Tag: Barack Obama

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Mrs. President

“She has very much got his back,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s longtime strategist, in an interview. “When she thinks things have been mishandled or when things are off the track,” he continued, “she’ll raise it, because she’s hugely invested in him and has a sense of how hard he’s working, and wants to make sure everybody is doing their work properly.” NY Times 2012-01-06

There’s a lot of euphemism in there– she’s “invested” in him. She wants to make sure everybody is doing their work “properly”. She might think things have been “mishandled”.

Without a doubt, Michelle Obama is a smart lady. She might even be very smart about politics, but we’ll never know because it’s not likely she’ll ever run for office and be elected by voters to have authority and do things. No.

She reminds me of Hillary Clinton, another very smart lady, who didn’t actually run for any office until 2000 (when she ran for the Senate in New York), but wielded considerable influence, especially on the Clinton’s failed health care proposals… You could say that their husband’s “appointed” them to a kind of “position”.

The part that concerns me is this: it appears Obama’s advisors would sometimes meet with him and discuss possible strategies and goals and policies and reach some kind of decision and then Obama would go home that night and have dinner and read stories to his kids and go to bed and the next day, he would announce that he had changed his mind.

It was obvious to his aides and advisors that Michelle had spoken.

A lot of people will read about it in People Magazine– and look at the flattering photography to go with it’s article on the first lady– and think, this is wonderful. What a wonderful lady. She’s so… so… invested.

Personally, I find it appalling. Here’s the reason why: Michelle didn’t attend the meeting and raise her issues and debate them and deal with opposing ideas and contrary facts like everyone else. She gets to have her say one-on-one with the President, a circumstance any other aide or advisor would kill for. No one to contradict your view of things. No one to point out something you missed. No one to raise facts and information that do not support your view. Just you and the most powerful man in North America.

If I was one of those aides and I had participated in a meeting in which we made our case for a certain policy or strategy and heard all sides of it and then found out, the next day, that Michelle Obama had changed the President’s mind, I would move to Chicago and run for mayor– that’s what I’d do. Especially if I was good at my job. Especially. But also if I was bad at my job. If I was more concerned with political success– getting re-elected–than with policy objectives.

The story is that the Obamas accepted the idea that they might not be re-elected in 2012. Initially.

Now, if I sucked at my job, I would just spend a lot of time sucking up to the First Lady.

The inconvenient truth here is that Michelle might have been right about some issues– she felt that the aides were too concerned with the political side of things– but we are also hearing about this through a filter. Yes, exclusive access to Michelle Obama, for a book. “The Obamas” by Jodi Kantor.

Michelle Obama considered not moving to the White House immediately at Inauguration, so the children could finish their school year in Chicago and take more time to adjust to life under the bubble– just like Mrs. Santos in West Wing!

They always tell you that that sort of thing is just not possible, that the Secret Service would have to shut down the whole block and search every neighbor entering or re-entering the neighborhood and that she wouldn’t be able to walk the dog anymore and blah, blah, blah.

They would have you believe that sophisticated Al Qaeda agents would spring from the sky in black ninja suits, smash through the windows, and snatch the first family and hold them hostage until America turned over a nuclear bomb so they could solve the Israel problem for once and for all.

This attitude towards security is what creates the hysteria around certain public people in the first place. Check other countries and you will find that few of them engage in this kind of psychotic delusion about the importance of politicians or celebrities. It’s not the product of the public’s attitude towards famous people: it’s the product of famous people doing everything they can to convince people they they are so unbelievably different from you and I that they must be treated as gods.

Even as Mrs. Obama dazzled Americans with her warmth, glamour and hospitality early in the presidency, she was also deeply frustrated and insecure about her place in the White House. NY Times

The New York Times announces to the world that Mrs. Obama — not Ms., of course– Mrs. Obama “dazzled” Americans. Well, sure they were: the New York Times told them to be dazzled and they were.

Well, what can you do? John Edwards gets a $400 haircut and it causes a sensation! Wait– the New York Times makes it sound like people are idiots for making a big deal about a $400 haircut. Maybe they are. Then again, maybe Edwards should have gotten a $35 haircut like most other women do. Maybe he should have announced beforehand that because he was now a contender, he would have to spend a ridiculous amount of money on haircuts. And shrug.

I don’t mean anything here to suggest that Hillary Clinton was not incredibly qualified for whatever government positions or non-positions she has ever held. Check her out in Wikipedia. I doubt that a more qualified woman ever ran for president.

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Lost Obama

Reading the comments section of a piece on the New York Times website, one is struck by the unanimity and passion of the readers who feel that this last one, this deal with the Republicans to keep the Bush tax cuts, is the last straw: they will never vote for Obama again. They feel betrayed, disappointed, angry.

The depth and breadth of rejection is stunning– post after post after post, categorically insisting that Obama is done.

Why didn’t we just elect McCain/Palin and get it over with? Other than Health Care, is there anything important that would be different? Is the Health Care plan even all that great, after gutting it of all the genuinely progressive elements?

It is striking. It is almost tragic. Suppose they got really mad and decided they would support someone progressive and liberal and passionate in the next round of Democratic presidential primaries, someone who is about change, who promises a new approach to government, and who seems to genuinely care about the average working stiff: they will never know until it’s too late if that person is going to be another Obama. They will never know until it’s too late if that man or woman is going to be signing another massive tax break for rich people, or cutting social security, or putting people on trial in front of military tribunals.

The funny thing is, if a nut case like Sarah Palin got elected, she’d probably do exactly what she promises to do, leading us all into disaster after disaster, like Iraq, Afghanistan, coal-fired power plants, ethanol, and the collapse of the financial industry.

An esteemed colleague of mine makes a compelling case that it’s too early to judge– every recent president plunged in the opinion polls at this stage of his presidency. Clinton and Reagan both recovered. George W. barely recovered. Health care may yet prove to be the jewel of his administration and the economy could turn around and everyone might eventually forget all about the mid-terms and the winter of 2010. It’s possible.

It’s possible that it takes two years for a new man to really begin to fit into the suit of the presidency, to know the length of it’s sleeves, the ability to stretch, the tightness around the crotch. Maybe we will see somersaults in 2011 and 2012.

Obama has made some exceptional appointments, and the government is at least behaving rationally on a range of domestic issues that never see the front page. But like those readers of the New York Times, I wonder why when some asshole on the right campaigns on stupid ideas like environmental and banking deregulation and aggressive military policies and lower taxes for the rich, he gets to do exactly what he said he was going to do, but when someone rational on the left wins an election, he always seems to track so far to the middle you have to wonder why we even have two parties.

Why not just let the tax cuts expire? Obama made it reasonably clear that he wanted to keep the tax cuts for the lowest earning Americans and the middle income Americans. Why not refuse the deal with the Republicans and say, fine, let them all expire. Most Americans, in poll after poll, support the elimination of the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans, as Obama proposed. Why didn’t he have the guts to fight for it? He just traded about $4 trillion in benefits to the well-off for about $56 billion in aid for the jobless.

Very, very good deal if you are rich in America. In fact, there’s a word for it, if you are rich in America, during a time of economic hardship and war: “obscene”.

He won’t get credit for extending the tax cuts anyway– the Republicans will be crowing about this for years to come. They’ll let everyone know that Obama was against it, even though he signed it into law. He won’t get credit for compromising– this kind of compromise looks weak and indecisive. And the projected deficits will be even bigger than they already were, which the Republicans will use as an excuse to attack Social Security and Medicare.

That’s the Republican way: create deficits and then campaign as fiscal hawks.

It looks for all the world like a lose-lose situation, and it looks humiliating and insulting and embarrassing.

Is it a done deal? I’m watching with great curiosity. There is a bit of rumbling among Congressional Democrats that they might not vote for it. It’s a very intriguing idea. Especially if you just got creamed in the mid-terms and you have this feeling of having your noses rubbed in it.

Especially if you are ambitious and think there might be room of the left for an insurgency in 2012.

You should have voted for Hillary instead? What would she do differently? Well, take a cue from Bill, for one thing: Clinton stood up to the Republicans when they held the government hostage to their agenda in 1995.

What did Clinton do?

Armey replied gruffly that if I didn’t give in to them, they would shut the government down and my presidency would be over. I shot back, saying I would never allow their budget to become law, “even if I drop to 5 percent in the polls. If you want your budget, you’ll have to get someone else to sit in this chair!” Not surprisingly, we didn’t make a deal.

Wow. So what happened to the uncompromising Clinton? The highest approval ratings since he took office in 1992.

On the other hand, the glee with with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell greeted the announcement of the deal is positively nauseating.

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3%

In a very recent poll, only 3% of American voters considered the war in Afghanistan the “most important” problem facing the country. Now, you may say, well, that doesn’t mean a lot of voters don’t consider it somewhat important. I would suggest that the fact that only 3% consider it the most important (consider that way more people think there really are witches), that it is a dead issue.

So, ten years after this war was considered so urgent, so important, so vital to the security interests of the United States that thousands of people would die for it, and billions of dollars of weapons would be deployed for it, it now doesn’t even register on the radar. Is there a lesson here?

Sure there is.

  • Americans have a very, very short attention span. If you can distract them for a few days, you too can be a Senator or Congressman or president. Do not worry your pretty little head about the consequences of your decisions five years down the road.
  • Number 1 explains why so many state and city pension funds are bankrupt. Apparently, American politicians are almost uniformly irresponsible or stupid or both. Don’t blame them: the same voters keep putting them back into office because they promise to be patriotic, religious, and heterosexual.
  • Americans can be fooled over and over and over again. We are about to see an entire new crop of idiots thrust into political office where, God help us, they may get their hands on Social Security, Medicare, and the Education system. God help us again.
  • Those large segments of America’s deeply religious communities who claim to be pro life? Shameless liars, all of them. Life is cheap. Life is shit. People are dying in a war no one cares about. These people never actually save anyone’s life, but they are more than happy to kill for cheap oil.
  • Those nations who sign on to America’s wars? Do you realize that your soldiers are also dying for a war that barely registers in the consciousness of the population of the country that talked you into this?
  • Obama, I guess, would love to walk away. The fact that Karzai is now talking to the Taliban about an accommodation of some sorts speaks volumes about where this is going. How lovely to be a Republican: you convince Americans it will be clean and simple and decisive, you start the war, you wage the war, you lose the war (make no mistake about it: it is lost), you borrow the money to finance the war, you reduce taxes on the rich so they don’t have to pay for it ever, then you walk away from the disaster. Then, in the next election, you run on a platform of a government that is less intrusive and more fiscally responsible.
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Decrypt-Kickers: RIM’s Blackberry

I personally find it hard to believe RIM’s assertions that the encryption on the data stored by their Blackberry servers can only be cracked by the user. The spiel given to the media today sounded painfully precise and specious.

India, China, Saudi Arabia, and several other nations have announced that they want RIM to give them access to software that will allow them to read users’ messages and data. For a week or so, it seemed like it was something RIM could do, but didn’t want to. Then they announced that, no, they couldn’t do it. Only the user could unencrypt his own data.

Hmmm. Hmmmmmm.

Silent through all this was the U.S. Government, which, thanks to the Patriot Act, can now lock you up without a warrant, send you to Jordan or Syria to be tortured, then imprison you in Guantanamo for five years, with no consequences whatsoever (thanks, Obama, for tricking us into believing you really thought this was unconstitutional or an affront to human rights in some way). Does RIM want me to believe that the U.S. government was content to be told that they would not be allowed to look at anyone’s data? Tough luck, Mr. Cheney– that is a user’s private information. You have no constitutional authority to look at it without permission.

I believe Obama probably doesn’t really like the Patriot Act. I’ll bet he also really thought he was going to change things. I believe that he doesn’t quite have the guts we thought he had when he was running for president. The American military and intelligence establishment, I figure, confronted him with their juiced-up scenarios of what could happen if one of these guys that they just know is a terrorist were able to blow up a subway station or the Statue of Liberty or something, and I’m sure the Republicans made sure he knew that they would be all over Fox News blaming him– and liberals in general– for the heart-rending deaths of innocent, lovable, happy, employed American citizens.

The essential dynamic here is this: if the intelligence agency really had enough accurate information to justly convict a person of a terrorism-related offense, they could easily do so legally any time they wanted. In fact, American juries fall all over themselves to convict anybody– especially colored or foreign people– of any offense imaginable, given the opportunity to do so, upon even the flimsiest evidence (and even, as recently reported, when the suspect has been exonerated by DNA evidence!).

The Patriot Act only exists so that the government can circumvent the normal, rational requirements of the constitution and lock somebody up just because they just know, in some intangible, irrational, unprovable, way, that the varmint was up to no good.

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Ridiculously, He Won

Palin owes her power to identity politics, pitched with moralistic topspin. She exploits the same populist impulse that fueled the career of William Jennings Bryan—an impulse described by one Bryan biographer as “the yearning for a society run by and for ordinary people who lead virtuous lives.” From Vanity Fair, September 2010

Is it even remotely possible that this dangerous lunatic could end up as President of the United States? The story is that she is preparing a run, setting up fundraising bodies, collecting direct-mail lists, distributing IOU’s to any number of Republican House and Senate candidates. That looks like groundwork. This looks like someone who believes her own (selected) press. I am so smart that even I don’t know how smart I am. Everybody who matters knows how smart I am.

There is something seriously demented about American politics. Americans hate their government. They believe that Washington is full of idiots and liars. These are the people they elected. Okay– so we were a tricked. These people were good when I voted for them, and then they got corrupted by Washington.

So a new guy comes along and says I won’t get corrupted. I’m going to clean out Washington. So they elect him. Two years later they hate him too. They hate him so much that when he spends $30 million smothering the state with ads declaring that his opponent is a child-molester and a heretic, they vote for him again. That’s all it takes, apparently, to fool the American voter. $30 million, supplied by the lobbyists representing the companies that persuaded their representative to do their bidding instead of the voters’.

So ask these voters, what’s ruining this country? Those damn unpatriotic foreigners! Feminists! People who don’t wear American flags in their lapels. Moslems! Mexicans! Homosexuals!

My friends, there isn’t a single Mexican in the country who can pay your Congressman enough money to do his will– but that’s who you’re upset about? You complain about the government wasting money on roads and schools, while they build billions of dollars of weapons for imaginary enemies? You have been driven into massive debts and bankruptcy and you’ve lost your job and your house because of the actions of greedy, dishonest American investment bankers, and you don’t like Obama because he’s smart and thinks he’s better than you?

The Vanity Fair piece on Palin is fascinating if only for a glimpse on that perennial American political paradox: how millionaire white American capitalists inevitably campaign for political office as “just folks” and try — and often succeed in painting their Democrat opponents as “elitists”.

Sarah Palin is America’s Evita in that regard– the poor little aw shucks hockey mom with down home values and divinely inspired common sense. How far that can take you in federal politics if you don’t even know who Margaret Thatcher is (presumably, she does now) is the question to be answered in 2012.

A friend of mine has mused that the Democrats should have lost the last election on purpose– the country was going to hell as a result of George Bush’s incompetence and there would be hell to pay and most people are too stupid to connect policies and consequences and delayed consequences, so whoever was in charge at the moment would get the blame.

My theory is that the Democrats did try to lose the election. They almost nominated a woman, realized she might win, thought better of it, and nominated a black man instead. Ridiculously, he won anyway.

There really, somewhere, should be a picture of John McCain sitting in an easy chair smiling. Smiling away…. Well, he should be smiling– instead, he seems bitter. Does he seriously believe that he could have come up with a plan that would have balanced the budget and reduced unemployment to 7% by now? Sure– by cutting taxes for the richest 1% of the population.

 

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Russell Defreitas and Obama’s Depressing Flag Lapel Pin

It is absolutely necessary that you believe there are dire threats against the United States out there and that only the institutional powers of the United States law enforcement agencies, along with Dick Cheney, can keep you safe:

But as time went on, more was revealed about the plot and the unlikelihood of its success (the fuel pipeline, for example, had safety mechanisms that would have prevented cascading explosions), as well as the level of government involvement (the informant had played a somewhat enabling role in pushing forward the plot). Ny Times, August 1, 2010

Yes, yes. And it turns out that one defendant appears to be somewhat inept:

Mr. “Russell Defreitas can’t mastermind his way out of the on-off switch on a video camera,”

That’s his own lawyer speaking.

And once again we have the specter of government infiltrators actually running the conspiracy– isn’t this “entrapment”? Yes, it is. Absolutely it is.

Feel safer? Mr. Defreitas is going to spend a long, long time in prison, mainly because he is a fool. There is not a politician in the United States who would countenance anything but the most draconian sentence imaginable. Do you hear me, Americans? You live in a nation where not a single politician of note has the guts or courage to state the obvious. Not a single one of your leaders, Democrat or Republican is willing to consider for even one second the possibility of saying what he really thinks about all this.

You’re laughing? I hear you laughing. Who cares about a man like Defreitas who sounds foreign anyway. But these same leaders are the ones who manage your economy and the environment and wars and intelligence and safety. And there may come a day when we all pay the price for the same lack of courage and conviction.

Obama’s depressing flag pin:

Yes, he had to do it. If he didn’t put the flag pin in his lapel, someone on Fox News would have zoomed in on the lapel and stared into the camera, oozing insider confidence, and whispered to his audience: “is it asking too much for our president to be even a little patriotic?” And Obama would have had to say on TV “I am patriotic” leading the viewer to wonder why he thought anyone thought he wasn’t patriotic. And so it goes. And so you Americans, so proud of your fantastic culture, your Coors beer, your jack-ass videos, your right to train your children to use rifles… we in Canada salute you.

 

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The Nobel War Prize

There are already lots of prizes for people who believe in war. In the U.S., there is, seemingly, universal acclamation. There and elsewhere there are medals, parades, monuments, and obscene financial considerations. People who are good at killing are more than adequately rewarded. At least until they get sick. That’s when the Republicans suddenly, bizarrely, always seem to want to pull the plug. Check it out: it’s the Democrats who almost always want to take better care of our veterans.

There are not so many awards for people who say “let’s not go out and kill people today. Let’s try to find a way to avoid war, to avoid destruction.” First of all, most Bible-thumpers– oddly– will excoriate you. I missed that part in Sunday School, where Jesus says, “kill your enemies”. Or the part where he says, “people who feel aggrieved by your stupid decisions in the past are your enemies and deserve to be killed.”

Anyway, even if I was a real militarist, I would shed a tear or two for the debasing of the Nobel Peace Prize. Whatever verbal pyrotechnics you must perform to prove that Obama’s decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan and rendition and the pictures of prisoner abuse in Iraq that he suppressed– constitute anything even remotely like “the promotion of peace”, they pale beside the plain and simple facts: Obama has embraced the wars and he has bought the Generals’ fervent belief that, given enough time, and resources, and foolish politicians, they might be able to “win” in Afghanistan yet. (Because, after all, we “won” in Iraq didn’t we?). We can “win” the war on terror, much like, after 30 years of the same failed policy, we have “won” the war on drugs.

We live in a world in which politician after politician, after concluding that a particular strategy isn’t working, invariably propose more and bigger of the same. Why? Not because the policies worked– they haven’t– but it isn’t politically viable to try an alternative. What if the Democrats proposed a illegal drug policy that wasn’t based on savage deterrence and ridiculously lengthy periods of incarceration? The shrieking would send Johnny Rotten to the madhouse.

Even if you think he’s right, why give him a “peace” prize for it? Give him a war prize. Give him a monument. Give him a favorable column in The Washington Post because he consulted with general after general after general and they all agreed: war is the solution and he bought it. If a little bit of war fails– try more of it. If that fails: try some more. If that fails: try some more. If that fails: consult with the generals again. Again, they will recommend war.

Could they not have postponed the ceremony at least? Coming as it did the day after Obama committed 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, seems a bit unseemly at best. It was truly embarrassing and sad. His speech to West Point– would Gandhi have done that?

Henry Kissinger’s picture is on the wall of honor at Oslo City Hall. It is almost impossible to imagine, today, what they were thinking when they gave it to him. What did they know? Did they have the slightest clue about what his role actually was in the Viet Nam War, and in the Nixon Administration? Were they nuts?

As a liberal, of course, I like Obama a lot more than Kissinger, but I still don’t think he should have been given the peace prize and I don’t think he should have accepted it. It think it was foolish, premature gesture.

The only good reason for giving it to him was to deliberately piss off curs like Charles Krauthammer and George Will. And the more they fume about it, the more I think, well, maybe he should accept it. They’re just jealous that George Bush Jr. didn’t get a peace prize.

Obama: “And it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace.”

Yes, that’s what a lot of people thought they were voting for. I still suspect that seven years from now, it might be recorded that armed conflict was avoided somewhere because Obama made some wise decisions… I suspect he is too smart to stumble into something like Iraq. But then, I also thought he was too smart to get bogged down in Afghanistan the way Johnson got bogged down in Viet Nam. But he has and is and in spite of his insistences to the contrary, the resemblance to Viet Nam is uncanny.

Irving Kristol, in today’s Washington Post, quotes Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech and compares it favorably with a speech by Bush. Okay– so does Irving Kristol now support Obama? Will he say, he has made good decisions about war and peace and Afghanistan? Not on your life– so while claiming that Obama is no different from Bush with one breath, he immediately proves that he is by attacking him at every other moment. But then, conservatives, lately, seem to ridicule the very idea that their platform should have any kind of coherence or consistency to it– these are incoherent times for them. Conservative policies created the biggest financial crisis in history and Sarah Palin and her cronies demand more of the same policies. The deregulated markets performed spectacularly badly– let’s have more deregulation. Viet Nam was a failure — let’s try it again in Afghanistan. We know something the Soviets didn’t know when they were there for a heartbreaking seven years. Honest, we do.

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Glenn Beck

“What I feel like saying is, sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies, and I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy. But that’s the way I feel and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.” Glenn Beck, interviewing Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, in 2008.

With the exception of Anne Coulter, I think most rational people today accept that McCarthyism was a bad thing. So we are waiting for the correct label for this kind of behavior by Glenn Beck, if it’s not simply McCarthyism. Well, it is McCarthyism. And it is as ugly and contemptible as we always thought McCarthyism was. And as it was in the era of Joe McCarthy, the majority (probably) of respectable conservatives are standing by silently because they are terrified of taking on these assholes.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if someone like James Dobson or Billy Graham or Ted Haggard posted an editorial saying that while he is a God-fearing Christian and principled conservative, he won’t stand for this kind of bullying or baiting or personal attack and he urges all citizens to show some respect for each other? And while he’s at it, he might mention that every night he prays for Obama to be safe, and for his children to be blessed with a father, and for his wife to feel deeply the richness of a good family life.

Sigh.

This is not trivial. As a Christian, the fact that the most prominent “leaders” of the church in the United States will never in a million years say anything like that is a theological and philosophical problem that I can’t solve.

Was there a race issue involved with Joe Wilson, calling Obama a liar?

Do we even need the race issue to recognize stunningly bad manners? Do we need a box of kleenex to deal with the fact that his election campaign fund-raising went up after the incident?

How long before a scary new political party is formed in the U.S.? Wait– is there a need for a radical, far-right, extremist party? Can’t the Republicans fit the bill?

The Toronto Police recently discovered some strange pipes and wires in the back of a van. The owner, apparently, told them that he had an alternative fuel system installed in the vehicle.

In the mistaken belief that you can’t be too careful (I believe that you can, in fact, be too careful), they cordoned off about 1.6 kilometers around the vehicle, barred people from their homes and businesses, and called in the bomb squad.

They then announced the bomb squad had defused the bomb by the early evening.

The owner of vehicle was charged with violation of his probation and possession of a bomb. Six hours later, they announced that it was, indeed, an alternative fuel system, and the charges would be dropped but the owner was not released.

The next day, the owner was released and the police announced he would not be charged.

My question is this: what did they “defuse”?

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So a guy, apparently, shows up at an Obama town hall meeting in New Hampshire a few weeks ago with a semi-automatic weapon and a t-shirt that refers to Thomas Jefferson’s statement: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” This guy’s t-shirt actually says “It’s time to water the tree of liberty…”

Let’s imagine that a few steps away some other dude pulls out a doobie and lights it up. And a few feet from him, some woman decides to breastfeed her baby. And a few steps from her, two men kiss each other on the lips. And a few steps from those two, an Arabic man puts a mat on the ground in the direction of Mecca. And he is standing close to guy wearing an “impeach George Bush” t-shirt.

Of these loyal citizens, whom might the police choose to detain? Well, all of them, except the man with the gun.

The gun-toting “libertarian” won’t be detained– he is exercising a sacred right. He also loudly and rather hysterically claims that he is standing up for liberty– he doesn’t want the government acting like a nanny and telling him what to do, nosirreee. Like telling him who he can kiss or what he can smoke or who he can pray to.

Of course, if that same government wants to tap his phone without a warrant, or put him on a plane and send him to Syria for some serious questioning, or send him to some other foreign country to lose his arm or leg or life on behalf of an oil company, or allow his job to be outsourced to some sweatshop in Asia somewhere… well, that’s fine with him. And if a corporation tells him what kind of health coverage he can have and what kind of treatments he can receive, well, gosh, that’s not like “liberty” or anything like that, I guess.

I’m just trying to imagine the American mind set here… when a protestor shows up with a t-shirt that advocates impeaching George Bush, he gets busted, dragged off– by government employees– because he constitutes some vague sort of risk. The courts almost always find these actions unconstitutional but the Bush Administration never paid much attention to the courts or judges or the law. But a man hangs around the venue at which President Obama is appearing with a semi-automatic weapon…. ?

I don’t think the hysterical right is even a large minority right now. I think these are marginal people, ill-informed, a little crazy. But their hysterics, at these town-hall meetings, are getting enormous media play– from the mythical “liberal” media, no less– and they seem to be scaring Obama, who seems to be backing away from a public option on health care even though polls of the rational majority have shown that most people are in favor of it.

There was a woman at a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire who got all teary and emotional about the threat to America by a health care plan that threatened to turn her nation into another Russia. She might as well have added that the fairies are trying to steal her turnips, for all the logic in her position. But she gets on the air, on TV, and makes people uneasy, and the Democrats back away.

It’s beyond contempt. It makes you wonder why anyone ever thought there was such a thing as “progress”.

It’s really easy to look back at McCarthyism and chuckle and assure ourselves that we have far more sense than that nowadays. No we don’t. And I have a feeling that a lot of people who find McCarthy ridiculous today might someday look back at this decade and find a lot of ridiculousness too. The use of torture and arbitrary arrests and detention? The hysterical rituals by which we think we’re keeping terrorists from blowing up Ellis Island and the Brooklyn Bridge? The determination of the widows of victims of 9/11 to honor liberty and freedom by banning unpatriotic plays from the theatre to be built as part of the new World Trade Center complex?

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State Secrets

The government’s recent brief cited the leading Supreme Court decision on state secrets, United States v. Reynolds in 1953, but it said nothing about Judge Walker’s reading of it.

“Reynolds itself,” Judge Walker wrote, “leaves little room for defendants’ argument that the state secrets privilege is actually rooted in the Constitution.”

The Reynolds case concerned an Air Force accident report. The government refused to turn it over in an injury lawsuit, saying that disclosure of the report would endanger national security by revealing military secrets.

When the report was finally released in 1996, it contained no secrets, but it did show that the deaths of nine men in the crash a B-29 bomber had been caused by the Air Force’s negligence.

NyTimes, August 2, 2009

As seems inevitable… It is not surprising, of course, that the Bush Administration would have sought to establish Reynolds as a precedent– sparing the government having to defend itself against those annoying lawsuits. A more recent ruling by Judge Walker, against the Bush Administration, asserted that the Reynolds ruling established no such precedent. But once again, we have Obama’s Justice Department supporting Bush policy positions that Obama seemed to criticize on the campaign trail. What gives?

These policies are not abstractions: real individuals have been kidnapped and tortured as a result of Bush policies and their only recourse, the courts, have been denied them by rulings by other courts that are contrary to Walker. The government– the President!– reserves the right to tell the courts when a lawsuit might “endanger” national security, without, of course, ever being accountable for what that danger is. Civil libertarians are rightly aghast.

It is so, so perfect that the major precedent for this kind of judicial ruling is so, so discredited: the U.S. Air Force was trying to cover up it’s own negligence, exactly as the plaintiffs in Reynolds alleged. Does anyone even know or care?

It is nauseating to read conservatives complain bitterly about Obama’s health care plans because they don’t want the government telling them what to do. You idiots! The government is declaring that it has the right to seize and detain and even torture you , and spy on you, and obtain your library records, and tap your phones without any judicial oversight at all– and you are worried that you’re going to forced to have health insurance! You don’t like liberals because they want to infringe on your personal freedoms?! Oh, the rank hypocrisy!

I am waiting for conservatives to enunciate a clear-cut declaration that they no longer accept the idea of “innocent until proven guilty”. Perhaps the movies and television dramas like “24” have finally succeeded where generations of McCarthyites failed.

A director of Homeland Security explained that 60-year-old women in wheelchairs are routinely searched when flying because… “if Al Qaeda knew that we were letting 60-year-old women in wheelchairs through, do you think they would hesitate to plant a bomb on a 60-year-old woman in a wheelchair?”

By golly, he’s right. And if Al Qaeda knew that they couldn’t get bombs onto airplanes, they would start putting them on ships and trains.

Does Al Qaeda know that this dink is in charge of homeland security? Because, if they did, I think they would rest assured that a nation run by idiots cannot long prevail anyway.

The more you are afraid, the more powerful the government and police are. I suggest you laugh at your government at least once a day.

 

More bad news about Obama:  “Unfortunately, the House measure is opposed by the Obama administration, which still seems to operate on the principle that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America.”  Paul Krugman, NY Times.  Link to Story.