Scooter the Second [Scooter the First being Phil Rizzuto, of course] has been convicted of lying to the grand jury and sentenced this week to 2 and a half years behind bars. I don’t think many people thought much about his plight or really cared how severe a sentence he would receive. And, as it turns out, the severity of the sentence should have been no surprise, in part because he had a bunch of clowns, incompetents, and criminals in his corner as character references. Appearing on Scooter’s behalf through letters and other testimonials were the usual suspects, all of whom cited Scooter as a family man, a dedicated public servant, and specifically not an idealogue. How do we know this? Because the likes of Richard Pearle and Douglas Feith [manipulators of US foreign policy in the middle east and instigators of the disasterous Iraq invasion] said so. So did Donald Rumsfeld [the man responsible for sending 125,000 men and women to do a job that would have been tough for 500,000 – and then never acknowledging his deadly errors]. But the creme of the bunch is Henry Kissinger, he of Cambodia invasion fame [2 million dead by the time the Kymer Rouge finally lost power] and the government official who approved the overthrow of Salvador Allende [assassinated during the takeover] and the installation of the murderous Pinochet in Chile [and the subsequent deaths of thousands]. Kissinger said in defense of Libby that he knew what it was like, with all the pressures of federal service, to “forget” how and when things happened. Let us never forget the role of Kissinger in the darker pages of US history. It continues to amaze how he, like a bad penny, keeps cropping up.
Archives for June 2007
Does the Primary System Work?
The recent presidential primary debates have made it clear that both major political parties will be selecting their candidates on the basis of limited purity rather than substance. For the Republican Party it is immigration that is pulling the candidates to the right. For the Democratic Party, withdrawal from Iraq pulls the candidates to the left. Perhaps this is for the best but it seems reasonable to wonder whether there might be a better way to select the two finalists in the process soon to be known as American Political Idol.
The fact that primaries are decided by narrow slices of both parties and that the press plays up one or two issues means that substantive discussion of a wide range of critical issues gets deferred until at least after the primaries and perhaps even after the election. The immigration debate will continue but will never lead to throwing 11 million immigrants out of America – cannot be done and should not be done, regardless of political rhetoric. And while the Iraq invasion was a horrible mistake the reality is that extricating America from that mistake will take time and will require a rethinking of America’s role in that part of the world.
The real loss in the primary race is that one or both parties are largely ignoring major issues that require attention. These include: the cost and availability of health care; the substantive quality of education beyond simply standardized testing; the need to repair the image of America throughout the world; the need for substantive environmental controls; the widening gap between the haves and have-nots; the long-term effect of huge deficits on future generations – the list goes on. But so far the emphases in this election are identified by focus groups in a limited number of primary states and the reporting of the press, which tends to reinforce the numbing vacuity of presidential hopefuls mouthing tired repetitions of unrealistic slogans on self-identified hot button issues.