Tag: John Boehner

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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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The Puritanical Conspiracy

You can’t not be wary of being accused of paranoia, of being one of “them”– the conspiracy theorists. But you can’t not be aware, as well, of the fact that the people responsible or not for the conspiracy would be fully cognizant of the fact that people can be persuaded to label people who understand what is going on as “paranoid”. As I have noted before, the best friend any Kennedy assassination conspirator might have had would have been Kennedy assassination conspiracy buffs, like David Lifton, who posited that Kennedy’s body had been surreptitiously stolen from Air Force One and surgically altered to cover up the fact that shots came from the front (wouldn’t it have been easier to just shoot him in the back?).

If I had been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy, I would not have had some stooge write a book asserting that there was no conspiracy– I would have a stooge write a book asserting a conspiracy, and let slip that aliens might have abducted the brain. Far more effective at manipulating public perception: it’s not cool to believe in conspiracy. Coolness is always more important than veracity.

And so to Clinton. Looking back, fifteen years later. To the impeachment scandal. You have to think about what happened to Julie Hiatt Steele.

Follow me:

Suppose it was a conspiracy of sorts– and I don’t mean a deep, dark, coordinated effort master-minded by some evil genius from within his impervious bunker. Keep the straw men out of it. I mean a group of powerful financiers including Richard Mellon Scaife, and group of complicit Republican politicians who probably were not fully aware of how things were being managed for them. Why would they be? What advantage would it be for Scaife if Asa Hutchinson or Henry Hyde knew that this was all a plan? They didn’t need to know. They just needed to know that Clinton could be harmed and they just needed to tools provided by one means or another. Scaife probably started the process, but Kenneth Starr and his cronies managed it quite well within their own fraudulent agenda.

Anyway, we have Starr struggling– unsuccessfully– to convince America that Clinton, like Nixon, had to go. The Republicans were not averse to voting for impeachment without public support, but the decisive votes would have to come from across the aisle, and the only way to get them was to persuade the Democrats to cut Clinton loose and vote for impeachment.

It was a strange situation. Several Republicans on the impeachment parade had themselves cheated on their wives. Newt Gingrich carried on an affair with a staff member while his wife was in the hospital being treated for cancer. The public didn’t think the issue was big enough to impeach a popular president. So Kenneth Starr was struggling.

Kenneth Starr looked like a less sophisticated version of John Roberts, current chief justice of the Supreme Court. Like Roberts, Starr was good at pretending to examine all the facts carefully as if he actually had an objective opinion on anything, and then, shockingly, arrive at the conclusion he always wanted: impeachment.

So Starr is struggling. The evidence was not as strong as he had liked. He tried to nail the Clintons for Whitewater by bullying Susan MacDougal into corroborating the allegations but she wouldn’t do it. So here’s what he did: he charged her with obstruction of justice. The “obstruction” was her failure to bend to his will and lie about the Clintons’ involvement with a illegal or inappropriate $300,000 loan. The other witness had really done something illegal and had agreed to testify against Clinton in exchange for a plea bargain. That’s how American criminal justice works. Only in the movies and TV are actual evidence and guilt involved in the equation.

So along comes Kathleen Wiley. Wiley had a history of prevarication and wasn’t a very good, credible witness, and she had openly flirted with Clinton and tried to arrange a tryst, to no avail. Then she went to Kenneth Starr and accused Clinton of groping her. On the day her husband, who was himself charged with misappropriating client’s funds from an investment scheme, shot himself to death in his car on a side-road somewhere.

Wiley claimed that a woman named Julie Hiatt Steele, who does appear to have been a sensible, rational person, also admitted to her that Clinton had groped her, and could testify that Wiley had told her about the groping long before the scandal broke (implying, of course, that she was jumping on a bandwagon). Wiley also had Michael Isikoff from Newsweek in her bag, and a book deal. The only thing she lacked, in fact, was credibility.

Did I mention the book deal?  The profit center?  The money, which should always be followed?

Yes, complicated. Let’s say for a moment that Kathleen Wiley’s story was completely untrue. Does it take a genius to conceive of the idea of her making it up? Maybe not out of whole cloth… maybe yes, out of thin air. Julie Hiatt Steele naturally denies the story. Kenneth Starr subpoenas her to testify. When she denies the story, as any perfectly truthful person would do, she is charged with Obstruction of Justice, which carries a potential sentence of 40 years.

Kenneth Starr, obviously out to prove that some tiny portion of the $50 million his investigation cost actually produced something, simply chose to punish the witnesses who refused to bend their testimony to his will by using his extraordinary powers to indict them for “obstruction of justice”, a term that meant whatever he wanted it to mean, Alice.

Then he leaked portions of their grand jury testimonies– a serious criminal offense, by the way– to the media, knowing full well that most news organizations wouldn’t bother to either fact check, or hold the leakers accountable for suggestive and inaccurate details.

Kind of whacky, isn’t it? But if this was the actual result, it is easily possible to imagine that someone planned this outcome, very carefully. Steele must have been enormously tempted to give in and corroborate Wiley– she was threatened with all kinds of dire consequences, her apartment searched, friends and relatives intimidated– if she did not cooperate, and all kinds of sweetness and light if she did.

It will be more difficult for them to employ this strategy against Obama, but I don’t doubt for a second that they will try. Wait for it. It’s coming. Remember, it will structured in such a way to permit Republican leaders to seem uninvolved in revelations, the leaks, the rumours, and then weep crocodile tears about doing their “duty” to investigate.

A carefully developed account of how the scandal was manipulated by Kenneth Starr, Lucianne Goldberg, and Linda Tripp.

Am I paranoid? Or not. If I am right about the Clinton impeachment, I might be right to anticipate that some kind of similar effort will be made against Obama at some point, especially if the Republicans gain a majority in the House (allowing them to hold inquisitions). Suppose Richard Mellon Scaife or the Koch brothers are out there right now with millions of dollars available to bring down the president, through whatever means possible, and without the slightest constraint of ethics or morals? How could they do it?

Well, the myth of the Tea Party is a start. The Tea Party does not exist, as the media would have you believe, in the sense of a powerful, influential, successful political force. Check the real poll numbers: the Tea Party is utterly impotent, in terms of real influence. There is not a single Republican candidate in any district who is winning because he or she is a “Tea Party” candidate, but there are least 16 who are losing, for that reason.

And it is beyond nauseating when establishment Republicans like John Boehner now strut around claiming that they have always represented the unsullied puritan ethos of those saintly tea party activists with their lovely racists signs and posters.

Most Americans– and I mean MOST, as in about 70%– shrug them off as inconsequential and embarrassing. Have you checked Sarah Palin’s numbers lately? The Democrats can only dream that she will be the Republican nominee for president in 2012. John McCain must weep at night knowing what he will now be remembered for.

In terms of fake influence, however, the Tea Party soars. In terms of “perception”, the news media, including the alleged liberal media, give it far more prominence than it deserves. Why? Because the Wall Street Journal and Fox News have ordained that the Tea Party is BIG NEWS. Because they believe that if they shout it out loud and often enough, people will actually begin to believe that America is embracing the political ideology of these idiots. Because they are funny and scary and outrageous. I believe their own insignificance will become apparent to them by January when Trent Lott’s dictum becomes true: “we need to co-opt them”. They will not resist, though, in some ways, I wish they would.

Anyway, Scaife and others would never do anything that would conspicuously link them directly to any of the more insalubrious efforts against Obama, including the pseudo-racist rumours about Islamic beliefs or Kenyan culture. They would merely fund groups who do, researchers, investigators, people like Linda Tripp who are willing to do the dirty work on behalf Mitch McConnell and the like.