TW3 — and don’t let the door hit ya …

June 19th, 2008

That Was The Week That Was … productive, I’d suppose, what with the Supreme decision; but odd, as usual. I’m scratching my head over R. Kelly — I guess I’ll have to do some research to satisfy myself.

The bonus reads are cool — farewell pieces to Dubby and the Pub’s I’ve had in my files, and poll numbers from today that will lift your spirits.

Jude

HARPER’S WEEKLY
June 17, 2008

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that detainees held as “enemy
combatants” by the United States in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
have a constitutional right to challenge their detention
through habeas corpus petitions in federal
courts. “Liberty and security can be reconciled…within
the framework of the law,” wrote Justice Anthony
M. Kennedy in the court’s decision. “The Framers decided
that habeas corpus…must be…a part of that law.”
Dissenting, Chief Justice John Roberts asked, “So who has
won? Not the detainees. The Court’s analysis leaves them
with only the prospect of further litigation.” Defense
lawyers for the detainees moved to establish that their
clients have the right to other constitutional protections
and sought to halt ongoing military-commission trials,
which permit hearsay and evidence gained from
torture. John McCain called the ruling “one of the worst
decisions in the history of this country.” Barack Obama
said, “I think the Supreme Court was right.” Obama, who
admitted to smoking cigarettes in recent months, also told
supporters that he anticipated a “brawl” with McCain and the
Republican National Committee: “If they bring a knife to
the fight, we bring a gun.” Jacob Bertrand, an employee at
a home-improvement store in Colorado, was arrested for
shooting a coworker twenty times in the chest and nose
with a nail gun, throwing a garbage can at him, and
attempting to set him on fire by dousing him in lacquer
thinner. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia pledged to calm the
world by raising his kingdom’s oil production, and
geneticists were developing bugs that eat woodchips and
excrete petroleum.

Taliban forces raided a prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan,
allowing 870 prisoners to escape. Afghan President Hamid
Karzai threatened to send troops across the Pakistan
border to fight the Taliban, and British and American
special forces were operating in Pakistan in an attempt to
capture Osama Bin Laden before George W. Bush leaves
office. “If he can say he has killed Saddam Hussein and
captured Bin Laden,” a U.S. intelligence source told the
“Times” of London, “he can claim to have left the world a
safer place.” Sheikh Ali al-Neda, the head of Saddam
Hussein’s tribe, was killed by a car bomb, and it was
reported that Pakistani smuggler A. Q. Khan possessed
blueprints for nuclear warheads more advanced than those
he is known to have sold to Libya, though it was unclear
whether he had sold them to North Korea or Iran. Dozens of
passengers died when a plane careened upon landing and
exploded in Sudan. It was announced that former Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s son, Omri, who was jailed
for campaign-finance corruption, will be released early
for good behavior, and Hamas declared that the elder
Sharon’s three-year vegetative coma is “a sign from Allah”
in punishment for Sharon’s ordering the death in 2004 of
wheelchair-bound Hamas cofounder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. A
German sportswriter, late for a flight to Vienna to cover
the European soccer championships, was arrested for
calling in a hoax bomb threat from his cell phone in an
attempt to delay his plane. The Treaty of Lisbon, which
reiterates many of the reforms proposed in the discarded
European Union Constitution, was rejected by voters in
Ireland, and a corpse-laden “quake lake” in the Sichuan
province of China was being drained.

Kyrgyz novelist Chingiz Aitmatov and television journalist
Tim Russert died. Two Anglican priests married in London,
and research showed that same-sex marriages are more
egalitarian than opposite-sex marriages. Investors from
Abu Dhabi were seeking to purchase Manhattan’s Chrysler
Building. Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was
planning to start a vulture real estate fund, backed by
labor unions, to profit off foreclosures resulting from
the national credit crisis; the manager of the
prostitution ring Spitzer patronized, Mark Brener, pleaded
guilty to conspiracy charges; and the prostitute who
serviced Spitzer, Alexandra Ashley Dupre, photographed
enjoying a day at the beach with her mother, was observed
to have a tattoo in Latin on her upper pelvis that reads
“tutela valui”-or, loosely translated, “I used
protection.” One in four adults in New York City were
infected with the virus that causes genital herpes, and
floods forced tens of thousands of Midwesterners from
their homes. After twice watching a video that,
prosecutors alleged, showed R&B singer R. Kelly having sex
with and urinating on his then 13-year-old goddaughter, a
jury in Chicago acquitted the 41-year-old on 14 counts of
child pornography. Responding to a Father’s Day 911 call
in Stanislaus County, California, about a man who was
kicking and beating his toddler by the side of the road,
police descended in a helicopter, shot and killed the man,
and found that his son, beaten beyond recognition, was
dead. Rats, it was discovered, are more likely to
cannibalize their young if their cages are clean.

– Christian Lorentzen
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/06/WeeklyReview2008-06-17

Bonus

Bye George
On the eve of George Bush’s visit to London as part of his farewell tour, an open letter to the departing US president sums up his legacy, both to his own country and Britain
David Edgar, The Guardian,
Saturday June 14 2008

Dear Mr Bush (forgive me, I can’t quite manage “Mr President” or even “George”),

We won’t be meeting in person, and we won’t even be adjacent, as our government has banned a march (from Parliament Square, tomorrow teatime) in protest against your visit.

The fact that this isn’t much of a surprise is one of the baleful consequences of your presidency. If we did meet, I’d probably ask if you ever speculate how things might have fallen out had supreme court Justice Anthony Kennedy switched sides on December 12 2000, and (an “if”, I know) you’d lost the Florida recount and the election. I’d do so because my first beef about your presidency is that it denied us Al Gore’s.

OK, a Gore victory wouldn’t have stopped 9/11, and he would probably have been persuaded to take punitive action against Afghanistan. But invading Iraq would have destroyed his party, and, after all, Saddam Hussein didn’t try to kill his daddy. Following Bill Clinton’s latter efforts, he would have paid more serious attention to resolving Israel/Palestine. But, most of all, he would have given authority and leadership to confronting our most important, and probably most urgent, global challenge. What did you do about your global carbon emissions? Pull out of Kyoto.

For all the talk of confronting evil-doers and mounting crusades - surely the most accidentally apt analogy of your presidency - the moral cynicism of your attitude to climate change is emblematic. (You do, now, admit to some “commonalities” on the issue with the rest of the world). Your promise to return moral probity to the Oval Office emptied out as soon as you got your feet under the desk.

Few remember your acceptance speech in the Texas House of Representatives, chosen because of its record of bipartisan cooperation, in which you reiterated your commitment to an inclusive “compassionate conservatism”, and hinted at an administration that would acknowledge the thinness of its mandate. What happened next? One of the largest tax kickbacks to the rich in history. By 2012, the lowest 20% of US citizens will have gained $45 (£23) from your 2001 and 2003 tax-cut programme. Those with incomes over $1m a year will be $162,000 better off. Truly, as Joseph Stiglitz puts it, a rising tide will lift all yachts. This 10-year tax cut round gave $1.35 trillion to the American rich. To give an idea of its enormity: you’ve “only” spent half a trillion in Iraq. The combined $1.85 trillion?

Universal healthcare introduced. Public education transformed. The social security timebomb defused at a stroke. You are spending in two weeks on the war what you spend in Africa in a year.

Following 9/11, America received a proper wave of international sympathy for its victims, who hailed from every corner of the planet. Understandably caught up in a wave of grief and defiance, the House of Representatives voted for the display of signs proclaiming God Bless America in schools, and the New York Board of Education passed a resolution requiring all public schools to lead a daily pledge. You set about removing the liberties that that pledge celebrates, with relish and a will.

Cornering the market in breathless acronyms, the Senate’s Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act increased government powers to conduct searches, deport suspects, eavesdrop on internet communications and monitor financial transactions. You appointed Iran/Contra scandal veteran John Poindexter to run an agency tasked with creating “Total Information Awareness” of your fellow Americans. The government can insist that libraries report what books they lend to whom. In a triumph of understatement, your press secretary warned that “people have to watch what they say and do”.

These “people” were Americans. This was before you started up on everybody else. This was before Guantánamo, and Abu Ghraib, and extraordinary rendition. This was when it was still a surprise to hear civilised, sensible politicians and commentators debating the efficacy of torture.

And then, there was the 2005 election, in which lines snaked round polling stations in South African proportions, and John Kerry received the largest democratic vote in history. Sadly, your election supremo managed to persuade sufficient numbers of previously non-voting Ohian Christian fundamentalists that a vote for Kerry was a vote for gay marriage to secure your reelection. You had already sought to do God in politics with a zeal unknown in US history. White House spokesmen contrast the “reality-based” reasoning of godless journalists with their own “faith-based” thinking. You have made a climate more conducive to creationism than at any time since the John Scopes monkey trial of 1925, in matters great and small.

Most of all, you have polarised the world, between good and evil, good guys and bad guys, us and them. One of the ironies of the Manichean, “clash of civilisation” model, which has split the world on your watch, is that the very aspects of literal, Wahhabist Islam that westerners have proper worries about - the death penalty, the subordination of women, homophobia, censorship, aggressive warmaking, the divine authority of leaders - are aspects you don’t have that much trouble with.

And then, there’s your effect on us over here.

Even those without illusions about Labour’s new dawn thought the Blair government would do three good big things. First, it would reverse the widening gap between rich and poor. Second, it would protect and perhaps update Britain’s much vaunted democratic and civil liberties. And third, the government’s obvious ease with the diversity of modern Britain would embed multiculturalism into our institutions and practices.

All three were going reasonably well, until Mr Blair went to Washington. We know what joining your invasions cost us. What did we get in return? We imported your excuse for the Iraq invasion, and so we also imported the collapse in trust which followed its unravelling. Increasingly, the patriotic values that our government invites newcomers to sign up to have looked less like a welcoming mat and more like a watchtower. In his famous January 2006 “stick a flag in your lawn” speech, Gordon Brown cited a “golden thread” of British freedoms - from Magna Carta to universal suffrage - culminating in the “generous, expansive view of liberty” we enjoy today. Ten months later, Tony Blair announced: “Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. So conform to it; or don’t come here.”

Three months after that, Brown is suggesting that newcomers undertake community service as a condition of becoming British citizens. We imported the self-righteous, “for us or against us”, ends-justifying-means mentality, which justifies not only the erosion of civil liberties but the presumptions on which they’re based. It seems increasingly difficult to argue that you can disapprove of an activity without wanting to ban or discourage it, that governments and police forces can abuse powers, and that surveillance, punitive sentencing and excessive detention is a threat to the innocent as well as the guilty.

Last Sunday, Jacqui Smith hoped that her opponents never had to deal with a terrorist outrage that 42-day detention might have prevented, as if there was no countervailing principle at stake. Her opponent on the libertarian side of the argument was Boris Johnson.

Three days later, all bar 36 of the parliamentary Labour party put themselves to the right of all the parliamentary Tory party bar Ann Widdecombe.

Following your helpful hints, we have imprisoned foreign nationals without trial, driving detainees and those subject to draconian control orders into mental hospitals.

Should you or anyone else wish to understand how the ever-tightening legal tourniquet has fuelled resentment in Muslim communities, download Gareth Pierce’s magisterial article on detention legislation from the London Review of Books website. Its title is: Was it like this for the Irish? You have made us unlearn the lessons of our own past.

Those of us who warned that - even as amended - the clauses prohibiting “glorification” of terrorism could be used against biographers of Nelson Mandela or historians of the Boston Tea Party were gently pooh-poohed as alarmist. But even we didn’t think the first person to be prosecuted under section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 would be a poet.

When Martin Amis conducts what he calls a “thought experiment” about the collective punishment of Muslims - travel restriction, strip searching, deportation - he gets defended by Christopher Hitchens in the Guardian. When Samina Malik fantasises about being a terrorist, she ends up in court accused of being one.

Last month, postgraduate student Rizwaan Sabir was held by the police for six days after Nottingham University found an al-Qaida training manual, downloaded from a US government website, on his computer. Despite his supervisors insisting it was relevant to his research, the university informed the police. The administrator who printed the document out for him, Hisham Yezza, is still detained, threatened with deportation under immigration regulations.

Like you, we are chipping away at the very things that we are asked to defend. The liberties that newcomers are asked to value and do value are being gradually eroded, because they’re here.

While finally, and cheered on by formerly progressive intellectuals and commentators, our government has blamed homegrown terrorism on the open, tolerant, multicultural, live-and-let-live Britain that, despite all problems and setbacks, has gradually emerged since and despite Enoch Powell’s apocalyptic jeremiad of 40 years ago.

So, is there anything to thank you for? Well, at least, in a number of significant respects, we know where we are. If your predecessor presided over a boom financed by ballooning personal debt, it’s good that your reinvention of 1980s gung-ho capitalism has exposed the predictable consequences of an unregulated economy fuelled by greed. The victims of the sub-prime mortgage collapse - small investors and small householders alike - stand side by side with the victims of hurricane Katrina as witnesses to the limitations of the nightwatchman state.

You’ve also reminded us of something. For you, the “war on terror” reveals enemies. For its opponents, the war has reminded us what we have in common. Pro-war ideologues have pitted progressive principles (secularism, sexual freedom, individual liberty) against the people we’ve attacked abroad and demonise at home.

The events of the last week - in the House of Commons and the supreme court - demonstrate the importance of civil liberties and human rights as a common platform for the powerless and the people who instinctively support them.

Finally, you’ve succeeded in doing something that doesn’t happen that often in either of our countries: you’ve made change a popular, engaging and viable political slogan (I see you’re even using it yourself). The joke postcard map that contrasted liberal, blue, coastal America with the blood-red central lump of “Dumbfuckistan” is a tempting heresy; the crude, county-by-county electoral map does seem to show that the further people live from other people, the more likely they are to vote for you.

But the mauves and purples of population-proportionate America remind us that there are married, churchgoing, rural DemocratS; that the American genius is for perpetual reinvention; that your country still retains that spirit of doing the impossible, which not only irrigated southern California but also desegregated the south.

So your lasting contribution to American politics may be something quite unthinkable a year ago: its first black president.

If so, the voters who outnumbered yours in 2000, and who turned out in unprecedented numbers against you in 2004, will not have voted in vain. ++

The Party’s Over
Steve Weber, HuffPo
June 10, 2008

It couldn’t be over fast enough.

Not the campaign to determine the Democratic presidential nominee, which despite a coarseness that permeated its penultimate moments, actually provided a higher level of discourse this country hasn’t been treated to in years. I’m talking about “the party”, the kolossally kataklysmic kegger thrown by those zany Republicans.

Don’t let their decades-long dominance of swaggering hypocrisy and crass capitalisto-fascism clad in two-button Brooks Brothers tweeds sporting Old Glory lapel pins fool you into thinking they can’t rave it up. When did you ever think you’d hear the word “trillion” used seriously? And so much bathroom sex! Twenty three skidoo!

I mean the kind of thick-skulled braggadocio that characterized America’s behavior to the rest of the thinking world. I mean the assemblage of the most unimaginative, unthinking, underhanded putzes who ever highjacked a government and made it into (by sheer dint of will and happenstance) a bruised, bumbling and broken behemoth, foisting their bitter beliefs on us and endangering everyone’s lives, including—dumbasses that they are—their own.

When Bush the Younger was dropped like a poison pill into the world’s water supply, the end, though painful, was thankfully near. The neocons latched onto the bloated citizenry and sucked to engorgement, leaving the once compliant suckee no choice but to finally dislodge them. True awareness peaks in the moments when death looms and America marshaled its reserves and rallied. Hence, we are here, today, at this historic, very human nexus of need and opportunity.

It’s a growth moment like you’d see in your kids when they figure out how to tie a shoe or viscerally grasp riding a bike. And while thousands, millions of people were victimized by BushCo’s greed and fatal pomposity and payback would seem by all rights proper, if all that would happen is their disappearance from the scene with only history to record their deeds, well then fine. Their presence has distracted us for too long and, should they ever develop them, their restless, guilty consciences will be sufficient torment.

Yep, the party’s over. So long, DeLay, Hastert, Ashcroft, Gonzalez. So long Rummy and Dick and Doug and Turd Blossom and Ari and Dana. So long King George. So long Condi and Tenet and L. Paul and Wolfie. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Even when they are all expelled to Dubai or Fox News or wherever the heck rascals and rogues congregate, there will still be the mother of all hangovers to contend with. But this sort of discomfort just might be what the doctor ordered, for with it comes clarity of purpose, our global role put in proper perspective, the remission of confusion, the resumption of reason and a future for hope. The place will have to be tented and fumigated, but it belongs to us now.

Phew. I thought they’d never leave. ++

Obama Sweeps McCain In Swing States For First Time
The Huffington Post
June 18, 2008

“With strong support from women, blacks and younger voters, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the apparent Democratic presidential contender, leads Arizona Sen. John McCain, expected to be the Republican candidate, among likely voters in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania,” according to simultaneous Quinnipiac University Swing State polls released today.

This is the first time Sen. Obama has led in all three states. No one has been elected President since 1960 without taking two of these three largest swing states in the Electoral College. Results from the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University polls show:

* Florida: Obama edges McCain 47 - 43 percent;

* Ohio: Obama tops McCain 48 - 42 percent;

* Pennsylvania: Obama leads McCain 52 - 40 percent.

In the three states, Obama leads McCain 10 to 23 percentage points among women, while men are too close to call. The Democrat trails among white voters in Florida and Ohio, but gets more than 90 percent of black voters in each state. He also has double-digit leads among young voters in each state. ++

“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

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves