On the Contrary

Frank Rich in “Why Wouldn’t the Tea Party Shut it Down?”:

“The real goal is to reward the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons by crippling what remains of organized labor, by wrecking the government agencies charged with regulating and policing corporations, and, as always, by rewarding the wealthiest with more tax breaks. The bankrupt moral equation codified in the Bush era — that tax cuts tilted to the highest bracket were a higher priority even than paying for two wars — is now a given. The once-bedrock American values of shared sacrifice and equal economic opportunity have been overrun.”

Middle class Republicans have to be brain dead to ignore these obvious realities at this point.  How do they continue to vote to disenfranchise themselves?  Willful Blindness-Ignoring inconvenient truths, willfully, that are right in front of our eyes.

Well the chattering class was at it again and it was all non sequitur.   The chattering class are those that follow and make a living tracking the inside the beltway political bantering.  Neither the chattering class nor the politicians they chatter about seem relevant to our problems anymore.  The number of people who think we are on the wrong path keeps growing while this sideshow goes on and we are all becoming more aware of the irrelevancy of our political process.  I started to write this blog several years ago to address the illogical statements or failed ideas being replayed, but the discussion has become so irrational and irrelevant that it is not about who has the right approach, but who is less relevant.  If you question that, I suggest you listen to David Stockman, Regan’s Budget Director, on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN  Sunday morning.  From the Republican side of the house, he points out the insanity of where we are, the irrationality of the present Republican Party, and the failure of our President to lead.  Those in Washington are jousting at windmills while the nation faces the real enemy, the lack of leadership and moral courage to face our future honestly.

Here, I think, is something we can agree on:  In order to prosper we need a modern infrastructure to support commerce, a well educated and healthy workforce, and an economy that is geared to world competition that benefits everyone.  Thomas Friedman, in his op-ed piece this morning, Got to Get This Right, said basically the same thing.  In order to get there, we need some some real  leadership that is ready to leave this ideological and counterproductive debate behind and do the obvious.  So far that leadership is not evident.

Right now the Republicans are recycling their small government, low taxes, and unregulated market place that has gotten us to this point in the disaster our country is becoming.  True government isn’t smaller, but it is less effective, which in effect makes it smaller.  Their activated right wing, the Tea Party, is offering absolute drivel that will just make things worse as they wish to be back in the 19^th century.  The Democrats have spent so much time leaning to the right to stay in power, that they have no backbone anymore to stand for anything.  From Frank Rich’s point of view in his op-ed Sunday morning,  Congress is never going to solve our problem since they are in fact, Still the Best Congress Money can Buy.   The President lacks either the moral fortitude, or a basic understanding of what he stands for or what needs to be done, to lead the nation.  He has made it abundantly clear that he cannot stand up and lead the nation to face our difficult future and make the tough decisions that need to be made.

What we need to do is not rocket science.  I think Tom Friedman has it exactly right.  We have to embrace the two commissions’ reports on dealing with the deficit.  In this case we can then debate the differences, but at least we are on the right track.  We will need to raise some taxes and cut others.  We will have to cut some programs, and invest in others.  That is a road map forward and a real discussion we should be having.  Instead we have politics as usual: hate immigrants, deny their children education that benefits all of us, tax cuts for the rich or a compromise to nowhere, ignoring our crumbling infrastructure, watch the states slash their education budgets, gay bashing, denying an extension of unemployment benefits (which benefit the economy), denying the START treaty, continuing a useless war in Afghanistan, and it goes on and on.  We are totally out o f control with no rational hand on the rudder.

So who is going to step up and lead us?  Who is going to layout “an integrated plan for nation-building at home that includes not only more spending but hard choices”?  Certainly it isn’t our President who has shown he just does not get it and everything he does is planned around politics instead of the good of the country.  Certainly not our Congress who is captured by moneyed interests that do not want to see changes to their profiteering.  I think we are at the great crossroad in our national history.  Someone has to step up and lead this nation.  This and the failure of President Obama is why many of us are looking elsewhere for leadership.   Most Americans get it.  So just how are we going to take back Washington and reinvigorate our government?  I just don’t know but it is the only way forward if we are not going to continue our slide into the also ran category.

Well, I watched all the news shows Sunday and read all the editorials including Paul Krugman this morning and I think we are headed for a big crash.  But then I didn’t think the Giants had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting to the World Series and I was proven wrong by a scrappy team that showed some real spunk winning the big game in the lions den.  Maybe the Democrats will do the same.  But there were some pearls of wisdom out there and I will try to capture them.

Meet the Press proved to provide some insight into our problems and misunderstandings.  A.J. Dionne fairly well summed up the Democrats shortcomings when he pointed out that those that are surging are running not only on what they accomplished, but what they hope to do in the future.  As he put it, it is not enough to point out the other guy is loony, but what is the plan forward.  This approach has a real downside for the Republicans because they have no plan.

One of the things that was truly bothering me was Harold Ford, who mostly agreed with A.J., but said that he thought the Democrats would keep the Senate, but lose the House, and that President Obama and the Democrats should be more “accommodating”.  He exact words were “push the reset button and be more accommodating.”  Well I could agree with pushing the reset button, but accommodating is what they were and is why their policies were too small.  As I have said before in this blog, accommodating with failure is not an option.  Republicans weren’t in the mood to negotiate and the next crop will be worse.  So by all means lets push the reset button, and then let’s go down fighting for what is right and will work, not what might get passed and then fail abysmally (see Paul Krugman below).

I actually agreed with the Republicans on the show, at least in part.  They wanted to see the nation face the sacrifices needed to deal with the deficit by letting the tax cuts expire for everyone which I think is a fine idea.  They also wanted a real discussion about cutting government where the real spending is.  But they saw no role for government in stimulating the economy and I guess all those Americans out of a job and losing their homes is okay with them when the real culprits are the bankers.  At least this crew of Republicans were real conservatives and were not offering tax cuts and balanced budgets understanding that these two together are an oxymoron.

Frank Rich had an enlightening editorial on Sunday (What Happened to Change We can Believe In)  and he put his finger on what I think angers most Americans with the Democrats.  Well there is the obvious fact that economy is not getting better so you could draw the false conclusion, failed policies.  But he identified the real thorn and that was that Wall Street and the Bankers got off scot-free.  To sum up, the average American is suffering and these guys are earning record profits.  Obama certainly prevented a catastrophe, but when it came to righting the ship, all the mutineers walked.  Same can be said for the bankers and the latest mortgage fiasco and once again the Administration appears to be operating as business as usual.  When it comes to finding culprits, the Administration is a coward.  I could extend this to the Iraq war, our treatment of detainees, and the loss of our privacy, but that is for another day.  The point Frank was making was Americans see business as usual and they may just vote for fruit loops if it will bring them change, any change.

But the way forward looks bleak if the Republicans gain power and that was demonstrated in three op-eds.  Paul Krugman this morning in his op-ed in the New York Times, Falling into the Chasm, made the point that the pundits are arriving at the conclusion that the Obama policies failed when in fact what history tells us is that they were the right policies, just way too small.  We are in this mess because we failed to learn from history that tells us that unemployment will take a long time to recover, and the policies put in place by the Obama administration were anemic.  Even sadder is that the Republicans who will gain by this failure of leadership have policies that will only make things worse.

Thomas Friedman, in The Election that Wasn’t, laid out what we need to do.  To wit, “In the short run, we’ll probably need more stimulus to get the economy moving again so people have the confidence to buy and invest. Ultimately, though, good jobs at scale come only when we create more products and services that make people’s lives more healthy, more productive, more secure, more comfortable or more entertained — and then sell them to more people around the world. And in a global economy, we have to create those products and services with a work force that is so well trained and productive that it can leverage modern technology so that one American can do the work of 20 Chinese and, therefore, get paid the same as 20 Chinese. There is no other way.”  He concluded with, “Government’s job is to help inspire, educate, enable and protect that work force. This election should have been about how.”  Once again it would seem that we are about to elect people who believe just the opposite.

Finally I could not leave out Maureen Dowd’s Supremely Bad Judgment.  She describes how the whack job, Ginni Thomas, reopened the whole Clarence Thomas sex addict thing, with corroborating evidence from one of Thomas’s girl friends and had we known this, we would not have this conservative nut job on the Supreme Court.  Remember all the Republicans who lied through their teeth defending him with their moral outrage?  How could Anita Hill stand before them and tarnish their righteous Clarence by having the audacity to tell the truth?  But the bigger conclusion is that we now have a Supreme Court that is populated by very conservative political operatives and the Citizens United decision is just the tip of the iceberg.  This is what conservative ideology will bring you, the final breakdown of the separation of powers and a complete loss of respect for the independence of the Supreme Court.  Remember Gore versus Bush?

So I would say the reality has been laid out for us.  We know what Democrats need to do to recover in the last week.  We know what they need to do if they hold on to power, and we know what we are going to get if they fail.  Does any of that make any difference?  Only if the rest of you get out and vote.  And oh by the way, call your kids and make sure they get their friends out also.  Otherwise we are going to be the United States of Corporations.

With the Democrats telling me to quit whining and the Republicans being the party of the status quo, I am wondering who represents me and a large number of Americans who are looking for real change.  There were two op-eds last Sunday that I think really told us where we are in American politics today.  They were The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O’Donnell by Frank Rich, and Third Party Rising by Thomas Friedman.

In The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O’Donnell, Frank makes the point that the Tea Party is not really a third party at all, but a tool of corporations (follow the money) to see that nothing changes.  What Christine O’Donnell’s lunatic campaign provides the Republicans is cover that they represent the common man and Christine O’Donnell is as common as you get with her failure to pay her mortgage, hold a job, or even be truthful about having an education.  As Frank put it, “She gives populist cover to the billionaires and corporate interests that have been steadily annexing the Tea Party movement and busily plotting to cash in their chips if the G.O.P. prevails.”  Clearly the Tea Party offers no alternative to politics as usual even if they had any rational policies.

Thomas Friedman describes in Third Party Rising his travels in Silicon Valley and being “astounded by the level of disgust with Washington, D.C., and our two-party system.”  For the Democrats, he opines, “Obama probably did the best he could do, and that’s the point. The best our current two parties can produce today — in the wake of the worst existential crisis in our economy and environment in a century — is suboptimal, even when one party had a huge majority. Suboptimal is O.K. for ordinary times, but these are not ordinary times. We need to stop waiting for Superman and start building a super consensus to do the super hard stuff we must do now. Pretty good is not even close to good enough today.”

So what we have in our politics today is a two-party system that is failing.  Republicans are the party of the big corporations and no change.  The Tea Party is a mindless tool of the Republicans to continue their failed policies.  The Democrats don’t know who they are and they stretch across the spectrum from Progressives to moderate Republican. No wonder they can’t get anything done.  All the parties are compromised by special interest money so that whatever is accomplished is at the margins or as Tom Friedman calls them, suboptimal solutions, leaving the real problems in place. Tom thinks the roots of a real third party may be at hand.

I would like to see the Progressives leave the Democratic Party or start exerting pressure like the Tea Party.  The Democratic Party simply has too much baggage to lead.  Harry Reid and the blue dog Democrats have defined the party and it is not a pretty picture.  The other piece of baggage is the term liberal.  Whether you like it or not, the term has been successfully tagged with enough negative connotations that is no longer operative.  Progressives, in my mind, offer the only real hope for this country.

Progressives understand that government is neither the best solution or the worst solution.  Some things (like medical insurance, or regulation) do not lend themselves to the private sector, while some things are better left to the market, albeit a regulated market.  Government can be a boon to business or a drag and what is required is smart government.  Smart government means letting the market place operate and reduce government interference and paperwork.  But it also means taking the long-term interest of the country into account instead of short term profits of the corporation (read a carbon tax and a real energy policy).

Progressives believe we should invest in our future even if in the short term it increases our debt.  Progressives believe in a vision for our future and then investing it that vision.  Tax cuts in a depressed economy would be the absolute worst way to try to stimulate the economy. In other words, lead by what works, not ideology.  But what works has to be defined for the majority of us, not just the rich.

Progressives believe in our Constitution and would actually end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and other mindless puritanical policies in favor of policies that recognizes the rights of all our citizens.  We would take a reasoned look at immigration and drug policy to do what works, not to feed some hysterical fear mongering.  And most importantly Progressives believe in a strong and growing middle class as the lynch pin of our economic well-being.  It doesn’t come from flow down, but real investment in their potential.

To date we have had a Democratic President, and a Democratic Congress trying to fix a Republican disaster, answering to the same corporate masters, and it is not working.  It is time to put these anachronisms out to pasture and become a progressive country and start looking at some optimal solutions instead of the same old failed policies over and over again because they meet our ideology instead of what works.  Now there is a party I could get fired up about.  I think it is the only way forward.

Okay, I have been missing in action, completely wrapped up in writing a proposal for a Floodwall in New Orleans.  This work can be rather intense (7am to 10pm, 7-days a week), so I have been remiss at writing my thoughts.  But in the middle of all this I had a plumber up here to work on my hot water heater.  So by necessity I had to take a break and it was enlightening.  It was a cold day up here (it snowed 3” on Wednesday) so when I mentioned how cold it was he said,  “ Yep, global warming”, in a sarcastic way.   Now I did not want to get into a discussion with the plumber about the whole issue, but I could not help myself and I said, “Climate change.”

Of course he responded, “I wonder how long it took them to invent that excuse.”   Realizing that I am dealing with someone who doesn’t read, or reads very, very selectively, I simply replied, “I think it is common sense.  You can’t keep dumping tons and tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere and figure it doesn’t change something.”  Now I could have taken the tact that one climate event is not indicative of climate change, but the point is, he already had made that leap.  Or I could have said there isn’t a respected scientific body today that doesn’t believe in climate change and we are the cause, but that would have also been lost on him.  He had selectively picked his facts to support his view, and the issue was closed.

But it gets better.  Some of the hot water from the hot water tank was back flowing into the cold line.  There is supposed to be a check valve to prevent this back flow (it only allows one-way flow).  There was one there, but it was malfunctioning so I asked him to replace it.  Well he might not have one because that darn old government made them take their lead valves out of circulation and it wasted thousands of dollars in unused valves.  I left this one totally alone because lead poisoning is a serious issue especially for children and I wonder what they are worth in dollars and cents?  But you are starting to get his view of government.

I said I would have to go up into my office to do some work while he was installing the valve and he asked what I did.  So I told him I work for a large design and construction firm helping them write their proposals and mentioned the floodwall job in New Orleans which is about $100-$200 million project.  So he said, who is paying for that and I said, he was in his tax dollars.  So he launched into a little diatribe about why his tax dollar should be wasted in Louisiana.  Again, I left it alone.  I was wondering if he knew how much of the rest of the country’s tax dollars are spent in California and especially around Sacramento for flood protection.  I wondered if he know how many federal dollars were spent after the 1989 earthquake.  I wondered if he understood shared risk.  Clearly we know where he would stand on health care reform with a concept that we all share the burden in covering this risk.

And there you have it.  “Ask not what I can do for my government, ask what my government can do for me.”  There is this underlying belief that government just interferes, when bad things happen to people, it’s their problem and they probably deserved it, and selective reading of facts to support this point of view.  Argument is futile.  If you are dealing with someone who selectively picks his facts, there is no hope.  And of course when you are dealing with someone who does this, you know they do not understand science or the scientific method.  Their reasoning processes are seriously flawed and they are oblivious to their s flawed thinking.  Those inconvenient other facts are not really facts at all, but lies made up by the same people who operate the black helicopters secretly hidden in Houston waiting to take over the country.

I guess the only hope is to keep hammering at them and not let organizations like the Fox News or conservatives control the talking points and define what are facts and what is real.  Frank Rich, this morning in his column (The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality),  pointed out how our own media is not challenging these falsehoods because they are incestuously interconnected with these people, and that maybe the Obama Administration, by choosing not to fully investigate what went on in the Bush Administration, has left the door open to this reinventing of history.  If my plumber and his grasp of reality is any indication, we had start fighting back or we will soon be reliving the disaster that was the Bush era.

Yesterday (Sunday), Frank Rich wrote an op-ed for the New York Times (The Up or Down Vote on Obama Presidency)  where Frank tried to examine some of the theories as to why this Presidency is going South.  He quickly put away the “over reached” argument and in a sideways manner tried to explain his lack of ability to communicate and over arching plan into which to put his agenda forward.  “The problem is not necessarily that Obama is trying to do too much, but that there is no consistent, clear message to unite all that he is trying to do”, and following a “pragmatic agenda.”  Actually Frank, I think the message to the president should be much more direct. ” Get your head out of you ass and start leading.”

Let’s start with issue number one this weekend and that is whether the President is going to fall back on military commissions to try the 9/11 bombers.  According to the news media the President is trying to decide where to try them.  Well Mr. President, get your head out of your ass and stand up for what America stands for.  While we wait around to see if you have a spine, Republicans and Al Qaeda operatives rejoice.  You don’t look just a little weak, your look anemic, and your lack of an understanding of basic principles will bring back the sad state of affairs we had with George Bush.  Try him in a Federal Court in the New York region and let the world see we actually do stand for something. Too bad if it is hard, waah, waah, waah.

Then lets look at the issue of gays in the military and for that matter gay marriage.  Once again the pragmatist says will look at it for a year.  Here again Mr. President, get your head out of your ass.  This is a civil rights issue pure and simple.  I don’t care what your religion tells you, our Constitution is not about your religion.  You don’t believe in gay marriage then don’t marry one, but many of our citizens are being deprived of their rights.  Once again to be pragmatic, you want to study all the issues, which means indecision and delay.  Do the right thing for once and just end it.  Right now you can stop dismissals from the military with an executive order.  Sure there are complications, but I guess people thought that when they integrated schools.   Can you do nothing with authority and certitude that gives people confidence you can lead?

Even Frank Rich said you finally stated what you wanted last week in regards to health care reform in an authoritative manner. We had a whole year waiting for you to extract your head from your ass and understand that the Congress is dysfunctional and if you want reform that works, you are going to have to lead them.  What is it about bipartisanship that you don’t get?  Bipartisanship is failure at the starting gate and this abortion of a bill we now have is the result of that foolish pragmatism.  Anything without a public option is a failure Mr. President and we will hold you accountable.

Then of course there are the torture memos and that whole sordid mess that you have decided to sweep under the rug.  What is it about doing the right thing you can’t seem to get your arms around?  It would be better for the country to look the other way?  At the risk of repeating myself, get your head out of your ass and start leading this country behind a set of principles we can believe in.  The Republicans, Mr. President, thought they were being pragmatic when they took this country down that road.  By your failure to look at the multitude of abuses to our civil liberties, you are facilitating a return to those practices under another “pragmatic” administration.

Oh, least I mention our problem with global warming or should I saw climate change for the morons who think a snowstorm negates global warming.  Here we have a real fight over cap and trade versus a carbon tax and in this “pragmatic” world of President Obama,  he will let Congress water this down until it is basically toothless.  As Thomas Friedman said in his column Sunday (Dreaming the Possible Dream) about some very promising new approaches to green energy, “All I know is this: If we put a simple price on carbon, these new technologies would have a chance to blossom and thousands more would come out of innovators’ garages. America still has the best innovation culture in the world. But we need better policies to nurture it, better infrastructure to enable it and more open doors to bring others here to try it.”  Well Mr. President, pull you pragmatic head out of your ass and stand up this or the world will pass us by.

Then there is the Blanche Lincoln debacle.  Here is a woman (the New York Times today referred to her a moderate Democrat – what a joke) who is doing what she can to torpedo President Obama’s agenda and she is facing a primary fight and what does knee jerk pragmatist President Obama do?  He says he will support her re-election.  Get you head out of your ass and stand for something beside Democrat Party Politics as usual.  Does FDR come to mind?  He understood the fight he was entering to save the nation.  Why can’t you?

So the bottom line for this President is that if he doesn’t pull his head out of his ass soon and recognize that his lack of principled leadership and that it is a new day in Washington where old ways of doing business are what got in this mess, he is going to be a failed President.  The nation screams for strong leadership and while the President dithers trying to be pragmatic and bipartisan, Rome burns.

If you want to be frustrated, watch the Sunday talk shows as we continue to miss the point and discuss the trivia.  The newspapers weren’t much better.  So for better or worse here are my Sunday thoughts:

• Howard Kurtz of CNN’s Reliable Sources was working hard again at missing the point.  The first thing they discussed was whether the White House criticism of Fox as no longer a news channel was effective, instead of a real examination of how Fox manipulates the news.  Howard criticizes the lack of fact checking and he doesn’t do his own.  See The Fox Propaganda Network.
• On the same program they discussed how the bogus story about the Chamber of Commerce reversing their stand on global warming and climate protection tricked the mainstream media.  I listened to a journalist whine about the pressure to get the news out fast.  Well, sweetheart, it isn’t news if it’s false.  They have yet to examine their role in this problem.  Their job is not to megaphone what other’s say, but to provide us with relevant stories that are fact checked.  The operative words here are relevant and fact checked.
• The New York Times reported that small businesses are facing up to 20% increases in their health insurance costs with no real reason why.  Meanwhile that moron Mitch McConnell says he won’t vote for the health care reform bill because it would raise rates.  Let’s see, rates are going out of sight without reform, and he won’t support reform because it will raise the rates.  Hmmm.  Sadly the public option the glacial Congress is considering will not allow private business to be part of it.  This is such a no-brainer yet we just refuse to face a single payer system.  (Small Business Faces Sharp Rise in Health Care)
• The Huffington Post (Leaderless) reported that our gutless President has decided to go with a Public Option that would only be available with a trigger mechanism.  Talk about failure to lead.  Meanwhile others talk about a public option with a “level playing field”.  What that means is raise the cost of the Public Option so the insurance industries are still able to rake off large profits.  When oh when will we figure out that providing health care is not appropriate to the profit motive, just like police and fire protection?
• Meet the Press today did highlight one important fact and that is the Administration’s focus on executive pay in the banks is just eyewash and is not real reform.  Until they structurally reform the system so that nobody is too big to fail, the government will always be the lender of last resort.  See Regulating Banks.
• In a really scary story, the New York Times (Prosecutors Turn Table on Student Journalists) reported that in Illinois, local prosecutors have subpoenaed the grades, grading criteria, class syllabus, expense reports and e-mail messages of the journalism students from Northwestern’s Medill Innocence Project, which has helped lead to the release of 11 inmates.  You can read the article, but what we have here is shoot the messenger, not examine the message.  To me it is clear they are trying to stifle this kind of embarrassment by trying to sully the program instead of dealing with the factual findings.  If you don’t see the connection to this and the State’s Secret Act and the problems with it, then call yourself a Republican.
• Finally on a positive note, it was nice to see Frank Rich echo my sentiments about the media and the balloon incident (The Fox Propaganda Network), while Maureen Dowd echoed my sentiment that the Catholic Church is trying to recruit the small minded from the Anglican Church (Bashing Organized Religion).  Every now and then I actually hit on something.

Another week where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, our President fails to lead, and the media and the nation continuing their glide to oblivion shunning critical thought.  All in all not many cheery thoughts.

I watched some of the news shows on Sunday as I returned from my consulting trip this last Sunday afternoon, and I was amazed to see how the Press is once again focused on the wrong thing.  This is the play for pay scandal in Illinois.  One reporter on CNN basically said that Obama should get the facts out as quick as possible to prevent being tarnished in this scandal.  I listened to Rick Sanchez on Monday repeat President-Elect Obama’s statement that he had reviewed the interactions between his staff and Blagojevich and found no evidence of “inappropriate discussions”.  Mr. Sanchez then questioned what inappropriate meant.  One paper said, “The “pay-to-play” scandal threatens to dog Mr. Obama through the opening months of his administration and undermine his campaign message of change.”

It will only dog him if the press doesn’t stop trying to create what isn’t there and there is no evidence anything is there.  I hate to break it to them, but nobody cares about this other than the press hoping for some titillation and ratings raising disclosures, and Republicans who are still focused on winning in 2008.  The rest of us want him to succeed, we believe Patrick Fitzgerald when he said there was no evidence that Barrack was involved.  Blagojevich himself, in taped conversations cited by prosecutors, suggested that Obama wouldn’t be helpful to him. Even if the governor were to appoint a candidate favored by the Obama team, Blagojevich said, “They’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation.”  It is a soap opera and the press is once again running amuck.  Let the Attorney do his job.  In the meantime, the rest of us are really worried about keeping ours.  Could we focus on our problems?

Here are some things that were in the news this week that are much more important about our way forward and help us learn from our mistakes:

• First there was the report, “Hard Lessons:  The Iraq Reconstruction Experience”  which was leaked to the press.  It quoted Colin Powell as saying the Department of Defense was making up numbers on Iraqi security forces to show progress, basic services are now back to the level before the war, but no better, and the finding that as the US started down this road to the largest rebuilding program since the Marshall Plan in Europe with no real plan, policies, or technical capacity to perform it.  Now does this surprise anybody in the mental world of Republicans who think any planning smacks of big government?  We have entered a world where we worship the military and we forget the lessons of Viet Nam:  They all lie.
• We all have heard about the shoe throw in Baghdad (YouTube).  If only our own press had the courage to stand up to the King like a poor Iraqi.  Actually what is sad is that most of the press has once again missed a golden opportunity to explore just exactly what was accomplished and at what cost.  According to the gentleman who threw the shoe, not much at way too high a price.
• In the New York Times it was reported in a report by issued jointly by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Democratic chairman of the panel, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican, “that top Bush administration officials, including Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, bore major responsibility for the abuses committed by American troops in interrogations at Abu Ghraib in Iraq; Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; and other military detention centers.”  No fooling.  Yet many of our good Republican friends continue to blame it on a few bad apples and live in total denial.  This was a failure of the moral leadership of George Bush and Republicans who could not see that they became the enemy.
• But probably the best summary was Sunday from Frank Rich in the New York Times where he said about Governor Blagojevich, “Blagojevich’s alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street. Yet those who promoted and condoned the twin national catastrophes of reckless war in Iraq and reckless gambling in our markets have largely escaped the accountability that now seems to await the Chicago punk nabbed by the United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald.”  His point is that Blagojevich is a small town crook and fool compared to where those “Giants of Wall Street”, and the arrogant Neocons have taken us.

What is the thread through all of this?  It is that we check our brains at the door over the last eight years and now there is a piper to pay.  Small town values are nice, but if they don’t stand up to reason, they need to be tossed.  Economic theories that promise us free rides (lower taxes and the world will be saved) need to be jettisoned also.  Government only does bad when the men and women who lead them do bad things and they need to be held accountable.  We can’t just push this behind us as though it did not happen.  We need to face what we have become before we can begin to become what we can.  Probably our saving grace is that through all of this there were some who were raising red flags.  What we need to find out is why didn’t we listen to them.

With the invasion of Georgia by the Russians we have heard the media anoint John McMean as the candidate with foreign relations experience.  It comes as an almost self-evident truth that he has the experience to deal with these events.  This in my mind is like saying, let’s stay with George Bush.  After all he is experienced.  The trouble is his experience is the last thing we want to leverage.  The other “self-evident” truth is that this crisis helps John McMean politically.  I would challenge the first, but not the second.  Sadly when people are afraid they slip into old authoritarian ways of thinking.  Let me explain.

George Lakoff in his “The Political Mind” points out that most of us think in two modes: Empathy and cooperation, and fear and obedience to authority.  In the first case it has to do with understanding and taking responsibility for those around us, and in the second case, it has to do with following rules that give order and moral authority.  Which mode we think in to reason out the problems depends on the framing of the issue and the attendant emotions attached to it.  The Russian invasion of Georgia activates the latter here because it raises the specter of the old confrontation with Russian and we need a tough disciplined approach.  Think of it another way:  Be afraid, go with something you know.  Let me find a nice father figure who acts tough and the world will be set right again.  This is exactly how George Bush won a second term.  So from this point of view the current situation with the Russians frames the whole understanding of the problem in John McMean’s favor.  His bellicose and presumptive policy statements were feel good moments for striking back, but they are toothless and in the end counterproductive.  They also demonstrated that he thinks in old ways and respond without clearly thinking through what is possible.  In other words if by experience we mean applying old approaches to new situations, I truly fear an “experienced old hand”.

There were two articles which pointed out John McMean’s thinking on foreign policy.  The first was an article in the New York Times called “The Long Run Response to 9/11 Offers Outline of McCain Doctrine”.  As pointed out in this article he was leading the pack that we should attack other countries besides Afghanistan, including Iraq to extend our sphere of influence.  Within several months of 9/11 he was quoted on MSNBC as saying, “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared.”  Quoting from the article:

“Within a month he made clear his priority. ‘Very obviously Iraq is the first country,’ he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: ‘Next up, Baghdad!’”

The point here is that McMean was making the case for hitting Iraq long before the White House was.  Some of his former supporters have indicated how reactionary he is without deep thought or the ability to listen to dissenting views.  Remember that he was a supporter of Ahmad Chalabi, pushed the untrue statements about Iraq’s WMD and connections with al-Qaeda, was a big supporter of Cheney and Rumsfeld before and during the invasion, and never called for Rumsfeld’s resignation as it is now claimed.

In the second article, an Op-Ed piece by Frank Rich, “The Candidate We Still Don’t Know”  Frank points out that what we know about John McMean is his “skin-deep, out of date McCain image.”  Then he lists what we should know:
➢    He didn’t start criticizing the war until almost 3 months after “Mission Accomplished” when the growing insurgency was no longer deniable
➢    The day Hurricane Katrina hit McMean spent the day with President Moron at a birthday bash, didn’t visit the area for six months and only started criticizing the response when he started to run for president
➢    McMean, who once stood up to “agents of intolerance” now is embracing them and was at fund raiser with Ralph Reed who one of Abramoff’s associates once described as just like us, only worse.
➢    He has surrounded himself with advisors who are part of the lobbying problem from the oil industry, Enron (Phil Graham), Fannie Mae, to Blackwater
➢    He frequently forgets key elements of policies or simply gets them wrong.  He can’t seem to remember if the Iranians are Shiites or Sunnis and that might make a big difference
➢    He forgets what he said the day before or contradicts himself
➢    And who can forget his memorable walk around a market in Baghdad claiming it was safe.  Then the next day many of the people he was talking with while he was being protected by half the American Army died in a bomb blast

Meanwhile the press continues to give him pass on most of this behavior and does not let the public see who they are really considering electing.  Ask yourself why many Republicans are joining Republicans for Obama?  The answer is they fear his reactive behavior and his inability to listen to other people and make reasoned judgments.

So here we are thinking this guy brings us the experience in these trouble times.  The only experience he brings us is one bad decision after another that he has not been held accountable for.  He is a nice guy (actually he isn’t) and the press gives him a pass.  My thought is if this is the kind of experience we are looking for, we are in real trouble.