Tag: bush

Was Torture the solution?

They were engaged in a desperate attempt to rewrite history — to argue that their methods of “enhanced interrogation” — provided the pivotal information that led to President Obama’s successful apprehension of Osama Bin Laden.

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From Robert, Huff Post:

“Last Sunday a veritable flotilla of neocon former Bush Administration national security officials flooded the zone on the Sunday Morning talk shows. They were engaged in a desperate attempt to rewrite history — to argue that their methods of “enhanced interrogation” — provided the pivotal information that led to President Obama’s successful apprehension of Osama Bin Laden.

Notable “experts” — like former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and former Vice President Dick Cheney argued authoritatively that “enhanced interrogation techniques” had provided the critical information that allowed Obama to find Bin Laden — eight years later.

Even though they behave like they have inside information, it is important to note that all of these former officials are exactly that — former. In 2008 the American voters had the good sense to make them former — since then, none of them has been privy to any thing more than the information that is available to the general public about the factors did or did not result in finding the location of Bin Laden.

That said, the information that is available publicly indicates that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad — the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, did in fact provide the “nickname” of one of Bin Laden’s couriers eight years ago. Khalid Sheik Mohammad (KSM) had in fact been subjected to repeated waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation.” The problem with their theory is that KSM did not divulge this information as a result of this “enhanced interrogation.” Apparently it was divulged many months later as a result of conventional methods. And the “nickname” of the courier was useless until signal intelligence allowed the United States to identify the real name and identity of the actual courier many years later.

In fact, the Obama Administration located Bin Laden because it re-focused substantial intelligence resources on the problem. It did the blocking and tackling of rigorous data analysis and painstaking surveillance. In other words rather than the bull-in-a-china-closet swagger and big talk that we heard from Bush and his team for years, Obama did the hard work necessary to quietly and effectively get the job done. Bush and company had failed miserably.

It’s pretty amazing that anyone would take Cheney and Rumsfeld seriously. Never mind that they diverted most of the government’s security resources away from the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks to their war in Iraq. Never mind that their “enhanced interrogation techniques” were used as the recruiting posters that enlisted thousands of terrorists bent on destroying the United States. Never mind that when they left office America’s prestige and popularity in the world had been squandered and was at an all time low.

Remember that just as in domestic politics, in world politics it matters if you have public support. That is especially true if the Muslim world continues its movement toward more democratic societies.

But in the end, the very fact that a coterie of former high-ranking officials are even making the argument that torture works is an embarrassment to America.

As a country, we need to emerge from this debate having placed the argument that “torture works” outside of the boundaries of acceptable political discourse once and for all.

In considering whether “torture works” the first question is: what do we mean by “works”? Torture has been used for centuries to achieve a variety of goals. It has been used to force subjects to tell what they know, to confess to crimes, to renounce their faith.

There is little question that torture gets a response from its victims. That’s why its practitioners find it “useful.” But that is also what makes its results completely unreliable. It isn’t hard for anyone to imagine that they would say pretty much anything to make the pain stop if they believed they were drowning, or if their joints felt they would break after they had hung by their arms for hours, or if they were repeatedly slammed against the wall, or if they had been left naked and shivering for hours in the cold and periodically showered with cold water, or if they had been confined in a small box for hours with insects. All of these were methods approved by the Bush Justice Department.

These are but the latest innovations in the tradition of ingenious, sadistic methods of inflicting pain and psychological torment. Over the centuries, torturers have invented machines like the rack to gradually tear apart people’s limbs. They have used rubber hoses to beat the bottom of people’s feet to a pulp. They have become adept at removing fingernails, and drilling on teeth without an anesthetic. They have learned to connect the exact amount of electric current a victim’s testicles or nipples in order to inflict maximum pain without ultimately killing the subject. And of course there has always been the ever-popular old-fashioned beating. While these were not on the list of approved methods, they differ only modestly from those on the “approved list.” All inflict excruciating physical or psychological pain.

It is precisely the fact that torture inflicts pain that makes it hard to believe the results of the intelligence that is gathered, or the truthfulness of a confession, or the sincerity of a renunciation of faith. That’s why most professionals who specialize in interrogation reject the reliability of the information gained by torture, and why courts throw out confessions obtained by torture.

That in fact is why we have the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution— to prevent the coerced confessions that were commonplace in 18th Century Europe. Remember, the Fifth Amendment is not just about protecting the rights of the accused. It is also about protecting society from the coerced, false confession that leaves the real criminal on the street…

Can’t the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the “intelligence” that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America? Have we so lost our bearings that we do not realize that each of us could be the hapless Argentine who sat under the Santiago’s sun, so possessed by the evil done to him that he could not stop shivering ?”

emphasis mine

see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/did-torture-work_b_859859.html

Conservatism’s Drown’s to Death in Oil

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George Lakoff

Author, The Political Mind, Moral Politics, Don’t Think of an Elephant! posted: July 16, 2010 09:00 AM

The issue is death –– death gushing at ten thousand pounds per square inch from a mile below the sea, tens of thousands of barrels of death a day. Not just death to eleven human beings. Death to sea birds, sea turtles, dolphins, fish, oyster beds, shrimp, beaches; death to the fishing industry, tourism, jobs; and death to a way of life based on the beauty and bounty of the Gulf.

Many, perhaps a majority, of the Gulf residents affected are conservatives, strong right-wing Republicans, following extremist Governors Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour. What those conservatives are not saying, and may be incapable of seeing, is that conservatism itself is largely responsible for what happened, and that conservatism is a continuing disaster for conservatives who live along the Gulf. Conservatism is an ideology of death.

It was conservative laissez-faire free market ideology — that maximizing profit comes first — that led to:

  • The corrupt relationship between the oil companies and the Interior Department staff that was supposedly regulating them
  • Minimizing cost by not drilling relief wells
  • The principle that oil companies could be responsible their own risk assessments on drilling
  • Maximizing profit by outsourcing risk assessment that told them what they wanted to hear: zero risk!
  • Maximizing profit by minimizing cost of materials
  • Maximizing profit by failing to pay cleanup crews and businesses for their losses
  • Focusing only on profit by failing to test the cleanup methods to be used if something went wrong
  • Minimizing cost by sacrificing the health of cleanup crews, refusing to allow them to use respirator masks to protect against toxic fumes.

It is conservative profit-above-all market fundamentalism that has led other oil companies to mount a massive PR campaign to isolate BP as an anomalous “bad actor” and to argue that offshore drilling should be continued by the self-proclaimed “good actors.” Their PR fails to mention that in Congressional hearings it came out that they all outsource risk assessment to the same company that declared that BP had “zero risk.” The PR fails to mention that they all use cost-benefit analysis to maximize profits just as BP did. Cost-benefit analysis only looks at monetary costs versus benefits, case by case, not at the risk of massive death of the kind gushing out of the Gulf at present. Death, in itself, even at that scale, is not a “cost.” Only an outflow of money is a “cost.” This is what follows from conservative laissez-faire market ideology, an ideology that continues to sanction death on a Gulf scale.

But the facts won’t make a difference to dyed-in the-wool conservatives, since the facts will be filtered through their ideological frames: when the facts don’t fit the frames, the facts will be ignored.

he conservative worldview says man has dominion over nature: nature is there for human monetary profit. Profit is sanctioned over the possibility of massive death and destruction in nature. Conservatives support even more dangerous drilling off the coast of Alaska and are working to repeal the President’s moratorium on deep water drilling. Nature be damned; the oil companies have a right to make money, death or no death.

Directness of causation is a rarely noticed property of the conservative worldview. What are the causes of crime? Bad people, lock ’em up, say conservatives. There are no social or economic causes, that is, systemic causes, in the conservative universe. So it is with the Death Gusher. Blame BP, the “bad actor.” Look for the immediate cause, but don’t look any further, at the profit-above-all system in which all oil companies operate, a system idolized by conservatives. Without an understanding of systemic causes, the causes cited above won’t make much sense.

…

Progressives have been much too kind to conservatives on this matter. They have largely accepted the Bad Actor Frame, criticizing BP but not the whole industry and its practices. No one should be drilling miles under the sea, where oil comes out at 10,000 pounds per square inch. No matter how much profit is involved.

Conservatism gushes death — and not only in the Gulf of Mexico.

see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/conservatisms-death-gushe_b_646488.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=071610&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BlogEntry

emphasis mine

The GOP and demented politics are to Blame

assaulted by what the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz described as a “fantastic proliferation of mass media.”

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A light in the darkness, from Bill Moyers Journal.

In the following interview Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas” and “The Wrecking Crew,” talk about why conservatives can get away with blaming Obama for the past decade of conservative failures.

Bill Moyers: There were hands in the air in Washington this week, but it wasn’t a stickup. The new Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, appointed by Congress to find out how America got rolled, began hearings this week. These four are not the victims of one of the greatest bank heists in history – they’re the perpetrators, bankers so sleek and crafty they got off with the loot in broad daylight, and then sweet talked the government into taxing us to pay it back.

Watching that scene on the opening day of the hearings, it was hard enough to believe that almost a year has passed since Barack Obama raised his hand, too — taking the oath of office to become our 44th President. Even harder to remember what America looked like before Obama, because we’ve also been robbed of memory, assaulted by what the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz described as a “fantastic proliferation of mass media.” We live in a time “characterized by a refusal to remember.” Inconvenient facts simply disappear down the memory hole, as in George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”

President Obama’s made plenty of mistakes during his first year, and we’ve critiqued them frequently here on the JOURNAL, but hardly anyone talks any more about what happened in the years before. He inherited from George W. Bush the biggest financial debacle since the Great Depression, along with two unpopular and costly wars, and a dysfunctional

and demoralized government.

It’s important to remember those years, a time that has been characterized by the historian Thomas Frank, as “A Low, Dishonest Decade.” He’s here to talk about them with me. Thomas Frank is editor of the recently relaunched BAFFLER magazine, a literary journal; a contributing editor of HARPER’S; a weekly columnist for THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; and the author of ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, the bestselling WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? and his latest bestseller, THE WRECKING CREW, now out in paperback. Good to have you back.

THOMAS FRANK: It’s my pleasure, Bill.

BILL MOYERS: How is it that the people who are responsible for the mess that Obama inherited are getting away with demonizing him when he’s only had less than a year to clean it up. Let me show you just a sample of commentators railing against the President.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: President Obama and the Democrats are destroying the US economy. They are purposefully doing it, I believe.

GLENN BECK: This is a well-thought out plan to collapse the economy as we know it.

JONATHAN HOENIG: The president has, I think if you listen to what he says, a hatred for capitalism. Where do jobs come from? They don’t come from the government, they come from the profit seeking self-interest, from what I hear and see, the President never misses an opportunity to smear and [no audio] slap!

RUSH LIMBAUGH: This guy is a coward. He does not have the gonads or the spine to even stand up and accept what he’s doing! All of this is his doing. He cannot even probably say, you should like this — you may not like this, but I’m telling you it’s the best thing for you, it’s the best thing for me. No! He knows it’s a disaster, he has to slough this off, on his previous– or his predecessor, the previous administration.

SEAN HANNITY: It’s his stimulus. It’s his record deficit spending. He quadrupled the debt in a year. You know, how many more are the Democrats going to say, “Well, it’s George Bush’s fault”? This is Obama’s economy now.

BILL MOYERS: What goes through your mind as a historian when you watch that?

THOMAS FRANK: Well, that is America for you. I mean, that is the, sort of the demented logic of our politics. Is that now– Obama’s been President for a year. And he will come before the public in the fall, you know, having to defend all of these terrible things. That’s how our politics works in this country.

BILL MOYERS: But you called it demented. I mean, you know, demented means crazy, mad. Mad and crazy enough to cause us to forget the world before Obama?

THOMAS FRANK: I’ll give you an example what I mean. So, I was on a radio show the other day with a tea party leader, you know, one of these protest leaders. And he seemed like a good guy. But what he did say that struck me was he said he was really against monopoly, you know? And we’re laboring under all these monopolies, all these concentrated powers here in America. And what we need to do is get back to free markets. And then we can do away with that. And it was mind-blowing.

Because if you look back any further than the Obama Administration, since, I mean, 1980 in this country, we have been in the grip of, you know, of this pursuit of ever-purer free markets. That’s what American politics has been about. That’s what has delivered this, you know, the awful circumstances that we find ourselves in today. And to think that that’s what’s missing, that’s what we need to get back to, is–

BILL MOYERS: That’s more than nostalgia. What is that?

THOMAS FRANK: Well, that’s the disease of our time. You know, that sort of instant forgetting.

BILL MOYERS: But what does it do to our politics when the very spokesmen for what some people have called a decade of conservative failure. I mean, remember before Obama, they turned a budget surplus into a deficit. They took us to war on fraudulent pretenses. They borrowed money to fight it. They presided over a stalemate in Afghanistan. They trashed the Constitution. They presided over the weakest economy in decades–

THOMAS FRANK: Not weak for everybody.

BILL MOYERS: No, no.

THOMAS FRANK: Some people did really well.

BILL MOYERS: Okay, they compiled the worst track record on jobs in decades. And they ended up with the worst stock market in decades. I mean, it was a decade of conservative failure. And yet, Obama’s their villain?

THOMAS FRANK: Think of all the crises and the disasters that you’ve described. And I would add to them things like the, what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And the Madoff scandal on Wall Street. And, you know, on and on and on. The Jack Abramoff scandal. The whole sordid career of Tom DeLay.

All of these things that we remember from the last decade. I mean, some of them that we’re forgetting. Like who remembers all the scandals over earmarking, anymore? And who remembers all the scandals over Iraq reconstruction? All that, you know, disastrous, when we would hand it off to a private contractor to rebuild Iraq. And it would, you know, of course, it would fail.

Those things have all sort of been dwarfed by the economic disaster and the wreckage on Wall Street. But I would say to you that all of these things that we’re describing here are of a piece. And that they all flow from the same ideas. And those ideas are the sort of conservative attitude towards government. And conservative attitudes towards governance. Okay?

….

What conservatism in this country is about is government failure. Conservatives talk about government failure all the time, constantly. And conservatives, when they’re in power deliver government failure.

BILL MOYERS: Not merely from incompetence, you say, but from ideology, from philosophy, from a view of the world.

THOMAS FRANK: And sometimes from design.

BILL MOYERS: From design? What do you mean?

THOMAS FRANK: Not always from design, but often. The Department of Labor, for example, the conservatives when they in office, routinely stuff the Department of Labor full of ideological cranks. And people that don’t believe in the mission.

And the result is that it doesn’t– they don’t enforce anything. Towards the very end of the Bush-era, the Department of Labor had been whittled down. It was a shell of its former self. And at the very end of the Bush Administration, one of the government accountability programs did a study of the Department of Labor. And, I’m smiling, because it’s kind of amusing. It was like an old spy magazine prank.

They made up these horrendous labor violations around the country and phoned them in as complaints to the Department of Labor to see what they would do, okay? They responded to one out of ten of these, you know, where they called in as like, “Well, we got, you know, kids working in a meat packing plant during school hours. You know, can you, you going to do anything about that?” “No.” Or you look at something like the Securities and Exchange Commission. These guys are supposed to be regulating, you know, the investment banks, okay? Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, that sort of thing. These guys were so under-funded, and not just under-funded, but you had people in charge of it who didn’t believe in regulating Wall Street.

BILL MOYERS: So, they made the Securities and Exchange Commission a laughing stock, if you will. They really did.

THOMAS FRANK: Right. Well, there’s these horrible stories that came out. Once Bush was out, there was a study done of the SEC, as well. These people didn’t even have like their own functioning photocopiers, okay? So, we’re talking about the lawyers that are supposed to be protecting us from Wall Street. And they have to go stand in line at Kinko’s to do their own photocopying. And they’re going up against the best paid, you know, best educated lawyers on planet Earth, who represent the investment banks. And they’re supposed to be defending us.

BILL MOYERS: The curious thing about this is that you and I and my audience knows that our ancestors believed that capitalism needed to be supervised. But when the conservatives came to power, they begin to muzzle the watchdog.

THOMAS FRANK: Yeah. Well, or you know, do away with it altogether, de-fund it. Look, the beginning in the 1980s, President Reagan came to office and came to power, and you remember the kind of rhetoric that he used to use in denouncing the Federal workforce. He hated the Federal workforce. And this is an article of faith among conservatives.

There’s something called the pay gap that they used to talk about a lot in Washington, D.C. Which is, back in the ’50s, ’60s, and up into the 1970s, Federal workers were paid a comparable amount to what people in the private sector earned. Okay? So, if you’re a lawyer working for the government, you got about as much as a lawyer working in the private sector.

Not as much, because government benefits are considered to be much better. Okay. Under Reagan, you had this huge gap open up between Federal workers and the private sector. I asked around. And I found out a government attorney makes $140,000 a year on retirement. After he’s been there all his life. In the private sector law firm in Washington, you’d be making $160,000 starting salary. That’s first year. Right out of law school.

BILL MOYERS: So what’s the consequence of this pay gap you described? Or, do we get inferior government because of it?

THOMAS FRANK: Absolutely. It keeps the best and the brightest out of government service, unless you’re really dedicated to a cause.

But let me go one step further with this, Bill. When I say this is done by design, I’m not exaggerating. And this is one of the more surprising things that I found when I was doing the research for “The Wrecking Crew,” is that there’s a whole conservative literature on why you want second-rate people in government, or third-rate.

THOMAS FRANK: Yes. And we can summarize that very briefly. That the market is the, you know, is the universal principle of human civilization. And that government is a kind of interloper, if not a, you know, criminal gang. And getting in the way.

BILL MOYERS: But we saw with this collapse and this bailout, we saw the failure of that.

THOMAS FRANK: Of course.

BILL MOYERS: And yet there’s no sense of contrition. What’s amazing to me, and you wrote this, that the very people who brought us this decade of conservative failures, the party of Palin, Beck, Hannity, Abramoff, Rove, DeLay, Kristol, O’Reilly, just might stage a comeback.

THOMAS FRANK: I think they might. I think there’s a very strong chance of that.

BILL MOYERS: After only 11 months out of power, because of the record. I mean–

THOMAS FRANK: Look, well, the stuff–

BILL MOYERS: –it’s crazy.

THOMAS FRANK: –the stuff we’ve been talking about here today. The stuff in “The Wrecking Crew,” that’s all forgotten. The financial crisis had that effect of– that stuff is now off the– down the memory hole.

BILL MOYERS: Do you really think they believe that unfettered capitalism, unregulated markets, will deliver an ideal democracy and prosperity for everybody?

THOMAS FRANK: No, I don’t. I think that they believe that, and to some degree, they’re sincere in that belief. But the conservative movement in Washington, I’m not talking about grassroots voters in Kansas here. I’m talking about the conservative movement in Washington. And the whole constellation of think tanks and lobby shops and not-for-profits. And, you know, newspapers and fundraisers and all of this stuff.

They believe this is an industry, okay? This is an industry that churns out this product. And one of the things that, I mean, it’s one of the things that they’re doing now is they excommunicate George W. Bush, deeply unpopular, so therefore, not a true conservative, right? So, that way they get to start over fresh. The problem with George W. Bush, the reason we’re in such a deep hole is that we never went far enough.

As Tom DeLay has said, in his newspaper column, and I’m paraphrasing here. The problem with conservatism isn’t that it was tried and failed. It’s that it never really got– we never really tried it in the first place. So, what we have to do — and I’ve heard, conservatives have said this. “What we have to do is go back and deregulate all the way. We have to, you know, slash government. We have to tear that thing down. That’s what it’s all about.”

And the amazing thing about this. This allows them to represent themselves as dissidents against the sort of established order in Washington. Even though they ran the established order for years and years and years and years.

BILL MOYERS: Here’s something else that’s bizarre to me. And I wonder what you think about it, as a historian. I mean, right after the failed terrorist threat of Christmas, Obama’s critics went to work scrubbing what happened when the Bush White House was out to lunch in the weeks and days leading up to 9/11.

I mean, you know, there were terrorists sneaking into the country. There were warnings from the intelligence community about something– an attack on an American city coming. And that’s all been flushed down the memory hole. Giuliani goes on the air and says, “We didn’t have any terrorist attacks when Bush was President.”

THOMAS FRANK: Yeah, and that’s another– we also forget the anthrax episode which happened right after 9/11. Look, this is not an argument that I have made. That other people have– that all of these things need to be added to the list of government failures. And if you want to talk why does government fail? You know, there’s two answers out there.

One is the conservative answer. Government fails because that’s the nature of government to fail. And if you want to look a little bit deeper, you know, why does government fail? Because government has been systematically destroyed. When we, whether you’re talking about the, you know, the pay gap and making– deliberately making government an unattractive career option. Or you’re talking about outsourcing.

This is another conservative strategy for dealing with the state. If you hate and despise government employees. And you understand them as, you know, unbelievable human wickedness, right? What do you do about them? Well, the answer’s obvious. And at the same time, you believe in the market. You believe that private industry does everything better. You outsource the Federal workforce.

BILL MOYERS: Have we reached a stage where you make things bad enough that people despair and then you manipulate their despair into– to your own advantage in the next election?

THOMAS FRANK: It’s a cynical town, Washington, D.C. And the conservative movement tends to be deeply, deeply, deeply cynical about government. Now, it’s also, I mean, deeply idealistic about the market. I mean, the market can do no wrong, almost by definition. But government they regard as a criminal gang. I mean, many, many conservatives have compared– oh, they always do, compare government to criminals. All the time.

Taxation is a form of theft. It’s as bad as a mugger in the street saying, “Give me your money.” And America is pretty much unique among the nations in that our political system, half of our political system is basically dedicated to the destruction of the government from within. I don’t know any other country where that’s the case. But there’s plenty of countries where government works really, really well. I mean, even, for God’s sake, in India, you know, which we don’t think of as being an advanced industrial society, their banks didn’t all go bust in the latest downturn. Now, why is that?

Because their equivalent of the Federal Reserve was not, you know, deregulating, stopping enforcement. They weren’t doing any of those things. They were keeping a very tight lid on it. Government can work. It works all the time.

BILL MOYERS: You wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Let me ask you to broaden that canvas and ask, with the answer to the question, what’s the matter with America that we tolerate all of this?

THOMAS FRANK: I think a large part of it is that– well, it’s the chronic historical forgetting, you know? We just elected Barack Obama in this– you know, he had quite a mandate. You know, biggest majority of any President since Reagan. And now a year later, and the public is already turning on him. And that’s a part of the problem.

But, you know, another part of it is that the conservative argument about government and freedom is very compelling when they say that something like, you know, the national, you know, any proposal for a national health program is a violation of our freedom. Americans don’t like to hear that their freedom is being violated. That is a hot button argument. Now, the obvious– look, there’s an obvious response that Democrats could make. Which is no, this is a way of growing our freedom. This will actually expand human freedom, not limit it. They never say that.

BILL MOYERS: Why? So, part of the problem with America is the Democratic Party?

THOMAS FRANK: A huge part of the problem, because look, the conservatives have for decades now made their– the whole point of their party is to attack government, attack the state, encourage cynicism about government. And then wreck it when they’re in charge, right?

Democrats never defend the state. They never come out and say, “No, no. It’s important to have, you know, government. It’s important to have a Department of Labor. These are, you know, having government actually– a good government increases your freedom. It doesn’t ruin it.” They never fight back consistently.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

THOMAS FRANK: I think they’re– some of them do. You’ve got members of Congress here and there that do. But by and large, the prominent leading Democrats in our society don’t do that. Why is that? Because I think that would get them in trouble with their funders. I mean, the power of money is huge in the political system. You know, despite all the efforts that have been made over the years to get money out of politics. It’s still immensely powerful.

BILL MOYERS: The book is Thomas Frank, “The Wrecking Crew.” The literary journal is “The Baffler.” Congratulations on both of them. And thanks for being with me on the Journal.

THOMAS FRANK: It was my pleasure.

Bill Moyers is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.

© 2010 Bill Moyers Journal All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145249/

see: http://www.alternet.org/story/145249/bill_moyers_%26_thomas_frank%3A_how_america%27s_demented_politics_let_the_gop_off_the_hook_for_their_giant_mess

Why do (some) Christians LOVE War?

There are no “blessed wars”. Yet virtually all evangelical, conservative and many mainstream church leaders were active supporters of the Bush wars.

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From Alternet: (By Gary G. Kohls, Consortium News)

“There are no “blessed wars”. Yet virtually all evangelical, conservative and many mainstream church leaders were active supporters of the Bush wars.When Gulf War I ended (during George Bush the Elder’s presidency), General Norman Schwartzkopf, the field commander, triumphantly proclaimed, “God must have been on our side!”

Such statements aren’t unusual for glory-seeking dictators, kings, princes, presidents and generals, regardless of what religion justified their particular war, but I cringed when I heard this self-professed Christian warrior claim God’s blessings on the war that made him famous.

I cringed when I heard Schwartzkopf claim God’s blessings on the carnage that he helped orchestrate because similar claims have been used to rationalize killing throughout history, from ancient times to some of the darkest days of the modern era.  Jesus’s God would not be on the side of the war-makers, but on the side of the peacemakers, the compassionate and long-suffering ones who work to prevent killing and to relieve the suffering of the victims of war.

As the German Nazis went about their systematic purging of any and all leftist or anti-fascist groups – Jews, socialists, homosexuals, liberals, communists, trade unionists and conscientious objectors to war – they insisted that God was on their side, too.

Adolf Hitler claimed that he was doing God’s will. German soldiers, both in WWI and WWII, went into battle with the words “Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us) inscribed on their belt buckles….

Though Hitler’s Nazi regime represented an exceptional form of horror in the industrialized slaughter committed during the Holocaust and related mass killings, it must be acknowledged that other countries, including the United States, have undertaken actions that have destroyed other populations and cultures, often with the blessings of religious leaders.

In the last two decades, the two Bush administrations mounted wars in the Persian Gulf region that had the consent (or acquiescence) of the majority of U.S. church leaders, with prayers from Billy Graham in the White House the night before the invasions began.

Virtually all Christian evangelical, conservative and many mainstream church leaders and their congregations were active supporters of the Bush wars.

Only four American Catholic bishops voted in opposition to Bush the Elder’s Gulf War I (at an annual conference of U.S. Catholic bishops). In Gulf War II, Pope John Paul II declared that the war was contrary to the teachings of Jesus, but most American Catholic leaders and parishioners ignored the pontiff’s warnings and supported the war. Most American Protestants did the same.

Yet, General Schwartzkopf and both Presidents Bush are in “good” company when it comes to believing that God is on their side in war. All U.S. presidents and presidential candidates in recent memory, even President Obama, end their speeches with “May God Bless the United States of America,” the equivalent of the German military’s “Gott Mit Uns.”  …

A major unasked question is “what should be the role of religion (specifically Christianity) in the starting and perpetuation of politically motivated wars?”

If war-makers mix religion and politics by invoking God’s blessings on the cannons and the cannon fodder, shouldn’t the churches, which are supposed to be the consciences of the nation, apply core Christian ethical principles to the war question and refuse to cooperate with the slaughter of fellow children of God?

(N.B.: What are “core Christian Ethics”?)

Sadly, for the past 1,700 years, Christian churches have not done so. They have largely failed in their moral obligation to teach and live the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount.

(N.B.: The “Golden Rule” is older that Christ – see Lao Tzu, for example.)

One only has to read the gruesome history of the many “holy wars” and atrocities committed in the history of Christendom, including the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the wars of the Reformation and counter-Reformation, the various genocides including the Nazi Holocaust…

Recall how, when military spokesmen try to explain away the deaths of non-combatants in these wars, they invoke the term “collateral damage” (the euphemism for the unintended killing and maiming of innocents in wartime) and quickly dismiss those deaths by spouting the unconvincing phrase that Schwartzkopf and all other apologists for war use: “we regret the loss of innocent life.”

And they piously mouth these equally insincere words: “our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims.” The same rote phraseology too often comes from the lips of religious leaders…

How can the legalized mass slaughter of war, often progressing to the point of genocide, be a part of a Christian tradition that started out with a small group of inspired, oppressed and impoverished peasants who were trying to live by the highly ethical, nonviolent teachings of their pacifist leader?

Interestingly, the active pacifism of the early Christian church did prove to be successful – and even practical. During the first few centuries of Christianity, enmity and eye-for-an-eye retaliation were rejected. The Golden Rule and the refusal to kill the enemy were actually taught in the church.

Gospel non-violence was the norm, so the professed enemies of those communities of faith were not provoked to retaliation because there was nothing against which to retaliate. Rather, enemies were befriended, prayed for, fed, nourished and embraced as neighbors – potential friends who needed understanding and mercy.

The church survived the persecutions of those early years and thrived, largely because of its commitment to the nonviolence of Jesus. It was not until the church was co-opted by the Emperor Constantine in the early 4th Century that power and wealth changed the priorities of church leaders.

Today, American Christianity is at risk of going the way of the pro-war “Christianity” of pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany, which may in the long run discredit the faith much the way Christianity lost credibility among many Germans because their churches and church leaders facilitated those destructive wars.

The vast majority of Germans before World War II were baptized members of a Christian church, but since WWII ended church membership has fallen sharply and the number of Germans attending weekly worship services is now estimated to be in the single digits.

The psychological and spiritual wounding of the soldiers and their families in the two world wars stripped the German churches of their moral standing….The world would have been far better off if the Christian leaders of the world had been faithful to the ethical teachings of the gospels and quit making blasphemous appeals to God on behalf of war, whether with those “Gott Mit Uns” belt buckles or the “God Bless America” political sloganeering.”

Emphasis and notes mine.

see: http://www.alternet.org/story/144818/jesus_hated_war_–_why_do_christians_love_it_so_much

We can learn from Judah the Maccabee

chasdarwin1 Comment

Aaron Zelinski, HuffPost:

“Tonight is the first night of Chanukah. Modern celebrants (including Senator Hatch) focus on the miracle of the Menorah, which tradition tells us stayed lit for eight days on a single day’s oil. However, Chanukah is also the political story of a few determined Maccabees leading an uprising against the much stronger Seleucid Empire.

Though the events Chanukah commemorates took place over 2,000 years ago, the historical story of the Maccabees provides useful lessons for our modern era. From the Seleucids, we see how not to fight a guerrilla insurgency. From the Maccabees, we learn how to rally a people and a nation.

Here are Chanukah’s five geopolitical lessons:

1) Corrupt governments propped up by outsiders are inherently unstable. …Massive military force cannot prop up a deeply corrupt regime indefinitely. If we want to end the insurgency, we must clean up the corruption.”

2) Insurgencies feed off charismatic leaders…In the modern fight against terrorism, the United States should not create figures like Judah, charismatic leaders for the other side to rally around. President George W. Bush did exactly the opposite: He promoted the cult of Bin Laden after September 11th, focusing the world’s attention on one man who was wanted “Dead or Alive.” Such pronouncements give guerilla insurgencies a guiding symbol.

3) Rebuilding symbolic structures matters… The literal meaning of Chanukah is “rededication.”

4) Israel was an independent state when much of Europe was untamed wilderness. The modern State of Israel is not a post-Holocaust reparation to the Jewish people, but rather the restoration of an ancient independent state of the Jewish people.

5) The world marches on…For us, even as we confront difficult decisions in Afghanistan and Iraq, we must not lose sight of the broader political ebbs and flows of the world.”


The Brownshirts are back – where is HUAC when we need it?

insurance industry funded fascism.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Perhaps HUAC should come back and investigate these folks…

Insurance industry funded fascism, from Frank Schaeffer, alternet: ” The Republican Old Guard are in the fix an atheist would be in if Jesus showed up and raised his mother from the dead: Their world view has just been shattered. Obama’s election has driven them over the edge. Consider Former Congressman Dick Armey. Several far right foundations and the multitrillion dollar health-insurance industry have teamed up with him  to organize the far right foot soldiers of the Republican Party to  intimidate people speaking on behalf of health-care reform.  They are using my old shock troops — given many of these folks were first energized by the Evangelical pro-life movement that my late father and I started in the 1970s. What we did to clinics they are now doing to congressmen and others speaking out for health care reform.

Having failed at the ballot box, having watched their Fox News-organized “tea parties” fizzle the intimidation tactics which the Republicans have embraced are being used in a well-financed, top-down orchestrated fake grass roots campaign by corporate interests to try and protect  the profits of the insurance business. Armey’s FreedomWorks is  organizing against health care reform. Armey’s lobbying firm represents pharmaceutical companies including Bristol-Myers Squibb. Armey’s lobbying firm also represents the trade group for the life insurance industry.  FreedomWorks is supporting the status quo at all costs. (They are also fans of fossil fuels. Armey’s lobbying firm represents Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the UAE, on energy related issues.)…I think I know what happened to him, Gingrich and the rest: They can’t compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can’t reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don’t run the country any more — and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the “other” into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court… for them this is the Apocalypse.

The last presidential election (to paraphrase Bart Simpson)  “broke their brains.” What else could explain their embrace of intimidation — rather than discourse — over the health care debate and such unsavory moments of madness as the Republicans accusing Obama and Judge Sonia Sotomayor of racism, knowing full well that they’d just destroyed their chances with the Hispanic community forever?…Dick Army and company have been driven mad by their reversal, not just of political fortunes but of seeing that they’ve wasted their lives. They now know they were wrong: about the country, the free market, war for fun and profit, and what the American people really want. They made their best case and were rejected by the American people —  and by history. Bush was their man and he turned out to be a fool. So now all the the Republican gurus have left is what the defeated Germans of World War Two had: a scorched earth policy. If they can’t win then everyone must go down. Obama must fail! The country must fail!…A barrage of outright lies, wherein the Democrats are being accused of wanting to launch a massive euthanasia program against the elderly, free abortions for everyone, and “a government takeover” of health-care is now being combined with physical intimidation that in several cases has required police escorts to protect pro health-care reform speakers… It’s time that this whole shabby (and insane) business be exposed, vilified in run out of town on a rail by whatever responsible Republicans — if any — that are still in the party and who want to see the fortunes of their party revived. Republican leaders taking insurance industry money via lobbying firms and using it to organize what amounts to roving bands of thugs not only need to be exposed but thrown out of the public debate forever.  They should become absolute pariahs.

It’s time to give this garbage in name: insurance industry funded fascism.”

N.B.: Frank Schaeffer – and his father Francis – was a right wing “pro life”zealot”.

Emphasis mine.

see: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/141833/right-wing_turncoat_gives_the_inside_scoop_on_why_conservatives_are_rampaging_town_halls/



Did the neocons ‘ protect’ us from attacks?

chasdarwinLeave a comment

One hears the Bush apologists state:  ” They ‘ saved’ us from attacks for nearly 8 years”.

Is this true?  To verify that statement, one must, of course, provide cause/effect data that the policies of that administration prevented attacks, such as the one against the Pentagon and other sites on 11 Sep 2001.

One might ask: ” What would the Bush administration have done if the US mainland been attacked again?”  Such an attack would have given them the opportunity and justification to do more of the same that they did after 9/11: increase military spending, and reduce civil and human rights.  That being the case, they would have seen such an attack as benificial, and therefore were not motivated to prevent same.

N.B.: Under the Clinton administration, there were 7 years and 11 months with out a terrorist attack; under the Bush/Cheney administration, 7 years and 4 months.

N.B.: The Bush admininistration did not protect us from the first terrorist any more than they did New Orleans from Katrina: the schrub saw a warning in a PDB  more than a month in advance and ignored it.

To JUST which mission where you referring?

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Greg Michell, author of Why Obama Won, writes in Huffpost:

On May 1, 2003, Richard Perle advised, in aUSA Today Op-Ed, “Relax, Celebrate Victory.” The same day, exactly six years ago, President Bush, dressed in a flight suit, landed on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and declared an end to major military operations in Iraq — with the NOW-INFAMOUS  “Mission Accomplished” banner arrayed behind him in the war’s greatest photo op.

Chris Matthews on MSNBC called Bush a “hero” and boomed, “He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics.” He added: “Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It’s simple.”

PBS’ Gwen Ifill said Bush was “part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan.” On NBC, Brian Williams gushed, “The pictures were beautiful. It was quite something to see the first-ever American president on a — on a carrier landing.”

Bob Schieffer on CBS said: “As far as I’m concerned, that was one of the great pictures of all time.” His guest, Joe Klein, responded: “Well, that was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day. That was the first thing that came to mind for me.”

Everyone agreed the Democrats and antiwar critics were now on the run…”

not ME!

more:

By Elisabeth Bumiller


WASHINGTON, May 1–President Bush’s made-for-television address tonight on the carrier Abraham Lincoln was a powerful, Reaganesque finale to a six-week war. But beneath the golden images of a president steaming home with his troops toward the California coast lay the cold political and military realities that drove Mr. Bush’s advisors to create the moment.

The president declared an end to major combat operations, White House, Pentagon and State Department officials said, for three crucial reasons: to signify the shift of American soldiers from the role of conquerors to police, to open the way for aid from countries that refused to help militarily, and–above all–to signal to voters that Mr. Bush is shifting his focus from Baghdad to concerns at home.

”This is the formalization that tells everybody we’re not engaged in combat anymore, we’re prepared for getting out,” a senior administration official said.

***
By Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt

BAGHDAD, May 2–The Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall, senior allied officials said today.”

Which is why I read HuffPost before the NY Times…

 

seehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/on-6th-anniversary-of-mis_b_194452.html

Who is crying now?

chasdarwinLeave a comment

That may sound like a 1950’s pop song (slow dancing…), but in this case it describes the GOP talking about spending deficits.

Bernie Horn, of The Campaign for America’s future, writes in Truthout:”Here it comes – an avalanche of misleading and mistaken “facts” about President Obama’s budget.

Last week, the House and Senate Budget Committees approved versions of the fiscal 2010 budget resolution, working from an extraordinary proposal by Barack Obama. The House version is fairly close to what the President proposed, while the Senate bill is a bit different – but still 98 percent of what the President requested. This week, the budget will come to the floor of the House and Senate, including votes on a series of amendments to slash or weaken progressive programs… The mud of fabrication and misinformation is so deep, we’ll have to peel it off in layers.

Huge Hypocrisy

First and foremost, conservatives are being supremely hypocritical about deficits and debt because their deficits caused the current national debt. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich and profligate military spending tripled the national debt. George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and war spending doubled the national debt. In fact, nearly 80 percent of the current debt – about which conservatives now bitterly complain – was caused by the three most recent conservative presidents: Reagan, Bush Senior, and Bush Junior.

Adding insult to injury, Republican budgets have been notorious for containing gimmicks designed to hide the full extent of their irresponsibility – the most egregious was funding the Iraq war with special appropriations outside of the budget.

This year, President Obama changed all that. His budget described a comprehensive plan covering 10 years. It included contingency funds that may or may not have to be spent. It was, quite simply, the most honest budget ever…three big lies about revenues. Obama is not “proposing the largest tax increase in history.” He is proposing to restore a measure of tax fairness by letting George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich expire next year. He is proposing to return to the tax policies that were in place during America’s great economic expansion of the late 1990s. Under the Obama program, only the rich will see their taxes increase – those with incomes over $250,000 per year. For all the rest of us, our tax rates will decline. In fact, Obama’s plan will deliver the largest middle-class tax cut in history.     Similarly, Obama’s plan is not “aimed at taxing small-business people.” This talking point is based on a fictional definition of a small businessperson invented by the Bush Administration… And I’ll bet you’re wondering, what is this “massive new national sales tax on your electric bill”? There is none. This is right-wing framing for the “cap-and-trade” system that experts insist is the only practical way to get a handle on global warming. This system forces companies to pay for their pollution, thereby encouraging clean, green technologies.

So to review the conservative tax trickery, the truth is that Obama’s budget delivers a substantial tax cut to 95 percent of Americans. The only ones who will see their taxes increase are the wealthy – and the corporate polluters!… If we spend to build the American economy, long-term deficits will go down. If we don’t spend, the recession will linger and deficits will skyrocket. It’s as simple as that.

And that brings us to the false argument that cutting the current budget is good for “our children.” If we don’t invest in our nation’s infrastructure, if we don’t restructure the pathetic economy handed down to us by George W. Bush and his conservative allies, if we don’t create a sustainable health care system, if we don’t take necessary steps to achieve energy independence and fight global warming – then we will be placing a terrible burden on our children. For them, and for us, we’ve got to change course, now….No doubt the GOP will offer one or more alternative budgets on the House and Senate floors later this week. No doubt they will be just like the alternative Republican stimulus packages in February – full of tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the rest of us.

The bottom line is: Conservatives caused this mess and now are running away from any responsibility for cleaning it up.”

——-

The writer is a Senior Fellow at Campaign for America’s Future and author of the recent book, “Framing the Future: How Progressive Values Can Win Elections and Influence People.”

see: http://www.truthout.org/033109R

There is a chance that the worst is over…

Today, stocks are up roughly 20 percent in the past two weeks, the biggest such short-term rally since 1938

chasdarwinLeave a comment

“In October, all three asset classes — stocks, bonds and commodities such as oil and farm products — were in freefall. Today, stocks are up roughly 20 percent in the past two weeks, the biggest such short-term rally since 1938.” 

Biggest short term rally since 1938?

From McClatchy: “WASHINGTON — With the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising around 20 percent over the past few weeks, a down Friday notwithstanding, the question on many lips is whether the stock market has hit bottom and, if so, when might the broader economy follow?

Stock prices often reflect expectations of how the economy will be faring six months or so into the future. If the recent rise in stock prices reflects that the market has bottomed out and is starting a bull run — as some prominent analysts tentatively suggest — that would point to a turnaround for the economy by late summer or early fall.

Few analysts are willing to declare that we’ve hit bottom without hedging, especially since there’s been plenty of premature speculation before about a market bottom during the past 16 months of recession. As if to mock the budding optimism, the Dow closed down Friday by 148.38 points to 7,776.18.

Most analysts now agree, however, that there are some encouraging shafts of light after months of pitch-black news.

“The best news now is that despite the worst . . . daily litany of horrible news, the strongest renewed bank fears, despite all of that, we’ve got stocks today essentially where they were in October,” said James Paulsen, chief investment strategist for Wells Capital Management, owned by the giant bank Wells Fargo.”

see: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/64992.html