A Vote Against American Aristocracy

As Nicholas Kristof states in today's Times op ed, "Maybe we can't make America as egalitarian and fluid as we would like, but we can at least push back against the concentration of power."

Electing Hillary Clinton in the coming election would mean -- whether you like her politically or not -- that for seven consecutive presidential terms we would have placed presidential power and trust in the hands of just two families.

I believe most Americans are weary of the status quo and would welcome a new vision. But will they vote for the person espousing it? Or will they be swayed by the monied media and corporatocracy that candidates like myself and Dennis Kucinich are not viable?

I am hopeful, but not optimistic. How about you?

All in the Families
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

Before I get to the “but,” let me say that Hillary Rodham Clinton would make a terrific president.

She has spent decades wrestling with public policy questions about poverty and health care. She is smart and pragmatic on foreign policy issues. And while it would be tough for a liberal or centrist woman to be elected (it’s much easier for a conservative like Margaret Thatcher), the rising Democratic tide increasingly makes her look electable.

But ... there is another issue at stake, one that goes to the heart of what kind of a nation we are.

If Mrs. Clinton were elected and served two terms, then for seven consecutive presidential terms the White House would have been in the hands of just two families. That’s just not the kind of equal-opportunity democracy we aspire to. Maybe we can’t make America as egalitarian and fluid as we would like, but we can at least push back against the concentration of power. We can do that in our tax policy, in our education policy — and in our voting decisions.

The political aristocracy in this country is more fluid than past nobility, and that is how the Clinton family entered it. But the benefit of membership in that aristocracy has probably increased over time, as larger Congressional districts and the rising cost of campaigns make it harder for an unfinanced unknown to rise in politics.

Particularly after George W. Bush rose to the White House partly because he inherited a name and rolodexes of donors from a previous president, we should take a deep breath before replacing one dynasty with another.

America’s history is based on a rejection of aristocracy. It’s true that in our early years, most of our leaders were wealthy elites — and, frankly, they did a superior job. But one of our most fateful elections came in 1828, “the revolution of 1828,” with the rise of Andrew Jackson.

Jackson, the rough-hewn fighter, a former child soldier, defeated John Quincy Adams, who symbolized all the daintiness, education and sophistication of the aristocracy that had ruled until that time.

John Quincy Adams was the better man (if Andrew Jackson were reading this, he would challenge me to a duel, which proves my point). But Jackson’s election was a healthy milestone for our democracy in that it truly opened up American politics.

It would be unhealthy to vote for or against a person solely because of his or her family. But where there is a pool of similar candidates, it seems reasonable to count inherited (and wedded) advantage as one factor — and to put a thumb on the scales of those who rose on their own.

Granted, Mitt Romney and Al Gore are also children of the American political aristocracy. And I wouldn’t argue that Mrs. Clinton should be excluded from consideration — just that it’s reasonable to count as a factor that her family has already lived in the White House.

In South Asia — Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka — it has been common for a spouse or child to inherit a political office. But that always has the feel of a politically immature democracy. It would feel very Sri Lankan if we had a father-son series and a husband-wife series of presidents.

And if Jeb Bush succeeds Hillary Clinton in the White House, I’ll flee to Sri Lanka.

There is one important counterargument — raised, perhaps not surprisingly, by my wife. It is that if our aim is to open up the political system and broaden opportunity, then what better way than to elect a woman?

It’s true that the election of a first woman (or black or Hispanic) might well nourish the American political system, just as the election of John Kennedy as the first Catholic did in 1960. But, as in Argentina or Bangladesh, the election of a first woman loses much of its significance if she has enjoyed a political shortcut as a predecessor’s wife.

If we really want a presidential dynasty, then that’s fine. But we shouldn’t back into it without discussion — for the second time in eight years.

American democracy was diminished in its infancy by the way power was largely held by a narrow nobility, however talented. Do we really want to embrace a similar concentration of power in the 21st century?

•

I’m holding another contest for poetry about the Iraq war. Details are on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground — or just send your (short) poem to iraqpoems@gmail.com.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Also See:

• Truthdigger of the Week:� Mike Gravel:

  Truthdig tips its hat this week to former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, who commanded the stage at Thursday’s presidential debate with a fiery and candid performance, taking other Democratic candidates to task for their positions and policies and maintaining a fiercely antiwar stance throughout. Loud and clear, Mr. Gravel.

• Mike Gravel, soon to be a household name:

  "Mike Gravel made such an impression in the first Democratic debate last week that his name is the 15th most popular search in the blogosphere."

Technorati tags: Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, Politics, 2008 Presidential Election, Hillary Rodham Clinton, George W. Bush, news, commentary, op ed

America's deadly "love" embrace

By William Blum
ICH

"If the United States leaves Iraq things will really get bad."

This appears to be the last remaining, barely-breathing argument of that vanishing species who still support the god-awful war. The argument implies a deeply-felt concern about the welfare and safety of the Iraqi people. What else could it mean? That the US military can't leave because it's needed to protect the oil bonanza awaiting American oil companies as soon as the Iraqi parliament approves the new written-in-Washington oil law? No, the Bush administration loves the people of Iraq. How much more destruction, killing and torturing do you need to be convinced of that? We can't leave because of the violence. We can't leave until we have assured that peace returns to our dear comrades in Iraq.

To better understand this argument, it helps to keep in mind the following about the daily horror that is life in Iraq: It did not exist before the US occupation.

The insurgency violence began as, and remains, a reaction to the occupation; like almost all insurgencies in occupied countries -- from the American Revolution to the Vietcong -- it's a fight directed toward getting foreign forces to leave.

The next phase was the violence of Iraqis against other Iraqis who worked for or sought employment with anything associated with the occupation regime.

Then came retaliatory attacks for these attacks.

Followed by retaliatory attacks for the retaliatory attacks.

Jihadists from many countries have flocked to Iraq because they see the war against the American Satan occupiers as a holy war.

Before the occupation, many Sunnis and Shiites married each other; since the occupation they have been caught up in a spiral of hating and killing each other.

And for these acts there, of course, has to be retaliation.

The occupation's abolishment of most jobs in the military and in Saddam Hussein's government, and the chaos that is Iraqi society under the occupation, have left many destitute; kidnappings for ransom and other acts of criminal violence have become popular ways to make a living, or at least survive.

US-trained, financed, and armed Iraqi forces have killed large numbers of people designated as "terrorists" by someone official, or perhaps someone unofficial, or by someone unknown, or by chance.

The US military itself has been a main perpetrator of violence, killing individually and en masse, killing any number, any day, for any reason, anyone, any place, often in mindless retaliation against anyone nearby for an insurgent attack.

The US military and its coalition allies have also been the main target of violent attacks. A Department of Defense report of November 2006 stated: "Coalition forces remained the target of the majority of attacks (68%)."

And here is James Baker, establishment eminence, co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, on CNN with Anderson Cooper:

Cooper: And is it possible that getting the U.S. troops out will actually lessen that violence, that it will at least take away the motivation of nationalist insurgents?

Baker: Many people have argued that to us. Many people in Iraq made that case.

Cooper: Do you buy it?

Baker: Yes, I think there is some validity to it, absolutely. Then we are no longer seen to be the occupiers.

In spite of all of the above we are told that the presence of the United States military has been and will continue to be a buffer against violence. Iraqis themselves do not believe this. A poll published in September found that Iraqis believe, by a margin of 78 to 21 percent, that the US military presence is "provoking more conflict that it is preventing".

Remember that we were warned a thousand times of a communist bloodbath in Vietnam if American forces left. The American forces left. There was never any kind of bloodbath.

If the United States leaves -- meaning all its troops and bases -- it will remove the very foundation, origin, and inspiration of most of the hate and violence. Iraqis will have a chance to reclaim their land and their life. They have a right to be given that opportunity. Let America's deadly "love" embrace of the Iraqi people come to an end. Let the healing begin.

William Blum is the author of: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir, Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire, Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Also See:

• When will American people be told the truth about Iraq? By Michael Goodwin:

  The president's promise to "complete the mission" is a triumph of a tired slogan over reality, just as the Dems' pledge to "end the war" is riddled with loopholes. It's time to cut the bull and be realistic about where we're going.

Technorati tags: William Blum, Iraq, War, Foreign Policy, Bush, James Baker, news, commentary

La Campagne, C'est moi

By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

LILLE, France

It’s hard not to be drawn to a presidential candidate with a name like a Bond girl, a smile like an angel, a figure that looks great in a bikini at 53, a campaign style like Joan of Arc, and a buffet for the press corps brimming with crustless fromage sandwiches, icy chocolate profiteroles, raspberry parfaits, red Bordeaux, espresso and little almond gâteaux. (When in France, let us eat cake.)

Ségolène Royal brought back the sizzle to socialism, raising the ire of Stephen Colbert’s right-wing TV host, who warned that “socialism is always a threat but never more so than when it looks like this.”

At first, Ségolène seemed like the ideal candidate for a country that knew it needed change but didn’t really want change, because she looked like change but wasn’t really going to change anything. But the infatuation dampened, like a spring romance.

I entered the Ségosphere, as her supporters call it, Thursday evening in Lille, for the last big rally — and perhaps last hurrah — of her “serene revolution,” as it’s dubbed.

The unmarried mother of four and daughter of a misogynistic army colonel entered the factorylike hall to a militant techno beat, gliding through the cheering crowd of 20,000 with a radiant smile and bright red jacket. Supporters, including many young ethnic Arab men and older women in head scarves up front, strained to touch and pat her.

On stage, she channeled a divine aura, levitating her arms like a Blessed Virgin statue, presenting herself as a glowing beacon against the forces of darkness, a k a Nicolas Sarkozy. In the Ségosphere, the right-wing front-runner is a brute, Rudy Giuliani without the restraint, while she is a healer. She consciously casts herself as Marianne, the symbol of France — playing “La Marseillaise” at rallies — but comes across more like Marianne Williamson, the New Age spirituality guru, going for the chakra vote.

“What I want, it’s for everybody to unleash this energy they feel within themselves,” she said, “but this energy that is sometimes curbed, curbed by so many blockages, curbed by so many negative speeches, curbed by so many shadows. ... It is not the dark side that I want to awake. It is the side of light, it is the side of hope, it is the part of joy, it is the part of smile, it is the part of France that loves itself as it is.”

Even though her strategy of playing the woman card fell flat, she kept it up in her last week. In Lille, she said she knew some wondered: “Is it really reasonable to choose a woman? Is France going to dare? I want to say: Dare. Dare! You won’t regret it.”

Ségo is bolder than the cautious Hillary, but stumbles into mistakes more often; unlike Hillary, she has not done her homework on foreign policy. Ségo blends a fierce will and feminine style more deftly than Hillary, but is also seen as somewhat cold, porcelain under her porcelain skin, rather than seductive, like Bill Clinton.

Ségo showed verve and grit in her self-professed role as a “gazelle” darting past the sexist old Socialist elephants — not to mention the father of her children, François Hollande, the head of her party, who wanted to run himself. Though Mr. Hollande supports Ségo, she does not seem as dependent as Hillary on getting her man to push people around for her.

France is chauvinistic — women got the vote in 1944 and compose only a small percentage of the National Assembly — but the country seems less neurotic than America about the idea of a woman as president. The trouble with Ségo’s campaign is not her gender. The trouble is that her only vision for France is herself. Hence, her nickname: Egolene.

A Sarko adviser called Ségo “a very pretty gadget” who looked modern but had no real plan to move France out of malaise and into the future.

When Ségo lost her temper at Sarko during Wednesday’s debate, on the issue of disabled children’s going to regular schools, it was denounced as contrived and inaccurate. She wanted to seem assertive and goad her abrasive and volatile rival into boiling over. Instead, he pushed the gender card back, telling her to “calm down” and stereotyping Serene Ségo as too moody and changeable to run a country that likes big, powerful leaders.

“She is not in a good mood this morning; it must be the polls,” he said Friday, after she warned that he was “a dangerous choice,” with “the same neoconservative ideology” as W., someone who could cause the country to erupt.

In a contest between what one Parisian calls “le fou” and “la fausse,” the crazy and the false, France may say oui to le fou.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, France, Elections, Segolene Royal, Nicolas Sarkozy, news, commentary, op ed

Is Condi Hiding the Smoking Gun?

By Frank Rich
The New York Times

IF, as J.F.K. had it, victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan, the defeat in Iraq is the most pitiful orphan imaginable. Its parents have not only tossed it to the wolves but are also trying to pin its mutant DNA on any patsy they can find.

George Tenet is just the latest to join this blame game, which began more than three years ago when his fellow Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Tommy Franks told Bob Woodward that Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s intelligence bozo, was the “stupidest guy on the face of the earth” (that’s the expurgated version). Last fall, Kenneth Adelman, the neocon cheerleader who foresaw a “cakewalk” in Iraq, told Vanity Fair that Mr. Tenet, General Franks and Paul Bremer were “three of the most incompetent people who’ve ever served in such key spots.” Richard Perle chimed in that the “huge mistakes” were “not made by neoconservatives” and instead took a shot at President Bush. Ahmad Chalabi, the neocons’ former darling, told Dexter Filkins of The Times “the real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz.”

And of course nearly everyone blames Rumsfeld.

This would be a Three Stooges routine were there only three stooges. The good news is that Mr. Tenet’s book rollout may be the last gasp of this farcical round robin of recrimination. Republicans and Democrats have at last found some common ground by condemning his effort to position himself as the war’s innocent scapegoat. Some former C.I.A. colleagues are rougher still. Michael Scheuer, who ran the agency’s bin Laden unit, has accused Mr. Tenet of lacking “the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.” Even after Mr. Tenet did leave office, he maintained a Robert McNamara silence until he cashed in.

Satisfying though it is to watch a circular firing squad of the war’s enablers, unfinished business awaits. Unlike Vietnam, Iraq is not in the past: the war escalates even as all this finger-pointing continues. Very little has changed between the fourth anniversary of “Mission Accomplished” this year and the last. Back then, President Bush cheered an Iraqi “turning point” precipitated by “the emergence of a unity government.” Since then, what’s emerged is more Iraqi disunity and a major leap in the death toll. That’s why Americans voted in November to get out.

The only White House figure to take any responsibility for the fiasco is the former Bush-Cheney pollster Matthew Dowd, who in March expressed remorse for furthering a war he now deems a mistake. For his belated act of conscience, he was promptly patronized as an incipient basket case by an administration flack, who attributed Mr. Dowd’s defection to “personal turmoil.” If that is what this vicious gang would do to a pollster, imagine what would befall Colin Powell if he spoke out. Nonetheless, Mr. Powell should summon the guts to do so. Until there is accountability for the major architects and perpetrators of the Iraq war, the quagmire will deepen. A tragedy of this scale demands a full accounting, not to mention a catharsis.

That accounting might well begin with Mr. Powell’s successor, Condoleezza Rice. Of all the top-tier policy players who were beside the president and vice president at the war’s creation, she is the highest still in power and still on the taxpayers’ payroll. She is also the only one who can still get a free pass from the press. The current groupthink Beltway narrative has it that the secretary of state’s recidivist foreign-policy realism and latent shuttle diplomacy have happily banished the Cheney-Rumsfeld cowboy arrogance that rode America into a ditch.

Thus Ms. Rice was dispatched to three Sunday shows last weekend to bat away Mr. Tenet’s book before “60 Minutes” broadcast its interview with him that night. But in each appearance her statements raised more questions than they answered. She was persistently at odds with the record, not just the record as spun by Mr. Tenet but also the public record. She must be held to a higher standard — a k a the truth — before she too jumps ship.

It’s now been nearly five years since Ms. Rice did her part to sell the Iraq war on a Sept. 8, 2002, Sunday show with her rendition of “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Yet there she was last Sunday on ABC, claiming that she never meant to imply then that Saddam was an imminent threat. “The question of imminence isn’t whether or not somebody is going to strike tomorrow” is how she put it. In other words, she is still covering up the war’s origins. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” she claimed that intelligence errors before the war were “worldwide” even though the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Mohamed ElBaradei publicly stated there was “no evidence” of an Iraqi nuclear program and even though Germany’s intelligence service sent strenuous prewar warnings that the C.I.A.’s principal informant on Saddam’s supposed biological weapons was a fraud.

Of the Sunday interviewers, it was George Stephanopoulos who went for the jugular by returning to that nonexistent uranium from Africa. He forced Ms. Rice to watch a clip of her appearance on his show in June 2003, when she claimed she did not know of any serious questions about the uranium evidence before the war. Then he came as close as any Sunday host ever has to calling a guest a liar. “But that statement wasn’t true,” Mr. Stephanopoulos said. Ms. Rice pleaded memory loss, but the facts remain. She received a memo raising serious questions about the uranium in October 2002, three months before the president included the infamous 16 words on the subject in his State of the Union address. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, received two memos as well as a phone call of warning from Mr. Tenet.

Apologists for Ms. Rice, particularly those in the press who are embarrassed by their own early cheerleading for the war, like to say that this is ancient history, just as they said of the C.I.A. leak case. We’re all supposed to move on and just worry about what happens next. Try telling that to families whose children went to Iraq to stop Saddam’s nukes. Besides, there’s a continuum between past deceptions and present ones, as the secretary of state seamlessly demonstrated last Sunday.

On ABC, she pushed the administration’s line portraying Iraq’s current violence as a Qaeda plot hatched by the Samarra bombing of February 2006. But that Qaeda isn’t the Qaeda of 9/11; it’s a largely Iraqi group fighting on one side of a civil war. And by February 2006, sectarian violence had already been gathering steam for 15 months — in part because Ms. Rice and company ignored the genuine imminence of that civil war just as they had ignored the alarms about bin Laden’s Qaeda in August 2001.

Ms. Rice’s latest canard wasn’t an improvisation; it was a scripted set-up for the president’s outrageous statement three days later. “The decision we face in Iraq,” Mr. Bush said Wednesday, “is not whether we ought to take sides in a civil war, it’s whether we stay in the fight against the same international terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11.” Such statements about the present in Iraq are no less deceptive — and no less damaging to our national interest — than the lies about uranium and Qaeda- 9/11 connections told in 2002-3. This country needs facts, not fiction, to make its decisions about the endgame of the war, just as it needed (but didn’t get) facts when we went to war in the first place. To settle for less is to make the same tragic error twice.

That Ms. Rice feels scant responsibility for any of this was evident in her repeated assertions on Sunday that all the questions about prewar intelligence had been answered by the Robb-Silberman and Senate committee inquiries, neither of which even addressed how the administration used the intelligence it received. Now she risks being held in contempt of Congress by ducking a subpoena authorized by the House’s Oversight Committee, whose chairman, Henry Waxman, has been trying to get direct answers from her about the uranium hoax since 2003.

Ms. Rice is stonewalling his investigation by rambling on about separation of powers and claiming she answered all relevant questions in writing, to Senator Carl Levin, during her confirmation to the cabinet in January 2005. If former or incumbent national security advisers like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski could testify before Congress without defiling the Constitution, so can she. As for her answers to Senator Levin’s questions, five of eight were pure Alberto Gonzales: she either didn’t recall or didn’t know.

No wonder the most galling part of Ms. Rice’s Sunday spin was her aside to Wolf Blitzer that she would get around to reflecting on these issues “when I have a chance to write my book.” Another book! As long as American troops are dying in Iraq, the secretary of state has an obligation to answer questions about how they got there and why they stay. If accountability is ever to begin, it would be best if those questions are answered not on “60 Minutes” but under oath.

Photo Credit: Frank Rich. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Frank Rich, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Condleezza Rice, George Tenet, news, commentary, op ed

Our Malignant Health Care System

Can This Patient Be Saved?
By ATUL GAWANDE
Guest Columnist, New York Times

As a surgeon, I’ve seen some pretty large tumors. I’ve excised fist-size thyroid cancers from people’s necks and abdominal masses bigger than your head. When I do, this is what almost invariably happens: the anesthesiologist puts the patient to sleep, the nurse unsnaps the gown, everyone takes a sharp breath, and someone blurts out, “How could someone let that thing get so huge?”

I try to describe how slowly and imperceptibly it grew. But staring at the beast it has become, no one buys the explanation. Even the patients are mystified. One day they looked in the mirror, they’ll say, and the mass seemed to have ballooned overnight. It hadn’t, of course. Usually, it’s been growing — and, worse, sometimes spreading — for years.

Too often, by the time a patient finally seeks help, I can’t help much.

We are adaptable creatures, and while that is generally good, sometimes it’s a problem. We have no difficulty taking prompt action when faced with a sudden calamity, like a bleeding head wound, say, or a terrorist attack. But we are not good at moving against the creeping, more insidious threats — whether a slow-growing tumor, waistline or debt.

It’s as true of societies as of individuals. We did not muster the will to reform our long-broken banking system, for example, until it actually collapsed in the Great Depression.

This is, in a nutshell, the trouble with our health care crisis. Our health care system has eroded badly, but it has not collapsed. So we do nothing.

For at least two decades, polls have shown that most consider our health system seriously flawed. With family insurance premiums now averaging $12,000 a year, the insured fear it will become unaffordable, and businesses regard health benefit costs as their single greatest obstacle to competing globally.

People without insurance are proven to be more likely to die, and 28 percent of working-age Americans are now uninsured for at least part of a year. Emergency rooms, required to care for the uninsured, have become so full they turned away 500,000 ambulances last year. As a result, large majorities support the idea of fundamental change.

Surveys also show, however, that 89 percent of Americans remain satisfied with their own health care and that 88 percent of the insured are satisfied with the coverage they have. So time and again, when confronted with the details and costs of any thoroughgoing reform, our enthusiasm evaporates.

I learned this lesson the hard way. I was in the Clinton administration when we lost health reform, partly because of special interests’ attacks, but mostly because the insured feared change more than the status quo. When voters in Oregon, one of our most liberal states, voted down a single-payer plan in a referendum in 2002, it was just the most recent sign of the pattern.

The only time the country has enacted a large-scale health system change was after a collapse. In 1965, when Medicare was created for the elderly and disabled, some 70 percent had no coverage for hospital costs. We’re not that badly off yet. Our health care system is like one of those tumors growing in my patients. The only questions are: When will it become bad enough to make us act? And will that be too late?

Reformers think we’re on the verge of waking up some morning, looking in the mirror and noticing the size of this tumor with enough alarm to do something radical about it. But isn’t it more likely we won’t?

Malcolm Gladwell has argued that when health care costs drive General Motors into bankruptcy, and 300,000 workers lose coverage overnight, that will be the next big crisis to prompt wholesale change. I thought so, too. But it now looks as if G.M. will instead wither slowly, shedding a plant here, a division there. And faced with a slow withering, we all just muddle on.

The case for sweeping reform — for severing health insurance from the workplace and creating a new system — is undeniable. But it’s going to be a long time before the large majority of Americans with decent coverage are persuaded to risk changing what they have. How then to cure a malignant health care system? Can we act before the patient collapses?

The answer is yes, but only if we make changes that alter most people’s coverage gradually, while still providing a path out of this mess. My next column will describe just that.

Atul Gawande, a general surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a New Yorker staff writer, is the author of the new book “Better” and a guest columnist this month.

Technorati tags: Atul Gawande, The New York Times, Health Care, news, commentary, op ed

Mission IMPEACHABLE (The Cheney episode)

NATIONAL CHENEY IMPEACHMENT POLL:
http://www.usalone.com/cheney_impeachment.php

Good morning fellow citizens. Vice president Richard B. Cheney is known to have committed high crimes against the Constitution of the United States, including fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and ties with Al Qaeda to justify an illegal war of aggression against Iraq. Cheney's corporate friends in the mainstream media have tried to persuade the American people that there is nothing we can do about it.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to speak out yourself in the National Cheney Impeachment Poll, which already has over 27,000 submissions, to send your vote to all your members of Congress at the same time, together with a letter to the editor of your nearest daily newspaper all with one click, and to rally everyone else you can to do the same thing, to overcome the media naysayers and make impeachment proceedings a reality.

And what would a secret mission be without an extraordinary new secret weapon which we DEBUT here, the Blog Voices Congressional Messaging Gateway. It looks like an ordinary internet web link, but just click on it below and see what happens.

LINK: http://www.usalone.com/blogvoices_new.php?Should%20Vice%20President%20Cheney%20be%20impeached%3F

It pops up a communications window direct to our dedicated submission server to send your messages to Congress in real time, without taking you off the page where you found the link. You can copy the link above to put in all your emails, in all your blog posts, it will do the same thing there, and all those submissions will pipe right into the same impeachment tally.

If there were a class in Constitutional law on impeachable offenses, they could save a lot of lecture time by just putting Dick Cheney's picture in the syllabus. If the fake case for the Iraq War were not enough, there is the abuse of illegal wiretaps, the outing of one of our best real intelligence assets, the promotion of torture as an instrument of our foreign policy and on and on, with Cheney the prime mover behind them all.

Why do you think they keep telling us that impeachment is "off the table"? It's because they know if the American people ever understood the power we have to ACTUALLY exercise our participatory democracy it would be a "slam dunk" of the good kind. And in fact Dennis Kucinich has put the issue back on the table by having the courage to file H.Res. 333, and he already has two co-sponsors in the House as of today.

All we have to do now is believe our voices count, to believe that we can have impact, and believe that when we speak out in sufficient numbers our representatives will have no choice but to do what they were elected to do, TO REPRESENT US! We are asking all progressive web sites to propagate the links above so we can get at least a million participant in this one poll, to demonstrate that we the people are ready to demand accountability.

http://www.peaceteam.net

Technorati tags: Impeachment, Dick Cheney, Polls, Activism

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE:

Calls for Bush to be "Tried, Hung and Shot"

The title says it all.

Thanks to Bush -- Rage is back -- and the sweet little video below has already received 2197 diggs.

Digg it.

Technorati tags: Rage, Coachella, Music, YouTube, Video, Bush

Minimum Security

By Stephanie McMillan

Technorati tags: Stephanie McMillan, Cartoons, Global Warming, Environment

Anti-Capitalism in Five Minutes

By Robert Jensen
CounterPunch.org

We know that capitalism is not just the most sensible way to organize an economy but is now the only possible way to organize an economy. We know that dissenters to this conventional wisdom can, and should, be ignored. There's no longer even any need to persecute such heretics; they are obviously irrelevant.

How do we know all this? Because we are told so, relentlessly -- typically by those who have the most to gain from such a claim, most notably those in the business world and their functionaries and apologists in the schools, universities, mass media, and mainstream politics. Capitalism is not a choice, but rather simply is, like a state of nature. Maybe not like a state of nature, but the state of nature. To contest capitalism these days is like arguing against the air that we breathe. Arguing against capitalism, we're told, is simply crazy.

We are told, over and over, that capitalism is not just the system we have, but the only system we can ever have. Yet for many, something nags at us about such a claim. Could this really be the only option? We're told we shouldn't even think about such things. But we can't help thinking -- is this really the "end of history," in the sense that big thinkers have used that phrase to signal the final victory of global capitalism? If this is the end of history in that sense, we wonder, can the actual end of the planet far behind?

We wonder, we fret, and these thoughts nag at us -- for good reason. Capitalism -- or, more accurately, the predatory corporate capitalism that defines and dominates our lives -- will be our death if we don't escape it. Crucial to progressive politics is finding the language to articulate that reality, not in outdated dogma that alienates but in plain language that resonates with people. We should be searching for ways to explain to co-workers in water-cooler conversations -- radical politics in five minutes or less -- why we must abandon predatory corporate capitalism. If we don't, we may well be facing the end times, and such an end will bring rupture not rapture.

Here's my shot at the language for this argument....

Read more.

Photo: Robert Jensen (Caroline Planque)

Technorati tags: Robert Jensen, Capitalism, Politics, Corporate America, news, commentary

Alberto Gonzales' Safety Net:

Confirmation Hearings For His Successor Could Spawn Criminal Investigations of The White House.

By Elizabeth Holtzman

No matter how many members of Congress lose confidence in Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush is unlikely to let him go. If Gonzales resigns, the vacancy must be filled by a new presidential nominee, and the last thing the White House wants is a confirmation hearing.

Already, the Senate is outlining conditions for confirming a Gonzales successor. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has said that his panel would not hold confirmation hearings unless Karl Rove and other White House aides testify about the firing of U.S. attorneys to clarify whether “the White House has interfered with prosecution.”

All this is reminiscent of the Watergate scandal. In 1973, as the coverup was unraveling, the Senate imposed a condition on the confirmation of President Nixon’s nominee for attorney general, Elliot Richardson. Richardson’s predecessor had resigned because of Watergate troubles. Concerned that the Justice Department would not get at the truth, the Senate insisted that Richardson would name a special prosecutor to investigate Watergate. Richardson duly appointed Archibald Cox.

The rest is history. Cox’s aggressive investigations led to the prosecution of top administration officials and the naming of Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator in the coverup. When Cox sought White House tapes of Nixon’s conversations with his staff, the president had him fired, unleashing a firestorm of protests. Americans demanded that a previously reluctant Congress start impeachment proceedings against Nixon. Congress complied; the House Judiciary Committee, of which I was a member, voted for impeachment, and Nixon resigned.

Aspects of this history could easily repeat themselves. The Senate could demand, as it did in 1973, that a new attorney general appoint a special prosecutor, and this could again have dire consequences for the White House.

A new special prosecutor would have many questions to investigate.

For starters, were any of the firings of U.S. attorneys federal crimes — such as obstruction of justice, designed to stymie investigations or to retaliate for prosecutions of Republicans? If so, who is responsible and how high up does that responsibility go? Did Deputy Atty. Gen. Paul J. McNulty, who gave inaccurate testimony to Congress about the firings, commit any crime in doing so? Were those who briefed him for that testimony complicit?

And what happened to the missing e-mail messages from Rove and others? Did these apparent violations of the Presidential Records Act — failure to keep copies of the exchanges — constitute federal crimes?

So there is ample work for a special prosecutor. The Senate could call for appointing one without waiting for Gonzales to resign. But in that case, Gonzales or McNulty would be making the appointment, and the integrity of the choice would be highly questionable.

That leaves Senate confirmation hearings of a new attorney general nominee as the main leverage for Congress to secure an independent criminal investigation of the U.S. attorney firings.

Moreover, the Senate might use such hearings to do more than secure testimony from White House aides about the firings, as Leahy indicated. It also might use the opportunity to probe the Justice Department’s role in mistreatment of detainees, four years of flouting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other serious matters.

Rather than face such scrutiny, the White House may prefer keeping a drastically weakened Gonzales in place. But doing so exacts a high price for the Justice Department and the nation. It damages department morale and credibility, undermines its ability to recruit and could affect perceptions of federal prosecutors, jeopardizing important cases. By retaining Gonzales to preempt Senate action, the president has signaled that this is a price he is willing to make the nation pay.

Elizabeth Holtzman is a former Democratic congresswoman from New York, is the coauthor of “The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens.”

© 2007 The Los Angeles Times

Thanks to Al Buono.

Technorati tags: Alberto Gonzales, Elizabeth Holtzman, Bush, Impeachment, Watergate, news

The U.S.' War on Democracy

The U.S.' War on Democracy
By Pablo Navarrete
Venezuelanalysis.com

John Pilger is an award-winning journalist, author and documentary filmmaker, who began his career in 1958 in his homeland, Australia, before moving to London in the 1960s. He has been a foreign correspondent and a front-line war reporter, beginning with the Vietnam War in 1967. He is an impassioned critic of foreign military and economic adventures by Western governments.

"It is too easy," Pilger says, "for Western journalists to see humanity in terms of its usefulness to 'our' interests and to follow government agendas that ordain good and bad tyrants, worthy and unworthy victims and present 'our' policies as always benign when the opposite is usually true. It's the journalist's job, first of all, to look in the mirror of his own society."

Pilger also believes a journalist ought to be a guardian of the public memory and often quotes Milan Kundera: "The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

In a career that has produced more than 55 television documentaries, Pilger's first major film for the cinema, The War on Democracy, will be released in the United Kingdom on May 11, 2007. Pilger spent several weeks filming in Venezuela and The War on Democracy contains an exclusive interview with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

-------------------------------------------------------------

PN: Could you begin by telling us what your new film ‘The War on Democracy’ is about?

JP: I happened to watch George Bush’s second inauguration address in which he pledged to “bring democracy to the world.” He mentioned the words “democracy” and “liberty” twenty one times. It was a very important speech because, unlike the purple prose of previous presidents (Ronald Reagan excluded), he left no doubt that he was stripping noble concepts like “democracy” and “liberty” of their true meaning – government, for, by and of the people.

I wanted to make a film that illuminated this disguised truth -- that the United States has long waged a war on democracy behind a facade of propaganda designed to contort the intellect and morality of Americans and the rest of us. For many of your readers, this is known. However, for others in the West, the propaganda that has masked Washington’s ambitions has been entrenched, with its roots in the incessant celebration of World War Two, the “good war”, then “victory” in the cold war. For these people, the “goodness” of US power represents “us”. Thanks to Bush and his cabal, and to Blair, the scales have fallen from millions of eyes. I would like “The War on Democracy” to contribute something to this awakening.

The film is about the power of empire and of people. It was shot in Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, and the United States and is set also in Guatemala and Nicaragua. It tells the story of “America’s backyard,” the dismissive term given to all of Latin America. It traces the struggle of indigenous people first against the Spanish, then against European immigrants who reinforced the old elite. Our filming was concentrated in the barrios where the continent’s “invisible people” live in hillside shanties that defy gravity. It tells, above all, a very positive story: that of the rise of popular social movements that have brought to power governments promising to stand up to those who control national wealth and to the imperial master. Venezuela has taken the lead, and a highlight of the film is a rare face-to-face interview with President Hugo Chavez whose own developing political consciousness, and sense of history (and good humour), are evident. The film investigates the 2002 coup d’etat against Chavez and casts it in a contemporary context. It also describes the differences between Venezuela and Cuba, and the shift in economic and political power since Chavez was first elected. In Bolivia, the recent, tumultuous past is told through quite remarkable testimony from ordinary people, including those who fought against the piracy of their resources. In Chile, the film looks behind the mask of this apparently modern, prosperous “model” democracy and finds powerful, active ghosts. In the United States, the testimony of those who ran the “backyard” echo those who run that other backyard, Iraq; sometimes they are the same people. Chris Martin (my fellow director) and I believe “The War on Democracy” is well timed. We hope people will see it as another way of seeing the world: as a metaphor for understanding a wider war on democracy and the universal struggle of ordinary people, from Venezuela to Vietnam, Palestine to Guatemala.

As you say, Latin America has often been described as the U.S.’ backyard. How important is Latin America for the U.S. in the global context?

Latin America’s strategic importance is often dismissed. That’s because it is so important. Read Greg Grandin’s recent, excellent history (I interview him in the film) in which he makes the case that Latin America has been Washington’s “workshop” for developing and honing and rewarding its imperial impulses elsewhere. For example, when the US “retreated” from Southeast Asia, where did its “democracy builders” go to reclaim their “vision”? Latin America. The result was the murderous assaults on Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, and the darkness of “Operation Condor” in the southern cone. This was Ronald Reagan’s “war on terror”, which of course was a war of terror that provided basic training for those now running the Bush/Cheney “long war” in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Noam Chomsky recently said that after five centuries of European conquests, Latin America was reasserting its independence. Do you agree with this?

Yes, I agree. It’s humbling for someone coming from prosperous Europe to witness the poorest taking charge of their lives, with people rarely asking, as we in the West often ask, “What can I do?” They know what to do. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, the population barricaded their city until they began to take control of their water. In El Alto, perhaps the poorest city on the continent, people stood against a repressive regime until it fell. This is not to suggest that complete independence has been won. Venezuela’s economy, for example, is still very much a “neo-liberal” economy that continues to reward those with capital. The changes made under Chavez are extraordinary – in grassroots democracy, health care, education and the sheer uplifting of people’s lives – but true equity and social justice and freedom from corruption remain distant goals. Venezuela’s well-off complain endlessly that their economic power has been diminished; it hasn’t; economic growth has never been higher, business has never been better. What the rich no longer own is the government. And when the majority own the economy, true independence will be in sight. That’s true everywhere.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte, recently called Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez “a threat to democracy” in Latin America. What are you views on this?

This is Orwellian, like “war is peace.” Negroponte, whose record of overseeing Washington’s terrorism in Central America is infamous, is right about Hugo Chavez in one respect. Chavez is a “threat” – he’s the threat of an example to others that independence from Washington is actually possible.

President Chavez talks about building "socialism of the 21st Century" in Venezuela. To what extent do you think this project is different to the socialist experiences in the twentieth century?

In the time I spent with Chavez, what struck me was how unselfconsciously he demonstrated his own developing political awareness. I was intrigued to watch a man who is as much an educator as a leader. He will arrive at a school or a water project where local people are gathered and under his arm will be half a dozen books – Orwell, Chomsky, Dickens, Victor Hugo. He’ll proceed to quote from them and relate them to the condition of his audience. What he’s clearly doing is building ordinary people’s confidence in themselves. At the same, he’s building his own political confidence and his understanding of the exercise of power. I doubt that he began as a socialist when he won power in 1998 – which makes his political journey all the more interesting. Clearly, he was always a reformer who paid respect to his impoverished roots. Certainly, the Venezuelan economy today is not socialist; perhaps it’s on the way to becoming something like the social economy of Britain under the reforming Attlee Labour government. He is probably what Europeans used to be proud to call themselves: a social democrat. Look, this game of labels is pretty pointless; he is an original and he inspires; so let’s see where the Bolivarian project goes. True power for enduring change can only be sustained at the grassroots, and Chavez’s strength is that he has inspired ordinary people to believe in alternatives to the old venal order. We have nothing like this spirit in Britain, where more and more people can’t be bothered to vote any more. It’s a lesson of hope, at the very least.

************

'The War on Democracy' is to be released in UK cinemas on Friday 15th June. There will be a special preview in London on Friday 11th May. The film is released in Australia in September 2007. For more info visit: www.johnpilger.com or www.warondemocracy.net

Hat tip to Al B. Thanks, buddy.

Photo Credit: Filmaker John Pilger in the barrio of La Vega, in Caracas, Venezuela. (Pablo Navarrete)

Technorati tags: John Pilger, Venezuela, United States, Hugo Chavez, Bush, Documentaries, news

Campaigning for History

Reflections on the American Presidency in a Political Season

The Flawed Wilsonian Dream
By Margaret MacMillan
The New York Times

"Today’s presidential candidates are understandably cautious when it comes to foreign policy, especially about stepping into the minefields of Iraq. But in their remarks, it is possible to discern an assumption about the rightness of American leadership in world affairs – a notion that is the legacy of Woodrow Wilson.

In January, when Hillary Clinton spoke at an event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, she warned, “We cannot lead the rest of the world if we do not have a vision of where we are headed and if we do not summon our leadership, not just based on our military strength, but on the strength of our values and our ideals as well.”

Barack Obama accepts that mission, too, as well as the Wilsonian view that the United States is more secure in a prosperous and peaceful world. But he is more aware of the dangers of such thinking. Quoted in a profile in this week’s New Yorker, he says: “The same idealism can express itself in a sense that we can remake the world any way we want by flipping a switch, because we’re technologically superior or we’re wealthier or we’re morally superior. And when our idealism spills into that kind of naïveté and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble, as we did in Vietnam.”

Since Wilson was president, the United States has positioned itself as the keeper of the world’s conscience and as the model for other nations to emulate. Over the years foreigners like me have both shared that view and resented it, because what looks like leadership from Washington can feel like bullying elsewhere.

The tendency was there long before Wilson, of course. “We shall be as a city upon a hill,” the Puritan John Winthrop remarked in 1630 as he sailed toward the New World. “The eyes of all people are upon us.” Well, actually, they weren’t then, and for a long time the 13 colonies and then the United States, preoccupied with the business of daily life and the building of their own nation, played very little part in the world. Even at the end of the 19th century, the United States had only a rudimentary foreign service, an army smaller than Italy’s and virtually no navy at all. But its economic power was growing and so was a sense of American nationalism. By the 1890s a new generation of thinkers and politicians was talking about “manifest destiny” and the need for the United States to exert its strength in the world as a force for good.

Its goodness, however, was not always evident to those peoples and nations at the receiving end of American policies, especially as an increasingly self-righteous United States also showed a willingness to use force, from economic to military, to get its way. In the years before the First World War, President Theodore Roosevelt repeatedly sent American troops into countries around the Caribbean. Wilson’s immediate predecessor, President William Howard Taft, talked about a new way of organizing international relations through “dollar diplomacy,” by which the United States would use its economic power to encourage more trade and investment, and so bind nations closer together.

It was Wilson, though, who took that paradox — of using American power to spread liberty and democracy — to a new level and who claimed for the United States the right to speak for the peoples of the world. Secure in his own righteousness, convinced that he spoke for the voiceless masses, he was blind to the inconsistencies in his own behavior. When he sent troops into Caribbean countries, Wilson famously said, “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!”

In 1914 and again in 1916, when he intervened in Mexico, on very flimsy grounds, because he believed that the leaders who had emerged there after a complicated power struggle did not represent the Mexican people, he was surprised when the Mexicans resisted. He went to the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I convinced that the United States was the only truly disinterested power there. Yet at the same time he happily contemplated the spread of American investment and trade.

Wilson still arouses strong reactions around the world. In the United States, he is widely regarded as one of the great foreign policy presidents, a visionary who bore the gift of a better, fairer world to the Europeans, who reacted with jeers and contempt. Even American statesmen who fall on the realist end of the spectrum admire Wilson’s vision and his attempt to build a new international order. President Richard Nixon hung Wilson’s portrait on the wall of the Cabinet Room. George W. Bush sounds positively Wilsonian when he talks of spreading democracy worldwide and encouraging free trade among nations as ways to promote stability.

The view among Europeans is quite different. There Wilson is often seen as a meddlesome and self-righteous pedant, even, in John Maynard Keynes’s word, “a booby.” His idea of building an international system based on a League of Nations and collective security has been attacked over the decades as unworkable or, worse, a cover for American hegemony. Europeans on the right have tended to see Wilsonianism as dangerously naïve; peace is kept rather by being strong yourself and working for a balance of power. Lenin and left-wing Europeans since him, in contrast, have argued that the League of Nations was simply a society of imperialists who would do their best to keep the oppressed of the world under control.

On the other hand, there were also many, perhaps a majority, in Europe well as in my own country, Canada, who looked on Wilson as a noble idealist. And Wilson’s impact was wider still than Europe. His Fourteen Points, with their promise of a new world order, were translated into a host of languages, from Kurdish to Arabic to Chinese, almost as soon as they were issued. As the world remembered the dreadful destruction of the Great War (and when the next generation saw the even greater disaster of World War II), it was hard not to agree that humanity must find other ways of settling its disputes than through modern warfare. Because the League of Nations ultimately failed, we tend to forget how much international support there was for it, and later for the United Nations.

Although he died disappointed, his dreams of an international system with the United States at its heart shattered, Wilson’s ideals have permeated American thinking ever since. Think of Franklin Roosevelt holding out his Four Freedoms to the world, with his support for the United Nations and the Bretton Woods economic system, which includes the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the GATT (the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, now replaced by the World Trade Organization).

If the Cold War, for a time, divided the world into two opposing camps, the hope never entirely died that international politics could be organized in a better way. And certainly the propensity of American leaders to look on the American system as the best one was enhanced by the country’s great ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. President Reagan meant it when he called the Soviet Union “evil.”

A French diplomat of Wilson’s time believed that if the president had lived in a different, less democratic era he would have been a tyrant “because he does not seem to have the slightest conception that he can ever be wrong.” There have been times when that assertion could apply to the United States itself. Wilson’s influence has done much good, but, as Obama warns, it can lead American presidents and their administrations to see the world as they would like it to be and not as it is."

Photo Credit: Margaret MacMillan, a professor of history and provost of Trinity College in the University of Toronto, is the author of “Women of the Raj” and “Paris 1919.” Her most recent book is “Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World.” (The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Woodrow Wilson, Margaret MacMillan, 2008 Presidential Election, commentary

America Disconnected

“The president can say we’re a country at war all he wants. We’re not. The military is at war. And the military families are at war. Everybody else is shopping.” -- Paul Rieckhoff

An Invisible War
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Paul Rieckhoff looked across the crowded restaurant, which was not far from Times Square.

“During World War II,” he said, “we could be in this place and there would be a guy sitting at that table who was in the war, or the bartender had been in the war. Everybody you saw would have had a stake in the war. But right now you could walk around New York for blocks and not find anybody who has been in Iraq.

“The president can say we’re a country at war all he wants. We’re not. The military is at war. And the military families are at war. Everybody else is shopping.”

Mr. Rieckhoff is an imposing six-foot-two-inch, 245-pound former infantry officer who joined the military after graduating from Amherst College. When he came home from a harrowing tour in Iraq in 2004, he vowed to do what he could to serve the interests of the men and women who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan but have never fully gotten the support they deserve from the government or the public at large.

He wrote a book, “Chasing Ghosts,” which is now out in paperback, and he formed a powerful veterans’ advocacy organization called Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Mr. Rieckhoff is not bitter. He’s actually funny and quite engaging (and a good writer). But he has very little tolerance for the negligence and incompetence the government has shown in equipping the troops and fighting the war in Iraq, and he is frustrated by the short shrift that he feels the troops get from the media and the vast majority of Americans.

There’s a gigantic and extremely disturbing disconnect, he says, between the experiences of the men and women in uniform and the perspective of people here at home. “We have a very diverse membership in I.A.V.A.,” he said. “We’ve got Republicans and Democrats and everything in between. But one of the key things we all have in common is this frustration with the detachment that we see all around us, this idea that we’re at war and everybody else is watching ‘American Idol.’

“I think that’s one of the main reasons why so many guys want to go back to Iraq. They come home and feel like: ‘Man, I don’t fit in here. You know, I’m out of place.’ ” Even though there’s never been a clear statement of the military’s mission in Iraq, and the goals have shifted from month to month and year to year, the soldiers and marines who have been sent there have felt that they were carrying out an important task on behalf of the nation.

“It’s tough to have such a serious sense of commitment,” Mr. Rieckhoff said, “and then come home and see so many people focused on such frivolous things. So I think that frustration is serious and growing. And I’ll tell you the truth: I blame the president for that. One of the biggest criticisms of the president, and I hear this across the board, is that he hasn’t asked the American people to do anything.”

Mr. Rieckhoff is convinced that if the public heard more from the soldiers and marines who have actually experienced combat, including those who have been wounded and suffered emotional trauma, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be viewed more seriously. Part of the problem, he said, is that too many civilians have little or no understanding of what war is really like, and of the toll it takes beyond the obvious toll of the dead and wounded.

Among other things, there are family problems, drug and alcohol abuse, untreated post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and suicide — all directly attributable to service in a war zone. “Incredibly,” he writes in his book, “no government agency keeps track of the number of veterans who kill themselves after their service has ended — another sign of how little value is placed on veterans’ long-term well-being.”

I mentioned a young soldier I had interviewed in 2005 who worried that because he had killed three insurgents during a battle in Iraq he might not be “allowed into heaven.” The soldier wondered whether he had “done the right thing.”

Mr. Rieckhoff nodded. “Asking somebody to die for their country might not be the biggest thing you can ask,” he said. “Asking my guys to kill, on my orders — as an officer, that’s difficult. I’m telling that kid to squeeze that round off and take a man’s life. And then he’s got that baggage for the rest of his life. That’s what you have to live with.”

I signaled for the check and we left the restaurant. It was a beautiful, sunlit afternoon. New Yorkers were smiling and enjoying the spring weather. There was no sign of a war anywhere.

Photo Credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Bob Herbert, New York Times, Iraq, Foreign Policy, Military, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Mental Health and Disorders, War, Bush, news commentary, op ed

WATCH OUT: Bush Is At It Again

Spying on Americans
New York Times Editorial

"For more than five years, President Bush authorized government spying on phone calls and e-mail to and from the United States without warrants. He rejected offers from Congress to update the electronic eavesdropping law, and stonewalled every attempt to investigate his spying program. Suddenly, Mr. Bush is in a hurry. He has submitted a bill that would enact enormous, and enormously dangerous, changes to the 1978 law on eavesdropping. It would undermine the fundamental constitutional principle -- over which there can be no negotiation or compromise -- that the government must seek an individual warrant before spying on an American or someone living here legally...."

Read more.

Illustration: Hardnewsnow.com (via thruthdig)

Also See:

• The Raw Story | Top officials: Bush can still wiretap US citizens without warrant

Technorati tags: Wiretapping, Eavesdropping, Surveillance of Citizens by Government, Bush, Politics, Government, news, commentary

Slam's Silence

Better Never Than Late
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

Instead of George Tenet teaching at Georgetown University, George Tenet should be taught at Georgetown University.

There should be a course on government called “The Ultimate Staff Guy.” A morality saga about how much harm you can do as a go-along, get-along guy, spending so much time trying not to alienate the big cheese so he doesn’t can you that you miss the moment where you have to can him or lose your soul.

If Colin Powell and George Tenet had walked out of the administration in February 2003 instead of working together on that tainted U.N. speech making the bogus case for war, they might have turned everything around. They might have saved the lives and limbs of all those brave U.S. kids and innocent Iraqis, not to mention our world standing and national security.

It would certainly have been harder for timid Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards, to back up the administration if two members of the Bush inner circle had broken away to tell an increasingly apparent truth: that Dick Cheney, Rummy and the neocons were feverishly pushing a naïve president into invading Iraq with junk facts.

General Powell counted on Slam Dunk — a slender reed — to help him rid the speech of most of the garbage Mr. Cheney’s office wanted in it. Slam, of course, tried to have it both ways, helping the skeptical secretary of state and pandering to higher bosses. Afterward, when the speech turned out to be built on a no-legged stool, General Powell was furious at Slam. But they both share blame: they knew better. They put their loyalty to a runaway White House ahead of their loyalty to a fearful public.

Slam Dunk’s book tour is mesmerizing, in a horrifying way.

“The irony of the whole situation is, is he was bluffing,” Slam said of Saddam on “Larry King Live” on Monday night, adding, “And he didn’t know we weren’t.” Mr. He-Man Tenet didn’t understand the basics of poker, much less Arab culture. It never occurred to him that Saddam might feign strength to flex muscles at his foes in the Middle East? Slam couldn’t take some of that $40 billion we spend on intelligence annually and get a cultural profile of the dictator before we invaded?

If he was really running around with his hair on fire, knowing the Osama danger, shouldn’t he have set off alarms when W. and Vice went after Saddam instead of the real threat?

Many people in Washington snorted at his dramatic cloak-and-dagger description of himself to Larry King: “I worked in the shadows my whole life.”

He was not Jason Bourne, lurking in dangerous locales. He risked life and limb on Capitol Hill among the backstabbers and cutthroat bureaucrats — from whom he obviously learned a lot. He spent nine years on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, four as staff director. When Bill Clinton appointed him to run the C.I.A. in 1997, the profile of him in The Times was headlined “A Time to Reap the Rewards of Being Loyal.” It observed that old colleagues had said “he had an ability to make many different superiors feel at ease with him.”

Six former C.I.A. officials sent Mr. Tenet a letter via his publisher — no wonder we’re in trouble if spooks can’t figure out the old Head Spook’s home address — berating him for pretending he wrote his self-serving book partly to defend the honor of the agency and demanding that “at least half” of the profits be given to wounded soldiers and the families of dead soldiers (there needs to be a Son of Slam law). One of the signers, Larry Johnson, told CNN that Slam “is profiting from the blood of American soldiers.”

“By your silence you helped build the case for war,” the former C.I.A. officials wrote. “You betrayed the C.I.A. officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld.”

They also said, “Although C.I.A. officers learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered Bin Laden an enemy ... you still went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to Al Qaeda. ...

“In the end you allowed suspect sources, like Curveball, to be used based on very limited reporting and evidence.” They concluded that “your tenure as head of the C.I.A. has helped create a world that is more dangerous. ... It is doubly sad that you seem still to lack an adequate appreciation of the enormous amount of death and carnage you have facilitated.”

Thus endeth the lesson in our class on “The Ultimate Staff Guy.” If you have something deadly important to say, say it when it matters, or just shut up and slink off.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, CIA, US Foreign Policy, Bush, George Tenet, Colin Powell, news, commentary, op ed

Tom-Tom Beats His Peace Drum

Oh, boy. I can't wait to hear all your comments on Friedman's latest column.

Let 'em rip.

For now, I'll just say this: Tom-Tom, the world community is not as gullible, timid and malleable as the American public has been and apparently, still is.

Your column is laughable.


The Hail Mary Pass
By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

On Thursday there will be a regional conference in Egypt to discuss stabilizing Iraq, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will represent the U.S. President Bush should go instead and give this speech:

I want to take this opportunity to speak to the Arab and Muslim nations gathered here today and to the world at large. I begin with a simple message: I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I rushed into the invasion of Iraq. I honestly believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I was wrong, and I now realize that in unilaterally launching the war the way I did, you all feel that I breached a bond of trust between America and the world. Not only did that alienate you from us, it made us less effective in Iraq. We had too few allies and too little legitimacy. I apologize — sincerely.

I’m most sorry, though, because my bungling of the war has prompted all of us to take our eye off the ball. I messed up the treatment so badly that people have forgotten the patient really does have a disease. Now that I’ve apologized, I hope you will stop fixating on me and look closely at what is happening in your backyard: the forces and pathologies that brought us 9/11 are still there and multiplying.

Friends, we are losing in Iraq. But whom are we losing to? Is it to the Iraqi “Vietcong” — the authentic carriers of Iraqi nationalism? No, it is not. We are being defeated by nihilistic Islamist suicide bombers, who are proliferating across the Muslim world. We are losing to people who blow up mosques, markets, hospital emergency wards and girls’ schools. They don’t even tell us their names, let alone offer a future.

Look at the past two weeks: On Thursday, at least nine Iraqi soldiers were found dead after a suicide car bomber rammed a checkpoint. Two suicide car bombers crashed into a Kurdistan Democratic Party office in Zamar. A day earlier, a suicide bomber killed four policemen in Balad Ruz. Two days earlier, nine U.S. soldiers were killed by a pair of suicide attackers driving garbage trucks packed with explosives. A few days earlier, five bomb attacks killed nearly 200 people in Baghdad. On Monday this week, a suicide bomber blew up a funeral in Khalis, killing at least 30.

That’s 12 suicide bombers in a little over a week. And it’s been like that every month. These suicide jihadists are so hard to defeat because they have no desire to build anything. Their only goal is to make sure that America fails in its effort to bring decent, pluralistic, progressive politics to Iraq. They will kill any number of Muslims to ensure that we fail.

Do not delude yourselves that this is only about Iraq. In March, a suicide bomber blew up an Internet cafe in Morocco, and on April 10 four more suicide bombers struck there. On April 11, a pair of suicide bombers, claimed by Al Qaeda, killed 24 people or more in separate attacks in Algiers. In February, a suicide bomber in Quetta, Pakistan, blew up a courtroom, killing the judge and at least 14 other people — the sixth suicide bombing in that country in a month. Last Friday, Saudi police arrested 172 who they said were jihadists who planned to do things like flying airplanes into oil fields. On Saturday, a suicide bomber in Pakistan killed at least 28 people while trying to blow up the interior minister.

You may think that I’m more dangerous than Bin Laden and that a strong America is more dangerous than Al Qaeda. You’re wrong. If we are defeated in Iraq, they’ll come after you. They already are. And if we’re defeated in Iraq, you’ll no longer have to contend with a world of too much American power. You’ll have to contend with a world of too little American power. You will not like it.

Don’t let your anger with me blind you to your own interests. You are holding your breath until I turn blue. But I’m not going to turn blue. You are. I want to get out of Iraq as soon as possible, but I need you Arab leaders to get off the fence. I know that you fear democracy in Iraq, but the alternative is much worse. If the jihadists win, the Arab world will have no future. I need your help in forging a settlement in Iraq and in denouncing this suicide madness from every mosque and minaret every hour of every day — with no qualifications.

And to Europe, China and Russia, I also say: Get off the fence — I can’t stabilize Iraq without your help. I don’t have the resources. I know I was a jerk in stiff-arming you. Believe me, I’m over it. I’m here to listen to what you want me to do. But unless we — the world of order — all pull together now, the forces of disorder are going to have their way, and there is no wall that will protect you.

Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Thomas Friedman, New York Times, International Relations, Middle East, Iraq, Foreign Policy, news, commentary, op ed

Rethinking Education

Superb Kristof column this morning on education reform. I've recommended a similar approach for years, only to hit my head against the wall of Democrat supported teacher's unions and Republican apathy.

It's about time for politicians to initiate reforms that go beyond ineffective policies based on empty slogans like "Leave no child behind."

"Any takers?" Kristof asks.

Yup. At least one, right here.

Gold Stars and Dunce Caps
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

In this presidential campaign, we need somebody who wants to address the question President Bush once raised: “Is our children learning?”

International testing shows that U.S. schools do a lousy job teaching math and science, in particular. And far too many American students aren’t going to college or even completing high school, undermining our competitiveness for decades to come.

Moreover, the U.S. education system reinforces the gulfs of poverty and race. Well-off white kids tend to go to good schools that propel them ahead, while many poor black and Hispanic kids attend bad schools that hold them back.

For inspiration, presidential candidates might look at this bold three-part plan for improving American schools:

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End requirements for teacher certification.

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Make tenure more difficult to get so weak teachers can be weeded out after two or three years on the job.

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Award $15,000 annual bonuses to good teachers for as long as they teach at schools in low-income areas.

Those ideas are cribbed from a provocative report on education from the Hamilton Project, which is affiliated with the Brookings Institution. The report was prepared by Robert Gordon of the Center for American Progress, Thomas Kane of Harvard and Douglas Staiger of Dartmouth, and it fits in with a burst of other research pointing in similar directions.

In the past, we tried to ensure the quality of teachers through certification procedures. But that has failed. Growing evidence indicates that certification requirements limit the pool of potential teachers — and discourage midcareer switches into teaching — without accomplishing much else.

“Teachers vary considerably in the extent to which they promote student learning, but whether a teacher is certified or not is largely irrelevant to predicting their effectiveness,” concluded a report last year for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The reality is that paper credentials can’t predict who will be an effective teacher. A half-dozen studies have found that teachers with graduate degrees aren’t any better than teachers without them. Other studies show that teachers who did well on their own SATs, or went to selective colleges or had high G.P.A.’s, don’t make significantly better teachers, either.

Yet teachers still vary tremendously in their effectiveness, as the Hamilton Project study found when it examined results in Los Angeles schools. It looked at the 25 percent of teachers who raised their students’ test scores the most, and the 25 percent who raised students’ scores the least. A student assigned to a class with a teacher in the top 25 percent could expect — after just one year — to be 10 percentile points higher than a similar student with a bottom-tier teacher.

“Moving up (or down) 10 percentile points in one year is a massive impact,” the authors wrote. “For some perspective, the black-white achievement gap nationally is roughly 34 percentile points. Therefore, if the effects were to accumulate, having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.”

The Hamilton Project study recommends that the weakest 25 percent of new teachers should be denied tenure and eliminated after two or three years on the job (teachers improve a lot in the first two years, but not much after that). That approach, it estimates, would raise students’ average test scores by 14 percentile points by the time they graduated.

“There’s no decision that school districts make that’s more important than the decision regarding who is going to stand in front of the classroom,” Professor Kane said. “Yet most districts spend more time choosing textbooks than they do reviewing the performance of teachers on their first few years on the job.”

School reform could also play a major role in fighting poverty and spreading opportunity. One sound proposal is to pay substantial bonuses to get the most effective teachers into schools with low-income students. It’s simply unfair for America’s neediest students to be continually assigned to the weakest teachers, perhaps consigning them to another generation of poverty. Higher pay will help recruit and retain excellent teachers.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have offered much leadership on education. Democrats have been too close to teachers’ unions to rock the boat, and Republicans don’t invest in education — so Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind effort has ended up as an underfinanced mess.

What we need now is for a presidential candidate to seize these ideas and run with them. Any takers?

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Related:

• Teachers Without Pedigrees


• Tierney: Vouching for Vouchers--Again


• The Unknown Candidate: Who Will Vouch for Tierney?


• The Unknown Candidate: Testing Education


• Educators Assail No Child Left Behind


• The Unknown Candidate: Educating Davey

Technorati tags: Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, Education and Schools, Economic Conditions and Trends, Layoffs and Job Reductions, Bush, news, commentary, op ed