PMC Commentary

“No confidence” is all that’s left

What could be more emblematic of the Bush administration’s response to global terrorism than its response to global warming?

In an expected communiqué at the G-8 summit, the administration proposes "resolve and urgency" on a crisis it prefers to obfuscate as “climate science,” although the draft “contain[s] no specific agreement on concrete steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on a schedule.”

Some resolve. Some urgency.

In other words, we have a serious problem of global proportions and lasting devastation, which we pledge to handle with the greatest determination -- except we haven’t a clue as to how we’re going to go about doing it, other than doing the same old ineffectual thing.

It’s true that we stand almost singularly alone in the world on this issue, but it’s only because we know better than others. We can’t explain it. Just take our word for it.

Meanwhile you can count on us to puff out our chest, issue strong words and go right on doing what we’ve been doing to absolutely no one’s benefit. That’s about the totality of our “plan.” So naturally the world should stand with us.

Tony Blair did, against sound reason, better judgment and global advice to the contrary.

Yesterday he and his countrymen got their reward for standing tall with Bush. As the New York Times assessed it, “Perhaps the crudest lesson to be drawn was that, in adopting the stance he took after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Blair had finally reaped the bitter harvest of the war on terrorism - so often forecast but never quite seeming real until the explosions boomed across London.”

Only George Galloway, the erstwhile Labor politician who recently berated the U.S. Senate for its Bushie wrongheadedness, said what everyone was thinking: "We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically, Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings."

Blair’s eager cooperation with the Bush administration on igniting the Iraq war was no raging Battle of Britain, wherein a Churchillian strongman was needed to display “resolve and urgency” in the face of a foreign aggressor. Iraq was a war of choice -- and that makes its toll in human lives and national honor a shameful one, not a resolute one.

It is that reality that Tony Blair, the Churchill wannabe, must answer for.

Luckily for the British, their system of government makes it much easier to rid themselves of a war criminal as leader than in the U.S. We’re stuck with George and his non-plan plan of the same old thing for three more years. But the Brits can opt out. And that, most assuredly, is what they should do and what they will do.

Though the world must wait for some modicum of reason to be reinstalled at 1600 Pennsylvania venue, it can be done at 10 Downing Street now. The geopolitical plague of Bush II waits to be washed clean.

Only then can we get on with actually confronting the plague of terrorism -- not with a swagger and a self-defeating, terrorist-recruiting occupation, but an honest-to-God plan. To do that that, honest leaders need apply.

The revolutionary right’s bloody civil war

There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that modern conservatism is in trouble. The bad news is that the opposition hasn’t been much of a force in helping the trouble along.

But for now, let’s just enjoy the positive: Conservatives are finally beginning to eat their own. This isn’t at all unusual for an ideological movement. In fact, using history as a guide, conservatives’ troubles have been quite expected and somewhat overdue.

Every revolution begins with an organized group of roughly (in modern conservatism’s case, very roughly) likeminded ideologues who suppress internal differences in the cause of acquiring power. As they solidify their power by elbowing or slaughtering the opposition, those once-suppressed differences begin to take on more prominence and sharper cleavages form within. And invariably there’s a revolutionary core that perceives its work as incomplete -- though completion is impossible because an even more radicalized core develops in an attempt to keep the revolution vibrant -- while fellow revolutionaries tend to moderate and enjoy their day in the sun.

The purifying bloodletting then ensues.

The Platonic Ideal of internecine ideological warfare remains the French Revolution. And oddly enough, it was that revolution that inspired the Burkean brand of conservatism that held forth for roughly 200 years in the United States before withering from the onslaught of its own revolutionaries.

The most radical element within the resulting conservative elite -- calling itself “movement conservatism” to distinguish it from the real kind -- are, of course, the autocratic evangelicals. Traditional conservatives once used them to get an electoral leg up, but soon found themselves subject to a hostile merger and used in return.

The most proximate cause of conservatism’s potential suicide is, as everyone knows, the looming Supreme Court battle. It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood when one reads Godly totalitarians like the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins say that unless their judicial demands are met -- principally meaning no Alberto -- “there will be a problem within the coalition.” Or Manuel Miranda, the one-time political hit man for caporegime Bill Frist, who has declared that the presidential pal’s insufficient commitment to radicalism “is something that [movement] conservatives on this nomination cannot tolerate.”

Most satisfying, Sir, as Edmund Burke would say. Most satisfying, indeed.

What is it that movement conservatives can’t tolerate about the president’s possible choice? Emory University law professor David Garrow explains: “Conservative in [Gonzales’] mind means following the statute as written by the legislature.” Oh my, that won’t do. No, that won’t do at all. What movement conservatives require is judicial activism, labeled, naturally, as strict constructionism.

As one GOP strategist lamented, “We need to be inclusive to all. If it’s ‘our way or no way’ [by movement conservatives], that’s really not a party.” He got that right, excepting that the “if” was wishful thinking.

Yet to be fair to the religious revolutionaries, it is not just they who’ve been busy remaking the Republican Party. Economic conservatives have done more than their fair share, promoting habits of grotesque deficit spending that would have made Eisenhower Republicans heave. And then we’ve those imperialist adventurers wrung of neoconservative fantasy who would put the Bob Tafts of yesteryear’s party into absolute apoplexy.

Each of these camps -- the religious zealots, the big-spending debtors and the faith-based imperialists -- is more than a little hostile to more than 200 years of American political tradition. Yet Democrats have failed to drive this fundamentally anticonservative, antiAmerican reality home to conservative Americans. And that’s a real puzzler.

There’s a chance that the GOP’s internal warfare will drive a stake through its own radical heart -- that its infighting will be more than its usual discipline and excellent organizational talents can handle. But it’s bad news for Democrats that they’ve been incapable of driving the stake themselves.

G.W. Bush: Stale Action Figure

In the summer of 1776 the Continental army’s adjutant general, Colonel Joseph Reed, was a tad miffed. The year wasn’t shaping up as a good one. His infant nation had been slogging it out on the ground, suffering military defeats, and Reed despaired at the insufficiency of American troops. In short order a realization came to him, which he put in a letter to his wife: “When I look round, and see how few of the numbers who talked so largely of death and honor are around me … I am lost in wonder and surprise…. Your noisy sons of liberty are, I find, the quietest in the field.”

Reed’s “sons-of-liberty” no-shows on the field of battle -- the pompous politicians and muscle-flexing agitators -- were his days’ neocon chickenhawks and Limbaughite talking heads. Then, as now, they of martial intent and strong rhetoric talked a good game, but had a way of being indisposed, or burdened with “other priorities,” when the lead started flying.

I happened to read the colonel’s observation last Monday the 4th in David McCullough’s new history, 1776, at about the same time our president was delivering a patriotic lecture at West Virginia University. For sure, George’s speeches are always painful to bear, but with Reed’s letter fresh in mind this particular speech was particularly painful, brimming as it was with a holiday surplus of fraudulent inspiration.

I’ve often thought that most people are unsuited for this nation’s highest office not because they’re intellectually deficient -- God knows that defect is no longer a barrier -- but because they simply don’t have the stomach for the over-the-top audacity that sells at events like Monday’s. The trait is, in a way, a perverse confirmation of Darwin’s fittest survivors. The odds of your butt getting far in life are greatly reduced if you risk getting it shot off. So if you’re an aspiring pol, best to be really audacious and plot your career of noble public service by first denying your country.

“During that hot summer in Philadelphia more than 200 years ago, from our desperate fight for independence to the darkest days of a civil war, to the hard-fought battles of the 20th century, there were many chances to lose our heart, our nerve or our way,” said Bush at the rally. And in this instance he spoke with a certain insight, having himself taken every privileged chance to keep his own heart and central nervous system intact.

“But Americans have always held firm,” he continued. “We know that when the work is hard, the proper response is not retreat; it is courage.”

Well, yes and no, it’s one of those judgment-call things. For some in the past -- the few, the proud, the lucky -- the truly proper response was quick and creative thinking, which involved a call to dad who then called a state official who in turn called subordinate powers-that-be who then saved their ivy-league hides by offering pleasant flight lessons in lieu of jungle-survival training.

Our quick thinker proceeded: “From the battle of New York, to the winter at Valley Forge, to the victory at Yorktown, our forefathers faced terrible losses and hardships. Yet they kept their resolve.”

George’s self-reference to founding father stature was an instance of how comical a serious situation can get, how delusional power can be and how gullible is the electorate. And if you’re like me, you’re unsure of who’s worse: bombasts like George II or the simpletons who cheer them on.

Take Steve Smith, for example, who decided to take this Fourth of July as an opportunity to declare permanent independence from intelligence. Steve, a 57-year-old West Virginia resident, turned out for POTUS’s speech and described George to a reporter as “our greatest president ever.”

When I ran across that imbecility, I felt emotionally akin to Colonel Reed, finding myself “lost in wonder.”

As such I offer no insightful summary here or even reasonably coherent commentary throughout; only evidence of one man suffering from Bush & Friends-overload. Perhaps that says enough.

Redefining Republicanism, one Republican at a time

In a wide-ranging, 10,000-word feature on Howard Dean’s past, present and future, Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post captured the party chairman’s deepest woe in one line: “Message has been a major problem for Democrats.”

“Major problem” is, at best, a minor understatement. Sally was being charitable. A “ruinous problem” is more apt. These days, unhappy voters who question, are disgruntled with, or outright detest the modern direction of the Republican Party are pretty much left with “Independent” as an alternative allegiance, however oxymoronic that phrase may be. After all, what’s the Democratic enticement? Any message leap to mind?

Thought so. And unfortunately, domestic politics doesn’t conform to the serviceable pragmatism of the enemy of your enemy being your friend. If it did, Democrats even now would be assigning congressional chairmanships and registering for new White House china.

Just as unfortunate was this incongruence in the WP article -- an incongruence separated by several thousand words: “We’re not going to let Republicans define us anymore! We’re going to say what Democrats are about!” Dean vows regularly. And later, this: “[His] plan is to shape a cogent message around three or four issues party leaders can agree on over the summer. ‘We’re going to get together and find out what they think they ought to run on to win, what is it they really believe,’” said Dean.

Whoops. What’s more, there was this from Dean: “You ask people what Republicans stand for, they stand for less taxes, more defense and less government. If I ask you what Democrats stand for, there’s going to be a poll in here.” Initially I read the latter as more lament than prediction, but evidently Democratic leaders do need to be polled to know what they stand for.

I am no longer confident, however, that Dean’s initial premise is correct: that people believe as fervently now as they did 10 years ago that Republicans “stand for less taxes, more defense and less government.” Howard hasn’t called me about his research data, but it seems to me there is change in the air -- change that could be helped along.

For instance, what polling results would drop in Dean’s lap if these questions were posed? “Because the Republican Party has slashed taxes on the superwealthy, do you agree with the party that the middle class should make up the difference?” And, “Because the Republican Party has committed our defense resources to Iraq, do you feel the party has made us safer?” And, “Because the Republican Party believes the most personal, intimate choices should be cleared through its politicians, do you believe it’s the party of ‘less government’?”

Needless to say, such a “push-polling” inquiry would yield dramatically different results -- and yield them at a twofold advantage. First, no longer would Democrats have to broodingly concede that people believe the Republican Party represents their interests in less taxes, a stronger defense -- in terms of security -- and smaller government. There’d be evidence aplenty to the contrary (and as jackhammer talking points for the talking-head shows). Second, this sort of tactical polling -- combined with broader educational campaigns -- could help turn on mental lights. Rather than confuse, it could clarify -- for one Republican at a time.

In short, old perceptions can be a new opportunity. If Democrats can untether traditional conservatives from transmogrified Republicanism, they’ll have half the battle won. And they can do it honestly by throwing light on the quite unconservative thrust of today’s GOP. It’s a matter of calling a spade a spade, or in this case, a radical a radical.

Democrats can then get on with the job of more positive framing, which the WP article projected: “Dean at least seems to have an inkling of what the message will sound like: His speeches are a drumbeat of jobs, fiscal conservatism, gas prices, national security, health care and getting lawmakers out of your living rooms.” All winners (with the exception of gas prices, a drumbeat against which would only devolve into a sickening show of demagogic desperation.)

But first do the job that should have begun years ago -- accurately framing the Republican Party as no longer the party of Abe, T.R. and Ike, but the plutocratic, wasteful, bullying, radical party of W. and DeLay.

The Great O’Con

Before we engage in battle over Sandra Day O’Connor’s successor, we should first take a moment to correct the media’s bandwagon eulogy of Madam Justice as a retiring queen of judicial judiciousness.

The New York Times, for instance, in a representative piece labeled “News analysis,” portrays O’Connor as the Court’s admirable voice of objectivity. Intones the Times, “Justice O’Connor warned that judges should be wary of overreacting” to passions of the moment, quoting one of her 1995 opinions to illustrate: “Some crises are quite real” and some are less so. “The only way for judges to mediate these conflicting impulses is to do what they should do anyway: stay close to the record in each case that appears before them, and make their judgments based on that alone.”

Five years later O’Connor had the opportunity of a long career to prove that she really meant it. But when push came to shove, she did not. And to this, the most important decision she was ever to make, the Times devoted all of two sentences within its 2000-word “analysis,” writing that “The most famous, or notorious, 5-to-4 opinion in 2000 was, of course, Bush v. Gore, which ended the Florida recount and effectively called the presidential election for George W. Bush. Justice O’Connor joined the unsigned opinion that declared the conditions of the recount to violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection.”

End of that story, let’s move on, declares the Times in effect. There’s fair-and-balanced praising to be done, so let’s soft-pedal that infamous decision that put an unelected bamboozler into the White House, who will now appoint the queenly king maker’s successor.

Yet whether or not the mainstream media acknowledge it, Bush v. Gore represents the illicit ground zero of O’Connor’s career, the dark hole of ultimate malpractice, and thus her legacy -- because there’s no getting around the simple fact that her 2000 vote was monumentally corrupt.

The weight of outside legal opinion on Bush v. Gore was crushing in its uniform hostility. Scholars knew what a banana-republic court would do, but trusted the highest court in this lawful land would not. Writing for the principled and vast majority of professional opinion, law professor Donald Wilkes has nicely summarized the Court’s dishonest gyrations, in which O’Connor was the deciding gyrator: “The Court has insisted that unequal treatment cannot constitute a violation of the equal protection clause unless it is done purposefully, and the five justices who joined in Bush v. Gore regularly vote to deny equal protection claims. Yet in Bush v. Gore these same five justices based their decision in favor of Bush on a novel, expansive interpretation of the equal protection clause, and did so despite the absence of any allegation or proof that the unequal treatment complained of was purposeful.”

David Strauss, also a professor of law, has written that “the majority’s decision appears to be simply indefensible…. The majority opinion insisted that its rationale was to be applied, essentially, only in this case -- basically conceding that the result, not the legal principle, dictated the outcome.” And the “result,” of course, was a wholly partisan declaration.

Another law professor, Michael J. Klarman, has likewise agreed: “I cannot think of another Supreme Court decision about which one can say with … confidence that reversing the parties, and nothing else, would have changed the result.” Perhaps the bluntest was noted prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi: “The Court committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogate for the Republican party.”

I’d like to think Mr. Bugliosi intended his lower-case “party” as a scathing double entendre, but either way, the decision’s ramifications have been, for sure, no party for the country at large.

In every instance it is the black deed that colors a luminary’s historical legacy: Richard Nixon shall forever be defined by Watergate, Lyndon Johnson by Vietnam, Roger Taney by Dred Scott, and so on. Sandra Day O’Connor, on purely partisan ground, deliberately upended democracy and ordered the White House keys into the hands of an unelected, bumbling governor who would soon graduate from bumbling to bedlam. That deed secures for O’Connor her own black legacy.

A mound of manure in 28 minutes

The president’s primetime emphasis this Tuesday on 9/11 and Iraq as cause and effect has received so much attention from the commentariat, other chunks of his speech have suffered critical neglect. For sure, outing Bush’s 9/11 scam is a journalistic courtesy of the highest order, but it is well advised to look at some of that night’s other humbuggery as well.

A few excerpts can’t do justice to the full scope of the speech’s head fakes; still, they offer at least a taste that any connoisseur of quackery would appreciate.

I lead with a classic sampling: “We are removing a source of violence and instability,” said Bush, “and laying the foundation of peace for our children and our grandchildren.”

More than a few viewers, I’m sure, experienced a shiver of pride at the sound of this Moa-like stab at political reeducation. But if the viewer paused to think about it, rather than indulging sheer patriotic hope, he’d be stunned by its gall. We aren’t “removing a source of violence and instability.” We are busily propagating sources of violence and instability -- a fact reported daily by dozens of journalists “in-country.” Bush’s success in hatching a massive insurgent-terrorist swarm in a heretofore effectively tamed nation is perhaps unmatched in the annals of backward leadership.

As for ensuring our children and grandchildren’s peaceful future, the president’s seeming determination to transform one country’s turmoil into perpetual global warfare throws that warm and fuzzy objective somewhat into doubt.

Or, this sample: “The new Iraqi security forces are proving their courage every day.”

The security forces’ courage isn’t really the fundamental question. The situation on the ground is far more psychologically complex. As a soldier or cop or security officer you may have the courage of a lion, but you’ll think twice about parading it when you know your wife, your children, your extended family members, even your family’s doctor or your barber may get whacked because of your manifested courage. You can ask men to put their own lives at risk, and many may accept, but you can’t expect much in the way of an enthusiastic turnout for getting friends and family beheaded.

Or, this triple-play puzzler: “If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them.” Followed by, “But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job.” Then, “Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight.”

Now naturally these commanders aren’t likely to tell this particular gang of civilian bosses who hand out the hash marks that by God they’ll have more troops or else. But two other oddities are even odder. First, send what troops? And second, Bush completed his triple-axle non sequitur by reaffirming that there shall be no more troops committed anyway -- period.

Or, try on this BushSpeak: “We are fighting against men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons who are capable of any atrocity…. They respect no laws of warfare or morality.” One marvels at the rigorous cynicism-test surely required of aspiring White House speechwriters. I doubt it’s necessary to point out the obvious, but … “Abu Graib and Guantanamo.”

This brief analysis leaves untouched still other imbecilities peddled Tuesday night, such as the myth of “the international community ha[ving] stepped forward with vital assistance” -- like two privates and a cook -- and that “an artificial timetable” for withdrawal would tell the enemy “that all they have to do is to wait us out” -- as though the enemy couldn’t just as well wait out a long, artificially peaceful occupation.

Most presidents take at least half a term to spread such a mound of oratorical manure. Bush did it in 28 minutes.