What's Left Out

These days, I'm avoiding the news as much as possible for a variety of reasons. First, I have enough to get worked up about while our house gets restored after it got flooded in the second 500-year rain event to hit Georgia in five years. With real pressures acting on me daily, why go out of my way to get worked up about a bunch of stuff over which I have no effect or control? Isn't the purposeful pursuit of avoidable stress a symptom of madness?

Second, who needs it generally? It's all a show, the politics show, and the people who run it feel that the only way that they can get the number of viewers/listeners/readers/subscribers they need is to get people frothing at the mouth. The truth is, when one stops to actually have a civilized conversation with other people, that most points in the political spectrum are separated by shades and hues rather than colors. Discuss an issue with a reasonable person from "the other side" in a calm manner, sans insults, sans accusations, and you will likely find broad areas of agreement. Further, if the discussion is lively enough, you might find that the two of you discover some third idea that is better than the one either of you started with. That is a productive approach to politics.

Unfortunately, it is better--for different reasons--for both those who have power and the media to have us at each others' throats. For the powerful, it helps them maintain their power. If we weren't attacking each other all the time, we might just figure out who, exactly, has been screwing us all along. And the media needs drama to sell product. Calm discussions that produce workable and interesting solutions lack drama. And so they feel they need to ratchet up the drama in order to make a better show, a better story.

One example of this is an article I made the mistake of reading only earlier this morning. I found it on the AP feed that I can't find a way of removing from the homepage for my Yahoo! email account.

The article seeks to add drama to passage of the healthcare bill by distorting some facts. The attitude presented is summed up (as it should be) in the lede:

The Democrats' control of a hefty majority in the Senate — plus the House — would suggest that President Barack Obama is within reach of overhauling the nation's health care system this fall.

But the numbers mask a more complicated reality: Obama and Democratic leaders have modest leverage over several pivotal Senate Democrats who are more concerned about their next election or feel they have little to lose by opposing their party's hierarchy.

What this article fails to point out is that the President and the Democratic leadership don't need 60 votes to pass the actual bill. They need 60 votes to invoke cloture, which is a procedural vote that closes down debate and would short-circuit any filibusters. Once they move the vote to the floor, all they need is 51. And every Senator they use in this article can justify voting for cloture by citing the need for having this issue "come before the American people." Once it is up for a true vote, they can do whatever is in their best interest.

And so, this story is a swiz based on the assumption that people won't think about the story in any manner deeper than they ask them to. And it makes things nice and dramatic. Which is no way to run a republic.

Afganistan

It used to be that I would post letters and comments I had submitted to The New York Times that hadn't been used on various blogs I've had. Well, I don't submit much to The Times anymore. That's so 2006. Now I'm getting ignored by Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish. I'm not really upset at getting ignored because I can't imagine the volume of email he and his couple of helpers have to wade through on a given day. And it should be said that an email I sent was quoted in its entirety just a couple of weeks ago when Andrew was on vacation.

Anyway. I sent an email yesterday that I think deserves inclusion here:

The approach we should have taken with Afghanistan was simple, up front. First, the President, since an act of war had been committed against the United States by an entity operating under the protection of the Taliban government, should have gone before Congress and gotten a declaration of war, which is the manner of doing these things according to the Constitution. Second, we should have invaded (as we did under the cover of a bogus “authorization”) and beaten the Taliban to a pulp (again, as we did). Then we should have treated with the Taliban. (Our mistake was in seeking “regime change,” a foolish, boorish, shortsighted, self-satisfied piece of nonsense.) We should then have provided a mini-Marshall Plan and been as magnanimous in victory as we were overwhelming in combat.

The same goes for the Gulf War in 1991. Instead of imposing draconian penalties on Saddam and his government, we should have helped them rebuild and invested in them as a new partner. Instead, we opted for pointless sanctions and wound up as the owners of an ongoing disaster.

Our greatest victory happened not at the end of World War II, but in its aftermath. We should have learned more from George Marshall, but never bothered to. And so we find ourselves mired in a couple of quagmires of our own making.

The Strange Case of Sarah Palin

It is starting to be old hat to see one or another of our Republican governors going bonkers on our TV screens. Interestingly, this only seems to happen to the ones whose jobs aren't all that difficult. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose state is collapsing all around him as if that giant mythical earthquake finally did happen, seems right as rain. He might be frustrated, he might be tired, he might be overworked or in over his head, but one thing he is not and that is nuts.

On the other hand, we have Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina and a man who clearly has had too much time on his hands. His recent appearances, all arranged to explain his decision to abdicate his responsibilities for a few days so that he could go boink some lady in South America, featured tears, incoherence, and all the symptoms of a very public nervous breakdown. The man needs a prolonged rest, preferably at a place with a euphemistic name and a good crazy-to-therapist ratio.

Given such competition, the reigning champ of Republican crazies, the Unsinkable Sarah Palin, must have felt forced to rise to the occasion. And she did. And how.

With lunatic logic cloaked in garlands of gibberish, The Lunatic Queen announced that she was quitting as governor because she's not a quitter and was going to move further into the limelight because she had received too much negative attention. Her disjointed and paranoiac ramblings, both in the press conference and on Facebook, have revealed--or revealed again--a person who is suffering from messianic delusions.

This needn't be debated. One can merely read the transcript of the press conference or any of the Facebook posts to see that she has come unhinged.

There are rumors surfacing that a major scandal involving her is about to break, and, since she has threatened to sue anyone who raises this, I want to support this notion in its entirety. I hope she sues me. I need the publicity.

However, I suspect that she has come to see herself as Jesus returned and filled with wrath rather than forgiveness. I pity her as much as anything else.

The fortunate thing is that she has, in a stroke, derailed any hopes she ever had of becoming President. And it will not be Democrats, the delusion of a liberal media, or the blogosphere that will cause it. It will be her fellow Republicans. I can already picture her at the first of the dozens of debates that will precede the Iowa Caucuses. There she will stand, behind her lectern, having to listen to opponent after opponent--there will probably be about 23 of them--point out that she quit, that she was not up to governance, that she withered under the lights. They will point out how they stuck it out and did their jobs, how they honored their commitments, and each will find a different way of reminding her that "winners never quit and quitters never win."

In short, she is either a fool or a loon, quite possibly both. We are in the process of watching a very public descent into madness, and it will not be a pretty thing. Nor will it, ultimately, be enjoyable. There just isn't enough schadenfreude in the world.

The Myth of the High-Flown Oratory

There are many myths and memes that float around the current President of the United States. Most of them have little basis in fact and arise merely from prejudice. One of the most prevalent is that Mr. Obama uses high-flown words and poetry as a way of avoiding having to say anything meaningful, which, when one takes the time to actually consider his speeches is no more true than the one about the moon being made of green cheese.

The speech he's made that made the greatest attempt at being poetic is also the one that was his least successful: the Inaugural Address. The poetry was forced and made up almost entirely of cliches that he didn't even bother to use imaginatively or with humor or irony. I enjoyed the Inaugural Address, but didn't think it a great speech, certainly not a work of rhetorical genius.

The two most effective speeches he's made that I've seen--the one on race and the one in Cairo--worked not because of their rhetorical flourishes, but because they were thorough, thoughtful arguments presented in plain English. His gift is for making structured arguments clearly, and his speeches owe more to the essay form than they do to oratorical classics.

What confuses his reflexive detractors is that he has a great voice and knows how to use it. They mistake the music of his delivery for music in his prose. That'll happen when you only consider the surface and not the substance.

The real test of whether his speeches are merely great oratorical tricks is this: Quote one. Where's the quotable phrase that everyone walks away from the speech talking about. I can't think of any. His was the "Speech on Race." Dr. King's was "I Have a Dream." He has no "All we have to fear is fear itself" or "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" or "With malice toward none."

I have no problem with people differing with the President's ideas or proposals, but I would ask this: If you must attack him, try attacking him for what he is rather than what he isn't.

Iran

At the moment, no one outside of Iran really knows what's going on there. And no one, anywhere, has any idea how it will all play out. Earlier this morning, I read a repost of the analysis of Noah Millman on The Daily Dish, and I found it to be nothing but well-intended hogwash. This is one of the problems with pundits, they function under the delusion that reality is linear.

And so, I'm not planning on making any predictions. There are a couple of things that I would like to take note of.

First, nations are a kind of narrative, a set of stories and assumptions that hold a people together. Whenever there are mass protests all across a nation, we can assume that the collective fiction that joined that nation together has crumbled. Things will go on until a new narrative is arrived at. It is impossible to say what that narrative will be. The only thing that can be said is that the old narrative is gone and that some new one will take its place.

Second, Iran, in my lifetime, has swung between two extreme narratives, the first being life under the Shah and the second being life under the Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khameini. Just as a pendulum narrows its arc with each pass, so to shall the next incarnation of Iran tend more toward the middle. The Iranians are a people who are clearly sick of being repressed, and there's a very good chance, I think, that they will get their way.

At least, I certainly hope they will. To the People of Iran: A long life and a prosperous one!

The Right to Free Expression--Even Unto Death

Sometimes I feel bad about the name of this blog simply because, since the election of Barack Obama, it's no longer completely true. I like him. I trust him. I think he's making a legitimate and sincere attempt to get things done.

This does not, however, mean that I think he or his administration is perfect or beyond criticism. Unlike the typical conservative, I'm not interested in hagiography. I want my leaders human.

The one area in which Mr. Obama has left me scratching my head has had to do with the manner in which he has so far, in practical terms, dealt with the horrifying legacy of the Bush Administration in terms of our treatment of prisoners from the farce known as The Global War on Terror®. The latest outrage that his administration has let slide was detailed on the Harper's website this morning by Luke Mitchell.

It seems that the policy of force-feeding prisoners at Gitmo who have gone on hunger strikes has continued. And while the rationale that they are saving the lives of the hunger strikers has a certain emotional resonance, it ultimately takes away a key manner of self expression available to prisoners whose very circumstances allow almost no other way of protesting their detention.

The hunger strike is an extreme form of nonviolent protest and works in the way that all forms of nonviolent protest work: It plays on the guilt of the oppressor. Forced feeding, of course, is a presentation of that guilt. We cannot let them starve themselves because, if we do, we also have to face up to the extreme misery and hardship that we have subjected them to.

The whole system is sick and rotten. If the detention system you have set up drives people to hunger strikes and suicide, you have failed. If the availability of self expression is that circumscribed, you have failed. If the possibility of legal protection and appeal is that remote, you have failed.

Mr. Obama, both in his torture speech and in his speech in Cairo yesterday, called us to defend ourselves with our better selves. He is right in this. However, when it comes to dealing with the Gitmo prisoners and forced feeding, he needs to practice what he preaches.

One's a Dick, the Other's Not

The week-kneed media, cowed into submission by an elderly Republican attack machine that spent the '80s and '90s whining "It's not fair! It's not fair!" even when the coverage patently was fair, showed its spinelessness again last week when it gave equal coverage to an important speech by a sitting President and a dissembling pack of lies and absurd assertions by a former would-be dictator. The President's speech, which I found to be thoughtful and nuanced, even if logically flawed in one major place, was then picked over with the avidity and attention a jackal gives to a bone it suspects contains some lovely marrow. Meanwhile, the man whose parents knew what they were doing when they named him Dick got away largely unscathed after having essentially vomited misstatements, innuendos, and level of speech that he would have--were it leveled at him when he was VP--labeled treasonous at the American Enterprise Institute.

First, I would like to point out that a press that does not question, that does not pick apart, that does not act like a jackal with a bone, but that does not do so with everyone equally is no press at all. There has been much gnashing of teeth over the last couple of years because of the demise of the newspaper industry on the grounds that every democracy worth the name needs a free press. However, unfortunately, we don't have a free press worth the name. What I see, rather than intrepid journalists, is a collection of self-important lickspittles who support the status quo and who enable and cherish the fearmongers.

They do this because news has not been news for some years now. It is entertainment. The pairing and equalizing of speeches--no matter how absurd or worthless such an equalization might be--is done for the ratings and no reason other. It's the return of Yellow Journalism, and the only difference between Rupert Murdoch and William Randolph Hearst is an interest in Marion Davies. If this is all that we are losing, so be it. It doesn't deserve to be saved.

I found that much of the bone-picking over the President's speech--including those that complained about his mention of possible "prolonged detention"--seemed to miss the portions of the speech in which he said that anything that he proposed would have to pass muster with the Congress and with the courts. This is something that many still don't get about this guy. He wants to be our President, not our Emperor. He has no illusions of being able to govern by fiat and seems to have some glimmer of understanding that he is the servant of the People and not their master. This is unusual in my lifetime and should be noted.

However, if he thinks that he will be able to come up with some way of detaining people indefinitely without trial, he is likely to find out that he was mistaken. Close Guantanamo we must, but no man, no matter how dangerous, should be held without benefit of legal review. And I find it hard to believe that the only evidence available for trying anyone truly dangerous could have been had only through torture, which is what is implied by the phrase "tainted evidence." How could such remorseless alleged enemies of the United States be unprosecutable under our nations laws? Wouldn't they have, at the very least, conspired against us? Who are these people? These cases need to be the most public. Why are they dangerous? Why can they not be prosecuted? Why is the need felt to keep them imprisoned for the remainder of their lives in contradiction of the very principles and ideals that the President so movingly admired at the beginning of his speech?

Again, I think I would have them detained openly for a while in some well-to-do American Muslim community. Let us win this war with the strength of our ideas and our lives, not by chucking some irrational soul down a bottomless pit.

And now I come to Mr. Cheney. He is, of course, a classic bully, and the thing to remember when confronting a bully is that they are generally full of hot air. Mr. Cheney, in particular, must be one hell of a poker player because his default response to events is to bluff. And no one, especially not the trembling press, ever calls him on it.

The first time I really noticed this tendency was during his debate with John Edwards in 2004. He started right in with an attack on Edwards by saying that he had never seen Edwards in the Senate. Well, this struck me immediately as being a double bluff. First, he was playing off the widely held knowledge that Edwards had spent most of his tenure in the Senate running for President. As a result, he was well-known for not being there. Second, by putting it the way he did, he implied that he spent most of his time down on Capitol Hill, which was, to put it mildly, utter and total bullshit. There are only two reasons for a Vice President to appear in the Senate chambers. He casts the deciding vote if there is a deadlock, and he certifies the results of the Electoral College. That year, I think that Cheney had been there once. It was the day that he told Pat Leahy to go fuck himself. Neither Edwards nor Bob Schieffer called him on it, and that's exactly the kind of behavior that he relies on.

His recent calls for certain information concerning the use of torture to be declassified is also, I would bet, a bluff. As much was implied in the President's speech when he said, "As Commander-in-Chief, I see the intelligence. I bear the responsibility for keeping this country safe. And I categorically reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation." This was a fairly straightforward repudiation of Cheney's argument that waterboarding was effective and useful. And yet, the lapdog press generally skipped over it. (I think I saw one mention of this.)

He's bluffing and, in his hubris, raising the stakes until the only option will be to call him. And that's when we'll find that he's holding ten-high nothing.

One final thing. I have adopted it as a rule of thumb that whenever someone tries to make you afraid that they are selling you something, and it is usually something that is not in your best interests. So just listen to Cheney. When does he ever present us with anything other than fear?

Beneath the hard shell of a bully lies the timid soul of the coward.