Long Pauses

Category: Politics

  • When Smart People Talk Dumb

    Hillary Clinton is a brilliant woman with total command of domestic and foreign policy, which is why it’s been particularly painful over the past two months watching her pander to poll-tested issues like this stupid gas tax holiday. And, seriously, she really needs to stop using “elite” as a pejorative — first because it degrades language (if “elite” doesn’t necessarily describe the most powerful office in the world, then it no longer means “elite”), and second because SHE LIVED IN THE WHITE HOUSE FOR EIGHT YEARS. Her efforts to exclude herself from “the elite” is an embarrassment to her intelligence and experience. She’s starting to sound an awful lot like a Republican.

  • Can I Go Home Now?

    Watching this video it occurs to me that, instead of the presidency, this guy would have been much happier if he’d inherited a West Texas Chrysler dealership. I have to admit that I more or less supported Bush’s immigration plan. It’s the first time in six-and-a-half years I’ve been able to say that about a White House policy.

  • Why Hillary Ain’t on My Short List

    I’m in a quoting/linking mood today. From a great post at Daily Kos:

    The question, Senator Clinton, is have you learned anything? Have you learned that to authorize war is always a last resort, not a first, or seventh, or seven times seventh. Have you learned that it’s not okay to allow fear — including fear for your career in politics — to herd you along with the crowd. Have you learned that good judgment isn’t just avoiding error. It’s acknowledging that an error has been made and working promptly to correct it.

  • I Think I’m in Love

    Jim Webb during his first hearing with the Armed Services Committee:

    I also want to say something about my longtime friend, Senator McCain’s comments when he was talking about the consequences of pulling out of Iraq and in your statement, Secretary Gates, you list some of these as an emboldened and strengthened Iran, a base of operations for jihadist networks in the heart of the Middle East, an undermining of the credibility of the United States.

    In many ways, quite frankly, those have been the results of the invasion and occupation. There’s really nothing that’s occurred since the invasion and occupation that was not predictable and in fact, most of it was predicted. It was predicted in many cases by people with long backgrounds in national security…and in many cases there were people who saw their military careers destroyed and who were personally demeaned by people who opposed them on the issues, including members of this administration. And they are people in my judgement, who will be remembered in history as having had a moral conscience.

  • One of Those Political Posts

    A few days ago I watched the episode of The West Wing in which President Bartlet is inaugurated for his second term in office, and it reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in years. On January 20, 2001, I was at a hotel in Pigeon Forge, TN, attending a retreat with other men from my church. I remember the date because that morning, during one of the small-group sessions, someone interrupted to turn on a TV. We all watched as Bush took the oath of office. Several men in the room began to pray. Others smiled and offered “Hallelujah”s. I muttered under my breath, “Thank God. Finally an end to eight years of peace and prosperity,” and my friend poked me in the ribs. I was the “liberal” of our group. He’d learned to expect and even appreciate my snark.

    In the years since, I’ve come to feel increasingly alienated from evangelical culture, and politics is an important reason. I used to write about this a lot more on Long Pauses, but I grew tired of my own voice and my own hypocrisies. Too much finger-pointing. Plus, the results of the 2004 election broke my heart. I’ve felt more than a bit defeated and hopelessly cynical ever since. It didn’t help when, a few months ago, I ran into one of those old friends and noticed the “W: Still the President” sticker on the back window of his car. I just don’t get it.

    Bush was elected on the promise of restoring “honor and dignity” to the White House, which, let’s face it, wasn’t an unappealing idea. I was as disgusted as anyone by Clinton’s personal behavior, by the 24-hour media shitstorm, and by the very real political fallout. So I wasn’t all surprised when Bush’s call to do away with the lying and the scandals that had disgraced the last few years of Clinton’s second term struck a chord with most evangelicals I know, particularly because that call was coming from someone who spoke their language, who had a bona-fide Christian testimony, and who promised to protect the “sanctity of human life.” (That Bush had an unimpressive pre-Presidency track record when it came to eliminating scandal was a point I soon gave up arguing with friends who supported him.)

    I’ve always had a begrudging respect for the political skills of the Bush administration. They play the game so well. They say they’re fiscal conservatives, then, with a Republican Congress in their back pocket, they explode the size of the federal government and deficit. “Support me on my big issues,” he seems to have promised House and Senate leaders, “and I won’t even threaten to veto a spending bill.” And he hasn’t. Not surprisingly, the amount of pork has more than tripled under his watch.

    Congress was more than willing to return the favor when Bush asked them for the right to declare war. With one eye on their home states and the upcoming midterm elections, they grabbed his cooked intelligence with both hands, hoisted it up onto the stump, and sounded a few more cheers for fear-mongering. “Mushroom cloud, you say? Mushroom cloud! We must do something! And do it today!” To hell with his campaign promise to never “nation-build.” Bush and his boys wanted this war, wanted to reshape the Middle East, wanted to re-engage America’s permanent war economy, and, boy, if you got in their way — if you questioned their motives or diverted from the War on Terror narrative they were writing — boy, you were fucked.

    Even though today’s announcement had been predicted for most of the week, I was still stunned when the indictments were read. I had to watch for five or ten minutes before I could accept what was happening. I’m not crazy. What a sad and pathetic week in the life of a sad and pathetic presidency.

  • Just a Question

    Every day, it seems, the NY Times online leads with a headline like, “Suicide Attack Kills at Least 22 in Iraqi City of Kirkuk.” Many of us who opposed the war did so, in part, because we feared that destabilizing Iraq would provoke a civil war that would prove a humanitarian crisis worse than even Saddam’s regime. I wonder how American sentiment toward our role in Iraq would change if we admitted that the civil war has already begun?

  • Confidence Man

    A new poll reveals that 70 percent of Americans now believe that any gains we’ve made in Iraq have come at an “unacceptable” cost, and 56 percent now believe the conflict was “not worth fighting.” Poll numbers are poll numbers, of course, but these seem significant if only because they suggest an interesting trend. A real majority now question the validity of the policy that most clearly defines the Bush administration. (And if Bush can call his margin of victory a “mandate,” then I can call 56 percent a “real majority.”)

    Also headlining the front page of The Washington Post website are breaking reports of 22 dead in an attack on a U.S. base, Dana Milbank’s coverage of Bush’s elusive tactics at yesterday’s press conference, and a report of Bush’s confidence in his Iraq policy. What interests me is the juxtaposition of stories — the images of death and destruction jutted up against Bush’s “confidence.” Reminds me of another president.

    Back in January, after reading Jeffrey Alexander’s The Meanings of Social Life, I predicted to a co-worker that the 2004 election would be a repeat of ’72, when Nixon won re-election with 60% of the popular vote despite the Watergate scandal. From my response to Alexander’s book:

    In November 1972, just four months after the Watergate break-in, 84% of voters claimed that the scandal did not influence their decision on election night. Two years later, the event had taken on such symbolic significance that Nixon was forced to resign. “Watergate could not, as the French might say, tell itself. It had to be told by society; it was, to use Durkeim’s famous phrase, a social fact. It was the context of Watergate that had changed, not so much the raw empirical data themselves” (156). In his thoughtful analysis, Alexander explains how Watergate, as a symbol, came to transcend the world of petty politics and to touch upon fundamental moral concerns, thus polluting the executive office with the counterdemocratic code. This process was greatly influenced by the ritualizing experience of the televised hearings and by the release of Nixon’s taped conversations. “By his words and recorded actions,” Alexander writes, “he had polluted the very tenets that the entire Watergate process had revivified: the sacredness of truth and the image of America as an inclusive, tolerant community” (169).

    As an example of how the Watergate context had changed, Alexander reminds us of Nixon’s infamous line, “I am not a crook.” In ’72 those words would have comforted Americans and reinforced their sacred faith in the presidency; by ’74, after the tapes and after the hearings, Nixon’s utterance of the word “crook” only reminded voters of their growing suspicions. Nixon had lost control of his rhetoric.

    I was mostly joking when I mentioned all of this to my co-worker a year ago, but I’m starting to wonder if there might be some truth to it. In the last month, Bush has given America’s highest civilian honor to George Tenet, the man who most on the right scapegoated for his “slam dunk” on Iraq intelligence. He’s nominated a petty criminal for the nation’s top security position. And he’s repeatedly emphasized his support of Donald Rumsfeld. I think we’re reaching a point when Bush’s statement of “confidence” will be read quite differently from how it’s intended.

  • Right Back Atya

    Right Back Atya

    Karen Hughes will, I assume, deny that this is the real President Bush.

  • Some Kind of Perspective

    For the last few months, during my weekly English as a Second Language classes, I’ve been teaching stories from The Best American Short Stories of the Century, a better-than-average collection edited by John Updike. The stories give us an excuse to discover new vocabulary and American idioms together, but much more importantly, they offer context. We began the semester with Benjamin Rosenblatt’s “Zelig” and talked about the turn-of-the-century immigrant experience. We read E. B. White’s “The Second Tree from the Corner” and discussed where the things of true value might be found in our lives. We read Mary Ladd Gavell’s “The Rotifer” and debated whether or not any of us truly has the power to effect positive change in another’s life. Not surprisingly, I had much more to learn from my students than they from me.

    Last night we discussed James Alan McPherson’s “Gold Coast,” a story about an interracial couple set in Boston during the late-1960s. I began the night by drawing some comparisons between the America of 1968 and our current climate. “Because of the civil rights movement and President Johnson’s escalation of our military involvement in Vietnam,” I told them, “many Americans really wanted change.” I told them a bit about the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that year and about the riots that broke out in so many urban areas. I reminded them of the assasinations and the rise of groups like the Black Panthers, and, because the story addressed the topic directly, we talked a bit about hippies and “limousine liberals.” And I told them about how Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey by nearly a million votes, even though 56% of the population voted against him. “America was deeply divided,” I told them. “Kind of like now.”

    And then one of my Mexican students reminded us of the 1968 Olympics that were held in Mexico City, where only ten days before the games opened 267 students were gunned down and more than 1,000 were wounded during a protest at the Plaza of Three Cultures. And then two of my South Korean students told us of their government’s secret decision to send troops to Vietnam despite the public’s protest against such a move. And then one of my Chinese students, a remarkable young woman who exudes joy like no one I’ve ever known, said, “Yes. The same in China. During the Cultural Revolution.”

  • In Lieu of Original Content

    I’ll just quote Charles Pierce:

    As Mo Udall once put it, the people have spoken, goddamn them.

    They showed up. The Republican base, that is. The people who believe that their marriages are threatened by those of gay people, the people who believe there were WMD in Iraq and that Saddam waved a hankie at Mohammed Atta, the people who believe His eye is on every embryo. They all showed up, and there are more of them than there are of us. This was a faith-based electorate and, for whatever reason, their belief was stronger than our reality. This is a country I do not recognize any more.

    The kids didn’t vote. African-American turnout seems to have stayed pretty much the same as it was in 2000, despite all the talk. We lost seats in the Senate and in the House. (Daschle is a pretty momentous beat, despite the fact that he’s not a wartime consigliore and never was.) They elected a polite David Duke in Louisiana, and someone who doesn’t believe gay people should teach school in South Carolina, and a creep in Oklahoma, and somebody who’s fairly obviously drifting into the fog in Kentucky. The pretty clearly indictable DeLay tactics in Texas worked like a charm. These are all victories won on grounds on which we cannot compete. When gay marriage trumps dead soldiers in Iraq, how do you run a race without dissolving into fantasy?

    I don’t know this country’s mind any more, let alone its heart.

  • The Long View

    From Bob Woodward, we’ve learned that President Bush doesn’t give much thought to history — “History? We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” — but for those of us who do, the San Francisco Chronicle has put together a nice collection of statements from prominent military historians, including G. Kurt Piehler, a member of my dissertation committee.

  • Presidential Referendum

    The Choice 2004, Frontline’s documentary overview of the lives of John Kerry and George W. Bush, foregrounded two key moments from the President’s career, moments that are by now familiar to all who have followed his development. The first was his road to Damascus conversion — the moment when he turned his life over to God and gave up drinking. The second was his father’s primary loss to Pat Robertson in 1988 — the moment when George, Jr. recognized the power of the evangelical vote and thought to himself, “I can do this.” He would become an asset for his father in that regard and would later rely on heavy appeals to the Religious Right in his own successful campaigns against Ann Richards and Al Gore.

    Not surprisingly, President Bush was at his best last night when asked about his faith and family. Ignoring for a moment the relevance of such questions in a supposed domestic policy debate that never addressed the environment, the Patriot Act, or stem cell research, those two questions allowed Bush to put aside policy (which is awfully complicated) to talk instead about feelings and relationships. They allowed him to slip into the comfortable rhetoric of evangelicalism. And Bush, to his credit, hit those softballs out of the park. Bush speaks eloquently — yes, I said it — about his faith because it is clearly important to him and because it has a language all its own. But this leads me to wonder: To whom exactly was he speaking?

    The significance of Bush’s insight in 1988 was that by speaking directly to the Religious Right in a language that they understood — by hitting hard on “moral issues” like abortion, marriage, and public displays of faith; by using the coded language of “stewardship,” “devotion,” and “providence” — he could accomplish three main goals:

    1. Transform a single position (on, say, abortion) into a fixed political identification and, in so doing, make of that position an objective barometer of a candidate’s moral fitness to lead (Clinton’s whoreishness played directly into the Right’s hands in that regard). Abortion, the argument goes, is objectively wrong; therefore candidates who support abortion are objectively unworthy of office.
    2. Solidify the Republican base by offering them a moral imperative to get out and vote. The large (and growing) network of evangelical churches in America, then, becomes a grassroots movement of its own, fostered by everyone from James Dobson and Billy Graham to Tim LaHaye and Thomas Kinkade.
    3. Nail shut the coffin on those strains of New Deal Democratic politics in the South that had been dying slowly since before Carter left office, and, in the process, grab control of the House.

    And so I ask again: To whom was Bush speaking last night? Every poll confirms that Bush and Kerry have solidified their bases. There are many, many Americans who will vote to re-elect President Bush solely because of his pro-life stance or because they see in him a reflection of themselves — someone whose life was radically changed by an encounter with God and who exercises daily the rituals of evangelical life: quiet times, prayers of confession, small group Bible studies. (That, after a decade of steady declines, the number of abortions has, in fact, increased under Bush is a subject for another day.) Bush’s genuine confession of faith last night was, I’m sure, one of the few moments of grace and honesty that many voters (most of whom are understandably cynical and apathetic about politics at large) recognized in an otherwise contentious campaign season.

    And so, for the millions of voters who are comforted by the language of evangelicalism, I’m sure that Bush’s performance last night reinforced all of the values that they had already projected onto him. But what about the rest of us? What about Christians (like me) who are deeply troubled by Bush’s conflation of regressive and immoral tax restructurings and arrogant imperialism with Divine Providence? What about Christians (like me) who also believe in liberal democracy and who see a clear separation between the purposes of the State and the Church? To be frank, we see in President Bush a man of faith who is not competent to lead. We see a man who, even after four years in the White House, has great difficulty articulating even the most fundamental of his policy decisions, even when those policies are valid. We see a man who, like the kings of old, is dangerously close to turning religion into a justification for despotism.

    And what about those undecided voters in the middle who don’t understand the coded messages in Bush’s religious rhetoric, who in fact feel excluded by it? I promise that they saw a very different debate last night. They saw a man who, incapable (and even suspect) of reason, turns instead to fancy and dogma for guidance. Which leads me to believe that this election will, in a very real way, be a referendum on Bush’s 1988 insight. Granted, there are millionaires who like his tax cuts and neocons who like his foreign policy and gun owners who will vote for whomever the NRA endorses, but Bush seems to be putting his fate in the hands of his apostles. And it scares the hell out of me to think that it might work.

  • Party Politics & the Movies

    Yeah, I know that Kerry’s plan for Iraq is only slightly less doomed to failure than Bush’s, and I know that Kerry’s years in the Senate have taught him too much about political compromise, but here, finally, is an honest-to-goodness, no-doubt-about-it reason to get behind the Kerry/Edwards ticket:

    In this very political year, as we approach the November elections, TCM has invited four prominent U.S. Senators to appear in interviews with host Ben Mankiewicz to introduce significant films in their lives. On October 7, John Edwards, Democratic vice presidential candidate and U.S. Senator from North Carolina, will consider Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Edwards chose Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear war because of its message that “putting this kind of power into the hands of human beings – no matter who they are – is an extraordinary thing.”

  • Still Big News

    On July 8 I posted a link to what I thought was a pretty big story: America’s decision in April to pull out of Falluja, thus creating a safe haven for terrorist and insurgents. (Follow this link to read the full article.) Yesterday, after weeks of bloody fighting in Najaf, The Times ran another piece on Falluja, and I’m at a lost to explain why it wasn’t front page news. In all of the sound a fury of the Sunday morning spin fests, shouldn’t someone have been talking about this?

    Both of the cities, Falluja and Ramadi, and much of Anbar Province, are now controlled by fundamentalist militias, with American troops confined mainly to heavily protected forts on the desert’s edge. What little influence the Americans have is asserted through wary forays in armored vehicles, and by laser-guided bombs that obliterate enemy safe houses identified by scouts who penetrate militant ranks. Even bombing raids appear to strengthen the fundamentalists, who blame the Americans for scores of civilian deaths.

    American efforts to build a government structure around former Baath Party stalwarts – officials of Saddam Hussein’s army, police force and bureaucracy who were willing to work with the United States – have collapsed. Instead, the former Hussein loyalists, under threat of beheadings, kidnappings and humiliation, have mostly resigned or defected to the fundamentalists, or been killed. Enforcers for the old government, including former Republican Guard officers, have put themselves in the service of fundamentalist clerics they once tortured at Abu Ghraib.

    UPDATE: Paul Krugman is covering this topic today.

  • Mr. Bush Comes to Town

    Speaking approximately fifteen miles from my home yesterday, President Bush said:

    Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq. . . . We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. . . . I had a choice to make: Either take the word of a madman or defend America. Given that choice, I will defend America every time.

    Then, repeating (again and again) what has apparently become his campaign mantra, he added, “The American People are safer.”

    It’s interesting to see how Bush’s rhetoric has evolved. While admitting — finally — that WMD have not been found, he continues to litter his speech with allusions to them, though they’ve now morphed into “weapons of mass murder,” and — in a turn of phrase that would have made Monicagate-era Clinton proud — they are now modified with the nebulous term, “capability.” I wish someone would ask him what “capability” means, exactly. It seems a fairly significant question.

    It’s also interesting to see how the year-long build-up to war has been reduced by his speech to a choice between trusting Saddam and declaring war on him. Forgotten are the voices of a majority in the United Nations and the millions of protesters, who resisted this false dichotomy. Forgotten are the alternative methods of defending America founded on multilateral diplomacy and the investment of resources in homeland security and the war on Al Qaeda. It’s all just a little bit maddening.

    I didn’t have the energy to comment on the link that I posted on Thursday, but it does seem to me to be a significant (and largely unreported) story. I’ve been critical of the war since late-2002, when it became obvious that Bush would have his “show of force” regardless of what happened at the UN or in Baghdad, but I’ve tried to avoid the pessimism that marks so much of the anti-war crowd. I want Iraq to be a better, more just nation for our intervention there. The fact that Falluja, a city of 250,000 people, is now a “safe haven” for those building bombs and blowing up our soldiers and Iraqi civilians seems to call into question Bush’s claim that we are safer for his efforts. Is this his proud legacy?

  • The Living Room Candidate

    Like David at GreenCine Daily, I’m pretty sure that a significant portion of my immediate future will be spent at the American Museum of the Moving Image’s new Web exhibit, The Living Room Candidate, a collection of presidential campaign commercials extending all the way back to Ike v. Adlai in 1952. Amazing, amazing stuff. It’s embarrassing to admit just how effective those “morning in America” spots really were.

  • Pretty close

    What I predicted:

    I think the president’s position on this issue has been made clear time and time again.

    What he actually said:

    In terms of this administration, we laid out the facts very clearly for the American people.

  • Catchin’ Spears

    I’m guessing that it’ll go something like this:

    Press: “Scott, how has the president responded to the 9/11 commission’s finding that there is ‘no credible evidence’ that Hussein’s government collaborated with al Qaeda?”

    McClellan: “You will need to ask the president. I don’t pretend to speak for his personal ‘response’ to any event.”

    Press: “Well then let me clarify. Does the president agree with the 9/11 commission’s finding that there is ‘no credible evidence’ that Hussein’s government collaborated with al Qaeda?”

    McClellan: “The president has the utmost respect for the members of the 9/11 commission, who have worked tirelessly and with great integrity at a very difficult moment in our country’s history. The commission members are very much on the front line of America’s war on terror.”

    Press: “But does the president agree with their finding that there is ‘no credible evidence’ that Hussein’s government collaborated with al Qaeda? His recent statements — along with those of the vice president — directly contradict the commission’s findings.”

    McClellan: “I think the president’s position on this issue has been made clear time and time again. Any other questions?”

  • Moral Equivalence

    A nice post yesterday from slacktivist:

    The rationalization of evil in opposition to a greater evil (real or imagined) seems like the only way for many Americans to retain their necessary self-image as “the good guys.” That path is sloped, and the slope is slippery.

    The alternative, I believe, is to remind Americans of, and to recommit America to, an idea of the good that involves more than simply being slightly better than the worst people we can think of.

     

  • Is It Just Me?

    From Bush’s commencement address at yesterday’s Air Force Academy graduation:

    Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless surprise attack on the United States.

    From a conversation that I overheard at lunch last week:

    Yeah, it’s the biggest one in the world . . . I mean . . . in America. Whatever.

    We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American.

    And please, please tell me that at least some of those newly-commissioned Air Force officers know that the Second World War began before Pearl Harbor. I mean, we can’t expect our President to know such things, but surely the military academies require their graduates to take a history course or two.

    ADDENDUM: A co-worker just pointed out that, while Bush was quick yesterday to quote from Eisenhower (thus aligning himself rhetorically with America’s unprecedented ideological consensus of the 1950s), he carefully avoided these bits:

    “Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in blood of his followers and sacrifices of his friends.” Guildhall Address. London June 12. 1945

    “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.” Canadian Club. Ottawa. Canada January 10. 1946

    “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.” First Inaugural Address January 20. 1953

    “There is–in world affairs–a steady course to be followed between an assertion of strength that is truculent and a confession of helplessness that is cowardly.” State of the Union Address Februarv 2. 1953

    “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” “The Chance for Peace” Address April 16. 1953

    “The world moves, and ideas that were good once are not always good.” Press Conference. Washington. D.C. August 31. 1955

    “The only way to win World War III is to prevent it.” Radio and TV Address September 19. 1956

    “The final battle against intolerance is to be fought–not in the chambers of any legislature–but in the hearts of men.” Campaign Speech. Los Angeles. CA October 19. 1956

    “I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it.” TV Talk with Prime Minister Macmillan August 31. 1959

    “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Farewell Address. Radio and TV January 17. 1961

  • Looking Back

    Yesterday, while unboxing another box — it’s a maddening, on-going process — I found the “Peace on Earth, No War on Iraq” sign that I carried in a protest during the rush to war, and it occurred to me that I am genuinely proud of that act. Proud like I’m proud of very few things in my life. It’s difficult to explain, but I know that it was absolutely the right thing to do. I guess that’s why I’m taking some comfort from quotes like these, all taken from traditionally conservative commentators:

    From Tucker Carlson:

    “I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it,” he said. “It’s something I’ll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who’s smarter than I am, and I shouldn’t have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I’m enraged by it, actually.”

    Mr. Carlson—never really a card-carrying member of the vast right-wing conspiracy—said he had broken off from the hawkish neoconservatives who flogged the war from the get-go. “I’m getting more paleo every day,” he said, referring to the so-called paleoconservatives.

    From Thomas L. Friedman:

    “Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a sudden? You’re the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept above politics.”

    Yes, that’s true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq — from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence — because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong.

    From George Will:

    Americans must not flinch from absorbing the photographs of what some Americans did in that prison. And they should not flinch from this fact: That pornography is, almost inevitably, part of what empire looks like. It does not always look like that, and does not only look like that. But empire is always about domination. Domination for self-defense, perhaps. Domination for the good of the dominated, arguably. But domination.

  • Because You Lied

    Because you lied to me, Dick. Remember? The White House sent its managers to Congress before the vote, and they briefed the House and Senate Intelligence committees on the dire threat of Saddam. The reconstituted nuclear program. The mushroom clouds that would be appearing over New York and Washington in a few years. The lie you were telling the American people in general terms, you told us with specific, impressive-sounding statistics and authoritative reports — that legendary ‘bad intelligence.’ It was on that basis and that basis alone — the basis of imminent threat to America from weapons of mass destruction — that my colleagues and I voted to give your boss the authority to invade. Now we know better.

    I accept my share of responsibility for the thousands who have since died and are still dying in an elective war that had nothing to do with the war on terrorism but which you and your fellow extremists at the Project for a New American Century had been lusting after since 1992, a war you wanted so badly you lied to Congress and the American people to get it, you dark and terrible man. I was not cynical enough. I know I must make amends for my mistake. But first, come November, the American people must fix another mistake.

    Andrew Christie imagines what he would tell Dick Cheney if he were in Kerry’s shoes. I just wish that Kerry would say something. His “we need a broader international coalition and more troops” line is already wearing thin. With Spain and Honduras pulling out and other leaders feeling growing pressure to follow suit, such a coalition will be damn near impossible. And I doubt that it would make much of a difference in Iraq anyway.

    I’ll be voting the “Anybody but Bush” ticket in November, but I’m still waiting for Kerry to give me a reason to do so enthusiastically.

  • God Save the Queen

    A friend just sent me this link from the National Catholic Reporter. Joan Chittister, like so many of us, watched Condoleezza Rice’s testimony with great interest, hoping to learn more about our government’s pre-9/11 knowledge of al-Qaeda. Instead, she was stunned by “the amount of self-congratulation spent on the fact of the testimony itself.” Chittister has made of the hearings an opportunity to reflect on the value of a monarchy in the 21st century, and I love her for it:

    As Americans, we are inclined to be a bit insular. Probably because we live on one of the largest islands in the world. Bounded on the east and the west by oceans and on the north and south by nations far smaller than we, the geography may have affected the boundaries of our minds, as well. We see ourselves as the center of the globe, the biggest, the best, the latest, the smartest, the most advanced, the most powerful, the most right, the paragon of all paragons in all things.

    We forget that unlike cell phones in Europe, which will work anywhere on the globe, ours don’t work outside the United States. We fail to understand that our videos can’t play too many places but on U.S. soil. We don’t even advert to the situation facing other coalition troops in Iraq. “I’ve been in the United States for six weeks,” one Brit told me, “and I have not heard a word on U.S. TV about the British soldiers in Iraq though our boys are being killed there, too, and news about U.S. engagement plays on European television daily.”

    We are a world unto ourselves. We forget, in other words, that rather than purporting to lead the human race in all things good, it may be time to join it. And government accountability may be as good a place as any to start. Most of all, at least in the Condoleezza Rice event, perhaps we have forgotten our P’s and Q’s. Or rather, their P’s and Q’s. “PQ’s” is British shorthand for “Parliamentary Questions.” In England, the Prime Minister himself goes to the House of Commons every Wednesday at noon to answer questions from members of parliament about any facet of government policy.

    More than that, the Leader of the Opposition can question or rebut the Prime Minister’s answers on the spot. No talk of “separation of powers,” no refuge-taking behind the veil of “presidential privilege.”

    Whenever I watch footage of those Wednesday afternoon shouting matches, I imagine an American president in the prime minister’s shoes. To be precise, I imagine George W. Bush in the prime minister’s shoes, but I’m all for bi-partisan bitch-slapping. The impeachment hearings certainly would have been more interesting (and perhaps seeing educated adults arguing breathlessly about the meaning of “is” would have helped reveal how absurd it all was). I disagree with many of Tony Blair’s policy decisions, but I can’t fault his intelligence or his articulateness. He handles his accusers with great aplomb and with nary a stutter or mispronunciation. And the political discourse at large benefits for it. Dubya has given fewer press conferences than any modern president, and I think we all know why. I wonder if any ideas have “popped” into his head since Tuesday night. (By the way, don’t you love the way he phrased that line, ascribing the action verb to the idea rather than to himself, as if it were his job to merely stand there waiting for inspiration? Apparently thinking is just too much work.)

  • Liberalism and Literature

    A comment left here on Wednesday by Daniel Green led me to his blog, which in turn led me to his wonderful article, “Liberalism and Literature.” A critique of the “academic left” and of ideological criticism, in general, Green’s piece is refreshingly articulate, well-informed, and even-handed. It echoes what I see as a growing dissatisfaction with contemporary, theory-centric literary studies — both within academia and outside of it — a dissatisfaction (political, professional, and aesthetic) that I hope to address in my dissertation (assuming, of course, that I ever get around to finishing the damn thing).

    I’m most sympathetic to Green’s argument when he points to the vast divide that separates traditional liberal ideals and the messy details of practical politics from the radical and Utopian ideologies that dominate certain sectors of literary criticism.

    This reductive approach, whereby all subjects are political, either inherently so or made to be so, is detrimental to real politics, which can be safely disregarded in favor of the more tidy rhetorical kind.

    Green supports his case with a spot-on analysis of America’s current political condition, which, as he points out, is itself a chorus of competing fictions. The “radical worldview” he likens to escapist genre fiction:

    an opportunity to leave behind the muddle of ordinary life in exchange for the narrative clarity and enhanced drama stories make available.

    Modern conservatism — steeped in its legends of “gun-toting colonials,” “bread-earning” husbands, and “a group of white founding fathers whose supreme wisdom literally cannot be challenged” — is founded, first and foremost, Green argues convincingly, on a belief in free market capitalism, itself a dominant force of liberal progress.

    It is impossible any longer to think of the “conservative” — at least in the United States — as one who simply resists impulsive change; instead, the postwar American conservative comes fully possessed of a complete collection of well-made fictions, chief among them the unequivocal faith in the “free market” (taken over, to be sure, from 19th century liberals), a fiction so powerful in its influence that conservatives have almost managed to conflate it with democracy itself.

    So what does any of this have to do with “Liberalism and Literature”? Green’s immediate concern here is reminding us that great literature — with its delight in ambiguity, the “universal uncertainty of human life and the agelessly unresolved conflicts stirred up by human aspirations” — is itself a primer for liberal ideals, including, in Tony Kushner’s words, the inevitability of “painful progress.” “I would again maintain,” Green writes:

    that my primary interest in literature — my belief in its capacity to sharpen the mind’s apprehension of the shaping patterns at work both in the imaginative creations of poets and novelists and in the imaginary creations many of us attempt to make of the social, political, and cultural arrangements we must unfortunately settle for in lieu of the more vivid if less tangible worlds evoked by the poets — has made me more alert to the many different forms the aestheticizing of mundane reality can take.

    That’s a tricky leap he has made there, but one with which I am growing increasingly sympathetic. His critics on the left would likely denounce Green’s argument as fundamentally conservative, claiming that by reducing the value of Art to its “universal” nature, he is ignoring the particular economic and “real” political forces that have shaped the making of the Art and our reception of it, and that he is therefore, by default, supporting those very forces. (I’ve made the same claim against Philip Roth’s recent fiction, actually.) But that critique is too easy, and, as a personal aside, it contradicts my own experience of literature. The years I’ve spent studying literature and film have had one great effect on me: They turned what was once a black and white world into a vast mosaic. And that process does, in fact, make a tremendous impact on “real” politics.

    One more note on this article:

    Much has been made — especially in recent years and in conservative regions like the American South — of the dominance of leftist or liberal thought in academia. Green offers, I think, the most obvious explanation for that dominance. I’ve thought the same thing for years, but never took the time to write it down:

    Considering a whole constellation of facts about contemporary America — among them its now unchallenged position as supreme economic, cultural, and military power, its exaltation of business and commerce as indicators of status and accomplishment, its thoroughgoing utilitarian approach to education and manifest impatience with the cultivation of intellect and sensibility for their own sakes — it is not at all surprising that those who choose what was once called the “life of the mind” at its universities would feel estranged from the official values that seem to animate the political and commercial life of American society. Whether such people would identify themselves as “liberals,” “radicals,” “progressives,” or just as independent thinkers, surely it is at the least unlikely that as a whole they would incline much toward the established conservative view of the way things ought to be.

    Good stuff.

  • By the Numbers

    Some interesting facts and figures from The Independent [via a Gauche], including:

    $127 billion: Amount of US budget surplus in the year that Bush became President in 2001

    $374 billion: Amount of US budget deficit in the fiscal year for 2003

    $23,920: Amount of each US citizen’s share of the national debt as of 19 January 2004

    $10.9 million: Average wealth of the members of Bush’s original 16-person cabinet

    88%: Percentage of American citizens who will save less than $100 on their 2006 federal taxes as a result of 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes

    $42,000: Average savings members of Bush’s cabinet are expected to enjoy this year as a result in the cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes

    $42,228: Median household income in the US in 2001

    $116,000: Amount Vice-President Cheney is expected to save each year in taxes

    44%: Percentage of Americans who believe the President’s economic growth plan will mostly benefit the wealthy

    I’ve been daydreaming lately about the upcoming Presidential debates, wondering if the eventual Democratic nominee will find the courage to really take Bush to task. When I daydream, I imagine the Democratic nominee saying something like this:

    Kerry/Edwards/Dean: “Ladies and gentleman, I’m going to be perfectly frank here. Thanks to President Bush’s cut in capital gains and dividends taxes, I saved an additional $42,200 this year. Let me repeat that: While most of you were cashing your $100 refunds, I saved $42,200! I won’t embarrass President Bush or Vice-President Cheney by telling you how much each of them saved (although it’s in the public record).

    “And you know what? I don’t need it. Which is why I donated that $42,200 to my favorite charities.

    “If you believe President Bush when he says that his tax cut doesn’t benefit folks like himself and folks like me, well let me tell you something: you’re wrong. His tax cuts are wrong. And, contrary to what Vice President Cheney may have learned from President Reagan, deficits do matter!”

    I can’t think of a better way to spotlight the real effects of Bush’s tax cuts. Of course, depending on how the pundits respond, this tact might blow up in the nominee’s face. But, man, I would love to see Bush’s reaction.

  • Democracy in America

    I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest. Mankind, for him, consists in his children and his personal friends. . . . He exists in and for himself. . . .

    Over this kind of men stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. . . . It gladly works for their happiness but wants to be sole agent and judge of it. . . . It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.

    — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840

    And nearly a century before television, no less. De Tocqueville is near the top of my “Darren, seriously, isn’t it about time that you read this?” list. I stumbled upon this passage while reading Wendy Brown’s Politics Out of History, a provocative defense of critical theory as a potentially invigorating voice in the discourse of liberal democracy. In the best chapters, she turns for guidance to Nietzsche and Foucault, who could, at best, be described as problematic political figures (what with Nietzsche’s hatred of egalitarianism and all). I plan to finish Brown’s book tonight and post a reading diary entry tomorrow.

    I’m just stunned, though, by de Tocqueville’s prescient description of contemporary America. A few days ago, I walked a hundred or so yards down the street to deliver a piece of mail that had been accidentally put in my box. My neighbor, who I’ve never met, looked at me closely through her window before opening the door an inch or two, deeply suspicious — this in a neighborhood that hasn’t experienced even a bout of vandalism in the six years I’ve lived there. When I run at night, I see the glow of my neighbors’ televisions emanating from behind their closed blinds. And then when I finish my run, I go home, close the blinds, and turn on my television. How sad.

  • Moral Empathy

    My dissertation is built around a model of postwar American society that was first proposed by Jeffrey Alexander in Fin-de-Siecle Social Theory (1995) and that he has since expanded upon in The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (2003). I picked up a copy of the latter a few weeks ago but haven’t yet had a chance to read it. (That I’m looking forward — with great expectation — to doing so over Christmas break probably says more about my personality than I should freely admit.) Alexander has a welcomed knack for translating the often obtuse language of social theory into workable frameworks. Theory and action — a nice change of pace.

    Alexander and Ron Eyerman, co-directors of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, published a great piece yesterday in Newsday (also available at Common Dreams), in which they argue that the massive economic and social changes necessary to alleviate suffering on a global scale are dependent, finally, upon change of a more fundamental and personal nature:

    Only when the privileged can put themselves in the place of others who are less fortunate, when they achieve moral empathy, can reforms be made.

    “How do we achieve this?” they then ask. Citing as examples the Civil Rights movement, Ghandi’s performed anti-colonialism, anti-Apartheid efforts, and feminism (among others), Alexander and Eyerman argue that the first step is breaking down the binaries that we’ve constructed to simplify our understanding of the world:

    rational/irrational, autonomous/dependent, honest/dishonest, open/secretive, cooperative/aggressive. We cannot have moral empathy for others we perceive as morally incompetent, irrational, dishonest, secretive, aggressive and dependent on authority. In such cases, their fate appears natural and morally justified. But we know that, by representing themselves in terms of the positive attributes, excluded groups can gain empathy among better off people who might come to their aid. Over time the excluded can achieve enough legitimacy in the public sphere to stage social protests that will be taken seriously and lead eventually to reforms. Subordination and inclusion are not static structural conditions; they can be negotiated.

    There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking here, of course, but something about that connection between constructed binaries and “moral empathy” really struck me. As I’m prone to do, it got me thinking about the American church and, more specifically, about the ways in which it has been complicit in many of our country’s more regrettable foreign and domestic policy decisions of late. In its efforts to stem the tide of “postmodern relativism” (or something like that), large segments of the church have worked aggressively to reinforce those simple constructions. It pains me, especially, when I hear Christians parrot Bush’s good/evil rhetoric, as if the Bible’s message of grace were somehow applicable only to us but never to them.

    Today, on AIDS Day, I’m reminded that three million people have already succumbed this year and that another forty million (three-eighths of them under the age of fifteen) are living with HIV. And I wonder why our churches can’t “stand united” to help, why they can’t muster the “moral empathy” to even care.

  • Stuck in the Long, Hard Slog

    How many thousands of hours will future historians devote to parsing through the events of this week? Yesterday, barely 48 hours after the downing of an American helicopter in Fallujah, six — and only six — members of the Senate showed up to approve the White House’s request for $87.5 billion, thus guaranteeing our long-term commitment of lives and resources to the future occupation of Iraq. The other 94 Senators, an homogeneous mix of Republicans and Democrats, skipped the vote so as to avoid putting their names in the official record. It’s an interesting strategy. Now they can’t be accused of abandoning our troops or of pouring billions into a useless cause.

    And you know what? I can’t say that I blame them.

    I’ve made a deliberate choice in recent weeks to keep quiet on these issues, partly because I’m tired, but mostly because I just don’t know where to stand. I protested the war last winter because, like so many by my side, I could see this coming. Hell, even Bush, Sr. saw it coming. From his memoirs:

    Trying to eliminate Saddam… would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible… we would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq… there was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see, violating another of our principles… Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.

    But then we started dropping bombs and killing thousands of people and dismantling what remained of Iraq’s infrastructure, and everything changed. Regardless of his political motives, I gained some respect for President Bush in recent weeks when he threatened to veto any changes to the appropriations bill that would turn our $20 billion “gift” into a “loan.” We owe the people of Iraq at least that much. But, of course, then I wonder how much of our gift will actually make it to the people of Iraq, and how much will simply be funneled into the pockets of American contractors (who might or might not have direct, personal connections to the administration). But, then again, even if the money does go to those contractors, who’s to say that they aren’t, in fact, the most qualified people to do the job and that the Iraqi people won’t benefit in the long run?

    And now you see why I’ve been so quiet.

    I wish I could join the knee-jerkers on my end of the spectrum who are turning up the “bring our boys home” rhetoric. Ray McGovern makes the most convincing argument that I’ve read yet. “Whether or not U.S. policymakers can admit at this point that they were ‘terribly wrong,’” he writes, “they need to transfer real authority to the United Nations without delay and support the U.N. in overseeing a rapid return to Iraqi sovereignty.”

    But, many protest, we can’t just withdraw! Sure we can, and better now than ten years from now, as in the case of Vietnam. If it is true that we are not in Iraq to control the oil or to establish military bases with which to dominate that strategic area, we can certainly withdraw. As in Vietnam, the war is unwinnable… hear that? Unwinnable!

    If the U.S. withdraws, would there be civil war in Iraq? One cannot dismiss this possibility lightly given the history of Iraq. But it is at least as likely that a regional-federal model of government that would include substantial autonomy for the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the center, and the Shiites in the south (something foreshadowed by the composition of the existing Council) could begin to function in relatively short order with help from the U.N. While some degree of inter-ethnic violence could be expected, chances are good that this model would still allow a representative national government to function.

    We won’t know if we don’t try. Besides, there is no viable alternative.

    McGovern, the 27-year CIA veteran and advisor to Bush, Sr., certainly understands the issue better than I. (That he directs the Servant Leadership School is another reason that I’m heeding his warning.) And with each day, as the death toll grows (23 already in November), I grow increasingly disheartened. When I heard of the helicopter tragedy on Sunday, my first thoughts were of my own family, who just last week marked the twenty year anniversary of the death of my cousin, who piloted a Black Hawk into (but not out of) Grenada. On November 2, 2023, sixteen other families will mark similar anniversaries and will still be mourning, as ours is.

    But wish as I might, I can’t yet join the knee-jerkers, and I’m not sure why, exactly. Except that I don’t want it all to have been for nothing.

  • Bring ‘Em On

    When Bush landed on the aircraft carrier in that flight suit, I immediately thought, “From now on, just do Bush in the flight suit. Every single time.”
    — Will Ferrell, on life after Saturday Night Live

    Can you just imagine how funny that would be? George W. Bush addressing the United Nations in his flight suit. George W. Bush debating Howard Dean in his flight suit. George W. Bush sitting at his Oval Office desk trying to find Waldo in his flight suit. He really is Too Stupid to be President.

  • This is Persecution?

    So, while driving to and from Atlanta this week we heard two interviews with David Limbaugh, who is out promoting his latest book, Persecution: How Liberals are Waging War Against Christianity. With a title like that, and with the vocal support of people like Ann Coulter, you can probably guess the gist of Limbaugh’s argument: 21st century America is fast devolving into 1st century Rome, where upstanding, Patriotic Christians (who just happen to vote Republican) are being thrown daily to the lions of liberalism. Here, as in most recent discourse of the like, “liberalism” has nothing to do with traditional notions of freedom and equality; it is, instead, shorthand for secularism or atheism or civil libertarianism or socialism or feminism or political correctness or multiculturalism or any number of other, often mutually exclusive political positions. Whatever.

    I only bring this up here because I found it so interesting that I heard Limbaugh level these charges on two different radio stations, one Christian, the other secular, during a three hour drive. In fact, while Limbaugh, the talk show hosts, and outraged listeners railed against those liberals who were limiting their ability to publicly express their faith, we were driving through Chattanooga, where (no exaggeration) one-third of all FM stations broadcast explicitly Christian content. I know that’s not the case everywhere, but come on . . .

    I won’t deny that I’m, at best, ambivalent about the wholesale purging of Christianity from, say, public schools. When more than 80% of Americans identify themselves as Christian, it seems unnecessary to me to systematically remove the word “Christmas” from our calendars. But to call this “persecution” — even after acknowledging the inflated rhetoric that is part and parcel of this type of book — is a disgrace. Has the Church in America become so thoroughly synonymous with middle class comfort that we have to seek out charges of persecution in straw man arguments like Limbaugh’s? Is this our proof that we’re “salt and light”? Disgusting.

    And speaking of straw men, did you catch Bill O’Reilly on Fresh Air? Be sure to listen to the entire interview. The last few minutes are priceless.