p m carpenter's commentary

George W.'s speech, Part II

The former president's speech, last Thursday, in economically devastated Michigan, prompts reflection once again on the one constant in George W. Bush's Chauncey Gardinerlike life: its wake of destruction wherever he's gone, in whatever he's done, upon whomever he's touched, with the lone exception, I assume, of his immediate family.

Always an immensely privileged bumbler, neither physical effort nor mental exertion was ever required of George Bush to lead the most comfortable of lives. Everything -- and I mean everything, including but especially the presidency -- was simply handed to him by others. It seems he came to expect such unearned gifts as the natural order of things, hence that singular word that came to define him: entitlement.

Historically, other notables born into high social station have felt similarly entitled -- one thinks of presidential patricians such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Kennedy -- but concomitant with that sense was a sense as well of obligation, of return, of, in the most honorable intent of the words, noblesse oblige.

Whether that latter sensibility came naturally to those men or was rather grudgingly embraced I'll leave others to speculate on; but the fact is, it did come. And it was of benefit to millions.

Perhaps the woefully wholesale lack of it in George W. was his parents' fault. I don't know. But one is also led to ask if it wasn't more the result of something deeper in George's essential character, something defined by its absence. And by that I mean his profound lack of wonder -- at himself, and the world at large. With it he might have stopped to ask at least every now and then: Why is it I've been able to go so far while trying so little? -- indeed, not trying at all.

At that point he might have said to himself: Maybe others could use a bit of a leg up, because maybe others are so far down only because people like myself are unjustifiably -- one could say, even, oppressively -- so far up.

And at that second and more advanced point, the real world might have then come into human focus for George. Indeed, given all that he started with and all that was handed to him throughout, he might even have made something of himself.

George W. finally gives a big (predictable) speech

It is only fitting that George W. Bush has delivered what is being called "his first major speech addressing his presidency and the state of the country" in this country's most Bush-afflicted economic basket case, Michigan.

Yesterday, in Benton Harbor, addressing the Economic Club (what's left of it) of Southwestern Michigan, the former president "poured out thoughts about his presidency, his retirement and the decisions he made -- some of which he said will appear in a book he’s writing about his eight years in the White House."

Yes, George writes a history book -- an excellent adventure indeed -- but something sure to be Dewey-decimaled under "fables," not history or memoirs.

On torture, for instance, George said, "I made a decision within the law to get information so I can say, I’ve done what it takes to do my duty to protect the American people." More accurate -- and less fabled -- is that George simply made law: his Yoo-yahooistic unitary atrocities had nothing to do with what was "within the law."

He added, "I can tell you, the information gained saved lives." And he and Mr. Cheney will keep right on adding that and insisting on that, no matter how many times the actual interrogators say, Bullshit.

As for "protect[ing] the American people," I can't imagine how the more than 4,000 families of the more than 4,000 Americans who needlessly died fighting the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place must feel about George's self-serving inventions.

Bush also said, incredibly, and in fatuous opposition to what virtually every outside observer and not a few insiders have asserted since: "The military option is the last option. No president relishes using the military option."

He even got the personal stuff wrong. "It was much harder to be the son of a president than president. And it was harder to be the father of a president than president," said Bush, just after saying, "My dad was the happiest guy when I left office."

No, George. There were at least 300 million much happier people than your dad.

Sestak tackles Specter, sort of

I heard it live on MSNBC's "The Ed Show" last night:

"Personally, I do intend to get in, but we make the decision as a family. This is a deployment," said former Navy admiral and current congressman Joe Sestak about his plans to wrestle Pennsylvania's Democratic senatorial nomination from the freshly re-minted Arlen Specter.

"We have not made a final decision," he added, although he also added that his family had been "very supportive." Finally, he said, "I intend to try to do this in a thoughtful, deliberate way."

Joe, in my somewhat experienced opinion you're off to one helluva bad start, since your hesitant semi-announcement was, by definition, neither thoughtful or deliberate. As I watched your interview with Ed Schultz, I was instantly puzzled by your almost convulsing body language before you answered his question about your campaign intentions.

Then came the actual answer. Kind of. Which explained but also amplified your vivid unease -- "I do intend to get in," but on the other hand I can't say, or I'm unwilling to say, that I'm getting in, which I just said.

Say what?

Oh, Joe, instead say it ain't so that a former military officer and such a high-ranking one at that could be so ... well, namby-pamby. I mean, just what was that? You must ask your already "very supportive" family? -- meaning you're actually fishing for campaign cash but don't wish to be brazen about it?

Joe, you've got to be brazen about it, otherwise it won't come. Political types don't let loose of their cash unless asked directly, bluntly, and forcefully. So be direct, blunt, and forceful.

What was worse, however, was the overall and rather deplorable hesitation in your semi-announcing of a quasi-campaign. I'd bet anything that that's not how you once conducted military deployments, which you so aptly compared to political ones. So before your next interview, Joe, rev up that old fighting, determined and decisive spirit.

And just so you know, Joe, I only offer this rather harsh criticism because even though as a non-Pennsylvanian I can't vote for you, I'd love to see you kick that opportunistic geezer of an unprincipled primary opponent from wherever you are to the mid-Atlantic.

The CIA's embarrassing Deep Throat on the loose

A one-time "deep-cover" spook of 25 years is causing both his former employer, the CIA, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi considerable embarrassment. More the CIA than Pelosi, though.

He writes in National Review Online as "Ishmael Jones," but it's not his pseudonymous holding forth on any classified info that troubles the agency: it's what he writes broadly -- and one can only assume that Jones has been properly vetted by NRO and he therefore speaks with some knowledgeable truth -- that disturbs.

"They," the folks at CIA, "mumble, they dissemble, and there's a lot of 'on the one hand ...'" writes Jones in partial defense of Pelosi -- "CIA managers do not give fist-pounding briefings" -- although he also chides her for, in his opinion, having used "the interrogation issue as a political tool for years."

Of greater import to Jones and condemnation of Pelosi, however, he charges that for years she "thrived upon CIA dysfunction, and she has ignored the need for broader systemic change at the CIA, change that is necessary to protect the lives of Americans and our allies."

This, as suggested by Jones, has been long-term behavior on Pelosi's part. So it was with an element of the contradictory that he further noted that "as long as Mrs. Pelosi supported [the CIA's] bureaucratic lifestyle, it supported her" -- as she was thriving on denouncing its dysfunction? -- "but when she attacked it, it fought back. The CIA may not be able to conduct efficient intelligence operations, but it knows how to survive."

That, at least, was a larger point, so maybe the previous lapse in logic can be forgiven. What followed, though, is an undeniably haunting bit of realism: "The real challenge to Mrs. Pelosi’s political power will come not from these latest revelations," says Jones, "but in the fallout from the next intelligence failure, when America is taken by surprise, or when President Obama makes a crucial decision based on false or nonexistent CIA intelligence."

And in that event, it would be the last we ever hear from an agency called Central Intelligence.

Will the GOP finally grow up?

With respect to the Sotomayor nomination an increasingly profound division within the GOP -- the widening gap between tactics deployed by the fringe base and party pols -- is already frequently noted by outside observers.

The former -- the base -- retains unfailing faith in the old hysterical ways. You can read a wide sampling of this almost anywhere online (my sampling here), but let Roger Pilon's blogging at the Cato Institute suffice here: "President Obama chose the most radical of all the frequently mentioned candidates before him"; hence, Pilon assures us, "there will likely be an extremely contentious confirmation battle ahead."

What's likely ahead, however, is an extremely somniferous confirmation schmooze.

For instance NRSC Chairman John Cornyn -- from way down Hispanic Texas way; I think he gets it -- is using words like "imperative" in calling his partisan colleagues not to "pre-judge" Ms. Sotomayor. He also wishes them not to "pre-confirm," but surely they get the point, too.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, head of the Republican Conference, urges a "respectful" process; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell promises that his troops "will treat Judge Sotomayor fairly"; and even the RNC's habitually agitated Michael Steele issued what the Politico labeled a "restrained statement."

The reason for all this sudden sanity is referenced above: looming, dooming demographics. But my God it took them long enough.

"If Republicans make a big deal of opposing Sotomayor, we will be hurling ourselves off a cliff," said former Bush adviser Mark McKinnon,. "Death will not be assured. But major injury will be." No, he was skirting the right track the first time. Republicans simply cannot beat the numbers; remaining oblivious to them guarantees their electoral demise.

Matthew Dowd, another Bush adviser, cautioned that Senate Republicans "can’t look like they are going after her in any kind of personal or mean way. There's no way they can even threaten a filibuster. I think a threat of that sort would be a problem, even if they didn't do it."

Odds are they won't, because otherwise we'd "have a bunch of white males who lead the Judiciary Committee leading the charge taking on an Hispanic woman.... It’s a bad visual. It’s bad symbolism," said Dowd. And if bad symbolism fails to grab Senate Republicans' attention, this is bound to: Dowd added that Texas -- Texas, mind you -- could easily convert into a swing state if Republicans miss this paragraph's first point.

It could be, it just could be, that temper-tantrum Republican pols will, if only out of dire and now absolute necessity, grow up. But of course only time will tell.

Kim Jong-il, Whacko at Large

How does the world deal with a lunatic government? No, I'm not talking about the Bush administration. That's history. But we still have the bamboo-basket case of North Korea, led -- ever since George W.'s retirement from the stage -- by the globe's most unbridled lunatic, Kim Jong-il.

It's not just a matter of tough negotiating with a tough, unpredictable negotiator, a man described by GlobalSecurity.org as "arrogant and self-centered in policy decision," hostile "to criticism or opinions different from his own," and in possession of a "personality [that] can be characterized by suspicion" and is so "extremely emotional" it "borders on double personality."

No, he's more like with a thuggish child. In a land of crushing poverty, he (or at least he used to, before a stroke caught up with him) dines on caviar and lobster and drinks vats of very pricey cognac; surrounds himself with gorgeous young ladies; fusses about his pompadour; wears platform shoes; loves racing cars and luxury sedans; and is reported to have a movie collection in excess of 20,000 films.

Or a despotic William Henry Harrison, since his official biography claims he was born in a log cabin (no kidding) on the highest peak in Korea, at which magical moment at "double rainbow" appeared (he was actually born at an army base in the Soviet Union, which retained no birth record of celestial auras).

Or, bluntly, a baby with a machine gun -- a really, really big and nuclear machine gun, in which he has invested his entire nation's wealth, what little is left. This baby king is also a kidnapper, a terrorist, and a documented extortionist.

So how does one negotiate with the likes of all that? Sounds to me like a job for someone with equal maturity -- so naturally we must look back to the aforementioned Bush administration. My pick is John Bolton, who's also commonly portrayed as arrogant and self-centered and hostile to criticism or opinions different from his own and in possession of a personality that can be characterized by suspicion and extreme emotion.

Maybe the two of them would simply hissy-fit themselves into enfeebled exhaustion.

Dick Cheney, "Toy Soldier" on Memorial Day Parade

Lyndon Johnson's horrific war in Southeast Asia was still but a mere U.S. advisory mission when Dick Cheney became eligible for the draft. In fact, John Kennedy hadn't been elected president yet; even the swelling of our advisory ranks was yet to come.

So I can understand how Master Cheney, then 18 and a student at Yale, might have pondered that a first-class education was more important both to himself and his country than peeling potatoes as a buck private in some Louisiana swamp.

Dick however was still eminently eligible by the time Johnson's war was red hot -- by the time, that is, that many of his political ilk were deriding the quite untimely value of a college education and extolling military gung-hoism and patriotic duty -- but gosh darn-it Dick had decided he should remain in pursuit of "other" and presumably higher "priorities."

So by the time he reached non-draftable age, he had asked for and received five deferments. Others served -- and got their butts shot at -- in his place.

One of them was future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

So it is of somewhat sickening irony, as the New York Daily News' Mike Lupica points out on this Memorial Day, that the draft-dodging, torture-endorsing, war-instigating "toy soldier" likes of a Dick Cheney -- "whose idea of a foxhole is Fox News" -- should now be dictating what kind of a person bodies forth a patriotic Republican in good standing.

Cheney of course does, and Gen. Powell doesn't.

"[T]hat really is the current Republican Party, isn't it?" writes Lupica. "Angry old white men like Cheney and [Rush] Limbaugh talking to each other. Two toy soldiers who enjoy insulting a real one like Powell."

Do they really not "get it"? Or must they actively, consciously suppress throughout every waking moment such naked contradictions and extraordinary, party-sinking hypocrisy?

Dear Mr. Obama: Don't do it

No one of reason could be entirely unsympathetic to President Obama's plan to hold known threats without the formality of at least some sort of procedural conviction. The U.S. Constitution, as has been noted, is not a suicide pact.

Still, as the New York Times so discreetly puts it this morning, his "proposal for a new legal system in which terrorism suspects could be held in 'prolonged detention' inside the United States without trial would be a departure from the way this country sees itself."

Well, yes and no. It certainly would not be a departure from the way it came to see itself under the Bush administration, which was a significant factor in its rejection of a GOP successor. But undoubtedly it would be a departure from America's larger and more deeply rooted historical traditions.

The very repugnance of anyone's informal "prolonged detention" casts "the concept of preventive detention ... at the very boundary of American law, and legal experts say any new plan for the imprisonment of terrorism suspects without trial would seem inevitably bound for the Supreme Court."

Now there's a roll of the dice, which would wobble and teeter and finally settle on only one man's decision -- Justice Kennedy's -- a thought the president himself says he abhors.

And assuming Kennedy is a go -- not, by far, an unreasonable assumption -- we are left with the near certainty that President Obama will soon be incarcerating suspects without benefit of trial for indeterminate duration, like some kind of absolute monarch straight out of an Alexander Dumas novel.

His "new" detainee system, says the Center for Constitutional Rights' president, Michael Ratner, would only "move Guantánamo to a new location and give it a new name."

I understand the politics of this thing and, as mentioned, I'm sympathetic to the brutal demands on Obama when it comes to protecting American life. If you want a guaranteed return of even starker right-wing authoritarianism, just let some deranged group of liberated detainees commit another 9-11. All political hell would break loose and we would soon find ourselves suffering permanently under yet another extraconstitutional regime.

On the other hand, can we really afford to extend the Bushian tradition of indefinite detention without trial? What is the greater cost to the nation's body politic if it takes "a national look in the mirror" and is forced to answer "yes" to the question, "Is this" -- imprisonment without trial, ever -- "what America does?"

Obama knows better. As president he may politically sense something less but as a former Constitutional law professor he incontrovertibly knows better.

Do as we don't

From the NYT, less actual news than a predictable consequence:

For many years, unemployment in the United States was lower than in Western Europe, a fact often cited by people who argued that the flexibility inherent in the American system — it is easier to both hire and fire workers than in many European countries — produced more jobs.

That is no longer the case. Unemployment in the United States has risen to European averages, and seems likely to pass them when international data for April is calculated.

Years ago European capitalism began emulating the cold, impersonal, socially destructive ways of American capitalism. Maybe now Europe will regain its old sense of community over profits. For us? It may be too late.

He did what he had to do

CQ Politics' Bill Pascoe contends that Obama, in his speech yesterday, violated the winning rules of campaining:

When you're explaining, you're losing.

What counts is not what you're saying, what counts is what you're talking about.

Always shoot at the guy above you, and never shoot at the guy below you unless he's catching up so fast you have no other option.

When you choose to engage, do so on terrain of your choosing, where you are strong and your enemy is weak.

And once you've chosen to engage on the terrain of your choice, make sure that if he brings a knife, you bring a gun.

"As a result," writes Pascoe, Obama "lost major ground on a matter of high public policy."

But Obama wasn't so much explaining as he was launching a fresh offense, over an issue he wants resolved soon, in opposition to a guy who increasingly had dominated the debate, while standing just yards away from the U.S. Constitution, and hugging a howitzer.

Plus, I wish I had a nickel for every time I have read that Obama somehow strategically erred.