Bin Laden and Fred Thompson made it official. They both aim to influence the 2008 presidential election.
Bin Laden, in his latest video, offered a message tailored to Democratic and Republican activists alike. First, he offered an end to the war. Second, he offered a massive tax cut and a permanent flat tax of just 2.5%. Blending a message that was overtly part Muhammad and part Chomsky, he asked only that Americans discard their corrupt, corporate-controlled democratic system, and embrace Islam. Small price for a flat tax.
Fred Thompson offered no such message clarity. After six months of planning his entry into the Republican presidential contest, Thompson’s first week on the stump was not encouraging. When right-wing talk show host Sean Hannity popped “The Question,” and asked Thompson why he was running for president and what distinguished him from the other candidates, the newly minted candidate muffed. Well, Sean, the candidate dissembled, I haven’t really thought about it in those terms…
It is an astonishing thing for lay observers of the process to see candidates stumble over The Question, as it would seem to be the single question every candidate knows they are going to be asked. Unlike “How would you get us out of the mess in Iraq?” each candidate can answer this one on their own terms. But when Hannity lobbed the softball his way, Thompson missed.
The depth of the destruction that George W. Bush has done to the Republican Party is evidenced by the lack of an anointed candidate just four months before the first nominating votes are tallied. Not since 1964 have the Republicans had a wide-open contest for the party nomination, as both the party’s famed internal discipline and candidate adherence to the shibboleths––pro-Life, anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-tax, pro-faith––have come undone. Fred Thompson may catch fire, and don the mantle of Reagan that slipped from George Allen's grasp as the word macaca left his lips, but if his first week is any indication, he may never reach the levels of popularity he held before he formally entered the race.
It just isn’t supposed to be this way. The right people have not been consulted. Whether dead, disgusted or indicted, the powerbrokers who are supposed to take care of these things are nowhere to be seen, and the two leading choices for Republican primary voters are a pro-choice, pro-gay, anti-gun, multiple divorcee married to a Jew, and a formerly pro-gay, pro-choice Mormon from a family with a polygamous past.
A choice between Liberal and an Apostate. Just friggin’ great. Now along comes Fred, and he can't say why.
Among the Democratic candidates, message clarity has become the central debate, now reduced to the parsing of single words. Hillary has chosen the mantle of Experience, while Obama has embraced Change. This past week, Hillary showed her Clintonian bloodlines when she took it to Obama by questioning what the meaning of the word Change is, and claiming that she is in fact the candidate offering both Experience and Change.
God help Obama. For surely the game will be up if he loses both words.
The real word that the Clinton campaign is relying on is Inevitability. After staunching Obama’s initial momentum, Hillary now sits around 35-40% among Democratic voters in national polls and holds a 15-20% lead over Obama. In Democratic debates she has been a dominant voice and successfully stoked the emerging sense of inevitability. And it is a strategy that offers increasing returns. The more inevitable she seems, the more likely are others to drop out, temper their rhetorical attacks and pay obeisance to her as the presumptive nominee.
But the funny thing is that the closer people look, the less they seem to like. In Iowa, the first state to put their delegates on the line, five polls taken since August 1st show a very tight race: Clinton 25%, Edwards 25%, Obama 21%, Richardson 12%. Therefore, even as the fires of Inevitability are stoked, on the ground Iowa is a horse race, Nevada and South Carolina--western and southern respectively--are less naturally hospitable terrain for Clinton, and only polling in New Hampshire mirrors the national trends. Accordingly, the prospect looms that the juggernaut could derail in the early weeks of voting, a risk that can be effectively eliminated if Michigan and Florida--states in which her lead exceeds 20%--successfully move forward in the process.
What is most puzzling about the meta-debate between the forces of Experience and the forces of Change, is that Hillary is conceded the mantle of experience, while the best Obama can do is suggest that experience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, as he proffers Cheney and Rumsfeld as his cases in point. But this is a specious argument. Experience matters deeply in foreign affairs, particularly in a world where our antagonists and counterparts, be they Osama Bin Laden, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Vladimir Putin or the Chinese Central Committee, have proven a capacity to think strategically, take a long view of history and see foreign relations a web of complex, interconnected relationships. It would indeed be reassuring to believe that our President was able to see and navigate the world in all its complexities, set forth a vision of the world twenty or thirty years down the road, engage other nations in embracing that future, and lead the world toward that end. To say the experience is not of value seems, somehow, to miss the point.
Even as Hillary is accorded the mantle of Experience, she has in fact held no executive post and stood accountable for her choices in that capacity. Like Obama and Edwards, she is a one-term U.S. Senator and a lawyer with a keen mind. And she was First Lady, and present in the halls of power for eight years. But she was neither the President nor the Vice President, and at best can sell herself as a co-conspirator for the best of her husband’s years.
The experience that Hillary can validly claim, and which should be no small consideration, is her proven ability to withstand the slings and arrows that lie ahead for whichever candidate emerges as the party nominee. From healthcare reform, to the death of Vincent Foster, to the selling of the Lincoln Bedroom, to her husband’s philandering, to the pardoning of Marc Rich, Hillary Clinton has taken the bullets, looked into the camera and never blinked. This is the Experience that Hillary brings as a candidate, and it is no small offering.
But it is not Change.
Perhaps this is what the Iowa voters see. And it is enough to give them pause.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Thursday, May 03, 2007
George Tenet goes public
Dick Cheney must get a kick out of watching George Tenet and Hilary Clinton try to change the subject.
Tired of being Dick Cheney’s bitch, and remaining silent as the Vice President repeatedly and publicly blamed the decision to go to war on his assurances that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD, George Tenet is lashing back. In his new book, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet contends that the Vice President and the Administration were intent on going to war all in Iraq along, and that WMD merely served as a pretext.
This is old news. After all, in a 2003 interview in Vanity Fair magazine, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz forthrightly explained that the Bush Administration had several reasons for launching its war with Iraq––none of which, incidentally, suggested Iraqi complicity in the 9/11 events or constituted a casus belli under the generally accepted laws of war––but chose WMD as the central rationale because it was the easiest to sell.
Much to Tenet’s chagrin, the WMD narrative––including the ensuing claims of intelligence failure and political manipulation––remains central to public discourse around the history of the war, and continues to obscure the more wide-ranging motivations. Riding the talk show circuit, interviewers ignore the substance of his book––the threats the to the nation, the depth and breadth of Al Qaeda's capabilities––and return to the WMD soap opera. What did he know? When did he know it? What did others know? Did he want to apologize to the American people? [Wolf Blitzer, CNN, 5/2/07.]
Bush, Cheney and their acolytes are indifferent to the public WMD debate, however, because it was never determinative. Prior to September 11th, as Tenet suggests, the Bush Administration was intent on removing Saddam Hussein from power for a range of reasons, which reflected the perspectives of different groups within the Administration. First, there were the Neoconservatives. As typified by Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol, this group saw the institution of democratic governments in the Middle East as critical to regional stability and global security, and supported military action in Iraq as a means to establish a beachhead from which to catalyze political transformation.
Second, there was the Office of the Vice President. While Cheney was a member of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, his strategic focus was on energy security. This group saw Saddam’s commitment to give Russian, Chinese and French oil companies leases to develop the massive Iraq oil fields––after United Nations sanctions were removed––as a fundamental threat to American commercial interests and economic security, and supported military action as a means to achieve three goals: Preventing Russo-Sino control of vital resources, establishing a regime that would direct those contracts to American and British companies, and putting boots on the ground within striking distance of both Saudi and Kuwait, to deter future threats to America’s interests in the region.
Third, there was the group whose views in many respects most closely mirrored those of the Clinton Administration that first promulgated the policy of regime change in Iraq. Led by Rumsfeld, this group saw Saddam as a proven threat to the region, and international terrorism as a growing strategic threat to America’s interests. They viewed action in Iraq as imperative both to forestall further aggression by Saddam, and to prevent an alliance with terrorist groups that had declared war on America and the west years earlier.
For each group, the attacks on September 11th escalated the urgency of acting, and Tenet’s assurance that Iraq harbored WMD provided a compelling narrative for selling a war that each group believed critical to the nation’s interests. While Tenet blames Cheney for continuing with the public charade and hanging him out to dry, others across the political spectrum have found it useful to stick to the script. Among Democratic presidential aspirants who voted for the war, the formulation of blaming bad intelligence and manipulation has become the accepted route for appeasing the Party faithful. For his part, John Edwards has elevated apologizing to a central campaign theme as he expresses his regret for trusting the intelligence rather than his own judgment, while Hillary Clinton clings to the “If I knew then what I know today…” formulation.
Hillary Clinton continues to resist John Edwards full-throated apologia because she wants to be President more than she wants to be the Democratic nominee, and this chosen path grates against her––and no doubt her husband’s––instincts. From a strategic standpoint, the clamor for an exit from Iraq is fraught with risk for the nation and the region. While not necessary a neocon-petrocentric-militarist, she is probably closer to the Administration’s world view than Edwards––and no doubt shares Joe Biden’s assessment that he is “clueless” on matters of foreign affairs. She understands that the prospect of American disengagement from the Middle East is already creating fear across the region, and leading the Sunni states––among them Egypt, Jorden and Saudi Arabia––rushing to develop nuclear programs as a deterrent to growing Iranian and Shia power, and that the next President must have a mandate to build a new strategic framework for the region. Almost alone among the Democratic candidates, she embraces Anthony Zinni's view that no Democrat, if elected, will be able to deliver on the withdrawal commitments they are now so eagerly proffering.
Politically, Clinton views Edwards’ apology-as-job-qualification as suicide for a Democratic nominee come November 2008. Edwards’ account––that as a Senator, he trusted the CIA rather than his own judgment––is simply a more convenient history to embrace than the less convenient truth that he did trust his own judgment. In the toxic political climate of the day, with the drums beating and the rhetoric flying, when it came time to vote, it was easier to fly the flag and vote Aye than to vote Nay and risk the scorn that would ensue. For Edwards the Presidential aspirant, it is better now to plead guilty to having been duped than to face the far worse indictment of having lacked the courage to vote Nay, of having chosen to vote for war and to send soldiers to die, in order to preserve––in Bill Clinton’s words––his own future political viability.
When the general election rolls around 18-months from now, neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney will be on the Republican ticket, and while Iraq looms to be a central issue, the protagonists of that war will be leaving the theatre. It is notable that even as the Democrats are being pushed to the left by their base, the Republican field is notably lacking in fire-breathing partisans, and that the Democratic debate two weeks ago included more Senators who voted for the war than the Republican debate this evening. In a sense, the Republican field may actually be less captive of the war, and may be adapting more quickly to a new political landscape where a resurgent Independent center looms to be critical once again, comprising voters for whom apologies for bad judgment will do little to win votes for the highest office, and Out Now will not suffice for a strategic vision for America’s role in the world.
Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney both understand what George Tenet seems to have missed, the WMD narrative worked––and it is still working. And Clinton and Cheney also understand that the longer it remains central to the Democratic campaign, the more it will weaken and diminish the ultimate victor, and the more likely it is that a Republican will the White House 18 months from now.
Tired of being Dick Cheney’s bitch, and remaining silent as the Vice President repeatedly and publicly blamed the decision to go to war on his assurances that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD, George Tenet is lashing back. In his new book, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet contends that the Vice President and the Administration were intent on going to war all in Iraq along, and that WMD merely served as a pretext.
This is old news. After all, in a 2003 interview in Vanity Fair magazine, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz forthrightly explained that the Bush Administration had several reasons for launching its war with Iraq––none of which, incidentally, suggested Iraqi complicity in the 9/11 events or constituted a casus belli under the generally accepted laws of war––but chose WMD as the central rationale because it was the easiest to sell.
Much to Tenet’s chagrin, the WMD narrative––including the ensuing claims of intelligence failure and political manipulation––remains central to public discourse around the history of the war, and continues to obscure the more wide-ranging motivations. Riding the talk show circuit, interviewers ignore the substance of his book––the threats the to the nation, the depth and breadth of Al Qaeda's capabilities––and return to the WMD soap opera. What did he know? When did he know it? What did others know? Did he want to apologize to the American people? [Wolf Blitzer, CNN, 5/2/07.]
Bush, Cheney and their acolytes are indifferent to the public WMD debate, however, because it was never determinative. Prior to September 11th, as Tenet suggests, the Bush Administration was intent on removing Saddam Hussein from power for a range of reasons, which reflected the perspectives of different groups within the Administration. First, there were the Neoconservatives. As typified by Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol, this group saw the institution of democratic governments in the Middle East as critical to regional stability and global security, and supported military action in Iraq as a means to establish a beachhead from which to catalyze political transformation.
Second, there was the Office of the Vice President. While Cheney was a member of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, his strategic focus was on energy security. This group saw Saddam’s commitment to give Russian, Chinese and French oil companies leases to develop the massive Iraq oil fields––after United Nations sanctions were removed––as a fundamental threat to American commercial interests and economic security, and supported military action as a means to achieve three goals: Preventing Russo-Sino control of vital resources, establishing a regime that would direct those contracts to American and British companies, and putting boots on the ground within striking distance of both Saudi and Kuwait, to deter future threats to America’s interests in the region.
Third, there was the group whose views in many respects most closely mirrored those of the Clinton Administration that first promulgated the policy of regime change in Iraq. Led by Rumsfeld, this group saw Saddam as a proven threat to the region, and international terrorism as a growing strategic threat to America’s interests. They viewed action in Iraq as imperative both to forestall further aggression by Saddam, and to prevent an alliance with terrorist groups that had declared war on America and the west years earlier.
For each group, the attacks on September 11th escalated the urgency of acting, and Tenet’s assurance that Iraq harbored WMD provided a compelling narrative for selling a war that each group believed critical to the nation’s interests. While Tenet blames Cheney for continuing with the public charade and hanging him out to dry, others across the political spectrum have found it useful to stick to the script. Among Democratic presidential aspirants who voted for the war, the formulation of blaming bad intelligence and manipulation has become the accepted route for appeasing the Party faithful. For his part, John Edwards has elevated apologizing to a central campaign theme as he expresses his regret for trusting the intelligence rather than his own judgment, while Hillary Clinton clings to the “If I knew then what I know today…” formulation.
Hillary Clinton continues to resist John Edwards full-throated apologia because she wants to be President more than she wants to be the Democratic nominee, and this chosen path grates against her––and no doubt her husband’s––instincts. From a strategic standpoint, the clamor for an exit from Iraq is fraught with risk for the nation and the region. While not necessary a neocon-petrocentric-militarist, she is probably closer to the Administration’s world view than Edwards––and no doubt shares Joe Biden’s assessment that he is “clueless” on matters of foreign affairs. She understands that the prospect of American disengagement from the Middle East is already creating fear across the region, and leading the Sunni states––among them Egypt, Jorden and Saudi Arabia––rushing to develop nuclear programs as a deterrent to growing Iranian and Shia power, and that the next President must have a mandate to build a new strategic framework for the region. Almost alone among the Democratic candidates, she embraces Anthony Zinni's view that no Democrat, if elected, will be able to deliver on the withdrawal commitments they are now so eagerly proffering.
Politically, Clinton views Edwards’ apology-as-job-qualification as suicide for a Democratic nominee come November 2008. Edwards’ account––that as a Senator, he trusted the CIA rather than his own judgment––is simply a more convenient history to embrace than the less convenient truth that he did trust his own judgment. In the toxic political climate of the day, with the drums beating and the rhetoric flying, when it came time to vote, it was easier to fly the flag and vote Aye than to vote Nay and risk the scorn that would ensue. For Edwards the Presidential aspirant, it is better now to plead guilty to having been duped than to face the far worse indictment of having lacked the courage to vote Nay, of having chosen to vote for war and to send soldiers to die, in order to preserve––in Bill Clinton’s words––his own future political viability.
When the general election rolls around 18-months from now, neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney will be on the Republican ticket, and while Iraq looms to be a central issue, the protagonists of that war will be leaving the theatre. It is notable that even as the Democrats are being pushed to the left by their base, the Republican field is notably lacking in fire-breathing partisans, and that the Democratic debate two weeks ago included more Senators who voted for the war than the Republican debate this evening. In a sense, the Republican field may actually be less captive of the war, and may be adapting more quickly to a new political landscape where a resurgent Independent center looms to be critical once again, comprising voters for whom apologies for bad judgment will do little to win votes for the highest office, and Out Now will not suffice for a strategic vision for America’s role in the world.
Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney both understand what George Tenet seems to have missed, the WMD narrative worked––and it is still working. And Clinton and Cheney also understand that the longer it remains central to the Democratic campaign, the more it will weaken and diminish the ultimate victor, and the more likely it is that a Republican will the White House 18 months from now.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Reality Bites: Exhibit A
We have a problem accepting reality when it threatens our preferred historical narrative.
Exhibit A is Kirk Radomski.
As reported today above the fold in the New York Times, Radomski, now 37, has admitted in federal court to distributing a range of performance enhancing drugs––including anabolic steroids, amphetamines and human growth hormone––as a batboy and equipment manager in the clubhouse of the New York Mets during the period 1985-1995.
Perhaps Radomski’s admission can bring to an end the roiling debate over the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, to say nothing of the rest of professional sports. If a 15-year-old batboy was distributing drugs in the Mets clubhouse to “dozens of players,” one can safely conclude that the practice was pervasive.
This is not a Claude Rains moment. Learning of Radomski’s admission, no one can reasonably be “Shocked, shocked, that there were illegal drugs being used in baseball.” After all, any baseball fan worthy of the name read Jim Bouton’s classic Ball Four, which exposed––among other crude habits––the widespread use of amphetamines––or “greenies”––in the Yankees clubhouse during the 1963 and 1964 seasons. And while Bouton’s revelations about America’s heroes earned him the enduring enmity of his teammates and the Yankees organization, no one seriously challenged the veracity of his claims.
Today, several years after the Senate charade that marched players before the cameras to buttress the careers of the Senators and destroy those of the players, Mark McGwire is still pilloried for declining to state what everyone knew, his bash-brother Jose Canseco is still shunned for stating what everyone knew and writing a book about it, and the Baseball Commissioner and team owners who deflected questions from the Senators with the skill of cigarette company executives, still invoke the name of Senate titan George Mitchell as their agent in their efforts to “get to the bottom of the situation.”
Well, maybe the image of the 15-year-old Radomksi offering up anabolic steroids and methamphetamines to Ray Knight and Mookie Wilson and David Cone will finally allow people to come to grips with the long history of drug use in Major League locker rooms, and cease the fatuous effort to lay baseball’s problem with performance-enhancing drugs at the feet of McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds. The impact of money on the purity of America’s Game dates back at least to the Black Sox scandal in 1919, and the casual use of illegal drugs in the clubhouse dates at least to the early 1960s. The advent of free agency, and the ensuing growth in player performance-based compensation, magnified the incentives for players to seek out ways to improve their performance. And as Radomski and Bouton both suggest, the teams were co-conspirators in the effort.
Radomski’s “revelations” are particularly timely, as the ongoing steroid drama is reaching its apotheosis. One day over the next few months, Barry Bonds will break Hank Aaron’s long-standing home run record, and Bonds pursuit of Aaron’s record has become a national morality play. Hank Aaron is an historic figure in American sports, a man who endured the barbs of the civil rights struggle, and yet remains a figure of stature and grace. In contrast, Barry Bonds is, well, Barry Bonds. Surly and aloof, Bonds is widely vilified as a cheater and remains the protagonist in the steroid controversy. Major League Baseball, which profited greatly from the race between McGuire and Sosa to break Roger Maris’ single season home run record, is at a loss about how and whether to recognize Bonds when he hits home run 756. Aaron himself refuses to acknowledge Bonds, and Aaron’s disdain supports those who view Bonds as the villain in the drama.
The fact is, however, that Barry Bonds is not destroying America’s Game. America’s Game is an American game, part of our commercial popular culture, with its rules and rewards. It is possible that Barry Bonds may have outstripped his peers in his use of steroids––as he has in all other aspects of the sport––and certainly today’s Barry Bonds physically bears little comparison with the Barry Bonds who came into the League. However, the same can be said of Roger Clemens, and other players whose records are steadily displacing those of players from earlier eras.
As one looks back over the past 40 years, it is impossible to know who benefited and who did not from performance-enhancing drugs, and therefore how their records should be compared. Bonds vs. A-Rod? Clemens vs. Maddox? Ricky Henderson vs. Maury Wills. In each case, the first player seems the more likely beneficiary than the second. We only know from the testimony of Radomksi, and the supporting observations of Bouton and Canseco, that the opportunity was there, and that many took advantage. Yet no player has been targeted, vilified and ostracized like Bonds.
As the Bonds drama unfolds, we will most certainly continue to recite the preferred narrative––that Barry Bonds is a unique villain in this saga, rather than just the most recognized actor in what has been a decades-long play in which many are complicit. New York fans will certainly prefer to cling to their image of Lenny Dykstra as a hard-scrapple, tobacco-chewing, throw-back player, and view today’s story as an aberration. Others will argue that unlike Bonds, Dysktra and the other heroes of summers’ past were the unwitting victims of team doctors and trainers, and perhaps even an occasional 15-year-old batboy, pushing their wares.
But as it ain’t so. It just ain’t so.
Exhibit A is Kirk Radomski.
As reported today above the fold in the New York Times, Radomski, now 37, has admitted in federal court to distributing a range of performance enhancing drugs––including anabolic steroids, amphetamines and human growth hormone––as a batboy and equipment manager in the clubhouse of the New York Mets during the period 1985-1995.
Perhaps Radomski’s admission can bring to an end the roiling debate over the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, to say nothing of the rest of professional sports. If a 15-year-old batboy was distributing drugs in the Mets clubhouse to “dozens of players,” one can safely conclude that the practice was pervasive.
This is not a Claude Rains moment. Learning of Radomski’s admission, no one can reasonably be “Shocked, shocked, that there were illegal drugs being used in baseball.” After all, any baseball fan worthy of the name read Jim Bouton’s classic Ball Four, which exposed––among other crude habits––the widespread use of amphetamines––or “greenies”––in the Yankees clubhouse during the 1963 and 1964 seasons. And while Bouton’s revelations about America’s heroes earned him the enduring enmity of his teammates and the Yankees organization, no one seriously challenged the veracity of his claims.
Today, several years after the Senate charade that marched players before the cameras to buttress the careers of the Senators and destroy those of the players, Mark McGwire is still pilloried for declining to state what everyone knew, his bash-brother Jose Canseco is still shunned for stating what everyone knew and writing a book about it, and the Baseball Commissioner and team owners who deflected questions from the Senators with the skill of cigarette company executives, still invoke the name of Senate titan George Mitchell as their agent in their efforts to “get to the bottom of the situation.”
Well, maybe the image of the 15-year-old Radomksi offering up anabolic steroids and methamphetamines to Ray Knight and Mookie Wilson and David Cone will finally allow people to come to grips with the long history of drug use in Major League locker rooms, and cease the fatuous effort to lay baseball’s problem with performance-enhancing drugs at the feet of McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds. The impact of money on the purity of America’s Game dates back at least to the Black Sox scandal in 1919, and the casual use of illegal drugs in the clubhouse dates at least to the early 1960s. The advent of free agency, and the ensuing growth in player performance-based compensation, magnified the incentives for players to seek out ways to improve their performance. And as Radomski and Bouton both suggest, the teams were co-conspirators in the effort.
Radomski’s “revelations” are particularly timely, as the ongoing steroid drama is reaching its apotheosis. One day over the next few months, Barry Bonds will break Hank Aaron’s long-standing home run record, and Bonds pursuit of Aaron’s record has become a national morality play. Hank Aaron is an historic figure in American sports, a man who endured the barbs of the civil rights struggle, and yet remains a figure of stature and grace. In contrast, Barry Bonds is, well, Barry Bonds. Surly and aloof, Bonds is widely vilified as a cheater and remains the protagonist in the steroid controversy. Major League Baseball, which profited greatly from the race between McGuire and Sosa to break Roger Maris’ single season home run record, is at a loss about how and whether to recognize Bonds when he hits home run 756. Aaron himself refuses to acknowledge Bonds, and Aaron’s disdain supports those who view Bonds as the villain in the drama.
The fact is, however, that Barry Bonds is not destroying America’s Game. America’s Game is an American game, part of our commercial popular culture, with its rules and rewards. It is possible that Barry Bonds may have outstripped his peers in his use of steroids––as he has in all other aspects of the sport––and certainly today’s Barry Bonds physically bears little comparison with the Barry Bonds who came into the League. However, the same can be said of Roger Clemens, and other players whose records are steadily displacing those of players from earlier eras.
As one looks back over the past 40 years, it is impossible to know who benefited and who did not from performance-enhancing drugs, and therefore how their records should be compared. Bonds vs. A-Rod? Clemens vs. Maddox? Ricky Henderson vs. Maury Wills. In each case, the first player seems the more likely beneficiary than the second. We only know from the testimony of Radomksi, and the supporting observations of Bouton and Canseco, that the opportunity was there, and that many took advantage. Yet no player has been targeted, vilified and ostracized like Bonds.
As the Bonds drama unfolds, we will most certainly continue to recite the preferred narrative––that Barry Bonds is a unique villain in this saga, rather than just the most recognized actor in what has been a decades-long play in which many are complicit. New York fans will certainly prefer to cling to their image of Lenny Dykstra as a hard-scrapple, tobacco-chewing, throw-back player, and view today’s story as an aberration. Others will argue that unlike Bonds, Dysktra and the other heroes of summers’ past were the unwitting victims of team doctors and trainers, and perhaps even an occasional 15-year-old batboy, pushing their wares.
But as it ain’t so. It just ain’t so.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
The Jazzman's Wife
Sitting alongside her husband in Alabama this week, Hillary Clinton looked small. Diminished.
This is, no doubt, why her strategists have been determined to keep the two apart in public appearances. Not because as the publicly cuckolded and humiliated spouse she must detest him, but because seeing her sitting alongside him evokes so many images––images that do not serve her well.
Hillary is small and diminished next to Bill exactly because he is large, and larger than life. He is a titanic political figure, and as much as she struggles to emit the intellectual grasp that was one aspect of his persona, she has none of his touch of the common man. She lacks any measure of his deeply felt empathy for the individual, whether in Appalachia, the inner ring suburb or the inner city. Sitting there, as much as we might feel her pain, we know that she does not feel ours.
Worse still, sitting next him, one knows that behind all of her pretenses to being the candidate with real experience in the world, she is a one-term Senator––much as Obama and Edwards––and two-term First Lady. Internationally, she is a rock star, but the image of her sitting next to her husband reinforces, visually and viscerally, that she is the first derivative of a powerful political figure, and that her rise to Senator, and any hope she might have of the Presidency, demands that he be at her side. She had no choice to leave him in the wake of his infidelities if she was to achieve her own ambitions.
And that is the other image that strikes the observer, for Bill is nothing if not authentic, while Hillary sits as yin to his yang, the candidate who is packaged and careful and whom one never really believes that one can ever know.
As George W. Bush settles in for his last two years with approval ratings below 30%, and with America’s image in the world lying in tatters at his feet, do we really want another President who is driven to define herself against someone else, or some image of whom people think them to be? The Bush Presidency was undone in the beginning by the President and team’s rejection of all things Clinton. From their rejection of the outgoing administration’s concerns over Al Qaeda to the dismantling of FEMA, decisions early on derived from a compulsion to reject any notion that their hated predecessor––the Slick Willy who continually confounded their best-laid plans––could have gleaned any wisdom about the world during his eight years in office. Then, as Iraq loomed, the Bush Presidency was further damaged by the President’s determination to turn away from his father’s path, and to reject the entreaties of his father’s advisors, from Scowcroft’s plea to stay out of Iraq early on, to the President’s skillful marginalization of Jim Baker and the Iraq Study Group just a few months ago.
Now, Hillary looms as a candidate similarly defined by the struggle to be her own self, even as the world knows that she would never be where she is but for Him. Her struggle against the shadow of the man sitting next to her in Alabama this week was demonstrated by her overreaction to David Geffen’s suggestion that lying comes too easily to the Clintons. Rather than simply suggest that Geffen never disparaged them when he was spending the night in the Lincoln Bedroom, or that his bitterness dated to Bill Clinton’s decision not to pardon American Indian leader and convicted murderer Leonard Pelletier, Hillary lashed out at Geffen and attacked him for engaging in the “politics of personal destruction.”
Of course, it wasn’t about personal destruction. But it was intensely political, as Hillary was stuck––as she often will be as she continues on the long sprint to Iowa and New Hampshire––between her desire to leverage the patina of the Clinton Presidency, while rejecting ties to its more sordid moments. She could not give a straightforward response to Geffen, because it suggest her complicity in the selling of the Lincoln Bedroom for campaign contributions, and worse, the selling of Presidential Pardons to the likes of Billionaire tax cheat Marc Rich.
Hillary’s over-wrought reaction to Geffen, and her subsequent appearance with Bill in Alabama, do not speak well for her ability to navigate her campaign through the long months ahead. Despite an overwhelming advantage in fundraising, name recognition and organization, there is a sense of incipient panic in the Clinton camp, and tetchiness in her public comments. On the fundraising side, the Clinton finance team has threatened that donors must get on board early, or lose any credit later on, and warned them against giving to “both sides.” On the political side, bringing Bill down to Alabama showed an inability to stick to the game plan, and an astonishing lack of confidence in the candidate to deal with the problem at hand.
And the problem, of course, is Barack Obama. For months, the question on the Democratic side was who would emerge as the anti-Clinton, and over the course of 2006, several candidates took their turn in the sun. First there was Gore, then Mark Warner and then John Edwards. Each star rose and then set as the media moved on. Now, it is Obama’s turn, and he has begun to separate himself from the pack. But the Clinton campaign was not content wait to see if he would stumble along the way in the face of public and media scrutiny, perhaps because of the threat he posed to Clinton’s African American base, or perhaps just because he is so comfortable in his own skin and as such looms as such a stark contrast.
The numbers are only just beginning to justify such a strong response on the Clinton side. On Intrade, the online trading site that has emerged as a force in measuring political trends, the odds of a Clinton nomination remains around 50%, though they dropped to 46% in the wake of the Geffen dust-up. However, Obama has emerged as the clear threat, rising to 25% as Edwards odds have dropped from 20% to below 10%, and he has been lapped by resurgent Gore speculation. Polling results, which measure popularity rather than expected outcome, have been worse for Clinton, with some showing the gap narrowing toward 10%, with Obama a growing favorite among Black voters. Clearly, whatever gauge one chooses, the aura of inevitability has been pierced.
Hillary Clinton’s struggles as a candidate are just beginning. As she sat in Alabama next to Bill, the comparison did not serve her will. Unlike Maggie Thatcher, who when shown the Bronze statue of her that was unveiled before Parliament last week, commented that she would have preferred Iron, but Bronze would have to do, Hillary’s problem is that she lacks authenticity, and without authenticity, how can there be trust? When she voted for the war, was it out of conviction, or because she believed that to win the Presidency as a woman she needed to be tough? If she declines to apologize, is it because her original vote was one of conviction, or because as a female candidate she has determined that she must show a steel backbone? When all that she does reeks of strategy and tactics, how does one know who she really is?
Or, as an observer had to wonder as she sat next to Bill this week, did she stay with him because she loves him and forgave him his faults, or because she knew that without him, and the embrace of his success and popularity, she had no chance to win the White House? Is it personal, or is it just politics. Just strategy and tactics, but for which she would just be another one-term Senator with big ambitions, or more likely another Wall Street banker dreaming dreams of what might have been.
This is, no doubt, why her strategists have been determined to keep the two apart in public appearances. Not because as the publicly cuckolded and humiliated spouse she must detest him, but because seeing her sitting alongside him evokes so many images––images that do not serve her well.
Hillary is small and diminished next to Bill exactly because he is large, and larger than life. He is a titanic political figure, and as much as she struggles to emit the intellectual grasp that was one aspect of his persona, she has none of his touch of the common man. She lacks any measure of his deeply felt empathy for the individual, whether in Appalachia, the inner ring suburb or the inner city. Sitting there, as much as we might feel her pain, we know that she does not feel ours.
Worse still, sitting next him, one knows that behind all of her pretenses to being the candidate with real experience in the world, she is a one-term Senator––much as Obama and Edwards––and two-term First Lady. Internationally, she is a rock star, but the image of her sitting next to her husband reinforces, visually and viscerally, that she is the first derivative of a powerful political figure, and that her rise to Senator, and any hope she might have of the Presidency, demands that he be at her side. She had no choice to leave him in the wake of his infidelities if she was to achieve her own ambitions.
And that is the other image that strikes the observer, for Bill is nothing if not authentic, while Hillary sits as yin to his yang, the candidate who is packaged and careful and whom one never really believes that one can ever know.
As George W. Bush settles in for his last two years with approval ratings below 30%, and with America’s image in the world lying in tatters at his feet, do we really want another President who is driven to define herself against someone else, or some image of whom people think them to be? The Bush Presidency was undone in the beginning by the President and team’s rejection of all things Clinton. From their rejection of the outgoing administration’s concerns over Al Qaeda to the dismantling of FEMA, decisions early on derived from a compulsion to reject any notion that their hated predecessor––the Slick Willy who continually confounded their best-laid plans––could have gleaned any wisdom about the world during his eight years in office. Then, as Iraq loomed, the Bush Presidency was further damaged by the President’s determination to turn away from his father’s path, and to reject the entreaties of his father’s advisors, from Scowcroft’s plea to stay out of Iraq early on, to the President’s skillful marginalization of Jim Baker and the Iraq Study Group just a few months ago.
Now, Hillary looms as a candidate similarly defined by the struggle to be her own self, even as the world knows that she would never be where she is but for Him. Her struggle against the shadow of the man sitting next to her in Alabama this week was demonstrated by her overreaction to David Geffen’s suggestion that lying comes too easily to the Clintons. Rather than simply suggest that Geffen never disparaged them when he was spending the night in the Lincoln Bedroom, or that his bitterness dated to Bill Clinton’s decision not to pardon American Indian leader and convicted murderer Leonard Pelletier, Hillary lashed out at Geffen and attacked him for engaging in the “politics of personal destruction.”
Of course, it wasn’t about personal destruction. But it was intensely political, as Hillary was stuck––as she often will be as she continues on the long sprint to Iowa and New Hampshire––between her desire to leverage the patina of the Clinton Presidency, while rejecting ties to its more sordid moments. She could not give a straightforward response to Geffen, because it suggest her complicity in the selling of the Lincoln Bedroom for campaign contributions, and worse, the selling of Presidential Pardons to the likes of Billionaire tax cheat Marc Rich.
Hillary’s over-wrought reaction to Geffen, and her subsequent appearance with Bill in Alabama, do not speak well for her ability to navigate her campaign through the long months ahead. Despite an overwhelming advantage in fundraising, name recognition and organization, there is a sense of incipient panic in the Clinton camp, and tetchiness in her public comments. On the fundraising side, the Clinton finance team has threatened that donors must get on board early, or lose any credit later on, and warned them against giving to “both sides.” On the political side, bringing Bill down to Alabama showed an inability to stick to the game plan, and an astonishing lack of confidence in the candidate to deal with the problem at hand.
And the problem, of course, is Barack Obama. For months, the question on the Democratic side was who would emerge as the anti-Clinton, and over the course of 2006, several candidates took their turn in the sun. First there was Gore, then Mark Warner and then John Edwards. Each star rose and then set as the media moved on. Now, it is Obama’s turn, and he has begun to separate himself from the pack. But the Clinton campaign was not content wait to see if he would stumble along the way in the face of public and media scrutiny, perhaps because of the threat he posed to Clinton’s African American base, or perhaps just because he is so comfortable in his own skin and as such looms as such a stark contrast.
The numbers are only just beginning to justify such a strong response on the Clinton side. On Intrade, the online trading site that has emerged as a force in measuring political trends, the odds of a Clinton nomination remains around 50%, though they dropped to 46% in the wake of the Geffen dust-up. However, Obama has emerged as the clear threat, rising to 25% as Edwards odds have dropped from 20% to below 10%, and he has been lapped by resurgent Gore speculation. Polling results, which measure popularity rather than expected outcome, have been worse for Clinton, with some showing the gap narrowing toward 10%, with Obama a growing favorite among Black voters. Clearly, whatever gauge one chooses, the aura of inevitability has been pierced.
Hillary Clinton’s struggles as a candidate are just beginning. As she sat in Alabama next to Bill, the comparison did not serve her will. Unlike Maggie Thatcher, who when shown the Bronze statue of her that was unveiled before Parliament last week, commented that she would have preferred Iron, but Bronze would have to do, Hillary’s problem is that she lacks authenticity, and without authenticity, how can there be trust? When she voted for the war, was it out of conviction, or because she believed that to win the Presidency as a woman she needed to be tough? If she declines to apologize, is it because her original vote was one of conviction, or because as a female candidate she has determined that she must show a steel backbone? When all that she does reeks of strategy and tactics, how does one know who she really is?
Or, as an observer had to wonder as she sat next to Bill this week, did she stay with him because she loves him and forgave him his faults, or because she knew that without him, and the embrace of his success and popularity, she had no chance to win the White House? Is it personal, or is it just politics. Just strategy and tactics, but for which she would just be another one-term Senator with big ambitions, or more likely another Wall Street banker dreaming dreams of what might have been.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Jim Baker's last dance
Has there been a commission that has risen to rock star status before? Certainly there have been some legendary commissions, and no doubt Arlen Specter can point to his deft presentation of the Single Bullet Theory as staff counsel to the Warren Commission as the launching point for his rise to the United States Senate. But in this era of the 24-hour news cycle, James Baker and the Iraq Study Group are riding high.
And riding for a fall.
Baker did well to time the release of his memoir––whose title touts the virtue of staying out of politics––with the President’s thumping in the mid-term elections and the imminent presentation of the Iraq Study Group recommendations to the President and Congress. Baker’s reputation has never been higher, as the wiley partisan who served in the administrations of Presidents Reagan and Bush ’41, and who led Bush ’43 to the White House through the swamp that was the 2000 election, is now seen by Democrats and Republicans alike as the Man on the White Horse who might yet bring the White House to heel and chart a new direction for America’s policy in Iraq.
While on his book tour in the weeks preceding the election, Baker offered an early glimpse into the direction that the Iraq Study Group was taking. Specifically, he suggested that the United States should bring both Syria and Iran into direct negotiations over the future of Iraq and the region, and described at length the successes he achieved as Secretary of State through determined negotiations with Syria. It is, he submitted, more important to negotiate with one’s enemies than with one’s friends.
Since the election, events have proceeded at a furious pace. First, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld––viewed as a key roadblock to any recommendations that the Iraq Study Group might present––was jettisoned by the President, and former Baker aid and Study Group member Robert Gates was nominated to be his successor. Rumsfeld’s departure was immediately heralded as a victory for Jim Baker and his circle of foreign policy Realists over the Vulcans––the coterie of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Neocons––who have held Bush ’43 in thrall and led the nation into Iraq.
Then, over the past several days, Iraq Study Group members met with the President and Congressional leaders to discuss the Group’s work and to solicit ideas. The meetings and the press conferences that followed could not have been staged to provide a more deliberate contrast to the administration’s own conduct of foreign policy, as leaders from both parties praised the commission for its openness to new ideas.
Lost in all of this excitement, however, was the President’s own notable lack of enthusiasm. Speaking before the cameras, the President would only offer that he was impressed with the membership of the Iraq Study Group––which incidentally he had approved in advance––and that they asked good questions. Perhaps a stronger statement that he was growing weary with being bullied in public by his father’s team came later, when during a meeting with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert the President called for greater international isolation of Iran.
Unless Jim Baker has lost the political instincts that have served him so well over the years, he must know that he is at risk of having overplayed his hand. Coming on the heels of a massive public rebuke at the polls, the performance of the Iraq Study Group prancing before the cameras and Baker’s own public admonishments on matters of diplomatic strategy have publicly embarrassed the President. Since the election and the dismissal of Rumsfeld, President Bush has been stripped bare by the media and presented as an errant child turning to his father to be bailed out of a terrible mess, and Jim Baker has been the lead agent of the President’s humiliation.
Baker’s challenge is to clean up the mess that he himself has made. President Bush ’41, who has remained silent throughout his son’s presidency, must by now have taken Baker to the woodshed. After all, it is not just the public humiliation that Baker has visited on his son, but the damage that Baker and his group have done to the nation’s interests. After all, success in foreign policy and diplomacy are rooted in credibility and leverage, and the events of the past two weeks have weakened the President’s hand considerably. Now, the President is being pushed into negotiations that he has demurred at the moment when his position is weakest, and the perception of weakness has been exacerbated by every action Baker has taken.
No one has provided more explicit testimony to the damage Baker has done to the President, to the nation and to his best friend’s son than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the leader who has gained the most through the course of the Bush’s presidency. Seizing on his adversary’s weakness, Ahmadinejad announced this week that his nation is prepared to enter negotiations with the United States––as Baker has proffered––but only after the Bush administration corrects its bad attitude.
Since the outset of the Iraq war, the damage to the United States has been severe. Our military has been weakened, our treasury spent, and our credibility and moral standing in the world undermined. With the creation of the Iraq Study Group, Baker took on the challenge of fixing the mess that Iraq had become. Baker is no doubt correct in his stance on negotiations and building bi-partisanship, but he should have remembered that his job was to garner results, not accolades, and that at the end of the day his group had an audience of one. For two more years, President Bush will continue to be the arbiter of American foreign policy, and if Baker’s work does not convince him, it will be for naught.
The least Jim Baker and his Iraq Study Group could do is do no harm. But apparently, that moment is past. Unless he can pull a rabbit out of the hat––or perhaps produce the long-sought grand bargain that the Iranians proposed just three short years ago––Baker will only have book sales to show for his last foray into the public square.
And riding for a fall.
Baker did well to time the release of his memoir––whose title touts the virtue of staying out of politics––with the President’s thumping in the mid-term elections and the imminent presentation of the Iraq Study Group recommendations to the President and Congress. Baker’s reputation has never been higher, as the wiley partisan who served in the administrations of Presidents Reagan and Bush ’41, and who led Bush ’43 to the White House through the swamp that was the 2000 election, is now seen by Democrats and Republicans alike as the Man on the White Horse who might yet bring the White House to heel and chart a new direction for America’s policy in Iraq.
While on his book tour in the weeks preceding the election, Baker offered an early glimpse into the direction that the Iraq Study Group was taking. Specifically, he suggested that the United States should bring both Syria and Iran into direct negotiations over the future of Iraq and the region, and described at length the successes he achieved as Secretary of State through determined negotiations with Syria. It is, he submitted, more important to negotiate with one’s enemies than with one’s friends.
Since the election, events have proceeded at a furious pace. First, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld––viewed as a key roadblock to any recommendations that the Iraq Study Group might present––was jettisoned by the President, and former Baker aid and Study Group member Robert Gates was nominated to be his successor. Rumsfeld’s departure was immediately heralded as a victory for Jim Baker and his circle of foreign policy Realists over the Vulcans––the coterie of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Neocons––who have held Bush ’43 in thrall and led the nation into Iraq.
Then, over the past several days, Iraq Study Group members met with the President and Congressional leaders to discuss the Group’s work and to solicit ideas. The meetings and the press conferences that followed could not have been staged to provide a more deliberate contrast to the administration’s own conduct of foreign policy, as leaders from both parties praised the commission for its openness to new ideas.
Lost in all of this excitement, however, was the President’s own notable lack of enthusiasm. Speaking before the cameras, the President would only offer that he was impressed with the membership of the Iraq Study Group––which incidentally he had approved in advance––and that they asked good questions. Perhaps a stronger statement that he was growing weary with being bullied in public by his father’s team came later, when during a meeting with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert the President called for greater international isolation of Iran.
Unless Jim Baker has lost the political instincts that have served him so well over the years, he must know that he is at risk of having overplayed his hand. Coming on the heels of a massive public rebuke at the polls, the performance of the Iraq Study Group prancing before the cameras and Baker’s own public admonishments on matters of diplomatic strategy have publicly embarrassed the President. Since the election and the dismissal of Rumsfeld, President Bush has been stripped bare by the media and presented as an errant child turning to his father to be bailed out of a terrible mess, and Jim Baker has been the lead agent of the President’s humiliation.
Baker’s challenge is to clean up the mess that he himself has made. President Bush ’41, who has remained silent throughout his son’s presidency, must by now have taken Baker to the woodshed. After all, it is not just the public humiliation that Baker has visited on his son, but the damage that Baker and his group have done to the nation’s interests. After all, success in foreign policy and diplomacy are rooted in credibility and leverage, and the events of the past two weeks have weakened the President’s hand considerably. Now, the President is being pushed into negotiations that he has demurred at the moment when his position is weakest, and the perception of weakness has been exacerbated by every action Baker has taken.
No one has provided more explicit testimony to the damage Baker has done to the President, to the nation and to his best friend’s son than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the leader who has gained the most through the course of the Bush’s presidency. Seizing on his adversary’s weakness, Ahmadinejad announced this week that his nation is prepared to enter negotiations with the United States––as Baker has proffered––but only after the Bush administration corrects its bad attitude.
Since the outset of the Iraq war, the damage to the United States has been severe. Our military has been weakened, our treasury spent, and our credibility and moral standing in the world undermined. With the creation of the Iraq Study Group, Baker took on the challenge of fixing the mess that Iraq had become. Baker is no doubt correct in his stance on negotiations and building bi-partisanship, but he should have remembered that his job was to garner results, not accolades, and that at the end of the day his group had an audience of one. For two more years, President Bush will continue to be the arbiter of American foreign policy, and if Baker’s work does not convince him, it will be for naught.
The least Jim Baker and his Iraq Study Group could do is do no harm. But apparently, that moment is past. Unless he can pull a rabbit out of the hat––or perhaps produce the long-sought grand bargain that the Iranians proposed just three short years ago––Baker will only have book sales to show for his last foray into the public square.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
When the election is over
The evangelical Christian community has been down this road before.
As Kevin Phillips writes in American Theocracy, at several moments in our history the nation’s large evangelical Christian community has been drawn into the political arena by politicians seeking to harness their numbers for their own political ends. Each time it has ended badly, and, with their spiritual mission compromised and their leaders seduced by power, they have withdrawn from the public square.
Once again, it is ending badly.
With only hours remaining before voting begins, President Bush is winging across the American heartland, touching down in districts that have no business requiring his attention. Long gone is the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism at home and humility abroad that he rode to the White House six years ago. Now he is the American Nativist reborn, railing against gay marriage, illegal immigration and the Democratic Threat to America’s Future.
Just weeks ago, in the wake of the 9/11 anniversary, the Republican message of Fear––Fear of Terrorism, Fear of Tax Increases, Fear of Nancy Pelosi with a Gavel and Henry Waxman with a Subpoena––seemed destined to deliver an electoral victory. In that optimistic moment, Party strategists even envisioned the war in Iraq as an issue that would play to Republican advantage.
The political ad that had been prepared––entitled The Stakes––loomed to be a centerpiece of the tri-part Fear campaign. A post-modern inversion of the famous Daisy ad that suggested to voters that the world risked nuclear war if Barry Goldwater elected without ever mentioning him by name, The Stakes showed only the face of Osama bin Laden, while in silence his words of hatred for America scrolled down the screen, followed by the words These are the Stakes. The Stakes was intended to remind voters that war is upon us and that Democrats lack the stomach to take on the threats that we face.
But few people have ever seen The Stakes. Perhaps that is because Republican strategists realized that it is hard to watch The Stakes and not question why our focus has been on Iraq all this time rather than on bin Laden, and why after all the hyperbole, the man who attacked us on 9/11 has drifted from our radar screen. Or perhaps that is because the Republican campaign came unglued in the wake of the relentless cascade of events––from Iraq to North Korea to Iraq to Mark Foley to Iraq––that left it playing defense for weeks, until John Kerry stepped in to draw the media fire.
In these last days, the President has turned his back on the political center and has focused his message at the right wing of his party. Instead of the campaign of Fear that was designed to move the votes of Americans of all stripes, he has returned to the social issues that he hopes once again will energize the evangelical Christian community that has twice supported his election and that remains his sole source of positive approval ratings.
And as the prospects for victory deteriorated, the President’s rhetoric escalated. He had no choice. From that bright morning back in Texas, when Karl Rove and Matthew Dowd charted a political strategy that eschewed the political center in favor of a strategy built around motivating the evangelical Christian community, the President was committed.
But as the President comes to them again for their support, for the evangelical Christian community the President’s words must ring hollow. For six years, the President has had total control over the levers of power, and yet his stump speech is largely about what needs to be done rather than about what he has accomplished. Like his recent strategy of quoting Osama bin Laden to engender support for the war in Iraq, his stump speech has in an odd ways become less a testament to his principles than to what he has failed to accomplish.
But worse than the lack of results has been the corruption of the movement itself, as Phllips suggested. Beginning with the Shiavo tragedy, the deeply-rooted sentiments of the evangelical community have been manipulated for personal and political gain. The wave of scandals, including Enron and Abramoff and Foley and Haggard, have each involved personalities who moved easily from piety to power to wealth to disgrace. And in the wake of each scandal, the moral clarity of the leaders of the evangelical Christian community has been further undermined, as they rose to the defense of people who did not deserve defending.
Finally, the corrupting influence of politics on the evangelical leadership was laid bare in the Foley scandal. Faced with evidence that Republican leaders had failed in their duty to protect House pages from a predatory member, evangelical leaders cast away any remaining claim to moral clarity as they blamed gay Republican staffers rather than call the House leadership to account for their failure to protect the children in their care.
If Karl Rove is wrong, and the polls and pundits have it right this time, tomorrow the President’s base will hold him accountable. He has used them and he has failed them, and he has failed the nation. At a time when unemployment has hit historic lows and the stock market has hit historic highs, the President has a better case to make than the demonization of gays, Mexicans, judges and Democrats. But instead he will go to the well one last time. And when it is over, the evangelical community will, as Phillips suggests, retreat back to their spiritual mission of conversion and personal salvation.
When George Bush embraced the strategy that Rove and Dowd suggested could build a permanent Republican majority, he fell prey to hubris. Rove provided a strategy for winning elections that was fundamentally flawed as a strategy for governance. The use of demonization as an electoral strategy undermined the President’s ability to build governing coalitions, and the paradigm of good vs. evil that suits the President so well quickly migrated from electoral strategy to the halls of Congress to civil society.
Today, Dowd’s new book Applebee's America suggests that the strategy Bush embraced may have run its course. Fully half of those in each political party are voicing disgust with the tenor of political dialogue as it has evolved and are looking for a politics of compromise and conciliation. If Karl Rove and Ken Melman are not successful in generating the turnout from their base that is the core of their strategy, the political implications will be significant for 2008 and beyond.
For the Republican Party, which has alienated New England moderates, old-school fiscal and small government conservatives, gay and pro-choice party members, changing course to tack back to the political center is unlikely. The Party is now firmly in the hands of the right wing, as there are few moderates left in the Senate or the House, and after tomorrow, Maine’s women Senators and Arlen Specter may be all that is left of the Republican Party along the long moderate arc that once stretched from Ohio through New England.
The challenge for Democrats will be to resist a move to the left just at the moment when the political center has been abandoned by the Republicans. As anti-war sentiment has taken center stage, the Democratic left is feeling its oats, and can fairly argue that it was the centrist Democrats who folded under Republican pressure. For those on the left who for years have lusted for a Rovian move to the left and argued that such a strategy would mobilize voters who now stay home, the thought of moving toward the center is anathema. At the same time, the new voices in the party may include the staunch centrists recruited to run this year by Rahm Emmanuel, people like Jim Webb, Jon Tester, Heath Shuler and Bob Casey will likely push back against a move to the left.
Such is the illogic of the moment, and the political forces that may be put into play as the polls close tomorrow. The activists in each parties will likely lay claim that the future of their party, leaving a void in the political center. Ironically, the President who embraced a strategy for victory that proved toxic for governance may have produced a political landscape where neither party is eager to embrace the large core of voters who are ready for a breather from the partisanship that has racked the nation.
And then, of course, there is the prospect that the pundits are wrong and that Rove is right. If the evangelical community that he and the President have cultivated come out tomorrow and deliver the goods for the Party, and the House and Senate stay in Republican hands, the long-term outcome is even more certain. The Republican move to the right will be vindicated, and a Democratic move to the left will be inevitable. And the paradigm of blue vs. red, and good vs. evil that have riven the nation will likely continue.
As Kevin Phillips writes in American Theocracy, at several moments in our history the nation’s large evangelical Christian community has been drawn into the political arena by politicians seeking to harness their numbers for their own political ends. Each time it has ended badly, and, with their spiritual mission compromised and their leaders seduced by power, they have withdrawn from the public square.
Once again, it is ending badly.
With only hours remaining before voting begins, President Bush is winging across the American heartland, touching down in districts that have no business requiring his attention. Long gone is the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism at home and humility abroad that he rode to the White House six years ago. Now he is the American Nativist reborn, railing against gay marriage, illegal immigration and the Democratic Threat to America’s Future.
Just weeks ago, in the wake of the 9/11 anniversary, the Republican message of Fear––Fear of Terrorism, Fear of Tax Increases, Fear of Nancy Pelosi with a Gavel and Henry Waxman with a Subpoena––seemed destined to deliver an electoral victory. In that optimistic moment, Party strategists even envisioned the war in Iraq as an issue that would play to Republican advantage.
The political ad that had been prepared––entitled The Stakes––loomed to be a centerpiece of the tri-part Fear campaign. A post-modern inversion of the famous Daisy ad that suggested to voters that the world risked nuclear war if Barry Goldwater elected without ever mentioning him by name, The Stakes showed only the face of Osama bin Laden, while in silence his words of hatred for America scrolled down the screen, followed by the words These are the Stakes. The Stakes was intended to remind voters that war is upon us and that Democrats lack the stomach to take on the threats that we face.
But few people have ever seen The Stakes. Perhaps that is because Republican strategists realized that it is hard to watch The Stakes and not question why our focus has been on Iraq all this time rather than on bin Laden, and why after all the hyperbole, the man who attacked us on 9/11 has drifted from our radar screen. Or perhaps that is because the Republican campaign came unglued in the wake of the relentless cascade of events––from Iraq to North Korea to Iraq to Mark Foley to Iraq––that left it playing defense for weeks, until John Kerry stepped in to draw the media fire.
In these last days, the President has turned his back on the political center and has focused his message at the right wing of his party. Instead of the campaign of Fear that was designed to move the votes of Americans of all stripes, he has returned to the social issues that he hopes once again will energize the evangelical Christian community that has twice supported his election and that remains his sole source of positive approval ratings.
And as the prospects for victory deteriorated, the President’s rhetoric escalated. He had no choice. From that bright morning back in Texas, when Karl Rove and Matthew Dowd charted a political strategy that eschewed the political center in favor of a strategy built around motivating the evangelical Christian community, the President was committed.
But as the President comes to them again for their support, for the evangelical Christian community the President’s words must ring hollow. For six years, the President has had total control over the levers of power, and yet his stump speech is largely about what needs to be done rather than about what he has accomplished. Like his recent strategy of quoting Osama bin Laden to engender support for the war in Iraq, his stump speech has in an odd ways become less a testament to his principles than to what he has failed to accomplish.
But worse than the lack of results has been the corruption of the movement itself, as Phllips suggested. Beginning with the Shiavo tragedy, the deeply-rooted sentiments of the evangelical community have been manipulated for personal and political gain. The wave of scandals, including Enron and Abramoff and Foley and Haggard, have each involved personalities who moved easily from piety to power to wealth to disgrace. And in the wake of each scandal, the moral clarity of the leaders of the evangelical Christian community has been further undermined, as they rose to the defense of people who did not deserve defending.
Finally, the corrupting influence of politics on the evangelical leadership was laid bare in the Foley scandal. Faced with evidence that Republican leaders had failed in their duty to protect House pages from a predatory member, evangelical leaders cast away any remaining claim to moral clarity as they blamed gay Republican staffers rather than call the House leadership to account for their failure to protect the children in their care.
If Karl Rove is wrong, and the polls and pundits have it right this time, tomorrow the President’s base will hold him accountable. He has used them and he has failed them, and he has failed the nation. At a time when unemployment has hit historic lows and the stock market has hit historic highs, the President has a better case to make than the demonization of gays, Mexicans, judges and Democrats. But instead he will go to the well one last time. And when it is over, the evangelical community will, as Phillips suggests, retreat back to their spiritual mission of conversion and personal salvation.
When George Bush embraced the strategy that Rove and Dowd suggested could build a permanent Republican majority, he fell prey to hubris. Rove provided a strategy for winning elections that was fundamentally flawed as a strategy for governance. The use of demonization as an electoral strategy undermined the President’s ability to build governing coalitions, and the paradigm of good vs. evil that suits the President so well quickly migrated from electoral strategy to the halls of Congress to civil society.
Today, Dowd’s new book Applebee's America suggests that the strategy Bush embraced may have run its course. Fully half of those in each political party are voicing disgust with the tenor of political dialogue as it has evolved and are looking for a politics of compromise and conciliation. If Karl Rove and Ken Melman are not successful in generating the turnout from their base that is the core of their strategy, the political implications will be significant for 2008 and beyond.
For the Republican Party, which has alienated New England moderates, old-school fiscal and small government conservatives, gay and pro-choice party members, changing course to tack back to the political center is unlikely. The Party is now firmly in the hands of the right wing, as there are few moderates left in the Senate or the House, and after tomorrow, Maine’s women Senators and Arlen Specter may be all that is left of the Republican Party along the long moderate arc that once stretched from Ohio through New England.
The challenge for Democrats will be to resist a move to the left just at the moment when the political center has been abandoned by the Republicans. As anti-war sentiment has taken center stage, the Democratic left is feeling its oats, and can fairly argue that it was the centrist Democrats who folded under Republican pressure. For those on the left who for years have lusted for a Rovian move to the left and argued that such a strategy would mobilize voters who now stay home, the thought of moving toward the center is anathema. At the same time, the new voices in the party may include the staunch centrists recruited to run this year by Rahm Emmanuel, people like Jim Webb, Jon Tester, Heath Shuler and Bob Casey will likely push back against a move to the left.
Such is the illogic of the moment, and the political forces that may be put into play as the polls close tomorrow. The activists in each parties will likely lay claim that the future of their party, leaving a void in the political center. Ironically, the President who embraced a strategy for victory that proved toxic for governance may have produced a political landscape where neither party is eager to embrace the large core of voters who are ready for a breather from the partisanship that has racked the nation.
And then, of course, there is the prospect that the pundits are wrong and that Rove is right. If the evangelical community that he and the President have cultivated come out tomorrow and deliver the goods for the Party, and the House and Senate stay in Republican hands, the long-term outcome is even more certain. The Republican move to the right will be vindicated, and a Democratic move to the left will be inevitable. And the paradigm of blue vs. red, and good vs. evil that have riven the nation will likely continue.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Curt Weldon's truth
Curt Weldon (R-PA) wants his race to be run on the merits of his service to his constituents and to the country. The Congressman from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, is being railroaded from the seat he has held for almost twenty years. The problem is that he cannot tell who is leading the charge, or if it is just a bipartisan gang-bang.
Weldon is an old-school politician. Weaned as a pup from his days as the Mayor of Marcus Hook in John McNichol’s Delaware County Republican machine, Weldon built a political base beginning with the support of volunteer firefighters to win a seat on County Council. When Bob Edgar––the Democratic minister-turned-politician who won the historically Republican 7th Congressional seat as part of the 1974 post-Watergate deluge and held it for six terms––decided to leave Congress, Weldon stepped in and won the seat with McNichol’s blessing. That was twenty years ago.
Like Weldon, Delaware County is old school. For more than a century, the County has been a Republican stronghold. But shifting demographics have led to changes in Pennsylvania politics, and its traditional urban vs. rural tensions have given way to divisions between the Democratic east and the Republican west. These changes are reflected in the governor’s race where the incumbent Democratic Governor and former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell is facing the Republican and Pittsburgh Steelers legend Lynn Swann. For Weldon, Rendell’s enormous popularity in the Philadelphia suburbs––he won Delaware County 2-1 in his first race for Governor––illustrate the ebbing of Republican control in its long-time bastion and the erosion of Weldon's traditional base.
As Weldon faced the media this week, he was struggling to grasp what led to the FBI investigation coming to light just three weeks before Election Day. His public response was to lash out at his Democratic challenger, Joe Sestak, a well-spoken Admiral with thirty years of service in the Navy. The race is a dead heat, but even so, attacking Sestak directly is not easy for Weldon, who if reelected is in line to become the Chairman of the powerful Armed Services Committee. He is not vitriolic by nature and holds those who serve in the armed forces in high esteem.
But inside, Weldon must suspect that the FBI investigation and the timing of the leak come from a different source. Despite his prominence on the Armed Services Committee, Weldon has been a vocal critic of the Defense Intelligence establishment, and led investigations into the controversy surrounding the classified Able Danger military intelligence program. Able Danger, Weldon argues, proved the complicity of the government in enabling the 9/11 attacks by hiding evidence of the plot as it was unfolding. He was bi-partisan in his attacks, and unrelenting in his accusations.
Weldon believes that the public never grasped the significance of Able Danger. He followed the facts where they led and refused to give the Bush administration a pass. The administration responded to his assault by working the media to spread the notion that Weldon was a “whack job” and successfully undermined the credibility of the story. As a result, Able Danger became just became one more 9/11 conspiracy theory.
For Weldon, the pay-back for his disloyalty to the administration came this week. Somewhere, deep in Republican Washington, whether in the offices of Karl Rove at the White House, Ken Mehlman at the RNC or Donald Rumsfeld at Defense, calls were made. Even if his defeat means the loss of the House, for Rove et al Weldon had gone rogue and they would make him pay. Kim Jong Il may get away with embarrassing the administration, but not some out-of-control, volunteer firefighter from a working class family in Marcus Hook.
So here Weldon is, with three weeks left until Election Day, fighting for his political life. He is forced to stand outside in a strip mall and defend himself against the charges leveled by the FBI that He used his influence to help his daughter.
He used his influence to help his daughter? He stands in front of Kinkos and declares his innocence. There is no truth to the charge. He pleads. Funny isn’t it, these charges coming out three weeks before an election?
He has to attack the Sestak campaign, because it is what he is expected to say. He has to decry his innocence because in this new world of political correctness, faced with reporters who see taking him down as their own ticket to the big time, it is what he is expected to say.
He can’t stand there and tell the truth––that he is being railroaded by his own party because he is an honest man from Marcus Hook whose only crime is that he has been telling the truth. He can’t stand there and tell the truth because in this caustic political age and faced with the shifting politics of suburban Philadelphia, he cannot win without the voter profile database in Ken Mehlman’s computer, and Karl Rove’s micro-targeted, get-out-the-vote effort that is the key to Republican hopes on November 7th.
But as a politician of the old school, and as a father, what Curt Weldon most regrets is that he can’t stand in front of the cameras, and all those reporters with their pads and self-righteous questions, and say what he really wants to say: Did I use my influence to help my daughter? Hell yes. Hell yes I did. And I’d do it again. What father worth his salt wouldn’t?
Curt Weldon would stand there and say, in the words of Chicago Mayor Daley when accused during an election campaign of steering an insurance contract to his son If a father can’t help his son, what is America coming to?
That is what he wanted to say to the voters of Delaware County, to his friends and neighbors who have known him all his life, to the people of Marcus Hook who gave him his start, to families across the County who elected him to Council to bring jobs to their row-house neighborhoods and who then sent him to Washington to be their voice in a city corrupted by the Bushes from Yale and the Rumsfelds from Princeton––none of whom would be where they are today without the influence of their fathers. He would stand proudly before them and say, Damn right. I did what I could to help Karen. And for twenty years I have done everything I could to help each of you. That is what he wanted to say. It was the truth. And for those from the old school in Delaware County, those are they words they would want to hear.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
A Doctrine undone
Five years and twenty-seven days. From birth to death, the life span of a Doctrine.
The Bush Doctrine was born on September 11, 2001 and died on October 8, 2006. Rest in Peace.
History will judge the damage that was done to our nation in the intervening years through our determined unilateralism, our righteous castigation of any nation not heeling to our lead, and our arrogation unto ourselves of the right to interpret international law.
Perhaps, as Dick Cheney suggests, history will judge he and the President as visionaries, who unique among the leaders of the western nations understood the threats of our time and stood their ground. Or perhaps this will be judged as an era when America’s most cherished principles were not lived out in our politics, and when the American people failed the American purpose.
The irony of the Bush Doctrine, however, is not that it sidestepped democratic principles even as it claimed to build democracy in the world, but rather that for all of its unapologetic assertion of military power––of the using America’s might to rid the world of the terrorist scourge––it was a strategic failure. If the televised images New Orleans after Katrina pulled back the curtain and exposed the domestic failures and indifference of the administration, North Korea’s dramatic entry into the elite club of nuclear nations gave the lie to all of the muscular rhetoric that has characterized the Administration’s foreign policy.
Since its designation as a Charter Member of the Axis of Evil, North Korea has sat in the cross-hairs of American strategic rhetoric. The President, commander-in-chief of a massive military machine and possessed of a proven willingness to pull the trigger, set forth his strategic doctrine in no uncertain terms: It was unacceptable for North Korea to continue with its nuclear program and it would be intolerable for North Korea to become a nuclear power.
For his part, faced with the prospect of becoming the next Axis power to be crushed in the name of the Bush Doctrine, Kim Jong Il pushed his nuclear program forward. Then, last week––undoubtedly emboldened the President’s diminished political support and seeing the American military straining at the combined demands of the wars already on its plate––Kim pushed all of his chips into the center of the table and called the President’s bluff.
Surely, it was a moment for which the administration had prepared. Surely, after years of beating the drums of regime change, they understood that developing a nuclear capacity was the sole deterrent to American power for regimes under threat. Surely, after years of forswearing direct negotiations with North Korea as a high-stakes strategy to force concessions, the Bush administration had a Plan B in mind in the event that Kim declined to blink.
Surely not, as it turned out. Within one week of the nuclear detonation, the Bush Doctrine unraveled before the world. Faced with a real weapon of mass destruction, held by an unstable regime starved for cash and with a proven willingness to proliferate, there were no calls for a new coalition of the willing. The Secretary of State did not travel to the capitals of power in Paris, London, Berlin or Moscow, or to the front-line capitals in Seoul, Tokyo or Peking as Plan B was put in place. There was no Plan B. Instead, President Bush stood before the world and did what those Democratic leaders his supporters so despise might do: he took the military option off the table and hailed United Nations sanctions as the appropriate response to North Korea’s formal arrival as a nuclear power.
Within one week, the unacceptable was accepted, and the intolerable became tolerated. Within one week the Bush Doctrine of forward defense, preemptive war and aggressive unilateralism was replaced with what can at best be described as a new commitment to Containment, the oldest of doctrines of the nuclear world. One week and one bomb later, the President’s once-strident Neoconservatism gave way. Now, the President praised the United Nations and the value of collective action. He lauded the importance of tough diplomacy. He eschewed suggestions of a military response. And he embraced sanctions.
After all of the threats, after all of the posturing, after all of the swaggering cowboy rhetoric, the question was called, and the American response was…. Sanctions.
The rhetorical urges that were part and parcel of the Bush Doctrine die hard, however. Two days after the North Korean test, Condi Rice was at it again. Visibly angry as she stood before the gathered media, Rice conceded that the United States did not intend to attack North Korea, but insisted that they now faced “international condemnation and international sanctions unlike anything that they have faced before.” She then turned her verbal rapier toward Russia and China, insisting on what they must now do in the face of North Korea’s intransigence.
But Rice was flailing. The days of unilateralism are over, but her rhetoric has not yet adjusted to the new reality. The reality is what it has always been. Russian and China, like North Korea––and every other state for that matter––will pursue the path that they believe serves their own self-interest. The sooner she stops talking and starts listening, the sooner a new strategic doctrine can emerge that might enable American leadership to once again have meaning in the world.
What we are left with is worse than just a failed strategic doctrine, for today the world is a far more dangerous place. Just as the credibility and capacity of America’s military as a deterrent force in the world has been degraded by the war in Iraq, America’s credibility and capacity to lead in the world has been diminished by five years of hectoring and self-righteous leadership. Iran, on the one hand, looms as a far greater threat than North Korea to our strategic interests, and they well understand that the bankruptcy of the Bush Doctrine leaves them with far greater latitude to pursue their own nuclear and regional ambitions. Al Qaeda and the Sunni Jihadists, on the other, continue to benefit from the images televised across the Islamic world of American troops at war in a Muslim land.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world, beginning with our allies and extending to those such as Russia and China, whose support is critical to our political and economic future, must be waiting with great interest and anticipation to see how our national leadership responds in what may be an historic opportunity. Will we embrace the opportunity to reach out and rebuild our alliances? Will we show some of the humility in the world that Candidate George Bush suggested six long years ago? Will we return to our isolationist tendencies and withdraw from the world? Or will our President push ahead, his rhetoric intact, his spirit undaunted, but as an emperor unclothed before the world?
Unfortunately, this President has not proven to have great insight into when things are not going well, and deplores admissions of failure. But there is hope. Jim Baker has begun to assert himself into the national scene, and in the weeks following the November election we may yet see the elders of the Bush clan finally wake up, before the New World Order that the President’s father proclaimed not so very long ago is completely undone by the messianic and misguided ambitions of his son.
The Bush Doctrine was born on September 11, 2001 and died on October 8, 2006. Rest in Peace.
History will judge the damage that was done to our nation in the intervening years through our determined unilateralism, our righteous castigation of any nation not heeling to our lead, and our arrogation unto ourselves of the right to interpret international law.
Perhaps, as Dick Cheney suggests, history will judge he and the President as visionaries, who unique among the leaders of the western nations understood the threats of our time and stood their ground. Or perhaps this will be judged as an era when America’s most cherished principles were not lived out in our politics, and when the American people failed the American purpose.
The irony of the Bush Doctrine, however, is not that it sidestepped democratic principles even as it claimed to build democracy in the world, but rather that for all of its unapologetic assertion of military power––of the using America’s might to rid the world of the terrorist scourge––it was a strategic failure. If the televised images New Orleans after Katrina pulled back the curtain and exposed the domestic failures and indifference of the administration, North Korea’s dramatic entry into the elite club of nuclear nations gave the lie to all of the muscular rhetoric that has characterized the Administration’s foreign policy.
Since its designation as a Charter Member of the Axis of Evil, North Korea has sat in the cross-hairs of American strategic rhetoric. The President, commander-in-chief of a massive military machine and possessed of a proven willingness to pull the trigger, set forth his strategic doctrine in no uncertain terms: It was unacceptable for North Korea to continue with its nuclear program and it would be intolerable for North Korea to become a nuclear power.
For his part, faced with the prospect of becoming the next Axis power to be crushed in the name of the Bush Doctrine, Kim Jong Il pushed his nuclear program forward. Then, last week––undoubtedly emboldened the President’s diminished political support and seeing the American military straining at the combined demands of the wars already on its plate––Kim pushed all of his chips into the center of the table and called the President’s bluff.
Surely, it was a moment for which the administration had prepared. Surely, after years of beating the drums of regime change, they understood that developing a nuclear capacity was the sole deterrent to American power for regimes under threat. Surely, after years of forswearing direct negotiations with North Korea as a high-stakes strategy to force concessions, the Bush administration had a Plan B in mind in the event that Kim declined to blink.
Surely not, as it turned out. Within one week of the nuclear detonation, the Bush Doctrine unraveled before the world. Faced with a real weapon of mass destruction, held by an unstable regime starved for cash and with a proven willingness to proliferate, there were no calls for a new coalition of the willing. The Secretary of State did not travel to the capitals of power in Paris, London, Berlin or Moscow, or to the front-line capitals in Seoul, Tokyo or Peking as Plan B was put in place. There was no Plan B. Instead, President Bush stood before the world and did what those Democratic leaders his supporters so despise might do: he took the military option off the table and hailed United Nations sanctions as the appropriate response to North Korea’s formal arrival as a nuclear power.
Within one week, the unacceptable was accepted, and the intolerable became tolerated. Within one week the Bush Doctrine of forward defense, preemptive war and aggressive unilateralism was replaced with what can at best be described as a new commitment to Containment, the oldest of doctrines of the nuclear world. One week and one bomb later, the President’s once-strident Neoconservatism gave way. Now, the President praised the United Nations and the value of collective action. He lauded the importance of tough diplomacy. He eschewed suggestions of a military response. And he embraced sanctions.
After all of the threats, after all of the posturing, after all of the swaggering cowboy rhetoric, the question was called, and the American response was…. Sanctions.
The rhetorical urges that were part and parcel of the Bush Doctrine die hard, however. Two days after the North Korean test, Condi Rice was at it again. Visibly angry as she stood before the gathered media, Rice conceded that the United States did not intend to attack North Korea, but insisted that they now faced “international condemnation and international sanctions unlike anything that they have faced before.” She then turned her verbal rapier toward Russia and China, insisting on what they must now do in the face of North Korea’s intransigence.
But Rice was flailing. The days of unilateralism are over, but her rhetoric has not yet adjusted to the new reality. The reality is what it has always been. Russian and China, like North Korea––and every other state for that matter––will pursue the path that they believe serves their own self-interest. The sooner she stops talking and starts listening, the sooner a new strategic doctrine can emerge that might enable American leadership to once again have meaning in the world.
What we are left with is worse than just a failed strategic doctrine, for today the world is a far more dangerous place. Just as the credibility and capacity of America’s military as a deterrent force in the world has been degraded by the war in Iraq, America’s credibility and capacity to lead in the world has been diminished by five years of hectoring and self-righteous leadership. Iran, on the one hand, looms as a far greater threat than North Korea to our strategic interests, and they well understand that the bankruptcy of the Bush Doctrine leaves them with far greater latitude to pursue their own nuclear and regional ambitions. Al Qaeda and the Sunni Jihadists, on the other, continue to benefit from the images televised across the Islamic world of American troops at war in a Muslim land.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world, beginning with our allies and extending to those such as Russia and China, whose support is critical to our political and economic future, must be waiting with great interest and anticipation to see how our national leadership responds in what may be an historic opportunity. Will we embrace the opportunity to reach out and rebuild our alliances? Will we show some of the humility in the world that Candidate George Bush suggested six long years ago? Will we return to our isolationist tendencies and withdraw from the world? Or will our President push ahead, his rhetoric intact, his spirit undaunted, but as an emperor unclothed before the world?
Unfortunately, this President has not proven to have great insight into when things are not going well, and deplores admissions of failure. But there is hope. Jim Baker has begun to assert himself into the national scene, and in the weeks following the November election we may yet see the elders of the Bush clan finally wake up, before the New World Order that the President’s father proclaimed not so very long ago is completely undone by the messianic and misguided ambitions of his son.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Take a bow for the new revolution
It will be no surprise if the current era of Republican dominance in Washington, D.C. falls on the predations of Mark Foley and the failures of Republican leaders to respond appropriately or in time. After all, nothing falls the righteous like hypocrisy, nothing hits the news cycle like sex and nothing deepens the wound like a good cover-up.
In a moment when the President has become the very embodiment of steadfastness, House Republicans have shown no such spine. With the warrior caste of Gingrich and DeLay banished for lesser crimes, the current leaders sprinted for the exit even as the House burned around them, stopping only to implore Speaker Hastert to sacrifice himself that they might be saved.
The Foley fiasco––the first Instant Messenger-enabled political scandal––has achieved the White House objective of changing the subject, but in an unforeseen direction and with unimaginable force. For an electorate riven between anger over an unpopular war and the liminal anxieties of living in a Jihadist’s world, the turmoil in the House can tip the scales.
And for good reason.
The political turmoil and rancor that defines this political season has reached a fever pitch in part because the problems lack definition, much less simple solutions: The war in Iraq, the Jihadist threat, inter-religious tensions, the decline of American economic and political leadership, declining real incomes, growing debt, a declining dollar, volatile energy markets, a nuclear North Korea, an emboldened Iran, looming war between Russia and her near-abroad nascent-states…
But the Foley fiasco is different. People understand sex and power. Not sex in the prurient sense, but sex as a human motivation and power as the brass ring of the political class.
And that is the essence of the Republican denouement. The current cycle of Republican dominance began with a Contract with America that promised fiscal responsibility and political accountability, solidified its base through the assertion of family values in the wake of the Clinton impeachment, and achieved complete control over the government with the inauguration of George W. Bush, who had campaigned on a platform of fiscal conservatism and tax cuts at home, and humility in the world. In short, Republicans promised a government more limited in scope, a political class more limited in ambition, and a national interest defined by values, at home and abroad.
Twelve years since the contract with America, and six years since the consolidation of power in Republican hands, these central arguments are a distant memory. Our fiscal house lies as burnt embers at our feet, notions of humility in the world have been replaced with a muscular unilateralism, and fear has become the tool of maintaining the power of the new, dominant political order.
The Foley fiasco has provided the electorate with a means for understanding their fundamental discontent. Across the electorate, people are disgusted by the conduct and by the hypocrisy. They have long experience with cover-ups, they fiercely defend their children, and most of all they deplore politicians who value keeping power over proper conduct and decency.
Even as the usual array of partisans––from Sean Hannity to Katherine Harris to the Family Research Council––have sought to deflect blame for the affair to Democrats, homosexuals or George Soros, the public reaction has deepened. The Foley fiasco has now entered the realm of metaphor, reminding the electorate that democracy demands the vigilance of the governed, and that any party, whatever they promise, whether in fire-side chats or contracts on the Capitol steps, ultimately becomes corrupted by power and tenure alone.
Ultimately, as the Who suggested in their anthem from a prior era, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” each new revolution comes to its moment of reckoning, as people look at their leaders and cry in disgust:
“Meet the new Boss,
Same as the old Boss.”
As George Bush and Karl Rove look down the road at the train wreck that looms, more than ever they need to change the subject. “If the election were held today…” they would be facing the worst possible outcome. Republican control of Congress would be rejected not through a referendum on the war in Iraq, not through the conduct of the war on terror, and not even as a referendum on the handling of Mark Foley’s reprehensible contact, but rather as a fundamental statement that it is time for a change.
However, even in the face of this possible outcome, they must pause and smile, if only for a moment. For on the Democratic side, there is no Gingrich, no Robespierre, and apparently not even a Clinton, prepared to feel the pain of the electorate, and become the face and the voice of a new political order.
In a moment when the President has become the very embodiment of steadfastness, House Republicans have shown no such spine. With the warrior caste of Gingrich and DeLay banished for lesser crimes, the current leaders sprinted for the exit even as the House burned around them, stopping only to implore Speaker Hastert to sacrifice himself that they might be saved.
The Foley fiasco––the first Instant Messenger-enabled political scandal––has achieved the White House objective of changing the subject, but in an unforeseen direction and with unimaginable force. For an electorate riven between anger over an unpopular war and the liminal anxieties of living in a Jihadist’s world, the turmoil in the House can tip the scales.
And for good reason.
The political turmoil and rancor that defines this political season has reached a fever pitch in part because the problems lack definition, much less simple solutions: The war in Iraq, the Jihadist threat, inter-religious tensions, the decline of American economic and political leadership, declining real incomes, growing debt, a declining dollar, volatile energy markets, a nuclear North Korea, an emboldened Iran, looming war between Russia and her near-abroad nascent-states…
But the Foley fiasco is different. People understand sex and power. Not sex in the prurient sense, but sex as a human motivation and power as the brass ring of the political class.
And that is the essence of the Republican denouement. The current cycle of Republican dominance began with a Contract with America that promised fiscal responsibility and political accountability, solidified its base through the assertion of family values in the wake of the Clinton impeachment, and achieved complete control over the government with the inauguration of George W. Bush, who had campaigned on a platform of fiscal conservatism and tax cuts at home, and humility in the world. In short, Republicans promised a government more limited in scope, a political class more limited in ambition, and a national interest defined by values, at home and abroad.
Twelve years since the contract with America, and six years since the consolidation of power in Republican hands, these central arguments are a distant memory. Our fiscal house lies as burnt embers at our feet, notions of humility in the world have been replaced with a muscular unilateralism, and fear has become the tool of maintaining the power of the new, dominant political order.
The Foley fiasco has provided the electorate with a means for understanding their fundamental discontent. Across the electorate, people are disgusted by the conduct and by the hypocrisy. They have long experience with cover-ups, they fiercely defend their children, and most of all they deplore politicians who value keeping power over proper conduct and decency.
Even as the usual array of partisans––from Sean Hannity to Katherine Harris to the Family Research Council––have sought to deflect blame for the affair to Democrats, homosexuals or George Soros, the public reaction has deepened. The Foley fiasco has now entered the realm of metaphor, reminding the electorate that democracy demands the vigilance of the governed, and that any party, whatever they promise, whether in fire-side chats or contracts on the Capitol steps, ultimately becomes corrupted by power and tenure alone.
Ultimately, as the Who suggested in their anthem from a prior era, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” each new revolution comes to its moment of reckoning, as people look at their leaders and cry in disgust:
“Meet the new Boss,
Same as the old Boss.”
As George Bush and Karl Rove look down the road at the train wreck that looms, more than ever they need to change the subject. “If the election were held today…” they would be facing the worst possible outcome. Republican control of Congress would be rejected not through a referendum on the war in Iraq, not through the conduct of the war on terror, and not even as a referendum on the handling of Mark Foley’s reprehensible contact, but rather as a fundamental statement that it is time for a change.
However, even in the face of this possible outcome, they must pause and smile, if only for a moment. For on the Democratic side, there is no Gingrich, no Robespierre, and apparently not even a Clinton, prepared to feel the pain of the electorate, and become the face and the voice of a new political order.
Friday, July 21, 2006
Time to stop
At the inception of the Lebanon crisis, American intelligence analyst George Friedman observed:
“From an international standpoint, the Israelis expect to be condemned. These international condemnations, however, are now having the opposite effect of what is intended. The Israeli view is that they will be condemned regardless of what they do. The differential between the condemnation of reprisal attacks and condemnation of a full invasion is not enough to deter more extreme action. If Israel is going to be attacked anyway, it might as well achieve its goals.”
Then a funning thing happened on the way to the front: international condemnation did not fall on Israel as it had in the past. Across the international community, Israel’s right to defend itself was affirmed and blame instead was heaped upon the Hezbollah for its instigation of the crisis. Sunni Arab leaders across the region attacked the needless provocations.
Even from the beating heart of the Axis of Evil, comment was muted. Iran, whose interests were being directly served by the Hezbollah action, only cautioned Israel not to attack Syria. Meanwhile, junior Axis partner Syria was quiet, as Syrian President Assad shared with Israel the desire to keep his regime in power and not see it replaced by Islamists were Israel to attack his country and topple his regime.
Iran’s ability to manipulate events on the ground in the Middle East through its proxy forces is impressive. In Iraq, it was an Iranian “agent of influence,” Ahmad Chalabi, whose manipulation of intelligence, Neocon fantasies and Dick Cheney’s oil lust helped instigate an American invasion that is well on the way to securing Iranian control over the largest remaining oil reserves in the world. In Lebanon, another Iranian agent, Hassan Nasrallah, led Hezbollah––itself a creation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps––to attack on Israel on the same day Iran was due to report back to European negotiators on its nuclear program.
In one fell swoop, Iran was off the front pages and its proxy forces had displaced Hamas and Fatah as the vanguard of the Palestinian struggle against Israel.
In Lebanon, the United States is once again playing patsy to Iranian manipulations. From the beginning of the current crisis, the United States gave Israel the green light to pursue its goal of inflicting maximum damage on Hezbollah. From the Right in the United States came cries of glee that someone was taking the fight to a real terrorist organization, while from the Far Right dreams that the launching of the Hezbollah missiles might have been the first shot in the Battle of Armageddon.
Even as the casualties mounted, President Bush proclaimed the righteousness of the Israeli cause and failed to utter even a word of sympathy to those dying on the ground. On the same day that he vetoed funding of embryonic stem cell research––taking a firm moral stance against the taking of potential life––he failed to offer a word of concern for the loss of actual life in the ongoing battle.
Israel must take note of the evolving situation and not fall prey to following for too long the encouragement of its American ally. Despite its self-proclaimed leadership in the Global War on Terror and of the Greatest Military Force in History, the Bush Administration never seems to have grasped the central lesson of asymmetric warfare, which has been born out in the GWOT, but that dates back to Vietnam, the American Revolution and Scipio Africanus’ pursuit of Hannibal: the dominant force loses if it fails to win, while the overmatched force wins as long as it continues to fight.
Israel’s challenge is not to destroy Hezbollah. Despite Israeli hubris, it cannot achieve that goal. Instead, Israel’s objective must be to achieve the optimal leverage for a ceasefire that includes international commitments to change the conditions on its border with Lebanon in as enforceable a manner as possible.
Over the past week, the international consensus reflected the need to achieve just such an outcome. However, the United States was pushing to delay an end to the fighting. Condi Rice postponed a trip to the region, while U.N. Ambassador John Bolton offered the specious rationale that in a fight with a terrorist organization there is no one to negotiate with, no “head of state.” The Bush Administration, supported vocally by Pat Robertson and his 700 Club minions, continued to cheer Israel along, singing in one voice an odd rendition of “Onward Hebrew Soldiers.”
But Israel is overplaying her hand. The longer the fight ensues, the stronger Hezbollah becomes simply by surviving the confrontation with the larger Israeli force. The longer the fight ensues, the more it will undermine the willingness of Arab states in the region to support the realignment of power within Lebanon that Israel truly seeks. And the longer the fight ensues, the more international public opinion will weigh the loss of human life and Lebanese sovereignty against the initial wave of support for Israel.
As the ground war begins, Israel should pause and reconsider. At this moment, Israel should perhaps give more heed to Iran’s 3,000 years of experience in navigating Middle East conflicts, and a little less to the hubris and encouragements of its far less experienced American ally.
“From an international standpoint, the Israelis expect to be condemned. These international condemnations, however, are now having the opposite effect of what is intended. The Israeli view is that they will be condemned regardless of what they do. The differential between the condemnation of reprisal attacks and condemnation of a full invasion is not enough to deter more extreme action. If Israel is going to be attacked anyway, it might as well achieve its goals.”
Then a funning thing happened on the way to the front: international condemnation did not fall on Israel as it had in the past. Across the international community, Israel’s right to defend itself was affirmed and blame instead was heaped upon the Hezbollah for its instigation of the crisis. Sunni Arab leaders across the region attacked the needless provocations.
Even from the beating heart of the Axis of Evil, comment was muted. Iran, whose interests were being directly served by the Hezbollah action, only cautioned Israel not to attack Syria. Meanwhile, junior Axis partner Syria was quiet, as Syrian President Assad shared with Israel the desire to keep his regime in power and not see it replaced by Islamists were Israel to attack his country and topple his regime.
Iran’s ability to manipulate events on the ground in the Middle East through its proxy forces is impressive. In Iraq, it was an Iranian “agent of influence,” Ahmad Chalabi, whose manipulation of intelligence, Neocon fantasies and Dick Cheney’s oil lust helped instigate an American invasion that is well on the way to securing Iranian control over the largest remaining oil reserves in the world. In Lebanon, another Iranian agent, Hassan Nasrallah, led Hezbollah––itself a creation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps––to attack on Israel on the same day Iran was due to report back to European negotiators on its nuclear program.
In one fell swoop, Iran was off the front pages and its proxy forces had displaced Hamas and Fatah as the vanguard of the Palestinian struggle against Israel.
In Lebanon, the United States is once again playing patsy to Iranian manipulations. From the beginning of the current crisis, the United States gave Israel the green light to pursue its goal of inflicting maximum damage on Hezbollah. From the Right in the United States came cries of glee that someone was taking the fight to a real terrorist organization, while from the Far Right dreams that the launching of the Hezbollah missiles might have been the first shot in the Battle of Armageddon.
Even as the casualties mounted, President Bush proclaimed the righteousness of the Israeli cause and failed to utter even a word of sympathy to those dying on the ground. On the same day that he vetoed funding of embryonic stem cell research––taking a firm moral stance against the taking of potential life––he failed to offer a word of concern for the loss of actual life in the ongoing battle.
Israel must take note of the evolving situation and not fall prey to following for too long the encouragement of its American ally. Despite its self-proclaimed leadership in the Global War on Terror and of the Greatest Military Force in History, the Bush Administration never seems to have grasped the central lesson of asymmetric warfare, which has been born out in the GWOT, but that dates back to Vietnam, the American Revolution and Scipio Africanus’ pursuit of Hannibal: the dominant force loses if it fails to win, while the overmatched force wins as long as it continues to fight.
Israel’s challenge is not to destroy Hezbollah. Despite Israeli hubris, it cannot achieve that goal. Instead, Israel’s objective must be to achieve the optimal leverage for a ceasefire that includes international commitments to change the conditions on its border with Lebanon in as enforceable a manner as possible.
Over the past week, the international consensus reflected the need to achieve just such an outcome. However, the United States was pushing to delay an end to the fighting. Condi Rice postponed a trip to the region, while U.N. Ambassador John Bolton offered the specious rationale that in a fight with a terrorist organization there is no one to negotiate with, no “head of state.” The Bush Administration, supported vocally by Pat Robertson and his 700 Club minions, continued to cheer Israel along, singing in one voice an odd rendition of “Onward Hebrew Soldiers.”
But Israel is overplaying her hand. The longer the fight ensues, the stronger Hezbollah becomes simply by surviving the confrontation with the larger Israeli force. The longer the fight ensues, the more it will undermine the willingness of Arab states in the region to support the realignment of power within Lebanon that Israel truly seeks. And the longer the fight ensues, the more international public opinion will weigh the loss of human life and Lebanese sovereignty against the initial wave of support for Israel.
As the ground war begins, Israel should pause and reconsider. At this moment, Israel should perhaps give more heed to Iran’s 3,000 years of experience in navigating Middle East conflicts, and a little less to the hubris and encouragements of its far less experienced American ally.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
L'Enfant President
Generals criticize Donald Rumsfeld and he doesn’t blink. People take shots at Dick Cheney, he shoots back. Why then do Republican Wise Men continue to treat the President as if he is a china doll?
With his popularity at its lowest point and turmoil in the ranks of Republicans who fear the loss of Congress in the fall elections, George W. Bush has agreed to bring in his father’s long-time consigliere, former Secretary of State James Baker, to embark on a fact-finding mission and advise the President on Iraq. Apparently, the decision to bring in Baker––the ultimate fixer whose last and only role in the Bush 43 presidency was to lead the successful Florida recount war in 2000––was a touchy one agreed to collectively by the father, the son and Condaleeza Rice. According to the New York Times, Baker accepted the charge reluctantly, as he was concerned that any criticism of Bush’s Iraq policy could be seen as second-guessing the President. Accordingly, his recommendations will focus solely on how to move forward, and not touch on the past.
How did we come to this? President Bush is now well into his second term––an accomplishment that eluded his father––and yet his father’s advisors continue to view him as the son whose independence needs to be nurtured along. Worse yet, these advisors––truly some of the political wise men on the American scene––feel more duty bound to protect the son’s ego than the nation’s future.
George W. Bush continues to struggle to escape from the shadow of his father. There is some irony in this, as George H. W. Bush himself struggled with the shadow of his own powerful father, Republican heavyweight and Senator Prescott Bush. President Bush 41, who had served in Congress, had run the CIA, and served two terms as Vice President––and by most measures had little left to prove––reportedly thought to himself upon taking the Presidential oath of office, “I wonder what the old man would think of his boy now?”
Like the protagonist of a Shakespearean tragedy, George W. Bush has defined his political persona in direct contrast to his father. He eschewed the family’s core political values of fiscal discipline, internationalism and quiet religious faith as he embraced the evangelical constituency new to the Republican Party, threw fiscal caution to the wind, promulgated a doctrine of unilateral war, and pronounced his direct and personal relationship with a God who he suggested put him in the White House to lead the millennial struggle with the evil forces besetting America.
For his own part, Bush 41 has made every effort to stay in the background. Even as Bush 43 publicly embraced his father’s rival and predecessor, Ronald Reagan, evinced barely concealed contempt for his father’s politics and presidency and wielded his religion as a rapier in political debate, the elder Bush bent over backward to be supportive of his son.
The tension between the two Bush camps only briefly came into public view during the run up to the Iraq war, as the elders of the former Bush administration opposed the direction of the new administration’s foreign policy and march to war in Iraq. Within the new Bush administration, only Bush 41 holdover Colin Powell argued the internationalist stance in opposition to the rising tide of unilateralism, until he finally played the good soldier and made his ill-fated presentation to the United Nations Security Council––a presentation that drew down the last reserves of his hard-earned credibility and effectively marked the end of his public life.
The final effort of the Bush 41 inner circle to forestall the Iraq invasion came as Bush 41 alter ego––and Condi Rice mentor––Brent Scowcroft published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that argued against the looming war and the notion that Saddam was an imminent threat or linked to the 9/11 attacks. Immediately following the publication of that piece, however, Scowcroft and the Bush 41 posse went silent, as the word came down that the former President was concerned that they had overstepped and would be seen as undermining his son’s presidency.
By all accounts, Bush 43 gave little heed to his father’s views. Asked later by Bob Woodward if he had consulted with his father––a man of experience and wisdom––as he contemplated an invasion of Iraq, the President demurred and suggested that he had looked instead to “a higher father.”
What is James Baker to make of this? In defiance of the better judgment of his father’s inner circle, George W. took the nation to war, and the outcome that they foresaw came to pass. But there are no judgments to be made on the decision itself, as that might undermine the President’s credibility and damage his presidency.
Undermine the President’s credibility? Damage his presidency?
The President is at 33% in the polls. He took the nation into an unnecessary war that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and cost thousands of lives. His administration is scorned internationally and has destroyed America’s credibility in the world. The Iranians are effectively calling his bluff as they seek to become a nuclear power. Gasoline is heading over $3.00. He has lost control of the Republican Congress, foresaken his second-term agenda, bankrupted the nation’s treasury and destroyed the last vestige of fidelity of the Republican Party to its own core principles. Somewhere in a dark cave in Waziristan, Osama is laughing, and James Baker is concerned that he might undermine the credibility and stature of his friend’s son?
The President made a mockery of himself this week when he went before the cameras and claimed, “I am the decider, and I decide what is best.” Like a parent scolding a child, he asserted his authority. But that authority ultimately rests on the consent––and the respect––of the governed, and that assertion quickly became fodder for late-night comics.
James Baker’s challenge is a tough one. Presidents can recover from bad decisions and from political hostility, but ridicule and contempt are tougher. The President's problem is not that he has failed to win the respect of his father, but that he has lost the respect of the nation. James Baker is a tough and smart man, and there are three long years left in this presidency. It is time to take off the kid gloves, stop thinking about protecting the son and worry instead as Brent Scowcroft did four years ago about the interests of the nation.
With his popularity at its lowest point and turmoil in the ranks of Republicans who fear the loss of Congress in the fall elections, George W. Bush has agreed to bring in his father’s long-time consigliere, former Secretary of State James Baker, to embark on a fact-finding mission and advise the President on Iraq. Apparently, the decision to bring in Baker––the ultimate fixer whose last and only role in the Bush 43 presidency was to lead the successful Florida recount war in 2000––was a touchy one agreed to collectively by the father, the son and Condaleeza Rice. According to the New York Times, Baker accepted the charge reluctantly, as he was concerned that any criticism of Bush’s Iraq policy could be seen as second-guessing the President. Accordingly, his recommendations will focus solely on how to move forward, and not touch on the past.
How did we come to this? President Bush is now well into his second term––an accomplishment that eluded his father––and yet his father’s advisors continue to view him as the son whose independence needs to be nurtured along. Worse yet, these advisors––truly some of the political wise men on the American scene––feel more duty bound to protect the son’s ego than the nation’s future.
George W. Bush continues to struggle to escape from the shadow of his father. There is some irony in this, as George H. W. Bush himself struggled with the shadow of his own powerful father, Republican heavyweight and Senator Prescott Bush. President Bush 41, who had served in Congress, had run the CIA, and served two terms as Vice President––and by most measures had little left to prove––reportedly thought to himself upon taking the Presidential oath of office, “I wonder what the old man would think of his boy now?”
Like the protagonist of a Shakespearean tragedy, George W. Bush has defined his political persona in direct contrast to his father. He eschewed the family’s core political values of fiscal discipline, internationalism and quiet religious faith as he embraced the evangelical constituency new to the Republican Party, threw fiscal caution to the wind, promulgated a doctrine of unilateral war, and pronounced his direct and personal relationship with a God who he suggested put him in the White House to lead the millennial struggle with the evil forces besetting America.
For his own part, Bush 41 has made every effort to stay in the background. Even as Bush 43 publicly embraced his father’s rival and predecessor, Ronald Reagan, evinced barely concealed contempt for his father’s politics and presidency and wielded his religion as a rapier in political debate, the elder Bush bent over backward to be supportive of his son.
The tension between the two Bush camps only briefly came into public view during the run up to the Iraq war, as the elders of the former Bush administration opposed the direction of the new administration’s foreign policy and march to war in Iraq. Within the new Bush administration, only Bush 41 holdover Colin Powell argued the internationalist stance in opposition to the rising tide of unilateralism, until he finally played the good soldier and made his ill-fated presentation to the United Nations Security Council––a presentation that drew down the last reserves of his hard-earned credibility and effectively marked the end of his public life.
The final effort of the Bush 41 inner circle to forestall the Iraq invasion came as Bush 41 alter ego––and Condi Rice mentor––Brent Scowcroft published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that argued against the looming war and the notion that Saddam was an imminent threat or linked to the 9/11 attacks. Immediately following the publication of that piece, however, Scowcroft and the Bush 41 posse went silent, as the word came down that the former President was concerned that they had overstepped and would be seen as undermining his son’s presidency.
By all accounts, Bush 43 gave little heed to his father’s views. Asked later by Bob Woodward if he had consulted with his father––a man of experience and wisdom––as he contemplated an invasion of Iraq, the President demurred and suggested that he had looked instead to “a higher father.”
What is James Baker to make of this? In defiance of the better judgment of his father’s inner circle, George W. took the nation to war, and the outcome that they foresaw came to pass. But there are no judgments to be made on the decision itself, as that might undermine the President’s credibility and damage his presidency.
Undermine the President’s credibility? Damage his presidency?
The President is at 33% in the polls. He took the nation into an unnecessary war that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and cost thousands of lives. His administration is scorned internationally and has destroyed America’s credibility in the world. The Iranians are effectively calling his bluff as they seek to become a nuclear power. Gasoline is heading over $3.00. He has lost control of the Republican Congress, foresaken his second-term agenda, bankrupted the nation’s treasury and destroyed the last vestige of fidelity of the Republican Party to its own core principles. Somewhere in a dark cave in Waziristan, Osama is laughing, and James Baker is concerned that he might undermine the credibility and stature of his friend’s son?
The President made a mockery of himself this week when he went before the cameras and claimed, “I am the decider, and I decide what is best.” Like a parent scolding a child, he asserted his authority. But that authority ultimately rests on the consent––and the respect––of the governed, and that assertion quickly became fodder for late-night comics.
James Baker’s challenge is a tough one. Presidents can recover from bad decisions and from political hostility, but ridicule and contempt are tougher. The President's problem is not that he has failed to win the respect of his father, but that he has lost the respect of the nation. James Baker is a tough and smart man, and there are three long years left in this presidency. It is time to take off the kid gloves, stop thinking about protecting the son and worry instead as Brent Scowcroft did four years ago about the interests of the nation.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Odd man out in a three-hand game
In the Jihadist world, once you declare war on Israel, everyone wants to get in on the action.
Hamas’ tightrope walk just got dicier, and soon they will be looking for a net. In his new tape broadcast today on Al Jazeera, Osama Bin Laden embraced Hamas as a rallying cry for his Sunni Muslim Jihadist movement. By framing the freezing of aid to the Palestinian Authority by the west as proof of a “crusader war” against Islam, Bin Laden sought to reassert himself and his Al Qaeda movement onto the international scene.
Can it be a coincidence that Bin Laden felt compelled to go public just one week after Iran convened a conference on Palestine and committed funds to Hamas? Bin Laden, after all, is struggling to maintain the supremacy of his Al Qaeda movement as the vanguard of the Jihadist struggle in the face of Iran’s successful efforts to encroach on Al Qaeda’s––and Bin Ladin’s––turf.
In the Jihadist universe, Iran’s President Ahmadinejad brings strong credentials and troops to the Jihadist cause. After all, he is a product of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps––the Pasdaran––that was founded by Ayatollah Khomenei in the wake of the Iranian revolution, and that has grown to rival the Iranian military in size and counts the home-grown international terrorist groups Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad among its assets.
The battle for Jihadist hegemony between Iran and Al Qaeda is just the latest chapter in the thousand-year struggle between the Shi’a and Sunni for the mantle of the Prophet. Since their rejection of the Caliphate in the formative years of Islam, the Shi’a have struggled under the thumb of Sunni rule, and any temporal alliance between the Shi’a and the Sunni––such as their apparent alliance in opposition to the west––is only a tactical detour from their doctrinal wars. The Shi’a hold fast to their opposition to the Sunni ecclesiastic and legal order, while Sunni fundamentalists, including Al Qaeda and their Taliban sponsors, view the Shi’a as apostates to be beheaded in traditional fashion.
Since his election just nine months ago, Ahmadinejad has swiftly displaced Bin Laden as the poster boy for the Global War on Terror as he has pushed Iran’s nuclear program forward. Faced with international consternation over the prospects of a nuclear Iran, Bin Laden has found himself struggling for airtime.
Bin Laden’s audio tapes seem almost quaint in a world where the GWOT has been escalated to the nuclear stage. Trapped in the mountains of Waziristan, Bin Laden has become a bystander in the continuing international drama that is 21st century Islam. Faced with the prospect of withering into irrelevance, he did the only thing struggling Arab leaders seem to be able to do in such circumstances––he played the Palestinian card.
But a sign of how things have changed in the miasma of Middle East politics can be seen in the Hamas reaction to Bin Laden’s tape. In the wake of the first airing of Bin Laden’s latest recording on Al Jazeera, Hamas leaders took no time in distancing them from the former top dog in the Jihadist struggle. Appealing directly to the western audience, Hamas spokesmen Sami Abu Zuhri declared Hamas’ philosophy to be "totally different" from Bin Laden’s and that Hamas was "very keen to have good relations with the West."
Hamas is trying to avoid becoming a pawn in a game that it surely wants no part of. They might share Shi’a Iran’s dream that Israel be wiped off the face of the earth, as they also share Al Qaeda’s Sunni Islamist orientation. But Iran and Al Qaeda’s antipathy is deeply rooted, and their interest in Hamas is purely tactical and self-interested. Hamas will only lose if it becomes embroiled in the tug of war between Iran and Al Qaeda, particularly at a time when it is trying to shed its Jihadist mantle for a cloak of statesmanship in hope of finding a middle ground that wins it western acceptance without totally neutering its Islamist politics.
In decades past, the Palestinian leadership––a term whose oxymoronic essence Hamas is struggling to shed––bartered its services between competing patrons. But in the wake of tactical missteps at Taba and Wye River, support for the wrong side in the Gulf War, and images of cheering masses on 9/11, the Palestinians may finally have seen the folly of hooking their star to patrons seeking to rally the Muslim world on the aching Palestinian backs. In a matter of minutes following the Al Jazeera broadcast, Hamas spoke out and declined Bin Laden’s advances, and the audience whose approval they sought were Bin Laden’s western adversaries in the Battle of Civilizations.
There remains for Hamas to address the matter of Israel. The future of the Palestinian people lies in partnership with Israel, the single economic engine of a region bereft of economic life. Perhaps their evident fear of Bin Laden’s embrace will open Hamas’ eyes before they continue their march down a road that leads nowhere.
Hamas’ tightrope walk just got dicier, and soon they will be looking for a net. In his new tape broadcast today on Al Jazeera, Osama Bin Laden embraced Hamas as a rallying cry for his Sunni Muslim Jihadist movement. By framing the freezing of aid to the Palestinian Authority by the west as proof of a “crusader war” against Islam, Bin Laden sought to reassert himself and his Al Qaeda movement onto the international scene.
Can it be a coincidence that Bin Laden felt compelled to go public just one week after Iran convened a conference on Palestine and committed funds to Hamas? Bin Laden, after all, is struggling to maintain the supremacy of his Al Qaeda movement as the vanguard of the Jihadist struggle in the face of Iran’s successful efforts to encroach on Al Qaeda’s––and Bin Ladin’s––turf.
In the Jihadist universe, Iran’s President Ahmadinejad brings strong credentials and troops to the Jihadist cause. After all, he is a product of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps––the Pasdaran––that was founded by Ayatollah Khomenei in the wake of the Iranian revolution, and that has grown to rival the Iranian military in size and counts the home-grown international terrorist groups Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad among its assets.
The battle for Jihadist hegemony between Iran and Al Qaeda is just the latest chapter in the thousand-year struggle between the Shi’a and Sunni for the mantle of the Prophet. Since their rejection of the Caliphate in the formative years of Islam, the Shi’a have struggled under the thumb of Sunni rule, and any temporal alliance between the Shi’a and the Sunni––such as their apparent alliance in opposition to the west––is only a tactical detour from their doctrinal wars. The Shi’a hold fast to their opposition to the Sunni ecclesiastic and legal order, while Sunni fundamentalists, including Al Qaeda and their Taliban sponsors, view the Shi’a as apostates to be beheaded in traditional fashion.
Since his election just nine months ago, Ahmadinejad has swiftly displaced Bin Laden as the poster boy for the Global War on Terror as he has pushed Iran’s nuclear program forward. Faced with international consternation over the prospects of a nuclear Iran, Bin Laden has found himself struggling for airtime.
Bin Laden’s audio tapes seem almost quaint in a world where the GWOT has been escalated to the nuclear stage. Trapped in the mountains of Waziristan, Bin Laden has become a bystander in the continuing international drama that is 21st century Islam. Faced with the prospect of withering into irrelevance, he did the only thing struggling Arab leaders seem to be able to do in such circumstances––he played the Palestinian card.
But a sign of how things have changed in the miasma of Middle East politics can be seen in the Hamas reaction to Bin Laden’s tape. In the wake of the first airing of Bin Laden’s latest recording on Al Jazeera, Hamas leaders took no time in distancing them from the former top dog in the Jihadist struggle. Appealing directly to the western audience, Hamas spokesmen Sami Abu Zuhri declared Hamas’ philosophy to be "totally different" from Bin Laden’s and that Hamas was "very keen to have good relations with the West."
Hamas is trying to avoid becoming a pawn in a game that it surely wants no part of. They might share Shi’a Iran’s dream that Israel be wiped off the face of the earth, as they also share Al Qaeda’s Sunni Islamist orientation. But Iran and Al Qaeda’s antipathy is deeply rooted, and their interest in Hamas is purely tactical and self-interested. Hamas will only lose if it becomes embroiled in the tug of war between Iran and Al Qaeda, particularly at a time when it is trying to shed its Jihadist mantle for a cloak of statesmanship in hope of finding a middle ground that wins it western acceptance without totally neutering its Islamist politics.
In decades past, the Palestinian leadership––a term whose oxymoronic essence Hamas is struggling to shed––bartered its services between competing patrons. But in the wake of tactical missteps at Taba and Wye River, support for the wrong side in the Gulf War, and images of cheering masses on 9/11, the Palestinians may finally have seen the folly of hooking their star to patrons seeking to rally the Muslim world on the aching Palestinian backs. In a matter of minutes following the Al Jazeera broadcast, Hamas spoke out and declined Bin Laden’s advances, and the audience whose approval they sought were Bin Laden’s western adversaries in the Battle of Civilizations.
There remains for Hamas to address the matter of Israel. The future of the Palestinian people lies in partnership with Israel, the single economic engine of a region bereft of economic life. Perhaps their evident fear of Bin Laden’s embrace will open Hamas’ eyes before they continue their march down a road that leads nowhere.
Solving social security
One tall red-eye* and a scone. That will be $4.13.
Can it be that simple? The retirement security of the average American coffee drinker has been undermined by Seattle’s greatest export, the Starbucks Culture. Not to take anything away from Boeing––Seattle’s other export engine––but even as it flies below the radar screen of the average American’s budget, the cost of coffee in the morning has become significant.
Do the math. $4.13 per day. Assume cost inflation at 3% per year––modest for coffee, but let’s be conservative––put that together with stock market returns that have averaged 12% per year over the past 30 years. What do we get?
Retirement security. Or lack thereof.
Here is the choice. Coffee and a scone each morning beginning at age 25, or take the same amount each day and invest it in an index fund a retirement fund until age 65. 40 years later, the Starbucks Investment Program––“Your retirement security is just a SIP away”––produces a nest egg of just under $2 million, or a monthly annuity approaching $10,000 for life.
That amount, it is worth noting, is anywhere from one and one-half to two times the monthly benefit that the Social Security Administration projects for a worker who enters the workforce at age 25 with a salary of $40,000 to $60,000 and retires 40 years later.**
So, drink up America. That coffee is more expensive than you can imagine.
________________________________________
Notes:
* The drink of a real coffee drinker. A cup of coffee with a shot of espresso.
** For a $40,000/year beginning salary, the projected monthly benefit at age 65 is $5,160. For a $60,000/year beginning salary, the projected monthly benefit at age 65 is $6,569. (www.ssa.gov)
Can it be that simple? The retirement security of the average American coffee drinker has been undermined by Seattle’s greatest export, the Starbucks Culture. Not to take anything away from Boeing––Seattle’s other export engine––but even as it flies below the radar screen of the average American’s budget, the cost of coffee in the morning has become significant.
Do the math. $4.13 per day. Assume cost inflation at 3% per year––modest for coffee, but let’s be conservative––put that together with stock market returns that have averaged 12% per year over the past 30 years. What do we get?
Retirement security. Or lack thereof.
Here is the choice. Coffee and a scone each morning beginning at age 25, or take the same amount each day and invest it in an index fund a retirement fund until age 65. 40 years later, the Starbucks Investment Program––“Your retirement security is just a SIP away”––produces a nest egg of just under $2 million, or a monthly annuity approaching $10,000 for life.
That amount, it is worth noting, is anywhere from one and one-half to two times the monthly benefit that the Social Security Administration projects for a worker who enters the workforce at age 25 with a salary of $40,000 to $60,000 and retires 40 years later.**
So, drink up America. That coffee is more expensive than you can imagine.
________________________________________
Notes:
* The drink of a real coffee drinker. A cup of coffee with a shot of espresso.
** For a $40,000/year beginning salary, the projected monthly benefit at age 65 is $5,160. For a $60,000/year beginning salary, the projected monthly benefit at age 65 is $6,569. (www.ssa.gov)
Saturday, April 08, 2006
Failure of imagination
In politics––as in most other areas of life for that matter––credibility is everything. Why is President Bush in such trouble? Loss of credibility. Why are the Democrats unable to do much about it? Lack of credibility.
In their first week in office, the newly elected Hamas government blundered mightily. Faced with international demands that they accept Israel and recognize prior agreements––demands that are anathema to all that Hamas stands for––newly installed Foreign Minister Mahmound Zahar a wrote a letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan with a sentence suggesting the possibility of recognizing Israel.
A furor arose when it became apparent that the letter sent to Annan differed substantially from the copy of the letter made public in Gaza. Specifically, the letter made available for local consumption omitted the offending sentence.
Caught in an act of duplicity, a Hamas spokesman insisted that they had sent an early draft of the letter to Annan by accident, and that the Gaza draft was the final draft.
Funny how that happens.
Zahar, Prime Minister Ismail Haniya and some others get together. Someone writes a draft letter to Kofi Annan with a sentence that essentially reverses the central position of Hamas. Then they argue back and forth. Ismail says no. Mahmoud says we have to. Ismail finally says no way. OK, they agree, let’s remove that sentence. So, who is going past the post office?
Oops, they sent the wrong letter.
In the meantime, Annan’s office insists that they have not received a revised letter, or any communication from Zahar suggesting an error was made.
But none of that really matters. The notion that Palestinian leadership would say one thing for world consumption and another to the Palestinian street is not news. Dog bites man, so to speak.
The election of Hamas upset the status quo in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Faced with the prospect of an unraveling of the peace process, the quartet of nations overseeing the “roadmap” moved quickly to demand that Hamas come into the tent. Demands were made that Hamas must recognize Israel. Threats were made that aid would be cut off. In the early, panicked moments, no thought seemed to be given to the fact that recognition under duress was meaningless.
In one sense the election of Hamas was a breath of fresh air. At least they were honest and said what they believed at home and to the world at large. At first blush, they appeared to bring a sense of integrity and credibility to the process.
But with the duplicity surrounding the U.N. letter, it appears that not much has changed. The fact is that there has not been a peace process and cannot be one in a situation where one letter is sent to the international community, while another version is circulated at home––an apt metaphor for the long-time practice of the Palestinian leadership of saying the right things in diplomatic circles while stoking the fires of hatred at home.
Even as there has been a sea change with the Palestinian election of Hamas, the politics of peace in Israel have been transformed. According to Yoram Peri, Director of the Chaim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics and Society at Tel Aviv University, Arik Sharon’s great insight in forming Kadima was his early recognition that the Israeli landscape has fundamentally evolved with respect to the peace process.
As Peri describes it, Sharon recognized that even as 70% of Israelis indicate that they are prepared to make significant sacrifices for peace, they have also come to accept the likelihood that peace will not be achieved in their lifetime. An Israeli electorate that was long defined by the division between the “Land for Peace” camp on the left and the “Peace for Peace” camp on the right was ready to move on to other issues. The success of Kadima reflects a fundamental redefinition of the nation’s politics around issues of wealth, poverty and national prosperity. The withdrawal from Gaza and construction of the separation barrier on the West Bank are the physical manifestations of a politics and psychology of separation, of a people who are reconciled to move on.
Hamas has stepped to the fore just as Israeli is walking away. It is ironic that even as Hamas is steadfast in their commitment to the destruction of the State of Israel and rejection of the Oslo accords, they continue to assert their demands for what Israel and others must do for them. From the Israelis whom they are sworn to destroy, they demand continued services as provided under accords they now reject. From the international community, they demand continued aid that was agreed in the wake of these same accords. From the Arab League they demand aid to insulate the Palestinians from the consequences of their own decisions.
One week in office and the Hamas that promised new leadership has become just more of the same. Unfortunately, the failure of Hamas goes beyond a loss of credibility, but reflects a failure of imagination, an inability to imagine a future different from the past.
The peace process is over, for no Palestinian leadership will now be able to accept what the Israelis might be prepared to offer. But in fact, the Palestinians and Israelis do not need a peace agreement, a long-term truce in the model of Korea will do just fine.
But what the Palestinians desperately need, and what Hamas has been unable to offer, is a vision of the future. And for this the Asian model of note is Singapore. Founded as an independent nation forty years ago––one year after the creation of the PLO––Singapore was a tiny, crowded, impoverished nation with no resources. In the ensuing decades, based on a national strategy centered on foreign investment and education, they have built one of the most successful economies in the world.
Singapore has become the model for national development, as other nations are learning. Earlier this year, Intel announced plans to build a major chip plant in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam as part of a network of seven plants including ones in Malasyia, Costa Rica and China. Ismail Haniya and Mahmoud Zahar should have greater things on their mind than wordsmithing letters to Kofi Annan. Instead, they should be asking “Why not Gaza City?” The Palestinians, whose population is educated and a stone’s throw from Intel’s operations in Israel, should be ready to embrace a vision of the future that is different from the past. But that would require two new things from the Palestinian leadership: imagination and an end of the politics of dependency.
Now that would be news. Man bites dog, as they say.
In their first week in office, the newly elected Hamas government blundered mightily. Faced with international demands that they accept Israel and recognize prior agreements––demands that are anathema to all that Hamas stands for––newly installed Foreign Minister Mahmound Zahar a wrote a letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan with a sentence suggesting the possibility of recognizing Israel.
A furor arose when it became apparent that the letter sent to Annan differed substantially from the copy of the letter made public in Gaza. Specifically, the letter made available for local consumption omitted the offending sentence.
Caught in an act of duplicity, a Hamas spokesman insisted that they had sent an early draft of the letter to Annan by accident, and that the Gaza draft was the final draft.
Funny how that happens.
Zahar, Prime Minister Ismail Haniya and some others get together. Someone writes a draft letter to Kofi Annan with a sentence that essentially reverses the central position of Hamas. Then they argue back and forth. Ismail says no. Mahmoud says we have to. Ismail finally says no way. OK, they agree, let’s remove that sentence. So, who is going past the post office?
Oops, they sent the wrong letter.
In the meantime, Annan’s office insists that they have not received a revised letter, or any communication from Zahar suggesting an error was made.
But none of that really matters. The notion that Palestinian leadership would say one thing for world consumption and another to the Palestinian street is not news. Dog bites man, so to speak.
The election of Hamas upset the status quo in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Faced with the prospect of an unraveling of the peace process, the quartet of nations overseeing the “roadmap” moved quickly to demand that Hamas come into the tent. Demands were made that Hamas must recognize Israel. Threats were made that aid would be cut off. In the early, panicked moments, no thought seemed to be given to the fact that recognition under duress was meaningless.
In one sense the election of Hamas was a breath of fresh air. At least they were honest and said what they believed at home and to the world at large. At first blush, they appeared to bring a sense of integrity and credibility to the process.
But with the duplicity surrounding the U.N. letter, it appears that not much has changed. The fact is that there has not been a peace process and cannot be one in a situation where one letter is sent to the international community, while another version is circulated at home––an apt metaphor for the long-time practice of the Palestinian leadership of saying the right things in diplomatic circles while stoking the fires of hatred at home.
Even as there has been a sea change with the Palestinian election of Hamas, the politics of peace in Israel have been transformed. According to Yoram Peri, Director of the Chaim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics and Society at Tel Aviv University, Arik Sharon’s great insight in forming Kadima was his early recognition that the Israeli landscape has fundamentally evolved with respect to the peace process.
As Peri describes it, Sharon recognized that even as 70% of Israelis indicate that they are prepared to make significant sacrifices for peace, they have also come to accept the likelihood that peace will not be achieved in their lifetime. An Israeli electorate that was long defined by the division between the “Land for Peace” camp on the left and the “Peace for Peace” camp on the right was ready to move on to other issues. The success of Kadima reflects a fundamental redefinition of the nation’s politics around issues of wealth, poverty and national prosperity. The withdrawal from Gaza and construction of the separation barrier on the West Bank are the physical manifestations of a politics and psychology of separation, of a people who are reconciled to move on.
Hamas has stepped to the fore just as Israeli is walking away. It is ironic that even as Hamas is steadfast in their commitment to the destruction of the State of Israel and rejection of the Oslo accords, they continue to assert their demands for what Israel and others must do for them. From the Israelis whom they are sworn to destroy, they demand continued services as provided under accords they now reject. From the international community, they demand continued aid that was agreed in the wake of these same accords. From the Arab League they demand aid to insulate the Palestinians from the consequences of their own decisions.
One week in office and the Hamas that promised new leadership has become just more of the same. Unfortunately, the failure of Hamas goes beyond a loss of credibility, but reflects a failure of imagination, an inability to imagine a future different from the past.
The peace process is over, for no Palestinian leadership will now be able to accept what the Israelis might be prepared to offer. But in fact, the Palestinians and Israelis do not need a peace agreement, a long-term truce in the model of Korea will do just fine.
But what the Palestinians desperately need, and what Hamas has been unable to offer, is a vision of the future. And for this the Asian model of note is Singapore. Founded as an independent nation forty years ago––one year after the creation of the PLO––Singapore was a tiny, crowded, impoverished nation with no resources. In the ensuing decades, based on a national strategy centered on foreign investment and education, they have built one of the most successful economies in the world.
Singapore has become the model for national development, as other nations are learning. Earlier this year, Intel announced plans to build a major chip plant in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam as part of a network of seven plants including ones in Malasyia, Costa Rica and China. Ismail Haniya and Mahmoud Zahar should have greater things on their mind than wordsmithing letters to Kofi Annan. Instead, they should be asking “Why not Gaza City?” The Palestinians, whose population is educated and a stone’s throw from Intel’s operations in Israel, should be ready to embrace a vision of the future that is different from the past. But that would require two new things from the Palestinian leadership: imagination and an end of the politics of dependency.
Now that would be news. Man bites dog, as they say.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
A day for the ages
On one day, three stories.
First, a story of truly Biblical proportions. The Gospel of Judas Iscariot has emerged. The papyrus manuscript was discovered in the Egyptian desert and today the National Geographic Society announced the publication of the first translation of the Coptic text of the Gospel of Judas.
And what a story it tells. Judas, it seems, was not a Judas at all. Rather, in betraying Joshua ben Joseph to the Romans, Judas was literally doing the Lord’s work. The section of the gospel beginning "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week, three days before he celebrated Passover" relates how Jesus asked Judas to betray him and turn him over to the Roman authorities.
Jesus understood what he was asking of Judas, who he said would “be cursed by other generations” for his actions, and explained to Judas that he was asking of him an act of devotion over and above the other disciples. “You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."
What does it mean that the story that has been passed down for 2,000 years appears to have gotten it wrong? Judas did not sell out Jesus for a fistful of dollars? Jesus’ prophesy that one of his disciples would betray him was not prophetic at all? How then does one view Jesus’ condemnation of the friend who was actually doing his bidding?
How do our stories change when the facts that first supported them grow less certain in the face of new information? Do we reconsider Judas now?
Second, a more mundane story. Scooter Libby––unlike Judas as we may now have to understand him––is not inclined to take one for the team and keep his conversations with his boss quiet for 2,000 years.
Libby’s testimony to the Grand Jury investigating the leaks of classified C.I.A. information involving Valerie Plame and pre-war intelligence appears to indicate that both Dick Cheney and President Bush explicitly authorized Libby to leak classified information to New York Times reporter Judy Miller, in order to counter charges made by Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, that undermined the credibility of the Administration’s rationale for war with Iraq.
The President, who has publicly excoriated leaks from his Administration, was provided with a legal opinion from Cheney adjutant David Addington that a Presidential action to disclose classified information ”amounted to declassification of the document.” The ultimate defense, it would seem, though one observe replied caustically to that theory. “There is no process for declassification? The President can declassify documents on a whim, even if the only purpose is to smear a political opponent?”
It all goes back to the rationale for the war. That elusive story that twists and turns. The one rationale that just never seems to be there is that Iraq was an imminent threat, that traditional casus belli that would squeeze the round peg that is the Iraq War into the square hole that is International Law.
Finally, the third story. The Senate has reached its compromise on immigration reform with a bill that at least grants a nod to the realities on the ground, the 12 million illegal immigrants who are increasingly dug into American society and who really are not going anywhere. 12 million people, 7.5 million of them employed. Five percent of the United States work force.
The Senate is about to come face to face with their counterparts in the House, who led by James Sensenbrenner and Tom Tancredo passed their own measure for the defense of the U.S. border and the imposition of harsh criminal penalties on the aliens in our midst.
Defense of the border is a good and necessary thing. The U.S. border should be guarded as well as any in the world, but as any good economist will tell you, building a ten-foot wall dividing the United States economy from the Mexican economy, dividing a world of opportunity and hope from a world that offers a bleak future will only spark a run on eleven-foot ladders.
The House may have good intentions, but their hearts are punitive and unforgiving. The House leaders, who are leading the right wing of the Republican Party, imbued with evangelical fervor and arrogating unto themselves the mantle of God's wisdom, are forgetting the central wisdom of Joshua ben Joseph. They shall be judged for how they treat the least among us. All the rest is rhetoric.
First, a story of truly Biblical proportions. The Gospel of Judas Iscariot has emerged. The papyrus manuscript was discovered in the Egyptian desert and today the National Geographic Society announced the publication of the first translation of the Coptic text of the Gospel of Judas.
And what a story it tells. Judas, it seems, was not a Judas at all. Rather, in betraying Joshua ben Joseph to the Romans, Judas was literally doing the Lord’s work. The section of the gospel beginning "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week, three days before he celebrated Passover" relates how Jesus asked Judas to betray him and turn him over to the Roman authorities.
Jesus understood what he was asking of Judas, who he said would “be cursed by other generations” for his actions, and explained to Judas that he was asking of him an act of devotion over and above the other disciples. “You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."
What does it mean that the story that has been passed down for 2,000 years appears to have gotten it wrong? Judas did not sell out Jesus for a fistful of dollars? Jesus’ prophesy that one of his disciples would betray him was not prophetic at all? How then does one view Jesus’ condemnation of the friend who was actually doing his bidding?
How do our stories change when the facts that first supported them grow less certain in the face of new information? Do we reconsider Judas now?
Second, a more mundane story. Scooter Libby––unlike Judas as we may now have to understand him––is not inclined to take one for the team and keep his conversations with his boss quiet for 2,000 years.
Libby’s testimony to the Grand Jury investigating the leaks of classified C.I.A. information involving Valerie Plame and pre-war intelligence appears to indicate that both Dick Cheney and President Bush explicitly authorized Libby to leak classified information to New York Times reporter Judy Miller, in order to counter charges made by Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, that undermined the credibility of the Administration’s rationale for war with Iraq.
The President, who has publicly excoriated leaks from his Administration, was provided with a legal opinion from Cheney adjutant David Addington that a Presidential action to disclose classified information ”amounted to declassification of the document.” The ultimate defense, it would seem, though one observe replied caustically to that theory. “There is no process for declassification? The President can declassify documents on a whim, even if the only purpose is to smear a political opponent?”
It all goes back to the rationale for the war. That elusive story that twists and turns. The one rationale that just never seems to be there is that Iraq was an imminent threat, that traditional casus belli that would squeeze the round peg that is the Iraq War into the square hole that is International Law.
Finally, the third story. The Senate has reached its compromise on immigration reform with a bill that at least grants a nod to the realities on the ground, the 12 million illegal immigrants who are increasingly dug into American society and who really are not going anywhere. 12 million people, 7.5 million of them employed. Five percent of the United States work force.
The Senate is about to come face to face with their counterparts in the House, who led by James Sensenbrenner and Tom Tancredo passed their own measure for the defense of the U.S. border and the imposition of harsh criminal penalties on the aliens in our midst.
Defense of the border is a good and necessary thing. The U.S. border should be guarded as well as any in the world, but as any good economist will tell you, building a ten-foot wall dividing the United States economy from the Mexican economy, dividing a world of opportunity and hope from a world that offers a bleak future will only spark a run on eleven-foot ladders.
The House may have good intentions, but their hearts are punitive and unforgiving. The House leaders, who are leading the right wing of the Republican Party, imbued with evangelical fervor and arrogating unto themselves the mantle of God's wisdom, are forgetting the central wisdom of Joshua ben Joseph. They shall be judged for how they treat the least among us. All the rest is rhetoric.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Our critical infrastructure
Even as we labor to build a workable national legislature in Iraq, perhaps we should pay attention to the mess we have made of things here in the Homeland.
With the abomination of the Dubai World Ports episode behind us, 160 members of the House of Representatives have jumped on to sponsor legislation that would curtail foreign investment in United States airlines. Our airlines––which drift with the price of diesel fuel between various stages of bankruptcy and insolvency––have been designated by the legislation as part of our “critical infrastructure.”
For many years, the Senate and the House were also part of our critical infrastructure, but that time appears to be passing. Three years ago, few members of the Senate demurred at voting for the Iraq war resolution in the face of threats to their patriotism. Few members––six to be exact––even visited the room set aside for members to view the classified intelligence material that purported to justify our “little bit of unilateralism.”
Over the past few weeks, the Senate and the House proved to have learned nothing from the Iraq war vote as members fell over each other––and trampled the sober few who objected––as they ran to the front of the train that would railroad in one moment the Dubai port deal, America’s leadership position in the international economy, the dignity of Arab and Muslim populations, common sense and national dignity.
Now, just as Duncan Hunter and Hillary Clinton, Chuck Shumer and Dennis Hastert are dusting themselves off from their thrilling experience of bi-partisanship, a new train is building up steam and soon will be taking on new members. The buzzword of this new movement is critical infrastructure, and we should all be afraid, we should be very afraid.
The bleating of our national leaders aside, our critical infrastructure is not our ports and airports––little of whose security it should be noted lies in the hands of the private companies that operation ships, terminals, airlines or airport gates––but rather our intellectual property, our legal system and our network of relationships in the world. This reality has been slow to dawn upon the Bush Administration, but they are coming around. Gone are the full-throated cowboy cries for unilateralism as senior Administration figures from the Pentagon to Langley to Foggy Bottom have begun to embrace a new doctrine that suggests that our success in the world rests in the quality of our partnerships in the world––with other nations, with intelligence services and with trading partners––and that these relationships are rooted in the goodwill of the people of those nations toward America.
To be leaders in the new world order, it appears that we must, in fact, lead. And one measure of leadership seems to be whether anyone is following. Now, as the Administration has begun to herald the relationships that only a few short wars ago it encouraged us to deride, only the Vice President clings to the notion of Battleship America.
But the fear the Administration helped foment has become entrenched in the American psyche. As Osama retreated into his cave, we retreated into ours, and as the Dubai travesty showed the climate of fear is with us. Now, however, the leadership mantle has passed from the President to the Congress, and sensing opportunities for political advantage in the fear game, Hunter and Clinton, Shumer and Hastert are leading their minions forward.
However, for the American public the true source of fear has changed. Terrorism is a threat, but it is one that must be combated through intelligence networks and dedicated efforts with our partners away from the front pages of the daily newspapers. But the fear now felt among the electorate does not arise from Osama’s visage, but stems from deeper uncertainties about the future that we face. The future of our families and of our children. And against this threat, Congress is not rushing forward with solutions.
In the world today, Americans have cause for concern. For 80% of the population or so, real incomes are stagnating. For those who lose their jobs, the next career offers lower pay and fewer benefits. For working and middle class parents, two incomes must replace one for living standards to be maintained––taking time away from children and each other––and for visions of the American dream of living better than one’s parents to be achieved. For 80% of the population, the world that we have created in the wake of our victory in the Cold War is a forbidding place.
The critical infrastructure of our nation has been weakened significantly, and Congressional leaders are doing nothing. The critical infrastructure for Americans––those real Americans that matter in Washington every four years or so––are pensions and healthcare and higher education. With pension security, healthcare and access to higher education, American families can tackle the future. Without these three in place, fear can overwhelm families, forcing longer hours, greater stress and deepened anxiety.
Fear has captured the national psyche, and the fear has deep roots. But it is the fear of what the future holds at most personal level that should be the center of national attention. The critical infrastructure is closer to home than the nearest port or airport, it is the safety net. And the holes in the net can be seen from the kitchen table.
But where are Hunter and Clinton, Shumer and Hastert on these matters? One party holds all of the power and yet does nothing. The other party holds no power yet offers nothing as an alternative. In the current climate is Muslim-baiting and fear mongering the best we can do? Has the pursuit of political advantage sapped Congress of any larger vision of what ails the people it serves?
Just not like them, the Iraqi people must think. Please, not like them.
With the abomination of the Dubai World Ports episode behind us, 160 members of the House of Representatives have jumped on to sponsor legislation that would curtail foreign investment in United States airlines. Our airlines––which drift with the price of diesel fuel between various stages of bankruptcy and insolvency––have been designated by the legislation as part of our “critical infrastructure.”
For many years, the Senate and the House were also part of our critical infrastructure, but that time appears to be passing. Three years ago, few members of the Senate demurred at voting for the Iraq war resolution in the face of threats to their patriotism. Few members––six to be exact––even visited the room set aside for members to view the classified intelligence material that purported to justify our “little bit of unilateralism.”
Over the past few weeks, the Senate and the House proved to have learned nothing from the Iraq war vote as members fell over each other––and trampled the sober few who objected––as they ran to the front of the train that would railroad in one moment the Dubai port deal, America’s leadership position in the international economy, the dignity of Arab and Muslim populations, common sense and national dignity.
Now, just as Duncan Hunter and Hillary Clinton, Chuck Shumer and Dennis Hastert are dusting themselves off from their thrilling experience of bi-partisanship, a new train is building up steam and soon will be taking on new members. The buzzword of this new movement is critical infrastructure, and we should all be afraid, we should be very afraid.
The bleating of our national leaders aside, our critical infrastructure is not our ports and airports––little of whose security it should be noted lies in the hands of the private companies that operation ships, terminals, airlines or airport gates––but rather our intellectual property, our legal system and our network of relationships in the world. This reality has been slow to dawn upon the Bush Administration, but they are coming around. Gone are the full-throated cowboy cries for unilateralism as senior Administration figures from the Pentagon to Langley to Foggy Bottom have begun to embrace a new doctrine that suggests that our success in the world rests in the quality of our partnerships in the world––with other nations, with intelligence services and with trading partners––and that these relationships are rooted in the goodwill of the people of those nations toward America.
To be leaders in the new world order, it appears that we must, in fact, lead. And one measure of leadership seems to be whether anyone is following. Now, as the Administration has begun to herald the relationships that only a few short wars ago it encouraged us to deride, only the Vice President clings to the notion of Battleship America.
But the fear the Administration helped foment has become entrenched in the American psyche. As Osama retreated into his cave, we retreated into ours, and as the Dubai travesty showed the climate of fear is with us. Now, however, the leadership mantle has passed from the President to the Congress, and sensing opportunities for political advantage in the fear game, Hunter and Clinton, Shumer and Hastert are leading their minions forward.
However, for the American public the true source of fear has changed. Terrorism is a threat, but it is one that must be combated through intelligence networks and dedicated efforts with our partners away from the front pages of the daily newspapers. But the fear now felt among the electorate does not arise from Osama’s visage, but stems from deeper uncertainties about the future that we face. The future of our families and of our children. And against this threat, Congress is not rushing forward with solutions.
In the world today, Americans have cause for concern. For 80% of the population or so, real incomes are stagnating. For those who lose their jobs, the next career offers lower pay and fewer benefits. For working and middle class parents, two incomes must replace one for living standards to be maintained––taking time away from children and each other––and for visions of the American dream of living better than one’s parents to be achieved. For 80% of the population, the world that we have created in the wake of our victory in the Cold War is a forbidding place.
The critical infrastructure of our nation has been weakened significantly, and Congressional leaders are doing nothing. The critical infrastructure for Americans––those real Americans that matter in Washington every four years or so––are pensions and healthcare and higher education. With pension security, healthcare and access to higher education, American families can tackle the future. Without these three in place, fear can overwhelm families, forcing longer hours, greater stress and deepened anxiety.
Fear has captured the national psyche, and the fear has deep roots. But it is the fear of what the future holds at most personal level that should be the center of national attention. The critical infrastructure is closer to home than the nearest port or airport, it is the safety net. And the holes in the net can be seen from the kitchen table.
But where are Hunter and Clinton, Shumer and Hastert on these matters? One party holds all of the power and yet does nothing. The other party holds no power yet offers nothing as an alternative. In the current climate is Muslim-baiting and fear mongering the best we can do? Has the pursuit of political advantage sapped Congress of any larger vision of what ails the people it serves?
Just not like them, the Iraqi people must think. Please, not like them.
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