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This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.

Friday, May 30, 2008

Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky: McCain (Mis)Speaks

Source: TomDispatch.com (5-29-08)

[Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky are the co-authors of the recently published Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War in Iraq: The Experts Speak, which provided the basis for this essay. Their previous book, also a product of The Institute of Expertology, is The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation. They appeared recently on Bill Moyers Journal.]

The Iraq war was a disaster for Iraq, a disaster for the United States, a disaster for the Middle East, a disaster for the world community, but most of all, it was a disaster for the experts.

They were wrong about its difficulty. (It was to be either "a cakewalk" or "a walk in the park" -- take your pick). They were wrong about how our troops would be greeted ("as liberators" said Vice President Dick Cheney on September, 14, 2003; "with kites and boom boxes" wrote Professor Fouad Ajami on October 7, 2002). They were wrong about weapons of mass destruction. ("Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise" wrote Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen on February 6, 2003.) They were wrong about how many troops would be needed. ("It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct a war itself," said Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on Feb 27, 2003.)

They were wrong about the number of casualties. ("...we're not going to have any casualties," said President George W. Bush in March, 2003). They were wrong about how much it would cost. ("The costs of any intervention would be very small," according to White House economic advisor Glenn Hubbard on October 4, 2002). They were wrong about how long it would last. ("It isn't going to be over in 24 hours, but it isn't going to be months either," claimed Richard Perle on July 11, 2002.) They were wrong about the "sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network," as Secretary of State Colin Powell put it in addressing the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. They were wrong about the likelihood of Iraq descending into civil war. ("[There is] a broad Iraqi consensus favoring the idea of pluralism," insisted William Kristol and Robert Kagan on March 22, 2004.) There was, in fact, very little they were not wrong about.

Who are we to make such charges? Not to be boastful, we are, respectfully, the CEO and president -- the founders, as it were -- of the Institute of Expertology, which has been surveying expert opinion for almost 25 years. It is true that our initial study, The Experts Speak: The Definitive Guide to Authoritative Misinformation, came under attack back in 1990 because, at the time, we failed to find a single expert who was right, although we readily conceded that, in statistical theory, it was possible that the experts were right as much as half the time. It just proved exceedingly difficult to find evidence of that other 50%.

In Mission Accomplished!, our new study of the experts -- people who, by virtue of their official status, formal title, academic degree, professional license, public office, journalistic beat, quantity of publications, experience, and/or use of highly technical jargon, are presumed to know what they are talking about -- we once again came under attack from critics who claimed that our failure to include any misstatements by Senator Barack Obama betrayed a political bias. These allegations were quickly refuted. Everybody knows that Obama has no experience and therefore does not qualify as an expert. Senator Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize the Iraq war, did make the cut, but the presidential candidate-cum-expert of genuine interest is Senator John McCain.

At first, we were impressed by the senator's statements in Republican primary debates about how he had actually opposed the Bush administration's conduct of the war from the start. As he told CNN's Kiran Chetry, in August of 2007, "I was the greatest critic of the initial four years, three-and-a half years."

Well, having dug into those missing years a bit, here, for the record, is what we found to be Senator McCain's typical responses to some of the key questions posed above:

How would American troops be greeted?: "I believe… that the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators." (March 20, 2003)

Did Saddam Hussein have a nuclear program that posed an imminent threat to the United States?: "Saddam Hussein is on a crash course to construct a nuclear weapon." (October 10, 2002)

Will a war with Iraq be long or short?: "This conflict is… going to be relatively short." (March 23, 2003)

How is the war going?: "I would argue that the next three to six months will be critical." (September 10, 2003)

How is it going (almost two months later, from the war's "greatest critic")? "I think the initial phases of [the war] were so spectacularly successful that it took us all by surprise." (October 31, 2003)

Is this war really necessary?: "Only the most deluded of us could doubt the necessity of this war." (August 30, 2004)

How is it going? (Recurring question for the war's "greatest critic"): "We will probably see significant progress in the next six months to a year." (December 4, 2005)

Will the President's "surge" of troops into Baghdad and surrounding areas that the senator had been calling for finally make the difference?: "We can know fairly well [whether the surge is working] in a few months." (February 4, 2007)

In April 2007, accompanied by several members of Congress, Senator McCain made a surprise visit to Baghdad to assess the surge, had a "stroll" through a market in the Iraqi capital, and then held a news conference where he discussed what he found: "Things are better and there are encouraging signs. I've been here many times over the years. Never have I been able to drive from the airport. Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today. The American people are not getting the full picture of what's happening here today."

The next evening, NBC's Nightly News provided further details on that "stroll." The Senator and Congressmen were accompanied by "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead." (In addition, the network said, still photographs provided by the military revealed that McCain and his colleagues had been wearing body armor during their entire stroll.)

Reality check: Five months later, on September 12, 2007, McCain again observed that "the next six months are going to be critical."

Six months later, McCain claimed that the U.S. had finally reached a genuine turning point in Iraq and that his faith in the surge was (once again) vindicated. On March 17, 2008, he reported: "We are succeeding. And we can succeed and American casualties overall are way down. That is in direct contradiction to predictions made by the Democrats and particularly Senator Obama and Senator Clinton. I will be glad to stake my campaign on the fact that this has succeeded and the American people appreciate it."

Well, we at the Institute of Expertology appreciate it, too, and we are, of course, pleased to record the Senator's ever-renewable faith in this latest turning point. As scrupulous scholars, however, we do feel compelled to add that the Senator is not the first to detect such a turning point. Indeed on July 7, 2003, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith said: "This month will be a political turning point for Iraq."

On November 6, 2003, President Bush observed: "We've reached another great turning point..." On June 16, 2004, President Bush claimed: "A turning point will come two weeks from today."

That same day the Montreal Gazette headlined an editorial by neoconservative columnist Max Boot: "Despite the Negative Reaction by Much of the Media, U.S. Marines Did a Good Job in Fallujah, a Battle That Might Prove a Turning Point." On February 2, 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated: "On January 30th in Iraq, the world witnessed an important moment in the global struggle against tyranny, a moment that historians might one day call a major turning point." On March 7, 2005 William Kristol wrote: "[T]he Iraqi election of January 30, 2005... will turn out to have been a genuine turning point."

On December 18, as that year ended, Vice President Cheney, while conceding that "the level of violence has continued," assured ABC News: "I do believe that when we look back on this period of time, 2005 will have been the turning point..."

The Institute continued to record turning points in remarkable numbers in 2006, and 2007, but perhaps in 2008 the surge will, indeed, turn out to be the turning point to end all turning points. After all, Senator McCain has staked his campaign on it.

This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.

Posted on Friday, May 30, 2008 at 6:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Michael Tomasky: Who Is John McCain?

Source: NY Review of Books (6-12-08)

It is little remembered today that the political career of John Sidney McCain III, a career now thoroughly laundered in mythology, began with the help of several fortuities. In 1973 he returned from his five and a half years of captivity in North Vietnam to Washington, or technically Arlington, Virginia, which had been his childhood home for more years than any other single place as he followed his father, a celebrated four-star admiral, on the elder McCain's naval assignments. He was one of 591 prisoners of war repatriated early that year as a result of Operation Homecoming, and was selected by the editors of US News & World Report as the one returning POW who would be given a thirteen-page spread in the magazine to describe his ordeal (having a famous father never hurts), which brought him the same kind of attention and acclaim that had earlier, for different purposes, been showered upon the young Hillary Diane Rodham and the young John Forbes Kerry.

By 1977 he held the post of naval liaison to Congress, his father's old position, and shortly thereafter attained the rank of captain. It was on Capitol Hill that he met and befriended important senators—Gary Hart of Colorado, William Cohen of Maine, and most of all John Tower of Texas, the buddy to whom he was closest during a period of his life that included its share of carousing and irreparably strained his marriage to his first wife, Carol. When asked to explain the dissolution of their marriage in the late 1970s, she said, "I attribute it more to John turning forty and wanting to be twenty-five again than I do to anything else."

But here was the first piece of luck, for his split from Carol enabled him to romance Cindy Hensley, an Arizonan seventeen years his junior whom he had met while vacationing in Honolulu in 1979 (he was separated) and with whom he was in love, he has written, by the end of their first evening together.

They married in May 1980, and from this union tumbled other fortuities. That she lived in Arizona meant that McCain would be moving to a state—with which he'd had even less association than Hillary Clinton had had with New York in 1999—whose growing population would gain it an extra congressional seat after the 1980 census, a circumstance on which his eye was keenly fixed. Her background—her father, Jim, ran the country's largest Anheuser-Busch distributorship—meant he would have the money and connections to launch the political career he had been coveting since he started meeting those famous pols. McCain hardly knew a soul in Arizona, but already he was telling friends in 1981 that he would swoop into the new seat in 1982 and then succeed Barry Goldwater in the Senate when Goldwater retired.

Then, one piece of bad luck: the new district would be cut in Tucson, not Phoenix. But this was soon followed by the greatest fortuity of all. John Rhodes, the Phoenix Republican who was the House minority leader, unexpectedly announced his retirement. The McCains lived just outside the Rhodes district, but Cindy's money ensured that they were able to buy a house in it and move in immediately. ...

Posted on Friday, May 30, 2008 at 6:24 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Josh Patashnik: Veeps won't change the math of the election in November

Source: New Republic (5-29-08)

[Josh Patashnik is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.]

There's a strain of logic in recent presidential campaign discourse that goes something like this: Though Barack Obama sports a modest lead over John McCain in national polling, his apparent weakness in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida could lead to a loss in the electoral college even if he wins the national popular vote by a wide margin. But his salvation could lie in picking someone from one of those states, like Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell or Ohio governor Ted Strickland, as his running mate....

... it's certainly possible that the election will be so close as to make a split conceivable. So Obama had better pick a Rendell or a Strickland as V.P., right? Well, no. Summing up the work of the political scientists who have explored the question, David W. Romero of the University of Texas at San Antonio concluded in a 2001 paper that "vice presidential candidates have no influence on the voters' choice for president." (Bolding mine.) Events like the announcement of a running mate or the vice presidential debates can produce a momentary blip in polls--like the ten-point bounce Kerry got when he selected John Edwards--but it soon disappears.

There's little evidence vice presidential candidates make a difference even in their home states. A 1989 analysis by Robert Dudley and Ronald Rapoport in the American Journal of Political Science found that, on average, a vice-presidential candidate improves his ticket's performance in his home state by only a statistically insignificant 0.3 percent. (Presidential candidates, by contrast, get a sizable four-percent boost in their home states.) Their result has been borne out in the years since--remember when Edwards was supposed to put North Carolina in play for Kerry? They lost by 12 points. What's more, the effect tends to be strongest in small states--Edmund Muskie pretty clearly put the Democratic ticket over the top in Maine in 1968--but nonexistent in large states where retail politics count for less. Even the edge LBJ supposedly gave JFK in Texas is debatable: It was a heavily Democratic state, and Kennedy fared well in other Southern states with similar demographics.

These questions are part of a larger debate in political science: Can the outcomes of presidential campaigns shift significantly as a result of campaign quirks, or are they determined largely by underlying economic and political fundamentals? For the most part, the latter view has won out--and it suggests that the Democratic nominee is headed for a relatively comfortable win. Of course, the candidacy of Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton, for that matter) makes 2008 the first election that won't have two white male candidates, and therefore something of a historical anomaly. The race could end up being a 2000-style nail-biter--and, in that case, there's a small possibility that electoral math and running mates will make a difference. But if things do play out as they have for decades, a lot of hyperventilating pundits will have egg on their faces.

Posted on Friday, May 30, 2008 at 5:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

What's the Difference Between Dan Bartlett, Brian Williams and David Gregory? A Lot Less Than You Think

Source: Huffington Post (Blog) (5-30-08)

[For over 20 years, David has been a banker covering the energy industry for several global banks in New York. Currently, he is working on several journalism projects dealing with corporate and political corruption that, so far, have escaped serious scrutiny by mainstream media. He is trained as a lawyer.]

There's a difference between lying and dissembling. Dan Bartlett lied on Wednesday. Brian Williams and David Gregory merely dissembled. Yet the statements of all three are discredited by the same smoking gun, the one that has been hiding in plain sight for more than five years, and has been subject to a virtual news blackout at NBC News. This White House is beyond redemption. But it's time for NBC and other major networks to come clean.

The White House Lie:

"The fact of the matter was the weapons of mass destruction weren't there. The intelligence was wrong. But that doesn't make people out to be liars or manipulators or propagandists. It makes them wrong." Dan Bartlett on CNN, May 28, 2008

The Smoking Gun: Anyone who read the newspapers with an ounce of common sense could figure out that the case for WMD was a sham. On March 7, 2003, 11 days before Bush invaded, the nuclear weapons inspectors reported that there was zero evidence that Saddam had ever done anything to develop nuclear weapons since losing the Gulf War in 1991. Muhamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency went far beyond offering an alternative analysis of the notorious aluminum tubes or those "documents" from Niger. He categorically said that they found no evidence. The Bush administration's response: Nothing, or at least nothing substantive. (ElBaradei's findings were subsequently validated by Bush's own inspections team, headed up by Charles Deufler.)

ElBaradei's report put the world on notice that the case for nuclear WMD was fatally flawed. When Dan Bartlett, John McCain, and everyone else at the White House refused to acknowledge that the U.N. inspectors had punctured their case for war, they became, to use Bartlett's words, "liars or manipulators or propagandists."

The Smoking Gun That Discredits NBC: Because ElBaradei's report struck at the heart of the case for war, any reputable news organization would consider its substance to be extremely important. That evening, NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw reported nothing about ElBaradei's findings. On CNBC, The News with Brian Williams also reported nothing. NBC's virtual blackout of the story persisted, and thereby skewed its coverage of almost everything relating to WMD and the decision to go to war. (The most notable pre-war exceptions to the blackout were Tim Russert's defamatory smears against the nuclear inspectors.)

There are countless examples where NBC's reporting and commentary sidestepped the full import of ElBaradei's pre-war disclosure. Chris Matthews' remarks are typical:

"I mean, that was a critical part of a lot of people who supported this war -- regular people, journalists, et cetera, said, I don't like the idea of going to war, but if they've got nuclear weapons, I guess we have to. And that was a successful trump card and it was a deal maker for a lot of people who supported the war, middle of the road people." Chris Matthews on Hardball, October 19, 2005

NBC's blackout continues to this day, thereby extending Dan Bartlett a veneer of plausibility, and enabling Brian Williams and David Gregory to dissemble so freely, as they did on Wednesday:

"I think he [Scott McClellan] is wrong...I think the questions were asked. I think we pushed. I think we prodded. I think we challenged the president. I think not only those of us in the White House press corps did that, but others in the rest of the landscape of the media did that. If there wasn't a debate in this country, then maybe the American people should think about, why not? Where was Congress? Where was the House? Where was the Senate? Where was public opinion about the war? What did the former president believe about the pre-war intelligence? He agreed that -- in fact, Bill Clinton agreed that Saddam had WMD.


"The right questions were asked. I think there's a lot of critics -- and I guess we can count Scott McClellan as one -- who thinks that, if we did not debate the president, debate the policy in our role as journalists, if we did not stand up and say, this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn't do our job. And I respectfully disagree" David Gregory on Hardball, May 28, 2008 .

(Gregory's allusion to Bill Clinton is a standard smoke-and-mirrors ploy used by the right wing. Bill Clinton never believed that the pre-war intelligence was sufficiently reliable to support military action. Both he and Senator Clinton advocated the use of continued inspections instead of military action.)

"I've always put it this way. In Katrina, the evidence was right next to us. Sadly, we saw fellow Americans, in some cases, floating past face down. We knew what had just happened. We weren't allowed that kind of proximity with the weapons inspectors. I was in Kuwait for the buildup of the war. And yes, we heard from the Pentagon on my cell phone the minute they heard us report something that they didn't like. The tone of that time was quite extraordinary". Brian Williams on The Today Show, May 28, 2008

Andrea Mitchell was in the room when El Baradei gave his report to the U.N. and to the world. "We weren't allowed that kind of proximity with the weapons inspectors," is Williams' way of throwing sand in the face of NBC's viewers.

Here's the bottom line: Anyone (e.g. Colin Powell, George Tenet, Dan Bartlett) who says, "We relied on flawed intelligence," is speaking in bad faith, because after March 7, 2003 he acted in bad faith. And any journalist who accepts that rationalization at face value is not doing his job.

Posted on Friday, May 30, 2008 at 5:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Quin Hillyer: Meet the New Barry Goldwater

Source: American Spectator (5-30-08)

[Quin Hillyer is an associate editor at the Washington Examiner and a senior editor of The American Spectator.]

Many conservatives realistic enough to know there will never be "another Reagan" nevertheless wish at least for another Barry Goldwater. They don't realize that we already have one. His name is John McCain.

Granted, McCain is more like the Goldwater of 1981 than like the conservative standard bearer of 1964. At age 72, Goldwater was, like the 72-year-old McCain today, a former conservative firebrand who long since had become a source of frustration for many conservatives. He actually started frustrating them during his presidential campaign 17 years earlier when he summarily replaced the mastermind who won him the nomination, Clif White, with an entirely different campaign team for the fall -- and then proceeded to run a campaign as if he didn't really care about winning, but just about spouting off. He also never repaid Ronald Reagan's great support for his campaign with anything even approaching loyalty in return, going so far as to support Gerald Ford against Reagan for the Republican nomination in 1976 and again withholding his support for Reagan in the primaries in 1980. In fact, he also had lost touch with his own constituents. Goldwater survived his own Senate re-election campaign in 1980 by the skin of his teeth, pulled across the finish line almost despite himself by the strength of the Reagan landslide at the top of the ticket along with a determined effort on his behalf by pro-life voters.

At least Goldwater was still pro-life in 1981. And he never gave up his small-government predilections, nor his support for a strong defense and for meeting the needs of individual servicemen. Irascible, iconoclastic, sometimes a bit profane, always his own man and nobody else's, the Goldwater of 1981 was a curmudgeon's curmudgeon -- but he still had a lot to offer his country, working ceaselessly with Sen. Don Nickles during Goldwater's final term to re-organize the military command structure in a way that succeeded tremendously well when first put to a real test during the Gulf War of 1991....

Posted on Friday, May 30, 2008 at 4:39 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Broder: What Jimmy Carter Could Teach Obama

Source: Real Clear Politics (5-29-08)

A year after Jimmy Carter lost his re-election race to Ronald Reagan, Hamilton Jordan, his former White House chief of staff, sat down for a lengthy interview with scholars at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Last week, after hearing the news of Jordan's death, friends at the center sent me a transcript of that 27-year-old interview. As they predicted, it was of intense interest for current politics, and particularly on the challenge facing Barack Obama.

The main theme of Jordan's interview was this intriguing observation: "Only because of the fragmentation that had taken place" in the Democratic Party and its allied groups was Carter able to be nominated and elected in 1976. But that same fragmentation made the challenge of governing so difficult that he was almost doomed to fail.

What he meant was this: In the two previous elections, the Democratic Party was riven by strife over the Vietnam War, social policy and civil rights. It was bitterly divided by the nomination of Hubert Humphrey over Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and of George McGovern over Humphrey and other challengers in 1972. In 1974, after Watergate ended the Republican revival, the old-guard Democrats suddenly confronted an influx of reform-minded new faces in Congress.

It was in the resulting "chaos," as he called it, that Jordan conceived the possibility of making the one-term governor of Georgia the next president. The "fragmentation" they discovered was real, not metaphorical. Carter won the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary with less than 30 percent of the votes, as four more-liberal contenders -- Morris Udall, Birch Bayh, Fred Harris and Sargent Shriver -- split up the rest.

But once Carter was in the White House, the liberals who controlled Congress quickly took his measure. They put their obligations to their constituencies and interest groups ahead of any loyalty to him. He never had a "honeymoon" and by his third year, his presidency had unraveled, not because of Republican obduracy but because of Carter's inability to lead his fellow Democrats.

What has Carter's case to do with Obama? The individuals and the times seem very different. A white Southern governor versus a mixed-race Hawaii-born senator. A Navy veteran-peanut farmer versus a lawyer-intellectual activist.

But the two have more in common than meets the eye. Both were largely unknown to the nation's Democrats at the start of their election years. Both faced more-credentialed rivals. Both ran as outsiders, vowing to reform Washington. Both relied on generalized promises to raise politics to a higher standard than the outgoing Republican administration. Both benefited from early plurality victories over large and divided fields. Obama gained his first and most important win in Iowa with 37.6 percent of the votes, while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards split almost 60 percent evenly. Both Carter and Obama lost several of the late primaries, but held on to the delegate lead they had staked out earlier....

Posted on Friday, May 30, 2008 at 12:12 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ramesh Ponnuru: In Carter's Shadow

Source: Time (5-28-08)

[Ramesh Ponnuru is a Washington, D.C. based Indian American columnist and a senior editor for National Review magazine.]

The ghost of Jimmy Carter is haunting the 2008 campaign. Well, let me restate that: the ghost of his presidency haunts the 2008 campaign. As for Carter, he certainly has not passed on; he is an active freelance diplomat and campaign consultant. In recent days he has told Hillary Clinton to "give it up" in June and estimated the size of Israel's nuclear stockpile. (Other previous Presidents have kept tactfully silent about its very existence.) Earlier, both John McCain and Barack Obama had felt compelled to denounce Carter's meeting with representatives of Hamas.

Carter's almost predictable intrusions into the news have done little to sway events, but they have conjured memories of a past that the current President and his two would-be successors are trying not to repeat.
Start with President George W. Bush, whose deep unpopularity has set the tone for the campaign. In the late 1970s, the public came to regard Carter as a failed President, and his failure colored attitudes toward his party for more than a decade. Republicans tied Democrat after Democrat to the stagflation and foreign policy weakness of that era. Now Republicans worry that perceptions of Bush are going to hurt them for a generation.

Voters who came of age in the 1980s were strongly Republican, thinking Ronald Reagan had brought America back. By contrast, young people today identify themselves as strongly Democratic. They disapprove of Bush and the Iraq war in large percentages, worry about their economic futures and have started paying attention to politics at a time when Republicans have often been making the news for incompetence and scandal.

Bush probably thought he had avoided going down as a failure when he won a second term, which had eluded Carter (and Bush's father). But the only sure way for him to escape that fate is for a Republican to win the presidency this year. Reagan would have seemed a less transformative figure if Michael Dukakis had succeeded him, and Bill Clinton would have had a deeper impact on his party and the country if Al Gore had won in 2000. Whatever their past differences, Bush has ample reason to root for McCain now.

Of the two likely nominees this year, Obama is closest to Carter in background and policy leanings. The parallels between his campaign so far and the one Carter ran in 1976 are striking. Like Carter, Obama had little national experience when he started to run. Neither was given much chance of winning the nomination. Instead of running on a detailed platform, Carter told crowds that what Washington needed was "a government as good as its people"—just as Obama promises "change we can believe in." Carter's message sold well after Richard Nixon's disgrace, and press accounts from the time suggest that people found the born-again Carter to be charismatic. That parallel is a promising one for Obama.

Posted on Friday, May 30, 2008 at 1:40 AM | Comments (0) | Top

George F. Will: Caesaropapism Rampant

Source: Newsweek (6-2-08)

Barack Obama recently said, "I believe in our ability to perfect this nation." Clearly there is something the candidate of "change" will not change—the pattern of extravagant presidential rhetoric. Obama is trying to replace a president who vowed to "rid the world of evil"—and of tyranny, too.

But then, rhetorical—and related—excesses are inherent in the modern presidency. This is so for reasons brilliantly explored in the year's most pertinent and sobering public affairs book, "The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power," by Gene Healy of Washington's libertarian Cato Institute.

Healy's dissection of the delusions of "redemption through presidential politics" comes at a moment when liberals, for reasons of liberalism, and conservatives, because they have forgotten their raison d'être, "agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility." Liberals think boundless government is beneficent. Conservatives practice situational constitutionalism, favoring what Healy calls "Caesaropapism" as long as the Caesar-cum-Pope wields his anti constitutional powers in the service of things these faux conservatives favor.

War is, as Randolph Bourne said, "the health of the state." And as James Madison said, war is the "true nurse of executive aggrandizement." Today's president has claimed the power to be the "decider," deciding on his own to start preventive wars, order torture prohibited by treaty and statute, and arrest American terrorist suspects on American soil and hold them indefinitely without legal process. But Healy's critique of the heroic presidency ranges far beyond national-security matters.

"Tell me your troubles," said FDR, Consoler in Chief, in a fireside chat with a radio audience. In 1960, the year the nation elected a charismatic (a term drawn from religion) president who regarded the office as "the center of moral leadership," an eminent political scientist called the presidency "the incarnation of the American people in a sacrament resembling that in which the wafer and the wine are seen to be the body and blood of Christ." In 1992, Gov. Bill Clinton promised a "New Covenant" between government and the governed. That, Healy dryly notes, was "a metaphor that had the state stepping in for Yahweh."...

Posted on Friday, May 30, 2008 at 1:06 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Mark Mellman: Obama so far is doing ok with white working class voters

Source: NYT (5-29-08)

[Mark Mellman is a Democratic pollster whose clients include the majority leaders of the House and Senate. He polled for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.]

DOES Barack Obama have a problem with the white working class? Despite the ubiquity of the term during this presidential campaign, it’s hard to say what, exactly, “working class” means. If you define class by education, which is polled more consistently than occupation or income, Mr. Obama certainly seems to have trouble with these crucial swing voters. In almost every Democratic primary, he has lost white voters who didn’t graduate from college to Hillary Clinton. But that doesn’t mean those voters will snub him in the fall.

First, there is no relationship between how candidates perform among any particular group of voters in primaries and how they do with that segment in the general election. In 1992, Bill Clinton lost college-educated voters to Paul Tsongas in the early competitive primaries, but he went on to win that group in November by the largest margin any Democrat ever had. Similarly, John Kerry lost young voters in the competitive primaries in 2004 before going on to win them by a record margin in the general election.

Second, Democrats running for president have been losing white, non-college-educated voters since before Mr. Obama was elected to the Illinois legislature. Al Gore and Mr. Kerry each failed to win a majority of this bloc in the general election. With these voters, the size of the losing margin is what matters.

Mr. Gore lost them by 17 percentage points while winning the national popular vote. Mr. Kerry lost them by 23 points and the country by fewer than two and a half points. The last Democrat to win white, non-college voters was Bill Clinton, who carried them by a single point in the three-way races in 1992 and 1996.

By comparison, Mr. Obama is only two percentage points behind John McCain among these voters in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. Another recent survey shows him down seven points.

In other words, Mr. Obama is faring better today with the white working class than did either Mr. Gore or Mr. Kerry....

Posted on Friday, May 30, 2008 at 1:01 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Robert Kagan: U.S. foreign policy in expansive, idealistic, and militarist mode has done well: defeats of Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet communism, for instance

Source: http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org (Spring) (5-1-08)

[Robert Kagan is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Transatlantic Fellow at The German Marshall Fund. He is the author of The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Knopf).]

“The Iraq War will always be linked with the term ‘neoconservative,’” George Packer wrote in his book on the war, and he is probably right. The conventional wisdom today, likely to be the approved version in the history books, is that a small group of neoconservatives seized the occasion of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, to steer the nation into a war that would never have been fought had not this group of ideologues managed somehow to gain control of national policy.

This version of events implicitly rejects another and arguably simpler interpretation: that after September 11, 2001, American fears were elevated, America’s tolerance for potential threats lowered, and Saddam Hussein naturally became a potential target, based on a long history of armed aggression, the production and use of chemical weapons, proven efforts to produce nuclear and biological weapons, and a murky relationship with terrorists. The United States had gone to war with him twice before, in 1991 and then again at the end of 1998, and the fate of Saddam Hussein had remained an unresolved question at the end of the Clinton administration. It was not so unusual for the United States to go to war a third time, therefore, and the Bush administration’s decision can be understood without reference to a neoconservative doctrine. After September 11, the Bush administration weighed the risks of leaving Saddam Hussein in power against the risks of fighting a war to remove him and chose the latter, its calculus shaped by the terrorist attacks and by widely shared suppositions about Iraq’s weapons programs that ultimately proved mistaken.

If one chose to believe this simpler version, then the decision to invade Iraq might have been correct or mistaken, but the lessons to be learned from the war would concern matters of judgment, tactics, and execution—don’t go to war based on faulty intelligence; don’t topple a foreign government without a plan to bring order and peace to the country afterwards; don’t be so quick on the trigger; exhaust all possibilities before going to war; be more prudent. But they would not raise broader issues of foreign policy doctrine and grand strategy. After all, prudence is not a foreign policy. It is possible to be prudent or imprudent, capable or clumsy, wise or foolish, hurried or cautious in pursuit of any doctrine. The intervention in Vietnam was the direct product of the Cold War strategy of containment, but many people who think the Vietnam War was a mistake nevertheless do not condemn containment. They believe the war was the misapplication and poor execution of an otherwise sound strategy. One could argue the same was true of Iraq.

One could, but very few critics of the war do. The heated debate in the United States over the past few years has not been so much about bad intelligence, faulty execution, or imprudence in Iraq. In his book The Assassins’ Gate, Packer claims that he is unable to explain why the United States went to war without recourse to the larger doctrine behind it. “The story of the Iraq war,” he writes, “is a story of ideas about the role of the United States in the world.” And the ideas he has in mind are “neoconservative” ideas. His premise, and that of most critics, is that neoconservatism was uniquely responsible for the United States going to war in Iraq and that, had it not been for the influence of neoconservative ideas, the war never would have occurred....

Posted on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 9:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Andrei Cherny: A lesson from Berlin for Baghdad

Source: USA Today (5-28-08)

[Andrei Cherny, the co-editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, is the author of The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour.]

Nearly three years after the invasion, it was clear that the occupation was failing. Little rebuilding had taken place in a country that had been showered with U.S. bombs. The economy was barely sputtering along. The security situation was growing worse. In the once-thriving capital, death from random violence and at the hands of armed gangs had become so pervasive that the city had acquired the nickname of "Crime Capital of the World." Worst of all — since the purpose of the occupation was, in the words of the top U.S. general on the ground, "to establish and maintain democracy — American style" in a country widely seen as culturally unfit for such a system — opinion polls showed that faith in the idea of democracy was plummeting to levels lower than those at war's end.

By most measures that mattered, by 1948 the occupation of Germany was a fiasco.

A swift turnabout

A year later, the modern Federal Republic of Germany was born with a constitution that, unlike that of the Weimar Republic, recognized "inviolable and inalienable human rights" such as equality before the law, the right to assemble and freedom of faith, press and speech. Today, Germany is the anchor of a free and prosperous Europe.

There is a grave danger in policymaking by historical analogy. Baghdad is not Berlin. The world of 2008 is not that of 1948. But the only way we have any sense of where we are going is in the context of where we have been. The manner in which America turned around the failing occupation of Germany is a lesson worth learning. Even if there is to be a massive withdrawal from Iraq in 2009 (something which is by no means certain) there will be — whether we like it or not — other military actions and other occupations by U.S. forces in the years ahead.

What happened in Germany in 1948 and 1949 was the Berlin Airlift — the massive U.S. and British effort to feed and supply West Berliners facing a Soviet blockade.

Before the airlift, many Americans had assumed that Germans would only embrace democracy once they felt secure from the looming Soviet military threat. Others — including those in the Truman administration who had authored the Marshall Plan and been shaped by the New Deal — believed that economic regeneration was a necessary precursor to political liberty.

"You cannot build real democracy in an atmosphere of distress and hunger," proclaimed American military governor Lucius Clay....

Posted on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 3:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thomas Frank: Welcome to Nixonland

Source: WSJ (5-28-08)

[Mr. Frank is the author of What's the Matter with Kansas.]

... Well, now the main events of the '60s are 40 years behind us, and still we can't shake them. In the last national election, we redebated the Vietnam War. In the one coming up, we will be forced to debate Barack Obama's not-even-tenuous connection to the Weathermen. (We will probably not be asked to judge the poisonous legacy of the Young Americans for Freedom, although McCain adviser Charlie Black was actually a leader of that group.)

We can also be fairly sure of the word that will be used as the demon decade is again wheeled out: elitism. In the '60s-as-remembered, the conflict that overlays all the others from that period was between ordinary, hard-working Americans and the privileged kids who went to fancy schools where they learned to disrespect the American flag and call the police names. Like the ghost of Archie Bunker, this peculiar class war has appeared over the years whenever some well-polished liberal is in need of a comeuppance.

The politician who fashioned a permanent Republican parable out of the decade's antagonisms was Richard Nixon. The man was born for the backlash. In "Nixonland," a brilliant and engrossing study of the politician and the period, Rick Perlstein uses, as a motif for the future president's career, the society of outsiders Nixon started at college in opposition to the establishment club.

"The Orthogonians" was a made-up name that might well have meant, "the squares." Orthogonians weren't working-class, exactly, but nevertheless there was a real authenticity to their revolt against the glamorous ones – the "Franklins" – who lorded it over them. Recruiting like-minded Orthogonians and fueling their grievances, Mr. Perlstein writes, became the signature maneuver of Nixon's career, from the days of Alger Hiss all the way to the White House. (Mr. Perlstein is a friend who has said kind things about my work in the past.)

"There were new currents to surf in the soaring sixties, based in the same kind of old resentments," Mr. Perlstein writes, "new kinds of common people being put upon by new kinds of insolent and condescending Franklins – the new kind of liberal who seemed to be saying that . . . college kids who spat on the flag were oh-so-much more with-it than you."

Nixon is gone today, along with the rioters and the radicals who riled his Silent Majority. Most of the culture-war issues of those unhappy days are forgotten too; even the culture-war issues of 2004 have already lost some of their potency.

Yet the strange class war that defined Nixonland renews itself endlessly, with different leaders and different symbols, but always with the same dynamic: the striving squares revenging themselves upon the hip and the snooty....

Posted on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 1:43 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Dick Morris: Hillary is the new Wallace

Source: NY Post (5-28-08)

In its final days, Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign has come to echo George Wallace's 1968 run.

Like Clinton, Wallace as a candidate stalked the Northeast exploiting white anger. Like her, he bypassed the nation's more educated and liberal parts to focus squarely on those who felt left behind, rallying animosity against elites.

But behind the mask of populism, it was race that fueled Wallace's campaign from the start. And it is race that has brought new life to Clinton's campaign in its final days.

Like Wallace, Clinton doesn't address racial prejudice squarely, but cloaks the appeal to our darker fears in seemingly neutral issues. He used opposition to school busing; she has played off Obama's alleged elitism and ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

To be fair, neither appeal is totally invalid.

Busing failed to integrate our schools and led, instead, to greater segregation as whites fled to the suburbs and/or to private schools.

Rev. Wright, meanwhile, is enough to scare the daylights out of anybody. To have a president who sat willingly in his pews, absorbing and seemingly condoning his hatred, is a worrisome prospect indeed.

But the basic fact remains that Clinton, like Wallace, is relying on race. Their tactics are similar, appealing to the same kind of voters for parallel reasons.

No, Clinton isn't a racist - but she's still using race to win elections. (So, by the way, did Bill Clinton in 1992, with his criticism of Sister Souljah and his much-publicized backing for capital punishment.)

Racism is as racism does. When a politician consciously exploits racial divisions, fears and animosity to win an election, he or she deserves condemnation.

But Hillary Clinton is neither a racist nor a populist; she's an opportunist. Discovering that the establishment consensus has left behind millions of disgruntled voters - the angry white men of yesteryear - she, like Wallace before her, is creating new fissures in the electorate in the hopes of upsetting a harmony that doesn't serve her ends.

Her advocates say that Clinton has found her voice. But this new voice is but an echo of a a discordant note in a discredited past.

In the coal mines of Kentucky and West Virginia and the former factory towns of Western Pennsylvania and Central Ohio, the anger into which this voice taps remains alive, hot and glowing. But most of America has moved beyond prejudice, beyond diversity, beyond even tolerance, into a post-racial era.

It was a proud feature of our politics in 2008 that we seemed to have crested this wave of progress - until Clinton, embittered by frustrated ambition, blew on the smoldering embers of racial fear to stage a comeback for the nomination.

It isn't her proudest moment.

Posted on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 1:30 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Scott W. Johnson: The Kennedy-Khrushchev Conference for Dummies

Source: Weekly Standard (5-28-08)

[Scott W. Johnson is a Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the blog Power Line.]

BARACK OBAMA FIRST VOWED to meet unconditionally with the leaders of America's foremost enemies in the YouTube Democratic candidates' debate on July 23, 2007. Since then he has reaffirmed and expanded on the commitment in a variety of contexts, promoting such meetings as a sort of panacea for America's national security challenges. In making these pronouncements, Obama sounds like a precocious college undergraduate who finds himself granted a vision that has eluded elders whose befuddled reckoning has brought them to an impasse.

In Portland on May 18, Obama cited John F. Kennedy's 1961 summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna among the series of negotiations that led to America's triumph over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The Vienna summit, however, disproves Obama's assertion regarding the unvarying value of meetings between enemy heads of state about as decisively as any historical episode can refute a thesis. In addition to poor judgment, Obama has demonstrated that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Kennedy first addressed the subject of a possible summit with the Soviet Union in the second Kennedy-Nixon debate. Unlike Obama, Kennedy expressly rejected a summit without preconditions. Indeed, Kennedy expressed his agreement with Nixon that he "would not meet Mr. Khrushchev unless there were some agreements at the secondary level--foreign ministers or ambassadors--which would indicate that the meeting would have some hope of success, or a useful exchange of ideas." In the third debate, Kennedy suggested that the strengthening of American conventional and nuclear forces should precede any summit with the Soviet Union.

Once in office, Kennedy more or less discarded his previously expressed conditions for a summit. In a letter written in February and secretly delivered to Khrushchev in March 1961, Kennedy expressed his willingness to meet Khrushchev "before too long" for an informal exchange of views. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy sensed that discussions without an agenda or prior agreement might be disadvantageous to the United States. He let the matter drop, but Khrushchev accepted the invitation on May 4. The meeting was to occur in Vienna late that spring.

Through a secret Washington encounter between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Soviet intelligence agent Georgi Bolshakov the following week, the president sought to explore an acceptable compromise on nuclear testing in connection with ongoing negotiations in Geneva that might be finalized in Vienna. The compromise, however, would have to be depicted as originating from the Soviet side. In Jack Kennedy: Education of a Statesman movie-star biographer Barbara Leaming shows a finer sense of power politics than Barack Obama does. In his back-channel offer, she writes, Kennedy inadvertently conveyed to Khrushchev "that in the aftermath of Cuba he was nervous that Vienna be perceived as a success" and that "he was willing to deceive the American people, who, at his instigation, were to be told that the [compromise offer] had come from the Soviet negotiators rather than from him. In sum, he bared his vulnerabilities to an opponent well able to take advantage of them."

The parties reached no agreement on any set agenda or proposals prior to their meeting in Vienna on June 3 and 4. The meetings were therefore confined to the informal exchange of views referred to in Kennedy's February letter. By all accounts, including Kennedy's own, the meetings were a disaster. Khrushchev berated, belittled, and bullied Kennedy on subjects ranging from Communist ideology to the balance of power between the Soviet and Western blocs, to Laos, to "wars of national liberation," to nuclear testing. He threw down the gauntlet on Berlin in particular, all but threatening war.

"I never met a man like this," Kennedy subsequently commented to Time's Hugh Sidey. "[I] talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill 70 million people in ten minutes, and he just looked at me as if to say 'So what?'" In The Fifty-Year Wound, Cold War historian Derek Leebaert drily observes of Khrushchev in Vienna, "Having worked for Stalin had its uses."

Kennedy sought a brief final session with Khrushchev to clear the air regarding Berlin. In that final meeting at the Soviet embassy, however, Khrushchev bluntly told Kennedy, "It is up to the U.S. to decide whether there will be war or peace." Kennedy responded, "Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be war. It will be a cold winter." On this unhappy note the two leaders' only face-to-face meeting came to an end.

Immediately following the final session on June 4 Kennedy sat for a previously scheduled interview with New York Times columnist James Reston at the American embassy. Kennedy was reeling from his meetings with Khrushchev, famously describing the meetings as the "roughest thing in my life." Reston reported that Kennedy said just enough for Reston to conclude that Khrushchev "had studied the events of the Bay of Pigs" and that he had "decided that he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could be intimidated and blackmailed." Kennedy said to Reston that Khrushchev had "just beat [the] hell out of me" and that he had presented Kennedy with a terrible problem: "If he thinks I'm inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won't get anywhere with him. So we have to act."

Seeking the advice of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and others, Kennedy pondered his options for the following seven weeks. On July 25 he gave a televised speech to the American people reflecting on the Vienna meeting. In the speech he announced that he was seeking congressional approval for an additional $3.25 billion in defense spending, the doubling and tripling of draft calls, calling up reserves, raising the Army's total authorized strength, increasing active duty numbers in the Navy and Air Force, reconditioning planes and ships in mothballs, and a civil defense program to minimize the number of Americans that would be killed in a nuclear attack. In August, Khrushchev responded in his own fashion, erecting the Berlin wall and resuming above ground nuclear testing. Kennedy showed his commitment to maintain Western access to Berlin by sending a battle group of 1,500 men together with Vice President Johnson and General Lucius Clay in from West Germany.

The following year brought the Cuban missile crisis, another sequel to Khrushchev's reading of Kennedy's weakness. Close as the Cuban missile crisis brought the two sides to war, however, it was perhaps not the most consequential effect of Khrushchev's reading of Kennedy's weakness. Persuaded that he needed further to demonstrate "fearlessness and backbone," in the words of William Manchester, Kennedy observed to Reston that the only place where the Communists were challenging the West in a shooting war was in Southeast Asia. Summarizing Kennedy's own evaluation of the aftermath of the Vienna conference in his 2003 biography of Kennedy, Robert Dallek writes that Kennedy "now needed to convince Khrushchev that he could not be pushed around, and the best place currently to make U.S. power credible seemed to be in Vietnam."

In short, the Vienna conference resolved no issue between the United States and the Soviet Union. On the contrary, if anything, it precipitated crises that were resolved through the display and use of military force.

What harm can possibly come of a meeting between enemies? There are many, like Obama, who say that no harm can come from talking. To paraphrase JFK's June 1963 Berlin speech, let them come to study the Vienna conference.

Posted on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 1:17 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Adam Holland: What Obama's Uncle Charlie Saw

Source: AdamHolland.blog (5-28-08)

[Mr. Holland runs an investigative blog.]

Comments made on Memorial Day by Barack Obama concerning his uncle's role as a liberator of a concentration camp in World War II have attracted considerable attention. Obama told the story of his great-uncle being among the liberators of a death camp he erroneously identified as Auschwitz (read here). Republican blogs (read here) immediately pounced, stating correctly that Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army, and charging Obama with lying . Fox News followed suit, absurdly claiming that the fact that the uncle was in fact a great-uncle was scandalous (read here). The Obama campaign replied that, in fact, the story was true and that the concentration camp involved was a satellite camp of Buchenwald.

This entire news story revealed in some of Obama's opponents a sad lack of interest in the truth and willingness to distort an honest mistake into a deliberate lie. It also betrayed a lack of knowledge of the history of the Holocaust. The true history behind the story is so astounding and so important that it merits much more attention than this manufactured controversy. Anyone knowing the history of the liberation of the concentration camps would readily understand how the trauma of what he saw caused Senator Obama's uncle to isolate himself at home for several months after returning from the war. What he saw was the outside world's first view of what came to be called the Holocaust.

Obama's great-uncle Charles Payne served with the 89th Infantry Division (read here and here and here). Strictly speaking, this division didn't liberate either Auschwitz or Buchenwald. Obama's uncle Charlie was one of the liberators of Ohrdruf (read here and here), a subcamp of Buchenwald which was famous at the time both for being the first camp liberated by the Allies and because of the actions of General Eisenhower who visited the camp a week later. Eisenhower was said to be more deeply shocked and angered by what he saw there than by any other experience of the entire war.

Robert Abzug wrote the following in his book entitled "Inside the Vicious Heart" (read here):

Soon after seeing Ohrdruf, Eisenhower ordered every unit near by that was not in the front lines to tour Ohrdruf: "We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against." Eisenhower felt it was essential not only for his troops to see for themselves, but for the world to know about conditions at Ohrdruf and other camps. From Third Army headquarters, he cabled London and Washington, urging delegations of officials and newsmen to be eye-witnesses to the camps. The message to Washington read: 'We are constantly finding German camps in which they have placed political prisoners where unspeakable conditions exist. From my own personal observation, I can state unequivocally that all written statements up to now do not paint the full horrors."


Survivors told Eisenhower prisoners were hung with piano wire



(Film of Generals Eisenhower and Patton and other U.S. officers inspecting the camp is viewable online here.) Eisenhower also ordered that German civilians in the area tour the camp to see exactly what the Nazi regime had done.

Civilians from town of Ohrdruf were forced to view the bodies

Seeing these films and photographs and reading the following eyewitness accounts by some of the camp's liberators, one can see why what Obama's uncle saw at Ohrdruf was so traumatic.

from the website of the Society of the 89th Infantry Division of World War II: "Ohrdruf / Reimahg"

The 89th Infantry Division in World War II was the first unit to actually come upon a Nazi concentration camp. The discovery of the Ohrdruf camp, by the 89th Infantry Division, is memorialized in the Holocaust Museum located in Washington, DC.

Ohrdruf was a work camp, not an extermination camp, but the difference is difficult to discern. Prisoners were literally worked to death and disposed of by burning in incinerators, which was the most "cost-effective method". As the Allies approached, panic set in for the guards. Those inmates who couldn't walk were shot. Others were forced to march towards a "safe haven", with most of them dying in the effort. It was a horrible and unbelievable scene which seared its way into one's memory.

The following comments were written by Carl Peterson, President of the Division Society (read here):

The Ohrdruf hellhole was one of many sub camps of the nearby Buchenwald Concentration Camp outside (the town) of Weimar, Germany, which is located about 32 miles ENE from Ohrdruf. The Buchenwald camp had been established back in 1938. Buchenwald had it all including an execution facility and crematorium. From what I had been able to determine, the Ohrdruf Camp dated back to June of 1944, when 1000 men were sent there presumably from Buchenwald. These men were immediately put to work digging tunnels into the nearby hills. Gun emplacements and more tunnels were later built at a point eight miles from the camp at a place that had been set aside to become an underground headquarters for Adolph Hitler and his government. Some of the tunnels were designed to contain railroad tracks, which would allow a train from Berlin carrying Hitler, and key members of the government to be parked under ground. After five months only 200 of the original 1000 men remained alive due to very poor working conditions and shortage of food and proper clothing. However as time passed more and more inmates were provided from Buchenwald and other locations. As the hospital in Ohrdruf became jammed with sick, a series of "death transports" routinely and as often as twice a week were used to transport the dead to Buchenwald's crematorium. There are reports of a crematorium at Ohrdruf; however that effort came late and was primitive compared to the capability of the Buchenwald camp to dispose of dead bodies, and to dispose of very sick persons by injections followed by a trip to the crematorium. Some of the inmates were Yugoslav prisoners of war, a matter against the rules of international law. As of 25 March 1945, a report from Buchenwald reflects a total of 9943 inmates, about 6000 of whom were Jews, were at Ohrdruf all working on tunneling and construction of underground facilities. In early April of 1945, during the afternoon of April 5th, which was one day after the liberation of Ohrdruf, 9000 prisoners from Ohrdruf arrived at Buchenwald in desperate and starving condition, after a forced death march over the approximately 32 miles separating the two camps. Hundreds of others had collapsed along the route of march from weakness. They were shot without mercy by the SS. At Buchenwald, the Jews. if they could he identified, were immediately taken away for execution. By this time there was some open resistance at Buchenwald, which worked to the advantage of some of the Jews and others.

At Ohrdruf, generally the only inmates that remained as the American forces were closing in, were those who were unable to make the forced march to Buchenwald for a few reasons such as being too weak to do so. The SS was disposing of these inmates with a shot to the back of the head or neck; or in some reports, they had been machine gunned to death. However, earlier at Ohrdruf before the proximity of the American forces created panic: many inmates had been put to death by hanging, after which the bodies were shipped to Buchenwald for disposal. But in the panic situation of the pending liberation, bodies had been dumped into makeshift pits one of which was a crematorium which did not do its job very well - and became the object of photographs which some of us have seen and others have viewed the scene in person.
The following is from Bruce Nickols, one of the liberators of the camp (read here):

From the outside, the camp was unremarkable. It was surrounded by a high barbed wire fence and had a wooden sign which read, "Arbeit Macht Frei." The swinging gate was open, and a young soldier, probably an SS guard, lay dead diagonally across the entrance. The camp was located in the forest and was surrounded by a thick grove of pine and other conifers. The inside of the camp was composed of a large 100 yards square central area which was surrounded by one story barracks painted green which appeared to house 60-100 inmates.

As we stepped into the compound one was greeted by an overpowering odor of quick-lime, dirty clothing, feces, and urine. Lying in the center of the square were 60-70 dead prisoners clad in striped clothing and in disarray. They had reportedly been machine gunned the day before because they were too weak to march to another camp. The idea was for the SS and the prisoners to avoid the approaching U.S. Army and the Russians.

Adjacent to the "parade ground" was a small shed which was open on one side. Inside, were bodies stacked in alternate directions as one would stack cordwood, and each layer was covered with a sprinkling of quicklime. I did not see him, but someone told me that there had been a body of a dead American aviator in the shed. This place reportedly had been used for punishment, and the inmates were beaten on their back and heads with a shovel. My understanding is that all died following this abuse.

I visited some of the surrounding barracks and found live inmates who had hidden during the massacre. They were astounded and appeared to be struggling to understand what was happening. Some were in their 5 tier bunks and some were wandering about.

This was the first camp to be "liberated" by the Allied armies in Germany. Orhdruf was visited by Generals Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley and there are photographs of them observing the bodies of the machine-gunned inmates. According to Eisenhower, Patton had refused to visit the punishment shed, as he feared he would become ill. He did vomit at a later time.

Further into the camp was evidence of an attempt to exhume and burn large numbers of bodies. There was a gallows, although I really cannot remember whether I saw it or not. I don't remember leaving the camp. I recall being numb after seeing the camp. I had just turned 20 years old and I had read the biographical "Out of the Night." It was a pale and inadequate picture of a German concentration camp by a refugee German author.

I recall becoming very upset when we got back to our quarters, but the whole experience was far beyond my understanding. I wrote a letter to my parents describing the experience, which was read at a local gathering of businessmen. It was widely disbelieved.
American soldiers of the Fourth Armored Division survey the dead at Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Germany, April 1945.

Soldiers of the U.S. Fourth Armored Division survey the dead at Ohrdruf, April 1945.

According to General George Patton's diary (read here):

It was the most appalling sight imaginable. In a shed . . . was a pile of about 40 completely naked human bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purpose of removing the stench.

When the shed was full--I presume its capacity to be about 200, the bodies were taken to a pit a mile from the camp where they were buried. The inmates claimed that 3,000 men, who had been either shot in the head or who had died of starvation, had been so buried since the 1st of January.


Americans view cremation pyre at Ohrdruf on April 13, 1945

Captain Alois Liethen, who was one of the first American soldiers to see the camp, wrote the following to his family in a letter dated April 13, 1945 (read here):

As long as I am writing a horror tale I might as well describe some of the people who were in charge of this camp. The commandant (a man whose name I knew bak (sic) in the states and who I am looking for now more than ever was an SS Hauptsturmfuhrer BRAULING, and his right hand man was another SS man by the name of STIBITZ. Their favorite pasttime together with one or two other camp officials was to go out to the burning pit with a bottle of whisky each where they would sit and watch the burning of the weeks accumlation (sic) of dead bodies while they joked and drank their whiskey. Personally, the stench of the pit was enough to drive me nuts and a bottle of whiskey might have been a good thing for me while I was there. I have smelled a lot of foul odors -- like out at the rendering works and other places -- but this one was the worst. Evidently they were in such a hurry that they didn't get enough tar and wood on the last pyre for there were about fifty half burned cadavers lying there in chars.

Here are some excerpts of a speech by Rabbi Murray Kohn, a survivor of the camp, to a reunion of the 89th Division (read here):

It has been recorded that in Ordruf itself the last days were a slaughterhouse. We were shot at, beaten and molested. At every turn went on the destruction of the remaining inmates -- indiscriminant criminal behavior. Some days before the first Americans appeared at the gates of Ordruf, the last retreating Nazi guards managed to execute with hand pistols, literally emptying their last bullets on whomever they encountered leaving them bleeding to death as testified by an American of the 37th Tank Battalion Medical section, 10 a.m. April 4, 1945...

I must tell you something about Crawinkle, (a satelite camp of Ordruf). It was recently discovered after the reunification of east and West Germany that in nearby Crawinkel, the Nazis were preparing the Fuhrerbunker, the final headquarters of Hitler from where he planned to strike a deal with the Americans to join in fighting the Red Army. We worked around the clock, the project was known as the Olga Project. We were excavating inside the hills a bunker. Ten thousand people died there and it was completed with rivers of blood right down to the cutlery to embellish Hitler's table.

The current U.S. presidential campaign has already featured the bizarre spectacle of President Bush, in a speech to the Knesset, drawing an analogy between Obama's desire for diplomacy with our enemies and Neville Chamberlain's abandonment of the Sudetenland. That sort of campaign by false historical analogy misuses history. Now we see the Republican campaign stoop to distortion and innuendo utterly misusing history again. I say to the Republicans look at the true history of the liberation of the camps in which Uncle Charlie took part and soberly reflect on the humanity involved. Anything less would be a disservice to those who suffered in the camps and to the troops who liberated them.

Posted on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 12:52 AM | Comments (5) | Top

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Walter Shapiro: The end of both Clintonism and its opposite -- Kennedy-style liberalism -- draws closer

Source: Salon (5-27-08)

The sun-dappled image from August 1997 shimmers in memory. The two great Democratic political dynasties had set sail on carefree waters. Aboard the Mya as the schooner maneuvered its way out of Menemsha Harbor on Martha's Vineyard were the reigning Clintons and the radiant Kennedys. The news photographs, which mesh with my memory, show the president and the ruddy white-haired Massachusetts senator, along with a waving Hillary Clinton and the extended Kennedy clan, including Rep. Patrick Kennedy and daughter-of-Camelot Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg.

Last week, 11 years after that in-happier-times snapshot, the curtain began to descend on the Kennedys and Clintons alike. Before the wrenching news of a brain tumor, there had always seemed something eternal about Ted Kennedy: the survivor, the eternal-flame keeper of the dream that never died, the last active link to the heady days of can-do 1960s liberalism.

Each day brings Hillary Clinton closer to publicly acknowledging that her own presidential ambitions are over or, at least, redeposited in a safe-deposit box with a long lease. Certainly, her maladroit comment last week about Bobby Kennedy's assassination -- even if it was wrenched out of context in a take-no-prisoners media environment -- may well have been her presidential swan song. At the same time, her husband, the baffled 42nd president, is struggling with his new role as "Over-the-Hill Bill." In an interview with People magazine, Bill Clinton admitted that he can no longer be trusted to speak "late at night" when he is "tired or angry" without issuing himself "Miranda warnings."

The Clintons and the Kennedys were on separate trajectories long before Teddy and most of his family blessed the presidential ambitions of Barack Obama. Like comets with elongated orbits, the two families would periodically intersect (a teenage Boys State president from Arkansas shaking JFK's hand at the White House) and forge fruitful political alliances as they did during the 1990s. But even though they could dominate rooms and domesticate political enemies, the 76-year-old patriarch of the Senate and the 61-year-old former president are, at their core, as different as Hyannisport, Mass., and Hope, Ark....

Posted on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 1:23 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Douglas Feith: How Bush Sold the War

Source: WSJ (5-27-08)

[Mr. Feith was under secretary of defense for policy from July 2001 until August 2005. This article is adapted from his new memoir, "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism" (HarperCollins).]

In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq.

President Bush no longer stressed Saddam's record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy. This new focus compounded the damage to the president's credibility that had already been caused by the CIA's errors on Iraqi WMD. The president was seen as distancing himself from the actual case he had made for removing the Iraqi regime from power.

This change can be quantified: In the year beginning with his first major speech about Iraq – the Sept. 12, 2002 address to the U.N. General Assembly – Mr. Bush delivered nine major talks about Iraq. There were, on average, approximately 14 paragraphs per speech on Saddam's record as an enemy, aggressor, tyrant and danger, with only three paragraphs on promoting democracy. In the next year – from September 2003 to September 2004 – Mr. Bush delivered 15 major talks about Iraq. The average number of paragraphs devoted to the record of threats from Saddam was one, and the number devoted to democracy promotion was approximately 11.

The stunning change in rhetoric appeared to confirm his critics' argument that the security rationale for the war was at best an error, and at worst a lie. That's a shame, for Mr. Bush had solid grounds for worrying about the dangers of leaving Saddam in power.

In the spring of 2004, with the transfer of sovereign authority to the Iraqis imminent, the president was scheduled to give a major speech about Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld received an advance draft and he gave it to me for review. In keeping with the new trend, the drafted speech focused on the prospects for Iraqi democracy.

White House officials understandably preferred to declare affirmative messages about Iraq's future, rather than rehash the government's intelligence embarrassments. Even so, I thought it was a strategic error for the president to make no effort to defend the arguments that had motivated him before the war. Mr. Bush's political opponents were intent on magnifying the administration's mistakes regarding WMD. On television and radio, in print and on the Internet, day after day they repeated the claim that the undiscovered stockpiles were the sum and substance of why the U.S. went to war against Saddam.

Electoral politics aside, I thought it was important for national security reasons that the president refute his critics' misstatements. The CIA assessments of WMD were wrong, but they originated in the years before he became president and they had been accepted by Democratic and Republican members of Congress, as well as by the U.N. and other officials around the world. And, in any event, the erroneous WMD intelligence was not the entire security rationale for overthrowing Saddam.

On May 22, 2004, I gave Mr. Rumsfeld a memo to pass along to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and the president's speechwriters. I proposed that the speech "should deal with some basics – in particular, why we went to war in the first place." It would be useful to "make clear the tie-in between Iraq and the broader war on terrorism" in the following terms: The Saddam Hussein regime "had used WMD, supported various terrorist groups, was hostile to the U.S. and had a record of aggression and of defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions."

In light of 9/11, the "danger that Saddam's regime could provide biological weapons or other WMD to terrorist groups for use against us was too great" to let stand. And other ways of countering the danger – containment, sanctions, inspections, no-fly zones – had proven "unsustainable or inadequate." I suggested that the president distinguish between the essential U.S. interests in Iraq and the extra benefits if we could succeed in building democratic institutions there: "A unified Iraq that does not support terrorism or pursue WMD will in and of itself be an important victory in the war on terrorism."

Some of the speech's rhetoric about democracy struck me as a problem: "The draft speech now implies that we went to war in Iraq simply to free the Iraqi people from tyranny and create democracy there," I noted. But that implication "is not accurate and it sets us up for accusations of failure if Iraq does not quickly achieve 'democracy.'"

As was typical, the speech went through multiple drafts. Ms. Rice's office sent us a new version, and the next day I wrote Mr. Rumsfeld another set of comments – without great hope of persuading the speechwriting team. The speech's centerpiece, once again, was the set of steps "to help Iraq achieve democracy." One line in particular asserted that we went to Iraq "to make them free." I dissented:

- "This mixes up our current important goal (i.e., getting Iraq on the path to democratic government) with the strategic rationale for the war, which was to end the danger that Saddam might provide biological or [other] weapons of mass destruction to terrorists for use against us."

- "There is a widespread misconception that the war's rationale was the existence of Iraqi WMD stockpiles. This allows critics to say that our failure to find such stockpiles undermines that rationale."

- "If the President ignores this altogether and then implies that the war's rationale was not the terrorism/state sponsorship/WMD nexus but rather democracy for Iraqis, the critics may say that he is changing the subject or rewriting history."

Again, I proposed that the president distinguish between achieving our primary goal in Iraq – eliminating a security threat – and aiming for the over-and-above goal of democracy promotion, which may not be readily achievable.

Mr. Bush gave his speech at the Army War College on May 24, as Iraq was entering into the last month of its 14-month occupation by the U.S. The president declared: "I sent American troops to Iraq to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power. I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history, and find their own way."

I had hoped the president would explain why sending American troops to Iraq had helped defend our security, but he did not....

Posted on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 1:21 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Gregory Rodrigue: It's hard to reach a national consensus when so many people are hard partisans

Source: LAT (5-26-08)

[Gregory Rodriguez is a columnist and author who specializes in a variety of contemporary social issues.]

As we cloister ourselves in like-minded enclaves, we're less likely to reach national consensus.
May 26, 2008

Voter turnout this primary season has been setting records. With interest so high, some analysts are predicting another blockbuster general election in November. But can American democracy survive all this heightened interest in the political process?

Half a century ago, political scientist Paul Lazarsfeld became one of the first scholars to document the link between political participation and partisanship. He discovered that partisans voted more regularly and with greater enthusiasm than those who resided in the ideological middle. Although most experts then and now agree that high voter participation is generally a good thing, Lazarsfeld observed that partisan-driven turnout also has its dark side.


"Extreme interest goes with extreme partisanship," he wrote way back in 1954, "and might culminate in rigid fanaticism that could destroy the democratic processes if generalized throughout the community." Therefore, he concluded that a "lack of interest by some people is not without its benefits too."

In other words, a healthy democracy needs the uncommitted middle, the fence straddlers and the apathetic as much as it the firebrand activists. Indeed, in a nation so torn by the passions of partisans, it is those of us who aren't all that enamored of either side who give politicians the room to compromise, which, of course, is the art that politics is supposed to be all about.

But these days, skeptics and the uncommitted are becoming few and far between. The number of voters in the middle has become smaller and smaller, and hence there are fewer people willing to hear what both sides have to say. In the 1980s, maybe 25% of voters could be persuaded to vote for either major party. According to one estimate, that number may have dwindled to less than 10% today. The squeezing out of moderates in the electorate has since led to the decline in the number of moderates (and by that, I mean members willing to work with the other party and maybe even vote with it occasionally) in the House of Representatives, where they held 37% of the seats in the mid-1970s but only 8% in 2005. ...

Posted on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 12:53 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, May 26, 2008

Donald Boudreaux: Is misogyny to blame for Clinton's misfortunes?

Source: WSJ (5-26-08)

[Mr. Boudreaux is chairman of the economics department at George Mason University.]

Hillary Clinton is now complaining that her candidacy has been harmed by sexism. Interviewed earlier this week by the Washington Post, Sen. Clinton said the polls show that "more people would be reluctant to vote for a woman [than] to vote for an African American." This gender bias, she grumbled, "rarely gets reported on."

So a woman who holds degrees from Wellesley and Yale – who has earned millions in the private sector, won two terms in the U.S. Senate, and gathered many more votes than John Edwards, Bill Richardson and several other middle-aged white guys in their respective bids for the 2008 Democratic nomination – feels cheated because she's a woman.

Seems doubtful. But hey, I'm a guy and perhaps hopelessly insensitive. So let's give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that her campaign has indeed suffered because of sexism.

This fact (if it be a fact) reveals a hitherto unknown, ugly truth about the Democratic Party. The alleged bastion of modern liberalism, toleration and diversity is full of (to use Mrs. Clinton's own phrase) "people who are nothing but misogynists." Large numbers of Democratic voters are sexists. Who knew?

But here's another revelation. If Mrs. Clinton is correct that she is more likely than Barack Obama to defeat John McCain in November, that implies Republicans and independents are less sexist than Democrats.

It must be so. If American voters of all parties are as sexist as the Democrats, Mr. Obama would have a better chance than Mrs. Clinton of defeating Mr. McCain. The same misogyny that thwarted her in the Democratic primaries would thwart her in the general election....

Posted on Monday, May 26, 2008 at 11:23 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Robert McHenry: Who Can Account for the Rev. Hagee? (Hitler, Jews & the Middle East)

Source: Britannica Blog (5-26-08)

[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.]

I wonder what sort of man the Rev. John Hagee must be (see video overview, produced prior to the news that McCain and Hagee were parting ways). That “Rev.” tells us that he is, as they say, a man of God. On the evidence, he’s a man who thinks in large, even cosmic terms – he explains great historical events in terms of vast plans, and he finds, if not specific prophesies, then at least anticipations of them in a book he holds to relate the inerrant word of this same God.

He holds to a view of the history of the world called “premillennial dispensationalism,” which is an impressive mouthful of a label for an elaborate fantasy about The End. This particular figment requires that biblical Israel be restored in order for the drama of end times to play out. So the Rev. Hagee is a supporter of the modern state of Israel, not in the sense that he wishes it well and works to assure that it and its people will continue to exist and prosper despite their many enemies, for he knows that they won’t endure, any more than the rest of the Earth. No, he supports Israel as a tool, a means to get to the end of things along the lines he believes he understands from “Revelation,” the concluding section of that book.

This instrumental view, this seeing of someone or of a whole population as a means to an essentially private end, pops up even earlier in the Rev.’s interpretation of history. As he sees it, and as he believes the prophet Jeremiah (ibid.) indicated so long ago, the Holocaust was also simply a means to an end.

We know, of course, that for Adolph Hitler it was a means to an end, the end being a Europe, a Reich, that was Judenfrei – free entirely of the Jews. But Hagee tells us that it was a means also for God: God wanted the Jews to reestablish Israel and so He whipped up the Holocaust as a way of prodding them – or however many might be left – to abandon Europe for the old homeland. And so they did, and now there is an Israel, and so we can get on with the business of the Second Coming and the consequent eternal bliss promised to the Rev. Hagee and his coreligionists.

As I said at the beginning, I don’t know what sort of man could believe this. And I certainly don’t grasp the notion of a God who could come up with such a plan. Let’s think about it a bit.

If you had wanted the Jews to leave Europe and resettle in the Middle East, how might you have gone about it? Let’s make it easier: Pretend you are God. You are omnipotent. So, taking the softest possible approach, you could just have whispered into each Jew’s ear, “Cheese it! and get thee to Israel.” Some secular or skeptical ones would have resisted, of course, but you didn’t need them all to go anyway, just a good-size core group to get things off the ground. Surely, on hearing a Word directly from God, a goodly number would promptly have upped stakes and gone.

Or you could have been less subtle. There is precedent for a pillar of fire, leading the godly to the promised land. A couple of plagues, precisely targeted, would no doubt have done the trick as well. Or you could simply have caused them all to disappear from where they were and reappear instantly in Palestine. There are four ways right off the top of my head. All in all, it wouldn’t have been an especially hard thing to manage, if you’d been God.

But instead, this God, the God of Hagee, lays out a time-consuming, expensive, ridiculously sloppy program. First, he selects the highly unlikely ex-corporal Hitler as his tool, has him spend more than a dozen years gradually gaining political power in Germany, has him undertake the conquest of Europe so that he can reach all those Jews scattered about the place, and then has him instigate the systematic extermination of six million or so of them by the most brutal methods his minions can devise. Why? Why, pour encourager les autres! A staggering idea, no? Except for the Rev. Hagee, apparently, who recites it with the equanimity that, when it does not proceed from wisdom, is so often the product of derangement.

Well, OK, credit where credit is due: The scheme worked, though I can’t help wondering how the Rev. Hagee accounts for the many obstacles that were thrown in the way of the refugees even then. But – pardon me – this is a depraved tale, told not necessarily by an idiot but by someone whose ideology is morally incoherent.

An idle question or two for the Rev.: In this scenario, exactly what is Mr. Hitler guilty of? Did he not do precisely as instructed, by no lesser an authority than your God himself? Was he free to do otherwise? How do you suppose he was rewarded for his service?

I cannot imagine why anyone would listen to a man who thinks this way. That numbers do is one of the more telling arguments against democracy. Senator McCain is well rid of him.

Posted on Monday, May 26, 2008 at 11:03 AM | Comments (3) | Top

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Andrew Stephen: Hating Hillary

Source: New Statesman (5-22-08)

[Andrew Stephen was appointed US Editor of the New Statesman in 2001, having been its Washington correspondent and weekly columnist since 1998.]

History, I suspect, will look back on the past six months as an example of America going through one of its collectively deranged episodes - rather like Prohibition from 1920-33, or McCarthyism some 30 years later. This time it is gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind. It has been shamelessly peddled by the US media, which - sooner rather than later, I fear - will have to account for their sins. The chief victim has been Senator Hillary Clinton, but the ramifications could be hugely harmful for America and the world.

I am no particular fan of Clinton. Nor, I think, would friends and colleagues accuse me of being racist. But it is quite inconceivable that any leading male presidential candidate would be treated with such hatred and scorn as Clinton has been. What other senator and serious White House contender would be likened by National Public Radio's political editor, Ken Rudin, to the demoniac, knife-wielding stalker played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? Or described as "a fucking whore" by Randi Rhodes, one of the foremost personalities of the supposedly liberal Air America? Would Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein fame) ever publicly declare his disgust about a male candidate's "thick ankles"? Could anybody have envisaged that a website set up specifically to oppose any other candidate would be called Citizens United Not Timid? (We do not need an acronym for that.)

I will come to the reasons why I fear such unabashed misogyny in the US media could lead, ironically, to dreadful racial unrest. "All men are created equal," Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed in 1776. That equality, though, was not extended to women, who did not even get the vote until 1920, two years after (some) British women. The US still has less gender equality in politics than Britain, too. Just 16 of America's 100 US senators are women and the ratio in the House (71 out of 435) is much the same. It is nonetheless pointless to argue whether sexism or racism is the greater evil: America has a peculiarly wicked record of racist subjugation, which has resulted in its racism being driven deep underground. It festers there, ready to explode again in some unpredictable way.

To compensate meantime, I suspect, sexism has been allowed to take its place as a form of discrimination that is now openly acceptable. "How do we beat the bitch?" a woman asked Senator John McCain, this year's Republican presidential nominee, at a Republican rally last November. To his shame, McCain did not rebuke the questioner but joined in the laughter. Had his supporter asked "How do we beat the nigger?" and McCain reacted in the same way, however, his presidential hopes would deservedly have gone up in smoke. "Iron my shirt," is considered amusing heckling of Clinton. "Shine my shoes," rightly, would be hideously unacceptable if yelled at Obama.
Evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, American men like to delude themselves that they are the most macho in the world. It is simply unthinkable, therefore, for most of them to face the prospect of having a woman as their leader. The massed ranks of male pundits gleefully pronounced that Clinton had lost the battle with Obama immediately after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, despite past precedents that strong second-place candidates (like Ronald Reagan in his first, ultimately unsuccessful campaign in 1976; like Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson and Jerry Brown) continue their campaigns until the end of the primary season and, in most cases, all the way to the party convention.
None of these male candidates had a premature political obituary written in the way that Hillary Clinton's has been, or was subjected to such righteous outrage over refusing to quiesce and withdraw obediently from what, in this case, has always been a knife-edge race. Nor was any of them anything like as close to his rivals as Clinton now is to Obama....

Posted on Sunday, May 25, 2008 at 4:01 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Friday, May 23, 2008

Mort Kondracke: Can GOP Reform to Avoid 'Kennedy Scenario' for 2008?

Source: Real Clear Politics (5-23-08)

Everyone in and around American politics is pulling for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) on a personal level. But Republicans have to work very hard to avoid the fulfillment of his political dream.

In an interview in March, Kennedy talked about the difference that the 1964 Democratic landslide meant for the passage of liberal legislation, specifically Medicare. He clearly was hoping for a similar triumph this year.

Kennedy recalled to me how, two years after his arrival in the Senate back in 1962, "we failed with Medicare. But it passed in 1965. The principal difference was the election of 1964. ... We failed in the spring, but it passed in the late winter. Fifteen Senators just absolutely changed their votes on the basis of the election of '64."

Actually, Democrats picked up just one Senate seat in that election, but it gave them a total of 68 votes. And Democrats picked up 37 House seats as President Lyndon Johnson scored a victory over Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), 61 percent to 39 percent.

When I asked him whether it would take a 1964-style landslide to pass his long-sought goal of universal health care, he said, "No, I just think we need additional Democratic votes in the Senate and a Democratic president to lead them."

There is little chance that Kennedy's choice for president, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), will pull an LBJ-sized victory this year, but Kennedy clearly is hoping that Obama's ability to attract new voters to the polls will expand their party's majorities in the House and Senate and make it possible to pass liberal legislation.

And Republicans have every reason to fear that this Kennedy dream might be fulfilled. In the Senate, Democrats can't gain the nine seats they need for a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority, but they can gain as many as seven, and possibly pull moderate Republicans across the line to support Democratic initiatives, much as LBJ pulled conservative Southern Democrats.

In the House, as Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) warned last week, "the political atmosphere facing House Republicans this November is the worst since Watergate," which cost the GOP 49 seats in 1974. Having lost 30 seats in 2006, the GOP could lose 20 more this year....

Posted on Friday, May 23, 2008 at 7:48 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, May 22, 2008

David Horowitz & Ben Johnson: Party of Defeat

Source: Reprinted from the Introduction to: Party of Defeat (Spence, 2008) (5-22-08)

What nation can prevail in a war if half its population thinks the war is unnecessary and unjust, and its commander-in-chief is a liar, and its own government the aggressor? What president can mobilize his nation if his word is not trusted? And what soldier can prevail on a field of battle if half his countrymen are telling him that he shouldn’t be there in the first place?

It was July 2003, only three months after American forces entered Iraq, when the Democratic Party launched its first all-out attack on the president’s credibility and the morality of the war. The opening salvos were reported in a New York Times article: “Democratic presidential candidates offered a near-unified assault today on President Bush’s credibility in his handling of the Iraq war, signaling a shift in the political winds by aggressively invoking arguments most had shunned since the fall of Baghdad.”[16]

While American forces battled al-Qaeda and Ba’athist insurgents in the Iraqi capital, the Democratic National Committee released a television ad that focused not on winning those battles, but on the very legitimacy of the war. The theme of the ad was “Read His Lips: President Bush Deceives the American People.” The alleged deception was 16 words that had been included in a State of the Union address he delivered on the eve of the conflict.[17]

These words summarized a British intelligence report claiming that Iraq had attempted to acquire fissionable uranium in the African state of Niger, thus indicating Saddam’s (well-known) intentions to develop nuclear weapons. The report was subsequently confirmed by a bipartisan Senate Committee and a British investigative commission, but not until many months had passed and the Democratic attacks had taken their toll.[18] On its surface, the attacks were directed at the president’s credibility for repeating the British claim. But their clear implication was to question the decision to go to war – in other words to cast doubt on the credibility of the American cause. If Saddam had not sought fissionable uranium in Niger, it was suggested, the White House had lied in describing Saddam as a threat.

In the midst of a war, and in the face of a determined terrorist resistance in Iraq, Democrats had launched an attack on America’s presence on the field of battle. This separated their assault from the normal criticism of war policies. Senator John Edwards, then a candidate for the Democrats’ presidential nomination, had voted to authorize the war and was still claiming to support it. In an interview with the New York Times, he identified the significance of the Democrats’ attack: “The most important attribute that any president has is his credibility – his credibility with the American people, with its allies and with the world.” But even as Edwards said this, he joined the Democrats’ attack, publicly insinuating that the president was a liar who had deceived the American people on the gravest issue imaginable. “When the president’s own statements are called into question,” Edwards explained to the reporter, “it’s a very serious matter.”[19]

When the nation is at war, it is graver still. To destroy the credibility of the commander-in-chief, while his troops are in battle, is to cripple his ability to support them and to win the war they are fighting. For this reason, throughout the history of armed conflict, a united home front has been an indispensable element of victory. For the same reason, a principal aim of psychological warfare operations has been to target the credibility of the enemy’s leaders and the morality of the enemy cause.

General Ion Michai Pacepa was the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to defect from the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. In a commentary about the attacks on President Bush during the war in Iraq, Pacepa recalled: “Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels.”[20] No president can marshal his nation’s resources if his people distrust him or disbelieve their own cause. To attack a president’s credibility in the middle of a war, over a matter as ambiguous as a 16-word summary of an allied intelligence report, is an attempt to undermine the war itself.

During the Vietnam War, General Pacepa wrote, Soviet intelligence “spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America’s presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren’t facts. They were our tales, but…as Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.”[21]
Nor did this Soviet campaign to discredit the United States stop with Vietnam. As Pacepa explains: “The final goal of our anti-American offensive was to discourage the United States from protecting the world against communist terrorism and expansion. Sadly, we succeeded. After U.S. forces precipitously pulled out of Vietnam, the victorious communists massacred some two million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Another million tried to escape, but many died in the attempt. This tragedy also created a credibility gap between America and the rest of the world, damaged the cohesion of American foreign policy, and poisoned domestic debate in the United States.”[22]
It is one of the ironies of the campaign against the war in Iraq that its opponents cite the political conflicts over Vietnam as a precedent for their extraordinary attacks on a war in progress. In doing so, they misconstrue the past and misunderstand its lessons. During Vietnam, the nation’s political leaders, both Democrats and Republicans, were united in their support of the war effort for more than 10 years. Their bipartisan unity only came to an end when both parties conceded that a victory was no longer politically possible. It was only in the presidential campaign of 1972, 11 years after the first American advisers were sent to Vietnam that Senator George McGovern ran against the war itself. By that time both parties were agreed on a policy of military withdrawal, and by that time truce negotiations with the Communists – initiated by a Republican administration – had already begun.

The conflict over war policy during the 1972 campaign was over the proper way to accomplish a withdrawal favored by both parties. It was over how to leave not whether to leave. The McGovern Democrats favored a policy of immediate and unconditional retreat. Their campaign slogan was “America Come Home.” The Nixon Republicans wanted to negotiate a truce whose terms would preserve the non-Communist regime in South Vietnam, and deny victory to the Communist aggressors. Their slogan was “Peace with Honor.”

The McGovernites did not believe American forces should have been in Vietnam in the first place. McGovern’s candidacy was a strategic campaign to block America’s Cold War policy of containing Communist expansion. Unlike the Democrats of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the McGovernites believed America was the problematic imperial power, not the Soviets. This position represented a sea change in the Democratic Party, whose leaders had actually launched the Cold War policy of containing Soviet Communism beginning with the Truman administration in 1947. Under John F. Kennedy, it was they who had initiated America’s military presence in Vietnam. Until the McGovern candidacy, the Democratic leadership, including its presidential candidate in 1968, Hubert Humphrey, had supported the Vietnam War. It was the first time since the Civil War that an opposition party had conducted a national campaign to challenge the justice of America’s war aims.

The campaigns against the wars in Iraq and Vietnam may seek the same end – the defeat of American power – but their differences are revealing. In regard to Iraq, the Democrats’ attacks on the justice of the American cause came not at the end of a 10-year stalemate, but within three months of the swiftest, most successful campaign in military history. The attacks were conducted not by movement activists but by leaders of the Democratic Party, and they came in the first months of a war that both parties had until then supported, and that had been endorsed by the previous Democratic administration, and that both parties had voted to authorize. The attacks on this war have no precedent in the American past.

Posted on Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 8:49 PM | Comments (7) | Top

Harvey Wasserman: Can a civil rights/feminist presidential union put John Edwards on the Supreme Court?

Source: Free Press (5-22-08)

As the end game for the Democratic nomination takes shape, the historic union of the feminist and civil rights movements has never been more in evidence. Nor has the next upcoming appointment to the US Supreme Court ever been more pivotal.

It's no accident that for the first time in history, we have both an African-American and a female contender. No matter what one may think of the two individuals -- their stands on the issues, their personalities, their "baggage" -- the margins between them are very small. They are each a product of historic movements that have come to this moment precisely at the same time, and in partnership. It will be difficult for the Democrats to win without the full, enthusiastic support of both of them.

Part of this confluence can be told through parallel voting rights histories. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, allegedly guaranteed the right to vote "regardless of race." The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing the ballot for women, came a full fifty years later.

Does that say this country is more sexist than racist?

Well, yes and no. Women had the right to vote in many early states. The last to nix it was New Jersey, in 1808. That was also the year the U.S. Constitution banned the importation of slaves.

Black men could vote in many northern states right from the time of independence. That right was never formally rescinded.

But even in those northern states, African-American voter registration and the counting of their votes have been severely compromised -- especially in urban areas in the 20th century, and decisively in the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004.

Meanwhile, the poll tax, which was used to keep blacks from voting in the south, was not banned by a Constitutional Amendment until 1964.

From the end of the Civil War at least until the 1970s, the Democratic Party and its terrorist wing, the Ku Klux Klan, effectively kept both black men and black women from voting in the south. More than 3,000 known lynchings helped disembowel the African-American franchise.

And the poll tax has now been effectively re-instated in the form of the voter ID requirement, just certified by the US Supreme Court, set to spread from Indiana through the state whose legislatures are controlled by the GOP.

For women overall, the vote was first re-instated in Wyoming in 1869, and in some other states with strong populist and socialist movements through 1920.

But many early feminists actually got their start as abolitionists. While campaigning to end slavery, they were often assaulted by men who couldn't bear to hear a female speak in public. In one infamous incident, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott sailed all the way to London for an international conference against slavery, only to be barred at the door by the men.

Furious, they convened the first conference for women's rights in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. There they declared that "all men and women are created equal." Their most prominent male speaker was Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist ex-slave who helped equate the twin crusades of race and gender.

The partnership -- and frequent tension -- between the two movements has been essential ever since. In every major grassroots movement that has defined this country, it's impossible to separate them.

In 2008, if Barack Obama is in fact the presidential nominee, he and Hillary Clinton must come to some kind of agreement about the VP slot -- and much more. And the women of this country, who are the majority of voters, and without whose overwhelming support the Democrats can't win, must be as happy with the outcome as those who have identified primarily with the civil rights movement.

The word is consensus. It is hard to achieve. But then it's even harder to beat.

Which brings us to John Edwards. For many on the left, he was the top choice for the presidency, and would seem a likely VP candidate. He might also make a great attorney-general.

But it's no mystery the future of what's left of our democracy hangs on the thin thread of the highly unreliable fifth vote of Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. As we just saw in this horrendous voter ID decision, that thread can and has snapped with terrifying impact.

Given the age of the other Justices, the next president will fill at least one, and possibly two or three seats on the Court. If just the first one is filled by John McCain, the litany of basic rights and freedoms that we'll lose is almost beyond comprehension. Everything Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes and the extremist corporate/religious right have done to destroy the essence of American democracy will be set in stone for the rest of our lifetimes, and those of our children. Countless victories won with the blood, sweat and tears of the feminist, civil rights, labor, environmental, peace, social justice, good government and any other "small d movement" you can think of will be as good as gone.

John Edwards might bring unique power, clarity and charisma to a Court in desperate need of someone to balance the hideous Antonin Scalia, perhaps the single most destructive judge in all US history.

But if nothing else, the stakes at the Court should remind us all why we need a unified path to victory in the fall.

Amidst the tumult and the turmoil, let us all pray -- and work -- for the better natures of our souls.

Posted on Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 6:12 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Michael Schwartz: The Loss of an Imperial Dream

Source: TomDispatch.com (5-22-08)

[Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. His analyses of America's Iraq have appeared regularly at Tomdispatch.com, as well as Asia Times, Mother Jones, and Contexts. His forthcoming Tomdispatch book, War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context (Haymarket, June 2008) explores how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the U.S. to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling a sectarian civil war. His email address is Ms42@optonline.net.]

On February 15, 2003, ordinary citizens around the world poured into the streets to protest George W. Bush's onrushing invasion of Iraq. Demonstrations took place in large cities and small towns globally, including a small but spirited protest at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Up to 30 million people, who sensed impending catastrophe, participated in what Rebecca Solnit, that apostle of popular hope, has called "the biggest and most widespread collective protest the world has ever seen."

The first glancing assessment of history branded this remarkable planetary protest a record-breaking failure, since the Bush administration, less than one month later, ordered U.S. troops across the Kuwaiti border and on to Baghdad.

And it has since largely been forgotten, or perhaps better put, obliterated from official and media memory. Yet popular protest is more like a river than a storm; it keeps flowing into new areas, carrying pieces of its earlier life into other realms. We rarely know its consequences until many years afterward, when, if we're lucky, we finally sort out its meandering path. Speaking for the protesters back in May 2003, only a month after U.S. troops entered the Iraqi capital, Solnit offered the following:

"We will likely never know, but it seems that the Bush administration decided against the ‘Shock and Awe' saturation bombing of Baghdad because we made it clear that the cost in world opinion and civil unrest would be too high. We millions may have saved a few thousand or a few tens of thousand of lives. The global debate about the war delayed it for months, months that perhaps gave many Iraqis time to lay in stores, evacuate, brace for the onslaught."

Whatever history ultimately concludes about that unexpected moment of protest, once the war began, other forms of resistance arose -- mainly in Iraq itself -- that were equally unexpected. And their effects on the larger goals of Bush administration planners can be more easily traced. Think of it this way: In a land the size of California with but 26 million people, a ragtag collection of Baathists, fundamentalists, former military men, union organizers, democratic secularists, local tribal leaders, and politically active clerics -- often at each others throats (quite literally) -- nonetheless managed to thwart the plans of the self-proclaimed New Rome, the "hyperpower" and "global sheriff" of Planet Earth. And that, even in the first glancing assessment of history, may indeed prove historic.

The New American Century Goes Missing in Action

It's hard now even to recall the original vision George W. Bush and his top officials had of how the conquest of Iraq would unfold as an episode in the President's Global War on Terror. In their minds, the invasion was sure to yield a quick victory, to be followed by the creation of a client state that would house crucial "enduring" U.S. military bases from which Washington would project power throughout what they liked to term "the Greater Middle East."

In addition, Iraq was quickly going to become a free-market paradise, replete with privatized oil flowing at record rates onto the world market. Like falling dominos, Syria and Iran, cowed by such a demonstration of American might, would follow suit, either from additional military thrusts or because their regimes -- and those of up to 60 countries worldwide -- would appreciate the futility of resisting Washington's demands. Eventually, the "unipolar moment" of U.S. global hegemony that the collapse of the Soviet Union had initiated would be extended into a "New American Century" (along with a generational Pax Republicana at home).

This vision is now, of course, long gone, largely thanks to unexpected and tenacious resistance of every sort within Iraq. This resistance consisted of far more than the initial Sunni insurgency that tied down what Donald Rumsfeld pridefully labeled "the greatest military force on the face of the earth." It is already none too rash a statement to suggest that, at all levels of society, usually at great sacrifice, the Iraqi people frustrated the imperial designs of a superpower.

Consider, for example, the myriad ways in which the Iraqi Sunnis resisted the occupation of their country from almost the moment the Bush administration's intention to fully dismantle Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime became clear. The largely Sunni city of Falluja, like most other communities around the country, spontaneously formed a new government based on local clerical and tribal structures. Like many of these cities, it avoided the worst of the post-invasion looting by encouraging the formation of local militias to police the community. Ironically, the orgy of looting that took place in Baghdad was, at least in part, a consequence of the U.S. military presence, which delayed the creation of such militias there. Eventually, however, sectarian militias brought a modicum of order even to Baghdad.

In Falluja and elsewhere, these same militias soon became effective instruments for reducing, and -- for a time -- eliminating, the presence of the U.S. military. For the better part of a year, faced with IEDs and ambushes from insurgents, the U.S. military declared Falluja a "no go" zone, withdrew to bases outside the city, and discontinued violent incursions into hostile neighborhoods. This retreat was matched in many other cities and towns. The absence of patrols by occupation forces saved tens of thousands of "suspected insurgents" from the often deadly violence of home invasions, and their relatives from wrecked homes and detained family members.

Even the most successful of U.S. military adventures in that period, the second battle of Falluja in November 2004, could also be seen, from quite a different perspective, as a successful act of resistance. Because the United States was required to mass a significant proportion of its combat brigades for the offensive (even transferring British troops from the south to perform logistical duties), most other cities were left alone. Many of these cities used this respite from the U.S. military to establish, or consolidate, autonomous governments or quasi-governments and defensive militias, making it all the more difficult for the occupation to control them.

Falluja itself was, of course, destroyed, with 70% of its buildings turned to rubble, and tens of thousands of its residents permanently displaced -- an extreme sacrifice that had the unexpected effect of taking pressure off other Iraqi cities for a while. In fact, the ferocity of the resistance in the predominantly Sunni areas of Iraq forced the American military to wait almost four years before renewing their initial 2004 efforts to pacify the well-organized Sadrist-led resistance in the predominantly Shia areas of the country.

The Rebellion of the Oil Workers

In another arena entirely, consider the Bush administration's dreams of harnessing Iraqi oil production to its foreign policy ambitions. The immediate goals, as American planners saw it, were to double prewar output and begin the process of transferring control of production from state ownership to foreign companies. Three major energy initiatives designed to accomplish these goals have so far been frustrated by resistance from virtually every segment of Iraqi society. Iraq's well-organized oil workers played a key role in this by using their ability to bring production to a virtual stand-still in order to abort the transfer -- only a few months after the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein's regime -- of the operation of the southern oil port of Basra to the management of then-Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

This and other early acts of labor defiance turned back the initial assault on the Iraqi government-controlled system of oil production. Such acts also laid a foundation for successful efforts to prevent the passage of oil policies shaped in Washington that were designed to transfer control of energy exploration and production to foreign companies. In these efforts, the oil workers were joined by both Sunni and Shia resistance groups, local governments, and finally the new national parliament.

This same sort of resistance extended to the whole roster of neoliberal reforms sponsored by the U.S.-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). From the beginning of the occupation, for instance, there were protests against mass unemployment caused by the dismantling of the Baathist state and the shuttering of state-owned factories. Much of the armed resistance was a response to the occupation's early violent suppression of these protests.

Even more significant were local efforts to replace the government services discontinued by the CPA. The same local quasi-governments that had nurtured the militias sought to sustain or replace Baathist social programs, often by siphoning off oil destined for export onto the black-market to pay for local services, and hoarding local resources such as electrical generation. The result would be the creation of virtual city-states wherever U.S. troops were not present, leading to the inability of the occupation to "pacify" any substantial portion of the country.

The Sadrist movement and the Mahdi Army militia of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was probably the most successful -- and most anti-occupation -- of the Shia political parties-cum-militias that systematically sought to develop quasi-government organizations. They tried to meet, however minimally, some of the basic needs of their communities, supplying food baskets, housing services, and serving a host of other functions previously promised by the Baathist government, but forsworn by the U.S. occupation and the Iraqi government that the United States installed when "handing over" sovereignty in June 2004.

The American occupationaires expected that their plans for the rapid privatization and transformation of the state-driven economy would indeed generate resistance, but they were convinced that this would subside quickly once the new economy kicked into gear. Instead, as the occupation wore on, demands for relief grew more strident and insistent, while the country itself, in chaos and near collapse, became visible evidence of the failure of the Bush administration's "free market" policies.

An Iraqi Agenda for Withdrawal

Occupation officials faced the same dilemma in the political realm. The original goal of the Bush administration was a stable, pro-Washington government, stripped of its economic and political dominance over Iraqi society, but a bastion of resistance to Iranian regional power. This vision, like its military and economic cousins, has long since disappeared under the weight of Iraqi resistance.

Take, for example, the two high profile Iraqi elections, celebrated in the mainstream American media as a unique Bush administration accomplishment in the otherwise relentlessly autocratic Middle East. Inside Iraq, however, they had quite a different look. It is important to remember that the United States initially planned to sustain its direct rule -- the Coalition Provisional Authority -- until the country was fully pacified and its economic reforms completed. When the CPA became a hated symbol of an unwanted occupation, planning shifted to the idea of installing an appointed Iraqi government, based on community meetings that only supporters of the occupation could attend. Full-scale elections would be postponed until winners fully supportive of the Bush agenda were assured. An outpouring of protest from the predominantly Shia areas of the country, led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, forced CPA administrators to move on to an election-based strategy.

The first election in January 2005 delivered a sizeable parliamentary majority voted in on platforms calling for strict timetables for a full U.S. military withdrawal from the country. American representatives then forcefully pressured the newly installed cabinet to abandon this position.

The second parliamentary election in December 2005 followed a similar pattern. This time, the backroom bargaining was only partially effective. The newly installed prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, reneged on his campaign promises by publicly supporting an ongoing American military presence, which caused deep fissures in the ruling coalition. After a year of unproductive negotiations, the 30 Sadrists in parliament, originally a key part of Maliki's ruling coalition, withdrew from both that coalition and the cabinet in protest over the prime minister's refusal to set a date for the end of the occupation. Subsequent parliamentary demands for a date certain for withdrawal were ignored by both the government and U.S. officials. While Maliki continued in office without a parliamentary majority, the controversy contributed to the soaring popularity of the Sadrists and waning support for the other Shiite governing parties.

By early 2008, with provincial elections looming in November, there was little doubt that the Sadrists would sweep to power in many predominantly Shia provinces, most critically Basra, Iraq's second largest city and southern oil hub. To prevent this debacle, Iraqi government troops, supported and advised by the U.S. military, sought to expel the Sadrists from key areas of Basra.

This use of military force to prevent electoral defeat was only one of many indications that the Iraqi government was feeling the pressure of public opinion. Another was the reluctance of Prime Minister Maliki to maintain an antagonistic stance toward Iran. Despite fervent Bush administration efforts, his government has promoted social, religious, and economic relationships between Iraqis and Iranians. These included facilitating visits to the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf by hundreds of thousands of Iranian Shia pilgrims, as well as supporting extensive oil transactions between Basra and Iranian firms, including distribution and refining services that promised to integrate the two energy economies. A formal military relationship between the two countries was vetoed by U.S. authorities, but this did not reverse the tide of cooperation.

The River of Resistance

As the occupation wore on, the Bush administration found itself swimming against a tide of resistance of a previously unimaginable sort, and ever further from its goals. Today, cities and towns around the country are largely under the sway of Shia or Sunni militias which, even when trained or paid by the occupation, remain militantly opposed to the U.S. presence. Moreover, though the prostrate Iraqi economy has been formally privatized, these local militias -- and the political leaders they worked with -- continue to raise demands for vast government-funded reconstruction and economic development programs.

The formal political leadership of Iraq, locked inside the heavily fortified, U.S.-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad, remains publicly compliant when it comes to Bush administration plans to transform Iraq into a Middle Eastern outpost -- including the continued presence of American troops on a series of mega-bases in the heart of the country. The rest of the government bureaucracy and the bulk of Iraq's grass roots are increasingly insistent on an early American departure date and a full-scale reversal of the economic policies first introduced by the occupation.

In Washington, for Democratic as well as Republican politicians, the outpost idea remains at the heart of the policy agenda for Iraq in this election year, along with a neoliberal economy featuring a modernized oil sector in which multinational firms are to use state-of-the-art technology to maximize the country's lagging oil production.

Iraqi resistance of every kind and on every level has, however, prevented this vision from becoming reality. Because of the Iraqis, the glorious sounding Global War on Terror has been transformed into an endless, hopeless actual war.

But the Iraqis have paid a terrible price for resisting. The invasion and the social and economic policies that accompanied it have destroyed Iraq, leaving its people essentially destitute. In the first five years of this endless war, Iraqis have suffered more for resisting than if they had accepted and endured American military and economic dominance. Whether consciously or not, they have sacrificed themselves to halt Washington's projected military and economic march through the oil-rich Middle East on the path to a new American Century that now will never be.

It is past time for the rest of the world to shoulder at least a small share of the burden of resistance. Just as the worldwide protests before the war were among the upstream sources of the Iraqi resistance-to-come, so now others, especially Americans, should resist the very idea that Iraq could ever become the headquarters for a permanent United States presence that would, in the words of Bush speechwriter David Frum, "put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans." Unlike the Iraqis, after all, the citizens of the United States are uniquely positioned to bury this imperial dream for all time.

This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.

Posted on Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 5:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Kelpie Wilson: Why Dems and Republicans Are Afraid of Two Words ... Peak Oil

Source: AlterNet (5-22-08)

[Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor. Trained as a mechanical engineer, she embarked on a career as a forest protection activist, then returned to engineering as a technical writer for the solar power industry.]

The pro-growth faction has reacted quickly and scathingly to the idea that there could be limits to growth.

In 1956, M. King Hubbert, a petroleum geologist with Shell Oil, presented a paper to the American Petroleum Institute that predicted US oil production would peak in the early 1970s and then follow a declining curve, now known as Hubbert's curve. But Hubbert almost didn't get to give his paper. He got a call from his bosses at Shell, who asked him to "tone it down." His reply was that there was nothing to tone down. It was just straightforward analysis. He presented the paper, unedited. You can read the whole story here.

Since that time, the oil industry and its political supporters have done everything they can to tone down the message that oil is a finite resource and that we will run out of it some day. Why would they do that? To further the short-sighted, short-term pursuit of profit. In 2004, Shell finally got caught in a lie about the size of its oil reserves. The company had inflated the stated size of its oil reserves to keep stock share prices high because who wants to invest in a company -- or an industry -- that is going the way of the dinosaurs?

Since 1956, the world economy has proceeded under a sort of oil company spell that has woven the illusion all around us that oil depletion is so far into the future that we don't need to worry about it. That belief was essential to support the aim of an endlessly growing economy. There have been a few hitches in that strategy.

In 1972, just as oil production in the United States reached its all-time peak, a group of computer modelers from MIT released a study called "The Limits to Growth." They predicted a steep decline in natural resources of all kinds. Because reserve numbers for many minerals, including oil, were not accurately known back then, they looked at different scenarios. Some showed us running out of oil before 2000 and some showed the peak occurring toward the middle of the 21st century.

The pro-growth faction reacted quickly and scathingly to the idea that there could be limits to growth. The MIT scientists were treated like Cassandras in academia and in the press. This strategy of killing the messenger, the bearer of bad news, soon permeated American politics. Jimmy Carter tried to grapple with the energy crisis in the late 1970s with support for energy alternatives and conservation, but he was ridiculed by the media and American consumers were not able to hear the message. Ronald Reagan walked away with the presidency and promptly tore the solar panels off the roof of the White House. Ever since then, it has somehow been "not polite" to talk about limits to growth.

Today, despite skyrocketing oil prices, most politicians still avoid the term "peak oil." ...

Posted on Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 5:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jeff Biggers: Appalachia's role in the national culture shouldn't be a laughing matter

Source: Huffington Post (Blog) (5-22-08)

[Jeff Biggers is author of The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2006).]

When I saw the clip of the Daily Show's Jon Stewart apeing a misinformed West Virginia voter last week, I had a flashback to a Saturday Night Live "Appalachian ER" skit, which featured rocker Neil Young embroiled in a mess of incest and depravity.

How the media loves its hillbillies.

Makes me wanna holler: The hand-wringing aftermath of the recent presidential primaries in Appalachia -- from western Pennsylvania, North Carolina, West Virginia and Kentucky -- says more about the media's prejudice and misperception of the Mountain South than any insights into the voting ranks and their racism or religious narrowness.

In the process, most pundits missed the two best kept secrets about Appalachia: In a region that has historically witnessed tremendous industrial upheaval and transition, there is no single Appalachia or Appalachian culture. Secondly, Appalachia has been a burning ground of change and an arena for rebellion and innovation for the past 250 years.

Yet, for a media quick to scapegoat or collect a soundbite for the evening news, the ignorant hillbilly gets trotted out of the woods as the exclusive symbol of the region, or, in fact, as the last acceptable slur in the country. Just as SNL has never aired a "Jewish ER" or "Black Sambo ER" skit -- thank God, recognizing that our nation has grown up on these matters -- the Daily Show's host probably will never track down and mock an elderly Jewish voter in Florida or an older African American in Michigan. Let's hope not.

Take hillbillies, on the other hand. Dating back to the 1850s, when George W. Harris created the character of Sut Lovingood, the "durn'd fool" with his "brains onhook'd" from eastern Tennessee for a New York newspaper, the media has obsessed over hillbillies, as if they have cornered the market on provincialism or racism in America. From bloggers on the liberal Daily Kos to untold television interviews, this same obsession has reared its ugly head in one commentary after another, blinding the writers from any historical truths about Appalachia.

One guest blogger for the environmental website Grist, a wonderful venue for investigative writers, completely wrote off the region as the "Deliverance" vote. Did this blogger ever consider the fact that the "Deliverance" vote in West Virginia overwhelmingly elects liberal Democrat Jay Rockefeller and anti-Iraq war icon Robert Byrd to the Senate, or that both senators have endorsed Obama?

New York Times columnist Timothy Egan, hands down one of the most insightful writers in the country and one of my literary exemplars, simply concluded in his latest missive: Goodbye Appalachia. (New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, who launched the newspaper on its course for world acclaim in the 1890s, came from Appalachia and modeled the Times on his Chattanooga editorial approach.)

Let's compare the coverage of the West Virginia with Rhode Island primaries. Unless we want to split hairs, a similar number of voters -- 8% versus 5% -- ranked race as the SINGLE most important factor in their vote for Senator Hillary Clinton. The media, though, never raised any concerns about racism in Rhode Island. This is New England, home of the free and brave, and the leaders in our nation's historical pursuit for independence, emancipation, and a higher literary purpose.

In West Virginia (and Kentucky), on the other hand, disregarding the fact that the Clintons have had a several decades-long relationship with southern Democrats in West Virginia, that Bill Clinton's folksy southern accent still goes down among the aging electorate like molasses, that Sen. Barack Obama ran a poor operation and did very little campaigning in the state and mainly invoked his Illinois coal state credentials in an anachronistic pitch for votes, the media preferred to dwell on the region's perceived legacy of backwardness. In truth, Obama blew it in Appalachia; Hillary reaped the rewards of the Clinton legacy.

Still, most reporters, exclusively interviewing older voters, went out of their way to find the most outrageous examples to confirm their hillbilly-biased pronouncements.

Outside of NPR, most of the media completely overlooked a new generation of deeply rooted activists, extremely organized around the critical issues of mountaintop removal and sustainable development, that has emerged as a strong voice in Appalachia.

Sut Lovingood and Jon Stewart notwithstanding, if the media had done a little homework on the true legacy of Appalachia, they have might had the chance to take a more profound look at the region's voters.

Consider this: Though Obama was trounced in the coalfield regions, the United Mine Workers of America holds the distinction of being one of the oldest integrated unions in the country, and in fact, endorsed Obama this week; that Black History Month founder, Carter Woodson, emerged out of the coalfields of West Virginia, as did 19th Century African American spokesman Booker T. Washington, and pioneering black nationalist Martin Delany; that the legendary John Henry pounded those rails through Appalachia. In more recent times, imminent African American critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at Harvard University emerged out of the West Virginia experience, as did acclaimed novelist William Demby, one of the last living writers from the Harlem Renaissance.

A brief look at the larger mountain region further debunks this backward misperception.

Long before Rhode Island bucked the British Crown or their Boston neighbors tossed a little tea into the harbors, backwoods folks in Appalachia had already declared their independence from the British in 1772, incorporated their own articles of association, elected their own courts and sheriffs, and declared themselves the District of Washington.

A generation before New Englander William Lloyd Garrison launched his anti-slavery crusade, Appalachians launched the first newspaper dedicated to the anti-slavery issue in 1819, sent out abolitionist emissaries to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and eventually trained the famed Boston liberator. Garrison recognized Appalachian preacher John Rankin as the godfather of the anti-slavery movement.

In 1861, Rebecca Harding, a young woman writer from western Virginia, shattered the indifference of New England's literary elite to the working class and immigrant travails by publishing "Life in the Iron Mills," the first story of literary naturalism in the hallowed Atlantic Monthly and the nation. Harding Davis went on to deal with the issue of race and misperceptions by outsiders as early as the 1870s.

Nearly a century later, self-proclaimed "radical hillbillies" at the Highlander Folk School in Appalachia trained the shock troops of the Civil Rights Movements -- including Rosa Parks, four months before her historic refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 -- and refashioned and taught the anthem "We Shall Overcome" to young civil rights advocates as early as 1946. The first school to graduate an African American youth from its integrated high school ranks took place in the Cumberland mountains of Tennessee.

Random examples of Appalachia's progressive heritage? No, this is the backstory on our contemporary elections that should have informed some of the knee-jerk reactions to the region's complex role in the Democratic Primaries.

Perhaps the media, and Sen. Obama, will make a better attempt to understand Appalachia in the general election in November.

Posted on Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 1:39 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Robert J. Samuelson: The End of Entitlement

Source: Newsweek (5-26-08)

We middle-class Americans are in a funk. "The overarching economic narrative of the 2008 campaign is the idea that life for the middle class has gotten more difficult," writes Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center, which has just published a massive report on middle-class anxieties. By its survey, more than half of Americans believe they either have not moved ahead in the past five years (25 percent) or have fallen behind (31 percent).

Pew pronounces this "the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in nearly half a century."

It's not that Americans have lost their optimism. About two thirds say they have higher living standards than their parents did at the same age, and by a 2–1 margin they expect their children to live better than they do. But there's an underlying disenchantment that seems to predate today's higher oil prices, falling home values and declining employment.

"When my college-educated, gainfully employed thirty-something friends and I get together, we talk about money," writes Nan Mooney in her new book, "(Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents." "We talk about our inadequate health insurance and whether we can afford it, about how to juggle credit card payments and crushing student loans, how to both work and pay for child care or whether we feel we can afford to have children at all. I'll be honest: this wasn't the life I'd expected."

Part of the deceptive sense of falling behind reflects the elastic nature of being middle class. According to Pew, 70 percent of households now have two or more cars, and a similar share has satellite or cable TV; 66 percent have high-speed Internet; 42 percent already have flat-screen TVs. Thirty years ago, no one's parents had this inventory. More students go to college and graduate school, so more have debt. Health care is expensive in part because modern medicine can do so much. Someone has to pay. One in 10 households now has a vacation home, says Pew.

"Progress" keeps draining our pocketbooks. Pew finds that four fifths of Americans find it hard to maintain middle-class lifestyles; in 1986, two thirds did. But today's middle-class anxieties transcend the well-advertised "squeeze" on incomes. The deeper source of disquiet, I think, lies elsewhere. Middle-class families value predictability, order and security, and these reassuring qualities have eroded. People worry about rising living expenses; but what really upsets them is the possibility that their incomes or fringe benefits—pensions, health and disability insurance—might vanish altogether.

Paradoxically, "the lives of individual Americans have grown simultaneously more prosperous and more precarious," writes Peter Gosselin in his new book, "High Wire." Gosselin, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, has provided the most thorough account of this phenomenon to date. As he shows, the chances of being hit by a life-altering event (a long spell of unemployment, divorce, a big decline in work hours for one spouse) have declined slightly since the inflation-plagued 1970s and early 1980s.

But the consequences of setbacks have grown, he finds. The share of families suffering a 50 percent loss of income with a spell of unemployment rose from 17 percent to almost 26 percent. Fear of these setbacks has also up climbed the social ladder: not just factory workers and low-paid service employees but also managers and engineers. Companies downsize. Older workers exit in buyouts. Companies raise health-insurance premiums. The reliable "defined benefit" pension (which paid a fixed monthly amount) has given way to the riskier 401(k)—vulnerable to bad investment decisions and sinking stocks. Corporate protections have weakened, as Gosselin notes....

Posted on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 5:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Robert Parry: The Bushes and Hitler's Appeasement

Source: http://www.prlog.org (5-20-08)

[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com.]

The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush's own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis.

If Borah, an isolationist Republican from Idaho, sounded naive saying "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided," then what should be said about Bush's grandfather and other members of his family providing banking and industrial assistance to the Nazis as they built their war machine in the 1930s?

The archival evidence is now clear that Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from and collaborated with key financial backers of Nazi Germany. That business relationship continued after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and even after Germany declared war on the United States following Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

It stopped only when the U.S. government seized assets of Bush-connected companies in late 1942 under the "Trading with the Enemy Act." So, perhaps instead of holding up Sen. Borah to ridicule, Bush might have acknowledged in his May 15 speech that his forebears also were blind to the dangers of Hitler.

Bush might have noted that his family's wealth, which fueled his own political rise, was partly derived from Nazi collaboration and possibly from slave labor provided by Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

A more honest speech before the Knesset - on the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding - might have contained an apology to the Jewish people from a leading son of the Bush family for letting its greed contribute to Nazi power and to the horrors of the Holocaust. Instead, there was just the jab at Sen. Borah, who died in 1940.

President Bush apparently saw no reason to remind the world of a dark chapter from the family history. After all, those ugly facts mostly disappeared from public consciousness soon after World War II.

Protected by layers of well-connected friends, Prescott Bush brushed aside the Nazi scandal and won a U.S. Senate seat from Connecticut, which enabled him to start laying the foundation for the family's political dynasty.

In recent years, however, the archival records from the pre-war era have been assembled, drawing from the Harriman family papers at the Library of Congress, documents at the National Archives, and records from war-crimes trials after Germany's surrender.

Managers for the Powerful

One can trace the origins of this story back more than a century to the emergence of Samuel Bush, George W. Bush's great-grandfather, as a key manager for a set of powerful American business families, including the Rockefellers and the Harrimans. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Bush Family Chronicles: The Patriarchs."]

That chapter took an important turn in 1919 when investment banker George Herbert Walker teamed up with Averell Harriman, scion to a railroad fortune, to found a new investment banking firm, W.A. Harriman Company.

The Harriman firm was backed by the Rockefellers' National City Bank and the Morgan family's Guaranty Trust. The English-educated Walker assisted in assembling the Harriman family's overseas business investments.

In 1921, Walker's favorite daughter, Dorothy, married Samuel Bush's son Prescott, a Yale graduate and a member of the school's exclusive Skull and Bones society. Handsome and athletic, admired for his golf and tennis skills, Prescott Bush was a young man with the easy grace of someone born into the comfortable yet competitive world of upper-crust contacts.

Three years later, Dorothy gave birth to George Herbert Walker Bush in Milton, Massachusetts.

Lifted by the financial boom of the 1920s, Prescott and Dorothy Bush were on the rise. By 1926, George Herbert Walker had brought his son-in-law in on a piece of the Harriman action, hiring him as a vice president in the Harriman banking firm.

By the mid-Thirties, Prescott Bush had become a managing partner at the merged firm of Brown Brothers Harriman. The archival records also show that Brown Brothers Harriman served as the U.S. financial service arm for German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, an early funder of the Nazi Party.

Thyssen, an admirer of Adolf Hitler since the 1920s, joined the Nazi Party in 1931 when it was still a fringe organization. He helped bail the struggling party out with financial help, even providing its headquarters building in Munich.

Meanwhile, Averell Harriman had launched the Hamburg-Amerika line of steamships to facilitate the bank's dealings with Germany, and made Prescott Bush a director. The ships delivered fuel, steel, coal, gold and money to Germany as Hitler was consolidating his power and building his war machine.

Other evidence shows that Prescott Bush served as the director of the Union Banking Corp. of New York, which represented Thyssen's interests in the United States and was owned by a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands.

As a steel magnate, Thyssen was amassing a fortune as Hitler rearmed Germany. Documents also linked Bush to Thyssen's Consolidated Silesian Steel Company, which was based in mineral-rich Silesia on the German-Polish border and exploited slave labor from Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. But records at the National Archives do not spell out exactly when Bush's connection ended or what he knew about the business details.

In 1941, Thyssen had a falling out with Hitler and fled to France where he was captured. Much of Thyssen's empire went under the direct control of the Nazis, but even that did not shatter the business ties that existed with Prescott Bush and Harriman's bank.

It wasn't until August 1942 that newspaper stories disclosed the secretive ties between Union Banking Corp. and Nazi Germany.

After an investigation, the U.S. government seized the property of the Hamburg-Amerika line and moved against affiliates of the Union Banking Corp. In November 1942, the government seized the assets of the Silesian-American Corp. [For more details, see an investigative report by the U.K. Guardian, Sept. 25, 2004.]

No Kiss of Death

For most public figures, allegations of trading with the enemy would have been a political kiss of death, but the disclosures barely left a lipstick smudge on Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush and other business associates implicated in the Nazi business dealings.

"Politically, the significance of these dealings - the great surprise - is that none of it seemed to matter much over the next decade or so," wrote Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty.

"A few questions would be raised, but Democrat Averell Harriman would not be stopped from becoming federal mutual security administrator in 1951 or winning election as governor of New York in 1954. Nor would Republican Prescott Bush (who was elected senator from Connecticut in 1952) and his presidential descendants be hurt in any of their future elections."

Indeed, the quick dissipation of the Nazi financial scandal was only a portent of the Bush family's future. Unlike politicians of lower classes, the Bushes seemed to travel in a bubble impervious to accusations of impropriety, since the Eastern Establishment doesn't like to think badly of its own. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

To this day - as President Bush showed by mocking the long-forgotten Sen. Borah and then wielding the Nazi "appeasement" club against Barack Obama and other Democrats - the assumption remains that the bubble will continue to protect the Bush family name.

However, the evidence from dusty archives suggests that the Bush family went way beyond appeasement of Adolf Hitler to aiding and abetting the Nazis.

Posted on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 4:48 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Talbot: Obama/Kennedy vs. McCain/Goldwater

Source: Salon (5-21-08)

[David Talbot is the founder of Salon. He is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years," which will be released next week in paperback by Free Press.]

May 21, 2008 | If John McCain is running for George W. Bush's third presidential term, as Democrats have suggested, Barack Obama is campaigning for John F. Kennedy's second term.

That was driven home again this week when the Obama and McCain campaigns squared off over the question of whether the United States should negotiate with its enemies. Obama said this kind of diplomacy is a sign of strength. "Strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries," the Democratic candidate told a rally in Oregon on Monday.

To McCain, however, this kind of talk demonstrates Obama's naiveté and "reckless judgment." Bush himself jump-started the latest round in this fracas, suggesting that Obama's calls for diplomatic engagement amounted to "appeasement" of the forces of terror.

Is talking with our enemies a sign of strong and intelligent -- or weak and deluded -- leadership? This debate is shaping up as one of the major themes of the 2008 campaign -- just as it was in the 1964 presidential race before JFK was shot down in Dallas in November 1963.

Obama clearly understands this historical parallel and has often invoked JFK's inaugural address to support his calls for diplomacy, reminding Americans that Kennedy said we should "never negotiate out of fear, but ... never fear to negotiate." This was a controversial idea during the deep chill of the Cold War -- after years of bellicose propaganda that demonized Communist leaders as evil and untrustworthy foes who only understood force. And it is equally controversial idea today, after the Bush-Cheney regime's endless war on terror.

By 1963, John Kennedy had developed the courage and vision to directly challenge the Cold War -- the state of permanent fear and tension that had nearly led to the end of the world in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy knew that his opponent in his upcoming re-election campaign would likely be champion of the rising right, Senator Barry Goldwater, and he knew the battle lines between them on questions of war and peace would be starkly drawn. JFK predicted, in fact, that peace would become the major theme of the 1964 race.

Goldwater -- who was idolized by a future senator from Arizona, John McCain -- saw the Cold War world through the eyes of the Pentagon commanders who were constantly clashing with President Kennedy during his presidency. Like these military chiefs, Goldwater thought war -- even nuclear war -- with the Soviet enemy was inevitable, and he characterized Kennedy's efforts at diplomacy as "weak" and "soft."

But JFK, who had seen and felt the horrors of war, was determined to avoid a nuclear holocaust. He told his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, that he wanted his epitaph to read, "He kept the peace."...

Posted on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 4:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Lincoln Mitchell: Not since 1964 have Dems won white male vote. So?

Source: Huffington Post (Blog) (5-20-08)

[Lincoln Mitchell joined Columbia University in January of 2006 as the Arnold A. Saltzman Assistant Professor in the Practice of International Politics. ]

Political campaigns are, to a great extent, about numbers; and this year's presidential race has been no exception. The numbers we have heard throughout the campaign include 2025 - the number of delegates needed to secure the democratic nomination. Even this number had been disputed as the Clinton campaign has briefly tried to float the number 2209 as the real number of delegates needed to win the nomination, based on her desire to count the results in Florida and Michigan. 270 is the number of electoral votes needed to win in November. 14,000 is the number of votes by which John McCain beat Mike Huckabee in South Carolina to solidify his position as the Republican frontrunner and ease his path to the nomination.

There are, of course, many more numbers which I could cite as well, but there is one number which has been overlooked but is also very important for this election. That number, or more accurately year, is 1964. 1964 was the year the Beatles first toured the US, the year Mickey Mantle hit his last World Series homerun, the year we passed the Civil Rights Act. In 1964, John McCain had yet to be captured by the Vietcong; Hillary Rodham campaigned for Barry Goldwater; and Barack Obama was a toddler. 1964 was also the last time a Democratic nominee for President carried majority of the white working class vote, measured by either income or education. Since that time, no Democrat has carried a majority of these voters.

During the 44 years since Democrats last carried a majority of lower income white voters, this group has been called the silent majority, Reagan Democrats, angry white men and various other labels, but they have proven to be a relatively dependable part of the Republican coalition, providing significant majorities for GOP candidates Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

Obviously, losing this block of voters once central to the Democrat coalition was not easy for the party. However, 1964 was a long time ago and the party needs to move on and develop a strategy that recognizes this political reality. When, in the recent primary season, Hillary Clinton reinvented herself as the representative of the white working class voters, her surrogates and operatives dutifully reminded the media that the white working class is a key part of the Democratic base. Her campaign team was not simply spinning. They were saying what many Democratic strategists and leaders believe to be true, even in the face of 44 years of evidence to the contrary.

Clearly a Democratic nominee for president needs to win some chunk of the white blue collar vote, but winning a majority of that vote is not a realistic goal. Understanding this is essential because decisions about resource allocation are critical in campaigns. Strategic decisions to prioritize this vote over other segments of the electorate which might be easier to win could be very costly in November. By trying to win blue collar voters in the rust belt, Democrats overlook other potential growth areas for their party such as the west and, increasingly the south.

There are now several states in the west such as Wyoming and Montana where Democrats have recently won statewide elections, as well as southern states where Democrats are becoming competitive again. This strength has occurred largely without relying on blue collar white voters. Western voters have come to the Democratic Party out of concern about Bush's foreign policy and the growing sense that the Republican Party is no longer a good fit for their libertarian leaning view of politics. In the South, growing numbers of knowledge workers and other white liberals have, along with African American voters, formed the backbone of the Democratic coalition which has elected senators and governors throughout the region in recent years. In both regions, the increase in Latino voters has helped the Democratic Party as well.

Accepting this different road to 270 electoral votes will be difficult for many in the Democratic Party who have spent decades searching for the silver bullet that would bring white blue collar workers home to the Democrats. Unwillingness to accept this was at the heart of Hillary Clinton's electability narrative. Her narrative, that she was uniquely positioned to bring Reagan Democrats back home in November was prima facie absurd, but got an enormous amount of traction and was largely unchallenged in the media or, frankly, by the Obama campaign. The reality was that Clinton remained unpopular with this group, with 55% of white voters who had not completed college viewing her unfavorably in an April, 2008 AP poll.

The broader notion, however, that the only way for the Democrats to win was by sweeping the rust belt, is so widely accepted that Clinton's argument went unquestioned. The question that should be asked is that given that in each of the last two presidential elections the Democrats tried this strategy and failed, why would Clinton's chances in 2008 be any different. In 2004 the Democrats ran a war hero, albeit a liberal and extremely wealthy one from the Northeast, against an unpopular president who was viewed as mishandling an unpopular war, and still managed to lose Ohio, and, of course, the election. Betting the farm on the notion that in 2008 the Democrats can carry Ohio and win the election by running very liberal and very wealthy senator from the Northeast with no war record against a Republican who is a war hero and who has been critical of the mismanagement of an unpopular war, seems to fit at least one definition of insanity-doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

For the Democrats to win, they need to look to the future, not the past. The future has implicitly been one of the themes of Barack Obama's campaign. This is one of the reasons he has done so well with young voters and secured the nomination of the Democratic Party. More importantly, the path to victory for Obama is a 21st century one where Democratic strength in the northeast, upper midwest and the west coast is the base, as it has been in recent years, but the margin of victory will come from winning a few southern and western states. Obama is far more popular than Clinton in these regions and has swept primaries and caucuses in these states. Ohio and Pennsylvania aren't the only states with electoral votes that can get the Democrats to 270. North Carolina has 15, Virginia 13, Montana 3, Colorado 9 and New Mexico 5. These are also numbers worth watching in 2008.

Posted on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 7:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Glenn Greenwald: Ronald Reagan ... Chamberlainian appeaser of the 1980s

Source: Salon (5-17-08)

One of the most significant political developments over the last decade or so is that the defining views of what was once the extremist right-wing fringe have become mainstream. Few things illustrate that development more than this week's branding by George Bush, John McCain and Bill Kristol of Barack Obama (and anyone who prefers negotiations to knee-jerk wars with Israel's enemies as the optimal method for conflict resolution) as a Neville Chamberlain-like "appeaser."

This is the same exact insult, grounded in the same war-cheerleading mentality, that was hurled by the extreme Far Right at Ronald Reagan in the 1980s because he sought to negotiate with that decade's Evil Empire. Conservative Caucus Chair Howard Phillips, for instance, "scorned President Reagan as 'a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda,'" and published ads which, according to a January 20, 1988 UPI article (via LEXIS):

likens Reagan's signing of the INF Treaty to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's signing of an accord with Nazi Germany's Adolf Hitler in 1938. The ad, with the headline, "Appeasement Is As Unwise In 1988 As In 1938," shows pictures of Chamberlain, Hitler, Reagan and Gorbachev overhung by an umbrella. Chamberlain carried an umbrella and it became a World War II symbol for appeasement.
According to the January 19, 1988 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, when Pat Robertson was campaigning for President in Missouri in 1988, he "suggested that President Ronald Reagan could be compared to Neville Chamberlain . . . by agreeing to a medium-range nuclear arms agreement with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev." The Orange Country Register editorialized in September, 1988 that "Ronald Reagan has become the Neville Chamberlain of the 1980s. The apparent peace of 1988 may be followed by the new wars of 1989 or 1990."

Newt Gingrich -- who today regularly invokes the "Chamberlain/appeasement" cliche for anyone who does not crave war with Iran -- denounced President Reagan's rapprochement with Gorbachev in 1985 as potentially "the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich." Don Rumsfeld -- who gave a controversial 2006 speech likening war opponents to 1938 appeasers (and used the same 1939 quote as Bush just used from the U.S. Senator who wanted to talk to Hitler) -- has been tossing around the Chamberlain insult in order to promote his pro-war views for almost 30 years. The Associated Press reported on November 26, 1979 on efforts to oppose ratification of the SALT treaty:

"Our nation's situation is more dangerous today than it has been any time since Neville Chamberlain left Munich, setting the stage for World War II," Rumsfeld said at a news conference.
The people who think this way, who casually toss the Chamberlain slur around towards anyone who doesn't crave more war, today claim the Canonized Ronald Reagan as their Patron Saint of Strength and Greatness. But, back in the 1980s, people who thought that way were so far on the crazed fringe that they believed Ronald Reagan was too far to the Left, that he was the New Neville Chamberlain, "appeasing" the Soviet Union by sitting down and speaking with them in an effort to achieve a negotiated peace. Today, those same people and their core mentality dominate and define the Republican Party.

Posted on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 3:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

George Packer: The fall of conservatism

Source: New Yorker abstract (5-26-08)

The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history. Having served as Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon had lost the Presidency by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and had been humiliated in a 1962 bid for the California governorship. But he saw that he could propel himself back to power on the strength of a new feeling among Americans who, appalled by the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young, and the insults to national pride in Vietnam, were ready to blame it all on the liberalism of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Right-wing populism was bubbling up from below; it needed to be guided by a leader who understood its resentments because he felt them, too.

“From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority,” Buchanan told me recently, sitting in the library of his Greek-revival house in McLean, Virginia, on a secluded lane bordering the fenced grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency. “What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.’s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives—what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South.” Buchanan grew up in Washington, D.C., among the first group—men like his father, an accountant and a father of nine, who had supported Roosevelt but also revered Joseph McCarthy. The Southerners were the kind of men whom Nixon whipped into a frenzy one night in the fall of 1966, at the Wade Hampton Hotel, in Columbia, South Carolina. Nixon, who was then a partner in a New York law firm, had travelled there with Buchanan on behalf of Republican congressional candidates. Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, “burned the paint off the walls.” As they left the hotel, Nixon said, “This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.” Nixon and Buchanan visited thirty-five states that fall, and in November the Republicans won a midterm landslide. It was the end of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the beginning of his fall from power. In order to seize the Presidency in 1968, Nixon had to live down his history of nasty politicking, and he ran that year as a uniter. But his Administration adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few.

This strategy was put into action near the end of Nixon’s first year in office, when antiwar demonstrators were becoming a disruptive presence in Washington. Buchanan recalls urging Nixon, “We’ve got to use the siege gun of the Presidency, and go right after these guys.” On November 3, 1969, Nixon went on national television to speak about the need to avoid a shameful defeat in Vietnam. Looking benignly into the camera, he concluded, “And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of Americans—I ask for your support.” It was the most successful speech of his Presidency. Newscasters criticized him for being divisive and for offering no new vision on Vietnam, but tens of thousands of telegrams and letters expressing approval poured into the White House. It was Nixon’s particular political genius to rouse simultaneously the contempt of the bien-pensants and the admiration of those who felt the sting of that contempt in their own lives....

Posted on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 3:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, May 19, 2008

Kevin Phillips: The Old Titans All Collapsed. Is the U.S. Next?

Source: WaPo (5-18-08)

... Premature fears have also dogged the United States. The decades after the 1968 election were marked by waves of a new national apprehension: that U.S. post-World War II global hegemony was in danger. The first, in 1968-72, involved a toxic mix of global trade and currency crises and the breakdown of the U.S. foreign policy consensus over Southeast Asia. Books emerged with titles such as "Retreat From Empire?" and "The End of the American Era." More national malaise followed Watergate and the fall of Saigon. Stage three came in the late 1980s, when a resurgent Japan seemed to be challenging U.S. preeminence in manufacturing and possibly even finance. In 1991, Democratic presidential aspirant Paul Tsongas observed that "the Cold War is over. . . . Germany and Japan won." Well, not quite.

In 2008, we can mark another perilous decade: the tech mania of 1997-2000, morphing into a bubble and market crash; the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; imperial hubris and the Bush administration's bungled 2003 invasion of Iraq. These were followed by OPEC's abandoning its $22-$28 price range for oil, with the cost per barrel rising over five years to more than $100; the collapse of global respect for the United States over the Iraq war; the imploding U.S. housing market and debt bubble; and the almost 50 percent decline of the U.S. dollar against the euro since 2002. Small wonder a global financial crisis is in the air.

Here, then, is the unnerving possibility: that another, imminent global crisis could make the half-century between the 1970s and the 2020s the equivalent for the United States of what the half-century before 1950 was for Britain. This may well be the Big One: the multi-decade endgame of U.S. ascendancy. The chronology makes historical sense -- four decades of premature jitters segueing into unhappy reality.

The most chilling parallel with the failures of the old powers is the United States' unhealthy reliance on the financial sector as the engine of its growth. In the 18th century, the Dutch thought they could replace their declining industry and physical commerce with grand money-lending schemes to foreign nations and princes. But a series of crashes and bankruptcies in the 1760s and 1770s crippled Holland's economy. In the early 1900s, one apprehensive minister argued that Britain could not thrive as a "hoarder of invested securities" because "banking is not the creator of our prosperity but the creation of it." By the late 1940s, the debt loads of two world wars proved the point, and British global economic leadership became history.

In the United States, the financial services sector passed manufacturing as a component of the GDP in the mid-1990s. But market enthusiasm seems to have blocked any debate over this worrying change: In the 1970s, manufacturing occupied 25 percent of GDP and financial services just 12 percent, but by 2003-06, finance enjoyed 20-21 percent, and manufacturing had shriveled to 12 percent....

Posted on Monday, May 19, 2008 at 9:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Charles Krauthammer: Israeli Miracle ... The crime is not its policies but its insistence on living

Source: National Review Online (5-16-08)

Before sending Lewis and Clark west, Thomas Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis to Philadelphia to see Dr. Benjamin Rush. The eminent doctor prepared a series of scientific questions for the expedition to answer. Among them, writes Stephen Ambrose: “What Affinity between their (the Indians’) religious Ceremonies & those of the Jews?” Jefferson and Lewis, like many of their day and ours, were fascinated by the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and thought they might be out there on the Great Plains.

They weren’t. They aren’t anywhere. Their disappearance into the mists of history since their exile from Israel in 722 B.C. is no mystery. It is the norm, the rule for every ancient people defeated, destroyed, scattered, and exiled.

With one exception, a miraculous story of redemption and return, after not a century or two, but 2,000 years. Remarkably, that miracle occurred in our time. This week marks its 60th anniversary: the return and restoration of the remaining two tribes of Israel — Judah and Benjamin, later known as the Jews — to their ancient homeland.

Besides restoring Jewish sovereignty, the establishment of the State of Israel embodied many subsidiary miracles, from the creation of the first Jewish army since Roman times to the only recorded instance of the resurrection of a dead language — Hebrew, now the daily tongue of a vibrant nation of seven million. As historian Barbara Tuchman once wrote, Israel is “the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did 3,000 years ago.”...

Posted on Monday, May 19, 2008 at 9:15 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh: What will be the Bush legacy in the next US presidency?

Source: Cambridge University Press (blog) (5-19-08)

[Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh are authors of After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy.]

Two possible reasons account for Barack Obama’s recent embrace of George H. W. Bush. The first is that he wants to portray himself within the mainstream of the US foreign policy tradition and that he sees Bush Sr has standing squarely within it. He is in effect asking us to consider him as a welcome return to a diplomacy which was cautious and limited, more Kissinger than Wolfowitz. The second, building on the first, suggests an Obama foreign policy will defer to international law and rebuild American likeability abroad. As a campaign strategy this is commonsensical. As a foreign policy strategy is potentially disastrous.

We’ve argued in our recent book that a President Obama would likely adapt to the fact of American primacy rather than dilute it. If Obama is sincere in what he is saying about Bush Sr – and he may be – we might be wrong about him. Obama, instead of tweaking the Bush Doctrine for foreign consumption (our argument), could actually be engaged in a far more problematic endeavour: the revision and reapplication of a foreign policy that between 1989 and 1993 was hardly a study in success. What is it that Obama wants us to see in his foreign policy through the prism of George Bush Sr?

Does he want us to accept that his administration will sacrifice people in far away places about whom the US knows little? Bush Sr made much of kicking Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait only to abandon those who wanted him similarly removed from Iraq as well. In the spring of 1991, with Saddam in full retreat, Bush Sr did what international law, the UN and assorted Arab regimes demanded: he left the dictator in place. In so doing he left the Kurds and Shiites twisting. Expecting US liberation in a matter of weeks they were made to wait a further thirteen years. The mess the father started the son was obliged to clean up – with all the legacy of mistrust that has plagued the US reconstruction of Iraq.

Does Obama, as a fan of 89-93 diplomacy, want a foreign policy in which America only fights when its own direct interests are at stake? As Yugoslavia descended into hell under Bush Sr’s watch, his secretary of state said America had ‘no dog’ in that fight. It was left, as with Iraq, to a Bush Sr’s successor, Bill Clinton, to intervene on the behalf of Bosnian Muslims and halt Serbian aggression. Are we to deduce from this that an Obama administration will turn away from Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe and ‘return’ to a foreign policy of America first?

Will Obama, like Bush Sr, coddle Beijing? In 1989, the butchers of Tiananmen Square were hardly treated as such by Bush Sr. That same year, as communism was felled by the spontaneous movement of people that it had enslaved for so long, it was Bush Sr and Brent Scowcroft who warned about the instability such behaviour might induce.

Which of these foreign policy successes does Obama want to relive? If we’re right, a President Obama will not reawaken the amoral short-termism of Bush Sr. Instead, he will accept the central precepts of his son and wage a war on terror – only more effectively. For fear of being branded a black Jimmy Carter he wants us to think of him as a black Henry Kissinger. Neither legacy offers Obama the roadmap he will need if elected. Much as it may pain him to acknowledge it, what Bush Jr has done Obama will be obliged to adapt and extend.

Posted on Monday, May 19, 2008 at 7:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, May 16, 2008

Max Boot: So George H.W. Bush is Obama's role model?

Source: Commentary blog (5-16-08)

David Brooks [1] reports today that, like a lot of other Democrats, Barack Obama has become a born-again believer in the presidency of George H.W. Bush. The Democratic candidate tells Brooks: “I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush. I don’t have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm. I don’t have a lot of complaints with their handling of the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

This new-found admiration conveniently overlooks some decisions by the elder President Bush that were roundly and correctly criticized at the time by many liberals as well as conservatives: decisions such as the botched aftermath of the Gulf War, which resulted in Shiites and Kurds getting slaughtered after they heeded the President’s call to rise up; the notorious “Chicken Kiev” speech in which he urged Ukrainians to remain part of a dissolving Soviet Union; and the failure to intervene in Bosnia.

Instead, Obama focuses on a couple of the high points of the Bush presidency, even though the elder Bush’s realpolitik doctrine was as responsible for his failures as for his successes. But even taking Obama’s compliments at face value, how likely is it that he could or would replicate such achievements?

Although everyone supported Operation Desert Storm after its success became evident, it was a different story when Bush asked Congress to authorize the mission. Even after winning United Nations approval, he had trouble getting a Democrat-dominated Congress to sign off. The vote in favor of the war resolution was 52-47 in the Senate, with 45 Democrats voting nay. Only 10 Democrats voted for the resolution, mostly conservative Southerners. Even such moderates as Sam Nunn opposed the use of force. How likely is it that if Barack Obama-the most liberal member of the Senate last year-had been in the Senate that year that he would have voted for the resolution?

As for the other Bush administration achievement that he cites-”their handling of the fall of the Berlin Wall”-that was made possible by the long personal experience and contacts built up by the President over the course of many years on the international stage as an ambassador to China and the UN, CIA director, and vice president. That allowed Bush to conduct adroit diplomacy with Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev, and other world leaders. Obama has almost no experience in international affairs beyond having lived in Indonesia as a child; certainly he has never held a job in any field related to foreign affairs before entering the Senate three years ago. Granted, he is charming and charismatic. But what are the odds that he can replicate the kind of skilled diplomacy pursued by an old hand like George H.W. Bush?

The more likely comparison is not to Bush but to two previous Democratic nominees who had no experience in foreign policy before entering the White House: Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. In both cases they learned on the job and gradually improved, but the world paid a high price for their stumbles from Iran (Carter) to Somalia (Clinton).

Posted on Friday, May 16, 2008 at 4:56 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Clifford D. May: History is back ... But whose side is it on?

Source: National Review Online (5-15-08)

[Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.]

... After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was widely believed that liberal democracy had become, self-evidently, the only rational way to organize society. If that was so, it meant the greatest ideological debate of all times was settled. Francis Fukuyama famously called that “the end of history.”

Now Robert Kagan has a new book entitled: The Return of History and the End of Dreams. In particular, he writes, “autocracy is making a comeback,” with Russia and China the most significant examples. In other words, it’s not — as another senior State Department official told me last week — that Russia’s rulers have been “backsliding” in practice from a democratic ideal they embrace in theory. Rather, they believe in autocracy. They see it as an alternative that is not just viable but superior.

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s strongman, uses the term “sovereign democracy” to describe a governing model that has little tolerance for either opponents or critics. And he may not be incorrect in perceiving that given a choice between freedom on the one hand, and power, order, and stability on the other, most Russians prefer the latter.



In China, too, it is may be that most people are content to keep their noses out of politics in exchange for a higher standard of living and not having those noses removed from their faces by the authorities.

Where do Iran and other militant Islamist regimes fit in? They are autocratic, yet different, in ways both obvious and subtle. Nevertheless, as Kagan writes, the “willingness of the autocrats in Moscow and Beijing to protect their fellow autocrats in Pyongyang, Tehran and Khartoum increases the chances that the connection between terrorists and nuclear weapons will eventually be made.”

This is what frightens me — more than it does Kagan, with whom I talked at some length this week. He worries more about Russia and China, the “great autocratic powers,” than he does about Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Islamist regimes and groups. He argues that these radical theocrats cannot achieve their dreams. I agree, but think that begs this question: Can they destroy ours? That is their intention. Can we prevent them from acquiring the capability? I don’t know. Are we doing everything possible to stop them? I am convinced we are not — the ACLU, MoveOn.org, and Nancy Pelosi are only some of the reasons why.

Russia and China and other non-Islamist autocracies want to prosper — and survive. For them, peaceful coexistence with the democracies is an option. By contrast, the Islamists believe they have a religious obligation to fight, humiliate and, eventually, reduce the West to ashes. The more revolutionary and devout among them, as the eminent Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis has observed, regard “mutually assured destruction” not as a deterrent but as an inducement — a path to martyrdom and eternal rewards.

So perhaps the most important question to ask is not whether democracy is advancing or retreating. Perhaps it is this: Will the world’s free peoples, having defeated two mass-murdering enemies of freedom in the 20th century, find the unity, strength, courage, and determination to defend themselves from 21st century Islamists and their autocratic allies/enablers? Or as Kagan puts it: “History has returned and the democracies must come together to shape it or others will shape it for them.”

Posted on Friday, May 16, 2008 at 4:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Daniel J. Flynn: Top Ten Skeletons in the Left's Closet

Source: Frontpagemag.com (5-16-08)

[Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas and A Conservative History of the American Left. He is also the editor of www.flynnfiles.com.]

When the Left writes its own history, the past gets rewritten to suit the needs of the present. This is why I wrote A Conservative History of the American Left, to conserve not only fascinating figures now forgotten but to retrieve from the memory hole all that the Left has tossed down it. What is the history of the American Left that leftists want you to forget?

10. Ayatollah Khomeini, Leftist Hero

Reflexive anti-Americanism initially moved the Left to embrace the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Mother Jones, for instance, in 1979 predicted that “if Khomeini or his followers take power” then “democratic reforms, freedom for political prisoners, an end to the astronomical waste of huge arms purchases, and a constitutional government” would follow. The Nation, Michel Foucault, and other pillars of the Left similarly projected their ideals upon Khomeini and company.

9. Manson Family Values

“I fell in love with Charlie Manson the first time I saw his cherub face and sparkling eyes on TV,” hippie guru Jerry Rubin professed. “His words and courage inspired us.” Weatherman hoisted “Charles Manson Power” banners, adopted a spread-fingered greeting to symbolize the fork with which the Manson murderers impaled a victim’s stomach, and even boasted a cell nicknamed “The Fork.” Weatherman matriarch Bernardine Dohrn infamously proclaimed: “Dig it: first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”

8. Gay Activists Sue to Block AIDS Test

Today, homosexual activists blame Ronald Reagan and the clergy for the spread of AIDS. But in the mid-1980s, the National Gay Task Force and the Lambda Legal Defense, citing civil-liberties concerns, actually sued the federal government to stop the AIDS test. Thankfully, they lost and scores of lives have been saved as a result.

7. Murder Chic

The easiest way to become a hero on the Left is to kill another human being. John Brown, the Molly Maguires, the Haymarket Square Bombers, Joe Hill, Huey Newton, and Mumia Abu-Jamal—murderers all—have been venerated by the Left in song and on screen. The people they murdered are not even an afterthought.

6. Jonestown Kool-Aid

Before orchestrating the murder/suicides 900+ people in Guyana, Jim Jones was the darling of the San Francisco Left. Huey Newton, Angela Davis, and Willie Brown embraced a man who killed more blacks than the KKK. Democrats Rosalynn Carter, Walter Mondale, and Gerry Brown made campaign visits to the Peoples Temple’s “comrade leader.” The mayor of San Francisco even rewarded Jones for his activism by appointing him chairman of the city’s housing commission. “The temple was as much a left-wing political crusade as a church,” The Nation reported in 1978. Unfortunately, as the years progressed, more Americans gulped down the Left’s Kool-Aid that Jones was of the religious Right and not an atheist leftist.

5. Concentration Camps, American Style

A year before Hitler came to power in Germany, Margaret Sanger called for a vast system of concentration camps for the United States. The Planned Parenthood founder demanded “a stern and rigid policy of segregation or sterilization” for “dysgenic” Americans who “would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.” The 1932 speech concluded that “fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense—defending the unborn against their own disabilities.”

4. Heaven on Earth

American intellectuals looked upon the hell on earth that was post-revolutionary Russia and saw a heaven on earth. The New Republic credited the Russian Revolution with providing “the most democratic franchise yet devised in our world,” while The Nation found that “the franchise is more democratic in Russia than in England or in the United States.” Lincoln Steffens marveled after a visit to the Soviet Union, “The revolution in Russia is to establish the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.”

3. Eugenics

Even before the progressive era when most states instituted eugenics laws, the American Left had agitated for state controls over procreation. John Humphrey Noyes’ Bible Communists lamented that freedom of marital choice “leaves mating to be determined by a general scramble, without attempt at scientific direction” and devised the first eugenic experiment in the U.S.—“stirpiculture”—that produced dozens of children and prevented hundreds more. In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy dreamed of “race purification” to “preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out.” Other proponents included Margaret Sanger, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously decreed in Buck v. Bell, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” State governments ultimately sterilized upwards of 60,000.

2. Assassinating Presidents

Three of the four presidential assassins have been left-wing radicals. Bible Communist Charles Guiteau murdered President Garfield, anarcho-communist Leon Czolgosz murdered President McKinley, and Soviet Communist Lee Harvey Oswald murdered John F. Kennedy. Rather than own that history, the Left has invented conspiracy theories that absolve leftists from responsibility.

1. Nazi-Soviet Pact

The Left switched from pacifists to warmongers overnight once the Nazi attack upon the Communists dissolved the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Communist Party USA chief Earl Browder, who had dubbed WWII “the second imperialist war” during the pact, so thoroughly switched course when the Nazis attacked the Communists that he embraced conscription (after his opposition to it led to jail in WWI), endorsed a ‘no-strike’ pledge for labor unions (after encouraging strikes to impede the war effort), and kicked out Japanese Americans from the CP (after ostensibly championing civil rights). The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League ceased operations during the pact. The Communists’ New Masses panned the anti-Nazi Watch on the Rhine when it appeared as a play during the pact only to praise it when it appeared as a movie when Hitler and Stalin were again enemies.

Posted on Friday, May 16, 2008 at 4:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Kimberly A. Strassel: People are angry

Source: WSJ (5-16-08)

... The state of the union is angry. Citizens are furious about gas prices and health-care costs, broken schools and property taxes. These are the leaky hydrants, the constant reminders that government hasn't done much for them lately. Their fury has bubbled as they've watched Washington obsess over itself – dealing out earmarks, paying off constituencies, launching probes into political enemies. Accomplishing zip.

This anger is the best way to describe today's political landscape. Ever since Republicans were routed in 2006, and more recently with their loss of three special elections, the party has been in a debate about what changed in the country and what to do in response. In the primaries, as Mike Huckabee pitched to evangelicals, Rudy Giuliani pitched to fiscal conservatives, and Mitt Romney pitched to anything that moved, some went so far as to declare the "death" of the Reagan coalition.

Encouraging this panicked discussion has been a new theory that the nation is experiencing a seismic political shift. A few short years ago, we were supposed to be on the verge of a lasting conservative majority. Scrap that. Now we're lurching toward a lasting "middle" majority. Voters are said to have embraced "centrism." (Whatever that is.) All hail "moderates." (Whoever they are.) And don't forget the Moveon.org crowd, who argue we are, in fact, on the verge of a lasting liberal majority.

Maybe voters are just mad as hell. At everyone. George W. Bush's approval ratings have hit an all-time low at 31%, which is not good for Republicans. Then again, the Democratic Congress's approval rating clocked in at 18% – the lowest in Gallup's history.

Consider independents, that key voting group and bellwether of the national mood. Analysts have pointed to the growing number of registered independents as proof the country is moving toward the "middle." But as pollster Whit Ayres notes, what primarily defines independents is that they are all "cynical about politics and politicians." They aren't ideological in any particular way – left, right or center. They are "pragmatists," says Mr. Ayres. "They want solutions to problems."

This is what Republicans haven't yet understood. Their failures in office kicked off this anger, and they remain its target. Yet they've been doing a remarkable impression of 1980s Democrats, who engaged in trivial warfare even as Ronald Reagan laid out his vision for the future.

Today's GOP spends so much time fretting about how to relive the Reagan heyday, it has failed to do him credit by laying out its own plans for today's unique challenges. It remains in hock to interest groups, running ads about sanctuary cities as Americans curse over gas prices. In a repeat of 2006, it spends more time trying to scare voters about Democrats than defining itself. It refuses to give up the earmarks that are a symbol of its worn-out reign.

The presidential candidates tapped into this anger early, no one more so than Mr. Change, Barack Obama. John McCain laid out his first-term vision in a speech this week, but also bashed the Washington "politics of selfishness, stalemate, and delay." This McCain refrain helps explain why he remains competitive with Mr. Obama – in particular among independents.

Mr. McCain's agenda is not "centrist," but conservative. Independents are behind it because the Republican has convinced them he is apart from the status quo, and will get things done....

Posted on Friday, May 16, 2008 at 4:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Harvey Wasserman: Is Obama this year's Jackie Robinson?

Source: Free Press (5-16-08)

[HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE UNIITED STATES is at www.harveywasserman.com, as is his SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030. This article first appeared at http://freepress.org.]

Sixty-one years ago, a truly great athlete broke the color line in America’s "National Pastime," which still resides near the core of our culture.

Now the question of whether Barack Obama can do the same for the American presidency has moved to center stage.

Simply put, Jackie Robinson was one of history's most gifted all-around athletes. He mastered five major sports---football, baseball, basketball, tennis and track. As a complete performer, he may have been surpassed in the Twentieth Century only by the great Jim Thorpe.

It's hard to overstate the importance of Robinson’s 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. In his first game, he went hitless in three at-bats. But he went on that season to become baseball’s first Rookie of the Year. In a big league career that lasted through the 1956 season, he was voted into six All-Star games, played in six World Series, and was once chosen the league’s Most Valuable Player.

Robinson was an excellent hitter, a superb fielder and a uniquely daring and successful base runner. He is still universally ranked among the greatest to ever play the game. He was exciting to watch---especially when he stole home---and gave baseball an entirely new dimension that had nothing to do with race.

Would the impact of his breaking the Big League color line have been diminished if he had not been such an astonishingly good athlete?

Absolutely. A mediocre career would have rendered Jackie Robinson’s name a footnote, rather than the towering monument it remains today. The astonishing quality of his performance greatly accelerated the integration of all professional sports.

So now we must ask: how good is Barack Obama?

There are certain things he seems to share with Robinson. In the contract he signed with the Dodgers, Robinson was obliged to quietly absorb all the racial insults his teammates, the opposing teams and the public could throw at him. This he did with amazing grace.

When later he was free to speak out, he did so with eloquence and effect. He aligned himself with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Though later in life he worked for Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, the quality of his career and his character served to mute much of the racial polarization that could have made the integration of baseball an ugly failure.

In the long run, Jackie Robinson’s career became monumental because it transcended the issue of race.

Linking Obama with Robinson may seem stereotypical. But in the coming campaign, only one thing is certain: no stone will be left unthrown. Whether we want it or not, we are about to be shown just how deep the racial divide still cuts.

When confronted with Jeremiah Wright, Obama displayed remarkable skill. He has absorbed much of the testing brought on by Hillary Clinton. He’s indicated he may be willing to reach out to Ralph Nader, and to other diverse constituencies, without which he cannot win.

Clearly Obama is a uniquely gifted speaker. He has thus far run an effective, well-organized campaign, raised big money from a wide range of sources, and sustained a straight face before a thoroughly bought, seriously deranged corporate media.

Obama now must face the Rovian swift-boating thugs of the mainstream GOP. He and his family will be horrifically tested. Does anyone doubt this will be the ugliest campaign in US history?

There are some things working in Obama’s favor. Future historians may well note this as the turning point not only for an old way of doing politics, but for the age of white male leadership.

Given the total bust of the Bush Republicans, it’s no accident this is the first election in which both a female and a person of color have had a chance to win. What about the Bush presidency would incline the electorate to go for another white guy?

Ironically, this inclination toward a gender/racial shift may have doomed the candidacy of John Edwards. He was clearly shafted by the corporate media, which wanted nothing to do with his populist message, and which was fixated from the start on a Clinton/Obama, white female/black male confrontation.

His southern accent and appeal to white male voters was widely assumed to be a trump card. But Edwards’s campaign was haunted by the tainted legacy of failed and/or polarizing southern presidents, ranging from Johnson, Carter and Clinton to the southern Californians Nixon and Reagan, all culminating in the utterly catastrophic Texas Bushes.

History may record that in its anger and frustration, the American people finally turned toward a different blend of race and gender.

They may also see in Obama what Robinson’s coach Leo Durocher saw in integrating baseball. In a legendary locker-room rant, Durocher ripped into some of his Dodger players for their blatant racism.

But then he yelled that Robinson would "make us all rich" by bringing millions of new customers to the ballparks.

Durocher could not have been more right. By virtue of both his demographics and his skill, Jackie Robinson took major league baseball into a whole new world of public excitement, acceptance and prosperity.

In a globalized millennium, Americans must also realize that a person of color in the White House could be essential to restoring our declining fortunes, dumped so deeply in the hole by those endless wars of testosterone and greed. The indicators are everywhere that the good will squandered by the Bush catastrophe could be at least partly restored with a demonstration of this nation’s willingness to accept a new kind of leadership.

But Barack Obama cannot be ordinary, or even just really good. To win the presidency, he will have to be as even-tempered and controlled as Jackie Robinson. But he’ll also have to be as daring and skilled a candidate as Robinson was an athlete, especially when it comes to the on-going attempts by the GOP to rig the processes of voter registration and electronic vote counting.

And if he does get to the White House, just a well-meaning effort won’t cut it. A middling presidency is not enough.

In terms of war, the economy, the environment, energy, infrastructure, education, health care, corporate domination, election protection, and so much more, the United States is essentially in ruins. We have been sunk into a crisis on par with the ones that faced Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

To truly succeed, Barack Obama---in concert with all of us---will need a combination of daring and ability that hasn’t really been invented yet.

Sortof like Jackie Robinson stealing home, transforming the game of baseball, transcending the issue of race---and much, much more.

Posted on Friday, May 16, 2008 at 3:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jerusalem Post Editorial: How Bush stacks up against earlier presidents on Israel

Source: Jerusalem Post (5-13-08)

Of all the US presidents over the past 60 years, it is hard to think of a better friend to Israel than George W. Bush. No president has been more committed to steering the Middle East toward the values of liberty and tolerance which Americans naturally cherish, and presuppose to be universal.

Bush combines a personal affinity toward Israel with policies that are generally responsive to its concerns. His performance as president is best understood in historical context.

Harry S Truman courageously recognized Israel against State Department advice, but was personally prejudiced against Jews. Dwight Eisenhower rolled back Israel's 1956 Sinai Campaign victory and unintentionally solidified Nasser's hold on Egypt. John F. Kennedy pushed hard to keep Israel from developing an atom bomb.

Only Lyndon Johnson rises above his predecessors for opposing unilateral Israeli withdrawal after the 1967 Six Day War and establishing the "land for peace" principle which specified that the extent of Israeli concessions would have to be directly negotiated.

Richard Nixon was both personally prejudiced against Jews and the force behind the Rogers Plan that called for Israel's unilateral withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines. His Machiavellian secretary of state has been accused of delaying arms shipments during the Yom Kippur War. And it was also under Nixon that secret contacts between the US and an unreformed PLO began.

When Israel balked at making strategic concessions in Sinai, Gerald Ford ordered a "total reassessment" of US policy toward Israel. Jimmy Carter's unsympathetic attitude to Israel is now widely understood, notwithstanding his having facilitated the Israel-Egypt peace treaty.

Like his predecessor, Ronald Reagan sold advanced weaponry to Saudi Arabia. He also stymied Israeli battlefield achievements in the 1982 Lebanon War. George H.W. Bush sought to make US loan guarantees for the absorption of Soviet Jews contingent on Israeli concessions at the negotiating table.

And a well-intentioned Bill Clinton helped broker the 1993 Oslo Accord, which inadvertently set the stage for the second intifada.

BUSH ARRIVES here today with a little over seven months left in his presidency. Though his policies in Iraq were paved with good intentions and Israelis are grateful that Saddam Hussein is dead and buried, we are left with the lingering sense, albeit informed by hindsight, that the Iraqi campaign was a strategic blunder of historic proportions. Meanwhile, the al-Qaida leaders who masterminded 9/11 remain free, and parts of Afghanistan are in turmoil. The "real and present danger" facing Western civilization, Iran, is unchecked....

Posted on Friday, May 16, 2008 at 3:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Leon Wieseltier: The False Prophesy Of Jeremiah Wright

Source: New Republic (5-28-08)

I was tired of hearing Jeremiah Wright, so I started reading him. This did not improve matters. In his books I found mainly (in the words of one of his admirers) "Africentric Christian manhood," a panic about the situation of the African American male raised into a truculent paranoid theology. There are many expressions of love in Wright's preaching, but only for his own, which is not love's strongest test. In 1991, he inaugurated a series of sermons honoring Martin Luther King Jr., with a sermon called "Full of the Holy Spirit"- -the next one in the series was "The Audacity to Hope"--in which there appears this flourish: "Don't let anybody trick you into thinking Minister Louis Farrakhan is your enemy. He ain't the enemy. Any African man who can clean folks up, get them off of dope, get them in school, get them reading instead of rapping, get them building each other up, is not the enemy. ... Some folks are tricky. They will try to make you choose between Malcolm and Martin. Don't you let them. ... And they are not going to make me choose between Minister Jackson and Minister Farrakhan. When Jesse is right, he's my friend; when Louis is right, he is my friend. When Jesse is wrong, he is still my friend; when Louis is wrong, he is still my friend. You don't give up a friendship because you have a disagreement. That ain't no friend!" Except for the tenderness toward Farrakhan, this is reminiscent of Barack Obama's legendary Philadelphia speech: everybody is somewhat right; loyalties are unshaken by philosophies; differences are distractions in an hour of crisis. I do not doubt that the life prospects of African Americans in the inner cities constitute an hour--no, an era--of crisis, an American disgrace. I see why hopeless people are tempted by the social benefits of fascism, but I do not see why they succumb to the temptation, because nothing will determine their way through life more than what they believe, and Farrakhan's beliefs doom them to isolation and despair.

Is pride everything? What has race to do with truth? Is it really so hard to choose Martin over Malcolm? Anyway, Wright's tribute to Farrakhan's service to black literacy is vitiated by an extraordinary riff in another sermon in the series, called "Faith in a Foreign Land," in which he denounces the usurpation of African traditions by "Babylonian," or Western, traditions in the education of "exiles," or African Americans: "These exiles became schooled in Babylonian literature, from Beowulf to Virginia Wolfe [sic], and their heritage was wickedly wiped away from the tissues of their memory banks. They became skilled in Babylonian philosophy from Descartes to Meister Eckhart, from Immanuel Kant to Jean Paul Sartre, from existentialism to nihilism, from the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx to the wissenschaftlichkeit [sic] of Martin Heidegger. " This whole passage is a little sic. To mock Shakespeare, in a black church in Chicago, as "Babylonian Shakespearean literature"--that is nihilism. To exclude young African Americans from the mental ambition represented by such books is to defeat them. I first heard the preaching of Jeremiah Wright in 1989. The sermon was called "Premature Autopsies," it was written by Stanley Crouch, and it appeared on a powerful record by Wynton Marsalis called The Majesty of the Blues. In that sermon Wright lauded "the slow, painful development demanded of serious study." They were sterling words, but they were not the reverend's own....

Posted on Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 8:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

A.B. Yehoshua: The Jews' journey back to history

Source: Jerusalem Post (5-13-08)

[The writer is a novelist and essayist. His most recent book is A Woman in Jerusalem. - Project Syndicate ]

Ten years ago, on Israel's 50th anniversary, the peace process begun by the path-breaking Oslo Accord, reached by Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 1993, established the legitimacy of two peoples' national existence in their shared homeland on the basis of territorial compromise. There was a general feeling that this long conflict was being resolved.

Unfortunately, the past 10 years have witnessed a painful setback in many areas. Individuals and peoples are capable of enduring difficulties if there is a sense that the future will be better and conflicts resolved. But a sudden backward regression can lead to despair, which we feel today.

Why is it that struggles far more complex than the Israel-Arab conflict - apartheid in South Africa, the partition of Germany, or the collapse of the Soviet Union - all seem to have been resolved, usually without bloodshed, whereas the Middle East conflict, after more than a century, claims more victims every day?

One reason is that this conflict is unparalleled in human history. There is no other example of a nation that returned after a 2,000-year absence to a territory that it never stopped regarding as its homeland. So it is no wonder that the Arabs, especially the Palestinians, remain unable to comprehend, existentially or morally, what has befallen them.

THE JEWS' return to Israel was not colonialism, as the Arabs thought. Not only did the Jews lack a mother country, but in Europe they lived as a foreign nation, leading to expulsion and annihilation. The Jews did not come to exploit Palestine's resources or subjugate its residents in order to transfer the economic benefits elsewhere. Nor did they come like the American or Australian settlers in order to build a new identity and assimilate the natives into it.

Zionism aimed at renewing and deepening an old identity. From the beginning, there was no intention to damage the identity of the native-born Arabs, or to merge it with the traditional Jewish identity. Because the Arabs had no corresponding historical model from which to learn how to relate to the phenomenon that had overtaken them, they tried to interpret Zionism as colonialism, and thought that other nations' fight against colonialism provided a model for resistance.

Thus, for the Arabs, the legitimacy of Israel's right to exist remains an open question. Indeed, never before has the question of legitimacy been so fundamental to a conflict between nations....

Posted on Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 7:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Marilyn Gardner: Was It Easier Being a Mother in 1908?

Source: AlterNet (5-10-08)

[Marilyn Gardner is a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor.]

On the first Mother's Day 100 years ago, moms had a tough -- but rewarding -- job, just as they do today.

Motherhood ranks as one of the hardest jobs to do, yet one of the easiest to romanticize.

This Sunday, May 11, as families shower mothers with cards, gifts, and superlatives, they will be part of an observance that had its humble beginnings 100 years ago. On Sunday, May 10, 1908, simple church services in Grafton, W.Va., and Philadelphia honored the nation's mothers. A bill introduced in the US Senate that year failed to establish an official Mother's Day, but it set the stage for a successful measure in 1914.

With their tightly laced corsets, long skirts, heavy shoes, and upswept hair, the mothers of 1908 bear little physical resemblance to their counterparts in 2008, dressed in shorts, Spandex, and sneakers. But as today's busy mothers savor their holiday, some might think longingly of simpler times, before women spoke of "juggling" or "balancing" work and family. They might even be tempted to idealize mothers of a century ago, whose serene images grace family photo albums.

But wait. "It's not a time to be romanticized," says Stephanie Coontz, a historian and author of "Marriage: A History." "Mothers in 1908 spent less time mothering than they do today. Even in the middle classes, they spent much less time with their kids than we would have imagined."

One reason for this time deficit involves work. "Most families needed several wage earners," Ms. Coontz says. "Women took in boarders, did sewing at home, cleaning, and all sorts of jobs that weren't counted as jobs on the Census but were time-consuming."

A photo from that era shows a mother balancing a baby on her lap while she assembles cigarettes at her kitchen table. Two other children stand nearby.

Even mothers without paid employment labored endlessly doing housework. In 1908, a New York settlement worker estimated that the average woman, even in middle-class families, spent 40 hours a week just cleaning and shopping. Laundry was an arduous, two-day task, washing one day and ironing the next. Wood and coal stoves required tending and cleaning....

Posted on Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 6:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Thomas Frank: Our Great Economic U-Turn

Source: WSJ (5-14-08)

Twenty years ago, when I started out as a writer, the problems of mass prosperity were the ones that intrigued me most. America was then, as I thought it would always remain, the great middle-class nation. And in the permanent affluent society, questions of taste and waste and marketing and alienation were what really mattered, now and forever. When moved to consider workplace issues in those days, I instinctively placed them in the category of brutal-things-settled-long-ago: Without even thinking about it, I connected the word "labor" to the word "history."

It's not a mistake anyone can make any longer, whether they are pondering the voting patterns of working-class Hoosiers or the driest statistics in the record book. Median "nonelderly" household income, we find, fell consistently through the first half of this decade, despite the solid economic growth enjoyed by the country as a whole.

Some nonmedian folks did just fine, of course: The top 20% of households earned more, after taxes, than the rest of the country combined in 2005, while the topmost 1% of the population took home more than the bottom 40%. The top-earning hedge fund manager of 2007, in fact, made about as much last year in nominal dollars ($3.7 billion) as J. Paul Getty, one of the richest men in the world, was worth in the mid-1970s.

Real hourly wages for most workers, on the other hand, have risen only 1% since 1979, even as those workers' productivity has increased by 60%. What's more, American workers now clock more hours per year than their counterparts in virtually every other advanced economy, even Japan. And unless you haven't read a newspaper for 15 years, you already know what's happened to workers' health insurance and pension plans....

Posted on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 12:50 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

John B. Judis: Obama and the psychology of the color barrier

Source: New Republic (5-28-08)

... Now, with Barack Obama inching closer to the Democratic nomination, race looms yet again as a central factor in American politics. Already, race has played a key part in the Democratic primary, almost certainly hurting Obama among swaths of voters in states like New Jersey, Ohio, and, most recently, Pennsylvania. If he manages to win the nomination anyway--and it appears he will--race seems likely to play an even larger role in the general election.

What role, exactly, will that be? No one knows for sure, but the field of political psychology offers some clues. In recent years, scholars have been combining experimental findings with survey data to explain how race has remained a factor in American elections--even when politicians earnestly deny that it plays any part at all. In 2001, Princeton political scientist Tali Mendelberg summarized this research in a pathbreaking book, The Race Card. Her provocative analysis is hotly debated and far from conclusive; political psychology, after all, is not a hard science. Still, her ideas and those of other academics help to shed light on what has happened so far in the primaries and what might unfold once Obama wraps up the nomination. Their findings suggest that racism remains deeply embedded within the psyche of the American electorate--so deep that many voters may not even be aware of their own feelings on the subject. Yet, while political psychology offers a sobering sense of the difficulties that lie ahead for Obama, it also offers something else: lessons for how the country's first viable black presidential candidate might overcome the obstacles he faces.

If you were born before 1970 or if you read public-opinion polls, then you cannot doubt the profound transformation wrought by the civil rights era. In 1944, the National Opinion Research Center asked whether "Negroes should have as good a chance as white people to get any kind of job, or [whether] white people should have the first chance at any kind of job"--and 55 percent still thought white people should have the "first chance." By 1972, only 3 percent thought so. But some academics--noting the bitterness of battles over busing, affirmative action, and aid to cities, as well as the evolution of the GOP into a virtually all-white party--reasoned that racial prejudice remained, even if it was no longer overtly expressed. They believed it had simply changed form. Their challenge was to define and to demonstrate the existence of this new racism.

Many social scientists had long rejected the possibility that humans might harbor unconscious attitudes different from their conscious behavior. But, in trying to explain the persistence of racial prejudice, political psychologists were forced to hypothesize different levels of awareness and motivation. On the highest level was public moral reflection guided by social norms--which led to Trent Lott being pilloried when he famously said in 2002 that, if Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond had been elected president, the country could have avoided "all these problems." Beneath this, however, was a realm of knee-jerk opinion that might contradict a person's moral reflections; and still beneath that were unconscious attitudes, which, like a person's knee-jerk opinions, were often at odds with his or her public moral reflections. If racial prejudice persisted, it was on these deeper levels....

Posted on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 10:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Michael Barone: Rethinking the Iraq Critics

Source: Real Clear Politics (5-10-08)

[Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. He has written for many publications—including the Economist and the New York Times.]

In trying to understand news about the conflicts in Iraq, I work to keep in mind the difference between what we know now about decision making in World War II and what most Americans knew at the time. From the memoirs and documents published after the war, we've learned how leaders made critical judgments. But at the time, even well-informed journalists only could guess at what was going on behind the scenes.

Today we're only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes in regard to Iraq. One important new source is the recently published "War and Decision" by Douglas Feith, the No. 3 civilian at the Pentagon from 2001 to 2005. Feith quotes extensively from unpublished documents and contemporary memorandums, just as in the late 1940s Robert Sherwood did in "Roosevelt and Hopkins" and Winston Churchill did in his World War II histories. The picture Feith paints is at considerable variance from the narratives with which we've become familiar.

One such narrative is, "Bush lied; people died." The claim is that "neocons," including Feith, politicized intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction. Not so, as the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb Commission have concluded already. Every intelligence agency believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the post-invasion Duelfer report concluded that he maintained the capability to produce them on short notice. There was abundant evidence of contacts between Saddam's regime and al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. Given Saddam's hostility to the United States and his stonewalling of the United Nations, American leaders had every reason to believe he posed a grave threat. Removing him removed that threat....

Posted on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 9:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Malcolm A. Kline: Cold War on Campus

Source: Accuracy in Academia (5-1-08)

The latest survey on academic bias has sent academics into their usual state of denial despite evidence of same that frequently stares them right in the face.

“Taken together, 40 percent of the Americans in the survey said professors often use their classrooms as political platforms,” Robin Wilson of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on April 4th of a Gallup poll.

“When that many Americans think this happens often, higher ed has a problem,” says S. Robert Lichter, director of its Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University. Higher ed doesn’t feel that way:

• “The more you have less real experience on a campus, the more likely you might be to buy this ambient background belief,” Jeremy D. Mayer, director of the master's program in public policy at George Mason says.

• “The farther away you are from academe, the more worried you are about what goes on,” Harvard sociologist Neil R. Gross says. Actually, proximity may prove correct a maxim of author M. Stanton Evans. He outlines what he calls “Evans’ law of inadequate paranoia”: “No matter how bad you think things are, they’re worse.” “In America, particularly on college campuses, memorials to Communists have appeared with alarming frequency every few years,” my predecessor, Dan Flynn wrote in The American Spectator on April 4. “San Francisco is not alone in its veneration of people who deserve scorn and not applause.”

“The University of Washington, which also memorializes American veterans of the Spanish Civil War, boasts a Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies and accompanying Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies.” As it happens, I bonded with a couple of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) in the early 1980s.

The urban legend on the VALB is that they gallantly fought a proxy war against one of Hitler’s protégés in Spain when it wasn’t cool to do so. The actual government files on the VALB— American and Russian—show that they didn’t make a move that wasn’t directed by communist dictator Josef Stalin’s Soviet government. I met one of the veterans—Steve Nelson—when the VALB was raising money to provide ambulances to the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua which was then fending off a challenge from the anti-communist Contra rebels there. Incidentally, the FBI kept tabs on Nelson during World War II....

Posted on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 9:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, May 12, 2008

Michael Crowley: How impeachment explains the Clinton campaign

Source: New Republic (5-28-08)

The Clintons find themselves victimized and under siege. The presidency is being stolen from them. The press is out to get them. They deride elites and champion the masses. They live in a constant state of emergency. But they will endure any humiliation, ride out any crisis, fight on even when fighting seems hopeless.

That might sound like a fair summary of how Bill and Hillary Clinton have viewed the past five months. But it also happens to describe what, until now, was the greatest ordeal of the Clintons' almost comically turbulent political careers: impeachment. That baroque saga hardened the Clintonian worldview about politics and helps to explain their approach to this brutal campaign season. The Clintons have been here before, you see. They're being impeached all over again.

Even by the time Monica Lewinsky's name surfaced on the Drudge Report in January 1998, Bill and Hillary Clinton were plenty familiar with drastic reversals of fortune. Bill's future seemed ruined when he lost his bid for a second term as Arkansas governor in 1980; he started campaigning almost immediately and was back in office two years later. His 1992 campaign was defined by his "comeback kid" recovery from philandering and draft-dodging crises. After Republicans romped in the 1994 elections, Washington debated Clinton's very relevance.

For a time, it seemed the Lewinsky scandal might have exhausted their deep reservoir of resilience. After Bill--cornered by DNA on that famous Gap dress--confessed in a televised speech that was long on defiance and short on contrition, some Democrats were squirming.

Congressional Democrats were the superdelegates of 1998--worried that the Clintons' campaign to save themselves would extend into the fall, threatening their own political existences. Some in the Senate were on the brink of travelling to the White House to advise the president to resign. But congressional Democrats ultimately rallied, and Hillary played a decisive role in that effort. "I'm the field general of this operation," she told Democratic Representative Jim Moran, according to Washington Post reporter Peter Baker's definitive history of impeachment, The Breach. (Hillary had served as a staff lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate proceedings. Her fluency in impeachment law enabled her to make a powerful case about Republican abuses.) So, if Hillary has believed that she can sway superdelegates in the face of conventional wisdom, it's because she has some experience to justify her self-confidence.

Surviving impeachment didn't just require savvy tactics; it required defiance. The press predicted that MonicaGate would drive the Clintons from the White House. And, just as some liberal commentators argue that Hillary should end her candidacy for the good of the party and her own reputation, in 1998 many media outlets made similar arguments about her husband. The Philadelphia Inquirer, which had twice endorsed Bill, editorialized that resigning would be "the honorable thing." And it wasn't just ink-stained wretches. For a time, it seemed the entire Washington elite wanted the Clintons banished. A day before the 1998 election, Georgetown über-hostess Sally Quinn wrote in The Washington Post that "the Washington establishment is outraged by the president's behavior" and suggested that he resign to spare her town further humiliation. Never mind that poll after poll showed Americans were quite content with Clinton....

Posted on Monday, May 12, 2008 at 8:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Glenn Greenwald: John McCain’s Vietnam-Based View of War

Source: Salon (5-12-08)

[Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.]

Former Army Captain and military analyst Phillip Carter writes today in his Washington Post blog of the “stabbed in the back narrative” of Vietnam in the context of a new book advancing that narrative by Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition forces during the disastrous 2003-2004 period when, among other things, the Abu Ghraib abuses occurred. That narrative, says Carter, “is popular among American military officers of a certain age, who believe if only they’d had gutsy political leadership, support from the homefront, and a willingness to steamroll North Vietnam with overwhelming force, we might have won the war.” As Carter documents (emphasis in original): “It’s a good story, but it’s wrong. No amount of America firepower could have crushed the North Vietnamese people’s will.”

What almost always goes unmentioned when this myth is discussed is that one its most faithful adherents is John McCain, and he applies this mentality not only to Vietnam but also to every subsequent military conflict, including the current one in Iraq. During the debate in late 1990 over whether Congress should authorize the first President Bush to use military force against Iraq to repel the invasion of Kuwait, Henry Kissinger testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and had the following exchange with McCain:

MCCAIN: You know, one of the things I regret more than anything else when we ever hear there’s a chance of conflict or a possibility of a conflict, is we always re-visit the Vietnam War as some sort of role model when, in fact, the model of the Vietnam War is exactly what not to do in the conduct of war, including actions on the part of Congress. But to say that there was, quote, “fifty-two thousand casualties in the surgical strikes of North Vietnam” is just darn foolishness. The fact is, as you know, Dr. Kissinger, that in 1972, for the first time, there was significant bombing which was not constrained by either congressional or presidential mandate which virtually brought that nation to its knees with a minimum of casualties despite the hue and cry over one bomb that hit one hospital which seemed to be the biggest attack in the history of warfare, which still angers me. The Vietnamese and North Vietnamese themselves have stated that there was minimum casualties — in the 19 — in the Christmas ‘72 bombing raids. And the fact is, to purvey the idea that somehow — that airpower failed in Vietnam because airpower was not capable certainly is an insult to the experience and the intelligence of those of us who served there. . . . .

The — and Mr. Kissinger, isn’t it true that the reason why the North Vietnamese came back to the bargaining table at Christmas in 1972 was because they were virtually brought to their knees by the bombing of North Vietnam?

MR. KISSINGER: They certainly agreed after the bombing to things that they had not agreed before, and were very eager to settle. I believe they were brought back to the bargaining table — yes.

SEN. MCCAIN: Do you believe that 52,000 casualties over a seven-eight period or eight — let’s see, ‘65 — eight-year period is some kind of exorbitant number of casualties?

MR. KISSINGER: I have no — I have no independent knowledge of that figure one way or the other although it sounds credible to me.

That’s the very embodiment of the “stabbed-in-the-back” Vietnam narrative. We had our greatest success when we could bomb North Vietnam “not constrained by either congressional or presidential mandate.” That’s when we almost brought them “to their knees.” But incessant complaints about civilian casualties and anger over irrelevant matters such as the bombing of hospitals is what prevented us from winning — “which still angers him,” because the number of dead North Vietnamese wasn’t really “exorbitant.” There was room for plenty more. Ponder what that means for Iraq, Afghanistan and any other new countries on which a President McCain decides to wage war.

This simplistic message is all McCain has been saying for years about Iraq as well. One of the greatest myths about McCain now — mostly propagated by the candidate himself and then amplified by his media allies — is that, since 2004, he had been calling for the surge strategy to be used in Iraq. That’s just false. McCain wasn’t calling for the counter-insurgency strategies implemented by Gen. Petraeus. As surge advocates endlessly argue, the “Surge” isn’t exclusively or even primarily about more troops, but rather, is defined by its shift to a “population-centric approach.”...

Posted on Monday, May 12, 2008 at 6:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, May 9, 2008

Joe Conason: Was Hillary channeling George Wallace?

Source: Salon (5-9-08)

As long as Hillary Clinton is willing to spend the money and energy needed to continue her campaign, she certainly can ignore the pundits who insist that the Democratic nominating contest is over. What she should not ignore, however, is the damage that her increasingly reckless behavior is inflicting on her reputation and that of her husband -- especially when she starts to sound like a reincarnation of the late George Wallace.

When Clinton blathered on about "totally obliterating" Iran in the event it made a nuclear strike against Israel, and then reiterated that same statement last weekend, she made what was, until then, the single most ill-considered comment of the campaign. But now USA Today has published an interview in which she explained again why she regards herself as a more viable general-election candidate than Barack Obama -- except that this time, she crossed a bright white line.

Citing an Associated Press analysis "that found how Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me," she went on to say: "There's a pattern emerging here."


There is indeed a pattern emerging -- and it is a pattern that must dismay everyone who admires the Clintons and has defended them against the charge that they are exploiting racial divisions.

As Sean Wilentz and others have argued, there was no ugly subtext to her innocuous remark about the different roles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Baines Johnson in the civil rights crusade, although several prominent Obama supporters promoted that smear. And if Bill Clinton's comparison of Obama and Jesse Jackson was badly timed and clumsy, that too fell within the bounds of acceptable commentary. Indeed, the discussion of ethnic and racial voting preferences is not only fair but unavoidable and utterly mundane in American politics.

But this time she violated the rhetorical rules, no doubt by mistake. It was her offhand reference to "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans" that raises the specter of old Dixie demagogues like Wallace and Lester Maddox. Was she dog-whistling to the voters of Kentucky and West Virginia?

While I still cannot believe she actually intended any such nefarious meaning, she seemed to be equating "hard-working Americans" with "white Americans." Which is precisely what Wallace and his cohort used to do with their drawling refrain about welfare and affirmative action. This is the grating sound of Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, even though Tricky Dick would never quite stoop to saying such things in public....

Posted on Friday, May 9, 2008 at 7:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jack Kelly: Obama Needs a History Lesson

Source: Real Clear Politics (5-9-08)

[Jack Kelly writes aticles on political issues for Real Clear Politics.]

In his victory speech after the North Carolina primary, Sen. Barack Obama said something that is all the more remarkable for how little it has been remarked upon.

In defending his stated intent to meet with America's enemies without preconditions, Sen. Obama said: "I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did."

That he made this statement, and that it passed without comment by the journalists covering his speech indicates either breathtaking ignorance of history on the part of both, or deceit.

I assume the Roosevelt to whom Sen. Obama referred is Franklin D. Roosevelt. Our enemies in World War II were Nazi Germany, headed by Adolf Hitler; fascist Italy, headed by Benito Mussolini, and militarist Japan, headed by Hideki Tojo. FDR talked directly with none of them before the outbreak of hostilities, and his policy once war began was unconditional surrender.

FDR died before victory was achieved, and was succeeded by Harry Truman. Truman did not modify the policy of unconditional surrender. He ended that war not with negotiation, but with the atomic bomb.

Harry Truman also was president when North Korea invaded South Korea in June, 1950. President Truman's response was not to call up North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung for a chat. It was to send troops.

Perhaps Sen. Obama is thinking of the meeting FDR and Churchill had with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in Tehran in December, 1943, and the meetings Truman and Roosevelt had with Stalin at Yalta and Potsdam in February and July, 1945. But Stalin was then a U.S. ally, though one of whom we should have been more wary than FDR and Truman were. Few historians think the agreements reached at Yalta and Potsdam, which in effect consigned Eastern Europe to slavery, are diplomatic models we ought to follow. Even fewer Eastern Europeans think so.

When Stalin's designs became unmistakably clear, President Truman's response wasn't to seek a summit meeting. He sent military aid to Greece, ordered the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan, and sent troops to South Korea....

Posted on Friday, May 9, 2008 at 6:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Gary Sick: The strategy behind Hillary Clinton's comment that she would obliterate Iran

Source: Informed Comment (Blog run by Juan Cole) (5-9-08)

[Gary Sick, a political scientist at Columbia University was a National Security Council staffer under Carter and Reagan.]

Hillary Clinton's warning that the United States could "obliterate" Iran if that country should "foolishly consider" launching an attack on Israel is, of course, pandering to a broad American constituency that wants to hear tough rhetoric about Iran. It is also intended to appeal to a constituency that needs constant reassurance that America's relationship with Israel is secure. And, by addressing a strategic hypothetical that would by any measure be many years in the future ("in the next ten years" in her words), it seems intended to convince doubters that a woman is tough enough - perhaps more than tough enough - to be commander in chief.

Although her use of the word "obliterate" was both excessive and ill-advised, it might be seen as a challenge to Obama to match her toughness, or even as simply pandering shamelessly to a constituency that thrives on political red meat. That is not very flattering to her, but it might be regarded as politics as usual. What makes this statement particularly troublesome is that it cannot be dismissed as mere off-the-cuff responses to a TV interviewer. Rather, it appears to be part of a broader, considered policy that would likely be at the heart of the Middle East strategy of President Hillary Clinton.

The Clinton campaign, while explaining her remarks to skeptics, made it clear that this was no slip of the tongue. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reports that the "obliterate" remarks are part of a more extensive plan, first advanced in the debate prior to the Pennsylvania primary, for a new defensive alliance with the Arab states and Israel, in which the United States would extend not only a "security umbrella" over Israel but also "provide a deterrent backup" that would extend U.S. nuclear guarantees to Arab states who renounce n uclear weapons. The apparent author of this strategy is Martin Indyk. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/03/AR2008050301875.html

Martin Indyk came into Bill Clinton's administration as director for Middle East affairs on the National Security Council and later represented the United States as ambassador to Israel (twice) as well as a stint as Assistant Secretary for Near East Affairs at the Department of State. He was present at every stage of the Clinton administration's Middle East policy, but he is most frequently remembered, at least by Persian Gulf specialists, as the author of the so-called "dual containment" policy.

"Dual containment" basically postulates that the way to deal with recalcitrant states in the Persian Gulf (i.e. states that are unsympathetic to U.S. interests and objectives) is to isolate them and "contain" them, relying on sanctions and superior military power. It was also quite explicit in linking "containment of Iraq and Iran in the east" with "promotion of Arab-Israeli peace in the west." This was a new twist in U.S. policy which had previously maintained that the Persian Gulf/oil could be separated from the Arab-Israeli dispute. The policy was therefore viewed by many as attempting to wall off the troublesome Persian Gulf region so that the United States could focus on the Arab-Israel issue, or, as it later evolved, on Israel alone. It was also a unilateral policy: collaborators would be nice, but in their absence the United States could and would act alone.

Although the name "dual containment" is no longer used, especially after the invasion of Iraq removed one of the policy's targets, it is nevertheless true that the dominant premise of the policy - that you deal with your enemies and rivals unilaterally by isolation and threats rather than engagement - is one Clintonian policy that has been adopted unabashedly by the Bush administrat ion. It has defined U.S. policy in the region for the past decade and a half.

Dual containment was first announced by Indyk in May 1993, in the early months of the Bill Clinton administration. The previous administration of George Bush pere had held out the promise that "Good will begets good will," to entice Iran to intervene on behalf of the American hostages in Lebanon; Iran did so, but by the time the hostages were successfully released, Bush was deep into a presidential campaign and could not fulfill his commitment. Then, of course, he lost the election and the Iranians were told that they would have to forget about any U.S. promises.

Still, Iran had taken a serious decision to try to open channels to the United States, and when Bill Clinton was elected, they put out new feelers (in which I had a small role). These were ignored in favor of dual containment. Iran tried again with unilateral economic offers in 1995, but the Clinton administration responded by enacting far-reaching economic sanctions against Iran.

Dual containment and its accompanying sanctions were adopted with the stated objective of changing Iran's behavior on a number of issues: nuclear, Arab-Israel peace process, and terrorism, among others. After a full quarter of a century, with the United States doing everything in its power to coerce and threaten Iran economically and militarily, Iran's policies have changed to some degree, but it would take a real ideologue to claim that they have evolved on anything other than an Iranian schedule according to Iranian political objectives. In short, U.S. policies have failed utterly in their key objectives. Yet our answer - and the answer of the Clinton campaign from what we can tell - is more of the same. Clinton-Indyk give lip service to engagement, but then so does Bush-Cheney.

The "new defensive alliance" with Arab states of the Middle East that Sen. Clinton has been proposing in the past few week s is so similar to the anti-Iran alliance that the Bush administration has been trying to sell to the Sunni Arab states (with Israel as a silent partner), that I must admit I cannot see the difference. In fact, the "Bush Doctrine" toward Iran and the Arab states was nothing but a continuation of the "Clinton-Indyk Doctrine" that preceded it, and it now appears that if Hillary should win the presidency, we will come full circle back to Clinton-Indyk redux.

I have known Martin Indyk since we were at Columbia together, and I respect him as a professional. But I thought dual containment was a terrible idea from the first time I heard it, and Martin knows it. By emphasizing threats and sanctions above even the most minimal engagement, I think this concept was the origin of many of our worst mistakes and missed opportunities over the past 15 years.

Characteristically, this latest version never stops to ask how the regional states may react to our unilateral unfoldi ng of an "umbrella," much less our anticipation that they will respond with gratitude and formal recognition of Israel. That is what Indyk specifies as the price. This sounds like the kind of unrealistic expectations that we have built into our Middle East policies repeatedly over the past dozen years.

As my friends know well, I have been a stout defender of Hillary Clinton's campaign from the very beginning, while maintaining my admiration for Barack Obama. (In the most recent case, I was impressed by the fact that Obama refused to rise to the bait, while she accepted the hypothetical and ran with it.) I respected the depth of her politically skilled network, her grit and determination, and her ability to take a punch. My major argument, of course, was Clinton's experience. But experience is a two-edged sword.

The chance for a fresh start - for "change" in the current political lexicon - was to me the great hope of this presidential campaign. But Clinton's r ecent remarks, and the underlying policy from which they apparently sprang, are evidence that, at least on this issue, we might only look forward to more of the same under a Clinton presidency. In that sense, I think we would be losing one of the great chances of this generation to begin to fashion a more sensible policy in a region that I care about greatly.

Posted on Friday, May 9, 2008 at 12:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jesse Walker: The Paranoid Style Is American Politics

Source: http://reason.com (4-24-08)

[Mr. Walker is the managing editor of Reason.]

... In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the historian Bernard Bailyn showed that the worldview of the patriots who would soon revolt against England included a strong belief, in the words of one colonist, that "a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty." At the same time, Bailyn notes, British administrators "were as convinced as were the leaders of the Revolutionary movement that they were themselves the victims of conspriatorial designs." Colonial governors such as Thomas Hutchinson—a man John Adams accused of "junto conspiracy"—believed, in Bailyn's words, that "the root of all the trouble in the colonies was the maneuvering of a secret, power-hungry cabal that professed loyalty to England while assiduously working to destroy the bonds of authority."

After independence was won, the victorious patriots quickly found plots in their own ranks. If you didn't think the Jeffersonians were Jacobin pawns of the Illuminati, you probably fretted that the Federalists were conspiring to establish a monarchy. Nor did the hunt for subversive cabals end with the death of the revolutionary generation. The historian David Brion Davis has pointed out that the lead-up to the Civil War can be viewed as a clash between two conspiracy theories, one featuring a fearsome network of abolitionists and the other a hungry Slave Power.

And no, these passions haven't limited themselves to periods as violent as the war for American independence and the war between the states. It's telling that the 1990s, a time of relative peace and prosperity, were also a golden age of both frankly fictional and purportedly true tales of conspiracy. There are many reasons for this, including the not-unsubstantial fact that even at its most peaceful, America is still riven with conflicts. But there is also the possibility that peace breeds nightmares just as surely as strife does. The anthropologist David Graeber has argued that "it's the most peaceful societies which are also the most haunted, in their imaginative constructions of the cosmos, by constant specters of perennial war." The Piaroa Indians of Venezuala, for example, "are famous for their peaceableness," but "they inhabit a cosmos of endless invisible war, in which wizards are engaged in fending off the attacks of insane, predatory gods and all deaths are caused by spiritual murder and have to be avenged by the magical massacre of whole (distant, unknown) communities." Many bloggers with comfortable lives spend their spare time in a similar subterranean world.

Why all the paranoia? In part, of course, it's because there really are conspiracies out there. Power does attract the power-hungry. No, Hillary Clinton did not murder Ron Brown—but her explanations for her good fortune trading cattle futures do not bear close scrutiny. John McCain is not a deep-cover Manchurian Candidate, but he was a charter member of the Keating Five. Barack Obama is not a closet Islamist, but there are legitimate questions about his ties to the corrupt developer Tony Rezko. If politics is the art of compromise, then politicians will inevitably be compromised.

It also is often in a movement's interest to paint the opposition in the darkest possible colors, even when the stakes are small and even when the allegations involved are not completely true or relevant. More importantly, it is natural for the members of a movement to find such suspicions believable and to conjure up such theories themselves. It's always easy to think the worst about people outside your group, especially if they're already consciously working against your goals. This tendency becomes even stronger when a hierarchy is involved. The lower orders are inevitably suspicious of the elite, and the elite are always worried about the proles.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that one poll showed 15 percent of voters believing that Barack Obama is a Muslim. It shouldn't be a surprise that the stories anti-McCain conservatives used to whisper, that perhaps he collaborated with his captors in Vietnam, are now surfacing on the left as well. If Hillary Clinton somehow manages to take the Democratic nomination—an outcome that would probably require a conspiracy itself—you shouldn't be surprised when all the stories you heard about her in the '90s come roaring back, be they plausible or nuts.

Above all, you shouldn't be surprised when you hear these tales not just from that creepy-looking fellow manning the LaRouche booth near the bus stop but from ordinary, middle-class relatives and neighbors with ordinary, middle-class views. Welcome to America. Paranoia is a part of the political process.

Posted on Friday, May 9, 2008 at 1:31 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, May 8, 2008

George Will: Conservatives should beware of presidential power

Source: Real Clear Politics (5-4-08)

... A 1948 photograph here shows Truman at a lectern delivering a campaign speech in Los Angeles. Seated near the lectern is the man who had introduced Truman, 37-year-old Ronald Reagan. Between Truman's and Reagan's presidencies, between the dawn and dusk of what John Kennedy called the Cold War's "long twilight struggle," Americans accepted extravagant -- or so the Founders would have thought -- assertions of presidential powers. These assertions have been made by presidents of both parties, but have been intensified by the current president in the context of "the long war" against terrorists.

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, only one delegate (from ever-bellicose South Carolina, naturally) favored vesting presidents with an unfettered power to make war. Presidents, it was then thought, could respond on their own only to repel sudden attacks on the nation. "The Founders," says former Rep. David Skaggs, a Colorado Democrat, "counted on the competitive ambitions of the three branches to make checks and balances work." Instead, we have seen Congress' powers regarding war "migrate ignominiously to the executive."

A crucial event in the migration was Truman's decision to wage war in Korea, taken without Congress and never formally ratified by Congress, other than post facto by enabling appropriations, which are not an adequate substitute for the collaborative decision the Constitution's Framers anticipated for war-making. Since Korea, America has engaged in three major wars (Vietnam, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom) and many other exercises of military force, but Congress' constitutional powers relevant to war-making have atrophied from disuse. Both presidents Bush declared congressional assent unnecessary even while they were seeking it, in 1991 and 2002, respectively. Congress' passivity in the face of such constitutional impertinences has amounted to the silent repeal of the relevant constitutional provisions.

Because contemporary conservatism was born partly in reaction against two liberal presidents -- against FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society -- conservatives, who used to fear concentrations of unchecked power, valued Congress as a bridle on strong chief executives. But, disoriented by their reverence for Reagan, and sedated by Republican victories in seven of the last 10 presidential elections, many conservatives have not just become comfortable with the idea of a strong president, they have embraced the theory of the "unitary executive."

This theory, refined during the Reagan administration, is that where the Constitution vests power in the executive, especially power over foreign affairs and war, the president, as chief executive, is rightfully immune to legislative abridgements of his autonomy. Judicial abridgements are another matter.

When in 1952 Truman, to forestall a strike, cited his "inherent" presidential powers during wartime to seize the steel mills, the Supreme Court rebuked him. In a letter here that he evidently never sent to Justice William Douglas, Truman said, "I don't see how a Court made up of so-called 'liberals' could do what that Court did to me." Attention, conservatives: Truman correctly identified a grandiose presidency with the theory and practice of liberalism....

Posted on Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 5:57 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Steve Plaut: How 'Nakba' Proves There's No Palestinian Nation

Source: Jewish Press (4-30-08)

[Steven Plaut, a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press, is a professor at Haifa University. His book “The Scout” is available at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at steveneplaut@yahoo.com.]

Over the past few years, the term nakba (also spelled naqba) has become the favorite nonsense word of the Anti-Israel Lobby. Meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, it has been embraced by anti-Semites all over the planet to refer to Israel’s creation, which supposedly imposed a “catastrophe” upon the “disenfranchised Palestinian Arabs.”

Of course, the real catastrophe that befell the Arabs in 1948-49 was that they failed in their attempt to annihilate Israel and exterminate its population, and for that they paid a price.

Meanwhile, Nakba Nonsense has been spreading. Google finds over 85,000 web pages referring to Israel’s creation as a “nakba,” and a Yahoo search finds even more than that. The anti-Israel web magazine Counterpunch cannot mention Israel without using the term. Even Israel’s leftist minister of education, Yuli Tamir, has orderedthat the nakba be taught as partof the curriculum in Israeli schools, where Israel’s schoolchildren can be taught to mourn their own country’s existence.

(Tamir, who was previously a professor of education at Tel Aviv University, is so bizarre that in the summer of 1996 she published an article in the Boston Review defending female circumcision in the Third World and denouncing those who expressed disgust at the practice – see http://bostonreview.net/BR21.3/Tamir.html.)

Nakba ceremonies are now held each year by leftist professors at Israeli universities who mourn the very creation and existence of their country.

The nakba of the late 1940’s and 1950’s that befell large numbers of Jews living in Arab countries who were suddenly expelled, persecuted, and stripped of their property does not interest such people. Those Jewish refugees made new homes in Israel and actually outnumbered the Palestinians who fled.

Meanwhile, an urban legend has been fabricated about the origin of the term “nakba” – a fairy tale that claims the word was a banner waved by Palestinians starting in 1948, and that its very use shows how deep the roots of “Palestinian nationality” go.

So here is a little current events quiz: What is the real origin of the term “nakba” and what is its original meaning?

If you get the answer to the quiz wrong – in other words, if you say it refers to the events of 1948 – you are in very good company. I myself would have flunked the quiz up until a few days ago, when I stumbled on the correct answer. Not only does the bandying about of the “nakba” nonsense word not point to any “depths of roots of Palestinian nationality,” it proves the very opposite: namely, that there is no such thing as a Palestinian nation or nationality at all.

The authoritative source on the origin of “nakba” is none other than George Antonius, supposedly the first “official historian of Palestinian nationalism.” Like so many “Palestinians,” he actually wasn’t – Palestinian, that is. He was a Christian Lebanese-Egyptian who lived for a while in Jerusalem, where he composed his official advocacy/history of Arab nationalism. The Arab Awakening, a highly biased book, was published in 1938 and for years afterward was the official text used at British universities.

Antonius was an “official Palestinian representative” to Britain, trying to argue the cause for creating an Arab state in place of any prospective homeland promised the Jews under the Balfour Declaration of 1917. By the 1930’s Antonius was an active anti-Zionist propagandist, and as such was offered a job at Columbia University (where some things don’t seem to change much).

He served as an academic fig leaf for xenophobic Arab nationalists seeking to deny Jews any right to self-determination in or migration to the Land of Israel. And he was closely associated with the Grand Mufti, Hitler’s main Islamic ally, and also with the pro-German regime in Iraq in the early 1940’s.

Antonius was so passionately anti-Zionist that he continues to serve as the hero and mentor of Jewish leftist anti-Zionists everywhere. For example, the late Hebrew University sociology professor Baruch Kimmerling relied on Antonius at length in his own pseudo-history, Palestinians: The Making of a People (Free Press, 1993).

So how does Antonius provide us with the answer to the current-events quiz concerning the origin of “nakba”? The term was not invented in 1948 but rather in 1920. And it was coined not because of Palestinians suddenly getting nationalistic but because Arabs living in Palestine regarded themselves as Syrian and were enraged at being cut off from their Syrian homeland.

Before World War I, the entire Levant – including what is now Israel, the “occupied territories,” Jordan, Lebanon and Syria – was comprised of Ottoman Turkish colonies. When Allied forces drove the Turks out of the Levant, the two main powers, Britain and France, divided the spoils between them. Britain got Palestine, including what is now Jordan, while France got Lebanon and Syria.

The problem was that the Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians and were seen as such by other Syrians. The Palestinian Arabs were enraged that an artificial barrier was being erected within their Syrian homeland by the infidel colonial powers – one that would divide northern Syrian Arabs from southern Syrian Arabs, the latter being those who were later misnamed “Palestinians.”

The bulk of the Palestinian Arabs had in fact migrated to Palestine from Syria and Lebanon during the previous two generations, largely to benefit from the improving conditions and job opportunities afforded by Zionist immigration and capital flowing into the area. In 1920, both sets of Syrian Arabs, those in Syria and those in Palestine, rioted violently and murderously.

On page 312 of The Arab Awakening, Antonius writes, “The year 1920 has an evil name in Arab annals: it is referred to as the Year of the Catastrophe (Am al-Nakba). It saw the first armed risings that occurred in protest against the post-War settlement imposed by the Allies on the Arab countries. In that year, serious outbreaks took place in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq.”

Yes, the answer to our little quiz is 1920, not 1948. That’s 1920 – when there was no Zionist state, no Jewish sovereignty, no “settlements” in “occupied territories,” no Israel Defense Forces, no Israeli missiles and choppers targeting terror leaders, and no Jewish control over Jerusalem (which had a Jewish demographic majority going back at least to 1850).

The original “nakba” had nothing to do with Jews, and nothing to do with demands by Palestinian Arabs for self-determination, independence and statehood. To the contrary, it had everything to do with the fact that the Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians. They rioted at this nakba – at this catastrophe– because they found deeply offensive the very idea that they should be independent from Syria and Syrians.

In the 1920’s, the very suggestion that Palestinian Arabs constituted a separate ethnic nationality was enough to send those same Arabs out into the streets to murder and plunder violently in outrage. If they themselves insisted they were simply Syrians who had migrated to the Land of Israel, by what logic are the Palestinian Arabs deemed entitled to their own state today?

Palestinian Arabs are no more a nation and no more entitled to their own state than are the Arabs of Detroit or of Paris. They certainly are not entitled to four different states: Jordan, Hamastan in Gaza, a PLO state in the West Bank, and Israel converted into yet another Arab state via the granting of a “right of return” to Arab refugees.

Speaking of Palestinians as Syrians, it is worth noting what one of the early Syrian nationalists had to say. The following quote comes from the great-grandfather of the current Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad:

“Those good Jews brought civilization and peace to the Arab Muslims, and they dispersed gold and prosperity over Palestine without damage to anyone or taking anything by force. Despite this, the Muslims declared holy war against them and did not hesitate to massacre their children and women…. Thus a black fate awaits the Jews and other minorities in case the Mandates are cancelled and Muslim Syria is united with Muslim Palestine.”

That statement is from a letter sent to the French prime minister in June 1936 by six Syrian Alawi notables (the Alawis are the ruling class in Syria today) in support of Zionism. Bashar’s great-grandfather was one of them.

Posted on Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 8:36 PM | Comments (37) | Top

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Geoffrey R. Stone: McCain's Justice

Source: Huffington Post (Blog) (5-6-08)

[Geoffrey R. Stone is the Harry Kalven, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. From 1987 to 1994 he served as Dean of the University of Chicago Law School and from 1994 to 2002 he served as Provost of the University of Chicago. ]

John McCain's May 6 statement on the role of judges in our constitutional system might very well qualify as one of the most ignorant statements ever made by a presidential candidate on this most important subject.

At one point, McCain complained that sitting judges and justices systematically "abuse" the federal judicial power by issuing "rulings and opinions on policy questions that should be decided democratically." McCain is apparently blissfully unaware that the vast majority of current federal judges were appointed by Republican presidents and that seven of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices and twelve of the last fourteen Supreme Court Justices were appointed by Republicans. As Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

McCain also seems stunningly unaware that the Justices he simplistically lauds as "judicial passivists" are nothing of the sort. Justices like Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas, and more recently Roberts and Alito, have consistently voted to invalidate laws at a record clip, most notably holding unconstitutional a broad range of laws regulating commercial advertising, limiting corporate campaign expenditures, and authorizing affirmative action programs to enhance educational diversity -- to say nothing of Bush v. Gore. This is not strict construction and it is not judicial restraint. It is conservative activism gone wild -- in judicial robes. McCain just doesn't understand.

Even worse, McCain mocks the lifetime tenure of federal judges and assails what he scorns as liberal "judicial activism." Interestingly, McCain confidently invokes the framers of the Constitution as authority for his claim that what we need in this nation are more judges who will exercise "self-restraint." But after chiding Barack Obama, who actually knows something about constitutional law, McCain betrays his complete lack of comprehension of the Unites States Constitution and of the goals and concerns of those who crafted it.

A fundamental challenge facing the Framers of our Constitution was how to restrain intolerant, self-interested, and prejudiced majorities in order to ensure that they would not run roughshod over the rights and liberties of minorities. As James Madison observed, "the greatest danger" to liberty was to be found "in the body of the people, operating by the majority against the minority."

Early in the constitutional process, Madison expressed skepticism about the value of a Bill of Rights. As a practical matter, he simply did not see how a Bill of Rights could "provide any check on the passions and interests of the popular majorities." Indeed, "experience teaches the inefficacy of a bill of rights on those occasions when its control is most needed," for "overbearing majorities" tend simply to ignore these "parchment barriers." In a governmental system in which the majority could have its way, Madison asked Jefferson, "What use . . . can a bill of rights serve?"

In a letter back to Madison, Jefferson (who was in Paris at the time) extolled the role courts could play in enforcing a Bill of Rights. Jefferson urged Madison to consider "the legal check" which the Constitution "puts into the hands of the judiciary," a "body, which if rendered independent . . . merits great confidence for their learning and integrity."

Shortly thereafter, when Madison presented the Bill of Rights to the first Congress, he echoed Jefferson's argument, contending that if these rights are "incorporated into the Constitution, independent tribunals of justice will consider themselves in a peculiar manner the guardians of those rights; they will be an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive; they will be naturally led to resist every encroachment upon rights expressly stipulated for in the Constitution by the declaration of rights."

The "solution" to the seemingly insoluble dilemma of how to enforce the guarantees of the Bill of Rights against the "overbearing majorities" that would inevitably control the legislative and executive branches was thus, in part, the third branch - the judiciary, which could serve as "an impenetrable bulwark" against majoritarian encroachments on the fundamental liberties of political, social, religious, economic, and other minorities.

Unlike John McCain, the framers fully understood that lifetime tenure was not a mere perk of office, but essential condition for the American constitutional system to operate. The hope was that life tenure would insulate judges from the need to curry favor with the prevailing political majority, and thus free them to act on principle. As John Adams affirmed, for judges to be able to undertake this solemn responsibility, they must be firmly independent of the other branches of government and must hold "their positions by a permanent tenure in no way dependent upon the will and pleasure of the executive." Without that independence, Adams added, it would be absurd "to look for strict impartiality and a pure administration of justice, to expect that power should be confined within its legal limits, and right and justice done." A critical insight of the American constitutional system was the recognition that judges needed independence not only from the executive and the Congress, but, in Madison's words, from "the people themselves."

During the ratification debates, Alexander Hamilton strongly endorsed judicial review as "obvious and uncontroversial." Hamilton argued that constitutional limits could "be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of the courts of justice," and he maintained that "the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority." The "independence of the judges," he reasoned, is "requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill humours which the arts of designing men . . . sometimes disseminate among the people themselves." Judges, he insisted, have a duty to resist invasions of constitutional rights even if they are "instigated by the major voice of the community."

The truest aspirations of American constitutionalism are embodied in the decisions of the Supreme in cases like Brown v. Board of Education (declaring racial segregation unconstitutional), Gideon v. Wainwright (guaranteeing a person accused of crime the right to counsel), Reynolds v. Sims (insisting on one person/one vote), Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (prohibiting the poll tax), and Frontiero v. Richardson (protecting women against unconstitutional discrimination). The framers understood that our nation needs judges and justices who protect the rights of the minorities, the oppressed, and the downtrodden, not judges and justices who abuse the Constitution in order to protect the interests of commercial advertisers and corporate political contributors. To paraphrase John McCain, "the moral authority of our judiciary depends" not on false promises of "judicial restraint," but on real promises of judicial wisdom - the sort of wisdom that Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Hamilton banked on when they drafted our Constitution.

Posted on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 12:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Rep. Joe Baca: Cinco de Mayo's celebrated in the US

Source: Salon (5-5-08)

Every year, as we approach the 5th of May, stores and companies begin to promote Cinco de Mayo in their storefronts and through their advertisements. There are office parties, full of festive decorations, and children at school might have the opportunity to take a swing at a piñata. This splendor is to celebrate a date of significance to Mexicans and Mexican-Americans alike.

While this is not Mexican Independence Day (that is on September 16th), it is a date pivotal to the history of Mexico. In 1861, Mexico was bankrupt, and had outstanding debts to Britain, Spain, France and the U.S. While the Monroe Doctrine warned European nations to avoid intrusion into the affairs of the Americas -- France, England and Spain signed the Covenant of London, where they agreed to send troops to collect on those debts. England and Spain came to peaceful agreements with Mexico, while France prepared to attack.

On May 5th, 1862, the French attacked the city of Puebla, but under the leadership of Texas-born Mexican General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin, the Mexican Army was triumphant in the battle. It brought the country together and helped create a sense of unity.

Interestingly, the first celebrations of Cinco de Mayo started one year later in California, which had recently become part of the United States. According to a paper published last year by the UCLA Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture, as the French continued to attack Mexico, beginning with a subsequent attack on Puebla just one year after the initial attack, Cinco de Mayo brought together the people of California. The date brought together native-born Californios (individuals from the region prior to annexing by the U.S.); recent immigrants from Mexico, as well as Central and South-America; and the new generation of English-speaking American children. Since 1863, Californians have celebrated the fifth of May, and now people across the U.S. recognize the occasion as well. Yet it is virtually ignored in Mexico. From its inception, Cinco de Mayo has been a day for those with Mexican heritage in our country to celebrate our roots, marked with patriotic speeches and celebrations, displaying both U.S. and Mexican flags....

Posted on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 12:45 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Jeff Greenfield: Obama and Orwell and elitism

Source: Slate (5-1-08)

[Mr. Greenfield is a commentator on CBS News.]

Elitism has bedeviled American liberalism for the better part of four decades. It undermined the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry, and now it's making mischief in the Obama campaign every bit as much as the omnipresence of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The charge that liberal candidates don't connect with or understand the values and beliefs of regular Americans is embedded in old epithets like "limousine liberal," which I first heard aimed at New York Mayor John Lindsay in 1969. It was also at the core of "radical chic," the phrase made famous by Tom Wolfe in his savage 1970 account in New York magazine of a fund-raising party for the Black Panthers thrown by Leonard Bernstein and his wife in their Park Avenue duplex. (Wolfe didn't invent the term, but he gave it currency.)

There's also an even older and more illuminating antecedent from across the Atlantic: the writings of George Orwell in England in the late 1930s, which describe a version of elitism that echoes powerfully in our current political battle.

Orwell's 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier is an account of his travels to England's industrial North, to the towns of Barnsley, Sheffield, and Wigan. Orwell—once a scholarship student at Eton—wrote of everything from conditions in the coal mines to the homes, diets, and health of desperately poor miners. He himself was a socialist who could also turn a critical eye on the British left, and in the middle of the book, he devoted a chapter to the failure of socialism to gain a foothold among the very citizens who would have seemed to benefit most from its rise. Substitute liberal or progressive for socialist, and the text often reads as though Orwell were covering American politics today.

"Everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, is a way out [of the worldwide depression,]" Orwell writes. "It would at least ensure our getting enough to eat, even if it deprived us of everything else. Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such an elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already." And yet, he adds, "the average thinking person nowadays is merely not a Socialist, he is actively hostile to Socialism. … Socialism … has about it something inherently distasteful—something that drives away the very people who ought to be flocking it its support."
One key to the movement's lack of popularity, Orwell argues, is its supporters. "As with the Christian religion," he writes, "the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents." Then he wheels out the heavy rhetorical artillery. The typical socialist, according to Orwell, "is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism, or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler, and often with vegetarian leanings … with a social position he has no intention of forfeiting. … One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England." (Think "organic food lover," "militant nonsmoker," and "environmentalist with a private jet" for a more contemporary list.)

Orwell also rails against the condescension many on the left display toward those they profess to care most about. ...

Posted on Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 9:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Humberto Fontova: Jeremiah Wright's Cuban Friends

Source: Townhall.com (4-30-08)

[Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who idolize Him and Fidel; Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant.]

Was it remotely conceivable that someone with Jeremiah's Wright's worldview and connections had somehow avoided a pilgrimage to the world capitol of Yankee-hatred, to worship and commiserate with its high priests?

Not a chance. Reverend Wright was part of Revered Jesse Jackson's 300 person entourage to Havana in 1984. “Viva Fidel!” bellowed Reverend Jackson while concluding his speech at the University of Havana. “Viva Che Guevara!..Long Live our cry of Freedom!”

“He (Jesse Jackson)is a great personality,” reciprocated a beaming Fidel Castro, “a brilliant man with a great talent, capable of communicating with people, very persuasive, reliable, honest. Jackson's main characteristic is honesty. He is sincere and there is not a single bit of demagoguery in his conversations.”(italics mine)

As mentioned, this was summer of 1984, so at the time the world's longest-suffering black political prisoner suffered his incarceration and tortures in stoic defiance. “Nigger!” taunted his jailers between tortures. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!”

I do not refer to Nelson Mandela. No, this prisoner was being tortured a few miles away from the Revs. Jackson, Wright and their entourage of black American luminaries. The prisoner was a black Cuban named Eusebio Penalver and he was being tortured by Reverend Wright's gracious hosts. Mr Penalver's incarceration and tortures stretched to 29 years which makes him the longest-suffering black political prisoner in modern history, surpassing Nelson Mandela's record in time behind bars and probably doubling the horrors suffered by Mandela during this period.

Eusebio Penalver was bloodied in his fight with Castroism but unbowed for almost 30 years in its dungeons. He's what Castroites call a "plantado"--a defiant one, an unbreakable one. "Stalin tortured," wrote Arthur Koestler, "not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction."

"The worst part of Communism," wrote Solzhenytzin, "is being forced to live a lie."

Eusebio Penalver refused to collude in this lie. He spit in the face of the liars. He scorned any "re-education" by his jailers. He knew it was THEY who desperately needed it. He refused to wear the uniform of a common criminal. He knew it was THEY who should don it. Charles Rangel, Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright all toast his torturer. But through 30 years of those tortures Eusebio Penalver stood tall, proud and defiant.

"For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell," Eusebio recalls. "That's 4 feet high, so you couldn't stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide."

Sr Penalver served several months of this 30 year sentence naked in a "punishment cell" barely big enough to stand in, where he languished naked and in complete darkness. Shortly before his death in 2006, Senor Penalver told this writer, "Castro's apologists, those who excuse or downplay his crimes-- these people be they ignorant, stupid, mendacious whatever--they are accomplices in the bloody tyrant's crimes, accomplices in the most brutal and murderous regime in the hemisphere."

Imagine, say, Jesse Helms or Pat Buchanan, visiting South Africa at the same time Wright and Jackson visited Cuban, then yelling “Viva Botha!” Our ears would STILL be ringing from the media uproar.

But have you ever heard of Eusebio Penalver? He lived in Miami for almost 20 years and would have been a cinch for the media to track down. Ever see a CNN interview with him? Ever see him on 60 Minutes? Ever read about him in the New York Times? The Boston Globe? Ever hear about him on NPR during Black History Month? Ever hear the NAACP or Congressional Black Caucus mention him?

Why do I bother asking?

Jackson and Wright's Cuban pilgrimage was arranged by the Cuban Council of Churches, who sprang for the full $300,000 tab. “ I have been affiliated with the Cuba Council of Churches since the 1980s,” boasted Reverend Jeremiah Wright in a sermon just last year. “I have several close Cuban friends who work with the Cuba Council of Churches and you have heard me preach about our affiliation and the Black Theology Project’s trips to Cuba.” And naturally the kicker: “Our denomination’s Global Ministries is committed to calling for an end to the U.S. sanctions against Cuba.”

This same denomination, needless to add, clamored FOR sanctions against South Africa.

The Cuban Council of Churches, according to Cuban intelligence defector, Juan Vives, is an arm of Cuba's ICAP (Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos) itself an arm of Cuba's DGI, Cuba's secret police, founded and mentored by the KGB and East German STASI. the ICAP's long-time chieftan was Rene Cruz Rodriguez whose meteoric rise through Cuba's Stalinist bureaucracy was facilitated by his diligence as an early executioner, often beating out Che Guevara and Raul Castro themselves in his zeal to shatter the firing-squad victim's skull with a coup d' grace from his .45. Also, on Nov. 5, 1982 a Dade County, Fla., grand jury indicted Rene Rodriguez Cruz, for drug smuggling.

Courtesy of Cuban-American professor, Tony de la Cova, we have dramatic proof of how some of Jeremiah Wright's “close friends” distinguished themselves as Cuban Revolutionaries.

Posted on Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 8:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Steve Chapman: McCain finds his own radical friend

Source: Chicago Tribune (5-4-08)

[Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail: schapman@tribune.com]

Can a presidential candidate justify a long and friendly relationship with someone who, back in the 1970s, extolled violence and committed crimes in the name of a radical ideology—and who has never shown remorse or admitted error? When the candidate in question is Barack Obama, John McCain says no. But when the candidate in question is John McCain, he's not so sure.

Obama has been justly criticized for his ties to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, who in 1995 hosted a campaign event for Obama and in 2001 gave him a $200 contribution. The two have also served together on the board of a foundation. When their connection became known, McCain minced no words: "I think not only a repudiation but an apology for ever having anything to do with an unrepentant terrorist is due the American people."

What McCain didn't mention is that he has his own Bill Ayers—in the form of G. Gordon Liddy. Now a conservative radio talk-show host, Liddy spent more than 4 years in prison for his role in the 1972 Watergate burglary. That was just one element of what Liddy did, and proposed to do, in a secret White House effort to subvert the Constitution. Far from repudiating him, McCain has embraced him.

How close are McCain and Liddy? At least as close as Obama and Ayers appear to be. In 1998, Liddy's home was the site of a McCain fundraiser. Over the years, he has made at least four contributions totaling $5,000 to the senator's campaigns—including $1,000 this year.

Last November, McCain went on his radio show. Liddy greeted him as "an old friend," and McCain sounded like one. "I'm proud of you, I'm proud of your family," he gushed. "It's always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great."

Which principles would those be? The ones that told Liddy it was fine to break into the office of the Democratic National Committee to plant bugs and photograph documents? ...

Posted on Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 8:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Delbert Spurlock: Matthew Ridgway warned against relying on an all-volunteer military, and now we can see why

Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (5-4-08)

[Delbert Spurlock is a former general counsel and assistant secretary of the Army (dubert@live.com). He lives in Reston, Va.]

America's model for an all-volunteer military has now become a casualty of our war of choice in Iraq. The consequences for our military, our young people and their families, and our diplomatic flexibility to sustain our current commitments and to meet future challenges will be significant. None of this is being discussed in our current presidential campaigns.

Gen. Matthew Ridgway would have predicted as much, and some 20 years ago he nearly did.

I was assistant secretary of the Army for manpower at the time and visited with him for two extraordinary hours at his home in the hills above Pittsburgh. The all-volunteer force, enacted into law in 1974, was for the first time becoming a success. That is, the American people were becoming justifiably confident that the Army was shouldering its mandate to deter war or to defeat any foe it was compelled to face.

Acknowledging the Army's recruiting and training successes, Gen. Ridgway remained unpersuaded that the all-volunteer force was sustainable and that it was good for the country. He believed that it was imperative that our "Army be of the people, by the people and for the people."

He thought that a volunteer Army would distance itself from the people in whose name it acted. He also believed that the all-volunteer force made America more likely to engage in future Vietnams. For him the "nexus" between the nation and the battlefield was all that honored the sacrifice and justified a conflict.

Two decades later we fight a vicarious war, divorced from the toll on our volunteers, their families and the long-term costs of their service for the nation, immune from the horrors of our occupation, having ill-considered both the means and ends in sending our Army into the Middle East....

Posted on Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 5:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, May 2, 2008

E.J.Dionne: Not to absolve Reverend Wright of his behavior, but ...

Source: New Republic (5-2-08)

[E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.]

Do white right-wing preachers have it easier than black left-wing preachers? Is there a double standard?

The political explosion around the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was inevitable, given Wright's personal closeness to Barack Obama and the outrageous rubbish the pastor has offered about AIDS, 9/11 and Louis Farrakhan.

After Wright's bizarre and narcissistic performance at the National Press Club on Monday, Obama would have looked weak and irresolute had he not denounced him. But if there was a moment of courage in this drama, it was not Obama's condemnation of Wright but his earlier and now much-criticized effort to avoid a complete break with his unapologetic pastor.

In March, Obama tried to explain the anger in the black community and insisted that "to condemn it without understanding its roots only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."

In light of this racial gap, it's worth pondering why white, right-wing preachers who make ridiculous and sometimes shameful statements usually emerge with their influence intact.

The catalogue goes back to Bailey Smith, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Speaking at a 1980 religious convention that was also addressed by Ronald Reagan, Smith declared that "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew."

Reagan later asserted that he thought Jewish prayers were answered, but was less than definitive: "Everyone can make his own interpretation of the Bible," the Gipper said, "and many individuals have been making differing interpretations for a long time."

Two days after the 9/11 attacks, Jerry Falwell, appearing on Pat Robertson's "700 Club," declared: "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way--all of them who have tried to secularize America-I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"...


Posted on Friday, May 2, 2008 at 4:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Elizabeth Wurzel: Obama's Other Radical Friends

Source: WSJ (5-2-08)

[Miss Wurtzel, a recent graduate of Yale Law School, is the author of "Prozac Nation" (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).]

... Apparently, back when he was running for state senate, Barack Obama had fund-raising events at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and there's been some press about the senator's friendship with this controversial Weathercouple. Many reporters are well aware, even though Mr. Obama has described his connection to Ayers and Dohrn as "flimsy," that the senator's relationship with his radical Hyde Park neighbors is actually quite warm, even close.

In her tepid, wobbling way, Hillary Clinton has attempted to use this well-known fact to portray her opponent as a secret subversive. But mostly, the press doesn't want to touch this story – and no one else does either, as if it actually were TNT. Perhaps right-wing evildoers are holding onto this story to exploit in the general election.

There are a few other possibilities. One seems unlikely: That America has forgiven the '60s. It seems we will never quite get over the assorted shocks to the system and cumulative mayhem of an entire generation having a collective tantrum. It's the one decade that keeps coming up in every presidential election. Always, we have to know what the candidates were up to back then – the drafts, the deferments, the dodges, the drugs. Since Mr. Obama is too young to have a '60s story to tell, the Weatherman connection becomes his syndrome by proxy.

We can accept the '60s as necessary, but can't quite forgive the disarray. More likely, we never want another mess of that magnitude visited upon us again. And we all feel the pull right now. Between the war, the economy and some horrible x-element that can only be ruled a Carteresque malaise, we are all afraid of yet another turbulent time.

This next presidential election, we all know, is serious business. Time to pick a leader who will ensure that the kids are all right – and the grown-ups too. It's the reckoning, if not the rapture. And none of us wants to get bogged down with the same kind of stupid scandals that have dogged all our recent elections.

The brief attempt to link John McCain to a looker of a lobbyist lasted through a couple of news cycles, and went with the wind. The Clintons finally released their tax returns, we discovered they are multimillionaires, and life went on. We forgive the former first lady her sniper-fire memory lapse. All of us have been swiftboated to death, and this time around we are determined to elect a president without distraction and obfuscation: 527s be damned.

In a way, the public is saying that we don't want the country erupting into a divisiveness akin to what created the '60s scene, the atmosphere of the Weather Underground. Even Jeremiah Wright, an embarrassing pastor who would probably have brought down a less-deft political prestidigitator, will not do in Barack Obama. The Reverend rants and raves. It's a mess. But Mr. Obama's campaign will carry on.

As for Mr. Obama's friends, the Weathercouple: By all accounts, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers are unfathomably charming, brilliant and comely people, absolutely irresistible. Everybody who meets them is taken and forgets what they should know.

Mr. Obama expects us all to understand this, because we understand everything else. He is doing something most unusual: He's acting as if the American people are thinking with their brains. He's giving all of us a lot of credit. Could it be that we deserve it?

Posted on Friday, May 2, 2008 at 4:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Pepe Escobar: The Iranian Chessboard ... Five Ways to Think about Iran under the Gun

Source: TomDispatch.com (5-1-08)

[Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News. He's been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has made frequent visits to Iran and is the author of Globalistan and also Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge, both published by Nimble Books in 2007.]

More than two years ago, Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker how George W. Bush was considering strategic nuclear strikes against Iran. Ever since, a campaign to demonize that country has proceeded in a relentless, Terminator-like way, applying the same techniques and semantic contortions that were so familiar in the period before the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq.

The campaign's greatest hits are widely known: "The ayatollahs" are building a Shi'ite nuclear bomb; Iranian weapons are killing American soldiers in Iraq; Iranian gunboats are provoking U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf -- Iran, in short, is the new al-Qaeda, a terror state aimed at the heart of the United States. It's idle to expect the American mainstream media to offer any tools that might put this orchestrated blitzkrieg in context.

Here are just a few recent instances of the ongoing campaign: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates insists that Iran "is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons." Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admits that the Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of action" when it comes to Iran. In tandem with U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus, Mullen denounces Iran's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" in Iraq, although he claims to harbor "no expectations" of an attack on Iran "in the immediate future" and even admits he has "no smoking gun which could prove that the highest leadership [of Iran] is involved."

But keep in mind one thing the Great Saddam Take-out of 2003 proved: that a "smoking gun" is, in the end, irrelevant. And this week, the U.S. is ominously floating a second aircraft carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf.

But what of Iran itself under the blizzard of charges and threats? What to make of it? What does the world look like from Tehran? Here are five ways to think about Iran under the gun and to better decode the Iranian chessboard.

1. Don't underestimate the power of Shi'ite Islam: Seventy-five percent of the world's oil reserves are in the Persian Gulf. Seventy percent of the Gulf's population is Shi'ite. Shi'ism is an eschatological -- and revolutionary -- religion, fueled by a passionate mixture of romanticism and cosmic despair. As much as it may instill fear in hegemonic Sunni Islam, some Westerners should feel a certain empathy for intellectual Shi'ism's almost Sartrean nausea towards the vacuous material world.

For more than a thousand years Shi'ite Islam has, in fact, been a galaxy of Shi'isms -- a kind of Fourth World of its own, always cursed by political exclusion and implacable economic marginalization, always carrying an immensely dramatic view of history with it.

It's impossible to understand Iran without grasping the contradiction that the Iranian religious leadership faces in ruling, however fractiously, a nation state. In the minds of Iran's religious leaders, the very concept of the nation-state is regarded with deep suspicion, because it detracts from the umma, the global Muslim community. The nation-state, as they see it, is but a way station on the road to the final triumph of Shi'ism and pure Islam. To venture beyond the present stage of history, however, they also recognize the necessity of reinforcing the nation-state that offers Shi'ism a sanctuary -- and that, of course, happens to be Iran. When Shi'ism finally triumphs, the concept of nation-state -- a heritage, in any case, of the West -- will disappear, replaced by a community organized according to the will of Prophet Muhammad.

In the right context, this is, believe me, a powerful message. I briefly became a mashti -- a pilgrim visiting a privileged Shi'ite gateway to Paradise, the holy shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, four hours west of the Iran-Afghan border. At sunset, the only foreigner lost in a pious multitude of black chadors and white turbans occupying every square inch of the huge walled shrine, I felt a tremendous emotional jolt. And I wasn't even a believer, just a simple infidel.

2. Geography is destiny: Whenever I go to the holy city of Qom, bordering the central deserts in Iran, I am always reminded, in no uncertain terms, that, as far as the major ayatollahs are concerned, their supreme mission is to convert the rest of Islam to the original purity and revolutionary power of Shi'ism -- a religion invariably critical of the established social and political order.

Even a Shi'ite leader in Tehran, however, can't simply live by preaching and conversion alone. Iran, after all, happens to be a nation-state at the crucial intersection of the Arabic, Turkish, Russian, and Indian worlds. It is the key transit point of the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Indian subcontinent. It lies between three seas (the Caspian, the Persian Gulf, and the sea of Oman). Close to Europe and yet at the gates of Asia (in fact part of Southwest Asia), Iran is the ultimate Eurasian crossroads. Isfahan, the country's third largest city, is roughly equidistant from Paris and Shanghai. No wonder Dick Cheney, checking out Iran, "salivates like a Pavlov dog" (to quote those rock 'n roll geopoliticians, the Rolling Stones).

Members of the Iranian upper middle classes in North Tehran might spin dreams of Iran recapturing the expansive range of influence once held by the Persian empire; but the silky, Qom-carpet-like diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will assure you that what they really dream of is an Iran respected as a major regional power. To this end, they have little choice, faced with the enmity of the globe's "sole superpower," but to employ a sophisticated counter-encirclement foreign policy. After all, Iran is now completely surrounded by post-9/11 American military bases in Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iraq, and the Gulf states. It faces the U.S. military on its Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani, and Persian Gulf borders, and lives with ever tightening U.S. economic sanctions, as well as a continuing drumbeat of Bush administration threats involving possible air assaults on Iranian nuclear (and probably other) facilities.

The Iranian counter-response to sanctions and to its demonization as a rogue or pariah state has been to develop a "Look East" foreign policy that is, in itself, a challenge to American energy hegemony in the Gulf. The policy has been conducted with great skill by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who was educated in Bangalore, India. While focused on massive energy deals with China, India, and Pakistan, it looks as well to Africa and Latin America. To the horror of American neocons, an intercontinental "axis of evil" air link already exists -- a weekly commercial Tehran-Caracas flight via Iran Air.

Iran's diplomatic (and energy) reach is now striking. When I was in Bolivia early this year, I learned of a tour Iran's ambassador to Venezuela had taken on the jet of Bolivian President Evo Morales. The ambassador reportedly offered Morales "everything he wanted" to offset the influence of "American imperialism."

Meanwhile, a fierce energy competition is developing among the Turks, Iranians, Russians, Chinese, and Americans -- all placing their bets on which future trade routes will be the crucial ones as oil and natural gas flow out of Central Asia. As a player, Iran is trying to position itself as the unavoidable bazaar-state in an oil-and-gas-fueled New Silk Road -- the backbone of a new Asian Energy Security Grid. That's how it could recover some of the preeminence it enjoyed in the distant era of Darius, the King of Kings. And that's the main reason why U.S. neo-Cold Warriors, Zio-cons, armchair imperialists, or all of the above, are throwing such a collective -- and threatening -- fit.

3. What is the nuclear "new Hitler" Ahmadinejad up to?: Ever since the days when former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami suggested a "dialogue of civilizations," Iranian diplomats have endlessly repeated the official position on Iran's nuclear program: It's peaceful; the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no proof of the military development of nuclear power; the religious leadership opposes atomic weapons; and Iran -- unlike the US -- has not invaded or attacked any nation for the past quarter millennium.

Think of George W. Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new Blues Brothers: Both believe they are on a mission from God. Both are religious fundamentalists. Ahmadinejad believes fervently in the imminent return of the Mahdi, the Shi'ite messiah, who "disappeared" and has remained hidden since the ninth century. Bush believes fervently in a coming end time and the return of Jesus Christ. But only Bush, despite his actual invasions and constant threats, gets a (sort of) free pass from the Western ideological machine, while Ahmadinejad is portrayed as a Hitlerian believer in a new Holocaust.

Ahmadinejad is relentlessly depicted as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who wants to "wipe Israel off the map." That infamous quote, repeated ad nauseam but out of context, comes from an October 2005 speech at an obscure anti-Zionist student conference. What Ahmadinejad really said, in a literal translation from Farsi, was that "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time." He was actually quoting the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said it first in the early 1980s. Khomeini hoped that a regime so unjust toward the Palestinians would be replaced by another more equitable one. He was not, however, threatening to nuke Israel.

In the 1980s, in the bitterest years of the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini also made it very clear that the production, possession, or use of nuclear weapons is against Islam. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei later issued a fatwa -- a religious injunction -- under the same terms. For the theocratic regime, however, the Iranian nuclear program is a powerful symbol of independence vis-à-vis what is still widely considered by Iranians of all social classes and educational backgrounds as Anglo-Saxon colonialism.

Ahmadinejad is mad for the Iranian nuclear program. It's his bread and butter in terms of domestic popularity. During the Iran-Iraq War, he was a member of a support team aiding anti-Saddam Hussein Kurdish forces. (That's when he became friends with "Uncle" Jalal Talabani, now the Kurdish president of Iraq.) Not many presidents have been trained in guerrilla warfare. Speculation is rampant in Tehran that Ahmadinejad, the leadership of the Quds Force, an elite division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), plus the hardcore volunteer militia, the Basij (informally known in Iran as "the army of twenty million") are betting on a U.S. attack on Iran's nuclear facilities to strengthen the country's theocratic regime and their faction of it.

Reformists refer to Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran last October, when he was received by the Supreme Leader (a very rare honor). Putin offered a new plan to resolve the explosive Iranian nuclear dossier: Iran would halt nuclear enrichment on Iranian soil in return for peaceful nuclear cooperation and development in league with Russia, the Europeans, and the IAEA.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator of that moment, Ali Larijani, a confidant of Supreme Leader Khamenei, as well as the Leader himself let it be known that the idea would be seriously considered. But Ahmadinejad immediately contradicted the Supreme Leader in public. Even more startling, yet evidently with the Leader's acquiescence, he then sacked Larijani and replaced him with a longtime friend, Saeed Jalili, an ideological hardliner.

4. A velvet revolution is not around the corner: Before the 2005 Iranian elections, at a secret, high-level meeting of the ruling ayatollahs in his house, the Supreme Leader concluded that Ahmadinejad would be able to revive the regime with his populist rhetoric and pious conservatism, which then seemed very appealing to the downtrodden masses. (Curiously enough, Ahmadinejad's campaign motto was: "We can.")

But the ruling ayatollahs miscalculated. Since they controlled all key levers of power -- the Supreme National Security Council, the Council of Guardians, the Judiciary, the bonyads (Islamic foundations that control vast sections of the economy), the army, the IRGC (the parallel army created by Khomeini in 1979 and recently branded a terrorist organization by the Bush administration), the media -- they assumed they would also control the self-described "street cleaner of the people." How wrong they have been.

For Khamenei himself, this was big business. After 18 years of non-stop internal struggle, he was finally in full control of executive power, as well as of the legislature, the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, and the key ayatollahs in Qom.

Ahmadinejad, for his part, unleashed his own agenda. He purged the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of many reformist-minded diplomats; encouraged the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to crackdown on all forms of "nefarious" Western influences, from entertainment industry products to colorful made-in-India scarves for women; and filled his cabinet with revolutionary friends from the Iran-Iraq War days. These friends proved to be as faithful as administratively incompetent -- especially in terms of economic policy. Instead of solidifying the theocratic leadership under Supreme Leader Khamenei, Ahmadinejad increasingly fractured an increasingly unpopular ruling elite.

Nonetheless, discontent with Ahmadinejad's economic incompetence has not translated into street barricades and it probably will not; nor, contrary to neocon fantasyland scenarios, would an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities provoke a popular uprising. Every single political faction supports the nuclear program out of patriotic pride.

There is surely a glaring paradox here. The regime may be wildly unpopular -- because of so much enforced austerity in an energy-rich land and the virtual absence of social mobility -- but for millions, especially in the countryside and the remote provinces, life is still bearable. In the large urban centers -- Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tabriz -- most would be in favor of a move toward a more market-oriented economy combined with a progressive liberalization of mores (even as the regime insists on going the other way). No velvet revolution, however, seems to be on the horizon.

At least four main factions are at play in the intricate Persian-miniature-like game of today's Iranian power politics -- and two others, the revolutionary left and the secular right, even though thoroughly marginalized, shouldn't be forgotten either.

The extreme right, very religiously conservative but economically socialist, has, from the beginning, been closely aligned with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Ahmadinejad is the star of this faction.

The clerics, from the Supreme Leader to thousands of provincial religious figures, are pure conservatives, even more patriotic than the extreme right, yet generally no lovers of Ahmadinejad. But there is a crucial internal split. The substantially wealthy bonyads -- the Islamic foundations, active in all economic sectors -- badly want a reconciliation with the West. They know that, under the pressure of Western sanctions, the relentless flight of both capital and brains is working against the national interest.

Economists in Tehran project there may be as much as $600 billion in Iranian funds invested in the economies of Persian Gulf petro-monarchies. The best and the brightest continue to flee the country. But the Islamic foundations also know that this state of affairs slowly undermines Ahmadinejad's power.

The extremely influential Revolutionary Guard Corps, a key component of government with vast economic interests, transits between these two factions. They privilege the fight against what they define as Zionism, are in favor of close relations with Sunni Arab states, and want to go all the way with the nuclear program. In fact, substantial sections of the IRGC and the Basij believe Iran must enter the nuclear club not only to prevent an attack by the "American Satan," but to irreversibly change the balance of power in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

The current reformists/progressives of the left were originally former partisans of Khomeini's son, Ahmad Khomeini. Later, after a spectacular mutation from Soviet-style socialism to some sort of religious democracy, their new icon became former President Khatami (of "dialogue of civilizations" fame). Here, after all, was an Islamic president who had captured the youth vote and the women's vote and had written about the ideas of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas as applied to civil society as well as the possibility of democratization in Iran. Unfortunately, his "Tehran Spring" didn't last long -- and is now long gone.

The key establishment faction is undoubtedly that of moderate Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former two-term President, current chairman of the Expediency Council and a key member of the Council of Experts -- 86 clerics, no women, the Holy Grail of the system, and the only institution in the Islamic Republic capable of removing the Supreme Leader from office. He is now supported by the intelligentsia and urban youth. Colloquially known as "The Shark," Rafsanjani is the consummate Machiavellian. He retains privileged ties to key Washington players and has proven to be the ultimate survivor -- moving like a skilled juggler between Khatami and Khamenei as power in the country shifted.

Rafsanjani is, and will always remain, a supporter of the Supreme Leader. As the regime's de facto number two, his quest is not only to "save" the Islamic Revolution, but also to consolidate Iran's regional power and reconcile the country with the West. His reasoning is clear: He knows that an anti-Islamic tempest is already brewing among the young in Iran's major cities, who dream of integrating with the nomad elites of liquid global modernity.

If the Bush administration had any real desire to let its aircraft carriers float out of the Gulf and establish an entente cordiale with Tehran, Rafsanjani would be the man to talk to.

5. Heading down the New Silk Road

Reformist friends in Tehran keep telling me the country is now immersed in an atmosphere similar to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China or the 1980s rectification campaign in Cuba -- and nothing "velvet" or "orange" or "tulip" or any of the other color-coded Western-style movements that Washington might dream of is, as yet, on the horizon.

Under such conditions, what if there were an American air attack on Iran? The Supreme Leader, on the record, offered his own version of threats in 2006. If Iran were attacked, he said, the retaliation would be doubly powerful against U.S. interests elsewhere in the world.

From American supply lines and bases in southern Iraq to the Straits of Hormuz, the Iranians, though no military powerhouse, do have the ability to cause real damage to American forces and interests -- and certainly to drive the price of oil into the stratosphere. Such a "war" would clearly be a disaster for everyone.

The Iranian theocratic leadership, however, seems to doubt that the Bush administration and the U.S. military, exhausted by their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will attack. They feel a tide at their backs. Meanwhile the "Look East" strategy, driven by soaring energy prices, is bearing fruit.

Ahmadinejad has just concluded a tour of South Asia and, to the despair of American neocons, the Asian Energy Security Grid is quickly becoming a reality. Two years ago, at the Petroleum Ministry in Tehran, I was told Iran is betting on the total "interdependence of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-economic politics." This year Iran finally becomes a natural gas-exporting country. The framework for the $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known as the "peace" pipeline, is a go. Both these key South Asian U.S. allies are ignoring Bush administration desires and rapidly bolstering their economic, political, cultural, and -- crucially -- geostrategic connections with Iran. An attack on Iran would now inevitably be viewed as an attack against Asia.

What a disaster in the making, and yet, now more than ever, Vice President Dick Cheney's faction in Washington (not to mention possible future president John McCain) seems ready to bomb. Perhaps the Mahdi himself -- in his occult wisdom -- is betting on a U.S. war against Asia to slouch towards Qom to be reborn.

Posted on Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 8:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Clarence Jones: MLK and the Jews

Source: WSJ (4-30-08)

[Mr. Jones was Martin Luther King's personal attorney and close adviser. He is the co-author, with Joel Engel, of "What Would Martin Say" (Harper, 2008), from which this was adapted.]

Earlier this month, at a Los Angeles event for the national African-American fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi, the keynote speaker launched into an anti-Semitic tirade – directed at the fraternity's guest of honor. The shocking episode shows just how far we've strayed from the original vision of the civil rights movement – and how far we have yet to travel to realize that vision.

The guest of honor, Daphna Ziman, an Israeli-American woman, had just received the Tom Bradley Award for generous philanthropy and public service. But instead of praise, the Rev. Eric Lee berated her. "The Jews," he claimed, "have made money on us in the music business and we are the entertainers, and they are economically enslaving us." (Mr. Lee would later apologize to Ms. Ziman.)

It was bad enough that the event took place on April 4, the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Even more galling, Mr. Lee is the president-CEO of the L.A. branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Foundation – the very civil-rights organization co-founded by the slain civil-rights leader.

Martin would have been repelled by Mr. Lee's remarks. I was his lawyer and one of his closest advisers, and I can say with absolute certainty that Martin abhorred anti-Semitism in all its forms, including anti-Zionism. "There isn't anyone in this country more likely to understand our struggle than Jews," Martin told me. "Whatever progress we've made so far as a people, their support has been essential."

Martin was disheartened that so many blacks could be swayed by Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam and other black separatists, rejecting his message of nonviolence, and grumbling about "Jew landlords" and "Jew interlopers" – even "Jew slave traders." The resentment and anger displayed toward people who offered so much support for civil rights was then nascent. But it has only festered and grown over four decades. Today, black-Jewish relations have arguably grown worse, not better.

For that, Martin would place fault principally on the shoulders of black leaders such as Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson – either for making anti-Semitic statements, inciting anti-Semitism (including violence), or failing to condemn overt anti-Semitism within the black community.

When American cities were burning in the summers before he died, Martin listened to any number of young blacks holding matches blame Jewish landlords or Jewish store-owners in the inner city – no matter that Jews were a minority of landlords and store owners. He asked them, Who else might have bought the buildings that we lived in and rented us apartments? Who else was willing to come in and open stores and sell us the things we needed? Where were these Negroes with money who'd abandoned their communities? And if blacks had bought those businesses and buildings, would they have charged less for rent and bread?

As Martin wrote in 1967, "Negroes nurture a persistent myth that the Jews of America attained social mobility and status solely because they had money. It is unwise to ignore the error for many reasons. In a negative sense it encourages anti-Semitism and overestimates money as a value. In a positive sense, the full truth reveals a useful lesson....

Posted on Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 7:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Herb Keinon: Is the US Justice Department out to get Israeli spies?

Source: Jerusalem Post (4-24-08)

The surprise arrest in the US this week of 84-year-old Ben-Ami Kadish for allegedly spying for Israel a generation ago highlights a fascinating little point: One never hears about the US spying on Israel.

Why not? Is Washington not interested in inside info on what Israel is up to?

Is the CIA, with agents spanning the globe, not keen on securing pre-knowledge of Israel's technological advances in defense and security fields?

Unlikely.

Rather, the more probable reason is because when US spies are uncovered here, as they surely have been over the years, it never hits the news.

Yossi Alpher, a former senior Mossad officer, cited former US officials as saying that the CIA spies on Israel, just as it spies everywhere else. "But when someone is caught here, he receives a wrap on the knuckles, and is declared persona non grata," Alpher said. "The fact that you never hear that someone was tried and put in jail for spying for the US reflects a different approach on Israel's part. It is not that we are not worried about sensitive information falling into other hands, it's just that when those hands happen to be friendly ones, we deal with it differently - unlike the US Justice Department."

Alpher, who now co-edits the Israeli-Palestinian on-line dialogue magazine bitterlemons.org - and is most definitely not a conspiracy theorist seeing an anti-Semite lurking under every US government desk - said he can't escape the conclusion that the US Justice Department is looking for Israel.

"When you take this case, together with the refusal to release [Jonathan] Pollard, even when spies working for the Soviet Union and China who caused death to other agents have been released, when you take into account the AIPAC case [the 2005 arrest of two senior AIPAC staffers on espionage charges], and attempts to recruit Israelis [to spy here for the US], it seems the Justice Department is targeting Israel. I don't know why, but we are being treated pretty roughly."

Alpher said it is not unheard of in the annals of espionage, both here and abroad, that when someone old and frail is caught having spied may years ago, the charges are just dropped.

But not this time.

"The Justice Department is targeting Israel," he said. "They have been looking for additional Americans spying for Israel for a long, long time."

Indeed, one senior government official said Kadish's arrest may finally shed some light on why the US has been so adamant for so long in holding Pollard, even though other spies who have spied for hostile countries - not friendly ones - have been treated more leniently.

Most Israelis, the official said, have thought the Pollard case was over and done with. Most thought that his long-term incarceration, the closure of the intelligence organization, known as the Bureau of Scientific Relations, that "ran" him, the Israeli promise never to spy on the US again, and the intervening two decades had put an end to the affair as an American-Israeli issue.

But they were wrong.

"The Pollard case is not over," he said. "The US did not release him because they were convinced, and are still convinced, that there were other fish involved, much bigger than Pollard - including one very senior official. And they want him. Since Israel has never admitted this, the US is keeping Pollard as a bargaining chip, and not willing to part with him."

In light of the Kadish arrest, Pollard's chances of being released have diminished even further, he said, because it shows there were indeed other Israeli agents operating in the US at the same time, using similar methods, and being operated by the same handler - a man identified in the press as Yossi Yagur....

Posted on Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 6:18 PM | Comments (0) | Top

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