Senator McCain, on a visit to Iowa to campaign for Republican congressional candidates, was asked his reaction to a potential Democratic takeover of the Senate in the November 7 elections.
“I think I’d just commit suicide,” McCain told reporters.
Politics
The Coming Vote To Impeach
All votes are important. All elections are important. But in the general election fast approaching this November we have a chance to dump enough Republicans from Congress and elect enough [angry] Democrats to produce an impeachment team in the House and a majority vote to convict in the Senate. The target of course is George W. Bush. This man will go down in history as one of our worst Presidents – he is guilty of deception and incompetence on a grand scale. Those two qualities are a tough combination, almost an oxymoron, but Bush has managed both. It is a combination that equates to “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the Constitutional requirement for impeachment. We can use other terms, such as abuse of power and gross misconduct, to justify Bush’s impeachment, but deception and incompetence seem to capture the man. His grand deception is Iraq, which is also his greatest failure. But that is not to say that there are no contenders. The failure to deal with Katrina would stand out in any other presidency and forever brand such a president for that failure alone. But Bush has so much more. His domestic spying. His “off-site” prisons. His abandonment of Afghanistan. His ignorance of all things environmental. His perverted tax policies. But it is his deception, which he used to convince too many Americans and far too many Congressman, that we must invade Iraq and his incompetence in dealing with Iraq post-invasion that are the foundation of his impeachment. He followed the neo-cons’ grand strategy of empire. Publicly, he argued the need to separate Hussein from non-existent WMD. He represented to Congress only those facts that supported the invasion. His administration ignored, and even attacked, those who presented contrary facts. This rush to war, this deception has resulted in, according to one very recent estimate, over 600,000 Iraqi dead. Bush’s startling incompetence in the aftermath of the invasion has torn that country apart – the infrastructure is gone, the rule of law [such as it was] is gone, civil and social life is gone. The Iraqi people are dying. US and British soldiers are dying. The world is tired of it all. We, the people are tired of Bush and his deception, his incompetence. We need a new Congress – a Congress that will act to rid us and the world of this man. Vote this November and let the games begin.
Kerry Healey’s Lee Atwater Imitation
Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor and candidate for governor Kerry Healey has connected to Lee Atwater. He gained notoriety managing Bush Senior’s media campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988 when he promised to “strip the bark off the little bastard and make Willie Horton his running mate.” Horton was a black man who raped a white woman while on a weekend furlough from prison. The mugshot of Horton, who is African-American, gave what Atwater described as “every suburban mother’s greatest fear.”
Healey is channeling Atwater by running essentially the same campaign. She is buying a lot of TV time to scare the bejeesus out of those suburban mothers by attacking her opponent, Deval Patrick, for having provided competent legal counsel to defendants in court. Patrick defended a man convicted in Florida, now serving a life sentence, of shooting a policeman. Healey, who had no professional involvement with that or any other case, simply wants the defendant dead, and apparently does not believe in defendants having competent defense counsel. Other ads focus on a case in which her opponent supported a convicted rapist receiving a DNA test to prove his guilt or innocence. The DNA test did not prove his innocence and he remains in jail. End of story.
But not for Healey, whose ads are exactly what Atwater would have done back in the day.
Atwater contracted brain cancer in 1990 and died in 1991. His words as he approached death contain a lesson for Kerry Healey: “In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said I would ‘strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his running mate.’ I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not,’ he declared….The eighties were about acquiring wealth, power and prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. It took a deadly illness to bring me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.’
So far, Kerry Healey has not learned that lesson. She will likely end this campaign a loser in more ways than one.
Secrecy, the Press and the People
Francis Kukuyama raised an important issue in an Op Ed piece in the October 8 issue of the NY Times. For some time now the administration has been back backfiring on information by reclassifying previously open information to secret information. There is of course no good reason for this. There is much in our history as a country that we would regret later; that is not terribly surprising given everyone’s ability to make mistakes. But this is an administration obsessed with admitting no mistakes – not only by them, but also of any American administration (well- except perhaps the Clinton administration). Some of this back=fired reclassification is simply ludicrous: it makes secret information that has been widely published here and abroad for years. Fukuyama makes the salient point that the better informed we are the better decision we can make as an informed population.  Maybe that’s the point…
Christine Amanpour:The Press in War in 2006
A recent interview with Christine Amanpour describes the challenges of reporting in Iraq in 2006. The challenges come from two directions: the Bush administration constantly calling reality into question and the insurgents threatening death on reporters. The interview appeared on the website for Campus Progress and was carried out at Harvard. An interesting discussion by one of our best journalists.
Chechen War Reporter Found Dead
Our Kiwi correspondent forwards this story that is at the heart of the relationship of politics and the press in Russia:
As the url for this blog suggests, the focus here is often the intersection of policy and journalism. In some parts of the world that intersection too frequently produces carnage. This is surely case with the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the woman who the head of Russia’s journalism union has “described as the conscience of the country’s journalism.†It seems appropriate to draw readers’ attention to this report from the NY Times on her life and death.
Anne Applebaum has published a remembrance and an analysis of the situation for independent journalists in Russia for Slate. It is not pretty, but is worth reading to remind us of the courage that many journalists have and the price that some of them pay. And we are certainly not talking about Bill O’Reilly.
The Press and Rep. Foley
There has been much breast beating on the Congressman Foley-Senate page scandal. Certainly if revenge is best served cold, the Democrats have their due with this one. The party of the moral majority, the party of family values, the party committed to erasing the horror of the Lewinsky affair in the Oval Office has within it people of shabby morals. Shocking?? Of course not. The issue in all of this is not that there are sinners (or at least one sinner) in the GOP. The issue is the utter hypocrisy of the likes of Foley, and House Speaker Hastert and the gullibility of voters who believe in living saints who are self-beatified.
As for the press, it is pretty predictable. The Wall Street Journal – which went apoplectic about the Oval Office affair – commented that, †in today’s politically correct culture, it’s easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emailsâ€Â Is that bizarre or what?
Much of the mainstream press reports it in terms of its relationship to the coming elections, while at least one Dumbbell Radio loony compared Foley’s misuse of words with the Pope’s recent comments on Islam.
So we have this bizarre firestorm over a serious misdemeanor of a whacked out Congressman while thousands die in the War Without End in Iraq, Afghanistan has its largest poppy crop in history, a leading Republican Senator recommends inviting the Taliban into the Afghan government, Hezbollah continues to grow in strength in Lebanon, the U.S. middle class is disappearing downward, not upward, hope for peace in the Middle East has largely disappeared, and Bush et al just might be plotting an idiotic military adventure in Iran. And oh yeah, North Korea – that’s the country that actually HAS nuclear weapons, is preparing to test one. President Bush (aka Skippy) is touring the country raising money so we can re-elect the buffoons who have put us where we are. In Stupidistan.
Condi’s Incompetence
According to the new Woodward book, verified today by White House sources, Secretary Rice has conveniently misplaced or misfiled in her mind a meeting with George Tenet in July 2001 in which he urgently warned of an impending attack by Al Qaeda.
In an administration overloaded with incompetence, Rice is a particularly fatuous figure. Warned about an Al Qaeda attack she never flinched – just ignored it. As head of the National Security Agency she supported the invasion of Iraq based on phony evidence. Either she knew it was phony and ignored it or did not know when she should have. As Secretary of State she supported a misguided bombing campaign of Lebanon by Israel despite Lebanon being one of our few friends in the region. She followed that up by refusing to support a ceasefire, which would have spared Lebanon a portion of the violence visited on it. She has consistently presented the view that we cannot negotiate directly with North Korea or Iran without appearing weak. North Korea is now about to test a nuclear device; Iran continues to move – albeit slowly – toward development of nuclear weapons.
Is there a single positive accomplishment in her nearly 6 years in positions of influence?
Sex, Hockey and the Global Crisis
The first round ballots are in and it’s beginning to look very much as if Michael Ignatieff will be chosen leader of the Liberal Party of Canada at their convention in December, and would then be a very good bet to be the next Prime Minister of Canada. Ignatieff would be a most interesting opponent in any bilateral discussions with the US at a time in which the two countries are drifting apart faster than the Greenland icebergs are racing away from their former home. The alienation of its neighbours could be one of the more long-lasting results of the increasingly incomprehensible actions of a government in Washington that seems intent on separating itself from the rules of behaviour adhered to by its (former?) allies. Ignatieff would surely be the most experienced and knowledgeable expert on global affairs – he ran the appropriate institute at Harvard before making a run at Canadian politics – to be in a position to do something about it. And his discussion with Bush and his extraordinarily lightweight advisors might be a painful revelation about why North America can no longer be understood – as Europeans tend to do – as one big place called Amerika.
In order for that to happen, some very Canadian obstacles will have to be overcome. Hockey has popped up, as it always seems to do, in the strangest places. The Toronto Globe and Mail, which had run a very flattering lengthy piece on Ignatieff, ran a much less effusive piece on his main rival and former roommate at the U. of Toronto, Rhodes scholar Bob Rae, who is certainly no dummy, but hardly looks like a jock. He came in a miserable third in the Ontario delegation voting, no doubt because he had once been the socialist premier of Ontario when it got into serious financial problems. The article was highlighted by a photo of a comic-looking Rae in full hockey regalia skating for the Ontario legiskater team. The hockey photos of candidate Ken Dryden, who is given only an outside chance of being prime minister but a very good chance of being Minister of Sports, do not look comical. In fact in the week before the vote, the Montreal Canadiens announced that Dryden’s jersey, along with Quebec icon Serge Savard’s, would be retired and raised to the rafters of the coliseum in Montreal. Guess who gets the Quebec hockey vote. Ignatieff’s announcement that he enjoyed nothing more than having a beer and watching Hockey Night in Canada was met with some skepticism. And to top it off, Belinda Stronach, a top candidate who decided not to run, was identified in a divorce suit by the wife of Maple Leaf tough guy Ti Domi as the other woman who led poor Ti astray. Since Belinda had been married to Norwegian gold-medal speed-skater Olof Johann Koss, she might have given Dryden a run for his money as most experienced candidate on the ice.
Bush: Relying On Relics
Lord knows George W. has made his share of mistakes [and then some]: he has branded regimes as members of an “Axis of Evil” [which is similar to the damaging invective Chavez used in his UN speech, in which he called Bush a sulfur-smelling Devil]; he invaded Iraq when it posed no threat to the US while he diverted resources from Afghanistan [thereby losing two conflicts at once]; he continues to conflate 9/11 with Saddam Hussein; he relies on corporate polluters to make voluntary pro-environmental decisions [that one is a doozy]; he reserves tax reductions only for those who already make more than enough; and he relies on oil exploration to the exclusion of oil conservation [and then accuses us of being “addicted to oil”!!] – the list goes on and on. In fact, it’s difficult to identify one good call Bush has made. Give that man a set of facts and he’ll reach the wrong conclusion. It’s amazing and predictable – there should be some way of betting on it. At least then, we could win our bets, providing some consolation, as the Nation slides deeper down the tube.
Part of the fault [dear Brutus] lies in the advisors Bush selects. Fingers point to Cheney and Rumsfeld often enough as the originators and/or implementers of major pieces of the Bush Mess. These two old pros began their White House careers back in the 1970s with Nixon and Ford. The Cheney-Rumsfeld “cabal” is not new. They were with Nixon when Vietnam was still raging. The idea of “appeasing” that enemy was never considered back then and the idea of “appeasing” the enemy in Iraq doesn’t get much traction with these two today. What a surprise. Another little surprise, highlighted in Bob Woodward’s new book, is the involvement of another “blast from the past” in the Bush Mess. It’s Henry A. Kissinger! One of the architects of Vietnam. He of Cambodian Bombing fame. Supporter of Pinochet and the murderous regimes in South America of that period. His quote on Iraq, taken from the Washington Post, is straight out of the 1970s, “Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy.” That’s a strategy he followed for years on Vietnam – and you know where that got us. Lord, save us.
On a related aspect of Bush’s reliance on these “oldies but goodies,” Christopher Hitchens, a writer on current events [much more than a pundit] has written wonderfully and extensively on the “crimes” of Henry Kissinger. But Hitchens has also written extensively on the evils of Saddam Hussein and radical Islam. Hitchens was an impressive leftist writer in days gone by. Today he is a Bush supporter. So also today, Hitchens finds himself allied with Kissinger on the problems of Iraq and Islam. Now there is a set of strange bedfellows.