Tomlinson resigns from the CPB board. Remember? He’s the guy who hired someone to watch Bill Moyers and report on all the heinous liberalism going on. Among those dastardly, “anti-administration” liberals were Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska), and ex-congressman Bob Barr (R-Hypocrite). Unfortunately, Tomlinson remains head of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. So it’s too early to breathe a sigh of relief, but it is a step in the right… excuse me, proper direction.
Interestingly, in the midst of all of the attention to the CPB’s fight against liberal bias, the agency quietly announced a round of grantees for its “America at a Crossroads” project (6/27/05). Among the projects receiving CPB support are The Case for War, a film about neoconservative Richard Perle made by Perle’s longtime friend Brian Lapping; The Sound of the Guns, a film about former CIA director William Colby made by Colby’s son; Soldiers of the Future, which “will tell the story of Donald Rumsfeld’s recent efforts to transform America’s military”; Warriors, in which American Enterprise editor Karl Zinsmeister argues that the U.S. military “attracts a cross-section of citizens motivated by idealism and patriotism”; and Studying Hatred, a film by David Horowitz co-author Peter Collier.
And in Spring, 2006, be sure to watch the much anticipated documentary, “Big ‘Behind’: A Profile of Tim LaHaye.”
All this nonsense about Clinton and other Democrats saying the same thing as Bush, so Bush couldn’t have been lying is driving me nuts. It’s bad enough that they trot this out as an excuse for their own fuck-up, but when they conveniently forget that they were against the action Clinton took at the time to meet the threat (because it interefered with their blow-job trial) it’s infuriating.
Armey said in a statement. “After months of lies, the president has given millions of people around the world reason to doubt that he has sent Americans into battle for the right reasons.”
I won’t say it.
Here’s the real problem. Clinton said the usual boilerplate about Saddam being a dangerous guy and how he wanted to get weapons of mass destruction and how we had to be credible with our threats of force to keep him in line. And when Saddam stepped way out of line in 1998 he ordered the massive bombing operation that got all the Republicans’ panties in a twist because it happened at the time of the all important fellatio impeachment.
On the night he ordered the bombing, here is how Clinton explained American policy:
…we will pursue a long-term strategy to contain Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction and work toward the day when Iraq has a government worthy of its people.
First, we must be prepared to use force again if Saddam takes threatening actions, such as trying to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction or their delivery systems, threatening his neighbors, challenging allied aircraft over Iraq or moving against his own Kurdish citizens.
The credible threat to use force, and when necessary, the actual use of force, is the surest way to contain Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction program, curtail his aggression and prevent another Gulf War.
Clinton said that American policy was that if Saddam took certain threatening actions, we would use force.
Bush and Cheney said that Saddam might take threatening actions, so they had to invade.
That’s quite a different threat assessment. Clinton never suggested an invasion and occupation to deal with Saddam, his policy was to contain him with threats and judicious use of force when he provoked us. And apparently it worked. There were, after all, no weapons of mass destruction and he had perpetrated none of the other actions that would have led to a need for further use of force as of 2002.
General Zinni ran Operation Desert Fox and believed that it had crippled Saddam’s weapons capabilities. Inspectors, of course, could have verified that fact and Saddam allowed them back into the country in 2002 under the “threat of force.”
Even I wondered for a bit if Bush might actually be bluffing about invasion in the beginning, because 9/11 gave us some momentum to saber rattle to get inspectors back in. I suspect that some of the Senators who voted for the Iraq resolution held out some hope that this was what Bush had in mind — it had, after all, been Bush I and Clinton’s policy and it had kept Saddam contained and toothless for a decade. After about five mionutes of pondering the question I realized that Bush was deadly serious and there wsn’t a chance in hell that he could have the necessary finesse to pull something like that off. He wasn’t, after all, “into nuance.”
There was a lot of bellicose talk for years about Saddam because a public show of serious intent was part of the containment strategy. But until Commander Codpiece came along and empowered his neocon cabal of Iraq nuts, nobody was suggesting that the US military invade and occupy the country. Indeed, nobody thought it would be necessary in order to keep Saddam in check.
A lot of Democrats (including both Clintons) made a political gamble that after 9/11 they had to support the invasion because if it was successful they would have been tagged as soft. They were fighting the last war, Gulf War I, in which many Democrats looked foolish for having objected to such a painless, inexpensive, glorious victory. I’m afraid that many of the Democratic leadership bet on the wrong horse —- again. It is, sadly, a testament to how badly they deal with foreign policy that they got it wrong both times. A lot of us out here in Real Murika didn’t because we weren’t playing politics — just assessing the situation and deciding whether it made sense.
Still, it was undoubtedly difficult. 9/11 had cast a spell on our country, abetted by a media that turned the “war on terror” into an epic pageant of national pride and patriotism to such an extent that to question, much less oppose, was an act of political courage. There are very few politicans of either party with much of that:
Those were the Senators who voted against the resolution. How good, smart and prescient they appear today. The ones who didn’t showed lousy instincts. When the president is an idiot, it should be easy to conclude that he is not going to make good decisions about the need for war — or anything else. Millions of us knew the constant blathering about Bush’s great “leadership” after 9/11 was hype. They should have too.
But still, even the most craven Democratic opportunist cannot be held responsible for the administration’s repeated assertion’s that Saddam was a “grave and gathering danger” or that the Bush Doctrine was dutifully printed out from the PNAC web-site and distributed after 9/11 without any serious consideration of its ramifications. Bush was pushing a line that had many people wondering if he didn’t know something thast the rest of us didn’t. It was incomprehensible to a lot of Americans that an American president would be so reckless as to launch a war on unverified information.
There was no good reason to stage an invasion based upon the threat assessment we had. 9/11 actually made that proposition more dangerous and short sighted than it would have been before. They knew this, which is why they hyped the threat with visions of mushroom clouds and nefarious drone planes disguised a crop dusters. They knew that if we relied solely upon the threat assessment that the Clinton administration relied upon, the country would not back their war. So they lied.
The true irony is that it now appears that Clinton managed to accomplish what Bush said needed to be done, with a heavy bombing campaign during his own impeachment. (Talk about multi-tasking.) Bush came along and spent billions of dollars, stretched our military beyond its capabilities, destroyed our international credibility and got tens of thousands killed to accomplish something that had already been done in 1998. What a cock-up.
Foreign Policy Magazine And A Little From Foreign Affairs, For Extra Measure.
I’ve been subscribing to Foreign Policy for a few years now, but ever since they gave Newt Gingrich several pages to propose an American Ministry of Propaganda, I haven’t had much desire to do much more than glance at it. The current issue is different. It’s terrific, doing precisely what I hoped the zine would do. Not that I agree with everything, far from it, but it stirs the pot and gets some lesser-known stories out in provocative ways.
Take, for instance, this good news story about Iraq. Or so it seems at first. Commander James Gavrilis captured/liberated/whatever Ar Rutbah less than a month after the official start of the war. Spending around $3000 and relying on what sounds like a reality-based perspective on the situation, he managed to get the town back on its feet:
My initial approach to governing was very authoritative; it eliminated anarchy and allowed Iraqis to debate the details of democracy rather than survival. What the Iraqis needed was an interim authority to get them back on their feet. While the interim mayor and I provided this stability, the city council’s role was to oversee the mayor and to provide input, not necessarily to make policy. The laws and values of their society and culture were just fine. All we needed to do was enforce them. The city council was an important body for dialogue, debate, and legitimacy. But by initially limiting its decision-making power, we made sure the council couldn’t paralyze our progress.
Representatives in the city council included teachers and doctors, lawyers and merchants. At one town-hall meeting, a few of these professionals asked me about elections. They said the tribal sheiks and imams did not represent their interests, and they wanted to have a say in their government. I explained that they couldn’t vote right away because we had no election monitors or ballot boxes. Still, they insisted. Two rudimentary elections were held in the grand mosque to reconfirm the interim mayor—and Americans were not involved in either vote.
As an alternative to Saddam’s regime, the particular form of democracy was not as important as the concept of a polity that provided for the individual. That was really what Iraqis missed under Saddam. Good governance had to precede the form or type of democracy. Because we were effective in providing services, were responsive to individual concerns, and improved their lives, the Iraqis gravitated toward us and the changes we introduced. However, we didn’t have to change much. Ar Rutbah already had a secular structure that worked. We just put good people in office and changed the character of governance, not the entire infrastructure.
[snip]
One day, a few tribal sheiks came to complain of looting at night in some parts of the city. So, knowing that some of the sheiks were behind some of the looting, I established a neighborhood watch. I put them in charge and had their men act as the watchmen. And the sheiks were held accountable if the looting continued. I also had a team patrol those areas at night at random. The stealing ended abruptly.
[Snip]
n the end, I spent only about $3,000. This sum included the salaries of the police, the mayor, the army colonel, and a few soldiers and public officials. We paid for the crane and the flatbed trailers to move the generators to the city for electricity, and for fuel to run the generators. And we picked up the tab for other necessities, such as painting, tea, and copies of the renunciation form. But the change did not depend on the influx of funds; the Iraqis did a lot themselves. The real progress was the efficient and decent government and the environment we established. Without a lot of money to invest, we made assessments and established priorities, and talked with the Iraqis, exchanging ideas and visions of the future.
We intended to work ourselves out of our jobs, and when conditions were right we took steps back.
A very moving, hopeful story, and I’m not being anything other than sincere in saying so. But there’s just one teensy little problem with making this a textbook case example of why Iraq should have been invaded, which becomes obvious as the article winds down.
You see, unfortunately, Commander Gavrilis and his band of brothers were there for all of two weeks, and then they left. And then:
Although the Iraqis continued the work we started, the follow-up coalition forces did not. The distance between the locals and the troops widened. The Iraqis were eventually exposed and vulnerable to regime loyalists’ retribution and intimidation by foreign fighters. The local Iraqi security forces never developed to the point where they were stronger than the gangs of insurgents; they were never brought into a larger political or security framework of an Iraqi government so that they could be part of a collective security system. Left alone, the Iraqis simply couldn’t hold off the foreign fighters who passed through the city, using Ar Rutbah as a way station en route to Baghdad and Ramadi.
Now, you might think at first that this helps the argument of the liberal hawks, that Bush/Iraq could have worked had the occupation simply been more competent. Actually it doesn’t. Here’s part of the reason why.
As it happens, a few days earlier, I had read this remarkably bad article about Vietnam by Melvin Laird in Foreign Affairs about his tenure as Secretary of Defense during Nixon. Short version: “Don’t blame me for Vietnam. The guys before me got us into that mess, I did a great job, but I didn’t have time to finish, and the guys who came after me totally fucked it up.”
Now, there are major differences between Vietnam and Iraq, to be sure. Among them is that Commander Gavrilis seems like an intelligent, down to earth man, justly proud of his competence in a difficult situation while Secretary Laird reminds us what an arrogant, mistaken, paranoid son of a bitch he was thirty plus years ago. But the trajectory of failure is the same and, I’m afraid, entirely predictable. Let’s, for argument’s sake, take both men at their word, that they did a good job (a stretch with Laird, but bear with me). The problem is that no matter how good a job they could do, inevitably someone would replace them who wouldn’t do as good a good job, who didn’t care as much, who wasn’t as informed, who didn’t have the same combination of street instincts, commonsense, and decency that led to a temporary positive outcome. The main point is this: As Commander Gavrilis himself notes, any positive development was temporary and highly contingent. Because so little can be depended upon in such a volatile, and little understood, situation – be it Vietnam or a town in occupied Iraq – reversals due to incompetence and unexpected problems are all but certain. And let’s not forget that incompetence during occupation was only one of many areas that had to go well in Iraq. There was national and international law and opinion, the economy, the insurgency, and the prospect that major US armed forces could be required elsewhere. Many of these did go well (despite Bolton’s efforts to create total havoc, US forces didn’t have to relocate to Korea, thank God) but Iraq still failed. The problem was that nearly all contingencies had to go well, and unless you’re Bill Bennett on a roll, that’s impossible.
In any event, it surely would have taken more good luck than even Andrew Lloyd Webber possesses to have pulled off Ar Rutbah for another two weeks. Amd to imagine that democracy could actually take root then and flourish 2 1/2 years later is a pie in the sky fantasy. Not even Commander Gavrlis could have kept the situation moving forward that long. Not after Abu Ghraib, for instance.
As with Vietnam, (which despite Laird’s assertions did not in any way benefit from his clear-eyed genius as Defense Secretary, simply because there was no benefit to be had except to morticians and artificial limb manufacturers), Iraq could not work out. Incompetence, or insurgency, coalition atrocities, or sheer ignorance, or a combination of all four, was inevitable, and predictable.
And finally, I say with genuine sorrow: Commander Gavrilis’ efforts, no matter how admirable, were, in any significant sense, predictably doomed never to last long enough to make much difference in avoiding the tragic reality of Iraq’s people today.
Now, there are several other articles in Foreign Policy well worth reading that are equally interesting and subtle. For example, here’s a profile of Zarqawi. What makes this article important is not only that we learn who Zarqawi is, but his significance. He is no rare anomaly, like the fabulously wealthy and fanatical bin Laden. Zarqawi is just a halfway smart lowlife thug, warped by 7 years of imprisonment with torture, transformed into a committed jihadist, originally only a reluctant an ally of al Qaeda, and finally, as a result of the American invasion/occupation, advanced to the position of “emir” for al Qaeda in Iraq. Now, guess what? As Peter Bergen and Alec Reynolds make clear in a brilliant article in the same issue of Foreign Affairs where the odious Laird held forth, there are likely to many, many more Zarqawis in Iraq’s, and America’s, future. And that, too, was predictable, and predicted.
Another article from Foreign Policy, seemingly just an innocuous roundup and overview of scholars is equally subtle and chilling. Take a look at this chart of the leading lights in foreign policy studies. As the article notes, “nearly all are white men older than 50.” I’ll add to that that there is not a single native Arab speaker on that list and at least two of the so-called wise men in foreign policy -Huntington and Fukuyama – hold what can only be described, in the kindest terms, mostly worthless opinions. Women may join the list soon, the article notes. That’s all to the good, but the level of sheer mediocrity of the “scholars” on this list is astonishing, and is not likely to change much if one or two of the worst names are replaced by capable women.
When asked what region was most strategically important to the United States today, a resounding 58 percent answered the Middle East and North Africa. Yet, only 7 percent of U.S. international relations scholars specialize in the region. This gap may explain why the American intelligence community is still advertising for Arabic speakers.
Well, yes, it just might explain it. That, and the fact that openly gay specialists in Arabic aren’t welcome, too.
35% Of The American Public Living In Alternate Reality
Be afraid, be very afraid. After all that is happened, more than 1/3 of all Americans “approve” of Bush’s presidency. What will it take to wake these people up? What horrible things would Bush and his gang have to do – or not do – to drive his poll numbers further south?
And let’s try to be creative here. As enjoyable as fellatio, cunnilingus and its many delicious variations are for most of us, suggesting Bush get caught in flagrante delicto with Official A – or a horse, or whomever – just simply is not that original. Allow yourself to think way, way, outside the box (and the bedroom, and the bathroom), and let your imagination roam: What more could Bush inflict on us that he hasn’t already done, to make matters so bad his approval ratings would fall to a more reasonable, but still alarmingly high, number, say 10%?
Would he have to publicly declare his desire to be dictator? Nope, been there, done that. How about establish gulags in Eastern Europe? He’s beaten you to the punch.
I was puttering around earlier working on something else and I came across this hilarious paper dealing with the spousal notification issue from the “men’s rights” perspective.
Writing jointly for the Court on this aspect of the [Casey] decision, Justices O’Conner, Kennedy and Souter struck down the spousal notification requirement as in impermissible infringement on a woman’s right to privacy. The Court offered three basic reasons for holding that a wife could not be compelled to inform her husband of her intent to abort.
1. First, the Court discounted the husband’s interests by pointing to the realities of nature:
“[i]t is an inescapable biological fact that state regulation with respect to the child a woman is carrying will have a far greater impact on the mother’s liberty than on the father’s
In other words, because the fetus is in the woman and not the man, the woman’s interests trump.
This makes sense. I would even fo so far as to say that because the fetus is in the woman, the woman’s interests trump — the fetus. This fellow disagrees:
This reasoning might be questioned on several fronts. First, it is not the case that the biology is all with the women. As dozens of studies of couvade syndrome indicate, expectant fathers experience biological symptoms of pregnancy along with their partners. Both partners may feel nausea, irritability, food cravings, indigestion, and so on. Both can anticipate discomforts from pregnancy and the stresses of infant care. While the man’s aches and pains are “psychosomatic,” and are likely to be less intense than the woman’s, they are not inconsequential. Men and women both experience biological effects of pregnancy.
And they both have that glow…
In any event, the right to privacy recognized in Roe v. Wade is not based on biology only, but also on issues of emotion and identity. Justices O’Conner, Kennedy and Souter stated as much in Casey, observing that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy. These choices include the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. This is not the language of biology, but of religion or philosophy.
And if men choose to define their “concept of existence, of meaning, of the mystery of life” as being pregnant, the law should give them equal rights to the female body that is actually, you know, biologically pregnant. That’s called equality.
The greater maternal involvement in biological pregnancy cannot by itself resolve these larger issues. What matters, in addition to the physical effects on the body, are the consequences of abortion for the individual’s basic value structure and self-concept. Once the liberty interest protected by the Fourteenth Amendment is phrased in terms of choices and a concept of the self, rather than biology alone, the argument that the woman’s interests should trump the man’s requires further elaboration. Both men and women face choices about their roles as parents and their concepts of their own identities. Both men and women become bonded with the fetus. The fetus may be physically growing in the woman’s belly, but in the geography of the psyche, it is inside the man as well. To exclude expectant fathers from juridical notice on grounds of biology is to miss the importance of pregnancy in a man’s concept of himself as a parent and a procreative being and his vision of the meaning of his life.
I suspect that this guy’s concept of himself would be less enthusiastic about sharing the burden of pregnancy if the geography of the testicles were squeezed in a vise for 18 hours as he tried to expel a cantaloupe through his penis. It would very likely change his vision of the meaning of his life, as well.
Turns out a “top al Qaeda operative” escaped before he could testify to “abuse” by an American soldier. Of course, I believe it. No doubt in my mind. I mean, it’s not like they would lie about something like that, right? Permit a prisoner to escape or hide him (or worse) to prevent more embarassing revelations of torture. No, they just wouldn’t do that. That’s not what Americans – who live in a democracy and value freedom – do.
[Update: More misinformation…sorry, I meant details… about the escape here.]
What Reid did was a superb variation of the strategy I was talking about yesterday. But Reid, brilliant fellow, ignored my suggestion simply to focus back on Traitorgate. No,he broadened it to our advantage, stressing the notion that Digby and others have emphasized, that the real subject of Traitorgate is the systematic, deliberate lying about Saddam’s WMD before the war. Excellent, excellent, excellent.
Now, whatever it was Bush was talking about yesterday – does anyone remember? – well, Reid has the opportunity get to that when he’s good and ready. And this gives me hope that when he does, Reid won’t just roll over and surrender. Excellent, excellent, excellent.
Extra unexpected bonus: Watching Frist lose it today in real time, it’s clear Reid’s unmasked the true face of Cat Mengele. Oh, the embarassing soundbites tonight! Meow!!!
[Update: The gift keeps on giving. Reid’s action also puts considerable pressure on Cheney, because, as I just recalled, Cheney’s new security adviser, John Hannah, was linked to bogus information on Iraq. This means that some enterprising reporter might just think to ask whether it was all that appropriate for Cheney to hire Hannah as it really appears Cheney is just trying to extend the coverup about the prewar intelliegence.
Amazing how much good a touch of spine can do.
One final thought. When Bush, et al, get over their shock, their retaliation is gonna be quite ugly. And just as surprising. Watch out, Harry. You can expect that what Bush did to McCain will be just a mild foretaste of what’s gonna happen.]
So Harry Reid has called for the long awaited Phase II investigation into the Iraq debacle and they are going into a closed secret session to discuss it. The Republicans are squealing like pigs in a slaughter house.
Kyra and Ed Henry on CNN are characterizing it as “bickering” and “working against the interest of the American people.” Interestingly, Frist is calling it a “stunt” and “uncivil.” (No word yet from anyone about the substance.)
The Democrats should not back down on this. The Republicans are going to portray themselves a victimized and martyred, weeping like little bitty babies about “betrayal.” Oh mercy me, pass the smelling salts — that mean Harry Reid has “stabbed” Scarlett O’Frist in the back!
Fuck them. This is what an opposition party does and it’s long overdue. You want to change the subject, motherfuckers? Think again.
Yesterday I got chastised by at least one reader for never offering any solutions, just criticisms. It reminded me that I haven’t gotten on my personal soapbox lately and harrangued my audience with the notion that I think we should adopt a western and southwest red state strategy using a platform of personal liberty, economic responsibility, land conservation, energy independence and effective national security. If you’ve heard this before, feel free to move on. Otherwise, here is my super-duper message package to capture at least a couple of western red states and tip the balance to our side.
I understand that building a coalition of rural western states and big city blue states has its problems. But we have to find common ground with some red states somewhere and this seems like the most fertile ground requiring the least compromise on matters of primary importance to both. That’s the only way a coalition can be successful. You can’t force people into a mold, you have to mold the coalition around shared principles.
In a great post discussing the Alito nomination, Barbara at Mahablog articulates one part of this platform as she talks about the paternalist right wing:
The provision represents another rightie tendency, which is that righties essentially distrust human beings to make their own decisions. We saw that during the Terri Schiavo flap, when all manner of legislation was proposed that would have allowed government to intrude in a family’s end-of-life decisions. To a rightie, human beings are mindless beasts who need to be controlled by Big Brother so they don’t make “bad” decisions; i.e., decisions with which the rightie disagrees. And righties always assume that people who make these “bad” decisions have done so because they don’t think. Notice all the legislation imposed by states intended to make women reflect on a decision to abort, as if women can’t think for themselves. It’s beyond their comprehension that most women who decide to abort do understand exactly what a pregnancy is and realize that abortion is a serious matter.
“Republicans don’t trust people to make their own decisions.” It’s that simple. They want to tell people how to live. I believe that is a simple argument that plays ever so subtly on the Republican mantra that says “they don’t trust you with your own money!” We should steal it since they’ve already trained the ears of Americans to hear that formulation.
Survey USA found that while Utah and Idaho are among the most conservative on social issues in the country, many of the other western red states are quite liberal. Here’s a breakdown on choice:
23. Montana 53 percent “Pro-choice” 26. Arizona 56% 27. New Mexico 56% 30. Wyoming 57% 34. Colorado 61% 38. Oregon 62% 38. Nevada 64% 41. Washington 63% 46. California 65%
We do not need to pander on choice in order to win elections. In fact, we end up being mealy-mouthed and unappetising to both sides. Choice is a majority position and we should consistently articulate it as trusting people to make their own decisions about their personal lives. Period. Don’t get into religious interpretations. Don’t talk about the fetus. Just simply and straightforwardly say that people should be trusted to make their own decisions about complicated personal matters, that it’s nobody else’s business. It will make some people mad, to be sure. But it’s simple and it gets to the heart of the matter. People want to know where we stand and that is where we stand.
People should be able to freely practice their religion as long as they don’t expect anyone else to practice it or pay for it. People should be able to feel secure that their their homes, health and families are in the private sphere, where government has the least interest.
The western and southwestern states are far less amenable to intrusions on personal liberty, far less likely to be hyper-religious, far more “live and let live” than the southern red states. There is less history of racism than in either the south or the big cities (that’s not saying all that much) and they have been leaders in women’s equality. As the Republican party becomes a Christian dominated party of big government, this group is becoming unmoored from the GOP and is open to a new message from us.
They don’t like taxes, which is why economics have to be presented in terms of responsibility rather than entitlement, which they are. Nobody likes taxes, but responsible people recognise that taxes are unavoidable if we are to have a decent society. “It is irresponsible to burden business with outrageous health care costs and individuals with the fear of imminent catastrophe — the government needs to fix this problem.” “It’s irresponsible for the wealthy not to accept their rightful share of the burden to keep this country strong.” “It’s irresponsible for the government not to keep our promises to each generation by ensuring that social security stays healthy and that we don’t leave behind a mountain of debt for our children.”
They also don’t like corruption and cronyism. It goes against the western ethos of both rugged individualism and communitarian necessity. The dishonest Republican political machine has to be grating at their very marrow. This issue is, of course, central to our critique of the Republicans generally, but I think it carries extra weight with the anti-authoritarian west. They don’t like Washington much anyway. Washington corruption is particularly distasteful.
They are growing increasingly concerned about environmental degradation. Global warming affects people who work and live on the land — people in the west are more concerned with the environment in general than those in the south. This is an area of common cause. Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana has set forth some ideas about liquid coal that should be explored. Alternative energy is, in my opinion, a winning issue for us all around.
On national security, I think the simple answer is to point out that Republican unilateralism is creating enemies and bankrupting the country. There is a lot of evidence that people are resenting the amount of money that’s being spent on Iraq. The way to deal with this is to say that if the Republicans had followed the model of Bush’s father and worked with a real coalition toward goals that everyone could agree upon, we would not be bearing this kind of financial burden alone. We will never hesitate to act alone if the national security of the US is at stake. With Iraq, the administration claimed that we were in danger from a threat that didn’t exist and we took on the enormous cost of that mistake alone because the vast majority of the world didn’t agree with that assessment. We need to make sure that never happens again.
A few of the areas that are problematic for this coalition are guns, business regulation, unions and immigration. On the first I would adopt a states’ rights position and use governor Dean’s formulation that the rural areas have different concerns about guns than the cities and so there can be no national, one size fits all solution. Big city cops have different concerns than those in Montana.
We should argue that if business acts responsibly toward its community, its customers and its employees, they have no beef with us. Our society depends upon business being successful and there are many millions of them around the country that are both responsible and profitable. They should be rewarded, not penalized, for doing the right thing.
Unions need to take a page from California. They have been enormously successful in re-casting thier image here by simply pointing out that union members aren’t “special interests” they are cops, firefighters, nurses, teachers, state employees. Once people see unions again as average working people instead of the stereotype of mobbed-up “On the Waterfront” crooks or ridiculous patronage machines, they tend to look at the whole issue differently. We should encourage the unions to work together to send out this message of average working people you depend upon every day to take care of you when you are in need. It’s worked extremely well in California and I think it can work everywhere.
Immigration is going to be tough. I think we will have to look at the southwestern governors Napolitano and Richardson for some guidance. This issue is the canary in a coalmine of a faltering economy and it must be dealt with wisely. It’s becoming huge around the country and the Democrats have to find the proper balance. I don’t have the answers on this one.
The other side of all this is that the mountain red state voters need to recognise that the blue states are not the enemy of Real America. It’s a two way street. We should ask them for some consideration of our culture just as they ask us for theirs. These are the live and let live people. If we let them know that we have no interest in turning Helena or Las Vegas into San Francisco, maybe they will grant that it’s ok for San Francisco and Boston to have their own ways too. We have more in common than we have differences.
This discussion of what “real America” is, is a good starting point for launching this coalition. Despite what the GOP is trying to sell, Real America is all of us. The red state west is one element of the current Republican coalition that may just agree with that. We need them — and frankly they need us. Their unique culture of independence and self-sufficiency is far more threatened by what the modern Republicans are doing than anything the Democrats have ever done.
I’m sure there are huge holes in my plan. I’ve never sat down and really worked on it. But others have, people who are in the trenches looking at how we can build a Democratic majority now that the Republicans have a total lock on the south. I’m not saying that we should abandon the south — but we cannot depend upon it. History shows that the south is a voting block unto itself and almost always goes together. It’s a very tough nut for us to crack, particularly if we wish to keep any principles. There are better ways.
When it comes to punishment of those who dare to disagree with the White House, the Wilsons are but the tip of the iceberg. Robert Dreyfuss has a vitally important article in American Prospect about the evisceration of CIA under Porter Goss. Take the time to read it all. Here is a short quote from the end, but you really must read the details Dreyfuss prints to understand the full meaning of the disaster:
Without a doubt, Goss’ team is the most highly partisan ever to run the CIA. The ex–HPSCI staffers were notorious for taking a Republican Party–oriented stance on many issues, especially Murray, who once tried to get classified information released so it could be used against the Democrats. Under Goss, the CIA public-affairs office has been nearly shut down, under the tight control of Jennifer Millerwise — not an intelligence person, but a political operative who worked on the Bush-Cheney election campaigns and for Goss at the HPSCI. The partisan, pro-Bush nature of the current regime at the CIA was underlined when Goss issued a widely leaked memorandum telling agency employees to “support the administration and its policies in our work,” adding, “As agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”
The import of Goss’ memo to staff was not lost on agency veterans. “The meaning was that from now on, there is only one acceptable view, and that’s the neocon view,” said one. For many it was the final straw, convincing them that there was no hope of salvaging independent analysis. “At the [Directorate of Intelligence], they’re wondering, ‘What is our job now, now that our boss doesn’t seem to care about us anyway?’” says Gregory Treverton, who served on the National Intelligence Council under Bill Clinton.
That’s right. Bush’s familiar is systematically undermining the reliability of a president’s main source of proprietary information. Oh, I can easily understand the gray areas where intelligence can be couched for or against a particular policy. But this is different. What Goss is doing, with Bush’s evidently enthusiastic approval, is eliminating from CIA any data gathering and analyses that do not support the presumptions and policy wishes of the Bush White House.
In other words, what Bush is creating is a CIA that, had it existed in 2002, would have been far more wrong about WMD and Saddam/al Qaeda connections than it actually was.
Now, dear friends, for many weeks now, I have been reading a marvelous book by Dr. Lisa Randall entitled Warped Passages which is all about the new physics of branes, strings, and infinite hidden dimensions. Having done some of the most exciting work in this area, Randall not only knows what she is talking about but her explanations are as clear as a bell. Now, that doesn’t mean branes, bulk, and infinite invisible 5th dimensions are easy to comprehend, they’re not and Randall is too honest to spare us (which is great, you can actually learn something new about the world if you can keep an open mind and persist). You can spend several days, if you’re an amateur science lover with little math, just trying to get a slight sense of exactly how a massless neutrino, which is emitted after an interaction with a weak gauge boson, can help resolve an apparent violation of the law of the conservation of energy.
But as mind-bogglingly hard as the new physics is to grasp, it is child’s play next to trying to grok the reasoning behind Porter Goss’s destruction of CIA. Y’see, concepts like branes and asymmetrical elementary particles that only accept a charge when they’re right-handed (or is it left-handed?) get easier to understand the more you think about them. But the more you ponder why any Director would deliberately eliminate from CIA the objective gathering and assessment of data – rather than trying to improve it – the weirder it all sounds, the more incomprehensible it gets.
After a while my head starts to hurt real bad and I feel the only way to clear it is to try to understand something easy. Like modern string theory.