PMC Commentary

A great American died Saturday. John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the few, truly articulate voices of socialist opposition to modern American madness, is gone.

The New York Times has an excellent survey of his life and ideas. If for no other reason I recommend it as a first-rate compendium of delightful Galbraithisms, such as: “One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.”

In this held-over age of the vastly “comfortably pretentious,” Galbraith’s eloquent humanity will be missed.

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. has a retrospective piece on “the issue of preventive war as a presidential prerogative” in today’s Washington Post. As is the nettlesome habit of all historians, Schlesinger points out that this particular perversion of foreign policy is “hardly new” under George W. Bush, citing James Polk’s little adventure down Mexico way and Abraham Lincoln’s reasoned opposition to it:

“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure [emphasis added]. . . . If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’; but he will say to you, ‘Be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’"

True, Lincoln opposed the Mexican War, regarded Polk’s casus belli “intelligence” as thoroughly cooked and inveighed against the venture as the worst sort of presidential folly and challenged ethics (though it should be remembered that Lincoln was the most political of creatures, and as such his Whig loyalties no doubt influenced his public reasoning against a Democratic president).

What Schlesinger omitted, however, was Lincoln’s almost immediate regret that he ever opposed the bloody thing. His outspokenness killed -- permanently, he thought at the time -- his political future. He discovered the hard way how impolitic it is to oppose a war in progress, no matter how many excellent reasons may exist to do so.

That’s the flipside of Schlesinger’s retrospective. If Lincoln were alive today as a Democratic advisor he’d be issuing “Support Our Troops” memos to every client and, other than that, advocating silence. Some things really do never change -- unfortunately.

It’s no wonder we’re faring so poorly in Iraq. Although Donald Rumsfeld professes to conduct our military efforts there under the managerial concept of precise “metrics,” oddly, he doesn’t seem to know his numbers.

Friday, for instance, Mr. Rumsfeld tried to quash a widely publicized six-count general indictment by saying “Out of thousands and thousands of admirals and generals, if every time two or three people disagreed we changed the secretary of defense of the United States, it would be like a merry-go-round.”

It wasn’t “two or three,” Don. It was six. Six is different from two or three. Six is bigger. In fact, six is three times bigger than two and twice the count of three. For a man running a major military operation based on the marvels of complicated metrics, you should at least understand the fundamentals, Don. Really.

This isn’t the first time Mr. Rumsfeld has publicly betrayed his deplorable knowledge of basic math, either. Soon after he helped accomplish our mission in Iraq military intelligence was estimating “the insurgents’ strength at 50,000.” Yet “in public at least,” reported one major paper, Rumsfeld repeatedly “insist[s] that the attacks are the work of a few remnants of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist party and a handful of Islamic jihadists.”

A “few” and a “handful” versus 50,000. I’m no military analyst, but it seems even to this layman that when facing an enemy force of 50,000 it’s not smart -- definitely not smart -- to conflate that number with a “handful,” no matter how comfortingly propagandistic the intent may be. Doing so is just a dumb con that is bound to catch up with its perpetrator, which it has.

Also on Friday a Defense Department spokesman defended the same-day issuance of “a memorandum to a group of former military commanders and civilian analysts that offers a direct challenge to the criticisms made by [six, Don, count ‘em -- six, not two or three] retired generals.” The spokesman denied with all due Rumsfeldian indignation that the memo was “meant to enlist retired officers to speak out on behalf of Mr. Rumsfeld.” No, it was merely a “fact sheet,” one “sent out to provide people with the facts,” said this master of tautology. “We would be doing a disservice to the analysts and the American public if we didn't provide exactly what the facts are,” he clarified with a further touch of linguistic torture.

Let us return the favor and “provide exactly what the facts are” to Mr. Rumsfeld.

Don, your smarmy shtick of downplaying both the Iraq debacle and domestic criticism of it is so staggeringly contrary to reality even customarily obsequious military pros can no longer countenance it in silence. Your credibility is as toasted as your boss’s, and if you possessed even an ounce of that manly forthrightness you love to project you’d admit to your grotesque maladministration of this war and go home.

The numbers for George W. Bush continue sliding into their long-awaited home and natural habitat -- the sewer. According to the latest AP-Ipsos poll, “Just 36 percent of the public approves of his job performance…. Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction…. Only 40 percent of the public approves of Bush’s performance on foreign policy and the war on terror [and] just 35 percent of the public approves of Bush’s handling of Iraq.”

Richard Nixon didn’t fare much better than that as he was ducking subpoenas, the press and impeachment. Still, although Nixon was crooked, at least he was competent in his own criminal way. With Bush you get criminal incompetence -- or is it incompetent criminality? Either way, even his increasingly tenuous allies are increasingly inclined to use “incompetent” to describe the reign of George II these days.

But is it merely demonstrated incompetence that has pushed Bush’s numbers into the toilet? I think not. I think it goes much deeper than that, and I think none other than Winston Churchill put his finger on the actual reason long ago with respect to his own martial circumstances.

The opening years of the Second World War were not hopeful ones for England. The Brits faced a long, hard road to victory and no one knew its lethal potholes better than Churchill. Rather than artificially sugarcoat the road for an anxious populace, however, in public pronouncements the prime minister always balanced his determined optimism with the stated potential of defeat.

“There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away,” Churchill later wrote in looking back on his wartime conduct. “The British people can face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool’s paradise.”

A fool’s paradise -- otherwise known in contemporary parlance as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Yet it’s not so much that the Bush administration has been foolish -- mere foolishness the public often forgives; witness Bill Clinton’s reprieve -- or even that it hasn’t apologized for its monumental foolishness. It is, rather, the drip, drip, drip of this administration’s deceptions that the public now, finally, at long last, “bitterly resent[s].” They have been taken for a ride, they know it, and there’s no longer any denying it.

The faith-based neocon Bushies are famous for believing that they alone are capable of ignoring with success the lessons of history. Their shot at reinventing those lessons, however, first required deception. Recent events have shown just how wrong they’ve been, and how right honest realists such as Winston Churchill will always be.

A CNN news analyst said this afternoon that the latest entry in the Bush machinations logbook -- the “Scooter” revelations -- “raises serious questions about the White House’s credibility.”

On hearing that, however, what sprang to my mind were merely questions about the analyst’s seriously belated understatement. Did he mean “revives” already answered questions about the White House’s credibility? Puts the final nail in its coffin of credibility? Mean to imply that the White House has in some way retained some modicum of credibility over the last few months?

Historians will someday ponder at precisely what point the White House officially and unequivocally lost its last smattering of credibility, but their consensus undoubtedly will be that that final point came well before April 6, 2006. It's not too soon to agree on that much.

After saying he wishes to remain a major player in the conservative movement, the pestiferous Tom DeLay just said on “Hardball” that the one thing he’s always admired about the left -- brace yourself for zany fun -- is that it has always worked together. The right by contrast, lamented DeLay, is “fractured” -- indeed, “it’s always been fractured.”

Packed into one sentence were both his oxymoronic reference to a fractured movement, and the laughable characterization of the left as having prospered from excellent organization while the poor right has stumbled along for lo these many years as an unorchestrated operation.

Ever-astute Chris Matthews sat silently throughout, of course, then tossed another softie to the nation’s “I’m-so-indicted” propagandist. That’s Hardball in the Beltway for ya.