Liberals Enraged

Could anything be more ludicrous than liberals enraged? Dopey Joe Wilson called Barack Obama a “liar” and, in less than a day, they raise more than a half million dollars for his opponent. Good thinking, liberals – elect another Blue Dog, why don’t ya!

Note: Obama is a liar: as I pointed out yesterday, he lied in his speech to Congress about being open to good ideas. He’s for “death panels” too. Where there is private insurance, there are death panels comprised of capitalist profiteers and their flunkies, and Obama is very definitely for private insurance or, as we ought to call it, “the private option.”

Still, it is enlightening, now that the liberal media have turned on Dopey Joe, to find out more about the lowlifes Republicans elect. It seems that like his co-thinker, Mr. Plumber, this Son of the Confederacy is not really even a “Joe”; it turns out that he’s an “Addison Graves”!

Anyway, had liberals been outraged, as they should have been, about how Obama and Company let Van Jones succumb to the swords and daggers of the Mighty Glen Beck and his followers – in other words, to the leader of a gaggle of Fox News listeners with incipiently fascist dispositions; had they instead listened to Jones when he tactlessly uttered a truism, they’d have already taken to heart the plain fact that Republicans are “assholes.” But instead of raising a dime or two for Jones, or even supporting him with their mouths, they prefer to follow their Leader down the path of “niceness.” They might realize that it’s not just racism and resentment that has made the GOP a party of faux-Joes; it’s also “civility” like theirs – “bipartisan” civility. That civility is also what keeps Bush and Cheney and their underling torturers from being brought to justice; and it’s why Obama’s “reforms,” to the degree they’re at all ameliorative, are so utterly milquetoast. But then, as Robert Frost famously put it, a liberal is someone who will never take his own side in an argument.

Moderate Muddle Heads

If there is any greater obstacle than reempowred Clintonites to “change we can believe in,” it is “bipartisanship.” That’s what enabled the free market theologians of the Republican Party to frame the debate on Obama’s woefully inadequate but urgently needed “stimulus package.” They will not have their way, but they have already done grave harm. With Obama’s help, they’ve put the muddle heads in the “middle” in charge.

The free marketeers’ views are ludicrous, of course. But at least they are guided by a principle, and they have the virtue of consistency. It is hard not to admire those benighted legislators, if only for their obstinacy. Had “progressive” Democrats been similarly uncompromising, they might have prevented some of the most egregious of Bush’s and Cheney’s crimes. But, of course, that is not the Democrats’ way.

Do the Republicans in the House and Senate believe their own drivel? To the extent they do, who can blame them? It’s not just watching Fox News or listening to Rush Limbaugh or having a crush on Sarah Palin that moronizes those who are already predisposed to be stupid. Throughout the entire Reagan-Clinton-Bush family era, free market theology has been in the air we breathe. It has become an article of faith for many Republican voters. Even the Clintonite-Wall Street crowd Obama restored to power was on board with similar views – until quite recently, when reality struck.

Thanks to the Republicans’ obstinacy and Obama’s “bipartisan” flexibility, it now seems that the “moderates” will get to call the shots. Thanks to them – thanks specifically to three Republican Senators, Pennsylvania windbag Arlen Specter and two Maineacs, Olympia Snow and Susan Collins – the Senate will finally pass something. What they will pass lacks the virtue of consistency or fidelity to principle. In fact, it’s plain stupid. It cuts the size of the stimulus, at a time when it should be increased; and its cuts are targeted to be maximally counter-productive. It reduces aid to states, increasing unemployment and diminishing services, and it provides tax credits for homebuyers in a way that will likely reinvigorate real estate speculation. This is where bipartisanship leads. The result is so bad that now even liberals who had been inclined to give Obama every benefit of the doubt are expressing outrage -- witness Paul Krugman’s column, this morning, in The New York Times.

Maybe it’s not too late for Obama’s bipartisan nonsense to stop. Maybe he will use his Elkhart, Indiana town meeting today or his prime time news conference tonight to change course. Obama must realize by now that a change is long past due. Even Larry Summers was up in arms yesterday, on George Stephanopoulos’ Sunday talk show, about the cut in funding for the states! On the other hand, maybe Obama is still too much in campaign mode not to continue making nice to Republican snakes in the grass in order to win the favor of the morons in the middle – not just the “undecided” voters who got his undivided attention before November 4, but now their legislative counterparts, the ones on both sides of “the aisle” whom the media deem “moderate.”

The next few days will tell.

Republicans to the Rescue

Yet again. Democrats keep making the least of opportunities presented to them, but the Republicans keep them coming. There are signs, though, that even the Party of Pusillanimity has reached its limit, and that the “bipartisan” crap will soon end (at least for awhile). As Senator Charles (Schmucky Chucky) Schumer put it, “it takes two to tango, and the Republicans aren’t dancing.” If enough Democrats take his words to heart, maybe their flawed but indispensable stimulus package will finally happen.

Then the problem will just be that, in the face of an impending economic catastrophe, the Wall Street malefactors who brought it on -- or, rather, their “left” (Clintonite) wing – will be in charge of programs that don’t go nearly far enough and that hover too much around the old, failed ways. But that’s better (less bad) than a Republican concoction of barely warmed-over free market theology. After all, for voters who thought that with Obama they’d be getting “change” they could believe in, half a loaf – or, is it a third or only a quarter? – is better than continuing victimization by high-flying predators.

GOP vs. POP

One can only admire the obstinacy of House Republicans, not one of whom voted for the stimulus package – despite the election, despite public opinion, despite Obama’s popularity, despite everything. When not just repeating the old shibboleths about the evils of taxing and spending, they justify themselves with arguments that are, at best, borderline incoherent. The latest version: that there isn’t enough spending on “infrastructure,” though there is also, somehow, too much spending and not enough tax cutting. In a word, they’re idiots. But they know how to leverage their power.

That’s what they did back in the early days of the Clinton administration. It’s how we got the Contract (with/on) America, and how the likes of Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich got to be so powerful. Their positions were no more coherent then, though they were more in tune with the Zeitgeist of that still Reaganite era. Nevertheless, they were able to take power and hold onto it until 2006, doing untold damage – in accord with the wishes of their benighted “base.”

If only the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity (or, equivalently, Pelosiism) was similarly diabolical! We might then have been spared some of the wreckage of the past two years; we might even have been relieved of Cheney and Bush a few months earlier. But, of course, that was out of the question – not only because the Democrats have a tradition of abject cowardice, but also because many of the new additions to their Congressional ranks –for example, New York’s (actually David Patterson’s) new Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand -- were Rahm Emanuel recruits, with views even farther than usual to the right of the Democratic “base.”

But the so-called Progressive Caucus was another matter. They could easily have done what the Gingrich-Armey gang did. But, for that, they’d have had to have broken free from the Pelosiites, and defied their erstwhile Progressive Caucus colleague, Nancy Pelosi. They were too dense or too nice or both. Finally now, at least the House Judiciary Committee, with John Conyers in the lead, is showing a little more backbone: they are investigating Bush era Justice Department abuses, and they’ve issued a subpoena for Karl Rove! Lets hope they don’t back down. More importantly, lets hope Barack Obama and Eric Holder don’t make them back down. By early next week, when "Bush's brain" is scheduled to testify (under oath!), we’ll see which way the wind is blowing.

Meanwhile, Obama seems to be turning into the anti-Gingrich by making unprecedented gestures of “niceness,” and self-defeating concessions, to his obstreperous, and not particularly loyal, opposition. Maybe there’s some shrewdness behind the madness. More likely, Team Obama is still in the campaign rut – going after the moronic middle that thinks (if that’s not too strong a word!) that “bipartisanship” will make everything right.

To this, the “base” that put Obama in office and gave him a mandate for “change” should say with one voice – “enough already. Mister President, everybody who will ever like you already does. If the election were held today, you’d double your landslide. So stop campaigning and start governing.” Step number one: learn from the GOP. They have no defensible principles and no coherent strategy. But because they are mean sons of bitches who know no scruples, they are and always have been tactical geniuses. Now is the time to be like them – to put away childish, “bipartisan” things, so that, as your choice for invocation speaker, His Holiness Reverend Rick, might say, “thy will be done.”

The "Anti-War" Obama (and Clinton too)

Six years ago, Barack Obama, as a legislator in Illinois, delivered a speech opposing Cheney’s and Bush’s war plans for Iraq. Around the same time, Hillary Clinton voted in the U.S. Senate to authorize Cheney’s and Bush’s war. As Obama insists, this shows his “judgment” is better than hers. But since he became a U.S. Senator, Obama has voted with Clinton every time to fund the war or, what amounts to the same thing, to “support the troops.” Clinton has never apologized for her pro-war vote. But, as public opinion has turned, the Great Triangulator has come increasingly to present herself as an anti-war candidate. If Obama is the measure, she has succeeded. The two of them oppose the war in words; they agree it was a “mistake.” They agree that its economic consequences have been disastrous. They agree that it has wreaked havoc on military preparedness. They agree that too many lives, American and Iraqi, have been ruined by it. Nevertheless, the two of them say they would keep American troops and mercenaries in Iraq for an indefinite period -- ostensibly to maintain “order.” The two of them seem to think that this is America’s obligation: that we broke it, so we have to fix it. I have no quarrel with that, but I strongly disagree that the way to fix it is to break it some more. That is plainly their view. That’s why both of them concede that, after the “draw down” begins (within some large number of days after one or the other of them takes office), tens of thousands of personnel will have to remain in or near Iraq for indefinitely many (but fewer than a hundred!) years. Meanwhile, both of them would increase the American military presence in Afghanistan as part of the so-called War on Terror.

The Obama/Clinton position on Iraq resembles Obama’s position on health care. Obama has said that if we were “starting from scratch,” whatever that means, he would favor a single-payer, not for profit, Canadian-style system. But since we’re where we are – we’ll have to make do with something like Hillary-care but without mandates. In other words, we can’t do what’s obviously right because of where we are. And where would that be? Neither Obama nor Clinton will dare utter the obvious answer: we’re in a world where Democrats and Republicans are in the pocket of insurance and pharmaceutical companies. What they will say is that some people like the insurance they have in the present system, and that it would be too disruptive to force them to change. It’s true, of course, that some people do have decent health insurance. But who wouldn’t prefer a cheaper, more rational, more just system? Who, that is, other than the insurance and pharmaceutical companies? They’re the only reason why we can’t have what people living in civilized countries expect as a matter of course.

To say that we can’t leave Iraq immediately and entirely because it would be bad for Iraqis is of a piece with saying we can’t have single-payer health insurance because it would be bad for people (and employers) content with the status quo. Not only is this contention false; it’s meretricious. It deliberately misrepresents the real reason. We can’t have single-payer insurance because the Democrats’ and Republicans’ paymasters won’t hear of it. We can’t leave Iraq, really leave it, because our economic elites and their political operatives in the Democratic and Republican Parties agree that abject defeat is out of the question. Yes, we should never have gone into Iraq, and we shouldn’t stay there a day longer than “necessary.” But we can’t leave with our tails between our legs.

Never mind that, in the real world, we’ve already lost. It’s the appearance, stupid. The “Vietnam Syndrome” tied our masters’ hands for years; we can’t have that again. The problem is not that an Iraq Syndrome would disable the United States in the War on Terror. As John Edwards pointed out in a moment of lucidity, the War on Terror is a “bumper sticker war.” There is and can be no such thing; the idea is absurd. This is not to say that there isn’t much the United States can do to diminish the threat of terrorism. For example, it could get out of Iraq. But that would militate against the real fear: that an abjectly defeated United States would be less able to project its power in the oil-rich Middle East, less able to control strategic resources generally, and ultimately less able to sustain its position as the world’s one and only “superpower,” along with the economic benefits that follow from that role.

Our anti-War Democrats like Obama and Clinton can’t abide that any more than the neo-con advisors of Cheney and Bush and John McCain (Bush Three) can. In this sense, the anti-War Democrats, Obama and Clinton, are of one mind with the warmonger McCain. Where they differ is on how much harm they are willing to do to achieve their shared objective. Because they draw their votes, in part, from genuinely progressive constituencies, the “anti-War” Democrats Obama and Clinton want to do as little harm as possible (and to seem to be doing even less). Because they are accountable to the Darker Angels of our Nature, McCain and Company are less constrained.

McCain and his sidekick, Joe Lieberman, may even think the Iraq War can still be “won.” Obama and Clinton would like victory there too; they just don’t think it’s possible – not at a cost the country or at least the part of it likely to vote for them can bear. The punditocracy may see a deep divide here; and indeed the Obama/Clinton position, because it is less bellicose at a practical level, is the lesser evil. But at the level of underlying political conviction, these differences, though important in practice, effectively disappear. What remains is nothing but wrong-headed, degraded and dangerous “bipartisanship.”

Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby?

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton certainly are. But so is every damn Democrat in Congress. Not one of them voted No this week on a resolution supporting Israel (and rightly condemning Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli civilians) that did not object at all to Israel’s murderous assaults on civilians in the Gaza Strip or to the humanitarian crisis Israel has caused there. The resolution passed 404-1. The one No vote was Ron Paul’s.

Here is some background from Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies: “In Gaza, the five-day Israeli assault left the already besieged, impoverished, disempowered population reeling from the heaviest losses since Israel first occupied the Strip in 1967. The numbers of dead - 125-131, half civilians, at least 22 children, 4 infants - resulted in whole rows of mourning tents lining the torn-up roads in areas hardest hit. At least 370 children were reported injured. Hospitals faced hundreds seriously injured without reliable electricity and with huge shortages of vital drugs, spare parts for medical equipment, and surgical supplies. Ambulances came under Israeli fire, 3 medical workers were injured and at least one was killed. The destruction hit hardest in the bleak, crowded refugee camps; in Gaza City itself, two bombs from a U.S.-provided F-16 jet destroyed the 5-story headquarters of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, seriously damaging scores of nearby apartments….”

Only in America is this OK. Bennis continues: “The international outcry was fierce, with even UN and European Union officials condemning Israel's "disproportionate" and "excessive" violence. Israel claimed, as is its wont, that its attack was only "in response" to Palestinian rocket fire. But that claim ignored the immediate fact that the rocket fire itself escalated only after Israel's latest "targeted assassination" of a militant leader in Gaza, which also killed several members of his family. More importantly, it ignored the broader fact that Israel remains the occupying power in Gaza. According to John Dugard, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, "this means that its actions must be measured against the standards of international humanitarian law and human rights law. Judged by these standards Israel is in serious violation of its legal obligations. The collective punishment of Gaza by Israel is expressly prohibited by international humanitarian law and has resulted in a serious humanitarian crisis."

“Dugard appropriately condemned Palestinian attacks that terrorize Israeli civilians, but argued that such acts are an "inevitable consequence" of the Israeli occupation. "While such acts cannot be justified," he wrote, "they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or occupation." His report recognized that violence would continue as long as Israel occupies Palestinian land, and that "this is why every effort should be made to bring the occupation to a speedy end. Until this is done peace cannot be expected, and violence will continue. … Israel cannot expect perfect peace and the end of violence as a precondition for the ending of the occupation."

“Dugard's words,” Bennis writes, “take on particularly powerful meaning in the context of the March 6 gunman attack on a settler-linked yeshiva in Jerusalem that left 8 Israeli students dead and more injured.” Indeed.

Not only has the U.S. Congress, under Democratic leadership, failed to utter even a mute condemnation of what Israel has been doing; it has actually, as Bennis says, “….continued to add fuel to the fire by supplying Israel with more weapons, in contravention of the U.S. Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts. This year, U.S. taxpayers will provide Israel with $2.55 billion in arms shipments, a 9% increase over actual spending in 2007. This is the first installment of a ten-year U.S. commitment to increase arms shipments to Israel by 25%....”

The problem is not just the Democrats; it’s the Republicans too. The hands of the Bush administration, and especially Condoleezza Rice, are dirty up to their elbows in these events, and in the series of Israeli atrocities that preceded them. As much or more than every other administration since the Six Day War, they have bankrolled the Israeli government and given it carte blanche to do as it pleases. But they couldn’t have done it without enthusiastic Democratic encouragement and support. Of course, there are Democrats, a few anyway, who know better; and Republicans too – not just Ron Paul. But fear of the Israel lobby makes cowards of them all. This is why, when it comes to facilitating the government of Israel’s predations, and even egging them on, neither of our two parties is a lesser evil. There is only unvarnished “bipartisanship” at work.