The Power of 'War'

We are at war with terrorists, the government tells us, and have been at war with terrorists since Sept. 11, 2001. Forget for a moment the logical faults that exist in such pronouncements, because then you have to explain why we entered into a war only after their attacks, and not before, when they were planning those attacks. (That's what a recent spate of books by former administration officials alleges: that Georgedick Bushcheney's programmers ignored urgent pleas by outgoing Clinton people to recognize and deal with the dragon standing outside the door.) Does that mean declarations of wars can be retroactive?

Of course the point is moot because there is no declaration of war, against al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Moqtada Sadr or anyone else. There has been no declaration of war because the administration has not asked Congress to invoke the sole right of any government body in this country to declare war. Instead, the administration would have all of us believe that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were an act of war and that a de facto state of war existed since that time.

But pResident Bushcheney has used the assumed powers of an assumed war not only to increase the legitimate powers of government surveillance, but also to invoke aspects of his domestic policy that have nothing to do with fighting a war. Since when does a nation exact a tax cut, a trillion-dollar tax cut, no less, when it needs money to fight a war? Since when does national security depend on allowing timber companies virtually unfettered access to heretofore protected forests? How does defeating al Qaeda depend on abandoning an international effort to combat the danger of global warming?

"Understandably, many Americans have been supporting government actions that, under normal circumstances, would be considered unacceptable legally and morally. But, history teaches that crisis periods produce even greater problems and suffering as the heavy hand of unchecked government power crowds out civil society." 

That admonition comes not from Ralph Nader, or Michael Moore, or John Kerry, or anywhere on the left. It's from the Independent Institute, a centrist public-policy research group that has received accolades from all over the political spectrum. The essay goes on to say:

"For example, U.S. government agencies have been given unprecedented surveillance and police powers to arrest people indefinitely without charge or trial and to intercept all private communications, transactions, and records. Americans seek security, but not as an end in itself. We seek security to enjoy the blessings of liberty. Attempts to 'trade' liberty for security can only produce neither. Instead, we must achieve security in a manner consistent with a diverse and open society, individual liberty, and the rule of law."

However, we are being asked - no, told - to accept security at all costs and the reckless tangents that have nothing to do with security, but everything to do with a small group of individuals' worldviews. As the Bushcheney campaign produces commercials that focus on coffins at Ground Zero, it refuses to allow Americans to see the coffins of their husbands, fathers, sons and brothers returning from Iraq. It has shamelessly exploited, and is sure to continue to exploit, the grief, anger, despair and fear we felt when we saw the towers fall.

That we are faced with a dangerous adversary who has spoken of his wish for our destruction is evident. But make no mistake about it: This war is a two-front war: against al Qaeda for our safety, and against rationality for an administration's political survival.

Contact Ira Lacher here.

Let Us Pray

Today is the National Day of Prayer. Really.

NDP, as it's referred to by the National Day of Prayer Task Force, was established by Congress in 1952, when the Cold War was just really firing up, and when the right figured that America needed something to separate itself from the godless communists of the Soviet Union (see "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance). In 1988, the organization says, President Reagan set the NDP as the first Thursday in May.

The NDP Task Force, as the self-anointed guardian of what's good and right about NDP, has a chairman - yes, NDP calls leader Shirley Dobson "chairman," which might give you a hint as to where the group is coming from. It seems that Shirley Dobson is married to Dr. James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family. Focus on the Family is a Christian group that purports to advocate for the rights of families, apparently only as long as they are composed of a straight mother who is married to a straight father and are raising their children straight and not in some other chosen lifestyle. The Focus on the Family website has links to stories with blurbs such as: "A former abortion advocate's pro-choice rhetoric failed when God used Focus on the Family to confront her with the truth." The NDP Task Force says it has no link to FOF, which is technically accurate, because there's a link on the FOF website to the NDP site, but not vice versa.

The NDP Task Force claims that the National Day of Prayer is not Christian. But it says, "[T]he efforts of the NDP Task Force are executed specifically in accordance with its Judeo-Christian beliefs." (For the record, there are no Jewish prayers on the website.) It also says that the chairman (sic) before Shirley Dobson was "Mrs. Vonette Bright, wife of former Campus Crusade for Christ president and founder Bill Bright." The sample program outlines prayers to be said for the Executive Branch, the Congress, the Judicial Branch and the military. The program specifies those prayers should be led by a "Christian leader from the Community."

Of course, pResident Bushcheney has issued a proclamation supporting NDP. It reads, in part: "Through prayer, we recognize the limits of earthly power and acknowledge the sovereignty of God. According to Scripture, 'the Lord is near to all who call upon Him . . . He also will hear their cry, and save them.' " Governor Vilsack's proclamation is almost heathen by comparison. After a series of whereases, the Iowa governor "call[s] upon citizens to recognize this day in his or her own special way."
 
Maybe the Guv should have clicked on the NDP Task Force's list of things to pray for. The Media section is interesting. "We can . . . pray for the Christian individuals in the news and entertainment industries, asking the Lord to grant them strength and perseverance as they endeavor to let their lights shine in what is often an environment hostile to those who voice their belief in Christ." So al Jazeera, we're not praying for you; live with it.

Under Education, we find this: "Many of our schools and universities are minimizing traditional subjects such as history and math, and are instead promoting a radical social agenda. For example, some schools begin teaching homosexual propaganda to kindergartners. As a result, our children are entering the 'real world' knowing more about politically correct ideas than they do about reading or science!"

There's a section about Church - not church and synagogue, just church - "Pray for your churches and their leaders, asking God to grant us the wisdom and vision to make the Church a vessel for healing and revival in America."

Oddly enough, I believe in spirituality, but not bunkum. So in honor of this Congressionally bestowed National Day of Prayer, I offer my own:

Creator of us all: Help our eyes and ears to be opened and our hearts to be full. Help us realize that the way to know you has no singular path and no straight line. Help us to understand that no human being can claim to speak for you, and no one has the right to govern a population on the basis of that claim. And help us find the strength and the will to restore this country to a mission of sharing its bountiful wealth with its people, and of using its influence to better the lives of people everywhere. Amen.

Hero, Idiot, or Sap?

Pat Tillman once was paid to try to kill NFL quarterbacks for the Arizona Cardinals. He left it to go to kill alleged terrorists in Afghanistan, but got killed himself.

Sports Illustrated put him on the cover. Writer Gary Smith called him a "quiet, intense boy governed by a personal code of honor, a machismo that he defined and no one else, a Hemingway character out of the 1920s in Spain transplanted seven decades later to California soil." Smith also mentions that Tillman had been charged with felony assault after beating up a man in a fight outside a pizza parlor (he served 30 days in a juvenile detention center).

According to the writer, Tillman lost several relatives at Pearl Harbor, and he felt guilty that he hadn't gotten a chance to fight for his country, as did others in his family. So he became a Ranger - not the Texas kind, but the Army kind - was shipped out to Afghanistan and got blown up. To SI and many Americans, that makes him a hero.

Not to Ted Rall. A cartoonist and illustrator, and a finalist for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize, Rall is a pragmatic progressive in the Howard Dean mode. In fact, he just wrote an essay on his blog calling for Democrats to abandon a call for national gun control because it's a supercharged red flag for centrists who believe in hunting, target shooting, self-defense and the Second Amendment (Dean staked out this position as well).

But Rall's latest cartoon did not call Pat Tillman a hero. In fact, as Rall told Dave Astor of Editor and Publisher, the trade magazine of the newspaper industry, Tillman was a "cog in a low-rent occupation Army that shot more innocent civilians than terrorists to prop up puppet rulers and exploit gas and oil resources." In the cartoon, which was pulled from MSNBC, newspaper editors are bandying about what to call him. "Idiot?" says one. "Sap?" says another. The final determination? "Hero!"

Look, there isn't anyone, Ted Rall included, who doesn't believe that American military men and women are being asked to do an impossible job that carries with it extreme personal sacrifice and great risk. There isn't anyone who doesn't want our servicepeople to come home in a condition where the Pentagon will let them be photographed.

On the other hand, this "support for the troops" has nothing to do with the legitimate criticism the Bushcheney administration deserves for sending well-meaning, dedicated but misinformed, men and women into combat in the first place. We will not "aid and abet the terrorists" if we question why the anointed president is feeding patriotic Americans such as Pat Tillman a line about defending the country from terrorism when he and we know it involves nothing of the sort. We will not give "aid and comfort to the enemy" if we demand the real answers as to why America invaded and occupied a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. And we will not be committing treason by raising these objections over and over again, until they are no longer necessary.

Sit, Ubu, Sit

The conservative media is getting a new watchdog, one who understands what makes the Fox Newses and New York Posts sniff around and whom they pee on. According to the New York Times, David Brock, the lambaster of Anita Hill who recanted his right-wing proclivities in a book ("Blinded by the Right") several years ago, is setting up a website to "monitor the conservative media and correct erroneous assertions in real time."

"Because a healthy democracy depends on public access to accurate and reliable information," Brock writes on his site, "Media Matters for America is dedicated to alerting news outlets and consumers to conservative misinformation - wherever we find it, in every news cycle - and to spurring progressive activism based on standards and accountability in media."

This is very welcome. As investigative reporter Joe Conason has pointed out in his must-read book, Big Lies, right-wing poop has sullied the minds of many of us to the point where otherwise intelligent Americans believe that only neofascist "conservatives"- who want to conserve nothing, but instead would hurl this nation's social policies back to the hair-dragging days of Og, the Caveman - offer any hope of saving the world from godless hordes. Brock is living proof that reactionaries, even reactionaries who once wrote the vilest stuff they knew to be lies, are redeemable.

But I would suggest that Brock, for all his endeavors, is sniffing around the wrong fire hydrant. He should be looking not at The Washington Times or his former colleagues at The American Spectator. We know they'll scrape off the thinnest scum under the tiniest rock to take down opponents of the radical right and the Bushcheney administration. So why on earth waste the millions of dollars the Times says has been contributed by wealthy liberals (an oxymoron if there ever were one)? Spend that cash wisely. Look not at your enemies, but at your "friends."

Look closely at the so-called "liberal media."

Yes, for Newt's sake, the Times, The Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and other so-called bastions of fair and objective reporting. They, not the Fox News pit bulls, were the junkyard dogs who slandered Al Gore in 2000 by shamelessly repeating Bushcheney campaign-fed lies like the veep claims he invented the Internet (he never said that). It was the "impeccably objective" Tim Russert, not Sean Hannity, who played "gotcha!" with Howard Dean when he interviewed the governor in June of '03 on NBC's Meet The Press. It was the Boston Globe, not Ann Coulter, who made a big deal over PreDemNom John Kerry being Irish or Jewish.

The Washington-based national press corps, claim critics such as Eric Alterman and Bob Somerby, are worthless, bloated millionaires who have snuggled into the beds of D.C. society and are loathe to afflict the comfortable, as is their industry's calling, because the press corps themselves are the comfortable. Manic about being exiled beyond the Beltway - in Washington, a calamity almost as bad as finding white powder in your junk mail is being marginalized - they gleefully lap up the dog food the radical right is terrific at slopping out. So Mike Dukakis frees rapists, Howard Dean is a dangerous nut, and John Kerry threw away his medals - no, ribbons - no, medals - no, ribbons.

Grrrowff!

David Brock can spy on the right-wing media all he wants from his plush offices on K Street, Northwest, and think he's doing journalism and the nation a favor. But if he really wanted to do something worthwhile, he would support terriers like Alterman and Somerby, who have sic'ed themselves on the so-called McGruffs of journalism and exposed them for the lapdogs they really are.

That New-Time Religion

I've known and worked for a number of well-meaning, deeply spiritual individuals, of numerous religions. These people have a deep-seated personal faith, and they're convinced that there's a higher being whose precepts they need to be faithful to. I've found them to be, for the most part, honest, ethical, forthright and caring, and even if I disagreed with their politics, I'd trust them with my children's lives.

I also know religious nut cases. These people, also of differing faiths, believe their religion is the one true belief, that those who don't share their beliefs are either at best insignificant and at worst destined to roast in hell for all eternity, and that it's a sacred mission for the faithful to convert, or kill, the unbelievers.

Which one is Georgedick Bushcheney?

The anointed pResident takes every opportunity to remind his audience that he has accepted Jesus as his personal savior, that doing so saved his life, and that he takes his responsibilities as a Christian personally. He is purported to pray every day, often with his top advisers. His religion is said to influence his governing.

Is this a good thing or not?

It would be a good thing if the pResident of the United States were to follow the teachings of the Bible regarding treating your neighbors as yourself, and the words of Jesus when it comes to turning the other cheek. It would be a good thing if the pResident of the United States were to heal the sick, and care for the stranger and the needy, as the Bible commands.

But is it a good thing when the pResident of the United States uses the word "crusade" - a loaded word to Muslims if there ever were one - to characterize a "war on terrorism" waged almost solely against adherents of Islam? Is it a good thing when the leader of a pluralistic nation champions government aid to a faith-based system of charities, which would be allowed to discriminate against non-believers in hiring? Is it a good thing when the pResident of the United States refuses to discipline a high-ranking general (William Boykin) who has described U.S. policy against terrorism as a fight against Satan and, according to press reports, rebuked a Somali military man with the words, "My God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real god and his was an idol"?

Writes Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jane Eisner: "This almost imperceptible switch from personal appeal to national justification is deeply troubling. It leaves the inevitable impression that the pResident believes he is doing God's work by toppling the modern-day Satanic dictator in Iraq and portrays American foreign policy as a theologically driven struggle between good and evil, rather than a process driven by both values and reason."

The press in England, a country lacking anything close to the evangelical Christian element we are blessed with in America, has generally given more space to this issue than has the American press. Indeed, as William Powers writes in The National Journal:

"This is a gigantic story, the sort of thing that should be front and center as the country looks back at how we got into this war and tries to figure out whether this pResident deserves another term.

"Yet the more a politician talks about God, the more the press gets uncomfortable and weird. With scattered exceptions . . . the major political media have been less than eager lately to take on God."

Jimmy Carter was a president who accepted Jesus as his personal savior. He is also a well-meaning, deeply spiritual, religious individual who never, never, would have thought of describing American foreign policy in terms of good vs. evil or God vs. Satan. And don't forget: It was Carter's misfortune to have to oppose the ayatollahs of Iran. Now those guys were religious nut cases. Do we have one sitting in the Oval Office?

The Revolution Is Here

Back when the Baby Boomers took to the streets to register their discontent, the standard phrase was "when the revolution comes. . . ." We were speaking about that time in the not-too-distant future when the people would win their struggle and the oppressors would be overthrown. Well, the revolution's here. How do you like it?

Of course this ain't the revolution we were hoping to tip our hat to. But this revolution is just as profound as the Industrial Revolution was to the 18th and 19th centuries, resulting in a sea change in the way people in modern societies live, work, recreate and even die.

Permit me to get a bit academic on you. In this country, the Industrial Revolution had its most profound effect on rural America, resulting in the migration of millions from farms to cities. In 1890, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there were roughly 63 million Americans; 43 percent were farmers and farm laborers. By 1920, as industrialization took hold, that figure had dropped to 27 percent. By 1970, the U.S. population had risen to 204 million, and the farm population had plummeted to barely 5 percent. Millions of people had to find new ways of living. For those who couldn't cope, lifestyles and lives were shattered.

Which brings us to the new revolution. Historians may call it the Technological Revolution, and its impact may not be totally realized for centuries. It began when automation started eliminating manufacturing jobs, and it's still continuing, evidenced by the outsourcing of white-collar jobs. We don't know when this revolution will end (probably when the next one begins). But we do know that like the Industrial Revolution, it includes the potential for massive political and social upheaval.

So far we have escaped catastrophic unrest, because previous leaders have been wise enough to recognize when innovation and change was called for. The Great Depression could have destroyed America but for President Franklin Roosevelt's government interventions such as social security, unemployment insurance and federally sponsored public works projects that put people back on payrolls. (Oddly enough, the right has excoriated FDR's New Deal reforms as anathema to capitalism, but they just might have saved the Republic.)

Today's society is a witch's brew: unease created by the ongoing Technological Revolution, plus a mighty dollop of fear resulting from 9/11 - which Georgedick Bushcheney has shamelessly exploited. Ever since 9/11 Bushcheney has played the role of Mommy, saying to us, "Hold my hand, trust me, love me, and it'll be all right."

But kids soon learn not to trust parents who tell them everything's all right when it's not. So it's up to progressives to show everyone that we know how to get it together. Because the revolution sure as hell is here.

Contact Ira Lacher here.

The Great Turtle Island vs....Islam?

If Richard Clarke is correct, that overcoming Middle East terrorism is all about understanding and eventually helping to ease the ideological battle within Islam, we are lost.

"It is a war that we are losing," Clarke, author of the book Against All Enemies, wrote in Monday's New York Times, "as more and more of the Islamic world develops antipathy toward the United States and some even develop a respect for the jihadist movement.

"I do not pretend to know the formula for winning that ideological war," Clarke goes on. "But I do know that we cannot win it without significant help from our Muslim friends, and that many of our recent actions (chiefly the invasion of Iraq) have made it far more difficult to obtain that cooperation and to achieve credibility."

The reason is obvious: Americans don't know or care about cultures, much less religions, other than our own. America as a Judeo-Christian nation is advanced, modern-thinking and progressive, and everyone else is a sand-eating camel jockey, spear-throwing cannibal, rice-growing slant-eye and you can add your own hateful epithet. Even Europeans aren't immune. And we haven't even begun to talk about other religions.

For all the talk about "Judeo-Christian," Judaism is marginalized, as witness to the Supreme Court's ruling several years back that a Christmas tree is not a religious symbol, kids' sports leagues thinking nothing about scheduling events on Jewish holidays, much less Friday nights and Saturday mornings, and other examples.

Islam? Despite the rush to understanding following 9/11, almost half of Americans still equate Islam with violence. A poll taken last September by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 44 percent of Americans say that Islam is more likely to encourage violence than other religions. (Obviously, Americans know little or nothing about the Crusades, Western Christian Europe's war on the Muslim "infidels," which may have given rise to anti-Westernism more than a thousand years ago.)

What's most chilling about the poll is that instead of listening to what Clarke is saying - that the key to overcoming Middle East terrorism is through understanding of Islam's divides and how to appeal to Muslims who don't believe in the jihadists - we are retreating farther into our shells like turtles. Fewer of us believe we know "some" or "a great deal" about Islam than before the attacks, and fewer people say Islam and their own religion have a lot in common.

Clarke ends his essay with a call to common sense: "We all want to defeat the jihadists. To do that, we need to encourage an active, critical and analytical debate in America about how that will best be done." But the only thing we're seeing is intolerance. A sampling of popular best-selling titles about Islam on Amazon.com includes: Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia  by Ahmed Rashid; Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent; and Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West by Robert Spencer. Confidence is not high.

Contact Ira Lacher here.

The New McGovern?
It's Not Whom You Think

In 1972, George McGovern outmaneuvered a divided Democratic field to emerge as the party nominee to oppose Richard Nixon - and his campaign fell apart following the convention.

There were a number of reasons for this, but perhaps the most important has rarely been examined: The traditional party faithful, especially organized labor who supported center-rightists Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie, turned their back on the antiwar senator from South Dakota, leaving him and his boy-wonder campaign staff to the mercy of Nixon's Southern strategy of bigotry and fear.

Now, jump ahead to last winter and spring, when Howard Dean was exciting progressive Democrats by saying what they were thinking - he opposed America's invasion of Iraq, he opposed corporate terrorism, he would fight for affordable health insurance for all Americans, he was from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Critics from the right of the party bleated, "Don't nominate this guy because he's another McGovern - too far left for his own good - and he'll bring the party down just the way McGovern did 32 years ago."

Well, the bad moon of McGovern is unmistakably rising, only this time it's coming from the right! By moving unmistakably "toward the center," PreDemNom John Kerry is threatening to alienate the energetic, passionate, progressive Democrats who supported Dean, Dennis Kucinich and, yes, Ralph Nader. And to win in November the Democrats simply can't do without that energy and passion.

If the proposed platform handed out to delegates at last weekend's district party conventions is any indication, the Democrats are going to march into the general election campaign forthrightly refusing to repeal the insidious No Child Left Behind legislation that aims to break down resistance to government-endorsed private education; refusing to vastly overhaul NAFTA and stanch the outflow of jobs overseas; refusing to take a strong stand against corporate abuse; refusing to advocate for true and vital environmental reforms; and, of course, refusing to commit to U.S. withdrawal in the shortest possible time from Iraq. All in the name of convincing the vast middle muddle that a Democrat without gumption would be better at running the country than a Republican who has strongly held views, even if they're so far outside the mainstream you have to navigate that tributary by a mule-driven canal boat.

So how does McGovern enter into this? In 1972, it was the vast center, which the Democrats needed desperately to defeat Nixon, that abandoned the South Dakota senator, leaving the president to feast on the "silent majority" that re-elected him by one of the greatest landslides in history. Today, despite right-wing myths to the contrary, the country is much closer politically, as evidenced by the utter skin-of-the-teeth margin in 2000 and polls that indicate a similar result in November. Kerry and the Democratic center-right threatens to alienate progressives at his peril - and that of the nation.

Ralph Nader: The independent presidential hopeful, or, as Kerry Democrats call him, the Presumptive Pain in the Ass, says that the only way to stabilize Iraq is with an international peacekeeping force composed of neutral nations and Islamic countries. "Iraq should be able to sort out [its] issues more easily without the military presence of a U.S. occupying force," he says.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0419-09.htm

Daniel Ellsberg: The Nixon-era Defense Department analyst who released to the New York Times what became known as the Pentagon Papers -- a confidential report that detailed over two decades the U.S. involvement in Vietnam -- predicted the escalating violence in Iraq "will get far worse." He also took issue with John Kerry's plan to perhaps increase involvement, saying, "I want him [Kerry] elected, but I'm not happy with what I'm hearing. ''We must persevere. We can't leave.' I hope that is a campaign promise he [Kerry] will go back on."

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0420-04.htm