PMC Commentary

To have and have not

Senate Democrats blew it. Strategically they took one step forward and then two back tactically, the one familiar battle maneuver of the modern Democratic Party.

I write, of course, about the filibuster-agreement affair. Its short and unhappy life was, for the Democratic Party, good public relations in a bad bargain. Senate Dems came out on top for a change.

They managed to deflect an obstructionist public image -- never mind the image’s fairness; it was there -- while obtaining an open promise from the opposition that the judicial filibuster was fair game down the road; most importantly, in the case of Supreme Court nominations. The controversial slate of judges at hand was going to be confirmed anyway as fallout from the nuclear option, so why not score a major p.r. point in the process by looking like the reasonable ones? It was a smart move.

Now I’m not so naïve as to think Republican leaders were going to live up to the deal. That, I thought, was the whole point of Democrats brokering the deal to begin with, and was what made it so deliciously Machiavellian. They could sit and wait for the inevitable betrayal and then savage the GOP for what it is: a bunch of bullies who were poised all along to violate both the letter and spirit of the filibuster agreement. That prospect was -- and I emphasize was -- as certain as George again uttering “nucular.”

But, for Democrats, a high-flying strategy is merely an opportunity to shoot it down by shooting from the hip. In their case that means shooting themselves in the hip, which is what they promptly did in shooting down the confirmation vote on Bolton. This fringe ideologue has, just as the three appellate judges had, an excellent chance of being confirmed no matter what, and Democrats had already made their objections resoundingly clear. Stalling his confirmation made them no clearer.

But more importantly, stalling this near-certain conclusion of a farce by choking cloture only handed Senate Republicans a p.r. victory they’ll use to use to batter and ridicule the Dems mercilessly -- and in the eyes of an issue-muddled public, even justifiably.

It’s true that the brokered deal pertained only to judicial-nomination filibusters. As one of the Gang-of-14 Republicans allowed (mostly out of self-defense), "It is unfortunate. It is too bad. But the deal was on judges, not anything else."

Yet that nicety will almost certainly be lost on the public. To the great majority it was a filibuster deal, period. And there’s no doubt that’s how the GOP will exploit it, notwithstanding any mild protestations from its bipartisan moderates.

The Democrats could not have handed a prettier p.r. package to Senate majority leader Bill Frist, who had survived the parliamentary scuffle only as badly damaged goods. He never wanted the deal and was certain to look for any sleazy opening to break it. To no one’s surprise he already has, saying "actions speak volumes" in reference to the Bolton-confirmation vote and the Democratic pledge to rein in filibustering. "Tonight, after the Democrats have launched into yet another filibuster of a presidential nomination," he said, "those words seem empty and hollow."

Like all politics, this fight was about p.r. perceptions. That was the key to the filibuster deal. The Democrats held the cards for a change. With utter confidence in the inevitable, they could have waited for the GOP to trash the deal once it met with Supreme resistance. Then out the nuclear option would have come. But with the deal’s “spirit” still in place and still unmolested, the GOP would have had real problems with a disapproving public. It would have been the clear-cut bully.

Such Democratic bumbling gets tiresome to watch.

The nuclear option: It’s not just for senators anymore

We all know the Bush administration delights in offending the world. That’s hardly news. It bullied and browbeat its unilateral way into an illegal war; turned a blind eye to mountains of global-warming evidence; nominated a personality-disordered megalomaniac as America’s international door-to-door salesman -- well, space prohibits a complete recital, and you don’t need one anyway. The administration’s global rudeness and thus contributions to crises are as familiar as its unmannered smirk.

Its latest offensive behavior rated the lead headline in the New York Times Saturday morning. Normally when the administration persists in doing everything it can to ensure troubles of crisis proportions -- like drunken-sailor spending coupled with whacking the revenue base, hence ultimate fiscal collapse -- it is deemed by the press so commonplace as to be un-newsworthy. One can easily picture mainstream editors yawning over the latest prediction of real impending doom coming out of some think tank’s press office. Yada, yada, yada. Yesterday’s news. How trite.

So I was a trifle surprised at seeing the headline, “Month of Talks Fails to Bolster Nuclear Treaty,” on the Times’ front page (notably absent from other “liberal” papers such as the Washington Post and Boston Globe). What’s this? I thought these days all we had were newspapers, not news-papers. Did the talks fail because of something we did? Though news, that nevertheless would be un-news.

But there it was, in the fifth, twelfth and twenty-first paragraphs -- the news that’s no longer news, making its inclusion as news rather perplexing.

I quote: “Though President Bush has repeatedly declared that nuclear proliferation … is the biggest single threat to the United States, the administration decided against sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to [the United Nations] conference” whose purpose was “to strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.”

Needless to say the conference was a total loss. It was so total that even usually slippery diplomats were straightforward in describing it: Namely, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency said that “‘absolutely nothing’ had come out of the meeting.” No honest exchanges, no productive dialogues, no frank discussions. Just “absolutely nothing.”

Of course Condi was on hand afterward and elsewhere to reassure the world that her boss regards the treaty as "an extremely important document."

Notice that the 1970 agreement engineered to plug the flood of nuclear weapons is now a “document,” not a treaty -- as in your mortgage agreement is merely a piece of paper, not a contractual obligation. It would seem that Frank Luntz, having pretty much vanquished the vile influence of forthright language in domestic affairs, has expanded his doublespeak operation to include foreign policy.

Also unsurprising was this reportage on the administration’s propensity to make awkward complications disappear like foreign detainees, to wit: “A history of milestones in countering proliferation published by the American delegation omitted references to [past] commitments the Bush administration has rejected.” Keep scrubbing reality, guys. Perhaps no one will notice.

And most un-newsworthy was that it took a foreigner to point out the obvious. Paul Meyer, the Canadian representative to the U.S.-torpedoed talks, said, "We have let the pursuit of short-term, parochial interest override the collective long-term interest in sustaining this treaty's authority and integrity."

Ah, there’s one of W.’s bugaboos -- “collective”; along with “we,” “long-term interest,” “treaty” and “integrity.”

Clearly in reference to the Bush administration -- not “apparently”, as the NYT reported -- Mr. Meyer added, "If governments simply ignore or discard commitments whenever they prove inconvenient, we will never be able to build an edifice of international cooperation." Now how many bugaboos can you find in that sentence?

Still, our own former U.S. senator and nuclear-namby-pamby Sam Nunn declared that "we can't accept this as the last word. The U.S. must take a post-conference leadership role in bringing the international community together on this critical agenda." Post-conference. As in 2009? The story failed to clarify.

OK, so I’ve ragged the NYT a bit for cheap-shot advantage. But if this paper can insist on occasionally reporting un-news as news, if routine items like nuclear proliferation and world vaporization can still get its attention, and if the administration’s intransigence on these things can become the stuff that front pages are made of, perhaps other papers can recall their reason for being as well.

By now most of us know Bush’s reason for being. But a few stragglers somehow keep missing the scoop, and they need all the un-news they can get.

[ADDENDUM: With my thanks reader GB has sent these Toronto Star clips regarding the nuclear talks ...

With the U.S. refusing to discuss its disarmament commitment, and Iran objecting to any direct mention of its suspect nuclear program, the pact's 189 members could agree on little, let alone a concrete plan of action.

"It was a debacle," says a weaponry-sounding Paul Meyer, Canada's disarmament ambassador, whose hope of getting the members to agree to meet annually, not every five years, came to naught.

"A squandered opportunity," says Daryl Kimball, head of the Arms Control Association, the major U.S., anti-nuclear lobby group.

"A complete disaster," snaps Joe Cirinclione, a proliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"There was no shortage of good ideas coming in , but none was advanced because of the active obstructionism by the U.S. and Iran," he says. "There was no political will."

Cirinclione says the U.S.'s own delegation was deeply divided, with the professionals "seething" over their instructions to keep the agenda focused on the non-compliance of other states, not on Washington's failures.

"Bolton had his dead hand all over the policy," he says, referring to U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control, John Bolton, who is also U.S. President George W. Bush's highly controversial nominee for ambassador to the U.N.

In short, the U.S. policy is that, as the world's only superpower and in the thick of a war against terror, it wants no constraints on its nuclear program.

Analysts say that in the past, treaty members have deferred to the U.S. out of friendship, or fear, or dangerous complacency, but some are starting to balk at its hypocritical approach.

The longer the U.S. clings to a large nuclear arsenal and actively works on new atomic weapons - both in contravention of treaty obligations - the harder it will find it to get others to walk away from the nuclear option, they say.

The U.S. argument that the terrorist threat requires it to retain a nuclear capability is ludicrous, say observers.

Or, as Polanyi puts it: "Far from being a response to terrorism, nuclear weapons are an invitation."

The idea of holding on to more than 5,000 nuclear weapons 15 years after the end of the Cold War appals Robert McNamara, the former U.S. defence secretary who helped John F. Kennedy steer clear of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

He told a conference this week that Washington's nuclear policies "are immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, very, very, dangerous in terms of the risk of inadvertent or accidental launch and destructive of a treaty that has served us so well."

"The whole situation seems so bizarre as to be beyond belief ... to declare war requires an act of Congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minutes deliberation by the president and his advisers."

I guess when an anti-administration opinion is held by six-billion others and there's no way to equally "balance" that opinion with pro-administration spin, American papers, including the NYT, just don't run it. So mine wasn't such a cheap shot after all.

GB signed off with this bewildered question: "What were Americans thinking when they re-elected this corrupt gang?"

Oh, probably who the next "American Idol" will be.]

Hellfire and damnation -- in writing

A couple of short quotes said it all.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, after labeling Amnesty International’s just-released, scathing report on U.S. human rights violations as “ridiculous,” said "we hold people accountable when there's abuse.”

Retired military judge Kevin Barry said in response to this standard White House swill: “We have so much evidence of abuse in so many locations that to say it's a couple of bad people here or there has lost credibility with the public."

Since 2001 we’ve lived in two radically different worlds -- that of George W. Bush’s official fantasies, and that of reality. The first, having long since surpassed Wizard of Ooze dimensions, has indeed “lost credibility with the public” and is fading rapidly.

The best evidence of this is the recent turnaround in thinking by Walter Jones, the North Carolina Republican congressman who famously slapped the antiwar French by renaming their culinary gift to America, “freedom fries.” He’s not laughing at the antiwar crowd any longer. In fact, he’s joined them. "If we were given misinformation intentionally by people in this administration, to commit the authority to send boys, and in some instances girls, to go into Iraq, that is wrong. Congress must be told the truth," he told the Guardian.

That’s serious stuff, especially coming from a member of the Republican apparat.

Its significance lies in more than one congressman’s pro-war flip and quasi-suggestion of a special committee for impeachment. Its further significance is deeply sociopolitical; Rep. Walter Jones must be getting showered by letters, emails and calls from very, very unhappy, increasingly antiwar constituents – and from a Southern state, no less. That’s big.

When Karl Rove heard of Walter’s comments, my guess is that his thoughts flashed to another Walter, another president and another war. For when Walter Cronkite came out against our Vietnam involvement, Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America.”

Had he ever. And by most accounts so has George, who sucked America -- middle and all -- into a Mideast quagmire every bit as gooey as Vietnam, deploying as many lies and as much criminal culpability as any tinhorn dictator.

This culpability examined by Amnesty naturally worked the White House into a froth of denial and spin, which, given its credibility, pretty much confirmed Amnesty’s accusations by itself. But at least the human rights watchdog has plenty of credibility and its written findings contain just as much substance.

Amnesty’s report wasn’t just negative, it wasn’t just strongly worded, and it wasn’t just critical. It was, instead, absolute hellfire and damnation on paper, opening with, “The blatant disregard for international human rights and humanitarian law in the ‘war on terror’ continued to make a mockery of President George Bush’s claims that the USA was the global champion of human rights.” It went on to decry U.S. “war crimes in Iraq,” specifying “detainees in U.S. custody tortured in Abu Ghraib prison” and those held “in secret detention in undisclosed locations. In some cases, their situation amounted to ‘disappearance.’” Chile circa 1970s, anyone?

Iraq’s defense minister yesterday declared that his nation will not "achieve security at the expense of human dignity." Maybe. I doubt it. But maybe. Yet Amnesty left no doubt with respect to George W. Bush, who it says has “sent an unequivocal message to the world that human rights may be sacrificed ostensibly in the name of security.”

What lay outside Amnesty’s purview regarding “security” is that we’re less safe now than ever. And for what? At what price? Sixteen-hundred Americans who didn’t opt for Dick Cheney’s “other priorities”?

Amnesty’s U.S. director, William Schultz, got many of us dreaming about sublime justice with this observation: "The apparent high-level [American] architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera, because they may find themselves under arrest."

An exhilarating prospect: George, Dick and Rummie relaxing together ocean-side someday, only to be picked up on a rights-abuse rap. Maybe they could do their time at Abu Ghraib with Augusto Pinochet.

The religious right’s stealth politics

I’d have much more respect -- okay, some respect -- for religious rightists if they would simply start telling the truth about their strategic goals. Ever since their more visible political ascendancy in the 1990s, they have back-doored the public realm. Implicitly through their words and actions they’ve admitted they can’t win fairly and honestly. They know the American public won’t buy what they’re selling, so they get sneaky.

Don’t take my words for it. Take those of their own, the most famous, I suppose, being Ralph Reed’s goofy 1991 comment that "I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night."

Some might object that this was mere self-aggrandizement and nothing so lugubrious is ever played out on the ground. But consider a more down-to-earth example.

In the early 1980s a Californian by the name of Robert Simonds organized something called Citizens for Excellence in Education. Sounds innocuous enough, for sure, and its publicly advertised purpose was positively noble: to improve public education throughout our land. The organization would do this by helping to elect excellent citizens deeply concerned with better education to local school boards. Thirteen years later Simonds’ outfit would claim victory in having assisted more than 12,000 of its citizens onto these boards controlling more than 2000 schools. Nothing wrong with that. That’s the American way.

But it was a stealth campaign run by a stealth organization.

Rather than improving the quality of education in public schools, Simonds’ goal was to fight "socialistic, atheistic, new age and value-free" schools. He only advertised this in his campaign-advice book, "How to Elect Christians to Public Office." More telling was Simonds “election tactic of choice,” which was to “de-emphasize being a Christian [and] emphasize the candidate's status as a conservative parent concerned about the well-being of children” (emphasis added, Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 11, 1996).

Why the subterfuge? There’s nothing wrong with advocating one’s worldview in the pursuit of what one considers to be better public policy, but there’s something a good deal wrong with folks who feel the need to deceive.

The above tale of stealth is but one of many, and a familiar one to the politically cynical; not, however, to those somewhat less versed in deceptive politics. And the following is for them, assuming a scattered few actually read this sort of stuff.

Most Americans willing to ponder history at all think Hitler rose to power ranting and raving much like any other demagogue and never making a secret of his racial beliefs and eventual racial policies, which makes his rise seem even more horrifying by granting it popular democratic sanction. But there’s a problem with that history, and the problem is, it’s untrue.

It is true, of course, that Hitler demagogically ranted and raved and had spelled out his extreme racialism in Mein Kampf. Yet in his pursuit of public office he later downplayed that racialism in public rants for the simple reason that he had realized it would alienate far too many Germans. He waited. He subdued his true agenda. His strategy was a brilliant tutorial in stealth politics.

Now before you call for the butterfly net and thorazine, let me hasten to say I don’t think some fascist theocracy is imminent, nor am I ringing the alarm bell of how it can happen here and all that. The differences in cultures, history and political circumstances are too vast for such a direct comparison. What I am saying is that there is always a substantive, and usually sinister, reason for stealth politics. So anyone reading this who might be inclined to sign on to such politics should stand back and ask himself -- Why all the cleverness, the subterfuge, the stealth?

It’s the bullying, stupid

The Senate locked horns over the filibuster; TV’s talking heads lectured on the filibuster; op-ed pages, talk-radio asylums and political Web sites parsed every parliamentary aspect of the filibuster -- and the debates were mostly an irrelevance. More on that in a minute.

First things first, and the very first, of course, is that the issue isn’t dead. It’s just under warming lamps. The Christian right -- these days virtually the entire Republican Party during primary season -- will pressure the leadership to make it all better, and soon. Neither gives up this easily and neither suffers compromise for long. They’re just regrouping. They’ll be back, which makes the filibuster “agreement” irrelevant.

And compared to the real issue at hand, the pro-and-con arguments employed were just as irrelevant. The most amusing irrelevance was the right’s teary-eyed crocodile warning that should the filibuster be defended successfully, well, boy, the left would regret it. Some day the right will be the minority again and it will flip and apply the parliamentary scourge with renewed vigor. Imagine that. Republicans -- Republicans, mind you -- hypocritically filibustering this and filibustering that after all those principled, anti-filibuster arguments. Say it could never be so, Shane.

The debate was at its oddest, though, when the anti-filibustering’s very origins went unexamined; origins that have little to do with judicial nominees and nothing to do with the filibuster itself. And those deepest origins, to put it with fair economy, are the right’s tiresome bullying.

True, power-grabbing played a part -- ensuring that the judiciary marches in ideological step and stays in step long after the right’s electoral demise -- but the power-grabbing at issue here involved forcing one set of social mores on a whole lot of individuals and groups with different social mores: in short, bullying.

That’s what the filibuster exercise came down to: The most blatant and potentially most self-defeating display of obscene bullying in America’s recent political history. The heart of the matter did come up from time to time, but largely got buried by endless debates on the filibuster’s propriety as a parliamentary tool.

Perhaps the right’s bullying has become so routine it’s barely noticed any longer. Or perhaps the media’s attention to what’s news-relevant has now surpassed mere deficit-disorder levels. After all, everyone knows that these days at least the networks’ news coverage starts and ends with Michael Jackson’s rating-grabbing crotch-grabbing.

But however inadequately covered, it remains that the filibuster circus was brought to town chiefly by right-wing bullies, and that’s the fundamental aspect the Dems should push harder politically than any other. Nobody likes bullies but bullies themselves, who account for maybe 25 percent of the electorate (hard-right evangelicals, Heritage Foundation donors and the John Bolton Fan Club).

There’s far more history to this bullying business than the filibuster, yet the larger electorate has failed to appreciate Republican history for what it is, mainly due to the opposition’s repeatedly botched message delivery.

We had the 1995 government shutdown, the first sign of the finest in contemporary political bullying to come. We had the perennial Clinton investigations, but outside the (then) scandal-obsessed Washington Post and New York Times, who cared? We had an unconstitutional impeachment, which the perpetrators then managed to twist into a character issue and carry into a stolen election -- a bit of bullying there, I’d say. We had mammoth bullying leading up to the Iraq invasion. We’ve had regularly served bullying on the dangers of free speech from totalitarian spooks like Ashcroft and Fleischer and Rumsfeld….

One could go on. So let’s just agree that the history is clear enough.

What doesn’t seem to be clear to Democrats -- now there’s a surprise -- is how to capitalize on what Republicans have handed them on a platter: the longest, most clear-cut record of political bullying in modern history. Why? Because they can’t seem to keep the basics in mind very long.

And the basics are what Clinton singularly got right and what the right has always gotten right -- a simple, single message, over and over and over till cranial numbness sets in.

It’s the bullying, stupid.

A pseudoconservative coup on its last, wretched breath

The recent New York Times’ story on the world’s increasingly hostile opinion of America in light of detainee-abuse reports was as revealing in what it did not address as what it did.

It wasn’t the journalists’ fault; their point was merely to objectively frame how we’re subjectively perceived around the globe -- and of course it ain’t good. As the article summarized, “Accounts of abuses … ricochet around the world, instilling ideas about American power and justice, and sowing distrust of the United States.” And as an Afghan curtly lamented, “The Americans were good people before.”

It was a poignant report that went on in that vein for 1500 words, and was depressing as hell.

But I found this short passage to encapsulate a good deal of misunderstanding, at least in Europe, where, according to the article, many people have “a persistent and uneasy sense that the United States fundamentally changed after September 11, and not for the better.”

Their misunderstanding lies in 9/11 as the turning point, while the truth, I think, is that America’s post-9/11 behavior was not a transformation in, but merely a symptom of, the Bush administration’s fundamental personality. That personality has us cornered because it’s a reckless one -- both authoritarian and pseudoconservative.

Those terms, used in the post-WWII era by philosopher Theodor Adorno and historian Richard Hofstadter, loosely applied to McCarthyite types with a crypto-fascist streak who were much less “American” than those they denounced. And from their unwitting vantage point of a half-century past, no one portrayed the current administration better than Adorno and Hofstadter -- 9/11 merely helped to put that portrayal in stark relief.

Hofstadter’s “pseudoconservative” -- so named because of the subject’s radicalism, not traditional conservatism -- was, deep down, the living antithesis of American ideals. He was “a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their destruction” (emphasis added). This flag-waving, cliché-spouting, dissent-hating patriot both loathed democratic government and endorsed its worst oppressions. Again, think McCarthy.

Adorno’s associated “authoritarian personality” possessed, among others, these traits: a generally hostile frame of mind; an obsession with characterizing groups and individuals in terms of the “strong” and “weak”; a fixed adherence to what he holds as “moral values”; an urge to punish whoever violates those values; and an animosity toward stereotyped “bleeding hearts.”

Frame them together -- the authoritarian and pseudoconservative -- and you have a creepy psychological snapshot of this country’s leaders and the retrograde population that still supports them. It’s an oddly antiAmerican-values bunch that, even though in the minority, managed to gain a foothold because so many in the majority just didn’t give a damn soon enough. We permitted a bloodless, ideological coup.

Consider the above disorders in relation to the Bushies. They and their domestic cheerleaders got us into the madness of invasion and occupation, which invited the madness of detainee abuse, because it was the feel-good, muscular thing to do: They cooked up a threat and then devoured it. They manipulated democratic consent. They showed the world who’s strong and who’s weak (the foreign ninnies not joining us, the critical ninnies at home). They exploited “moral values” as political cover. And above all they pushed the notion that our actions were the ennoblement of American ideals -- when they decidedly were not.

But in America’s defense I’ll say this to the world: Things are changing. Not within the difficult and diehard minority, God knows, which we’ll always have and every nation has. But within the majority, which, according to polls, has had enough from our authoritarian-pseudoconservative collection of neo-McCarthyites.

So don’t give up on us just yet.

Whoops. Now Grover Norquist is under investigation.

At this rate the dress code for the New School for Right-Wing Ideological Research will be orange jumpsuits.

Sorry for the loading problems you may have experienced with this page. The server's had trouble. I think it's now resolved, however.

Who’s on first …

Col. Theodore Nicholas, director of intelligence in Afghanistan: “I did not put pressure on the interrogation cell to violate standards to gain information.” (June, 2004)

Capt. Britton Hopper, commander of an intelligence battalion in Afghanistan: “There was a lot of pressure to get more intelligence … coming from top down.” (August, 2004)

A Frist-rate hypocrite

In early March, when Democratic Senator Robert Byrd compared the Republican anti-filibuster campaign to Nazi tactics, fellow senator Rick Santorum demanded that Byrd retract his comments because they "lessen the credibility of the senator and the decorum of the Senate."

Naturally, Santorum himself has now compared Democrats to Nazis: "[The Dems' nuclear opposition] is the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying: 'I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It's mine.’” The senator later said he didn’t mean to offend and his comments were only intended "to dramatize the principle of an argument."

Mr. Santorum, I don’t need to “dramatize” the argument I’m about to make, because you -- as the Senate majority’s No. 3 guy and No. 1 hypocrite -- made it for me. But do feel free to take offense. It’s meant that way.

When you launched your Senate campaign in 1993, you defended your minority party’s tactics of delay, obstructionism and filibustering -- with a twist, of course. To a group of retired steel workers you said the Republican strategy of balling up Clinton’s programs was nothing like “gridlock” (USA Today, April 16, 1993). No, you in the House (then) and your GOP playmates in the Senate were just “trying to let the American public have a voice in what's happening," which is precisely what the Dems are now doing and you’re dead against, on “principle.”

The next year a bipartisan group of noted politicos (e.g. Barry Goldwater and Elliott Richardson), who were sick of the obstructionism your party favored, got together to do some math. ''Action, Not Gridlock!'' as this group called itself, “compiled all the Senate votes on ‘cloture,’ the procedure to end debate on a filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass, and came up with ‘democracy scores’ [up to 100 percent] for every member…. 32 Republicans had ratings below 20 percent” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 30, 1994). Thirty-two of your ideological pals, Rick, pro-filibuster all the way.

A bit later, after your November ’94 election to the Senate, the Post-Gazette noted that “in the past year, Republicans in the Senate, despite being a minority, have managed to block much of Clinton's agenda by starting filibusters that Democrats couldn't muster 60 votes to stop.” But you, being you, once again took a hypocritical tack in defense of filibustering. Well, sure, you had said your party didn’t do “gridlock,” but on the other hand, ''Republican leaders in the past have had to play guerrilla warfare in order to accomplish things'' (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 10, 1994). The English language is a marvelous tool for smarmy distortion, don’t you agree?

Next, Rick, let’s take a brief look at your own filibuster record.

“Following is the 57-to-43 roll-call vote by which the Senate today defeated a move to close debate on the nomination of Dr. Henry W. Foster Jr. to be Surgeon General… Forty-six Democrats and 11 Republicans voted yes; 43 Republicans voted no.

“Pennsylvania: Santorum (R) No” (The New York Times, June 22, 1995).

Here we are again three days later:

“Dr. Henry Foster's nomination as surgeon general appears dead after two successive attempts to end a filibuster against him in the Senate failed.

“Voting against: Rick Santorum, R-Pa” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 25, 1995).

And here we are yet again on yet another up-or-down matter:

“Following is the 54-to-46 roll-call by which the Senate voted today on ending a filibuster on campaign finance legislation.

“NO … Santorum, Pa” (The New York Times, June 26, 1996).

That’s your record through only mid-1996. But it’s enough.

We know what you’d say to this, Rick. You’d say these votes aren’t fair comparisons because the nuclear option detonates only on judicial nominations -- not surgeons general or campaign finance legislation. But we also know that’s a pile of hooey.

Had today’s urgent GOP concern been a Democratic blockade against an ultraconservative surgeon general, let’s say, then you and your friends would be protesting that the nuclear option would be limited to that case. We both know you would. We all know it.

And don’t think we don’t also know that after successfully dismantling judicial filibusters that you won’t go after every unwanted filibuster.

We’re braced for it, because “it” is what makes you who you are, Rick -- a class-A, over-the-top, Frist-rate hypocrite.

Back to the Future in Iraq

Yesterday I checked out a few randomly chosen newspaper stories from two years ago to see precisely what was being said a couple months after our thumbs-up, mission-accomplished experience in Iraq. What an experience in itself.

It began with this choice USA Today report from July 3, 2003: “U.S. officials say that once security is established and electricity and other services are restored, winning over the population and crushing the resistance will be easier. ‘It is a transition,’ says [Baghdad’s provisional mayor] Ted Morris.”

Yeah, Ted, I think “transition” is what your diplomatic predecessors called Dien Bien Phu, Diem’s getting whacked and the Tet offensive -- all of which worked out swimmingly (even Tet, which we managed to lose while winning). But keep working on establishing security, electricity and “other services,” Ted … from wherever you smartly hightailed it to.

The same piece continued: “In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld chafes at any comparison between the situation in Iraq and the quagmire of the Vietnam War [in terms of both being ‘guerilla’ wars]. ‘It's a different time,’ Rumsfeld said at a briefing Monday. ‘It's a different era. It's a different place.’”

Right. Now this story, also from USA Today, just 15 days later: “On Wednesday, Army Gen. John Abizaid, the head of Central Command, said the ongoing conflict in Iraq meets the Pentagon's definition of a guerrilla campaign…. Abizaid ‘is reflecting what everybody on the ground already knows,’ says Dan Christman, a retired Army lieutenant general who helped plan for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. ‘I don't know why he (Rumsfeld) gets himself into these boxes. It clearly is a guerrilla war.’”

Well, here’s a thought, General Christman. Maybe Rumsfeld isn’t the ingenious geopolitician his publicity department says he is. Maybe he’s just a pompous ass with an ingenious publicity department.

This story from the Christian Science Monitor, same day as above -- July 18 -- was prescient in its understatement: “Analysts suggest that the Bush administration has avoided making the politically difficult decision to deploy 30-40,000 more troops to truly secure the key roads to Amman, Jordan, or the Baghdad airport. They argue that the Bush administration message is: ‘Trust us, we have things under control,’ leaving some soldiers here wondering if the White House really understands the situation.”

How many times this week have you read a piece on Iraqi events that contained multiple quotes from US soldiers castigating government superiors for “misunderstanding” the situation. I can imagine that a couple days later then -- July 20, 2003 -- when some of these soldiers sat down to read the Washington Post on-line, they were just as incensed to read of the “earlier administration insistence that assaults on coalition troops and cooperating Iraqis were no more than isolated manifestations of lawlessness.”

The administration’s former “insistence” brings to mind the Patton scene in which the freshly minted lieutenant general is reassured of allied air superiority right before the Luftwaffe pounds his headquarters.

Finally, this item that I ran across (the Independent, July 20, 2003) was again related to the harrowing concept of Vietnam redux that I wrote about yesterday: “An influential Sunni imam, speaking outside a mosque in north-west Baghdad, could not resist the Vietnam comparison. ‘Both wars -- Vietnam and Iraq -- were illegal under international law,’ the imam said. ‘And in both, the enemy is the same -- the United States.’ He predicted that Islam would provide the same sort of ideological underpinning for Iraqi resistance that Ho Chi Minh's nationalistic Communism did for the Vietnamese four decades ago.”

What I found curious about that paragraph was the predicted parallel of Islam providing “ideological” support as Ho Chi Minh had done -- when of course Ho’s support of the Viet Cong far exceeded the merely ideological. Ideas do have consequences, as the right is fond of saying; and I might add, especially when they come out of the end of a gun barrel.

Two years down, thousands dead, and the trouble’s just beginning. It’s horrifying to imagine the still-to-come carnage for all sides that the Bush administration never foresaw and, in an act of criminal negligence, never wanted to see.

This just in ...

... "From the Desk of David Horowitz" -- a living, breathing blob of silliness who for God-knows-what-reason has put me on his e-fundraising list.

"Dear P.M.:

"[yada yada yada] ... The Left in America would rather defend terrorists who murder innocent Americans than support our President and our efforts to keep America safe."

Holy tirade! That's over the top even for Horowitz. His funds must be sagging.

The ideology of ignorance

Reading journalists’ reports from Iraq is like being sucked into a time warp where ancient incompetence comes flying at you with mocking vengeance. It’s a confirming experience as well -- a confirmation that policy makers will never learn as long as ideology is seen as capable of trumping history.

This time around the Bushies were the best-and-brightest “adults.” They were the steely-eyed realists who understood the world as it is and how to handle it. They alone -- the neocon grownups and hard-asses -- could overcome the wimpish stain of Vietnam on America’s ego.

Iraq I? The Balkans? Child’s play. Not nearly enough to refurbish our standing in the world and erase those 1960s remnants of failure. They would do it right, in a big way, in the Middle East, and start with Iraq. They could hardly wait for excuses. In fact, they didn’t wait. They just made some up.

Now we read tales – literally from the Independent press – that reveal how similar the screw-up in Iraq is to that of Vietnam decades ago. To wit …

“The extent of US failure to control Iraq is masked by the fact that it is too dangerous for the foreign media to venture out of central Baghdad…. US forces seldom venture into much of Iraq.” Needless to say, journalists and doughboys weren’t too fond of careening around South Vietnam’s unhealthy countryside, either, and for the same “scurry, sniff, flinch” reasons.

During our Fallujah assault, the Independent noted that as we were being told of that “victory,” “at the same moment an insurgent offensive had captured most of Mosul.” The same Whackamole game played out from village to village in … yep … Vietnam.

And there was this: “Washington [has] never appreciated the fact that the US occupation was so unpopular.” Why? “Their massive firepower meant they won any set-piece battle, but it also meant that they accidentally killed so many Iraqi civilians that they were the recruiting sergeants of the resistance.” Ask any surviving South Vietnamese peasant what he thought of US forces and their “massive firepower” and you’d get the same frame of mind.

So how do you deal with locals distrustful of your presence? Easy. “The solution for the White House has been to build up an Iraqi force to take the place of US soldiers” – many of whom have “mutinied … or refused to fight.” You of course will recall the vast cooperation we received from the South Vietnamese regular forces, which operated in a perpetual state of getting up to speed. And now the New York Times reports that in Iraq the “build up” may take a bit longer than projected. Well blow me away.

Just as familiar is this chestnut: “The US army [is] also too thin on the ground.” Again, the difference between the Iraq situation and Vietnam is one without a distinction. True, in Iraq, Washington never planned enough troops. So we’re losing. In Vietnam the brass was forever citing a precise number of troops to achieve victory, which Washington gave them. We still lost. The old right -- the neocons’ predecessors -- concocted the myth that Washington starved the military in Vietnam and that was the reason we lost. But the fact is, there are never enough troops to occupy a nation that doesn’t want to be occupied. Ask the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Soviet Empire….

That, combined with the Independent’s concluding remarks, sum up the cause of failure redux: “The greatest failure of the US in Iraq is not that mistakes were made but that its political system has proved incapable of redressing them.”

There you go. That just about says it all. During Vietnam, Washington’s political system was enmeshed in the ideology of battling communism. It failed to comprehend the war’s nationalist roots and its fundamental construct of a civil war rather than expansionist aggression. So whatever wasn’t working was better than what they perceived as the alternative. And of course policy makers and the military always dangled victory in Vietnam. Let’s keep at it a little longer and we’ll have this mess cleaned up.

Ideology, entrenched thinking, false hope and fear of admitting failure and reversing course -- the combined causes of lasting pain in Vietnam.

As George C. Herring reflected in America’s Longest War: The Unites States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, “Failure never comes easily, but it comes especially hard when success is anticipated at little cost.”

[Please remember that your financial support -- in any amount -- of this site's running commentary is most needed and, of course, most appreciated. My thanks, P.M.]

The trail from McCarthyism to post-9/11 hysteria -- and liberal complicity

Most Americans have either forgotten or never learned that McCarthyism was an equal-opportunity political crime wave. The Wisconsin senator made a big -- and utterly unexpected -- media splash with his Wheeling, West Virginia speech (“I hold in my hand the names of …”) and commentators soon slapped his name on anticommunist witchhunting for convenience’s sake. But both parties tangoed; there was, indeed, both a Republican and Democratic McCarthyism at work. In fact, some historians believe that the Truman administration was more culpable in launching “McCarthyism” than McCarthy. (I don’t happen to subscribe to that argument, but I concede a partial validity.)

Although it’s true that McCarthy, especially, used anticommunism as a partisan weapon against domestic liberalism (read him and you’ll see Tail-Gunner Joe gunning for Democrats more than homegrown commies, whom he knew were as scarce as Alabama Buddhists), anticommunism’s political appeal and hysterical grip were too strong a force for most liberal politicians to publicly reject or denounce. To their discredit, they either played along or remained silent, hoping the madness would simply die a quick and quiet death. Consequently the madness lasted much longer than most political life-expectancies, and liberal complicity gave oxygen to needless suffering.

We face a similar and as great a danger today. Too many liberal pols are playing along, hoping for a better day, a more enlightened electorate, a more opportune time to strike.

And as in the 1950s, the reasonable person of today must ask -- If not now, when? Because here’s a little more eye-opening history that connects the then and now: The lunacy of today’s right still swings from the politico-genealogical tree of Republican McCarthyism and its eponymous practitioner.

McCarthy’s anti-liberal goonism reemerged in the 1960s through brash Goldwaterism -- Barry himself being a classic cold warrior who admired Joe and who added McCarthy’s “morality politics” to his presidential campaign portfolio. When Goldwater was crushed in ’64, liberals assumed that right-wing politics, if not the Republican Party, was as dead as the cirrhosis-eaten Senator McCarthy.

The Old Left relaxed and basked in its permanent victory and celebrated its own anticommunist credentials in the form of Vietnam, while the New Right picked up the strains of take-no-prisoners McCarthyism-Goldwaterism in the 1970s. New Righters carried on the crusade against godless liberals, who in turn ignored the New Right by and large and assumed it would go away soon enough.

It didn’t. Because then came Reaganism, kindly fed and funded by the New Right. He too was a passing fad, thought old and new liberals, who could afford to play along while the public figured out the scam of Reaganomics. Meanwhile the right wing demagogued its case and boom -- those quirky, temporary Reagan Democrats transmogrified into solid Republicans who were soon voting in Gingrichism.

So what did liberals do when George W. Bush then stole office? What did they do with the Bushism they were handed, which came from Gingrichism, which descended from Reaganism, which was birthed by New Rightism, which dropped from the clouds of Goldwaterism, which sprouted from McCarthyism?

They played along. They gave Bush his tax cuts. They gave him his illegal war. And they gave him the post-9/11 free rein that Karl Rove demanded of them -- for post-9/11 hysteria was psychological blood kin to anticommunist hysteria.

Besides, the only liberals winning elections were the triangulating appeasers. Right? And while liberals cowered in exiled self-denial, the right continued striking through think-tank “studies,” grassroots organizing, direct-mail financing, carefully developed media outlets and rock-solid, people-metered demagoguery.

Naturally, what and who did the public hear throughout all this? Well, they heard the message of the ones who were screaming a message.

The political accommodations that degraded to postwar McCarthyism have survived in odd ways and brought us to the crossroads we stand at today. Democrats can either feed more accommodation or they can fight the right’s growing ideological hegemony and jackbooted tactics that have sponsored a criminal war abroad and homebred autocratic overtones, which always, always grow uglier.

Senate Democrats seem poised, finally, to fight. But salvation also starts around the office water cooler.

So don’t be shy. Tell a wayward friend it’s time to shut down McCarthyism for good.

Is there anyone left …?

Is there anyone left other than delusional neocons, Bush-admin propagandists and personality-disordered jingoists who could say we have planted a flowering democracy in Iraq rather than opened a can of virulent worms? Is there anyone left who could intelligently gainsay last week’s headline, “Iraq on edge of civil war … if nation isn't already in one”?

Is there anyone left who sees anything but lasting anarchy in just one day’s reporting? “A roadside bomb … killed two civilians and wounded four. [An] Iraqi Army unit was attacked by a roadside bomb … killing four soldiers. A mortar fell on the College of Engineering, killing two students and wounding 12 others. Armed men … opened fire on an Iraqi National Guard patrol, killing two civilians and wounding three people. An officer in the Ministry of Defense was attacked ‘by a large terrorist group.’ Escort guards opened fire, killing four of the attackers.”

Is there anyone left who could read the rest of this single-day report without a wrenching sickness in the pit of the stomach? “Armed men attacked a primary school as students were taking an examination. Two teachers were killed and many were wounded. [T]he same group opened fire on local shops, leaving at least one man dead. A police officer and his wife were killed by an unidentified armed group and their three children were badly wounded. The bodies of three beheaded men were found. This follows the discovery on Sunday of the bodies of 46 people who had been killed.”

Is there anyone left who doesn’t recall the millions of prewar voices who predicted all this?

Is there anyone left who could dispute the semantic accuracy of saying bluntly that the Bush administration surpassed the realm of ineptitude and entered that of criminality three years ago? Is there anyone left, that is, who can dispute the memorandum evidence of Bush’s criminality as published by the Sunday Times of Britain? Can anyone deny the high crime behind Bush’s defying the memo’s conclusion that “self-defence” and “humanitarian intervention … could not be used” as legal justifications “in this case”? Is there anyone left who doesn’t still have those very justifications howled by Bush ringing in his ears?

Is there anyone left who could argue with downingstreetmemo.com’s synopsis that the memo “detail[s] how our government did not believe Iraq was a greater threat than other nations; how intelligence was manipulated to sell the case for war to the American public; and how all the talk of ‘war as a last resort’ was mere hollow pretense”? Is there anyone left who is surprised by this?

Is there anyone left other than bereaved American families searching desperately for comfort who doesn’t know with nauseous certainty that our sons and daughters have died in vain? Is there anyone left who can deny that bereaved Iraqi families and tens of thousands of Iraqi innocents have borne the burden of political opportunism and lofty theory?

Is there anyone left who could dispute that the Crime of Iraq and resulting Crimes of Abu Graib have subverted American credibility for years to come? That we are now weaker militarily than before? More vulnerable than before? That we are now a more justifiable target in the minds of Islamic extremists than before?

Is there anyone left to dispute that George W. Bush has done more for the cause of Islamic extremism than a thousand Osama bin Ladens?

Is there anyone left on whom it hasn’t dawned that Bill Clinton, having been impeached for “collateral” sexual deception, would have been impeached, convicted, drawn and quartered by the same Republicans for conspiring to deceive Congress about an illegal war?

And not least of all, given the Bush administration’s propensity for criminal conspiracy and the media’s propensity to wink at it, how long will anyone in America be safe to speak out about it?

[Please remember that your financial support -- in any amount -- of this site's running commentary is most needed, and of course most appreciated. My thanks. P.M.]