Politics and Press

a southern and northern intellectual analyze the Stanley Cup

#1 – a southerner: Ok i propose 2 loonies pergame and a 5 loonie bonus for winning the series. I understand you might be nervous and not want to bet. That is ok. Let me know.

#2 – a northerner: I doubt that you can afford loonies, so I suspect a trick.  But nevertheless I accept. I’ll be travelling south for a couple of days to see how the other half lives, and spend some toonies in the banana belt.  Will be back on Wednesday in time to see the first loonie go my way.

#1Some trick… The loonie costs me $1.2. Damn. That harper guy must know his stuff.. Playoff hockey is unbelievable.

#2 – after game 1: Why not just pay me now and relax?  Even Obama is refusing to make a bet with  Harper – perhaps he never heard of hockey (or Harper), or perhaps he doesn’t want to fork over anything  to a functioning economy – but you can’t back out now just because this is so one-sided. Estimates here are 7-0 for the first gameif theAmurcan goalie didn’t have a good evening, of course not as good as the Canuck one, one but still.  But can’t you find a power play coach down there? How about double or nothing?  It won’t be a sweep however since we want a couple of more home games and have promised to donate the proceeds to Winnipeg.

#1Between the ref missing the very obvious offside on the goal and the canucks resorting to biting the opponents, it does not look good for the Boston men. I will pass on the double or nothing but note that by betting in loonies I have already given you an extra 2%. Generous to a fault, I am, in despair, almost.
I watched much of the game in a barroom where everyone was asking the same question you ask RE: what is with the power play? Where is it and why is it hiding?
Am i ever glad i cancelled the bet.

#2 That’s not funny.  A guy sticks a finger in your mouth and then they complain when you bite it!  What else can you do with it? My cat does the same thing and doesn’t get a penalty! And these guys and the coaches are all pure laine and it’s an old tradition in maple syrup country to stick your finger in trees and things without being spied upon.
As for off side, that was only off sides if you think that off sides happens when your skate blade doesn’t quite make it back over the blue line, even though you try your very best!  I don’t think so in this day and age. It’s not winning that counts. It’s giving it the old college try!!

#1 can your cat skate? does it know how to stay onside? is it a Canadian cat or an Amurcan cat? These are the relevant questions to ask.

The North Korea Conundrum

We have it. The smoking gun. The evidence. The potential weapon of mass destruction we have been looking for as our pretext of invading Iraq. There’s just one problem – it’s in North Korea. –Jon Stewart

American media and politicians too often seem to share a commitment to forget some of the past and skip some of the possible consequences of policies when discussing an issue as serious and difficult as North Korea.  And the fact that the N. Korea issue is almost always described in narrow American terms adds to the difficulty of building support for addressing North Korea in any way but the tried and failed ways of the past.

For years America has been waiting for the N. Korean regime to collapse but it hangs on, starving its people, harassing its neighbors to the South and currying favor with nations like Iran seeking their weapons technology.  And while sanctions have done some damage they have not to date influenced significant positive change and there is no evidence that more sanctions will do much more. The six-party talks, with six countries holding six separate sets of interests, are similarly unlikely to produce positive change.

In this environment analysts on the right view attempts at diplomacy as “rewarding” N. Korea’s bad behavior and seriously discuss military options available to the U.S. While these options vary from analyst to analyst they all downplay the risk to the ten million inhabitants of Seoul. It is not comforting to read some of these analyses when a common thread is that as long as the risk is mostly to millions of South Koreans and only 15000 or so Americans military adventure is worth considering. 22 million S. Koreans live within 40 miles of Seoul, which is 35 miles from the N. Korean border.  N. Korea has over 500 long-range artillery tubes along the border and an army of over a million. The devastation of a military action would be incalculable. The fact that some would seriously consider initiating military action after our costly, deadly and largely counter-productive Iraq fiasco is bizarre, but scary.

The history of U.S. – N. Korean engagement does not provide much hope for the future. Agreements have emerged from time to time only to be broken by the North Koreans and/or treated to a kind of passive aggressive approach by the U.S.  KEDO, (The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization) was the last such major effort and it failed largely because the N. Koreans reneged on their part of the agreement. At the same time, the U.S.‘s commitment was less then total, largely due to a lack of trust and the influence of domestic politics in the U.S. which led to KEDO becoming a kind of orphan in American foreign policy.

The diplomatic option is a very tough pill to swallow. The N. Koreans have behaved outrageously and it is difficult – perhaps not possible – for Americans to accept that as difficult as it is, it may remain the United States’ best possibility to influence the regime. Those who would force the issue towards military action risk a far worse mistake than even the Iraq War. Former CIA official, National Security Advisor to Vice President George H.W. Bush, and U.S. ambassador to South Korea from 1989 to 1993 Donald Gregg in the Washington Post in 2006 summed up a realistic view of U.S. diplomatic attention as a “reward”:

“Why won’t the Bush administration talk bilaterally and substantively with [North Korea], as the Brits (and eventually the US) did with Libya? Because the Bush administration sees diplomacy as something to be engaged in with another country as a reward for that country’s good behavior. They seem not to see diplomacy as a tool to be used with antagonistic countries or parties, that might bring about an improvement in the behavior of such entities, and a resolution to the issues that trouble us. Thus we do not talk to Iran, Syria, Hizballah or North Korea. We only talk to our friends — a huge mistake.”

Gregg’s words provide a sensible backdrop as the Obama administration continues to wrestle with its choices in dealing with a rogue nation. Attack or talk?

Robert Byrd, RIP

“If I wanted to go crazy, I’d do it in Washington, where they wouldn’t know the difference.” Senator Robert Byrd

Robert Byrd was a man of considerable contradictions. A former member of the Ku Klux Klan, he voted against major Civil Rights legislation in the 60s and voted against confirmation of Thurgood Marshall for the Supreme Court. But later he became a prime fighter against the Republicans’ farce of the day – its “Contract with America”.  He collected billions in “pork’ for his state of West Virginia and   remained a social conservative for much of his tenure.

But this writer’s only personal memory of Senator Byrd is more than enough for him to have earned my enormous respect. During the Democratic Convention held in Boston in 2004 Byrd spoke at the First Parish Church in Cambridge and riveted the crowd with a powerful speech in opposition to Bush’s rush to war in Iraq. His principled opposition failed to carry the day but for at least one hour we had the opportunity to hear a man of conscience deplore an already planned war that would lead to hundreds of thousands of American and (mostly) Iraqi deaths, millions of Iraqis forced from their homes, and actual and committed costs to America of up to $3 trillion, all leading to a semi-free Iraq closely aligned with Iran.

America’s rush to an unnecessary war has left us militarily and economically weaker  with our national reputation sullied. Byrd predicted this and spoke forcefully in opposition to the war, no doubt aware that his was a lost cause. One excerpt from his speech that day catches the full flavor of his remarks that turned out to be, alas, prophetic:

“The foundations of our government have suffered. The liberties enshrined in the  constitution of the United States have  now  been designed by a presidency that is bent on a ruthless pursuit of power. A President that sees himself above the law … a presidency that relies on secrecy and manipulation in order to advance its own partisan agenda. It is the Constitution of the United States that has been undermined, undercut, and is under attack. It is the American people’s liberties that are in jeopardy.”

Mrs. Clinton Goes to Ottawa

The U.S. Foreign Minister, Mrs. Clinton, accepted an invitation to attend a meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the Arctic countries -Canada, the U.S., Denmark, Norway and Russia – this week in Ottawa and, without missing a beat, managed to insult and alienate the government whose invitation she had accepted on three different points. First she chided them for not having invited two other “Arctic” countries to the meeting, Finland and Sweden, making the Canadian Foreign Ministry wonder whether the U.S. even had maps in its Foreign Affairs Office since neither Finland nor Sweden have any coastline on the Arctic Ocean. Don’t even ask why she didn’t include Iceland. Then she told Canada it should not withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in 2011, as it had said it would do some years ago. That made the Canadian Foreign Ministry wonder whether the US Foreign MInistry realized that Canada was a sovereign nation, and that it had certainly done more than its part in the “NATO” war in Afghanistan , and had no intention to let another couple of hundred Canadians be killed in yet another fruitless war in the Hindu Kush. And then she told Canada it should change its abortion policy on foreign aid, strangely forgetting her own government’s failure to include such a policy in its own, by Canadian standards, extraordinarily weak domestic health bill.

On the same day in which she thought it was appropriate to lecture a host who had been cordial enough to invite her, four border guards under her command popped out of the shadows in the shared Vermont/Quebec border town of Stanstead/Upper Derby and captured an 82 year old Quebecker. He had wandered across the invisible border to buy a hamburger in Vermont as he had for many decades and the officers held him in custody for several hours before deporting him 10 meters north, after threatening him with a permanent exile from his once-friendly neighbour. Mrs. Clinton, who had been allowed to cross the border in the other direction without assault, declined comment on why a group of burly, rude border guards had been ordered into a town, where the border runs through the middle of the shared US/Canadian library, to take captive any senior citizens they spotted on their way to MacDonald’s.

Newfoundland geese, Nigerian bombers

Apparently the Canada geese that knocked that plane down into the Hudson river a few months ago were really from Newfoundland. Quick-thinking scientists did DNA tests on them that proved they were invaders from somewhere around l’anse aux meadows on the northern tip of the northern peninsula of the island where the Vikings once began the invasion of the Americas. For some reason this was met with a sigh of relief in certain quarters since it demonstrated that these weren’t American canadian geese. US geese apparently don’t do such things.

And now we have yet another shoe bomber/self immolator who strived mightily and unsuccessfully to commit suicide by killing 300 other folks in the process, and he too came from foreign shores. The result of this misadventure was total chaos in airports servicing the US market as security was tightened to the point of strangulation. The question is: what difference does it make where the wannabee killer came from, the result would be the same. Why have the greatest disruptions occurred at the US customs barriers at major European and Canadian airports, where security is surely better than at many domestic airports? Would the US Homeland security boss’s amazingly nutty statement some months ago that the 9/11 bombers came from Canada have anything to do with it? Canadians are amazed to still hear that urban myth when they visit the US and are even more amazed to discover Mme Napolitoni is still in charge of homeland security, though back then she had no idea how and where the 9/11 killers got on their planes.

In any case it is already clear that the only success that failed assassin will enjoy will involve the further isolation of the US because of border controls that are as useless as they are disheartening and ultimately counterproductive. Travellers are already looking around for some other place to visit and spend their money than in a place where a star-wars strip-search at the border has become a routine and legal procedure. Maybe the beaches of Cuba?

Whiting out the USA

According to last week’s New York Times, the US Homeland Security folks have ordered the guards at their new border station in Massena, New York – across from Cornwall, Ontario – to whitewash – erase -the name United States from the side of their building, as they consider the name itself to make it a security threat. The Montreal Gazette then wrote that the word “paranoid” no longer suffices to describe the US border policy, “surreal” is the right word.

Can it really be that such a great and powerful country whose own border it is supposedly defending is afraid to name itself? Can anyone imagine Romania or Bulgaria, both of which are now easier for Canadians to enter than the USA is, giving out such an order to their border guards? Is the lady who not long ago announced that the 9/11 terrorists came from Canada still in charge of Homeland Security?
Please, Barack, put some people who live on this planet in charge of your borders before it is too late.

Obama and the Politics of Disappointment

As the Obama presidency approaches the six-month mark the record is decidedly mixed. Our friends, the brothers Mackenzie, have indicated their disappointment in a recent posting critical of the “Buy American” element of the stimulus package and lays the blame on the “Obama regime”. While American presidents do not normally have the luxury of leading a “regime”, Bob and Doug point out the need for a more vigorous political stance by the president.

“Buy American” represents a gut response from politicians unwilling to provide leadership to the electorate, and unable to resist foisting easy answers onto a population whose inability to accept the reality of the decline of America leads them into a mythical America Uber Alles. A Buy American campaign fails to recognize that foreign companies hire many Americans and it begs for retaliation by other nations, leading to even greater trade imbalances and reduced employment in the future. Globalization is here to stay and politicians need to recognize that and deal with it honestly and realistically.

While the Republicans in Congress continue on an obstructionist journey to oblivion, Democrats in Congress share the blame for Buy American sentiments as well as for more serious failures looming on the horizon. Solidarity is not a keystone of the Democratic Party so while the Republican Senate and House of Representatives could support just about anything George W. Bush dreamed up, Democratic Senators and Representatives lack the kind of party discipline needed for a Democratic president to move the country toward major change – change perceived by some as threatening to lobbyists and major campaign contributors. Obama’s apparent commitment to  “pragmatism” in working with Congress in developing policy leads inevitably to disappointment.

While disappointments are there, more are sure to come. Prisoners remain in Guantanamo while members of Congress from both parties cower in fear over the possibility that any of them might be housed in prisons in their states; the stimulus package is far from successful and may very well end up an economic fiasco; a variety of security programs of questionable legality initiated by the Bush administration remain in place; the war in Afghanistan is beginning to look like a project of questionable value to the national interest; the health care debate seems headed toward the continuing of private insurance programs with no public alternative; the Congress  is unlikely to allow the Department of Defense to shake off the influence of the military industrial complex and  many major  public welfare initiatives are likely to fall victim to the economic  recession.

The current Congress lacks the statesmanship, ethics and intelligence necessary to deal effectively with domestic policy that has been built on a long history of private gain at public cost. There is an argument that capitalism has been the great strength of the United States but as we become increasingly committed to bailing out inefficient and even crooked industries, capitalism as we’ve known it begins to look more like the problem than the solution. If Obama is to have success it appears that it may have to be in foreign affairs, where presidents have more power and less need to coddle members of congress.

Iran and Mucho Macho Americano

Whenever I forget how pitiful the American press has become I turn to PBS’s Lehrer Report knowing that Judy Woodruff is likely to remind me. While I largely avoided cable TV and network news talk shows during the Iran election fallout I had noted in the NY Times and Washington Post the comments of various Republican politicians to the effect that the president had not been “forceful” enough in his comments on the Iranian elections. (Much like foreign leaders had not been forceful enough in discussing the U.S. presidential election of 2000 when our Supreme Court handed the presidency to G. W. Bush, rather than bother to count the votes in Florida.) Comments came from the usual suspects, Senators McCain and Graham, Representatives Boehner and Kantor, Newt Gingrich, right-wing neocon columnists like George Will and Charles Krauthammer, and of course the usual blowhard media types on Fox TV and dumbbell radio.

Obama’s point – that it was strategically essential to avoid making the U.S. the outside force to be blamed for the demonstrations – was lost on these political hacks and we were treated to the predictable displays of American artificial testosterone. Virtually every credible Iran analyst supported Obama’s approach and assessed it as correct, as did Indiana Republican Senator Lugar – one of a diminishing number of Republican Senators with foreign policy bonafides.

Understanding a difficult, complex situation in Iran requires more effort than most Americans will give to it and unfortunately more effort than most of the American press will put into it. The attraction for simple-minded blowhards to spout meaningless slogans is too strong for a country that long ago decided to see all events through a strictly American prism. This is just the time for PBS to step up and provide the kind of background and intelligence needed to sort through the complexities. Lehrer and Woodruff gave us what they too often fall back on – an interview of two politicians (Senators Graham and Kerry) on opposite sides to argue about things that more often than not avoid any prospect of actually educating the viewer about anything other than where the two stand on whatever is defined as the issue. Woodruff’s interview served to carry the GOP’s water, asking in two or three different ways just why Obama did not speak out more strongly. Senator Graham was all over that while Senator Kerry did as well as could be expected to educate the viewers on some of the realities of the situation.

It is perhaps unfair to pick on Woodruff when so many of her colleagues in the press bow to the same gods of vacuity and simplicity (anyone who watched the Obama’s press conference can attest to that), but we used to expect more from PBS than mind-numbing, self-serving debates by politicians.

For anyone seeking an intelligent, instructional and nuanced view of the Iranian situation and Obama’s response to it, I recommend Terry Gross’s interview yesterday of Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Listen to it here.

Interview with The Homeland Security Secretary

As if poor President Obama doesn’t have enough to worry about, as he considers whether it is the chaps who ordered torture in the name of homeland security or the chaps who carried out the orders – or neither or both – who should be brought to trial. And then, as a side show, his choice for protector of that same border gives an interview on Canadian national television outlining her concerns. Coming as it did upon the conclusion of a Canuck hockey game and first round sweep, the talk with an unknown woman appeared to be a perhaps somewhat heavy-handed satire about the former guardians of the US side of the Canadian border. Here was a comedienne portraying a US diplomat who was announcing that the US-Canada border must be made more impenetrable – just like the Mexican one – because the 9/11 terrorists had entered the US that way and that the currently informal border controls would have to be made much more stringent so it didn’t happen again. Well, you could walk down the street and ask almost anyone and they would know that no 9/11 terrorists entered from Canada, so this part of this routine was too nutty to really be cutting satire. The four-hour waits at the border on the last long weekend also made the second part too obvious since it was just meant to show the supposed US diplomat hadn’t crossed that border in years, if ever.

And then her name flashed on screen – Janet Napolitano, apparently a Canadian comedienne my brother and I had never heard of, though we have great connections in that field. And then her title popped up – Homeland Security Secretary of the USA. Well, that was a good one, if a bit of a cheap shot, until it turned out to be true. This birdbrain – apparently the former governor of Arizona – is in charge of US border security, and is going to cost both countries billions of dollars in lost trade, more if she builds a wall like the one on the Mexican border in the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, and she doesn’t know what country the guys came from who attacked New York. Sometimes satire just doesn’t pay.

TORTURED LOGIC

“Thus, although the subject may experience fear or panic associated with the feeling of drowning, the waterboard does not inflict physical pain. As we explained in Section 2340A Memorandum, “pain and suffering” as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of “pain” as distinguished from “suffering.”… Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to treat “suffering” as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering”….Jay Bybee, former Dept. of Justice Lawyer in the Bush Administration and current 9th Circuit Judge

Judge Bybee, a graduate of the University of Obfuscation Law School, might also have noted that chopping off a prisoner’s leg is allowable since he had two of them. He did not comment on what to do when you run out of legs but perhaps there are other body parts to consider– testicles, arms, kidneys etc. Reading the memoranda makes it clear that in this and other instances our Law Schools have helped create some monsters that would make Goebbels proud.

The release of four selected torture memoranda from the Bush Justice Department have raised two firestorms, each interesting in its own way. From the right we get the old familiar argument to screw the law and do anything we wish to anyone we think might want to hurt us, regardless of evidence and American values. A deep thinker from the Heritage Foundation reminded us on TV that in the white heat of post 9/11 it seemed clear that we needed to make sure we got the information needed to protect the country regardless of our laws or international law. He conveniently forgot that some of the memoranda were written as late as 2005 and that – in fact – we HAD the information that 9/11 was around the corner, that the information was given to Bush and National Security Advisor Rice – and ignored by both, and that there is little if any evidence that the subsequent use of torture ever improved the quality of information received.

It was not a huge surprise to see an op ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, criticizing the release of the information by former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey who were apparently upset that leaking the memos’ “…effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on September 11, 2001.” They must have missed the part – referred to above – where Rice and Bush were warned well before 9/11 – a warning based on intelligence gathered via more traditional – and legal – means. But then Hayden and Mukasey both have metaphorical blood on their hands in this matter so it’s not so surprising they take this view.

The blast from the left is criticism of Obama for deciding not to prosecute Intelligence operatives for torturing prisoners with the approval, even urging, of lawyers from Bush’s Department of Justice. (a piece in today’s NY Times details one such case) This is a quandary since to say “they were only following orders” has a 1940s reminiscent stink about it, but this was clearly a decision intended to protect intelligence operatives from the consequences of the folly of their masters and to avoid harming those agencies that – like it or not – we depend on for a degree of security. As for bringing the likes of Judge Bybee and others in leadership positions to justice, it seems unlikely until and unless Obama gets a much larger majority in the Congress. And even then, he would more likely argue for a kind of Commission on Reconciliation and Truth but when looking at the Bush administration and his cronies in Congress it is hard to imagine anything like truth or reconciliation being of any concern to them. And to be credible, such a Commission would need to be bipartisan.

In other news: President Obama welcomed Texas Governor Rick Perry’s suggestion that Texas secede from the Union and offered his assistance in facilitating the process. There is a strong rumor that George W. Bush would emerge from retirement to fill the Office of Texas Monarch, leaving Perry with even less of a job than he has currently.