WATERLOO

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:

(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.

(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.

So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Why else did Cheney frankly admit to torture?  For that matter, given his own unusually candid recent statements, is Bush also going to pardon himself?

Some constitutional “experts” don’t believe you can pardon yourself (the Constitution doesn’t say a damn thing one way or the other, which is why I’m skeptical about expertise here).  Personally, bearing in mind the way the Framers thought about most things, I doubt the term is supposed to include pardoning someone for something they haven’t yet been charged with, at all.  In other words, I don’t think ANY blanket or preemptive pardons, for all crimes that someone may or may not have committed, are constitutionally valid.  (Yes, in case you’re wondering–that includes Ford’s destructive and utterly unethical pardon of Nixon, which was OBVIOUSLY, to any reasonably astute person lacking the blinders of American national pride in “our leaders,” a quid pro quo, whether explicit or implicit.  And I am not impressed by polls showing a slight majority of people, many of whom weren’t even born then and most of the rest of whom don’t remember the circumstances very well, approve of the dirty deed.  Much more significantly, most people AT THE TIME, when they knew what was at stake and didn’t have the incentive of letting bygones be bygones, thought it was wrong.)

But I digress.  Regardless of whether it really is constitutional to issue preemptive pardons, blanket pardons, even self-pardons–it’s obvious that in this political climate they’d get away with it all the way.  Many would criticize, but who would have the guts to do anything about it?  And besides, there’s a rogue Republican-operative majority on the Supreme Court.  Yes, there’d be political fallout and everything, but that’s sort of like sticking a booger into a nuclear waste dump.  Bush has already incurred so much political damage, the P.R. side almost doesn’t matter any more, as long as HE can take sole responsibility–which is one of the great things about pardons.

It seems to me Bush and Cheney are setting up a situation where all of their subordinates can give the defense that wasn’t accepted when the Nazis used it, namely, “I was just following orders.”  That defense isn’t adequate under American law, either, but it might work anyway; after all, who holds our “leaders” to correct legal standards these days?  And besides, they can say their superiors actually confessed their own guilt.  Then, these “superiors,” the ones who actually gave the orders, Bush and Cheney and perhaps a few other people who can’t pass the buck, are immune from any prosecution because they were pardoned.  This lets everybody off the hook.  It’s sort of like a Ponzi scheme–or should I say Madoff scheme?–except with criminal liability instead of money.  But because justice is a lot less rigorously enforced than economics, this pyramid scheme wouldn’t inevitably collapse.

File this article within the “I hope I’m proved wrong within 37 hours” department.

UPDATE on January 19: I never thought it would be possible to say, even occasionally, “Good news from the White House,” until after the inaugural.  But unless the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, or is lying about the right hand for no apparent reason in a manner that will be exposed for the world to see within a matter of hours, I WAS wrong.  Well, hey–there’s a first time for everything.     :)

To be less cryptic, Bush’s mutants, ahem, aides are saying he ain’t doin’ no mo’ pardons.  I’ll dance a jig to that when it’s certain.

FURTHER UPDATES on January 30 — all happy ones:

1.  There were no further pardons.

2.  We now have President Obama instead of Unelected Usurper Bush.

3.  Having crashed inaugural morning, my computer is now working again.

The Supreme Court says Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The court’s 5-4 ruling strikes down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision goes further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.

The wackadoos are in full command. Not only do they have two of the three branches of the government in their pockets, but the Congress is theirs for the asking too (see the right-wing extremist FISA bill they’re about to pass). Now their judicial arm has created a new Constitutional “right,” just for the wackadoos. Brass knuckles are illegal, but guns are too safe for the government to ban. God bless America.

Incidentally, the above-quoted AP lede is dead wrong–it was by no means “the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.” The Supreme Court had ruled AGAINST the Second Amendment having any relevance to gun control laws over and over again in rulings going back to the 19th century.

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

Until the reign of general idiocy that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and is only just beginning to end, no one but gun wackos bothered quoting that irrelevant Amendment–or rather, quoting the second half of it, since the “well regulated militia” part never did their cause much good.

“Keep and bear arms”?  Nobody does that any more.  Members of the National Guard–which is today’s Congressionally-designated militia–do not keep their guns at all; they’re in an armory, and they’re the same issue the Army gets.  They DO bear arms when in uniform–unlike those who carry around a gun for self-defence or hunting, who are merely carrying arms.  In the eighteenth century, when the Second Amendment was drafted, to “bear arms” had a specifically military meaning (see the Oxford English Dictionary).

This explains the otherwise mysterious connection between a militia designed to protect the state and a right of the people.  Simply put, the feds can’t keep people from serving in their state militias–nor from keeping the weapons they’d need to do it, if any states still let militia members keep their own weapons (which they don’t).  It’s a right of the people to serve in their state’s military service–obviously subject to the provision that the state has to want them there (or the militia would hardly be “well regulated”).

Through the alchemy of our ever-obscurantist Supreme Kangaroo Court, this has transmogrified into a right to own a handgun for self-protection in the District of Columbia, which doesn’t have a militia.  Just about as logical as saying you have to stop counting votes because continuing to count them might at least temporarily swing the outcome, giving the impression that the person who’s going to be implanted into office anyway wasn’t really elected.  It’s the same five Justices–well, not quite, two having been replaced by the pseudo-president thereby implanted (and subsequently reimplanted through massive fraud).

What really worries me is the folks in D.C.  A lot of them are going to die because of this.  All in order to “reinforce the illusion, irrelevant to capitalist production but essential to its propaganda, that the individual stands self-sufficient above all symbolic restraint”–legal restraint in this case (quotation from page 21 of my big essay).

]]> http://www.newsince.com/2008/06/26/wackado-nation/feed/ 1 http://www.newsince.com/2007/11/01/for-whom-ma-bell-toles/ http://www.newsince.com/2007/11/01/for-whom-ma-bell-toles/#comments Thu, 01 Nov 2007 20:59:07 +0000 Nuisance Man http://www.newsince.com/2007/11/01/for-whom-ma-bell-toles/

Click to see the thrilling conclusion…

Graphic by Tim Hollis

The President…shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.

–U.S. Constitution

I do solemnly swear that I will…to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

–Richard Nixon, 1968 and 1972

Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

–Richard Nixon, 1977

Nixon’s long, painful decent from the Oval Office was marked by the constant assertions of The President’s Men that their loyalty to him overrode all other considerations, including legality, and that they considered this the height of honor. Interestingly, their oath of office is to uphold the Constitution and doesn’t even mention the president, while laws were already on the books that required of them outright disobedience to illegal orders. “Loyalty to the president” isn’t mentioned anywhere, although the fact that the laws allow the president to fire members of his government at will certainly explains where it comes from.

In our own time, the Nixon Doctrine of presidential lawlessness is being used far more vigorously than Tricky Dick ever would have dared. From signing statements to illegal search and seizure to cruel and unusual punishment to forced self-incrimination, Bush’s “anti-terrorism” campaign has ripped out so many parts of the Constitution he swore to preserve, they should probably just issue an abridged edition to save paper.

In the latest in a long train of usurpations, Bush has ordered staffers Harriet Miers, Joshua Bolten, and Sara Taylor to refuse to answer questions and provide documents demanded by Congress. Such orders from more traditional presidents would only be exposed after a lengthy investigation, but Bush has come right out and done it in the open. According to the dark hints of James Comey, whatever they’re hiding is so extreme that that guardian angel of civil liberties, John Ashcroft himself, was ready to resign in 2004 if they didn’t stop it, along with Comey and other top Justice Department officials.

The greatest prophet of the sixteenth century might actually not have been Nostradamus but Shakespeare:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office…

What Hamlet is trying to account for with his great speech, in his princely, flowery language, is why everybody doesn’t just off themselves, given how cruddy everything is. The political trends of the past few years lend renewed significance to this question–especially when it comes to the oath of office.

Consider Keith Ellison, the freshman Democratic congressman from Minnesota who was trashed late last year after he announced he’d be taking his oath on the Koran. His Republican colleague Virgil Goode, who serves a district in an area of Virginia that has been a bastion of slavery, Jim Crow, and white paranoia since the nation began, warned against more Muslims coming into the country and electing more Muslims to Congress. Goode also commented, “I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way.” In an op-ed, with admirably unintentional irony, he called on Americans to “save Judeo-Christian values” to avoid “leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion.”

Bush refused to criticize Goode’s overt anti-Muslim bigotry–”no judgments have been made,” Bush spokesman Dana Perino explained. But Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) took it upon himself to play the good cop for the GOP, distancing himself from Goode’s remarks:

“Why would you swear allegiance to a document outside your faith? …I embrace religious diversity. I welcome this new member of Congress. I’m glad he’s swearing allegiance to a document that is consistent with his faith.”

Unfortunately, what Graham says here is both a deliberate deceit and a clever political double-game to gain support from the prejudiced while simultaneously conciliating the unprejudiced. Smart politicians know that you don’t have to denounce your opponent to score points on him. All you have to do is draw attention to anything that might cost him support from the public, while at the same time saying, “As a high-minded person, I have nothing against this.” That is exactly what Graham is doing here, knowing perfectly well that many Americans are far more openly anti-Muslim than Bush or even Goode.

The deceit, on the other hand, comes down to a preposition. Lindsey Graham, who’s taken the oath of office five times within the halls of Congress, knows perfectly well that Keith Ellison did NOT “swear allegiance to” the Koran. Nor did Graham, nor Goode, nor anyone else, swear allegiance to the Bible. The Constitution does not permit anyone to take office in the United States that way. Here is the actual Constitutional provision concerning swearing in, nothing omitted:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

In other words:

1) You must swear allegiance to the Constitution itself.

2) The one thing you don’t do is swear allegiance to a religion.

The Framers put that in because religious “tests” used to be required to swear in members of the British Parliament, not letting them take their seats unless they swore to something that would contradict their consciences if they were not Christian, or not Protestant, or not Anglican, depending on how far back in history you go. Virgil Goodes have a long lineage.

In this country, you can swear your oath ON the Bible, ON the Koran, ON the Boy Scout Honor Code, or on anything else that ensures you’re not mentally crossing your fingers. But you only swear TO the Constitution.

So when Graham says, “I’m glad [Ellison]’s swearing allegiance to a document that is consistent with his faith,” this is a deliberate deception, designed to scare voters who fear that people with Islamic allegiances are out to get us. By pretending that Ellison took a different oath than the other members of Congress, Graham is trying to associate disloyalty with the Democratic party.

It’s part of a systematic effort within the Republican party to make Americans forget what the oath of office really is. After all, the so-called War on Terror in the name of which Bush junks everyone’s rights has never been a war on terrorists in general. I didn’t see Bush go after the Columbian government, despite all the labor leaders they’ve been killing; and Saddam Hussein wasn’t attacked for terrorism. No, the “War on Terror” is a war on Muslims who oppose the United States. By making that the new polarity in the world, questions of the Constitution fade away. Constitutionalism is pre-9/11 thinking–it’s just a piece of paper, after all.

As long as Americans are convinced that the proper allegiance of office-holders is to Judeo-Christianity and the national security state, our secular Constitution really doesn’t matter. Electees can go on with the formality of the Constitutional oath–you won’t see it unless you O.D. on CNN, and you’ll never see them uphold it. Few Americans will realize the illegality of the state they expect to save them from evil. In the New World Order, the polarity will not be between Constitution and lawlessness, but Christians and Jews versus Muslims, hawks versus traitors, with civil liberties as merely a fifth column.

The Republicans have been pushing that thinking ever since 9/11–and now they’re upping the ante. Because if enough Americans remember what their oath of office really is, Bolton, Miers, and quite possibly their higher-ups could be headed straight for the slammer.

UPDATE: Here is another proof of what I’m saying in this piece. Sara Taylor told Senator Leahy that she had to abide by her oath to the president. Leahy, sharp old codger that he is, sternly corrected her. See it here:

Ostensibly, Clinton was impeached and being tried for lying about a sexual liaison. If truthfulness about extramarital affairs had been a requisite for everyone in Congress to hold their seats before they voted to oust Clinton, neither the House nor the Senate could have formed a quorum.

–John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience

All Glenn Greenwald ever does, really, is uphold the sense of political decency, propriety, legality, and respect for the rules and for basic fairness that were, believe it or not, widely accepted by the American establishment as recently as the post-Watergate era (1975-78). Granted, they didn’t consistently practice what they preached, and huge areas — such as all U.S. operations overseas, and certain assassinations that had occured back home — were exempt from any concept of fairness, decency, or lawfulness whatever. But debates within the U.S. were, provided they stayed within certain bourgeois, pro-Cold-War bounds, protected by hard-fought-for rules of fairness — as were the contestations between the two major parties — as was ideological struggle within a rather broadly defined mainstream, from strong liberal to strong conservative. (It wasn’t until the Reagan era that we were indoctrinated through endless repetition with the idea that liberalism isn’t part of the mainstream. Most liberals and progressives, seeming to almost relish their faux unpopularity, did not strongly contest this nonsense at the time, with disastrous consequences ever since.)

And the corporate media, in those same post-Watergate times — at least the respectable, anti-tabloid media — adhered to strict rules of neutrality in news reporting that have since gone by the boards. (Imagine news stories that don’t assert what is likely to win public support or how the ongoing struggles they chronicle are likely to come out, that don’t make use of the passive voice or appeals to anonymous “experts” to attribute authoritative opinions, and that don’t strive for false balance — news stories that, even when they decontextualize or fail to dig enough, more or less report facts and not opinions. Yes, Virginia, many of the basic principles of journalistic integrity progressives now fight a 175-degree uphill battle for were once part of the establishment media’s own rulebook.) These rules did not prevent bias — even massive bias — in sourcing and framing assumptions, for example — but they did put some very real limits on it.

Don’t get me wrong — the rules of fairness under which public discourse operated in this country at that time were perfectly compatible with, and indeed conducive to, the capitalist order. Given the destructiveness which American imperalism had already achieved by 1975 (which Greenwald, significantly, does not criticize), it might not seem like much to aspire to get back to a comparable level of inconsistently principled public discourse. But we’ve fallen so very far that in fact it is a huge undertaking, and a desperately needed one to keep us from outright fascism. (No, North Carolina, we are not already in a state of fascism — or I’d be arrested for writing this — and not merely, as is likely, spied upon.)

Like Greenwald, Bill Moyers also, in his way, upholds the old sense of honor — the one that eventually forced out Agnew and Nixon, and that caused a backlash against their repressive machinations, not just among the great unwashed, but even among the freshly scrubbed of Washington opinion-setters (who already viewed said unwashed with the absolute condescension of an elite whose members know their names will always outweigh their lack of talent). Still less than Greenwald would Moyers ever question American imperalism as such. After all, he was the lackey of the president who lied us into Vietnam. In Moyers’ field of vision, such an act is only an excess, not a monstrosity like those committed by “our” foes.

Yet in opposing these excesses, folks like Moyers and Greenwald sometimes see with brutal clarity the exact place where tyranny is now advancing into yet another former stronghold of those who, however waveringly, resist it. My confirmed impression, from hanging out with my fellow leftists, is that most leftists most of the time don’t see this stuff for what it is, dismissing it as fiddling over crumbs. It is not.

To defend these quite unpurist strongholds, good radicals must fight full-shouldered beside our liberal brothers and sisters — even if in other areas, especially their nationalism, they are themselves part of the problem.

Turds found in Capitol

According to a Capitol Hill newspaper, police are unable to solve the mystery of the “caca caper.”

What mystery? They’re there every day, passing bills — rather than bowels — to kill more people in Iraq and maintain a class stratified society at home.

“Usually, if a turd gets into the Senate, it’s because he or she was elected,” Emily Heil reports for Roll Call. “But on Wednesday, several large piles of actual, nonmetaphorical ‘No. 2′ found their way into the Capitol, and the source isn’t yet clear.”