humiliating to the South.” Yet Southern white voting behavior remains distinctive. Democrats decisively won the popular vote in last year’s House elections, but Southern whites voted Republican by almost two to one.
The G.O.P.’s own leaders admit that the great Southern white shift was the result of a deliberate political strategy. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.” So declared Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, speaking in 2005.
And Ronald Reagan was among the “some” who tried to benefit from racial polarization.
True, he never used explicit racial rhetoric. Neither did Richard Nixon. As Thomas and Mary Edsall put it in their classic 1991 book, “Chain Reaction: The impact of race, rights and taxes on American politics,” “Reagan paralleled Nixon’s success in constructing a politics and a strategy of governing that attacked policies targeted toward blacks and other minorities without reference to race - a conservative politics that had the effect of polarizing the electorate along racial lines.”
Thus, Reagan repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen - a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud. He never mentioned the woman’s race, but he didn’t have to.
There are many other examples of Reagan’s tacit race-baiting in the historical record. My colleague Bob Herbert described some of these examples in a recent column. Here’s one he didn’t mention: During the 1976 campaign Reagan often talked about how upset workers must be to see an able-bodied man using food stamps at the grocery store. In the South - but not in the North - the food-stamp user became a “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks.
Now, about the Philadelphia story: in December 1979 the Republican national committeeman from Mississippi wrote a letter urging that the party’s nominee speak at the Neshoba Country Fair, just outside the town where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. It would, he wrote, help win over “George Wallace inclined voters.”
Sure enough, Reagan appeared, and declared his support for states’ rights - which everyone took to be a coded declaration of support for segregationist sentiments.
Reagan’s defenders protest furiously that he wasn’t personally bigoted. So what? We’re talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant.
Why does this history matter now? Because it tells why the vision of a permanent conservative majority, so widely accepted a few years ago, is wrong.
The point is that we have become a more diverse and less racist country over time. The “macaca” incident, in which Senator George Allen’s use of a racial insult led to his election defeat, epitomized the way in which America has changed for the better.
And because conservative ascendancy has depended so crucially on the racial backlash - a close look at voting data shows that religion and “values” issues have been far less important - I believe that the declining power of that backlash changes everything.
Can anti-immigrant rhetoric replace old-fashioned racial politics? No, because it mobilizes the same shrinking pool of whites - and alienates the growing number of Latino voters.
Now, maybe I’m wrong about all of this. But we should be able to discuss the role of race in American politics honestly. We shouldn’t avert our gaze because we’re unwilling to tarnish Ronald Reagan’s image. ++
The Republicans who would’ve impeached Bush?
Not so long ago, members of Congress put the rule of law above partisan politics and loyalty to the White House.
Vincent Rossmeier, Salon
Nov. 26, 2007
During the past six years, leading Republicans in Congress have prioritized allegiance to a Republican president above all other governmental and constitutional concerns. But there was a time when U.S. lawmakers, regardless of party affiliation, actually voted the way of their conscience. There was a time when a president could not break the law or ignore a summons from Congress with impunity. Indeed, by the height of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, a number of congressmen — including Republicans staunchly loyal to their party — acted to uphold the law and make Nixon accountable.
Today, the main concern of lawmakers seems to be the preservation of power and the entitlements that come with it. Republican allies of the White House have blocked congressional investigations into the Bush administration’s alleged misdeeds, including illegal spying on Americans’ phone calls. In 2006, the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Pat Roberts, R-Kan., thwarted an investigation into warrantless eavesdropping by the National Security Agency. While serving as chairman of the Judiciary Committee prior to the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006, Arlen Specter, R-Pa., though a vocal critic of the spying, failed to initiate any investigations into Bush’s wiretapping program, despite ample evidence that it violated the existing FISA laws. Meanwhile, top Democrats, including Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Dianne Feinstein of California, have shown a willingness to cave into Bush’s demands, including retroactive immunity for American telecom companies that assisted the government’s spying.
The Bush era has drawn various comparisons with the Nixon era, but what seems forgotten from that time is the courage exhibited by a handful of lawmakers, once fiercely loyal to the president, who ultimately decided to impeach him. In recent interviews with Salon, some of those former congressmen spoke about their reasons for risking their political career and taking a principled stand, the kind that seems so unlikely on Capitol Hill today.
In the spring of 1974, allegations filled the airwaves that Nixon had misused the CIA and FBI and had spied on Democratic opponents. A summer of contentious televised deliberations, conducted by the House Judiciary Committee, resulted in a vote in favor of three articles of impeachment. After thoroughly examining the evidence, a handful of Republicans decided to break ranks with the party and vote with the majority. They were joined by two Democrats from conservative Southern districts who ignored pressure and even threats of violence from their Nixon-supporting constituencies to vote the way the facts demanded. (The release of an audiotape directly implicating Nixon in the Watergate burglary led to his resignation on Aug. 9, before the full House could vote on the impeachment.)
At the outset of the deliberations, Rep. Peter Rodino of New Jersey, the Democratic chairman of the 38-member committee, stated that “the law must deal fairly with everyone.” But particularly for the Republicans from conservative districts, voting for impeachment meant not only going against their party, but also potentially angering their constituents and sacrificing their political career.
One them was M. Caldwell Butler of Virginia. In Nixon’s 1972 landslide reelection, Butler’s district had voted 73 percent in Nixon’s favor. In an interview given for a 1984 PBS documentary titled “Summer of Judgment: The Impeachment Hearings,” Butler said that when the Judiciary Committee began its deliberations, he was “still very defensive of the president.” Yet, by the end of that summer, he became one of the decisive Republican votes that sealed Nixon’s fate.
Behind his large, Coke-bottle glasses, Butler gave a rousing and emphatic speech to the committee that today seems both resonant and remote:
If we fail to impeach, we have condoned and left unpunished a course of conduct totally inconsistent with the reasonable expectations of the American people. We will have condoned a presidential course of conduct designed to interfere with and obstruct the very process he has sworn to uphold. We will have condoned and left unpunished an abuse of power totally without justification. In short, a power appears to have corrupted. It is a sad period in American history, but I cannot condone what I have heard, I cannot excuse it and I cannot and will not stand still for it.
Now 82, Butler told Salon in a recent interview that impeachment was “warranted because of the president’s conduct.” From his perspective, the impeachment was never a partisan issue. “I didn’t have any problem separating the Republican problem,” he said. “It was my first term in Congress, and I wasn’t all that crazy about the job anyway … I think it would have been a terrible thing if we had decided to vote strictly along party lines in the committee.”
However, Butler did feel pressure from his constituency to vote against impeachment. “Everyone one of us Republicans and Southern Democrats were from areas that had strong Nixon support in the previous election, so we all felt in jeopardy.”
Other Republicans who voted for articles of impeachment were Tom Railsback of Illinois, William Cohen of Maine, Harold Froehlich of Wisconsin, Lawrence Hogan of Maryland, Robert McClory of Illinois and Hamilton Fish of New York.
Railsback, now 75 and living in California, said in an interview that voting for impeachment was especially difficult for him because he considered Nixon a friend. But Railsback emphasized that despite this relationship, and despite his being a Republican, he made an independent decision. “I was never pressured directly by any of the White House people or the president or [White House chief of staff] Al Haig or John Mitchell or anybody else, nor was I pressured by the leadership of the Republican side of the House or Senate,” Railsback said. “I did talk to George Herbert Walker Bush. [Bush was then chair of the Republican National Committee.] He and I are good friends, and he was interested in my opinion. I didn’t tell him how I was going to vote or anything like that, but I let him know that I had some concerns.”
Railsback says that his party affiliation only made him more resolute in seeking the truth. “Because I was a Republican, I felt an additional responsibility to get what I thought was an accurate view of the facts and the evidence,” he said. “I just couldn’t worry about [voting against a Republican president]. I felt that the best thing we could do was what we thought was right.”
Like Butler, Railsback received considerable pressure from his conservative constituency to vote against impeachment. “There were some people in my district who were upset and we also had — this was not in my district — but we also had some bomb threats by mail that were being examined by the Postal Service prior to delivery,” he said.
“I think for us, particularly the Republicans, [the impeachment] wasn’t something we were very happy about or wanted to celebrate,” he added. “Looking back, I think all of us on the committee knew that what we were doing would likely be the most important legislative work that we would ever be required to do.”
Democrats from conservative districts, James Mann of South Carolina and Walter Flowers of Alabama, also took a risky stand. Mann, whose district had voted 78 percent in favor of Nixon in 1974, became the most outspoken and influential of the Southern Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. During the committee proceedings, Mann addressed his colleagues in his distinct Southern drawl: “Are we so morally bankrupt that we would decide that the system that we have is incapable of sustaining a system of law because we are imperfect?” Mann worried about the precedent the committee would set if it ignored Nixon’s assaults on the Constitution — future presidents might use Nixon’s example as justification for their own transgression of the law.
Mann developed Alzheimer’s in 2000 and was unable to be interviewed for this article. But his son, James Mann Jr., who helped his father write the first and second articles of impeachment in 1974, recently explained his father’s reasons for voting for Nixon’s ouster. “He would not have gone against his convictions to get reelected, of that I’m certain, and everybody that knows him would say the same,” said Mann Jr. “He felt strongly that the evidence was there.” Mann Jr. explained that his father became convinced of Nixon’s guilt only after plowing his way through volumes of evidence provided by John Doar, special counsel to the Judiciary Committee, who had conducted the committee’s investigation. His father had not gone into the hearings already convinced of Nixon’s guilt.
However, Rep. Mann’s decision was a fraught one. “He heard from hundreds of people, including his own mother, that you just can’t do this,” said Mann Jr. During the televised Watergate hearings, he said, two U.S. marshals were stationed outside the Mann household in South Carolina at all times. His father received numerous death threats once it became clear that he was going to vote in favor of impeachment. “My mother stayed in the kitchen in the back of the house to watch TV, where she normally would have watched in the front of the house. And she tried to stay out of the view of the windows,” he said. But his father “did not waver once he made his decision.”
It should not seem far-fetched for a politician to put conscience before party loyalty or political prospects. As Butler and Railsback put it, and as Mann Jr. said about his father, they and the other lawmakers who held Nixon accountable were only doing their job. But it is hard not to label their efforts as heroic in light of today’s inaction on Capitol Hill.
Near the close of the Watergate committee’s proceedings, James Mann Sr. issued a prophetic statement. He said, “If there be no accountability, another president will feel free to do as he chooses, but the next time, there may be no watchmen in the night.” ++
Mike Huckabee Is Not a Sane Man
Matt Taibbi, Alternet
Nov 24 2007
Mike Huckabee, the latest It Girl of the Republican presidential race, tells a hell of a story. Let your guard down anywhere near the former Arkansas governor and he’ll pod you, Body Snatchers-style — you’ll wake up drooling, your brain gone, riding a back seat on the bandwagon that suddenly has him charging toward the lead in the GOP race.
It almost happened to me a few months ago at a fundraiser in Great Falls, Virginia. I’d come to get my first up-close glimpse of the man Arkansans call Huck, about whom I knew very little — beyond the fact that he was far behind in the polls and was said to be very religious. In an impromptu address to a small crowd, Huckabee muttered some stay-the-course nonsense about Iraq and then, when he was finished, sought me out, apparently having been briefed beforehand that Rolling Stone was in the house.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he told me. “I finally get to tell someone who cares about Keith Richards.”
Before I could respond, Huckabee plowed into a long and very entertaining story — one that included a surprisingly dead-on Pirates of the Caribbean-esque impersonation — about how Richards and Ron Wood got pulled over for reckless driving while on tour in Fordyce, Arkansas, a million and a half years ago, in 1975. Richards ended up getting a misdemeanor conviction — an injustice that stood for thirty-one years, until Huckabee, a would-be rock musician himself, stepped in and pardoned Richards last year.
“It’s a long process, pardoning,” Huckabee said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “It takes a lot of paperwork. And the funny thing is, people said to me afterwards, ‘Governor, you’ll do that for Keith Richards, but you wouldn’t do that for an ordinary person.’ And my answer to that is always, ‘Hey, if you can play guitar like Keith Richards, I’ll consider pardoning you, too.’ ”
Huckabee, who in recent years has lost 100 pounds, has the roundish, half-deflated physique of an ex-fatty. With his button nose and never-waning smile, he looks slightly unreal, like an oversize Muppet. I was so taken aback by his appearance that I checked his hands to make sure they had the right number of fingers. After the Richards tale, he went on to tell me about the band he plays bass for, and how he has jammed with the likes of Percy Sledge and Grand Funk Railroad, and how he prefers John Entwistle to Flea’s slap-and-pop style of bass-playing. Ten minutes later, driving away from the fund-raiser, I caught myself thinking: Hey, this guy doesn’t seem like a total dickhead. I can almost see him as president. …
Then I woke up and did some homework that changed my mind. But I confess: It took a little while. Huckabee is that good.
Ever since Huckabee turned in a dominating performance at a summit of Christian voters in Washington a few weeks ago, he has been riding a surge among likely Iowa voters (he’s now second to Mitt Romney, and gaining). The media, like me, have been charmed by their initial impression: “It’s hard not to like Mike Huckabee,” gushed Newsweek. Even The Nation said he has “real charm.”
But all the attention on his salesmanship skills obscures the real significance of his rise within the Republican Party. Mike Huckabee represents something that is either tremendously encouraging or deeply disturbing, depending on your point of view: a marriage of Christian fundamentalism with economic populism. Rather than employing the patented Bush-Rove tactic of using abortion and gay rights to hoodwink low-income Christians into supporting patrician, pro-corporate policies, Huckabee is a bigger-government Republican who emphasizes prison reform and poverty relief. In the world of GOP politics, he represents something entirely new — a cross between John Edwards and Jerry Falwell, an ordained Southern Baptist preacher who actually seems to give a shit about the working poor.
But Huckabee is also something else: full-blown nuts, a Christian goofball of the highest order. He believes the Earth may be only 6,000 years old, angrily rejects the evidence that human beings evolved from “primates” and thinks America wouldn’t need so much Mexican labor if we allowed every aborted fetus to grow up and enter the workforce. To top it off, Huckabee also left behind a record of ethical missteps in the swamp of Arkansas politics that make Whitewater seem like a jaywalking ticket.
All of which begs the question: If this religious zealot’s rise represents the end of corporate dominance of the Republican Party, is that a good thing? Or is the real thing even worse than the fraud?
On October 30th, fresh off new polls showing him gaining ground all over the country, Huckabee holds an informal round-table luncheon with reporters at a posh restaurant on the Hill called the Monocle. This is the aristocrat political press, the esteemed Washington bureau reps of the big dailies and the newsweeklies, all white and mostly all in suits and silk ties. It’s something of a coming-out party for Huckabee, who has put this thing together to give the Beltway big dogs a sniff of his surging newcomer ass.
The luncheon starts out friendly, with reporters tossing Huck softballs about his newfound momentum and his suddenly beefed-up war chest. But once they run out of bullshit horse-race questions, they start in on him about his credentials as a right-winger. One reporter asks how his support of the “fair tax” (an alternative to the flat tax that some conservatives believe is skewed in favor of low-income Americans) qualifies as conservative; two others badger him about raising taxes to build roads in Arkansas; and a third, remarkably, asks Huckabee if it’s proper for a conservative to even talk about poverty on the campaign trail.
What the press doesn’t understand is that Huckabee has changed the equation of party-specific orthodoxies. A generation of GOP candidates have used the poor as a whipping-post stage prop, complaining about lazy, frantically copulating homeless fiends living in cars, fucking up the property values of Decent Folk. Huck turns that rhetoric around by saying, “We shouldn’t allow a child to live under a bridge or in the back seat of a car.” It’s a brilliant innovation for a candidate like Huckabee, who recognizes that the only thing he has to lose by talking about poverty and high CEO salaries is the support of the big-money wing of his party — something he doesn’t have anyway.
Choosing that strategy also allows Huckabee to do what no evangelical since Jimmy Carter has, which is talk about his faith in terms of sympathy for the underprivileged. “You can’t just say ‘respect life’ exclusively in the gestation period,” he says. Huckabee also edges openly into class politics, criticizing his own party for harping on the supposed success of the overall economy. “The reality is, there are many families that really are working as hard or harder than they’ve ever worked in their lives, and they’re not seeing that pay off,” he says.
For Huckabee, such lines aren’t just lip service. As governor of Arkansas, he outraged Republicans with his plan to expand health coverage for children, his embrace of refugees from Katrina and his support for subsidized higher education for the children of illegal immigrants. Worse still, from a Republican standpoint, Huckabee showed little hesitation in raising taxes to pay for such programs — one analysis claims that new taxes initiated during his tenure resulted in a net tax increase of $505 million. Even Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times and one of Huckabee’s most ferocious critics, concedes that the candidate’s populism isn’t an act. “I don’t question his sincerity on that,” he says of Huckabee, who, like Bill Clinton, grew up in modest circumstances. “He identifies with ordinary people.”
Patrician conservatives of the Bush school are alarmed by Huckabee’s challenge to traditional Republican thinking. “His record is really one of expanding government and raising taxes,” says Pat Toomey, president of the influential Club for Growth. Adds conservative pollster Frank Luntz, “Huckabee has an anti-CEO message that resonates with small-business conservatives. He’s the only Republican who regularly talks about Wall Street accountability.”
While a few Republicans have played with populist rhetoric in the past — Pat Buchanan comes to mind — it’s been ages since conservative voters had any viable alternatives to the soak-the-poor elitism of Newt Gingrich and George Bush. But that may be changing. Huckabee’s current surge on the national scene mirrors the rise during the 2006 midterm elections of so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats — candidates like Indiana’s Brad Ellsworth and North Carolina’s Heath Shuler who helped unseat the Republican majority in Congress with a mix of populist economics and religious dogma. “Huckabee’s exactly like the Blue Dogs,” says Brantley. “They have the same message.”
Coupled with his apparent gift for wooing the star-fucking national media class, Huckabee’s seizure of political territory long claimed by the corporate right is what makes him so dangerous. Because for all his political waffling in other areas — Huckabee has flip-flopped on a host of earthly political issues, from taxes to local control of school boards — he leaves absolutely no doubt about his commitment to religious wackohood.
George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic. But it doesn’t take much exposure to Huckabee to see that this former understudy of a Texas televangelist is deadly serious about the God thing. On the trail, Huckabee is most animated when he’s talking about religious issues. In the first Republican debate in New Hampshire, Huckabee, apparently unaware that human beings are primates, responded to a question about evolution by saying, “If anybody wants to believe that they are the descendants of a primate, they are certainly welcome to do it.”
Huckabee gave an even more damning glimpse into his inner batshit self in a recent appearance at the Prestonwood Baptist Church near Dallas, where he told audiences that Christians are sitting in the pole position of the race to Armageddon. “If you’re with Jesus Christ, we know how it turns out in the final moment,” he said. “I’ve read the last chapter in the book, and we do end up winning.”
Winning? I ask Huckabee when, exactly, he thinks victory will arrive. “When I was eighteen, I thought I had it pretty well figured out,” he says. “I thought the end of the world was coming at any moment.” But when I ask how his views have changed, he says only that he is “less adamant now.” Huckabee, with the wisdom of age, apparently believes we have at least a day or two left until the end of the world.
The troubling thing about Huckabee’s God rhetoric is that a man who is glad that Christians will “win” at Armageddon must be happy about the rest of us losing. When I press him on whether he believes all non-Christians are eternally damned, Huckabee is evasive. “Being president isn’t about picking who goes to heaven and who goes to hell,” he says. When none other than Bill O’Reilly hammered him on the same point a day later, Huckabee conceded that “I believe Jesus is the way to heaven.”
This God stuff isn’t just talk with Huck. One of his first acts as governor was to block Medicaid from funding an abortion for a mentally retarded teenager who had been raped by her stepfather — an act in direct violation of federal law, which requires states to pay for abortions in cases of rape. “The state didn’t fund a single such abortion while Huckabee was governor,” says Dr. William Harrison of the Fayetteville Women’s Clinic. “Zero.”
As president, Huck would support a constitutional amendment banning abortion and would give science a back seat to religion. “Science changes with every generation and with new discoveries, and God doesn’t,” he says. “So I’ll stick with God if the two are in conflict.” Huckabee’s well-documented disdain for science was reflected in the performance of the Arkansas school system when he was governor; one independent survey gave the state an F for its science standards in schools, a grade that among other things reflected Huckabee’s hostility toward the teaching of evolution.
Huckabee at most times is gentle and self-deprecating in his public address, but when he talks about religion, he gets weirdly combative and obnoxious, often drifting into outright offensiveness. At one appearance, Huckabee — who’s been known to make fart jokes in front of the state legislature — said he would oppose gay marriage “until Moses comes down with two stone tablets from Brokeback Mountain saying he’s changed the rules.” And he recently scored a rare offend trifecta, simultaneously pissing off immigrants, Jews and the pro-choice crowd when he ludicrously claimed that a “holocaust” of abortions had artificially created a demand for Mexican labor.
Huckabee also has a televangelist’s knack for getting caught with his fingers in various cookie jars. In his first year as governor, Huck used a $60,000 taxpayer fund for personal expenses like dog food, pantyhose and meals at Taco Bell. (One of his sons — also a very heavy man, as his father was — reportedly joked that “there’s not a Huckabee alive that can eat at Taco Bell for seven dollars.”) The governor also tried to keep $70,000 in furnishings for the governor’s mansion supplied by a local cotton grower, and used inaugural funds to pay for clothes for his wife. “Mike is first and foremost about Mike,” says Brantley. “He’ll nickel-and-dime whoever he can to line his pockets.”
Huckabee has also been accused of paying himself as a consultant to his own senatorial campaign, allowing special interests to pay for airline tickets for his daughter, receiving a canoe from a Coke bottler and — hilariously, if you’re wont to laugh at the sheer small-town gauche greediness of it all — setting up a “wedding registry” at Target and Dillard’s department stores so citizens could lavish the Huckabees with gifts as they renewed their marriage vows. The long list of desired goodies included twenty-four settings of Lenox “Holiday Nouveau” china, a KitchenAid mixer and a “Jack La Lanne power juicer.”
If you didn’t want to pick out something yourself, the Huckabees were glad to take straight cash. “Message from the couple,” the registry noted. “Target GiftCards are welcome.”
Brantley suggests that a lot of this behavior stems from a Southern tradition of ponying up to the local preacher. “If you’re the pastor of a church and you’ve got a guy who owns a men’s clothing store, you expect the guy to give you a couple of new suits every year,” says Brantley. “But Huckabee continued on like that as governor.”
The Arkansans I spoke with about Huckabee invariably describe him as thin-skinned and petty. One evangelical Arkansas Republican who has worked in several GOP campaigns says a family member provided free services to Huckabee just as he had for other preachers, believing that he was helping out someone who was “doing the Lord’s work.”
But the extent of Huckabee’s gift-gouging, the man says, was unprecedented: “It’s never been understood that that’s what you do for politicians.”
So far, Huckabee’s greedy past hasn’t prevented him from surging in the polls. Unlike the rest of the woefully underwhelming field of Republican candidates, Huckabee is a sincere, ideologically in-tune champion of a massive and frustrated conservative demographic. The fact that he is succeeding in spite of his obvious and undisguised lunacy is a testament to the desperation of the voting public, which is so hungry for a candidate who actually responds to its needs that it may be willing to overlook extraordinary levels of kookiness. That might also explain the stubbornly high levels of support for Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, who, though comparatively saner than Huckabee, have still been cast as the nutty uncles of the campaign’s interminable family drama.
Make no mistake, Huckabee can win this thing. None of his four main rivals — Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and John McCain — can claim to represent the Christian right. His biggest problem is money: Apart from a few prominent bundlers culled from the ranks of Arkansas-based Wal-Mart, Huck has largely been ignored by the big-money players in his own party. But even here he is steadily gaining: After raising $6,000 a day in the first quarter, he is now racking up $30,000 a day, much of it from small donors. That money could enable Huckabee to compete hard in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, where his relentless God-humping figures to score big at the polls. “We’ve got to do well in the early primaries,” he says. “If we do, there’ll be a total upheaval of the process.”
When Huckabee talks like this, he sounds like what he is — the Howard Dean of the Republican Party, an insurgent candidate who shot toward the top by appealing to a disaffected base. But Dean, who ended up stumbling out of Iowa with his balls stuffed in his mouth, learned the hard way that populist campaigns have a way of imploding under the glare of the modern campaign process. Which means: Charm only goes so far if you’re full-bore nuts. Huckabee may be able to get away with saying he’s not a primate, but he’d better not scream it. ++
Dennis Kucinich wants to hook up with Ron Paul
236.com
November 26, 2007
Ohio congressman and Democratic presidential longshot Dennis Kucinich told supporters over the weekend that he’s thinking about wild-card GOP hopeful Ron Paul as a running mate, because their administration could bring people together “to balance the energies in this country.” Paul, the libertarian doctor-congressman from Texas, holds diametrically opposed views from Kucinich’s on abortion, health care, and taxes, so, according to a Paul spokesman, a joint ticket “would never work,” but the two candidates do agree on ending the war in Iraq and protecting civil liberties.
Even if it’s just a fantasy, the Democratic-Republican joint ticket idea is delicious. Sure, the parties disagree on almost everything, but where could they come together? ++
āSo keep fightinā for freedom and justice, beloveds, but donāt you forget to have fun doinā it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickinā ass and celebratinā the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.ā ~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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November 27th, 2007
