by H.N. Burdett
Among the more fascinating books published during the past year was George W. Bush's Decision Points. Presidential memoirs are, of course, opportunities to present the case for the defense before historians, journalists and other assorted experts and upstarts have a chance to sharpen their long knives.
In this instance, there was an element of urgency. Had Nathan Miller lived to revise his book, Star-Spangled Men: America's 10 Worst Presidents, the 43rd President of the United States not only might well have appeared on the list, he might even have been at the very top.
On Bush's watch, pre-emptive war was waged against a nation erroneously believed to have had weapons of mass destruction leading to more than 100,000 verified Iraqi civilians and 3,000 Americans killed, as well as some 20,000 seriously wounded; the federal response was abysmally slow and inefficient to a category 5 hurricane that slammed into the Gulf Coast, wreaking havoc on parts of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, killing 1,500 and leaving tens of thousands homeless; and, after four years of record surpluses under the Clinton Administration, the Bush Administration ran annual deficits of more than $300 billion.
By utilizing anecdotes rather than reciting treatises on policy, which various sources allege never much interested Bush, he often reveals perhaps more than he actually intended. Particularly intriguing were Bush's impressions of his closest advisers and aides, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his longtime political guru, Karl Rove, whom he refers to as like a "political mad scientist."
After mulling over his short-listed candidates for vice president, Bush "seriously thought about offering the job" to Missouri Senator Jack Danforth, who had "earned my respect with his defense of Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation of 1991." But he turned to Dick Cheney, whose "experience was more extensive and diversified than that of anyone else on my list." Besides serving as President Gerald Ford's chief of staff and George H. W. Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney had run a global business and served a decade in Congress without losing an election.
"While Dick knew Washington better than about anyone, he didn't behave like an insider," Bush recalls. "He allowed subordinates to get credit. When he spoke at meetings, his carefully chosen words carried credibility and influence.
"Like me, Dick was a westerner. He enjoyed fishing and spending time outdoors. . . He had a practical mind and a dry sense of humor. He told me once he had started at Yale a few years before me, but the university asked him not to come back. Twice. He said he had once filled out a compatibility test designed to match his personality with the most appropriate career. When the results came in, Dick was told he was best suited to be a funeral director."
Karl Rove opposed Cheney's selection. Bush invited Rove to the governor's mansion to make his case. "I invited one person to listen in," Bush says. "That would be Dick. I believe in airing out disagreements. I also wanted to cement a relationship of trust between Karl and Dick in case they ended up together at the White House."
Rove contended "Cheney's presence on the ticket would add nothing to the electoral map, since Wyoming's three electoral votes were among the most reliably Republican in the country." Cheney's record in Congress was knee-jerk conservative and included some hot-button votes that could have been used against the ticket. And Cheney's heart condition "would raise questions about his fitness to serve." Furthermore, choosing George H. W. Bush's defense secretary "could make people question whether I was my own man." Bush 43 reveals that he did consult his father about the possibility of Cheney as vice president and that Bush 41 gave his former secretary of defense his blessing as a fine choice.
As Bush's first term was winding down, Cheney offered his resignation because, the president felt, a widespread impression persisted that the vice president was actually making all of the key White House decisions and by him leaving that notion would be disproved. While Bush says he appreciated the gesture, he told Cheney he wanted him at his side during a second term.
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld also offered his resignation after photographs were released showing U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees. But the resignation was declined because Bush curiously claims he could think of no one to replace Rumsfeld.
Bush had initially wanted Rumsfeld to head the Central Intelligence Agency. But during his interview, Rumsfeld "laid out a captivating vision for transforming the Defense Department. He talked about making our forces lighter, more agile, and more readily deployed. . .Rumsfeld impressed me. He was knowledgeable, articulate and confident. As a former secretary of defense (25 years earlier, under Gerald Ford), he had strength and experience to bring major changes to the Pentagon. He would run the bureaucracy, not let the bureaucracy run him."
Bush says his first cabinet selection was an "easy" call: "Colin Powell would be my secretary of state." The two first met at Camp David in 1989 when Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Powell and Cheney were there to brief Bush's father on the surrender of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
"Colin was wearing his Army uniform," Bush recalls. "In contrast to the formality of his dress, he was good-natured and friendly. He spoke to everyone in the room, even bystanders like the president's children."
Bush was further impressed that Powell was admired both at home and abroad and could "credibly defend American interests and values, from a stronger NATO to freer trade. I believed Colin could be the second coming of George Marshall, a soldier turned statesman."
But there came a time when Bush had serious second thoughts about Secretary of State Powell.
In March 2001, a White House meeting was held on North Korea policy. The previous administration had offered concessions to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il in return for his pledge to abandon that country's nuclear weapons programs. Bush maintains that the Clinton policy was a failure and he was determined that from then on, North Korea would have to change its behavior before America made concessions.
Early the next morning, he read an article in the Washington Post that began: "The Bush administration intends to pick up where the Clinton administration left off in negotiations with North Korea over its missile programs, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday."
Bush was stunned. He figured the reporter must have misquoted Powell "because the story was the exact opposite of what we had discussed at the meeting." He phoned Condoleezza Rice and told her, "By the time Colin gets to the White House for the meeting, this had better be fixed."
"I had given Condi a daunting assignment," Bush writes. "She had to instruct the secretary of state, a world-famous former general, a generation older than she, to correct his quote. Later that morning, Colin came bounding into the Oval Office and said, 'Mr. President, don't worry. It's all been cleared up.'"
Bush also recounts how CIA director George Tenet recruited David Kay, the United Nations' chief inspector in Iraq in 1996, to lead a new inspection team to search for weapons of mass destruction in that country.
Following the inspection, Kay told Congress in October 2003 that Iraq's WMD programs spanned more than two decades, involved thousands of people, billions of dollars, and were elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
"The left trotted out the mantra: 'Bush Lied, People Died,'" he says. "The charge was illogical. If I wanted to mislead the country into war, why would I pick an allegation that was certain to be disproven publicly shortly after we invaded the country? The charge was also dishonest. Members of the previous Washington administration, John Kerry and John Edwards, and the vast majority of Congress had also read the same intelligence that I had and concluded that Iraq had WMD. So had the intelligence agencies around the world. Nobody was lying. We were all wrong. The absence of WMD stockpiles did not change the fact that Saddam was a threat. In January 2004, David Kay said, 'It was reasonable to conclude that Iraq posed an imminent threat. . .What we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially than in fact we thought it was even before the war.'
"Still I knew the failure to find WMD would transform public perception of the war. While the world was undoubtedly safer with Saddam gone, the reality was that I had sent American troops into combat based in large part on intelligence that proved to be false. That was a massive blow to our credibility - my credibility - that would shake the confidence of the American people.
"No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn't find the weapons," Bush writes. "I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do."
Bush, in fact, was so sickened that after it became apparent there were no WMD, he posed for photographs in which he turned one of the more horrific misuses of power by a United States commander-in-chief into the sickest of sick jokes. The cameras caught him mugging like a clueless chimpanzee, looking under White House furniture for weapons of mass destruction. Families of 3,000 young men and women who did not come home from Bush's pre-emptive war were not amused.
If a fair system of international justice existed, George W. Bush would not be living a life of ease at his Crawford, Texas ranch. He would be in the dock at The Hague responding to allegations of war crimes, along with Cheney, Rumsfeld and a few others who incessantly beat the drums for punishing two countries who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Meanwhile Osama bin Laden, who ordered the suicide assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, continues to illude our forces while hooked up to his dialysis machine.
.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
LOOKING BACK TO THE STONE AGE
By H.N. BURDETT
The tax cut for the wealthiest Americans triggered my memory of a piece published by the nonpareil, I.F. Stone, on May 13, 1968, on the Poor People's March on Washington that was to be held later in that same month. After I found the article, my intention was to quote from it and discuss it within the context of the tax-cut deal the Obama administration made with the Republicans in Congress. It was the best deal President Obama thought he could make during the lame duck session, especially since he is looking ahead to two years of choosing between stagnation, capitulation or compromise. Upon reading Stone's insightful column, however, I couldn't bring myself to excerpt the piece; it is just too damn good. So here it is in its entirety:
THE RICH MARCH ON WASHINGTON ALL THE TIME
By I.F. STONE
No other western country permits such a large proportion of its people to endure the lives we press on our poor. To make four-fifths of a nation more affluent than any people in history, we have degraded one-fifth mercilessly.
REPORT OF THE CITIZENS INQUIRY INTO HUNGER
To see the Poor People's March on Washington in perspective, remember that the rich have been marching on Washington ever since the beginning of the Republic. They came in carriages and they come on jets. They don't have to put up in shanties. Their object is the same, but few respectable people are untactful enough to call it handouts. Washington owes its very existence as the capital to a deal for the benefit of wealthy speculators. They had bought up the deflated bonds issued to finance the revolution, paying as little as 15 cents on the dollar to the needy original investors. The speculators wanted repayment at full face value. It was only by promising to move the capital from Philadelphia to a new city to be built on the Potomac that Alexander Hamilton could get enough Southern votes to swing the deal.
The fiscal and banking system of the new republic was thus solidly established on the basis of a $20 million handout to the rich and on the Hamiltonian theory that if the new government would channel enough of the national wealth to the top some of it would eventually trickle down. In the meantime the farmer and the consumer would pay the taxes and the tariffs to keep the investor fat and happy. Ever since then the public treasury and the public lands have been a major source of the great American fortunes down to our own day of never-ending oil depletion allowances. The tax structure and the laws bear the imprint of countless marches on Washington; these have produced billions in hidden grants for those who least need them. Across the facade of the U.S. Treasury should be engraved, "To him who hath shall be given."
One easy and equitable way to finance an end to abject poverty in this country would be to end the many tax privileges the wealthy have acquired. A 12-man committee of industrialists and financiers has just recommended to Governor Rockefeller of New York a form of that guaranteed income the marching poor will demand. The committee proposes a negative income tax to raise 30 million of our neediest above the poverty level. Instead of paying income taxes they would receive enough from the Treasury to bring their incomes up to a minimum of $3,300 a year for a family of four. The additional cost would be about $11 billion a year. That is what the more obvious tax loopholes for the rich now drain from the U.S. Treasury.
Few people realize that our present tax and welfare structure is such as to encourage the wealthy to speculate and the poor to vegetate. If a rich man wants to speculate, he is encouraged by preferential capital gains which give him a 25 percent cushion against losses and take less than half as much on his speculative gains as on his normal earnings. But if a poor man on relief took a part time job, he had until very recently to pay a 100 percent tax on his earnings in the shape of a dollar-for-dollar reduction in his relief allowance. Even now after a belated reform in the welfare system, a poor man on relief, after his first $30 a month in extra earnings, must turn back to the Treasury 70 cents on the dollar while the rich man need pay the Treasury only 25 cents of every dollar he wins on the market even when his normal income tax rate is more than 50 percent. Such is the topsy-turvy morality of the Internal Revenue laws.
A heart-breaking report on hunger by a Citizens Board of Inquiry has just lifted the curtain on why the poor are marching. In the richest country in the world people eat clay to still the pains of an empty belly, children come to school too hungry to learn, and the infants of the poor suffer irreversible brain damage from protein deprivation. Much of the crime in the streets springs from hunger in the home. Much of this hunger is also linked to hand-outs for those who do not need them. Some of its roots may be found in subsidy programs designed to encourage farmers to make more money by producing less food. The effect has been to push the poor off the land and into the ghettoes. A program designed 30 years ago designed ostensibly to help the desperate family farmer has become a source of huge handouts to big farmers and farm corporations.
In 1967 the 41.7 percent of farmers with incomes of less than $2,500 a year received only 4.5 percent of total farm subsidies paid by the government while the top 10 percent, many of them farm corporations or vertical trusts in food processing, received 64.5 percent of these subsidies. The contrast between these handouts for rich farming interests and the stingy surplus food allotments for the poor is dramatically displayed in the statistical appendices of the Citizens Report on Hunger. In the calendar year 1966 a quarter billion dollars in farm subsidies was paid to a lucky landowning two one-hundredths of one percent of the population of Texas while the 28.8 percent of its population below the poverty line received less than $8 million in all forms of food assistance. Such grotesque maldistribution of federal aid is not limited to the South. That same year the U.S. Treasury paid almost $36 million in farm subsidies to one-third of one percent of the population of Nebraska while only $957,000 in surplus food allotments went to the 26.1 percent of its population which is in poverty. One farm company in California, J.G. Boswell, was given $2,807,633 in handouts by the Treasury that year and the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company got $1,236,355 in federal sweetening.
Such are the huge hogs that crowd our public trough. Other even bigger corporations live on the gravy that drips from the military and space programs. We may never reach the moon - or know what to do with it when we get there - but the race for it has already created a new generation of Texas millionaires. The arms race and the space race guarantee the annual incomes of many in the country club set.
Even before the marchers began arriving, the President at his latest press conference was already inviting them to leave. Their demands would be "seriously" considered, he said, "and then we expect to get on with running the government as it should be." For years "running the government as it should be," i.e., with a budget allocated 80 percent to the Pentagon and 10 percent to health, education and welfare.
Ours is a warfare, not a welfare state. And unless the better conscience of the country can be mobilized, it will wage war upon the poor, too. Only twice before in our history have the poor marched on Washington - Coxey's Army of the jobless back in 1894 and the bonus marchers in 1932. Both times they were easily dispersed by force. The last heartless chapter of the flinty Hoover Administration was the attack of General MacArthur's troops upon the encampment of the bonus marchers on the Anacostia flats. This time the shanties will not be burned down nor the poor scattered so easily. A clash would set off the hottest summer yet of our nascent civil war. The poor may prove an irresistible force. The Congress is certainly an immovable object.
At this dangerous juncture we need a crusade of the progressive well-to-do to supplement the efforts of the Poor People's March. We are glad to see that SANE and a group of other organizations is calling for demonstrations of stupport throughout the country for Saturday, May 25. We need volunteers to stand on street corners and collect money to feed the encampment of the poor in Washington. And we need an army of young white idealists to ring doorbells in the suburbs and awaken the middle class to the crisis the poor may precipitate. What lies ahead may be far more important than the election.
We wish the unaware millions of the suburbs could have heard the extraordinary collection of spokesmen for the poor whom the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy brought to Wesley A.M.E. Church for a preliminary rally here last week. The volcanic despair of our Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Indians, Spanish Americans and poor whites has thrown up new and unknown leaders able to present their case with an untaught and unmatchable eloquence. The descenders of the enslaved, the conquered and the dispossessed have found voices which makes one realize what human resources lie untapped among them. It was also thrilling in a time of rising separation to join hands again with blacks in singing, "We Shall Overcome" and to feel how truly this movement stems from Martin Luther King's teaching. If this fails, multi-racialism and non-violence will fail with it. Yet fail it must unless the middle class and the suburbs can be aroused to pressure Congress for the steps required to wipe out poverty. "There is nothing," Martin Luther King said, "except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war." Now is the time for the white and the fortunate to organize for this work of solidarity. This - it cannot be said too often - may be our last chance.
The tax cut for the wealthiest Americans triggered my memory of a piece published by the nonpareil, I.F. Stone, on May 13, 1968, on the Poor People's March on Washington that was to be held later in that same month. After I found the article, my intention was to quote from it and discuss it within the context of the tax-cut deal the Obama administration made with the Republicans in Congress. It was the best deal President Obama thought he could make during the lame duck session, especially since he is looking ahead to two years of choosing between stagnation, capitulation or compromise. Upon reading Stone's insightful column, however, I couldn't bring myself to excerpt the piece; it is just too damn good. So here it is in its entirety:
THE RICH MARCH ON WASHINGTON ALL THE TIME
By I.F. STONE
No other western country permits such a large proportion of its people to endure the lives we press on our poor. To make four-fifths of a nation more affluent than any people in history, we have degraded one-fifth mercilessly.
REPORT OF THE CITIZENS INQUIRY INTO HUNGER
To see the Poor People's March on Washington in perspective, remember that the rich have been marching on Washington ever since the beginning of the Republic. They came in carriages and they come on jets. They don't have to put up in shanties. Their object is the same, but few respectable people are untactful enough to call it handouts. Washington owes its very existence as the capital to a deal for the benefit of wealthy speculators. They had bought up the deflated bonds issued to finance the revolution, paying as little as 15 cents on the dollar to the needy original investors. The speculators wanted repayment at full face value. It was only by promising to move the capital from Philadelphia to a new city to be built on the Potomac that Alexander Hamilton could get enough Southern votes to swing the deal.
The fiscal and banking system of the new republic was thus solidly established on the basis of a $20 million handout to the rich and on the Hamiltonian theory that if the new government would channel enough of the national wealth to the top some of it would eventually trickle down. In the meantime the farmer and the consumer would pay the taxes and the tariffs to keep the investor fat and happy. Ever since then the public treasury and the public lands have been a major source of the great American fortunes down to our own day of never-ending oil depletion allowances. The tax structure and the laws bear the imprint of countless marches on Washington; these have produced billions in hidden grants for those who least need them. Across the facade of the U.S. Treasury should be engraved, "To him who hath shall be given."
One easy and equitable way to finance an end to abject poverty in this country would be to end the many tax privileges the wealthy have acquired. A 12-man committee of industrialists and financiers has just recommended to Governor Rockefeller of New York a form of that guaranteed income the marching poor will demand. The committee proposes a negative income tax to raise 30 million of our neediest above the poverty level. Instead of paying income taxes they would receive enough from the Treasury to bring their incomes up to a minimum of $3,300 a year for a family of four. The additional cost would be about $11 billion a year. That is what the more obvious tax loopholes for the rich now drain from the U.S. Treasury.
Few people realize that our present tax and welfare structure is such as to encourage the wealthy to speculate and the poor to vegetate. If a rich man wants to speculate, he is encouraged by preferential capital gains which give him a 25 percent cushion against losses and take less than half as much on his speculative gains as on his normal earnings. But if a poor man on relief took a part time job, he had until very recently to pay a 100 percent tax on his earnings in the shape of a dollar-for-dollar reduction in his relief allowance. Even now after a belated reform in the welfare system, a poor man on relief, after his first $30 a month in extra earnings, must turn back to the Treasury 70 cents on the dollar while the rich man need pay the Treasury only 25 cents of every dollar he wins on the market even when his normal income tax rate is more than 50 percent. Such is the topsy-turvy morality of the Internal Revenue laws.
A heart-breaking report on hunger by a Citizens Board of Inquiry has just lifted the curtain on why the poor are marching. In the richest country in the world people eat clay to still the pains of an empty belly, children come to school too hungry to learn, and the infants of the poor suffer irreversible brain damage from protein deprivation. Much of the crime in the streets springs from hunger in the home. Much of this hunger is also linked to hand-outs for those who do not need them. Some of its roots may be found in subsidy programs designed to encourage farmers to make more money by producing less food. The effect has been to push the poor off the land and into the ghettoes. A program designed 30 years ago designed ostensibly to help the desperate family farmer has become a source of huge handouts to big farmers and farm corporations.
In 1967 the 41.7 percent of farmers with incomes of less than $2,500 a year received only 4.5 percent of total farm subsidies paid by the government while the top 10 percent, many of them farm corporations or vertical trusts in food processing, received 64.5 percent of these subsidies. The contrast between these handouts for rich farming interests and the stingy surplus food allotments for the poor is dramatically displayed in the statistical appendices of the Citizens Report on Hunger. In the calendar year 1966 a quarter billion dollars in farm subsidies was paid to a lucky landowning two one-hundredths of one percent of the population of Texas while the 28.8 percent of its population below the poverty line received less than $8 million in all forms of food assistance. Such grotesque maldistribution of federal aid is not limited to the South. That same year the U.S. Treasury paid almost $36 million in farm subsidies to one-third of one percent of the population of Nebraska while only $957,000 in surplus food allotments went to the 26.1 percent of its population which is in poverty. One farm company in California, J.G. Boswell, was given $2,807,633 in handouts by the Treasury that year and the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company got $1,236,355 in federal sweetening.
Such are the huge hogs that crowd our public trough. Other even bigger corporations live on the gravy that drips from the military and space programs. We may never reach the moon - or know what to do with it when we get there - but the race for it has already created a new generation of Texas millionaires. The arms race and the space race guarantee the annual incomes of many in the country club set.
Even before the marchers began arriving, the President at his latest press conference was already inviting them to leave. Their demands would be "seriously" considered, he said, "and then we expect to get on with running the government as it should be." For years "running the government as it should be," i.e., with a budget allocated 80 percent to the Pentagon and 10 percent to health, education and welfare.
Ours is a warfare, not a welfare state. And unless the better conscience of the country can be mobilized, it will wage war upon the poor, too. Only twice before in our history have the poor marched on Washington - Coxey's Army of the jobless back in 1894 and the bonus marchers in 1932. Both times they were easily dispersed by force. The last heartless chapter of the flinty Hoover Administration was the attack of General MacArthur's troops upon the encampment of the bonus marchers on the Anacostia flats. This time the shanties will not be burned down nor the poor scattered so easily. A clash would set off the hottest summer yet of our nascent civil war. The poor may prove an irresistible force. The Congress is certainly an immovable object.
At this dangerous juncture we need a crusade of the progressive well-to-do to supplement the efforts of the Poor People's March. We are glad to see that SANE and a group of other organizations is calling for demonstrations of stupport throughout the country for Saturday, May 25. We need volunteers to stand on street corners and collect money to feed the encampment of the poor in Washington. And we need an army of young white idealists to ring doorbells in the suburbs and awaken the middle class to the crisis the poor may precipitate. What lies ahead may be far more important than the election.
We wish the unaware millions of the suburbs could have heard the extraordinary collection of spokesmen for the poor whom the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy brought to Wesley A.M.E. Church for a preliminary rally here last week. The volcanic despair of our Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Indians, Spanish Americans and poor whites has thrown up new and unknown leaders able to present their case with an untaught and unmatchable eloquence. The descenders of the enslaved, the conquered and the dispossessed have found voices which makes one realize what human resources lie untapped among them. It was also thrilling in a time of rising separation to join hands again with blacks in singing, "We Shall Overcome" and to feel how truly this movement stems from Martin Luther King's teaching. If this fails, multi-racialism and non-violence will fail with it. Yet fail it must unless the middle class and the suburbs can be aroused to pressure Congress for the steps required to wipe out poverty. "There is nothing," Martin Luther King said, "except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war." Now is the time for the white and the fortunate to organize for this work of solidarity. This - it cannot be said too often - may be our last chance.
Friday, December 10, 2010
TAX-CUT DEAL: ENGINE FOR CHANGE?
Maybe the tipping point has been reached. Maybe Democrats will hereafter so maintain their anger over the tax-cut deal that they will go on the offensive. Maybe the party of Andrew Jackson, the very personification of American toughness and resolve, will stop whimpering like a horde of mama's boys about being picked on, and apart, by schoolyard bully Republicans. Maybe the party of Harry "Give 'em hell" Truman will now begin operating from a position of strength that should be the birthright of the champions of working men and women, of social justice, and of all of those unlucky enough to be bypassed when silver spoons were distributed. Just maybe.
Thus far Democrats of recent vintage have demonstrated scant inclination and even less stomach for taking on the wealthiest Americans who believe they are deserving of special favors from the political party for which they have paid and are paying handsomely, building in the process a powerful propaganda machine that almost routinely convinces the majority of the electorate to vote against its own interests.
It is the same Republican party that back in the mid-1930s fought against workmen's compensation and Social Security as a sure path to the perdition of socialism and communism. The same GOP that a few decades later blathered that Medicare and Medicaid would surely be the end of the great experiment in democracy forged by the founding fathers. The same GOP that only last year voted in lockstep against extending health insurance to some 30 million people who do not now have it.
It is the same GOP that has preached with conviction borne of exceptional hubris the mantra that laissez-faire capitalism is the heart and soul of the nation, that rules and regulations shackle the economy from seeking its own level. In other words, let Wall Street operate above and beyond the law and the people will inevitably prosper. Prime the pump from the top and wealth will trickle down to the rest of us.
Precisely this kind of thinking did less to spread wealth than it did to compound the fiction that right here in the United States every mother's son and daughter can line their pockets if only the smartest investors are allowed to put deals together and buy and sell totally unfettered. Prime it from the top and everyone prospers.
That kind of thinking led in time to Enron, Madoff, and such outrages as cigarette manufacturers expressing no moral reservations about spiking their product to ensure addiction. That kind of thinking brought the implosion of the U.S. economy and ultimately the global economy. Advertise something-for-nothing and the suckers will line up to get their 'share.' But meanwhile, the tail must continue to wag the dog.
And so, with the days of the lame duck Congress dwindling down -- one in which the Democrats have a paper majority in both the Houses, overstated by the inclusion of blue dogs who often enough have voted with the minority -- an onerous tax deal is struck. In the bargain, the GOP achieved its goal of extending the Bush tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest 2 per cent of Americans.
No one can guarantee how much of the tax reduction would bolster the economy against how much would serve to further bloat the deficit or lower unemployment. To say nothing of the likelihood that extensions of the tax cut will lead to it becoming permanent, with, as Princeton economist Paul Krugman termed it "devastating effects on the budget and the long-term prospects for Social Security and Medicare."
The tradeoff to assure welfare to the wealthiest includes the extension of benefits for the unemployed; a temporary cut in the payroll tax, and tax breaks for investment. How much of this would funnel into the economy is a matter of conjecture, punctuated by doubt.
Progressives are rightfully incensed. A filibuster may be in the offing. Suggestions have been made that President Obama's capitulation to the GOP requires retribution in the form of support for a liberal presidential candidate to oppose him in the 2012 Democratic primary election.
As difficult as the deal may be for most Democrats to swallow, once the new Republican majority House of Representatives and virtually equally split Senate is seated in January, Democrats are unlikely to have much to celebrate over the next two years. With time running out on the lame ducks, a protracted stand on Democratic party principles is countered by nearly one in 10 Americans jobless and the distinct possibility that unemployment will worsen. The economy has deteriorated to the point where even temporary relief is welcome.
The danger inherent in the current scenario is Democrats engaging in circular finger-pointing rather than retaliating with a united front against the efficiency of the GOP machine that brought on the untenable circumstances that have been likened to blackmail and the holding of hostages.
With President Obama making what is perceived as over-the-top concessions to the GOP after interminable polarization of the two major parties, the tax-cut deal, unattractive as it is, may mark the last best chance to achieve bipartisanship that could determine the future of nothing less than the great American experiment in the durability of democracy.
Thus far Democrats of recent vintage have demonstrated scant inclination and even less stomach for taking on the wealthiest Americans who believe they are deserving of special favors from the political party for which they have paid and are paying handsomely, building in the process a powerful propaganda machine that almost routinely convinces the majority of the electorate to vote against its own interests.
It is the same Republican party that back in the mid-1930s fought against workmen's compensation and Social Security as a sure path to the perdition of socialism and communism. The same GOP that a few decades later blathered that Medicare and Medicaid would surely be the end of the great experiment in democracy forged by the founding fathers. The same GOP that only last year voted in lockstep against extending health insurance to some 30 million people who do not now have it.
It is the same GOP that has preached with conviction borne of exceptional hubris the mantra that laissez-faire capitalism is the heart and soul of the nation, that rules and regulations shackle the economy from seeking its own level. In other words, let Wall Street operate above and beyond the law and the people will inevitably prosper. Prime the pump from the top and wealth will trickle down to the rest of us.
Precisely this kind of thinking did less to spread wealth than it did to compound the fiction that right here in the United States every mother's son and daughter can line their pockets if only the smartest investors are allowed to put deals together and buy and sell totally unfettered. Prime it from the top and everyone prospers.
That kind of thinking led in time to Enron, Madoff, and such outrages as cigarette manufacturers expressing no moral reservations about spiking their product to ensure addiction. That kind of thinking brought the implosion of the U.S. economy and ultimately the global economy. Advertise something-for-nothing and the suckers will line up to get their 'share.' But meanwhile, the tail must continue to wag the dog.
And so, with the days of the lame duck Congress dwindling down -- one in which the Democrats have a paper majority in both the Houses, overstated by the inclusion of blue dogs who often enough have voted with the minority -- an onerous tax deal is struck. In the bargain, the GOP achieved its goal of extending the Bush tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest 2 per cent of Americans.
No one can guarantee how much of the tax reduction would bolster the economy against how much would serve to further bloat the deficit or lower unemployment. To say nothing of the likelihood that extensions of the tax cut will lead to it becoming permanent, with, as Princeton economist Paul Krugman termed it "devastating effects on the budget and the long-term prospects for Social Security and Medicare."
The tradeoff to assure welfare to the wealthiest includes the extension of benefits for the unemployed; a temporary cut in the payroll tax, and tax breaks for investment. How much of this would funnel into the economy is a matter of conjecture, punctuated by doubt.
Progressives are rightfully incensed. A filibuster may be in the offing. Suggestions have been made that President Obama's capitulation to the GOP requires retribution in the form of support for a liberal presidential candidate to oppose him in the 2012 Democratic primary election.
As difficult as the deal may be for most Democrats to swallow, once the new Republican majority House of Representatives and virtually equally split Senate is seated in January, Democrats are unlikely to have much to celebrate over the next two years. With time running out on the lame ducks, a protracted stand on Democratic party principles is countered by nearly one in 10 Americans jobless and the distinct possibility that unemployment will worsen. The economy has deteriorated to the point where even temporary relief is welcome.
The danger inherent in the current scenario is Democrats engaging in circular finger-pointing rather than retaliating with a united front against the efficiency of the GOP machine that brought on the untenable circumstances that have been likened to blackmail and the holding of hostages.
With President Obama making what is perceived as over-the-top concessions to the GOP after interminable polarization of the two major parties, the tax-cut deal, unattractive as it is, may mark the last best chance to achieve bipartisanship that could determine the future of nothing less than the great American experiment in the durability of democracy.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
ECONOMY TRUMPS POLITICAL IDEOLOGY
By H. N. Burdett
The Republican spin on the 2010 U.S. Congressional elections -- from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to columnist George Will -- attributes the Democratic Party drubbing to a repudiation of liberalism. But framing the GOP victories as American voters' reaction to the Obama administration's health care and economic stimulus initiatives is right out of Republican strategist Frank Luntz's playbook: Repeat an hypothesis often enough and loud enough and it eventually becomes conventional wisdom. Or, in Dr. Luntz's own words: "A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth."
The "dry recitation of the truth" of the election day turnaround that gives the GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives and a virtual even split in the Senate is that the economic recession trumped ideology. People voted their pocketbooks, as surely as they did in 1932 during the Great Depression; then, Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party were voted out, Franklin D. Roosevelt and New Deal liberalism swept in and the Democratic Party reigned over Washington for a generation.
This year was somewhat different, mainly because when Barack Obama was elected two years ago, the theme of his campaign was his promise of Change. The economy was only dragging at the time he launched his drive for the presidency, but had not yet imploded. The average American voter probably doesn't place all that much stock in campaign rhetoric, but in 2008 George W. Bush's popularity had sunk as low as it ever had for any U.S. president. The idea of Change to a majority of Americans spelled Relief. As the economy worsened, our troops were (and are) fighting in two West Asian countries, with still no sign of weapons of mass destruction, it wasn't hard to read the doomsday handwriting on the wall for the Republican Party.
Two years later, the mess left by the Bush-Cheney misadventure has yet to be cleaned up and the multitude of Americans who have lost their jobs and their homes, and those still hanging on by a thread, simply ran out of patience. The Republican Party had nothing to lose by turning to a Frank Luntz "compelling story." Actually it was an old story. The same one the GOP used once upon a time in its unsuccessful attempts to defeat Medicare and Medicaid: the Democrats were leading the country down the dreaded path to socialized medicine. When you've lost your job and you can no longer make the mortgage or your kids' school tuition payments, does the slippery slope to 'socialized medicine' really top your list of concerns?
Obama's campaign promise of Change had been at first perceived as just another presidential candidate's fancy sounding stump speech. Still the notion of switching horses in the nation's capital sounded better and better to an electorate no longer comfortable with being led by an administration neck-deep in its commitment to foreign oil, fighting unwinnable wars for reasons that seemed to change weekly if not daily and financed by a program of borrow, spend and stick the grandchildren with the bill.
But after Obama was elected and the economy kept plunging deeper and deeper toward catastrophe, Americans soon realized that he didn't have an immediate solution to restoring economic stability. Frustration and anger mounted and had to be unleashed. The national consensus was that someone had to pay and in hard times the party in power traditionally must shoulder the blame, regardless of the degree of actual culpability. Consequently, the comfortable Democratic majority in the House was transformed into an equally comfortable, though not veto-proof, GOP majority.
Republican congressional leaders now sound the clarion that they are training their sights on undoing what they couldn't stop from happening during the previous two years when the Democrats had majorities in both houses, as well as their man in the White House. The apparent first order of business is to overturn so-called Obamacare.
Neither conservatives nor liberals are completely satisfied with either the health insurance or economic stimulus initiatives -- the two most stunning successes of Obama's first two years at the helm. But if the President succeeds in rigidly defending these achievements and the economy vastly improves over the next two years, both plausible possibilities, offensive rather than cooperative politics could backfire on the Republicans.
Flawed as the health insurance law may be, it still opens the door for providing coverage for up to 32 million Americans who were uninsured; that combined with the elimination of pre-existing health conditions as a rationale for denying insurance provides a strong rationale for not trashing the Obama initiative.
The Democratic Party argument for retaining Obamacare is further bolstered by the President's stated willingness to tweak it so that small businesses will not be saddled with an unfair burden of providing health care for employees. Senate Minority Leader McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner might be better advised to cobble a compromise, then loudly and frequently claim credit for improving the health care act, rather than torching it.
As for the economic stimulus plan, General Motors recently announced a $20 billion profit -- an indicator that the American automobile industry may be making a comeback that seemed only a few months ago to be highly improbable if not impossible. There were few Americans who did not deeply resent the bailout of the auto industry as well as selected financial institutions, but should the U.S. economy get its head above water before November of 2012 and the troops are back home, as Obama has pledged, the political landscape will look far different than it does today. In politics, a year can be a lifetime, two years an era. For better or worse, the electorate has an incredibly short memory.
The Republican spin on the 2010 U.S. Congressional elections -- from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to columnist George Will -- attributes the Democratic Party drubbing to a repudiation of liberalism. But framing the GOP victories as American voters' reaction to the Obama administration's health care and economic stimulus initiatives is right out of Republican strategist Frank Luntz's playbook: Repeat an hypothesis often enough and loud enough and it eventually becomes conventional wisdom. Or, in Dr. Luntz's own words: "A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth."
The "dry recitation of the truth" of the election day turnaround that gives the GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives and a virtual even split in the Senate is that the economic recession trumped ideology. People voted their pocketbooks, as surely as they did in 1932 during the Great Depression; then, Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party were voted out, Franklin D. Roosevelt and New Deal liberalism swept in and the Democratic Party reigned over Washington for a generation.
This year was somewhat different, mainly because when Barack Obama was elected two years ago, the theme of his campaign was his promise of Change. The economy was only dragging at the time he launched his drive for the presidency, but had not yet imploded. The average American voter probably doesn't place all that much stock in campaign rhetoric, but in 2008 George W. Bush's popularity had sunk as low as it ever had for any U.S. president. The idea of Change to a majority of Americans spelled Relief. As the economy worsened, our troops were (and are) fighting in two West Asian countries, with still no sign of weapons of mass destruction, it wasn't hard to read the doomsday handwriting on the wall for the Republican Party.
Two years later, the mess left by the Bush-Cheney misadventure has yet to be cleaned up and the multitude of Americans who have lost their jobs and their homes, and those still hanging on by a thread, simply ran out of patience. The Republican Party had nothing to lose by turning to a Frank Luntz "compelling story." Actually it was an old story. The same one the GOP used once upon a time in its unsuccessful attempts to defeat Medicare and Medicaid: the Democrats were leading the country down the dreaded path to socialized medicine. When you've lost your job and you can no longer make the mortgage or your kids' school tuition payments, does the slippery slope to 'socialized medicine' really top your list of concerns?
Obama's campaign promise of Change had been at first perceived as just another presidential candidate's fancy sounding stump speech. Still the notion of switching horses in the nation's capital sounded better and better to an electorate no longer comfortable with being led by an administration neck-deep in its commitment to foreign oil, fighting unwinnable wars for reasons that seemed to change weekly if not daily and financed by a program of borrow, spend and stick the grandchildren with the bill.
But after Obama was elected and the economy kept plunging deeper and deeper toward catastrophe, Americans soon realized that he didn't have an immediate solution to restoring economic stability. Frustration and anger mounted and had to be unleashed. The national consensus was that someone had to pay and in hard times the party in power traditionally must shoulder the blame, regardless of the degree of actual culpability. Consequently, the comfortable Democratic majority in the House was transformed into an equally comfortable, though not veto-proof, GOP majority.
Republican congressional leaders now sound the clarion that they are training their sights on undoing what they couldn't stop from happening during the previous two years when the Democrats had majorities in both houses, as well as their man in the White House. The apparent first order of business is to overturn so-called Obamacare.
Neither conservatives nor liberals are completely satisfied with either the health insurance or economic stimulus initiatives -- the two most stunning successes of Obama's first two years at the helm. But if the President succeeds in rigidly defending these achievements and the economy vastly improves over the next two years, both plausible possibilities, offensive rather than cooperative politics could backfire on the Republicans.
Flawed as the health insurance law may be, it still opens the door for providing coverage for up to 32 million Americans who were uninsured; that combined with the elimination of pre-existing health conditions as a rationale for denying insurance provides a strong rationale for not trashing the Obama initiative.
The Democratic Party argument for retaining Obamacare is further bolstered by the President's stated willingness to tweak it so that small businesses will not be saddled with an unfair burden of providing health care for employees. Senate Minority Leader McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner might be better advised to cobble a compromise, then loudly and frequently claim credit for improving the health care act, rather than torching it.
As for the economic stimulus plan, General Motors recently announced a $20 billion profit -- an indicator that the American automobile industry may be making a comeback that seemed only a few months ago to be highly improbable if not impossible. There were few Americans who did not deeply resent the bailout of the auto industry as well as selected financial institutions, but should the U.S. economy get its head above water before November of 2012 and the troops are back home, as Obama has pledged, the political landscape will look far different than it does today. In politics, a year can be a lifetime, two years an era. For better or worse, the electorate has an incredibly short memory.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
SELECTING JUDGES AND DUMPING JUAN
By H. N. Burdett
Since leaving the United States Supreme Court four years ago, Sandra Day O'Connor has been the honorary chairman of a movement in Nevada urging that judges in that state be appointed rather than elected. The cause O'Connor passionately advocates recalls a fierce debate over that very issue at the 1967 Maryland Constitutional Convention and an appearance by former state governor Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin before the committee responsible for writing the executive branch section of the draft document.
A member of the panel, Judge Philip Dorsey, an avowed opponent of appointing judges, tried to nail down McKeldin on the question. "Now, Governor, wouldn't you say that the election of judges has worked quite well here in Maryland over many, many years?" Dorsey asked.
"Well, Judge Dorsey," McKeldin responded, "on that matter my answer will be the same as what the Irish cop told the drunk he found leaning against a lamp post, 'Paddy, if you're going to stand here, you're going to have to move on.' "
As the color rose in Judge Dorsey's craggy countenance over the unexpected response, McKeldin elaborated, "There's but one way I can think of to select judges to ensure that they will be of the highest quality." Committee members who had long wrestled for a solution to the judge selection quandary leaned forward in their seats to hear the former governor intone, "Immaculate conception!"
_______________________
National Public Radio is understandably and perpetually concerned about the flow of taxpayer dollars that keep its programming on the air. There are those in the Congressional paranoia caucus who are convinced that NPR is a thinly disguised tub-thumper for the so-called socialist state and would excise its funding quicker than one can shout 'red channels.' Some would eagerly substitute reliably conservative Fox News for NPR and be done with the matter.
The constant fear of having the plug pulled on the most informative, educational and politically unbiased organ within the entire American media spectrum is clearly behind the misguided firing of news commentator Juan Williams.
Sure, Williams's comment about his nervousness when people wearing "Muslim garb" board an airplane was excessive, unfortunate and deserving of a reprimand. But it was hardly in a class with the detestable venom spouted by unmitigated hatemongers who foul the airwaves of one of the few nations where free speech is a constitutional right. I don't know Williams personally, but I know and trust people who do and who tell me he does not have a prejudiced bone in his body.
Over the years, I've admired Williams as a reporter and can recall nothing to suggest that he is biased. Though I'm less familiar with his television news commentary, it is difficult to imagine Williams as a latter day Archie Bunker. As conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out on the television program Washington Week, Williams is not a reporter, he's an analyst and as such is expected to voice his opinions rather than demonstrate objectivity and restraint.
I can probably count on one hand with fingers to spare the number of times I can recall agreeing with the fiesty Krauthammer, who could probably put a neoconservative spin on the recitation of a weather report. But his defense of Williams was honorable and laudable.
The most that Juan Williams deserved from the suits in the NPR boardroom was a slap on the wrists. Williams regretted his remark and said as much over the air soon after it left his lips; to view his momentary indiscretion as a firing offense is over the top and smacks of bending over backwards to demonstrate NPR's impartiality.
There are vultures perched on Capitol Hill who would like nothing better than to swoop down on a moderate news analyst, of all people, as an example of what they perceive to be NPR's bias. The lack of courage on the part of NPR management to defy the forces that would use any excuse to remove this valuable media entity from the airwaves is far more troubling than Williams's political incorrectness. One can imagine Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, those icons of electronic media integrity, pinwheeling in their graves over Williams's treatment.
Since leaving the United States Supreme Court four years ago, Sandra Day O'Connor has been the honorary chairman of a movement in Nevada urging that judges in that state be appointed rather than elected. The cause O'Connor passionately advocates recalls a fierce debate over that very issue at the 1967 Maryland Constitutional Convention and an appearance by former state governor Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin before the committee responsible for writing the executive branch section of the draft document.
A member of the panel, Judge Philip Dorsey, an avowed opponent of appointing judges, tried to nail down McKeldin on the question. "Now, Governor, wouldn't you say that the election of judges has worked quite well here in Maryland over many, many years?" Dorsey asked.
"Well, Judge Dorsey," McKeldin responded, "on that matter my answer will be the same as what the Irish cop told the drunk he found leaning against a lamp post, 'Paddy, if you're going to stand here, you're going to have to move on.' "
As the color rose in Judge Dorsey's craggy countenance over the unexpected response, McKeldin elaborated, "There's but one way I can think of to select judges to ensure that they will be of the highest quality." Committee members who had long wrestled for a solution to the judge selection quandary leaned forward in their seats to hear the former governor intone, "Immaculate conception!"
_______________________
National Public Radio is understandably and perpetually concerned about the flow of taxpayer dollars that keep its programming on the air. There are those in the Congressional paranoia caucus who are convinced that NPR is a thinly disguised tub-thumper for the so-called socialist state and would excise its funding quicker than one can shout 'red channels.' Some would eagerly substitute reliably conservative Fox News for NPR and be done with the matter.
The constant fear of having the plug pulled on the most informative, educational and politically unbiased organ within the entire American media spectrum is clearly behind the misguided firing of news commentator Juan Williams.
Sure, Williams's comment about his nervousness when people wearing "Muslim garb" board an airplane was excessive, unfortunate and deserving of a reprimand. But it was hardly in a class with the detestable venom spouted by unmitigated hatemongers who foul the airwaves of one of the few nations where free speech is a constitutional right. I don't know Williams personally, but I know and trust people who do and who tell me he does not have a prejudiced bone in his body.
Over the years, I've admired Williams as a reporter and can recall nothing to suggest that he is biased. Though I'm less familiar with his television news commentary, it is difficult to imagine Williams as a latter day Archie Bunker. As conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out on the television program Washington Week, Williams is not a reporter, he's an analyst and as such is expected to voice his opinions rather than demonstrate objectivity and restraint.
I can probably count on one hand with fingers to spare the number of times I can recall agreeing with the fiesty Krauthammer, who could probably put a neoconservative spin on the recitation of a weather report. But his defense of Williams was honorable and laudable.
The most that Juan Williams deserved from the suits in the NPR boardroom was a slap on the wrists. Williams regretted his remark and said as much over the air soon after it left his lips; to view his momentary indiscretion as a firing offense is over the top and smacks of bending over backwards to demonstrate NPR's impartiality.
There are vultures perched on Capitol Hill who would like nothing better than to swoop down on a moderate news analyst, of all people, as an example of what they perceive to be NPR's bias. The lack of courage on the part of NPR management to defy the forces that would use any excuse to remove this valuable media entity from the airwaves is far more troubling than Williams's political incorrectness. One can imagine Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, those icons of electronic media integrity, pinwheeling in their graves over Williams's treatment.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
TOWARDS MILITARY POLICY SANITY
By H. N. Burdett
Andrew Bacevich, the West Point graduate, former career military officer and Pentagon intellectual who believes the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan was a grievous error, has taken up his pen once again to offer yet another healthy dose of rationality.
In his previous books and articles, Bacevich, who heads the international relations department at Boston University, makes the case that war is armed hostilities between nations and as such cannot be declared and waged against "isms," including terrorism. Therefore, as he sees it, interventions into Iraq and Afghanistan under the pretext of a war against terrorism is a colossal blunder if not a deliberate hoax and the right thing to do is to get the hell out of there.
It would be wrong to label Bacevich a radical pacifist. In the wake of 9/11, he feels the objective should have been a laser focus on capturing Osama Bin Laden and holding him and al-Qaeda accountable for their butchery.
Had the hunt for Bin Laden been formulated as an international police action, with the cooperation of the so-called coalition of the willing, rather than a full-scale military operation, Bacevich would have been supportive.
Moreover, had the obscene amounts of money the U.S. has poured into fighting two countries under the ludicrous rationale that they were threats to United States security because one of them had weapons of mass destruction that apparently never existed been spent on a coordinated international police action, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda might by this time have been relegated to history.
The route of perpetual war chosen by the Bush administration appears to have been calculated to ensure long-term Republican domination of the White House and Congress under the hypothesis that horses are not changed in midstream, nor presidents in mid-war. This together with U.S. reliance on oil providing the necessary national security and national interest elements converged to form the perfect storm that swept George W. Bush into the White House for an unlikely second term.
In his latest book, Washington Rules, Bacevich goes beyond the West Asian adventure, courtesy of the United States, to suggest a far different approach to U.S. military policy.
Over the past 60 years, he contends, U.S. military policy and practice have demonstrated troubling "elements of continuity." He has found what he calls "the sacred trinity" -- a policy reflecting "an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism."
Bacevich traces this thinking to the "American credo," expounded before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war on Japan, Germany and Italy, in early 1941 by the influential publisher, Henry Luce. Writing in his Life magazine, Luce exhorted Americans to "accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."
Luce's manifesto is one that any dictator might pronounce most reasonable, but any leader dedicated to the principles and ideals inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution might rightfully repudiate. Considering what was happening in Europe at the time, with Hitler's war machine toppling country after country, Luce's ringing rhetoric seemed more of a call to arms against an advancing tyrant than standard dictatorial rant.
To ensure that the United States avoids in the future repetitions of lunacies like waging preemptive war against two countries that had nothing to do with the 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon atrocities, while Bin Laden remains at bay, Bacevich calls for "a new trinity."
"The proper aim of American statecraft is. . .not to redeem humankind or to prescribe some specific world order, nor to police the planet by force of arms," he writes. "Its purpose is to permit Americans to avail themselves of the right of self-determination as they seek to create at home a 'more perfect union.' Any policy impeding that enterprise -- as open-ended war surely does -- is misguided and pernicious."
Recalling another early American tradition, the anti-imperial origins of the United States under the banner, "Don't Tread on Me," Bacevich proffers a new military policy based on the principle that this country "does not seek trouble but insists that others will accord the United States respect." Consistent with this tradition, he outlines a contemporary version as a substitute for the current "sacred trinity":
* First, the purpose of the U.S. military is not to combat evil or to remake the world, but to defend the United States and its most vital interests.
* Second, the primary duty station of the American soldier is America.
* Third, the United States should employ force only as a last resourt and only in self-defense.
"The Bush doctrine of preventive war -- the United States bestowing on itself the exclusive prerogative of employing force against potential threats even before they materialize -- is a moral abomination," Bacevich says, "the very inverse of prudent and enlightened statecraft."
He adds: "Never again should the United States undertake 'a war of choice' informed by fantasies that violence provides a shortcut to resolving history's complexities."
Bacevich suggests that the alternative triad would result in dramatic changes in our national security posture: "Military spending would decrease appreciably. The Pentagon's global footprint would shrink. Weapons manufacturers would see their profits plummet. Beltway bandits would close up shop. The ranks of defense-oriented think tanks would thin. These changes, in turn, would narrow the range of options available for employing force, obliging policymakers to exhibit greater restraint in intervening abroad. With resources currently devoted to rehabilitating Baghdad or Kabul freed up, the cause of rehabilitating Cleveland and Detroit might finally attract a following."
Not only should Bacevich's book be placed on Barack Obama's bedside table, it should be mandatory reading for anyone even thinking of seeking the presidency in 2012 and within the foreseeable future.
Andrew Bacevich, the West Point graduate, former career military officer and Pentagon intellectual who believes the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan was a grievous error, has taken up his pen once again to offer yet another healthy dose of rationality.
In his previous books and articles, Bacevich, who heads the international relations department at Boston University, makes the case that war is armed hostilities between nations and as such cannot be declared and waged against "isms," including terrorism. Therefore, as he sees it, interventions into Iraq and Afghanistan under the pretext of a war against terrorism is a colossal blunder if not a deliberate hoax and the right thing to do is to get the hell out of there.
It would be wrong to label Bacevich a radical pacifist. In the wake of 9/11, he feels the objective should have been a laser focus on capturing Osama Bin Laden and holding him and al-Qaeda accountable for their butchery.
Had the hunt for Bin Laden been formulated as an international police action, with the cooperation of the so-called coalition of the willing, rather than a full-scale military operation, Bacevich would have been supportive.
Moreover, had the obscene amounts of money the U.S. has poured into fighting two countries under the ludicrous rationale that they were threats to United States security because one of them had weapons of mass destruction that apparently never existed been spent on a coordinated international police action, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda might by this time have been relegated to history.
The route of perpetual war chosen by the Bush administration appears to have been calculated to ensure long-term Republican domination of the White House and Congress under the hypothesis that horses are not changed in midstream, nor presidents in mid-war. This together with U.S. reliance on oil providing the necessary national security and national interest elements converged to form the perfect storm that swept George W. Bush into the White House for an unlikely second term.
In his latest book, Washington Rules, Bacevich goes beyond the West Asian adventure, courtesy of the United States, to suggest a far different approach to U.S. military policy.
Over the past 60 years, he contends, U.S. military policy and practice have demonstrated troubling "elements of continuity." He has found what he calls "the sacred trinity" -- a policy reflecting "an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism."
Bacevich traces this thinking to the "American credo," expounded before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war on Japan, Germany and Italy, in early 1941 by the influential publisher, Henry Luce. Writing in his Life magazine, Luce exhorted Americans to "accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."
Luce's manifesto is one that any dictator might pronounce most reasonable, but any leader dedicated to the principles and ideals inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution might rightfully repudiate. Considering what was happening in Europe at the time, with Hitler's war machine toppling country after country, Luce's ringing rhetoric seemed more of a call to arms against an advancing tyrant than standard dictatorial rant.
To ensure that the United States avoids in the future repetitions of lunacies like waging preemptive war against two countries that had nothing to do with the 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon atrocities, while Bin Laden remains at bay, Bacevich calls for "a new trinity."
"The proper aim of American statecraft is. . .not to redeem humankind or to prescribe some specific world order, nor to police the planet by force of arms," he writes. "Its purpose is to permit Americans to avail themselves of the right of self-determination as they seek to create at home a 'more perfect union.' Any policy impeding that enterprise -- as open-ended war surely does -- is misguided and pernicious."
Recalling another early American tradition, the anti-imperial origins of the United States under the banner, "Don't Tread on Me," Bacevich proffers a new military policy based on the principle that this country "does not seek trouble but insists that others will accord the United States respect." Consistent with this tradition, he outlines a contemporary version as a substitute for the current "sacred trinity":
* First, the purpose of the U.S. military is not to combat evil or to remake the world, but to defend the United States and its most vital interests.
* Second, the primary duty station of the American soldier is America.
* Third, the United States should employ force only as a last resourt and only in self-defense.
"The Bush doctrine of preventive war -- the United States bestowing on itself the exclusive prerogative of employing force against potential threats even before they materialize -- is a moral abomination," Bacevich says, "the very inverse of prudent and enlightened statecraft."
He adds: "Never again should the United States undertake 'a war of choice' informed by fantasies that violence provides a shortcut to resolving history's complexities."
Bacevich suggests that the alternative triad would result in dramatic changes in our national security posture: "Military spending would decrease appreciably. The Pentagon's global footprint would shrink. Weapons manufacturers would see their profits plummet. Beltway bandits would close up shop. The ranks of defense-oriented think tanks would thin. These changes, in turn, would narrow the range of options available for employing force, obliging policymakers to exhibit greater restraint in intervening abroad. With resources currently devoted to rehabilitating Baghdad or Kabul freed up, the cause of rehabilitating Cleveland and Detroit might finally attract a following."
Not only should Bacevich's book be placed on Barack Obama's bedside table, it should be mandatory reading for anyone even thinking of seeking the presidency in 2012 and within the foreseeable future.
Monday, October 4, 2010
THERE WERE JUST NO GOOD CHOICES
By H. N. BURDETT
Recently I came across a newspaper column written more than 20 years ago and I lost it a little. I've never counted myself among the hardboiled school that professes to be totally devoid of sentimentality, but neither can I recall the last time a newspaper column has nearly brought me to tears. I now pass it on because if the topic has no special interest or meaning for you, it damn well should. Unless you already know - and I suspect more than a few of you might - I challenge each of you to identify the author, which I'll divulge via mass e-mail after I've felt enough time has passed so that anyone wanting to read it will have that opportunity. HNB
THE VIETNAM MEMORIAL
She had known, ever since she first read about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that she would go there someday. Sometime she would be in Washington and would go and see his name and leave again.
So silly, all that fuss about the memorial. Whatever else Vietnam was, it was not the kind of war that calls for some "Raising the Flag at Iwo Jima" kind of statue. She was not prepared, though, for the impact of the memorial. To walk down into it in the pale winter sunshine was like the war itself, like going into a dark valley and damned if there was ever any light at the end of the tunnel. Just death. When you get closer to the two walls, the number of names starts to stun you. It is terrible, there in the peace and the pale sunshine.
The names are listed by date of death. There has never been a time, day or night, drunk or sober, for 13 years she could not have told you the date. He was killed on Aug. 13, 1969. It is near the middle of the left wall. She went toward it as though she had known beforehand where it would be. His name is near the bottom. She had to kneel to find it. Stupid cliches. His name leapt out at her. It was like being hit.
She stared at it and then reached out and gently ran her fingers over the letters in the cold black marble. The memory of him came back so strong, almost as if he were there on the other side of the stone, she could see his hand reaching out to touch her fingers. It had not hurt for years and suddenly, just for a moment, it hurt again so horribly that it twisted her face. Then it stopped hurting but she could not stop the tears. Could not stop them running and running down her face.
There had been a time, although she had been an otherwise sensible woman, when she had believed she would never recover from the pain. She did, of course. But she was still determined never to sentimentalize him. He would have hated that. She had thought it was like an amputation, the severing of his life from hers, that you could live on afterward but it would be like having only one leg and one arm. but it was only a wound. It healed. If there is a scar it is only faintly visible now at odd intervals.
He was a biologist at the university getting his Ph.D. They lived together for two years. He left the university to finish his thesis and before he could line up a public school job - teachers were safe in those years - the draft board got him. They had friends who had left the country, they had friends who had gone to prison, they had friends who had gone to Nam. There were no good choices in those years. She thinks now he unconsciously wanted to go even though he said in one of his last letters, that it was a stupid fuckin' war. He felt some form of guilt about a friend of theirs who was killed during the Tet offensive. Hubert Humphrey called Tet a great victory. His compromise was to refuse officer's training school and go as an enlisted man. She had thought then it was a dumb gesture and they had a half-hearted quarrel about it.
He had been in Nam less than two months when he was killed without heroics, during a firefight at night by a single bullet in the brain. No one saw it happen. There are some amazing statistics about money and tonnage from the war. Did you know there were more tons of bombs dropped on Hanoi during the Christmas bombing of 1971 than in all of World War II? Did you know that the war in Vietnam cost the United States $123.3 billion? She has always wanted to know how much that one bullet cost -Sixty-three cents? $1.20? Someone must know.
The other bad part was the brain. Even at this late date, it seemed to her that was a quite remarkable mind. Long before she read C. P. Snow, the ferociously honest young man who wanted to be a great biologist taught her a great deal about the way scientists think and the way humanists think. Only once has she been glad he was not with her. It was at one of those bizarre hearings about teaching "creation science." He would have gotten furious and been horribly rude. He had no patience with people who did not understand and respect the process of science.
She used to attribute his fierce honesty to the fact that he was a Yankee. She is still prone to tell "white" lies to make people feel better, to smooth things over, to prevent hard feelings. Surely there have been dumber things for lovers to quarrel over than social utility of hypocrisy. But not many.
She stood up again, still staring at his name, stood for a long time. She said, "There it is," and turned to go. A man to her left was staring at her. She glared at him resentfully. The man had done nothing but make the mistake of seeing her weeping. She said, as though daring him to disagree, "It was a stupid fuckin' war," and stalked past him.
She turned again at the top of the steps to make sure where his name is, so whenever she sees a picture of the memorial she can put her finger where his name is. He never said goodbye, literally. Whenever he left he would say, "Take care, love." He could say it many different ways. He said it when he left for Vietnam. She stood at the top of the slope and found her hand half raised in some silly gesture of farewell. She brought it down again. She considered saying to him, "Hey, take care, love," but it seemed remarkably inappropriate. She walked away and was quite entertaining for the rest of the day, because it was expected of her.
She thinks he would have liked the memorial O.K. He would have hated the editorials. He did not sacrifice his life for his country or for a just and noble cause. There just were no good choices in those years and he got killed.
Recently I came across a newspaper column written more than 20 years ago and I lost it a little. I've never counted myself among the hardboiled school that professes to be totally devoid of sentimentality, but neither can I recall the last time a newspaper column has nearly brought me to tears. I now pass it on because if the topic has no special interest or meaning for you, it damn well should. Unless you already know - and I suspect more than a few of you might - I challenge each of you to identify the author, which I'll divulge via mass e-mail after I've felt enough time has passed so that anyone wanting to read it will have that opportunity. HNB
THE VIETNAM MEMORIAL
She had known, ever since she first read about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that she would go there someday. Sometime she would be in Washington and would go and see his name and leave again.
So silly, all that fuss about the memorial. Whatever else Vietnam was, it was not the kind of war that calls for some "Raising the Flag at Iwo Jima" kind of statue. She was not prepared, though, for the impact of the memorial. To walk down into it in the pale winter sunshine was like the war itself, like going into a dark valley and damned if there was ever any light at the end of the tunnel. Just death. When you get closer to the two walls, the number of names starts to stun you. It is terrible, there in the peace and the pale sunshine.
The names are listed by date of death. There has never been a time, day or night, drunk or sober, for 13 years she could not have told you the date. He was killed on Aug. 13, 1969. It is near the middle of the left wall. She went toward it as though she had known beforehand where it would be. His name is near the bottom. She had to kneel to find it. Stupid cliches. His name leapt out at her. It was like being hit.
She stared at it and then reached out and gently ran her fingers over the letters in the cold black marble. The memory of him came back so strong, almost as if he were there on the other side of the stone, she could see his hand reaching out to touch her fingers. It had not hurt for years and suddenly, just for a moment, it hurt again so horribly that it twisted her face. Then it stopped hurting but she could not stop the tears. Could not stop them running and running down her face.
There had been a time, although she had been an otherwise sensible woman, when she had believed she would never recover from the pain. She did, of course. But she was still determined never to sentimentalize him. He would have hated that. She had thought it was like an amputation, the severing of his life from hers, that you could live on afterward but it would be like having only one leg and one arm. but it was only a wound. It healed. If there is a scar it is only faintly visible now at odd intervals.
He was a biologist at the university getting his Ph.D. They lived together for two years. He left the university to finish his thesis and before he could line up a public school job - teachers were safe in those years - the draft board got him. They had friends who had left the country, they had friends who had gone to prison, they had friends who had gone to Nam. There were no good choices in those years. She thinks now he unconsciously wanted to go even though he said in one of his last letters, that it was a stupid fuckin' war. He felt some form of guilt about a friend of theirs who was killed during the Tet offensive. Hubert Humphrey called Tet a great victory. His compromise was to refuse officer's training school and go as an enlisted man. She had thought then it was a dumb gesture and they had a half-hearted quarrel about it.
He had been in Nam less than two months when he was killed without heroics, during a firefight at night by a single bullet in the brain. No one saw it happen. There are some amazing statistics about money and tonnage from the war. Did you know there were more tons of bombs dropped on Hanoi during the Christmas bombing of 1971 than in all of World War II? Did you know that the war in Vietnam cost the United States $123.3 billion? She has always wanted to know how much that one bullet cost -Sixty-three cents? $1.20? Someone must know.
The other bad part was the brain. Even at this late date, it seemed to her that was a quite remarkable mind. Long before she read C. P. Snow, the ferociously honest young man who wanted to be a great biologist taught her a great deal about the way scientists think and the way humanists think. Only once has she been glad he was not with her. It was at one of those bizarre hearings about teaching "creation science." He would have gotten furious and been horribly rude. He had no patience with people who did not understand and respect the process of science.
She used to attribute his fierce honesty to the fact that he was a Yankee. She is still prone to tell "white" lies to make people feel better, to smooth things over, to prevent hard feelings. Surely there have been dumber things for lovers to quarrel over than social utility of hypocrisy. But not many.
She stood up again, still staring at his name, stood for a long time. She said, "There it is," and turned to go. A man to her left was staring at her. She glared at him resentfully. The man had done nothing but make the mistake of seeing her weeping. She said, as though daring him to disagree, "It was a stupid fuckin' war," and stalked past him.
She turned again at the top of the steps to make sure where his name is, so whenever she sees a picture of the memorial she can put her finger where his name is. He never said goodbye, literally. Whenever he left he would say, "Take care, love." He could say it many different ways. He said it when he left for Vietnam. She stood at the top of the slope and found her hand half raised in some silly gesture of farewell. She brought it down again. She considered saying to him, "Hey, take care, love," but it seemed remarkably inappropriate. She walked away and was quite entertaining for the rest of the day, because it was expected of her.
She thinks he would have liked the memorial O.K. He would have hated the editorials. He did not sacrifice his life for his country or for a just and noble cause. There just were no good choices in those years and he got killed.
Monday, September 13, 2010
A MENCKENIAN WITH RESERVATIONS
By H. N. Burdett
As a reconstituted young bachelor I was once urged by a friend we'll call Bud to have dinner with his sister, we'll call her Bianca, which Bud foresaw as the launching of one of those proverbial matches conceived in Paradise.
The ink was not yet dry on Bianca's diploma certifying erudition with highest honors in comparative literature from one of the Three Sisters, though the identity of the specific sibling has slipped from memory.
In Bud's view, Bianca's chosen field of study had prepared her for naught other than perhaps a career in the teaching trade -- for which she had revealed nary a scintilla of inclination -- or wedded bliss with someone of my ilk.
As a newspaperman aspiring to evolve into a novelist, my ilk back then was highly in doubt. Thus Bud's matchmaking could be construed as either an abiding and touching faith in my potential, or an act of utter desperation; I have never been able to determine which, though if had to venture a guess...
At the time, I had recently emerged from a six-month hibernation, writing my first novel, which was not bad; that is to say, it was not merely bad, it was colossally atrocious.
There is little I can recall regarding that initial dinner with the alluring Bianca, other than what I will here relate.
My physical location and culinary preferences in those days suggest that the meal must have been consumed in my favorite restaurant in Baltimore's Little Italy. The most probable venue to which I was known to repair for the ritual preliminary bout to the evening's Main Event shifted between three eateries every two to three months, making it difficult to be precise even in this respect. Recently liberated from perhaps the most ill-matched marriage consummated on this planet, if not the entire galaxy, I was anxious to test S. J. Perelman's theory that the music of love is not the distant strains of a romantic violin but rather the triumphant twangs of a bedspring.
It may be conjectured with a degree of confidence that there was the involvement of a bottle or two of Chianti, which perhaps by city ordinance was a required staple of all meals partaken within that precinct. I further assume that I ordered veal, either marsala or Parmesan, for I was nothing if not a culinary eclectic, and as I place the episode in question it occurred well prior to my memorable though short-lived liaison with a pulchritudinous Washington animal rights lobbyist. The formidable persuasive powers of the latter clamped a tight lid on my voracious appetite for calf's flesh, though not too long after that fateful night we called it a day my guilt level faded with every swallow of each tender morsel of that ambrosial repast, relegating my career as a vegeterian to the cobwebbed cranial recesses where reminiscences of the unlikely and inexplicable reside.
What I do recollect with cinematic clarity about that garlic-scented evening of endless promise and heart-hammering anticipation was my Mensa short-listed's choice of a conversation starter delivered with wide-eyed innocence that Bambi himself might have envied, "I understand that you are a resolute Menckenian."
At Bianca's husky-throated words, there was the abrupt but unmistakable burst of the bubble of carnal certainty. An icicle formed at the root of my spine, shot upward and metastisized. The pervasive chill had less to do with Mencken, whose work I admired as much as I now appreciate, but rather with the suggestion that I might have been "resolute" about anyone or anything.
During that time, I was open for exploration of everything, declining to accept even the concept of face value. There were no indisputable facts, the very idea of which I equated with stagnation, with the waving of the white flag to the omnipresent forces of Ignorance. I could readily identify with E. B. White's internal struggle: awakening each morning conflicted between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy the world, making it difficult to plan his day.
The notion that I was a committed devotee of Henry Louis Mencken was a not uncommon error among those aware that I was a friend of the journalist and historian Gerald White Johnson, whose crystalline insights, genuine cordiality, plain-spoken profundity and Job-like patience had a tranformative impact that I doubt could be learned even had I been more attentive from any religious or higher education institution through which I passed.
Johnson had many years before I met him indeed been lured by Mencken to depart his beloved native North Carolina and join the staff of the Sunpapers of Baltimore.
While Johnson remained a thoughtful and unreconstructed progressive throughout his life, Mencken could no more be pigeon-holed ideologically than he could be persuaded to sign a petition for the Temperance Union. His not infrequent tirades against the social experimentation of Roosevelt's liberal New Deal were no more robust than his puncturing of the pomposity of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover conservatism.
I have never considered mysef a Menckenian, either resolute or restrained. Though I have often enough been amused and entertained by HLM's irreverence and in awe of his industriousness and versatility, I am troubled by anyone who saw anything remotely positive in Adolf Hitler, even, as it was with Mencken, when the appeal lasted not much beyond the blink of an eye.
The Sage of Baltimore's misguided belief that Hitler might be the savior of the land of his ancestry had a short run. That it had legs to stand up at all, much less run, in the mind of such a world-class iconoclast, a mind that could penetrate the shrewdest of mountebanks and detail their poses and posturing with seeming ease, makes Mencken's attraction to Der Fuhrer all the more befuddling.
Even so, I found myself defending Mencken in print against allegations of anti-Semitism after the latter's diary was published some years after his death, as decreed in his will. I did so in a newspaper review of the diary and felt no necessity to apologize for it, nor do I to this very day.
In scribbling his daily thoughts, Mencken could not have used more intemperate language to characterize either Jews or African Americans. I find this especially disgraceful from a man who wrote with such masterful command, always finding the right word apparently even while writing on a newspaper's deadline. He simply cannot be excused for sinking to such subterranean depths, no matter that these were ostensibly his most private thoughts. In fact, he suspected full well that his diary would one day be published and made elaborate arrangements for this to happen, doubtless as assurance that he would not be forgotten well beyond his parting 'this earthly vale.'
Despite HLM's usage of some of the most inflammatory words extant to describe persons of certain religious beliefs and racial origins, I remain unconvinced that he was a bigot or a racist. I am well aware that his diary offers a wealth of evidence to the contrary, but my feeling was then and remains that Mencken judged people individually rather than by the color of their skin or what or whom they worshipped.
Not even Mencken's passing infatuation with Hitler categorizes the Sage as an anti-Semite. It was certainly a mistake and a terrible one for which Mencken does not deserve a pass. But I feel his praise for Hitler was rooted in his love for Germany rather than hatred of Jews. Mencken soon, though not soon enough, understood that Hitler was an abomination, a genocidal tyrant more likely to be remembered as a lightning rod to bring shame and humiliation on the land of his ancestors than as the Aryan Moses.
There were doubtless other dents in Mencken's armor, but none as deep and permanent as his brief attraction to Hitler and the Third Reich.
To this day, Mencken's more rabid detractors continue to use his fidelity to Germany and all things German, which silenced his iconoclastic voice through two world wars to present a prima facie case that he was not only anti-Semitic and racist but anti-American as well. Utter nonsense. In nine well-chosen sentences, HLM digs the grave and buries this misguided hogwash, to wit:
One man likes the republic because it pays better wages than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober, pious and faithful to his wife. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the Cathedral at Chartres. Another because Roosevelt could not leave his job to his son. Another because living here, he can read the New York Journal.* Another because there is a warrant for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs.
Not only do I hold up these as the last words on charges that H. L. Mencken was un-American, but as an in-the-face response to those who would support the resistance by the super wealthy, who only too happily sign exorbitant checks for their country club dues, to raising their taxes. Taxes, after all, are dues for living in arguably the greatest country in the world. One can only imagine what Mencken might have written about the asininity of a nation slashing taxes for the extremely well-heeled while fighting preemptive wars financed by borrowed funds that our children and grandchildren will be forced to ante up long after the perpetrators of these unnecessary wars have gone to their just reward.
*Alas.
As a reconstituted young bachelor I was once urged by a friend we'll call Bud to have dinner with his sister, we'll call her Bianca, which Bud foresaw as the launching of one of those proverbial matches conceived in Paradise.
The ink was not yet dry on Bianca's diploma certifying erudition with highest honors in comparative literature from one of the Three Sisters, though the identity of the specific sibling has slipped from memory.
In Bud's view, Bianca's chosen field of study had prepared her for naught other than perhaps a career in the teaching trade -- for which she had revealed nary a scintilla of inclination -- or wedded bliss with someone of my ilk.
As a newspaperman aspiring to evolve into a novelist, my ilk back then was highly in doubt. Thus Bud's matchmaking could be construed as either an abiding and touching faith in my potential, or an act of utter desperation; I have never been able to determine which, though if had to venture a guess...
At the time, I had recently emerged from a six-month hibernation, writing my first novel, which was not bad; that is to say, it was not merely bad, it was colossally atrocious.
There is little I can recall regarding that initial dinner with the alluring Bianca, other than what I will here relate.
My physical location and culinary preferences in those days suggest that the meal must have been consumed in my favorite restaurant in Baltimore's Little Italy. The most probable venue to which I was known to repair for the ritual preliminary bout to the evening's Main Event shifted between three eateries every two to three months, making it difficult to be precise even in this respect. Recently liberated from perhaps the most ill-matched marriage consummated on this planet, if not the entire galaxy, I was anxious to test S. J. Perelman's theory that the music of love is not the distant strains of a romantic violin but rather the triumphant twangs of a bedspring.
It may be conjectured with a degree of confidence that there was the involvement of a bottle or two of Chianti, which perhaps by city ordinance was a required staple of all meals partaken within that precinct. I further assume that I ordered veal, either marsala or Parmesan, for I was nothing if not a culinary eclectic, and as I place the episode in question it occurred well prior to my memorable though short-lived liaison with a pulchritudinous Washington animal rights lobbyist. The formidable persuasive powers of the latter clamped a tight lid on my voracious appetite for calf's flesh, though not too long after that fateful night we called it a day my guilt level faded with every swallow of each tender morsel of that ambrosial repast, relegating my career as a vegeterian to the cobwebbed cranial recesses where reminiscences of the unlikely and inexplicable reside.
What I do recollect with cinematic clarity about that garlic-scented evening of endless promise and heart-hammering anticipation was my Mensa short-listed's choice of a conversation starter delivered with wide-eyed innocence that Bambi himself might have envied, "I understand that you are a resolute Menckenian."
At Bianca's husky-throated words, there was the abrupt but unmistakable burst of the bubble of carnal certainty. An icicle formed at the root of my spine, shot upward and metastisized. The pervasive chill had less to do with Mencken, whose work I admired as much as I now appreciate, but rather with the suggestion that I might have been "resolute" about anyone or anything.
During that time, I was open for exploration of everything, declining to accept even the concept of face value. There were no indisputable facts, the very idea of which I equated with stagnation, with the waving of the white flag to the omnipresent forces of Ignorance. I could readily identify with E. B. White's internal struggle: awakening each morning conflicted between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy the world, making it difficult to plan his day.
The notion that I was a committed devotee of Henry Louis Mencken was a not uncommon error among those aware that I was a friend of the journalist and historian Gerald White Johnson, whose crystalline insights, genuine cordiality, plain-spoken profundity and Job-like patience had a tranformative impact that I doubt could be learned even had I been more attentive from any religious or higher education institution through which I passed.
Johnson had many years before I met him indeed been lured by Mencken to depart his beloved native North Carolina and join the staff of the Sunpapers of Baltimore.
While Johnson remained a thoughtful and unreconstructed progressive throughout his life, Mencken could no more be pigeon-holed ideologically than he could be persuaded to sign a petition for the Temperance Union. His not infrequent tirades against the social experimentation of Roosevelt's liberal New Deal were no more robust than his puncturing of the pomposity of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover conservatism.
I have never considered mysef a Menckenian, either resolute or restrained. Though I have often enough been amused and entertained by HLM's irreverence and in awe of his industriousness and versatility, I am troubled by anyone who saw anything remotely positive in Adolf Hitler, even, as it was with Mencken, when the appeal lasted not much beyond the blink of an eye.
The Sage of Baltimore's misguided belief that Hitler might be the savior of the land of his ancestry had a short run. That it had legs to stand up at all, much less run, in the mind of such a world-class iconoclast, a mind that could penetrate the shrewdest of mountebanks and detail their poses and posturing with seeming ease, makes Mencken's attraction to Der Fuhrer all the more befuddling.
Even so, I found myself defending Mencken in print against allegations of anti-Semitism after the latter's diary was published some years after his death, as decreed in his will. I did so in a newspaper review of the diary and felt no necessity to apologize for it, nor do I to this very day.
In scribbling his daily thoughts, Mencken could not have used more intemperate language to characterize either Jews or African Americans. I find this especially disgraceful from a man who wrote with such masterful command, always finding the right word apparently even while writing on a newspaper's deadline. He simply cannot be excused for sinking to such subterranean depths, no matter that these were ostensibly his most private thoughts. In fact, he suspected full well that his diary would one day be published and made elaborate arrangements for this to happen, doubtless as assurance that he would not be forgotten well beyond his parting 'this earthly vale.'
Despite HLM's usage of some of the most inflammatory words extant to describe persons of certain religious beliefs and racial origins, I remain unconvinced that he was a bigot or a racist. I am well aware that his diary offers a wealth of evidence to the contrary, but my feeling was then and remains that Mencken judged people individually rather than by the color of their skin or what or whom they worshipped.
Not even Mencken's passing infatuation with Hitler categorizes the Sage as an anti-Semite. It was certainly a mistake and a terrible one for which Mencken does not deserve a pass. But I feel his praise for Hitler was rooted in his love for Germany rather than hatred of Jews. Mencken soon, though not soon enough, understood that Hitler was an abomination, a genocidal tyrant more likely to be remembered as a lightning rod to bring shame and humiliation on the land of his ancestors than as the Aryan Moses.
There were doubtless other dents in Mencken's armor, but none as deep and permanent as his brief attraction to Hitler and the Third Reich.
To this day, Mencken's more rabid detractors continue to use his fidelity to Germany and all things German, which silenced his iconoclastic voice through two world wars to present a prima facie case that he was not only anti-Semitic and racist but anti-American as well. Utter nonsense. In nine well-chosen sentences, HLM digs the grave and buries this misguided hogwash, to wit:
One man likes the republic because it pays better wages than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober, pious and faithful to his wife. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the Cathedral at Chartres. Another because Roosevelt could not leave his job to his son. Another because living here, he can read the New York Journal.* Another because there is a warrant for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs.
Not only do I hold up these as the last words on charges that H. L. Mencken was un-American, but as an in-the-face response to those who would support the resistance by the super wealthy, who only too happily sign exorbitant checks for their country club dues, to raising their taxes. Taxes, after all, are dues for living in arguably the greatest country in the world. One can only imagine what Mencken might have written about the asininity of a nation slashing taxes for the extremely well-heeled while fighting preemptive wars financed by borrowed funds that our children and grandchildren will be forced to ante up long after the perpetrators of these unnecessary wars have gone to their just reward.
*Alas.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
HUMOR IS SERIOUS BUSINESS
By H. N. Burdett
Insomnia in the wee, small hours of the morning is a personal affliction of relatively recent vintage. There are books at my bedside to ensure that, should they occur, such hours will be spent more productively than tossing and turning them away.
In preparation for slumber interruptus, volumes by E. B. White, S. J. Perelman and Joseph Epstein are within easy reach. Anything more challenging would have the effect of caffeine at a time when sleep is required, not stimulation.
At 4 a.m. on a recent morning, the old grey cells were up and running and annoying the hell out of the rest of my contentedly dormant self. I listlessly reached for one of my most beloved of all books: the one that shows the aforementioned Mr. White at his typewriter on the front cover, apparently taking dictation from a dachshund.
There's a dachshund who answers to the name of Tribbie in my family. She is owned by my daughter and grandson. In recent months I have been infused with inspiration not only by Tribbie, but also by a papillon who answers to the name of Penny, as well as by a veritable herd of felines who answer to no names, or anything else, but were nonetheless christened, respectively, Mowie, Conan, Cal and Ellen.
The aforementioned felines and canines do not so much get along as tolerate one another, that is for the most part. Their truce is an uneasy one. Tribbie and Penny not infrequently feel compelled to defend their downstairs territory against all enemies foreign and domestic, bewhiskered creatures all, with impressive ferocity. The barking ones, for reasons unknown to me, are not allowed upstairs in my daughter's house; it may have something to do with their voracious appetites and the need to protect the purring ones from near certain starvation.
Cal and Tribbie sometimes wrestle. When I first witnessed one of their contests, I was horrified to mistake it for a life and death struggle. But rather than blood, I observed a kind of camaraderie. I can never figure out who wins these matches, or even who may be the better wrestler. To the combatants, such calculations miss the point, which, I take it, is, mere exercise.
But I digress. Let's see, I believe I was expounding upon The Essays of E. B. White, which I selected in an effort not to waste three or four hours of insomnia. On the back dust cover of this particular volume, there is a quote from the author himself, his spot on characterization of the essayist as "a self-liberated man (I envision Joan Didion wincing), sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him is of general interest."
To double down on my assurance that should my reading ploy succeed I might return to much needed rest with a smile of contentment, I found White's wonderful piece titled, "Some Remarks on Humor" and was particularly taken with the following passage:
Practically everyone is a manic depressive of sorts, with his up moments and his down moments, and you certainly don't have to be a humorist to taste the sadness of a situation and mood. But there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying, and if a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point where his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break over into the opposite realm, it is because humor, like poetry, has an extra content. It plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the heat.
Reflecting upon that dollop of wisdom, any chance of stealing a couple of more hours of overdue rest was totally negated. Whenever I re-read a few of White's pieces (as with peanuts, it's hard to stop at one), I invariably conclude that he has already written everything worth writing. But then I have virtually the same invariable conclusion whenever I read Shakespeare and Saul Bellow. In the intimidating shadows of those giants, I pick up my pen and audaciously scratch out my own take on the world and its foibles. The gods must be in stitches.
Insomnia in the wee, small hours of the morning is a personal affliction of relatively recent vintage. There are books at my bedside to ensure that, should they occur, such hours will be spent more productively than tossing and turning them away.
In preparation for slumber interruptus, volumes by E. B. White, S. J. Perelman and Joseph Epstein are within easy reach. Anything more challenging would have the effect of caffeine at a time when sleep is required, not stimulation.
At 4 a.m. on a recent morning, the old grey cells were up and running and annoying the hell out of the rest of my contentedly dormant self. I listlessly reached for one of my most beloved of all books: the one that shows the aforementioned Mr. White at his typewriter on the front cover, apparently taking dictation from a dachshund.
There's a dachshund who answers to the name of Tribbie in my family. She is owned by my daughter and grandson. In recent months I have been infused with inspiration not only by Tribbie, but also by a papillon who answers to the name of Penny, as well as by a veritable herd of felines who answer to no names, or anything else, but were nonetheless christened, respectively, Mowie, Conan, Cal and Ellen.
The aforementioned felines and canines do not so much get along as tolerate one another, that is for the most part. Their truce is an uneasy one. Tribbie and Penny not infrequently feel compelled to defend their downstairs territory against all enemies foreign and domestic, bewhiskered creatures all, with impressive ferocity. The barking ones, for reasons unknown to me, are not allowed upstairs in my daughter's house; it may have something to do with their voracious appetites and the need to protect the purring ones from near certain starvation.
Cal and Tribbie sometimes wrestle. When I first witnessed one of their contests, I was horrified to mistake it for a life and death struggle. But rather than blood, I observed a kind of camaraderie. I can never figure out who wins these matches, or even who may be the better wrestler. To the combatants, such calculations miss the point, which, I take it, is, mere exercise.
But I digress. Let's see, I believe I was expounding upon The Essays of E. B. White, which I selected in an effort not to waste three or four hours of insomnia. On the back dust cover of this particular volume, there is a quote from the author himself, his spot on characterization of the essayist as "a self-liberated man (I envision Joan Didion wincing), sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him is of general interest."
To double down on my assurance that should my reading ploy succeed I might return to much needed rest with a smile of contentment, I found White's wonderful piece titled, "Some Remarks on Humor" and was particularly taken with the following passage:
Practically everyone is a manic depressive of sorts, with his up moments and his down moments, and you certainly don't have to be a humorist to taste the sadness of a situation and mood. But there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying, and if a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point where his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break over into the opposite realm, it is because humor, like poetry, has an extra content. It plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the heat.
Reflecting upon that dollop of wisdom, any chance of stealing a couple of more hours of overdue rest was totally negated. Whenever I re-read a few of White's pieces (as with peanuts, it's hard to stop at one), I invariably conclude that he has already written everything worth writing. But then I have virtually the same invariable conclusion whenever I read Shakespeare and Saul Bellow. In the intimidating shadows of those giants, I pick up my pen and audaciously scratch out my own take on the world and its foibles. The gods must be in stitches.
Monday, August 30, 2010
DEFINING FEMINISM IN AMERICA
By H. N. Burdett
Palin Envy may be pushing and shoving its way into our national consciousness. It is high time.
An epidemic of laryngitis seems to have overtaken women of progressive persuasion who mainly sit in silence on the sidelines as Sarah Palin puts her brand on feminism. Her long-running road show is at very least a cash cow for the less than righteous right.
Perhaps the decision to ignore Palin reflects the fact that liberal Democrats are perfectly content with two extremely competent women in the roles of Speaker of the House of Representatives and Secretary of State. An attitude of let them fume, flail and fumble, while we're the grown-ups intent upon leading by example.
Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are hands down the most mocked -- and dare we say despised? -- contemporary American political figures, after Palin, of course. Then again, it depends on who is doing the mocking and despising.
In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister dissect with near surgical precision the Palin conundrum and the urgency for progressive Democrats to find or create their very own version of the Sarah phenomenon.
Traister is the author of the forthcoming, "Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women." Holmes is the founding editor of the blog Jezebel.
The two feel that what the Democrats need is nothing less than: "A female candidate on the left who speaks as angrily and forcefully about her rivals' shortcomings as Sarah Barracuda does about the Pelosis and Obamas of the world. A smart, unrelenting female who unlike Ms. Palin, wants to tear down, not reinforce, traditional ways of looking at women."
Holmes and Traister then introduce the proverbial rub: to achieve this goal would "require a party that is eager to discover, groom, promote and then cheer on such a progressive Palin." There are grave doubts that such a party exists.
A lesson from the women's liberation days of the 1960s was that all women did not sing from the same hymnal regarding feminism. The Betty Freidans and Gloria Steinems spoke to one audience of women, Phyllis Schlafly to a quite different one. Schlafly was an army unto herself.
As the antichrist of liberal feminism, Schlafly had a collection of bumper sticker punchlines that resonated more with the male-dominated power structure than they reflected common sense -- even on no-brainers such as equal pay for equal work (which, incidentally, remains perhaps the most basic and yet elusive goals of the women's rights movement). But how could the logic and fairness of this issue, which even on its worst days never drew a convincing counter-argument, compete with Schlafly's full-throated concern that equal rights for women would lead directly to unisex public restrooms?
Gender equality enthusiasts naively postulated that the justness of their cause guaranteed that the women's movement would be a political monolith. Schlafly was equally determined to prove that this was an absurd misreading of the minds of American women. As much as so many women believe their most fundamental right is to have control over their own bodies, Schlafly presented the argument that no husband could ever be guilty of raping his wife because marriage implies sexual consent.
Furthermore, Schlafly can hardly be accused of the crime of inconsistency. She has through the years demonstrated remarkable fidelity to the conservative playbook: opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which she feels will, among other things, deny Social Security benefits for housewives and widows, as well as opposition to the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and Arms Control. For good measure, she believes -- and I'm not making this up -- that Congress should impeach Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy for casting the deciding vote to abolish the death penalty for minors.
Those who feel Schlafly is an anomaly even among conservative thinkers, should try reading her literary descendants: Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham (when she resumes writing, which she surely will) and Michelle Malkin. That formidable trio would have been regularly skewered when Mary McGrory and Molly Ivins were alive and well. These days Rachel Maddow pretty much has to set the record straight alone.
Meanwhile, though there may be two distinct ideological groups who think of themselves as feminists, the hearts and minds the Maddows and Coulters are even more driven to win and keep are those of the men who control the levers of power, from boardrooms to courtrooms to legislatures and governors' offices, as well as major political party platforms and coffers.
Not too long ago, the grievances presented by liberal women did not at all jibe with the world as most men knew it. Any number of men who considered themselves proudly liberal could readily associate themselves with the womanifesto of the '60s -- basically, equality in both the workplace and at home. But there was virtually always a line that these same men did not want crossed. Whether it was a more equitable division of household chores, changing diapers, or something else, it was almost always there.
Progressives cheered to the rooftops Barrack Obama's call for change in the 2008 election. The response was overwhelming. But the change that could not be predicted was how Palin, in Holmes's and Traister's words "an anti-choice, pro-abstinence socialist-bashing tea party enthusiast," is positioning herself to become "the
21st century symbol of American women in politics." While the arguments they pose are understandable and reasonable, they may be missing the point.
Sarah Palin is easily the most visible woman political figure stumping the nation today, it would require neither very much paper nor ink to recount that her actual achievements -- Governor of Alaska, defeated nominee for Vice President of the United States -- pale when compared with those of Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
As two of the three most powerful officeholders in the United States and, thus, the world, the Mesdames Pelosi and Clinton are making their mark. While Palin prattles on about the evils of tax-and-spend Democrats who refuse to cut taxes but can't resist funding any cockamamie social program that will plunge the country into ever greater indebtedness, Pelosi keeps steering the Obama administation program through the House of Representatives and Hillary Clinton keeps mending overseas fences the Bush administration with its neoconservative cohorts toppled recklessly and regularly.
The more success Ms. Clinton and Pelosi have in their respective endeavors, the more they will be demonized by the well-greased and oiled GOP smear machine -- Clinton as a ruthless combination of Lucrezia Borgia and Therese Defarge and Pelosi as "a San Francisco liberal," right-wing vernacular for the vilest, most depraved members of the most contemptible of all species.
The latter characterization is particularly amusing considering that Nancy D'Alesandro Pelosi was born and reared in Baltimore's Little Italy which resembles Haight-Asbury about as much as Manhattan compares with the crater of the moon. But nothing rouses the contempt of an opponent more certainly than success and Pelosi's record for steering Obama administration legislation through the House of Representatives nearly matches Tiger Woods's string of successes on the fairways before his fall from grace.
Hillary Clinton is regarded by the GOP as the personification of evil, despite her ability to work productively with some of the more conservative members of the U.S. Senate when she represented the State of New York in that august body. But Mrs. Clinton remains a convenient punching bag for rightists, in no small measure because she happens to be married to none other than the devil himself. It matters little to the disloyal opposition that Madame Secretary is making headway in restoring the global goodwill in which the United States spent more than 200 years investing before the Bush administration squandered it in only eight years.
With the American economy still on the ropes and unemployment -- when those who have given up even looking for work are counted -- above 10 per cent, the mood of the electorate can best be gauged by the as yet unknown quantity of the staying power of the Tea Party, the dissidents that Palin leads spiritually if not officially.
There remain legitimate questions regarding whether the tea-baggers can outlast their historic aberrant forebears, the Liberty League and the John Birch Society, whose notoriety was at least equally fearsome but relatively short-lived.
The durability of the Tea Party hangs by a tenuous thread that nevertheless will require significant change to unravel. Unless there is a dramatic economic and employment upward surge within the next two months, the Democrats can expect to take a pounding in the midterm congressional elections -- if for no other reason than they are there and have not yet fixed what was broken.
That a Republican majority bears at least equal responsibility for the damage, through waging a costly preemptive war, through borrow and spend profligacy and through slashing taxes for the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, may be irrelevant.
It requires a greater degree of political sophistication than voters generally demonstrate to comprehend that without the overly maligned economic stimulus packages and choosing instead the Republican option of continuing to cut taxes for the deserving wealthy and allowing the market to seek its own level with as few rules and regulations as possible would likely have had us digging out of a considerably deeper hole.
The misguided machismo which perpetuates the myth that only men are capable of running the country, compounded by the belief that the nation would be in better shape had we just left everything alone and done nothing about the economy,brings to mind the immortal question Will Rogers once posed: "If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't stupidity get us out?" A return to the conservative agenda would be a supreme test of that kind of thinking.
If the most inspiring leader for a back-to-the-future platform two years hence turns out to be Sarah Palin, with her Twitter wisdom ("Who hijacked the term 'feminist'? A cackle of rads who want 2 crucify other women w/whom they disagree. . ."), the Republican party is in real trouble, and maybe even the country.
Palin Envy may be pushing and shoving its way into our national consciousness. It is high time.
An epidemic of laryngitis seems to have overtaken women of progressive persuasion who mainly sit in silence on the sidelines as Sarah Palin puts her brand on feminism. Her long-running road show is at very least a cash cow for the less than righteous right.
Perhaps the decision to ignore Palin reflects the fact that liberal Democrats are perfectly content with two extremely competent women in the roles of Speaker of the House of Representatives and Secretary of State. An attitude of let them fume, flail and fumble, while we're the grown-ups intent upon leading by example.
Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are hands down the most mocked -- and dare we say despised? -- contemporary American political figures, after Palin, of course. Then again, it depends on who is doing the mocking and despising.
In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister dissect with near surgical precision the Palin conundrum and the urgency for progressive Democrats to find or create their very own version of the Sarah phenomenon.
Traister is the author of the forthcoming, "Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women." Holmes is the founding editor of the blog Jezebel.
The two feel that what the Democrats need is nothing less than: "A female candidate on the left who speaks as angrily and forcefully about her rivals' shortcomings as Sarah Barracuda does about the Pelosis and Obamas of the world. A smart, unrelenting female who unlike Ms. Palin, wants to tear down, not reinforce, traditional ways of looking at women."
Holmes and Traister then introduce the proverbial rub: to achieve this goal would "require a party that is eager to discover, groom, promote and then cheer on such a progressive Palin." There are grave doubts that such a party exists.
A lesson from the women's liberation days of the 1960s was that all women did not sing from the same hymnal regarding feminism. The Betty Freidans and Gloria Steinems spoke to one audience of women, Phyllis Schlafly to a quite different one. Schlafly was an army unto herself.
As the antichrist of liberal feminism, Schlafly had a collection of bumper sticker punchlines that resonated more with the male-dominated power structure than they reflected common sense -- even on no-brainers such as equal pay for equal work (which, incidentally, remains perhaps the most basic and yet elusive goals of the women's rights movement). But how could the logic and fairness of this issue, which even on its worst days never drew a convincing counter-argument, compete with Schlafly's full-throated concern that equal rights for women would lead directly to unisex public restrooms?
Gender equality enthusiasts naively postulated that the justness of their cause guaranteed that the women's movement would be a political monolith. Schlafly was equally determined to prove that this was an absurd misreading of the minds of American women. As much as so many women believe their most fundamental right is to have control over their own bodies, Schlafly presented the argument that no husband could ever be guilty of raping his wife because marriage implies sexual consent.
Furthermore, Schlafly can hardly be accused of the crime of inconsistency. She has through the years demonstrated remarkable fidelity to the conservative playbook: opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which she feels will, among other things, deny Social Security benefits for housewives and widows, as well as opposition to the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and Arms Control. For good measure, she believes -- and I'm not making this up -- that Congress should impeach Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy for casting the deciding vote to abolish the death penalty for minors.
Those who feel Schlafly is an anomaly even among conservative thinkers, should try reading her literary descendants: Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham (when she resumes writing, which she surely will) and Michelle Malkin. That formidable trio would have been regularly skewered when Mary McGrory and Molly Ivins were alive and well. These days Rachel Maddow pretty much has to set the record straight alone.
Meanwhile, though there may be two distinct ideological groups who think of themselves as feminists, the hearts and minds the Maddows and Coulters are even more driven to win and keep are those of the men who control the levers of power, from boardrooms to courtrooms to legislatures and governors' offices, as well as major political party platforms and coffers.
Not too long ago, the grievances presented by liberal women did not at all jibe with the world as most men knew it. Any number of men who considered themselves proudly liberal could readily associate themselves with the womanifesto of the '60s -- basically, equality in both the workplace and at home. But there was virtually always a line that these same men did not want crossed. Whether it was a more equitable division of household chores, changing diapers, or something else, it was almost always there.
Progressives cheered to the rooftops Barrack Obama's call for change in the 2008 election. The response was overwhelming. But the change that could not be predicted was how Palin, in Holmes's and Traister's words "an anti-choice, pro-abstinence socialist-bashing tea party enthusiast," is positioning herself to become "the
21st century symbol of American women in politics." While the arguments they pose are understandable and reasonable, they may be missing the point.
Sarah Palin is easily the most visible woman political figure stumping the nation today, it would require neither very much paper nor ink to recount that her actual achievements -- Governor of Alaska, defeated nominee for Vice President of the United States -- pale when compared with those of Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
As two of the three most powerful officeholders in the United States and, thus, the world, the Mesdames Pelosi and Clinton are making their mark. While Palin prattles on about the evils of tax-and-spend Democrats who refuse to cut taxes but can't resist funding any cockamamie social program that will plunge the country into ever greater indebtedness, Pelosi keeps steering the Obama administation program through the House of Representatives and Hillary Clinton keeps mending overseas fences the Bush administration with its neoconservative cohorts toppled recklessly and regularly.
The more success Ms. Clinton and Pelosi have in their respective endeavors, the more they will be demonized by the well-greased and oiled GOP smear machine -- Clinton as a ruthless combination of Lucrezia Borgia and Therese Defarge and Pelosi as "a San Francisco liberal," right-wing vernacular for the vilest, most depraved members of the most contemptible of all species.
The latter characterization is particularly amusing considering that Nancy D'Alesandro Pelosi was born and reared in Baltimore's Little Italy which resembles Haight-Asbury about as much as Manhattan compares with the crater of the moon. But nothing rouses the contempt of an opponent more certainly than success and Pelosi's record for steering Obama administration legislation through the House of Representatives nearly matches Tiger Woods's string of successes on the fairways before his fall from grace.
Hillary Clinton is regarded by the GOP as the personification of evil, despite her ability to work productively with some of the more conservative members of the U.S. Senate when she represented the State of New York in that august body. But Mrs. Clinton remains a convenient punching bag for rightists, in no small measure because she happens to be married to none other than the devil himself. It matters little to the disloyal opposition that Madame Secretary is making headway in restoring the global goodwill in which the United States spent more than 200 years investing before the Bush administration squandered it in only eight years.
With the American economy still on the ropes and unemployment -- when those who have given up even looking for work are counted -- above 10 per cent, the mood of the electorate can best be gauged by the as yet unknown quantity of the staying power of the Tea Party, the dissidents that Palin leads spiritually if not officially.
There remain legitimate questions regarding whether the tea-baggers can outlast their historic aberrant forebears, the Liberty League and the John Birch Society, whose notoriety was at least equally fearsome but relatively short-lived.
The durability of the Tea Party hangs by a tenuous thread that nevertheless will require significant change to unravel. Unless there is a dramatic economic and employment upward surge within the next two months, the Democrats can expect to take a pounding in the midterm congressional elections -- if for no other reason than they are there and have not yet fixed what was broken.
That a Republican majority bears at least equal responsibility for the damage, through waging a costly preemptive war, through borrow and spend profligacy and through slashing taxes for the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, may be irrelevant.
It requires a greater degree of political sophistication than voters generally demonstrate to comprehend that without the overly maligned economic stimulus packages and choosing instead the Republican option of continuing to cut taxes for the deserving wealthy and allowing the market to seek its own level with as few rules and regulations as possible would likely have had us digging out of a considerably deeper hole.
The misguided machismo which perpetuates the myth that only men are capable of running the country, compounded by the belief that the nation would be in better shape had we just left everything alone and done nothing about the economy,brings to mind the immortal question Will Rogers once posed: "If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't stupidity get us out?" A return to the conservative agenda would be a supreme test of that kind of thinking.
If the most inspiring leader for a back-to-the-future platform two years hence turns out to be Sarah Palin, with her Twitter wisdom ("Who hijacked the term 'feminist'? A cackle of rads who want 2 crucify other women w/whom they disagree. . ."), the Republican party is in real trouble, and maybe even the country.
Friday, August 27, 2010
THE PRESIDENT FACES FRIENDLY FIRE
By H. N. Burdett
The soft-spoken, sweet-talking Bayou country sage, James Carville, famously counsels, "When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil!"
Barrack Obama may or may not be going under for the third time, though he's undeniably swimming against a treacherous tide. But Republican congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner can't seem to find an anvil, only the end of George W. Bush's frayed rope.
It's hard to think of a single constructive idea the minority has contributed to the achievements of the first year and a half of the Obama administration: extending health care to from 16-32 million relatively poor Americans; meeting Obama's August 2010 deadline for the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, and the flawed but nonetheless enacted economic stimulus package and financial reform.
Even the GOP rages against the Obama program are flaccid and wobbly, delivered half-heartedly, as though rather than earnestly challenging they are just going through the motions. The right-wing blowhards of the airwaves are equally unsubstantive, only noisier.
No matter. The same so-called liberal media the foghorns of the right routinely bellow against are doing their job for them. The disloyal opposition has the luxury of at least temporarily sitting back, shutting up and enjoying the show. As if the Becks, O'Reillys and Limbaughs are about to let that happen.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich, reviewing Jonathan Alter's tome, The Promise, President Obama's Year One, in the New York Review of Books, feels it "confirms that the biggest flaw in Obama's leadership has to do with his own team. . .and it's a flaw that has been visible from the start."
Rich homes in on Obama's obsession with meritocracy which facilitated his own meteoric rise from community organizer to Illinois state senator to U.S. senator to the presidency, leaving mere mortal politicians to ponder whether he really does put on his pants one leg at a time as they do.
Recalling the administration's tardiness in responding to the BP oil spill, Rich recounts the White House endlessly repeating that energy secretary Stephen Chu is a Nobel laureate, as though credentials trump performance or lack thereof. And there's the droll observation that not only is Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag a Princeton summa cum laude with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, but his spokesman, Ken Baer, has a Ph.D. from Oxford. Facts that would impress only another thumb-sucking elitist.
Perhaps Obama felt that after eight years of Bush administration bumbling incompetence, high brain wattage would blind the public into faith and trust in its successors. Progressives are now learning that the smartest guys in the room can screw up as royally as the least engaged, and can be equally annoying, to wit, Timothy Gaithner and Lawrence Summers.
Indeed Gaithner and Summers are properly pole-axed as the foxes in Obama's chicken coop by John B. Judis in The New Republic.
While it has been argued that Gaithner's serial tax delinquencies should have disqualified him for secretary of the treasury, he has managed to intensify public disdain by his defense of the TARP initiative, his role in allowing Lehman Brothers to go under, and his indifference to AIG paying back their Wall Street creditors with taxpayers' money.
Meanwhile, Summers's reprehensibly imperious attitude as the top White House economic adviser about the inferiority of the judgments and opinions of his colleagues compared with his own, as well as his exaggerated concern over losing the confidence of business interests, have invited questions as to whether he has been helping or hurting the Obama administration.
While some Democrats see Obama's possible Waterloo in his single-minded persistence to pass health care restructuring "while the economy was hemorrhaging jobs," Judis insists that "the real damage was done earlier."
"What doomed Obama politically," Judis writes, as though the president's political demise is fait accompli, "was the way he dealt with the financial crisis in the first six months of his presidency. In an atmosphere primed for a populist backlash, he allowed the right wing to define the terms." Here Judis is quick to point out that had John McCain been elected, the all-too-apparent cluelessness the GOP presidential nominee exhibited on the campaign trail with regard to economics and financial issues indicated he most probably would have fared even worse than Obama has.
Judis goes on to correctly explain that populism is non-ideological, noting that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan each found ways of using its appeal during an economic downturn.
If during times of high unemployment and a weak economy, the president fails to adopt populism, the opposition will, Judis asserts. "That's what (Jimmy) Carter discovered during the stagflation of the late '70s," he points out. "And that's what happened in the last 20 months of the Great Recession to Barrack Obama and to the Democratic party he leads."
A litany of Obama actions that have driven progressives bananas is offered by Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation. The list ranges from backing away from inclusion of single payer insurance, the key to true health care reform, to reneging on the president's promise to fight for "a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming --an 80 per cent reduction by 2050. . ."
Musing upon the horrific George W. Bush legacy, with which Obama still contends and doubtless is fated to continue struggling against throughout his presidency, Alterman says: "Think about the Mineral Management Service, where chaos, corruption and incompetence competed with genuine malevolence to empower BP to ignore so many safety rules before the oil spill. Now multiply that by virtually the entire government regulatory structure, and you have some idea of the kind of mess left by Bush and Cheney to the Obama administration."
Judis stresses that the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter is "the specter hanging over Obama's presidency." Readily acknowledging that Obama has already accomplished more in the first 20 months of his administration than Carter did during his entire presidency, he adds, "But there is a disturbing political resemblance between the two presidents." Both ran inspired campaigns, positioned themselves above the partisan quarrels and scandals of their Republican predecessors, and initially raised the possibility of creating a "transformational" presidency. But Carter failed and Obama is failing to connect with large segments of the electorate.
PolitiFact.com, the St. Petersburg Times database that won a Pulitzer for fact-checking the 2008 presidential campaign offers another way of evaluating the progress of the Obama presidency. It catalogued and tracked a total of 502 promises Obama made during his campaign. One year later the analysis showed he had already kept 91 of them, made progress on another 285, "broken" 14, and was "stalled" on 89. Moreover, PolitiFact singled out 25 of Obama's most significant campaign promises; of these, in his first year 20 already have been "kept" or are "in the works." For a president who has yet to reach the halfway mark of his first term, that's hardly chopped liver.
Progressive dissatisfaction with Obama has less to do with the quantity of his accomplishments than their quality. More often than not, Obama settles for half a loaf. One of his political mentors puts it this way, "Sometimes you can't get the whole hog, so you settle for a ham sandwich." The White House mess will have to expand exponentially to accommodate the stockpiling of the president's ham sandwiches.
Obama constantly invites criticism from those who feel he relinquishes too much in the pursuit of his cockeyed quixotic dream of bipartisanship, which will become reality only when there is ice-skating on the Styx.
A one-term fate for the president is the current conventional wisdom of the Beltway soothsayers, who will never be accused of harboring foolish consistencies that Emerson tells us are hobgoblins of small minds.
But, as a former media colleague constantly used to remind me, you don't top chicken salad with chicken feathers, or something close enough to that. And Republican ammunition, no matter which candidate ultimately fires it, is reduced to belching the Methuselian cant of tax cuts for the rich, borrowing to cover government's bills and turning the tab over to our kids and grandkids to pay, and pulling the rug from under social programs.
The drumbeat for retrogression is less likely to produce a Republican bandwagon than induce an enormous collective yawn. With such a dog-eared, wrinkled and yellowing message, the GOP must pin its hopes on the messenger. That messiah has yet to surface, though there are more than a few aspirants itching to be so anointed.
If Barrack Obama can manage to dodge those frequent barrages of friendly fire, he may not only win re-election, he could even transform the Rushmore Four into a quintet.
The soft-spoken, sweet-talking Bayou country sage, James Carville, famously counsels, "When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil!"
Barrack Obama may or may not be going under for the third time, though he's undeniably swimming against a treacherous tide. But Republican congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner can't seem to find an anvil, only the end of George W. Bush's frayed rope.
It's hard to think of a single constructive idea the minority has contributed to the achievements of the first year and a half of the Obama administration: extending health care to from 16-32 million relatively poor Americans; meeting Obama's August 2010 deadline for the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, and the flawed but nonetheless enacted economic stimulus package and financial reform.
Even the GOP rages against the Obama program are flaccid and wobbly, delivered half-heartedly, as though rather than earnestly challenging they are just going through the motions. The right-wing blowhards of the airwaves are equally unsubstantive, only noisier.
No matter. The same so-called liberal media the foghorns of the right routinely bellow against are doing their job for them. The disloyal opposition has the luxury of at least temporarily sitting back, shutting up and enjoying the show. As if the Becks, O'Reillys and Limbaughs are about to let that happen.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich, reviewing Jonathan Alter's tome, The Promise, President Obama's Year One, in the New York Review of Books, feels it "confirms that the biggest flaw in Obama's leadership has to do with his own team. . .and it's a flaw that has been visible from the start."
Rich homes in on Obama's obsession with meritocracy which facilitated his own meteoric rise from community organizer to Illinois state senator to U.S. senator to the presidency, leaving mere mortal politicians to ponder whether he really does put on his pants one leg at a time as they do.
Recalling the administration's tardiness in responding to the BP oil spill, Rich recounts the White House endlessly repeating that energy secretary Stephen Chu is a Nobel laureate, as though credentials trump performance or lack thereof. And there's the droll observation that not only is Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag a Princeton summa cum laude with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, but his spokesman, Ken Baer, has a Ph.D. from Oxford. Facts that would impress only another thumb-sucking elitist.
Perhaps Obama felt that after eight years of Bush administration bumbling incompetence, high brain wattage would blind the public into faith and trust in its successors. Progressives are now learning that the smartest guys in the room can screw up as royally as the least engaged, and can be equally annoying, to wit, Timothy Gaithner and Lawrence Summers.
Indeed Gaithner and Summers are properly pole-axed as the foxes in Obama's chicken coop by John B. Judis in The New Republic.
While it has been argued that Gaithner's serial tax delinquencies should have disqualified him for secretary of the treasury, he has managed to intensify public disdain by his defense of the TARP initiative, his role in allowing Lehman Brothers to go under, and his indifference to AIG paying back their Wall Street creditors with taxpayers' money.
Meanwhile, Summers's reprehensibly imperious attitude as the top White House economic adviser about the inferiority of the judgments and opinions of his colleagues compared with his own, as well as his exaggerated concern over losing the confidence of business interests, have invited questions as to whether he has been helping or hurting the Obama administration.
While some Democrats see Obama's possible Waterloo in his single-minded persistence to pass health care restructuring "while the economy was hemorrhaging jobs," Judis insists that "the real damage was done earlier."
"What doomed Obama politically," Judis writes, as though the president's political demise is fait accompli, "was the way he dealt with the financial crisis in the first six months of his presidency. In an atmosphere primed for a populist backlash, he allowed the right wing to define the terms." Here Judis is quick to point out that had John McCain been elected, the all-too-apparent cluelessness the GOP presidential nominee exhibited on the campaign trail with regard to economics and financial issues indicated he most probably would have fared even worse than Obama has.
Judis goes on to correctly explain that populism is non-ideological, noting that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan each found ways of using its appeal during an economic downturn.
If during times of high unemployment and a weak economy, the president fails to adopt populism, the opposition will, Judis asserts. "That's what (Jimmy) Carter discovered during the stagflation of the late '70s," he points out. "And that's what happened in the last 20 months of the Great Recession to Barrack Obama and to the Democratic party he leads."
A litany of Obama actions that have driven progressives bananas is offered by Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation. The list ranges from backing away from inclusion of single payer insurance, the key to true health care reform, to reneging on the president's promise to fight for "a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming --an 80 per cent reduction by 2050. . ."
Musing upon the horrific George W. Bush legacy, with which Obama still contends and doubtless is fated to continue struggling against throughout his presidency, Alterman says: "Think about the Mineral Management Service, where chaos, corruption and incompetence competed with genuine malevolence to empower BP to ignore so many safety rules before the oil spill. Now multiply that by virtually the entire government regulatory structure, and you have some idea of the kind of mess left by Bush and Cheney to the Obama administration."
Judis stresses that the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter is "the specter hanging over Obama's presidency." Readily acknowledging that Obama has already accomplished more in the first 20 months of his administration than Carter did during his entire presidency, he adds, "But there is a disturbing political resemblance between the two presidents." Both ran inspired campaigns, positioned themselves above the partisan quarrels and scandals of their Republican predecessors, and initially raised the possibility of creating a "transformational" presidency. But Carter failed and Obama is failing to connect with large segments of the electorate.
PolitiFact.com, the St. Petersburg Times database that won a Pulitzer for fact-checking the 2008 presidential campaign offers another way of evaluating the progress of the Obama presidency. It catalogued and tracked a total of 502 promises Obama made during his campaign. One year later the analysis showed he had already kept 91 of them, made progress on another 285, "broken" 14, and was "stalled" on 89. Moreover, PolitiFact singled out 25 of Obama's most significant campaign promises; of these, in his first year 20 already have been "kept" or are "in the works." For a president who has yet to reach the halfway mark of his first term, that's hardly chopped liver.
Progressive dissatisfaction with Obama has less to do with the quantity of his accomplishments than their quality. More often than not, Obama settles for half a loaf. One of his political mentors puts it this way, "Sometimes you can't get the whole hog, so you settle for a ham sandwich." The White House mess will have to expand exponentially to accommodate the stockpiling of the president's ham sandwiches.
Obama constantly invites criticism from those who feel he relinquishes too much in the pursuit of his cockeyed quixotic dream of bipartisanship, which will become reality only when there is ice-skating on the Styx.
A one-term fate for the president is the current conventional wisdom of the Beltway soothsayers, who will never be accused of harboring foolish consistencies that Emerson tells us are hobgoblins of small minds.
But, as a former media colleague constantly used to remind me, you don't top chicken salad with chicken feathers, or something close enough to that. And Republican ammunition, no matter which candidate ultimately fires it, is reduced to belching the Methuselian cant of tax cuts for the rich, borrowing to cover government's bills and turning the tab over to our kids and grandkids to pay, and pulling the rug from under social programs.
The drumbeat for retrogression is less likely to produce a Republican bandwagon than induce an enormous collective yawn. With such a dog-eared, wrinkled and yellowing message, the GOP must pin its hopes on the messenger. That messiah has yet to surface, though there are more than a few aspirants itching to be so anointed.
If Barrack Obama can manage to dodge those frequent barrages of friendly fire, he may not only win re-election, he could even transform the Rushmore Four into a quintet.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
THE CRUX OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
By H. N. Burdett
Political campaigns have a way of bringing out the beast in even the most reasonable, fair-minded politicians. This year's congressional elections are no exception. How else to explain an act of calculated contretemps by a throwback to the days of principled conservatism in the nation's capital such as Senator Lindsey Graham?
In an era when rigid polarization dominates the Washington landscape, motivating the Republican minority in both houses of Congress to adopt the deplorable option of voting against virtually every piece of substantive legislation, and even a hint of compromise is synonymous with betrayal, the South Carolina senator was among the scant few reminders of a time when conscience and conciliation rather than contrived conflict was the order of the day. It was a time of Dirksen of Illinois, Scott of Pennsylvania and Mathias of Maryland, lawmakers who brought civility and honor as well as brain wattage to the Art of the Possible, as opposed to today's minority party preference for parroting bumper sticker slogans.
Graham, along with John McCain, once infused a measure of hope that immigration reform might be the breakthrough one dared to dream might resuscitate the long dormant if not comatose concept of bipartisanship in the corridors of power.
As a presidential candidate, McCain was taught the bitter lesson that Republican moderates with White House ambition either learn or resign themselves to forever harnessing their aspirations: deviation from the conservative gospel is the minefield route to the party's nomination for leader of the free world.
It is a lesson that was driven home to the 41st President of the United States. A paradigm of Republican centrism as a congressman from Texas, George Herbert Walker Bush was subjected to an old-fashioned whuppin' by Ronald Reagan during the 1980 GOP presidential primary. That a Grade B film actor could inflict such a thorough thrashing of a politician who had one of the most impressive resumes of anyone who has ever sought the presidency -- from congressman to chairman of the Republican party to director of the Central Intelligence Agency to Ambassador to the United Nations -- spoke volumes for the direction American politics had taken in the second half of the 20th century.
Bush 41 was subsequently chosen as Reagan's vice president running mate in the last year it was still regarded as important for Republicans to balance a conservative at the head of the ticket with a moderate candidate in the second spot. In that position, the elder Bush wore his new mantle as validation of his commitment to the tenets of his newly found aversion to rapid change. And he wore it proudly enough to succeed the Great Communicator in the election of 1988. As president, the senior Bush challenged Americans to read his lips as he pledged not to raise taxes, but eventually lapsed into responsible behavior when circumstances dictated, thereby assuring his fate as a one-term chief executive.
Following eight years of the Clinton administration, Republican boy genius Karl Rove never allowed George W. Bush to forget the sins of the father. That formula proved sufficient for the eldest son of the House of Bush to squeeze out a victory (by a single vote in the United States Supreme Court) in the controversial presidential election of 2000.
So disciplined was W. at adhering to his party's dogma that riding the crest of misplaced patriotism in the wake of the 9/ll attacks he could order the invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the suicide assaults on the trade center and the Pentagon, declare a victory that was a full decade premature, and still be re-elected in 2004.
Indeed conservative allegiance has been of such necessity for the nomination of Republican candidates for the presidency that even Nelson Rockefeller, with all of his millions as far back as the 1960s discovered that moderation was too much baggage for a presidential hopeful to haul into a GOP national convention. The last moderate to win that party's nomination was Dwight Eisenhower; the next may require credentials more impressive than merely winning a world war.
So it has come to pass that Lindsey Graham, though he has never actually revealed overt lust to reside in the White House, has now the requisite bona fides for that quest. He has toed the party line by renouncing his previous willingness to find a viable bipartisan solution to immigration reform. The South Carolinian has assumed a leading role in calling for a thorough review of arguably his party's foremost achievement: the adoption of the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution which decrees, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
Those words that sounded the death knell for slavery now incite the animus of conservative Republican extremists who have pushed their party ever further to the right. So much so that
a leading GOP spokesman, Senator Jeff Sessions, is so comfortable with the idea of re-positioning the party of Lincoln that he feels wording of the 14th amendment that terminated the institution of slavery could also mean "somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home and that child would forever be an American citizen."
Well, yes, the 14th amendment could technically lead to entire planes loaded with pregnant Brazilian women landing at Miami International, be herded into taxis and ambulances waiting to transport them to reserved rooms in the nearest available maternity wards.
Those who have been naively unaware of the extent of the so-called "anchor baby" problem infecting the United States are indebted to the Federation for American Immigration Reform for doing their homework.
FAIR estimates that there are 13 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Taking into consideration that the crude birth rate for the entire foreign-born population is 33 births per 1,000 population and adjusting downward to allow for women as a smaller share of undocumented workers, FAIR figures 363,000 children of illegal immigrants are born anually in this country.
A 2004 United States General Accounting Office report shows that three states submitted their annual cost estimates of educating children of undocumented foreigners. According to FAIR, "The estimates provided ranged from $50 million to $87.5 million in Pennsylvania and $932 million to $1.04 billion in Texas."
This same organization calls for more realistic quotas to be assigned to U.S. immigration and a moratorium on all such immigration until such figures can be determined, claiming, "By not correcting this mis-application of the 14th amendment, the funds that state and local governments must provide to anchor babies amount to a virtual tax on U.S. citizens to subsidize illegal aliens." FAIR does not seem to feel it is relevant to adjust for the taxes that illegal immigrants do indeed pay.
Rather than tackle symptoms of undocumented immigration like so-called "anchor babies," which amounts by and large to punishing the impoverished from south of the U.S. border who mostly want nothing more than to guarantee the survival of their families and are willing to leave their homeland, at least temporarily, to achieve this goal, Senator Graham and his conservative brethren might take a closer look at what drives south to north migration in the Americas and worldwide.
The crux of the problem is not the foreign worker who often enough risks his life to cross the border illegally, opts to live in constant fear of being caught, deported and even permanently separated from his family. Senator Graham, other anti-immigration lawmakers and immigration suppression organizations might find it more productive for achieving their stated goals to focus on the very source of clandestine trafficking in undocumented cheap labor. Law enforcement agencies need to home in on the human sleaze that lures impoverished, unemployed foreigners across the border with jobs for which they are paid under-the-table wages, violating an array of laws from those covering minimum wages and maximum hours to those designed to ensure employee safety, not to mention enrollment in health care programs and employment insurance and pensions.
Curiously little attention is directed towards those who promulgate, promote and perpetuate illegal immigration while their off-the-books employees are blamed and punished for the crime of struggling to survive. Only when legislators like Lindsey Graham recognize and act upon levying serious fines, in some cases temporarily suspending and, in others, permanently shutting down operations that seek to increase their profit margins through human exploitation, will true immigration reform finally be achieved. Meanwhile, foreign-born laborers continue to proliferate, they and their offspring desperately grasping at employment opportunities for which they are willing to subject themselves to multiple hazards, all the while learning to evade and subvert the laws of the land to which they have been lured.
Immigration, lawful or undocumented, traditionally inspires distrust and fear of foreigners, most frequently from the tier of workers whose jobs are most threatened by their existence. The inconvenient truth is that merchants of greed who represent the dark underside of capitalism contribute to the decay of an economic system that can be viable and productive through adjustments -- serious rules and regulations that are seriously enforced. Those conservatives who resist regulation with their familiar mantra that the marketplace can seek its true level only when it is completely unfettered are arguing for nothing less than exempting themselves from the concept of a level playing field, preferring to game the system to their own advantage.
As long as capitalism successfully defends itself against the notion that laws, rules, regulations, prohibitions on questionable behavior represent untenable restrictions on the free market, it is pursuing a course that is nothing short of suicidal. Unchecked exploitation of the system and of human resources can lead to the downfall of the world's most emulated economic system. Eternal vigilance is required to safeguard against it.
To replenish human resources, entrepreneurs will always resort to seeking the neediest, the hungriest, those eager and willing to take any job -- no matter how menial or hazardous -- to acquire their basic needs. Such a system is a predictable indicator of xenophobia, which is ever more pronounced among those whose livelihood is threatened by each succeeding wave of immigration.
The source of the United States's historic and continuing vigor and vitality -- the reason it is envied and emulated at the same time it is is mocked and hated -- is that despite ubiquitous immigration bashing, it is the immigrant's belief that hard work in this country can lead to a steady rise in economic status, and can even make one rich, wherein resides the secret of the United States's uniqueness. Waves of immigrants have accounted for U.S. growth and wealth from the very founding of the nation until the present day. To deny this is to deny our very history.
If the immigration saturation point has been reached and even passed in the United States, it is all the more reason for rational reform to take dead aim on eliminating the "pull factor" of avaricious and unconscionable traffickers in the cheapest possible labor to achieve the highest possible profits. As long as the former are allowed to exist and are, in fact, time and again subsidized by government, these merchants of greed who respect neither laws nor common decency will always be perfectly content to allow the very people they routinely and callously exploit to absorb abuse and shoulder the blame whenever capitalism appears in danger of imploding from its own excesses.
Political campaigns have a way of bringing out the beast in even the most reasonable, fair-minded politicians. This year's congressional elections are no exception. How else to explain an act of calculated contretemps by a throwback to the days of principled conservatism in the nation's capital such as Senator Lindsey Graham?
In an era when rigid polarization dominates the Washington landscape, motivating the Republican minority in both houses of Congress to adopt the deplorable option of voting against virtually every piece of substantive legislation, and even a hint of compromise is synonymous with betrayal, the South Carolina senator was among the scant few reminders of a time when conscience and conciliation rather than contrived conflict was the order of the day. It was a time of Dirksen of Illinois, Scott of Pennsylvania and Mathias of Maryland, lawmakers who brought civility and honor as well as brain wattage to the Art of the Possible, as opposed to today's minority party preference for parroting bumper sticker slogans.
Graham, along with John McCain, once infused a measure of hope that immigration reform might be the breakthrough one dared to dream might resuscitate the long dormant if not comatose concept of bipartisanship in the corridors of power.
As a presidential candidate, McCain was taught the bitter lesson that Republican moderates with White House ambition either learn or resign themselves to forever harnessing their aspirations: deviation from the conservative gospel is the minefield route to the party's nomination for leader of the free world.
It is a lesson that was driven home to the 41st President of the United States. A paradigm of Republican centrism as a congressman from Texas, George Herbert Walker Bush was subjected to an old-fashioned whuppin' by Ronald Reagan during the 1980 GOP presidential primary. That a Grade B film actor could inflict such a thorough thrashing of a politician who had one of the most impressive resumes of anyone who has ever sought the presidency -- from congressman to chairman of the Republican party to director of the Central Intelligence Agency to Ambassador to the United Nations -- spoke volumes for the direction American politics had taken in the second half of the 20th century.
Bush 41 was subsequently chosen as Reagan's vice president running mate in the last year it was still regarded as important for Republicans to balance a conservative at the head of the ticket with a moderate candidate in the second spot. In that position, the elder Bush wore his new mantle as validation of his commitment to the tenets of his newly found aversion to rapid change. And he wore it proudly enough to succeed the Great Communicator in the election of 1988. As president, the senior Bush challenged Americans to read his lips as he pledged not to raise taxes, but eventually lapsed into responsible behavior when circumstances dictated, thereby assuring his fate as a one-term chief executive.
Following eight years of the Clinton administration, Republican boy genius Karl Rove never allowed George W. Bush to forget the sins of the father. That formula proved sufficient for the eldest son of the House of Bush to squeeze out a victory (by a single vote in the United States Supreme Court) in the controversial presidential election of 2000.
So disciplined was W. at adhering to his party's dogma that riding the crest of misplaced patriotism in the wake of the 9/ll attacks he could order the invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the suicide assaults on the trade center and the Pentagon, declare a victory that was a full decade premature, and still be re-elected in 2004.
Indeed conservative allegiance has been of such necessity for the nomination of Republican candidates for the presidency that even Nelson Rockefeller, with all of his millions as far back as the 1960s discovered that moderation was too much baggage for a presidential hopeful to haul into a GOP national convention. The last moderate to win that party's nomination was Dwight Eisenhower; the next may require credentials more impressive than merely winning a world war.
So it has come to pass that Lindsey Graham, though he has never actually revealed overt lust to reside in the White House, has now the requisite bona fides for that quest. He has toed the party line by renouncing his previous willingness to find a viable bipartisan solution to immigration reform. The South Carolinian has assumed a leading role in calling for a thorough review of arguably his party's foremost achievement: the adoption of the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution which decrees, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
Those words that sounded the death knell for slavery now incite the animus of conservative Republican extremists who have pushed their party ever further to the right. So much so that
a leading GOP spokesman, Senator Jeff Sessions, is so comfortable with the idea of re-positioning the party of Lincoln that he feels wording of the 14th amendment that terminated the institution of slavery could also mean "somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home and that child would forever be an American citizen."
Well, yes, the 14th amendment could technically lead to entire planes loaded with pregnant Brazilian women landing at Miami International, be herded into taxis and ambulances waiting to transport them to reserved rooms in the nearest available maternity wards.
Those who have been naively unaware of the extent of the so-called "anchor baby" problem infecting the United States are indebted to the Federation for American Immigration Reform for doing their homework.
FAIR estimates that there are 13 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Taking into consideration that the crude birth rate for the entire foreign-born population is 33 births per 1,000 population and adjusting downward to allow for women as a smaller share of undocumented workers, FAIR figures 363,000 children of illegal immigrants are born anually in this country.
A 2004 United States General Accounting Office report shows that three states submitted their annual cost estimates of educating children of undocumented foreigners. According to FAIR, "The estimates provided ranged from $50 million to $87.5 million in Pennsylvania and $932 million to $1.04 billion in Texas."
This same organization calls for more realistic quotas to be assigned to U.S. immigration and a moratorium on all such immigration until such figures can be determined, claiming, "By not correcting this mis-application of the 14th amendment, the funds that state and local governments must provide to anchor babies amount to a virtual tax on U.S. citizens to subsidize illegal aliens." FAIR does not seem to feel it is relevant to adjust for the taxes that illegal immigrants do indeed pay.
Rather than tackle symptoms of undocumented immigration like so-called "anchor babies," which amounts by and large to punishing the impoverished from south of the U.S. border who mostly want nothing more than to guarantee the survival of their families and are willing to leave their homeland, at least temporarily, to achieve this goal, Senator Graham and his conservative brethren might take a closer look at what drives south to north migration in the Americas and worldwide.
The crux of the problem is not the foreign worker who often enough risks his life to cross the border illegally, opts to live in constant fear of being caught, deported and even permanently separated from his family. Senator Graham, other anti-immigration lawmakers and immigration suppression organizations might find it more productive for achieving their stated goals to focus on the very source of clandestine trafficking in undocumented cheap labor. Law enforcement agencies need to home in on the human sleaze that lures impoverished, unemployed foreigners across the border with jobs for which they are paid under-the-table wages, violating an array of laws from those covering minimum wages and maximum hours to those designed to ensure employee safety, not to mention enrollment in health care programs and employment insurance and pensions.
Curiously little attention is directed towards those who promulgate, promote and perpetuate illegal immigration while their off-the-books employees are blamed and punished for the crime of struggling to survive. Only when legislators like Lindsey Graham recognize and act upon levying serious fines, in some cases temporarily suspending and, in others, permanently shutting down operations that seek to increase their profit margins through human exploitation, will true immigration reform finally be achieved. Meanwhile, foreign-born laborers continue to proliferate, they and their offspring desperately grasping at employment opportunities for which they are willing to subject themselves to multiple hazards, all the while learning to evade and subvert the laws of the land to which they have been lured.
Immigration, lawful or undocumented, traditionally inspires distrust and fear of foreigners, most frequently from the tier of workers whose jobs are most threatened by their existence. The inconvenient truth is that merchants of greed who represent the dark underside of capitalism contribute to the decay of an economic system that can be viable and productive through adjustments -- serious rules and regulations that are seriously enforced. Those conservatives who resist regulation with their familiar mantra that the marketplace can seek its true level only when it is completely unfettered are arguing for nothing less than exempting themselves from the concept of a level playing field, preferring to game the system to their own advantage.
As long as capitalism successfully defends itself against the notion that laws, rules, regulations, prohibitions on questionable behavior represent untenable restrictions on the free market, it is pursuing a course that is nothing short of suicidal. Unchecked exploitation of the system and of human resources can lead to the downfall of the world's most emulated economic system. Eternal vigilance is required to safeguard against it.
To replenish human resources, entrepreneurs will always resort to seeking the neediest, the hungriest, those eager and willing to take any job -- no matter how menial or hazardous -- to acquire their basic needs. Such a system is a predictable indicator of xenophobia, which is ever more pronounced among those whose livelihood is threatened by each succeeding wave of immigration.
The source of the United States's historic and continuing vigor and vitality -- the reason it is envied and emulated at the same time it is is mocked and hated -- is that despite ubiquitous immigration bashing, it is the immigrant's belief that hard work in this country can lead to a steady rise in economic status, and can even make one rich, wherein resides the secret of the United States's uniqueness. Waves of immigrants have accounted for U.S. growth and wealth from the very founding of the nation until the present day. To deny this is to deny our very history.
If the immigration saturation point has been reached and even passed in the United States, it is all the more reason for rational reform to take dead aim on eliminating the "pull factor" of avaricious and unconscionable traffickers in the cheapest possible labor to achieve the highest possible profits. As long as the former are allowed to exist and are, in fact, time and again subsidized by government, these merchants of greed who respect neither laws nor common decency will always be perfectly content to allow the very people they routinely and callously exploit to absorb abuse and shoulder the blame whenever capitalism appears in danger of imploding from its own excesses.
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