What self respecting woman would work in a powerful position for a man who runs his organization like this:
Rumsfeld also infuriated another powerful woman – then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice – by not returning her phone calls. So she complained to the boss.
Bush advised Rice to be “playful” with the stubborn Rumsfeld in an effort to get along. And he cajoled Rumsfeld, telling him: “I know you won’t talk to Condi. But you got to talk to her.”
This is the famous macho cowboy president? Did he tell Colin Powell to be “flirty?” Does he instruct Stephen Hadley to toss his hair to get Rummy’s attention? It would be less insulting if he’d told Condi to give Rummy a blow job. At least she wouldn’t have been infantalized.
This is your Republican Party folks, protecting you from the terrorists who are coming to kill you in your bed. Feeling safer?
In the midst of all the excitement over the GOP congress’s under-age cyberstalking, I hope that we don’t lose sight of the other white meat — Woodward’s astonishing revelations in his new book “State of Denial.”
Yes, Woodward is a court stenographer and his earlier Bush hagiography shows the extent of his fealty to DC insiderism, but that’s exactly what makes this book so extraordinary. It’s clear that the Republican establishment is feverishly cannibalizing itself from within. Not only is the story of infighting, ineptitude and bad policy compelling, it’s especially interesting since it’s being told by the Republicans themselves as they begin the work of ex-communicating the Bush administration from themselves and the conservative movement.
We’ve all discussed the Shakespearean dimensions of this bizarre presidency, but I had no idea about this particular plotline:
Cheney had suggested Rumsfeld to Bush in late December 2000. Rumsfeld was so impressive, Bush told Card at the time. He had had the job in the Ford administration a quarter-century before, and it was as if he were now saying, “I think I’ve got some things I’d like to finish.”
But there was another dynamic that Bush and Card discussed. Rumsfeld and Bush’s father, the former president, couldn’t stand each other. Bush senior didn’t trust Rumsfeld and thought he was arrogant, self-important, too sure of himself and Machiavellian. Rumsfeld had also made nasty private remarks that the elder Bush was a lightweight.
Card could see that overcoming the former president’s skepticism about Rumsfeld added to the president-elect’s excitement. It was a chance to prove his father wrong. And Rumsfeld fit Cheney’s model of a defense secretary who could not only battle things out with the generals but who also had as much gravitas as the rest of the new national security team.
Bush would nominate Rumsfeld, he told Card. Cheney had been selected for his national security credentials. He was the expert, and this was the sort of decision that required expertise. Still, Bush wondered privately to Card about pitfalls, if there was something he didn’t see here. After all, his father had strong feelings.
Is this a trapdoor? he asked.
Man, that vaunted “gut” of his sure is imprssive, isn’t it? From the very beginning the sly old weasel Dick Cheney muscles out the former president (whom everyone in America assumed would be a valuable and valued advisor to his dimbulb son) using Junior’s adolescent need to reject his father. He and Rummy became the “good” fathers to the idiot dauphin and successfully shut out all the voices of reason from the (too prudent and cautious) old guard establishment that would have lined up with him. They were radicals who cleverly managed to make themselves appear to be wise old men. Junior knew no better — and wouldn’t have cared if he did.
(Who would have thought this could become such a huge factor in a modern representative democracy? It might as well be ancient Rome or the Borgia era in renaissance Italy.)
The extent of Rumsfeld’s screw-ups is well known by now, but this book seems to be asserting something about the war that is quite startling at this late date — the real reason they were so anxious to go into Iraq come hell or high water. Yes, we know it was about oil and it was about Israel and it was about PNAC wet dreams and seven thousand other things. But I’m talking about the Big Reason, the one that united all these people: Iraq is their long awaited chance to do Vietnam right.
Back in the days of the Ford presidency, in the wake of Watergate—the pardon of Nixon, the fall of Saigon—Cheney and Rumsfeld had worked almost daily in the same Oval Office where they once again stood. The new man in the photo, Bush, five years younger than Cheney and nearly 14 years younger than Rumsfeld, had been a student at Harvard Business School. He came to the presidency with less experience and time in government than any incoming president since Woodrow Wilson in 1913.
Well into his seventh decade, many of Rumsfeld’s peers and friends had retired, but he now stood eagerly on the cusp, ready to run the race again. He resembled John le Carre’s fictional Cold War British intelligence chief, George Smiley, a man who “had been given, in late age, a chance to return to the rained-out contests of his life and play them after all.�
“Get it right this time,� Cheney told Rumsfeld
In order to get Iraq right, they brought in another one of their old pals
A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush’s Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.
“Of the outside people that I talk to in this job,” Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him.”
The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.
Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.
In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.
In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled “Lessons for an Exit Strategy,” Kissinger wrote, “Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy.”
He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.
Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don’t let it happen again. Don’t give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.
He also said that the eventual outcome in Iraq was more important than Vietnam had been. A radical Islamic or Taliban-style government in Iraq would be a model that could challenge the internal stability of the key countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Kissinger told Rice that in Vietnam they didn’t have the time, focus, energy or support at home to get the politics in place. That’s why it had collapsed like a house of cards. He urged that the Bush administration get the politics right, both in Iraq and on the home front. Partially withdrawing troops had its own dangers. Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create momentum for an exit that was less than victory.
In a meeting with presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson in early September 2005, Kissinger was more explicit: Bush needed to resist the pressure to withdraw American troops. He repeated his axiom that the only meaningful exit strategy was victory.
“The president can’t be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece,” Kissinger said. “You may want to reduce troops,” but troop reduction should not be the objective. “This is not where you put the emphasis.”
To emphasize his point, he gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had written to President Richard M. Nixon, dated Sept. 10, 1969.
“Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded,” he wrote.
The policy of “Vietnamization,” turning the fight over to the South Vietnamese military, Kissinger wrote, might increase pressure to end the war because the American public wanted a quick resolution. Troop withdrawals would only encourage the enemy. “It will become harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers.”
Two months after Gerson’s meeting, the administration issued a 35-page “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” It was right out of the Kissinger playbook. The only meaningful exit strategy would be victory.
I have written a lot about the right’s stubborn obsessions. They just can’t seem to get out of their intellectual ruts, insisting forever that they were right about things they have been proven wrong about and carrying on for years disputing facts and evidence that nobody else disputes. It’s an odd affliction that you can see even today when people too young to have been born at the time, like Ann Coulter or Michele Malkin, take up ancient arguments of their rightwing forebears and carry on as if it is a matter of tribal pride to win the point even after the facts are long settled everyone else has ceased to care.
Dick Cheney’s single-minded insistence on reconstituting Nixon’s doctrine of the extremely powerful executive branch has long been seen in that light. But I have to admit that even though I knew all this, I failed to see that Iraq was consciously and literally motivated by the Vietnam experience among many of those who had been associated with the “defeat” in ways they psychologically couldn’t reconcile. It rings true. It simply didn’t occur to me that anyone would knowingly go down that road again so soon. Indeed, I thought it was impossible that the post-Vietnam military would ever let it happen. (That’s where Rummy came in…)
Coincidentally, Spencer Ackerman has a piece in TNR also discussing the right’s obsession with Vietnam:
On the right, the latter half of 2006 is feeling a lot like 1968, the year that the American public finally lost faith in the Vietnam war. And, just as they did then, conservatives are turning causality on its head: People aren’t growing disillusioned with the war because we’re not winning it; we’re not winning because people have grown disillusioned. After Vietnam, this analysis enabled the right to avoid the agonizing reappraisal of U.S. foreign policy that has been that war’s legacy for liberalism and the Democratic Party.
But avoidance has its consequences as well. It’s true enough that, for more than 30 years, the left has not infrequently suffered from “Vietnam syndrome”–the assumption that any military engagement will be a moral disaster and a potential quagmire. But, though it has been less examined, the lesson the right took from Vietnam–that the true danger to national security is not misguided wars, but overzealous opposition to misguided wars–is, if anything, more dangerous. Call it the Other Vietnam Syndrome.
[…]
Most Republicans and conservatives initially supported the war but criticized Lyndon Johnson’s handling of it. The myth took hold that if only Johnson would allow his generals to prosecute the war with sufficient brutality–mining the Haiphong Harbor, destroying the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia–it could be won. Richard Nixon took office promising to end the war on a platform of “peace with honor,” which nodded to opposition to the war across the political spectrum but, in truth, represented only the right-wing critique. (As Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer noted in 1972, “What President Nixon means by peace is what other people mean by victory.”) Just as importantly, he identified the forces of peace with dishonor. In a crucial speech in 1969, Nixon married middle-American discontent with the protesters to a plea for patience as he expanded the war. “If a vocal minority,” Nixon said, “however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this nation has no future as a free society.” It was no longer necessary on the right to be pro-war–only anti-antiwar.
[…]
The “stabbed in the back” myth has flourished on the right ever since. Indeed, what is so striking about conservative–and especially neoconservative–treatment of Vietnam is a near-complete disregard for the actual circumstances of the war. Occasionally, a book or scholarly article will come along challenging the conventional wisdom that the war was unwinnable or foolhardy, and it will receive some attention. (Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, for instance–an impressive piece of scholarship that argues, unconvincingly, that General Creighton Abrams made the war winnable–was headlined by The Weekly Standard as “the truth about vietnam.”) By and large, however, conservatives are content to shunt the actual Vietnam war to the background and elevate criticism of its critics. In his 1999 book, How We Got Here, David Frum argued that, just as the war showed signs of turning in America’s favor, victory was snatched away by an anti-American fringe on college campuses and in the halls of Congress. Though the conservative movement reviles Henry Kissinger, Frum approvingly quoted his contention that “[t]he so-called peace movement had evolved from seeking an end of the war to treating America’s frustrations in Indochina as symptoms of a moral degeneration that needed to be eradicated root and branch.” Similarly, in a revealing column during the Sunni and Shia insurgencies of spring 2004, Charles Krauthammer rejected the Iraq-as-Vietnam comparison–except in one crucial sense: “Walter Cronkite, speaking for the establishment, declared the war lost. Once said to be lost, it was.”
Believing themselves to be victimized (as always) by the hoary myth of the liberal elites, the conservatives just keep doing the same thing over and over again, running like frantic little rodents on the same hamster wheel, the goal as elusive as it ever was.
Ackerman concludes:
Faced with a disastrous war, the most important consideration is not “Were we wrong?” but “Why were we wrong?” and “How can we avoid being so wrong in the future?” These are questions that often will implicate the country’s leading politicians and intellectuals, and its cherished myths. The anguish of confronting them has been on display in the Democratic Party’s foreign policy debate for 35 years.
The results have not always been pretty. But they have been important. It is only when the United States shrinks from asking such agonizing questions that we wade back into agonizing wars. That is a price that conservatives have been willing to pay, as the ugly pre-Iraq war debate vividly displayed. When conservatives achieved power, their 35-year-old willful blindness led the country right back into a quagmire, this time in a desert.
Republicans did worse than that. They nursed their grudges against the counter culture and turned them into an opportunistic partisan culture war. And the real pieces of work, the neocons and the partisan veterans like Cheney and Rumsfeld waited patiently until they got their chance to “do it right.” Never having honestly assessed what went wrong the first time but merely laying facile blame on liberals and the anti-war movement, they have willfully made the same mistakes all over again and seem to have no more sense of their own responsibility than they did three decades ago.
Woodward slips in a little tidbit about all this that should prove to be very powerful for the Democrats if they understand what they are seeing and act accordingly:
Karl Rove, Bush’s top political adviser, weighed in with the president. A contentious session with Congress was coming up. As he saw it, the Democrats were in no mood for a honeymoon. With Rice’s confirmation hearing to replace Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and with the expected nomination of White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales to be attorney general, would another Senate confirmation overload the system?
“I’ve got Powell going. I’m going to have to replace Condi,” the president told Rove. “Do I have to have some continuity in all of this?” And, clearly, the conduct of the war in Iraq would be the subject of confirmation hearings for anyone Bush nominated to be the new secretary of defense.
Rove agreed they did not want to do anything that would prompt hearings on the war.
I’ll bet they didn’t. But all their dirty linen is now being exposed. The macho GOP they’ve been selling for 30 years turns out to be a bunch of whiny cranks who are so obsessive about their youthful “failures” that they have spent their entire lives getting into a position that they could prove they were right after all. But it’s clear that the modern Republican party is incapable of governing a superpower. They have no capacity for self-analysis or learning from their mistakes so they cannot be trusted to learn from this two term debacle of terrorist attacks, unnecessary wars, economic insecurity, corruption and now even covering up for known sexual predators rather than risk their hold on power.
Therefore the Democrats simply must hold thorough investigations into the Iraq war if they become a majority in either house of congress. For the good of the country, this must be stopped, and the Republicans have shown they are completely incapable of doing it themselves.
It is long past time that Democrats killed the 60’s albatross the Republicans hung around their necks more than three decades ago and throw the dead carcass right back at them. This country’s problems are not caused by unreconstructed hippies ruining the political system. The problem today is the eternally resentful, unreconstructed anti-hippies who somehow got psychologically paralyzed by the events of that time.
Lord Almighty, it looks like we got us a gen-you-wine Republican sex scandal. And it’s a doozy, isn’t it? Maybe people will notice that something is seriously rotten under GOP rule now.
If we lived in a nation that wasn’t completely dysfunctional, this scandal wouldn’t be at the top of the list of scandals that have been revealed just in the last week:
A new book by the official court scribe describes an administration so inept, unorganized and incoherent that if most people were aware of the details, the president’s fear campaign would blow back hard against him. If the terrorists really are coming to kill us in our beds any day now, then we are in deep shit with these guys in charge.
We have more news this week-end that Karl Rove and the white house were actively and personally involved in all the Jack Abramoff congressional corruption scandals which feature ripping off taxpayers of many millions of dollars.
It turns out that Bush fired Colin Powell.
The intelligence community agree that the invasion of Iraq super-charged the extremist jihadist moviement and is fuelling terrorism far more quickly and broadly than we would have had to deal with otherwise.
We have officially sanctioned torture and the repeal of habeas corpus — at the least competent president in history’s discretion.
I’m sure I’ve missed something.
But it looks like Mark Foley’s raunchy emails are going to be the scandal that may just bring it home for November. They made their puritanical, moralizing bed, now their going to have to roll around in the muck and the mire they made it with. Let’s let ‘er rip.
First of all, Mark Foley is clearly one exceptionally screwed up dude. A semi-closeted gay Republican whose signature issue is online sex predators and missing kids sending sexually explicit IM’s to congressional pages is one of the most blatant act of self-immolation I’ve ever seen.
But that’s not the real scandal, is it? While I’m sure the religious right will make the same charges about “gayness” they always do when their institutional leaders turn out to be hypocrites and chickenhawks (in all senses of the word), Foley’s unsavory habit of hitting on teen-agers who worked at the capital and the GOP leadership’s truly disgusting propensity to cover it up at all costs is the issue.
George Will mentioned “Elmer Gantry” this morning on This Week, a novel that I have discussed many times on this blog. There’s a great line from the book that I think perfectly describes the modern Republican moralists who’ve been kicking us in the teeth with their alleged family values for the past couple of decades:
“He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.”
The politicians of the modern Republican party are a bunch of Elmer Gantrys who sold a lot of Americans a bill of goods for a long, long time. I don’t know if their supporters are ready to hear it, but I have to believe that if the leadership of the GOP congress allowing one of their own to sexually prey on 16 year old male pages doesn’t wake them up, nothing will. I am not sanguine.
Chalk up another win this week for the established order as they grind forward with a full and complete grip on power. The Hillary and Bill display of righteous indignation, which coincides not with the latest atrocity accomplished by the administration, but with the attack upon their ‘good’ name (a Rovian ploy, by the way), did little to assuage my contempt for mainstream Democrats. The Clintons, like most other Democrats (save the likes of Feingold and Conyers) are highly sublimated animals whose efforts are geared more toward social acceptance into the club, and not sufficiently toward political opposition, in my opinion. I’ve expressed before my belief that all the engineered politics of Billary are designed to cover her flawed judgment of having ever supported the war in Iraq. Karl Rove neutered the entire Democratic party when he forced them to anti-up on the war – in or out – and all those who registered high on the presidential ambition meter — John Edwards, Evan Bayh, Hillary Clinton — said, “Oh, count me in … I’m strong on defense too.” As the then twenty-two year old dylanesque song-writer, Conor Oberst, exclaimed at the time (in his song called “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves”) — “The approval rating’s high, so someone’s gonna die.”
The rest is history, as they say.
So once again I feel helpless as that amalgamation of the most powerful persons in industry, politics, religion, and military — I’m speaking of the Republican Party — commits ongoing tyranny against every citizen of the United States. Yesterday it was by misleading the nation into war, authorizing illegal wiretapping, bribing legislators for favorable votes in Congress, and exerting power and control over the now-corporatized press, and today it is by authorizing human torture without any due process whatsoever. It’s human tyranny, something so new and unusual (tongue firmly in cheek) that the opposition party has no idea how to deal with it. We must be very careful with the language we use so as not to offend the sensibilities of the American Idiots.
And this is why one more time I find myself hearkening back to the pre-Revolutionary period when a group of New England liberals took opposition to a previous established order, one that also got too big for its britches, and one that also began committing acts of tyranny in order to preserve its power. I’m referring, of course, to the British parliament. Note the similarity of the setting: At the time, Great Britain was the wealthiest nation on earth, and the foundation for free institutions; the people of England had a Bill of Rights, and an unwritten constitution based on the natural law; the constitution had been confirmed more than fifty times by Parliament, according to John Adams. In short, the English people were — free.
So when Great Britain used coercive measures to bring her subjects into compliance on matters of taxation and trade, things that seem almost trivial by comparison to today, many American intellectuals became obsessed with the threat of tyranny. So much so that they actually used the word “tyranny” to describe the party in power. That word, in fact, appeared thousands of times in print throughout the Revolutionary period. It was used in private letters written by and to the delegates of the Continental Congress and appeared in such derivative forms and creative spellings as: tyrany, tyrrany, tyranni, tyranic, tyrannic, tyranical, tyrannical, tyrannically, tyrannies, tyranys, tyrannize, tyrannized, tyrannous, tyrant, and tyrant’s. And how ironic that the letters were directed at an earlier tyrant George, this one the King of England. The delegates’ letters (culled from this CD ) were peppered with colorful phrases:
inexorable Tyrant the artful Wiles of an infatuated and tyrannical Ministry the impious War of Tyranny the severest extremities of tyranny deep lay’d Schemes of Tyranny instruments of tyranny mercenary Soldiers of a Tyrant the Ministerial Sons of Tyranny the infernal hand of Tyranny outrages of Tyranny Threats of a Tyrant barbarous Tyranny the rapacious Hand of a Tyrant the Pillars of Tyranny merciless Tyrant Torrent of Tyranny Slaves of Tyranny bloody Standard of Tyranny Infringements of a Tyrant Altar of Tyranny absolute despotic Tyrant Encroachments of Tyranny System of Tyranny
Particularly colorful, and my personal favorite was one by Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut, who asked: “When will Tyrant Worms cease to disturb human Happiness?”
Clearly, in the interest of preserving their hold on power, Parliament had stepped on someone’s liberties.
In spite of the inflammatory language, the early leaders in America were not mere propagandists. They actively sought knowledge of human behavior and understood the threat posed by institutional tyranny. One source of knowledge (please note here that I’m paraphrasing and borrowing heavily from the source by Delbert Cress referenced below) was a book written by James Harrington in 1656 called Commonwealth of Oceana. Harrington tracked the themes of tyranny and corruption, and set forth theories about political degeneration, the decline of freedom, and the need for a constitutional balance. In pre-Revolutionary America, Oceana could be found in the Harvard College Library, the New York Society Library, and the Charleston Library in South Carolina. The contents of Oceana and theories of how political institutions always devolve into tyranny had become part of a pre-Revolutionary mindset.
Another source of knowledge for the revolutionaries was John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon who had written behind the pseudonym of Cato. In the early 1720s, in London, Trenchard and Gordon published a set of works called Cato’s Letters. The letters conjured up images of tyranny, and explored the threat to society posed by institutional corruption. From Cato’s Letters emerged a view that power itself corrupts men, leading eventually to political intrigue, unfair influence, and patronage. By 1776, Cato’s Letters were known to exist in 40% of the colonial libraries and they, along with Harrington’s Oceana, were known to have been studied by Thomas Jefferson, John Dickinson, John Adams, Henry Knox, and Benjamin Rush. These same men also studied the works of Sidney, Molesworth, Fletcher, Hutcheson, and Blackstone. So too did Benjamin Franklin, James Otis, Josiah Quincy, Jr., John Hancock, Samuel Adams, George Mason, James Wilson, and scores of lesser known citizens. The American intellectuals also studied the Greek and Roman republics, the ancient Goths and Germans, the success of the Swiss, and the writings of Machiavelli. James Burgh brought many of the earlier theories forward and added to them when he published Political Disquisitions in 1775. John Adams, George Washington, Samuel Chase, John Dickinson, Silas Deane, John Hancock, Thomas Mifflin, James Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson all were known to have received copies of Burgh’s work when it was first published in America in 1776.
Those early American politicians were profound in their enlightened thoughts on institutional behavior and the workings of government and society. Many of the contemporary views on the inevitability of political corruption were formed as a result. Josiah Quincy was exceptionally marked in his prose, suggesting that the powerful institution was “a monster” birthed by “human follies and vices” where “depravity and cowardice” can thrive. He called the professional soldier an unwitting “slave” hired by men of “ambition and power” who could then manipulate the soldier for self-serving ends. Quincy believed the military’s awesome power made “wicked ministers more audacious” and saw them advancing “schemes inconsistent with … liberty” and “destructive of the trade.” According to Quincy, the military/political institution was the place where “a will and a power to tyrannize are united.” He called the impacts inevitable and fatal in both the political and the moral world.
The learned nature and the observations made by men such as Samuel Adams, Josiah Quincy, Simeon Howard, and others, reflected their wisdom and the studied reality which they came to know about human nature. The inclination to increase personal power is simply a part of the natural human makeup. Inclination toward power leads to the unfair advancement of self-interest, personal gratification, and exploitation. And powerful people, facing any perceived threat to their power, large or small, are inclined to use coercion to protect their standing. Tyranny, therefore, was a natural ingredient that could eventually be found in any institution. As the institution devolves, it always seeks to increase its power.
People also morph into unrecognizable characters as their institutions become corrupt. Samuel Adams, writing after the shots were fired at Lexington, but before Independence had been declared wrote in elegant prose to his friend James Warren about the threat posed by ambitious men and the institutional military:
A standing army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the liberties of the people. Soldiers are apt to consider themselves as a body distinct from the rest of the citizens. They have their arms always in their hands. Their rules and their discipline is severe. They soon become attached to their officers and disposed to yield implicit obedience to their commands. Such a power should be watched with a jealous eye…. Men who have been long subject to military laws, and inured to military customs and habits, may lose the spirit and feeling of citizens. And even citizens, having been used to admiring the heroism which the Commanders of their own Army have displayed, and to look upon them as their saviors, may be prevailed upon to surrender to them those rights for the protection of which against invaders they had employed and paid them. We have seen too much of this disposition among some of our countrymen.
The anonymous essayist Caractacus earlier expressed the same sentiment when his essay “On Standing Armies” appeared in a colonial Philadelphia newspaper:
History is dyed in blood when it speaks of the ravages which standing armies have committed upon the liberties of mankind: officers and soldiers of the best principles and character have been converted into instruments of tyranny by the arts of wicked politicians.
America was once a vibrant and vocal enterprise where prominent people spoke with courage and conviction. We are now a muted and sublimated culture where the opposition is cowardly, and too afraid they will be ostracized if they speak out. A once participatory and opposition-minded mainstream press is now preponderantly part and parcel of the largest institution, that amalgamation of powerful forces referred to earlier. The most influential reporters (Russert, Brokaw and their ilk) are millionaire staffers, corporate automatons, and vanity authors who have become inured to the ways and customs of their employers. The elite way of living that goes along with their wealth and social status make them less likely to question the actions of government tyrants. Yet they are the very people with the responsibility to do so, and they are the people who are in a position to do so.
I want to ask how did we get here, but I think the answer is obvious. We are still in the dark ages politically and if we are lucky enough survive the current phase of the human journey, it will be a long, long time, I think, until society advances beyond this sorry state.
Sources: As noted above, the references to tyranny are from Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789, Paul H. Smith, editor. The background on sources of study for the early American leadership comes from Citizens in Arms, Lawrence Delbert Cress, Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1982.
3 GEORGE and SUSAN ALLEN SENATOR & WIFE The former Virginia governor and son of a legendary Redskins coach wears cowboy boots and is all over the news of late – could it be his attempt to win the 2008 Presidential Superbowl of Politics, or is that just a bunch of “macaca?” She’s lovely, bright and known to loosen him up.
What with all the soul searching lately and discussion of where we draw the line as we attempt to traverse the minefield of current electoral politics, I think this is a good time to link up to this very interesting meta-blog piece by political scientist and blogger Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber in this month’s Boston Review.
Farrell does a thorough analysis of the netroots and then homes in on our common self-description as non-ideological partisans out to change a corrupt and inept party structure:
Their experiences have deepened the netroots’ conviction that there’s something rotten in the Democratic Party. Quasi-corrupt relationships hamper the ability of Democrats to win elections; candidates for office are expected to hire certain well-connected consultants if they want to receive party funding. Party leaders try to eke out narrow wins, focusing their attention only on the most competitive races instead of campaigning aggressively across the country. Elected officials prefer stroking the egos of major donors to grass-roots organizing. Senators mug to pundits’ and newspaper editors’ penchant for bipartisanship by denouncing fellow Democrats as extremists, giving cover to Republicans, and dragging the political center ever further toward the right. These problems cripple the party’s ability to compete successfully, guaranteeing continued Republican hegemony. In response, netroots bloggers want to reform the party’s organizational structures and punish elected officials who weaken the party in pursuit of their personal agendas.
Absolutely. As I watched the torture debate unfold this week, I was acutely aware of exactly those deficiencies in the party and saw the whole ugly mess as a result of terrible partisan tactics and non-existent strategy. But something else niggled at the back of my mind. There was something tremendously meaningful happening about which Democrats of good faith were deeply concerned and it had nothing to do with partisanship and everything to do with citizenship.
I was reminded one of one the previous times such an outrageous, hurried, ill conceived machination was presented as a fait accomplis by the Bush administration and it brought millions of people into the streets — the Iraq war. I recall pragmatic voices saying at the time that protesting was a bad move, that it hurt our image, that we should concentrate on gaining institutional power. And I wrote at the time that I understood why people said that, but you have to give people something more than dry tactics and strategy in politics:
People need to feel part of something in order to get involved in politics. And as someone who has volunteered in many a campaign I can tell you that for the last decade it has had all the uplifting inspiration of the Bataan death march. It is work with no satisfaction in the soul or spirit and without that politics becomes nothing more than a duty.
The Republicans have a base of committed true believers and we desperately need some of that too. Telling these newly galvanized Democrats that the only way they can legitimately express themselves is through the ballot box — particularly in this day of manufactured, pre-fab campaigning — is a very self-defeating idea.
I thought about that this week. Most people don’t commit themselves to politics simply because they want to win or even because they want to stop someone else from winning (although when dealing with these modern Republicans that is a huge factor.) Most of us are interested and involved because we believe in certain things and we care about our country and our government. We band together with others who share our ideology and our values.
Farrell writes:
Netroots activists often compare themselves to the Goldwater supporters who took over the Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s. But a close reading of Rick Perlstein’s book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (which enjoys near-canonical status among netroots bloggers), suggests that the differences between Goldwaterites and the netroots are as important as the similarities. Goldwater’s followers succeeded not only because of their organizational skills but because of their commitment to a set of long-term ideological goals. Over two decades, they relentlessly sought to undermine the ideological foundations of the existing American political consensus, rebuilding it over time so that it came to favor conservative and Republican political positions rather than liberal or Democratic ones. The result is a skewed political system in which Republicans enjoy a persistent political advantage. The issue space that American politics plays out on has been reconstructed so that its center of gravity quietly but insistently pulls politicians to the right. So it isn’t any accident that bipartisanship in the modern era mostly consists of hewing to the Republican agenda.
As Perlstein argued in these pages two years ago, it isn’t impossible to remould this conventional wisdom, although it is difficult and risky. And the netroots can surely play an important role. Their comparative advantage is exactly in framing political issues and controversies so that they resonate widely. Prominent netroots bloggers recognize in principle the importance of the battle over ideas. Kos and Armstrong devote a substantial portion of Crashing the Gate, to discussing the need for a Democratic apparatus of think tanks and foundations that parallels the conservative intellectual machine. Kos writes regularly about how the Democrats need “big ideas� if they are to win. However, because the netroots conceive of themselves as a non-ideological movement, they aren’t delivering on their potential to help provide and refine these big ideas themselves and thus reshape the ideological underpinnings of the political consensus. If the netroots truly want to tilt the playing ground of American politics back again so that it favors the Democrats, they will need to embrace a more vigorous and coherent ideological program.
I want to win, don’t get me wrong. And I’m a pragmatist by nature so I have little patience with purity pledges or tilting at windmills. But I am explicitly liberal in orientation and I want to see this country tilt back to a more liberal politics. If I was afraid to make a point of that before this week I no longer am. I learned that even upholding the constitution is now a matter of liberal political ideology instead of simple mainstream patriotism.
Farrell makes many interesting observations about our nascent movement and comes to some conclusions that I think we all need to at least begin to think about. We care about changing the party and we’re practical people who aren’t operating on a rigid agenda. But is that really enough? Farrell makes a compelling case that it isn’t.
Update: For more bloggy goodness, if you haven’t seen this video interview with our man Atrios, you’re missing out. My only complaint is that he rudely failed to introduce the famous Eschacats. What was he thinking?
It’s been a tough week for all of us. But it’s been a tough week for the Republicans too. From John Hulse in the comments:
We have Mark Foley a republican congressman from Florida’s 16th Congressional District, a 52 year old man, sexually harassing a 16 year old (boy) congressional page, resigning from congress immediately. The congressman was even asking the young boy for photos of himself. Sexually explicit computer messages. Something like “Would you please slip your tighty-whities off for me.” and “Are you turned on?” Creepy times 10.
We have snippets of Bob Woodward’s new book, where Laura Bush is walking around the White House hallways calling for Don Rumsfeld’s resignation.
Then a CIA report that says that the invasion and occupation has made the United States LESS SAFE and recruited 1 million new crazed terrorists who are willing to kill themselves and all of us.
Reports are now saying that American troops are coming under attack 100 times EVERY SINGLE DAY. That�s an attack about every 13 minutes. Give or take a roadside bomb.
Crooked republican lobbyist, Jack Abramoff now is being reported to have had hundreds of meetings inside the White House. Offering gifts to the richest men in the White House. Free concert tickets, free dinners to nice restaurants, free trips, free travel. FREE FREE FREE.
Quite ironic how the poor of Katrina were left to starve and die, but Bush’s friends get concert tickets and a free meal. The average American can’t afford to take a vacation and these corrupt pieces of human garbage get free trips to Scotland to play golf. All they had to do was agree to screw over the Indians. It seems from the evidence that it was an easy call for them to make.
The question one wonders is how much more harm to America could George Bush and the republicans do to America if they were with the other side?
And finally Bill Clinton’s slam dunking of poor Chris Wallace. Mr. Wallace ended up peeing all over himself and lying about all the tough questions he asked the Bushies.
All this and we left out, TORTURE. George W. Bush will be known forever to history as the torture president. Both al Qaeda and the United States, I’m afraid.
Oh yeah�.I almost forgot. MA-KA-KA!
Let’s just say this is going to be a helluva campaign. Fasten your seatbelts.
Update: This Republican Boytoy scandal must really have the leadership freaked out:
House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) told The Washington Post last night that he had learned this spring of some “contact” between Foley and a 16-year-old page. Boehner said he told House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), and that Hastert assured him “we’re taking care of it.”
ooops
Boehner later contacted The Post and said he could not remember whether he talked to Hastert.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is defending President Bush’s anti-terrorism tactics in multiple court battles, said Friday that federal judges should not substitute their personal views for the president’s judgments in wartime.
He said the Constitution makes the president commander in chief and the Supreme Court has long recognized the president’s pre-eminent role in foreign affairs. “The Constitution, by contrast, provides the courts with relatively few tools to superintend military and foreign policy decisions, especially during wartime,” the attorney general told a conference on the judiciary at Georgetown University Law Center.
Right. The Empty Codpiece and his federalist society drones are the ones the constitution anticipated should be interpreting the constitution when the US engaged in an unending, undeclared “war” on a tactic.
If these Republicans manage to hold on to the presidency, which they very well may since we’ve anointed St McCain of Guantanamo, I guess we’d better get used to the idea that we are living in an All American form of military dictatorship. There really is no other way to interpret Gonzales’ statement.
Funny how we managed to get through the cold war and WWII without stripping the courts of authority, but then the Commies and the Nazis were nothing (nothing, I tell you!) to the existential threat posed by Osama bin Laden and his henchmen. It’ll be a miracle if the country survives.
I read today that one of the biggest corporations in the world has taken sides in the election and has chosen to explicitly identify themselves with a right wing shill. General Motors has actually hired Sean Hannity for a “patriotic” campaign to sell their cars. (This is a man who asks his guests “Is it that you hate this president or that you hate America?” )
Hannity is an unusual choice, to say the least. Apparently GM no longer cares if Democrats buy their cars. Good to know.
As I was casting about today for various Hannity quotes, I came across this beauty from his book “Deliver Us From Evil.” The events of this week made it particularly striking, I thought:
Uncomfortable with the idea of God-given natural rights, [liberals] seek to substitute their own concepts of liberty and justice — whatever they may be at the moment. The prefer the idea of a “living and breathing” constitution, one that can change with the times. Yet what they fail to see is exactly what Madison warned against: that a government with unchecked power — whose authority is not grounded in a more fundamental source of morality — leaves its people unprotected from evil.
This blind spot has left liberals far less suspicious of totalitarian regimes than they should be. Monarchism, national socialism, fascism, communism — all these forms of authoritarianism are illegitimate and inherently unjust. They enable a relative handful of people to hold the state’s levers of power, and use them to impose their will on an entire population. And inevitably they lead to abuse, oppression, even mass murder.
…We believe that American is a superior society not because Americans are superior human beings, but because our culture was founded on a recognition of our God-given natural rights — the “unalienable rights'” referred to in the Declaration of Independence. From that awareness flows a basic, shared respect for humanity, individual liberty, limited government and the rule of law.
Well, there’s unalienable and then there’s unalienable.
They (the detainees) do not deserve the full panoply of rights reserved for Americans. Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) 9/28/06
“It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people,” he said. “Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israeli’s and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.”
Do they all look like macacas Trent? because animals don’t qualify for those unalienable rights that are reserved for Americans. Well, some the Americans. The good ones. You know which ones.
