Amazing thing happened this past week: the Iraqi government appears to have actually represented one of the main concerns of the nation it purports to represent – namely that the occupying army of the United States start making definite plans for withdrawal… that is, total withdrawal from their country. One spokesperson for al-Maliki actually talked about a timetable for pulling out. Now, this is the government the Bush administration is so very adamant about protecting. The mere mention of a timetable on this side of the ocean is an invitation to be denounced as a “surrender monkey”. Those who’ve advanced the idea are roundly accused of undermining the Baghdad government, whose stability has been bought by the blood of our soldiers, etc. And yet, this is the opinion of the vast majority of Iraqis, so it’s little wonder Maliki would bring it up a) while status of forces agreement talks are going on, and b) when there are elections coming up. Maliki’s party has a slight problem with being seen as an indigenous political movement (i.e. Dawa and SCIRI were exile parties, SCIRI formed in Iran with help from the dreaded Revolutionary Guard). This is their version of a gas tax holiday, I suppose.

Either way, it seems we’ve been asked to leave. That can only mean one thing, if history is any guide: time for a new Iraqi government. This issue is a bit more complicated than it used to be, of course. Even though there are some paleolithic imperialists in the Bush orbit, I doubt they have the bottle to pull an outright coup d’etat, like we used to in the good old bad old days. Iran’s Mossadeq, Guatemala’s Arbenz, Chile’s Allende… even a longtime asset like South Vietnam’s Diem was dispatched with little thought to what would follow. In Vietnam, it was one desperate general after another, until they settled on the reliably fanatical Nguyen Van Thieu, who seemed more than content to preside over the utter destruction of his country under relentless and unprecedented American firepower. His predecessors were ejected most often because they were caught seeking some kind of rapprochement with the NLF. Not what Washington wanted then… or wants now.

Different war, different time, right? True enough. But the principle still applies. Suppose for a moment everything goes swimmingly in Iraq, from the Iraqi perspective. Suppose there’s a serious and deep reconciliation among the various sectarian and ethnic groupings, and that they all agree on one thing – that they want us to go home. Would we leave? I doubt it. As I’ve said here before, we didn’t invade Iraq to leave it; we came to stay, maybe as long as 100 years, as McCain suggested. (The oil would certainly be tapped out by then.) The administration and its allies have become very frank about wanting a military presence there to secure access to the second largest oil reserves in the world (and among the most profitable, as well). We’re building permanent bases and trying to push a status of forces agreement on a nation we basically destroyed over the course of the last 18 years. In the current atmosphere of rising gas prices, I’m sure our politicians believe that Americans will tolerate such a long-term commitment if they believe affordable gas may be a result. That remains to be seen… but will Iraqis tolerate it?

My guess is no. And though this hasn’t been an ultimatum, we may well be feeling that door hitting us in the ass quite soon.

luv u,

jp

Seems like more than a few people are appalled at what appears to be Obama’s recent lurch to the right. Actually, I think some of the stuff he’s saying now is more like where he’s been politically since walking onto the national stage four years ago. In spite of a lot of the hype about a liberal voting record, the O-Man is no George McGovern (sadly). He’s been hugely cautious since becoming a U.S. Senator, and whereas he has the rhetorical gifts to advance progressive positions (particularly ones – like universal health care – that tend to be popular to begin with), he doesn’t have those issues deep in his gut. I think this is a textbook case of political relativity. Here’s how it works: At the beginning of the election cycle, when there are eight or more members of your party contending for the nomination, there’s a fair chance that one of them is going to be somewhere close to your way of thinking. So you might back that person, and if s/he fails to make the first cut, you might look at the remaining contenders for the next best thing. Like… starting with Kucinich and moving to Edwards, because he seems closer to Kucinich than any of the other remaining Dems.

Still with me? Bully! Okay, so say your Edwards drops out, and you’re left with the somewhat uninspiring choice of the DLC-powered Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize Bush’s endless war in Iraq (i.e. gave a drunk a loaded bazooka) and Barack Obama, Mr. Ultra-Cautious, who spoke out against the war when he was not in a position to vote on it, and has since voted to fund the war. In that match-up, Obama may feel more like a committed progressive, even if he isn’t one. He’s just progressive relative to the other remaining candidate (Clinton). Now, as the presumptive Democratic nominee, he stands against McCain, who has been busily burnishing his right-wing credentials (on alternate Tuesdays). This allows Obama to embrace his inner “moderate”, and still seem progressive relative to McCain. At the same time, the tendency is for the winning candidate to assume some of the policies of the other contenders, thereby broadening his/her appeal.

So… you end up with this candidate who’s an amalgamation of all these other candidates – like someone added them all up and figured the average. As it happens, that ends up being somewhere around where Obama lives politically. What happens next? What the hell am I, Kreskin? Well…. here’s my guess (since I asked). Obama will play the muddle in the middle for the next few weeks. Then he’ll do something like what Gore did in 2000 – just before the Democratic convention, he’ll deliver some firebreathing populist speeches to get the base energized, knock a good one home at the convention, and use that as his basic stump sermon for the rest of the campaign. If he’s elected (big if), he’ll go back the that middle-ing Amalgaman place before inauguration day. My guess – no guarantees.

Our problem is simply that no candidate in this race is proposing the kind of tectonic policy shift that would be commensurate with the problems we face. That can only come from us. Election day is just the beginning.

luv u,

jp

Heard a McCain foreign policy adviser on NPR’s All Things Considered this week. (I suppose that’s a bit more relevant a news feature than the story about astronauts voting in space that ran a few days earlier on ludicrous Morning Edition.) The McCain guy had worked for prominent Republicans before, of course – namely Trent Lott and Donald Rumsfeld. That’s right – Lott, the retrograde southern conservative politician who was so reflexively racist that he made a comment he couldn’t back away from even in the wake of the G.O.P.’s 2002 congressional electoral victory… his foreign policy adviser. And, of course, Donald Rumsfeld, undoubtedly the most disastrous Defense Secretary since Robert McNamara (middle name: Strange)… How reassuring to know that McCain is getting the same advice Rummy enjoyed. So… what did this adviser to great minds have to say about the war in Iraq? Well, the NPR interviewer (Robert Siegel) stuck to narrow issues relating to the “metrics of success”, as Rumsfeld might have put it. McCain’s man bobbed and weaved a bit, saying we can start thinking about leaving when Al Qaeda is defeated. Asked how we would know when that had happened, he told Siegel they will be defeated when they are no longer a strategic threat. What does that mean in concrete terms? Ahem.

I think the general assumption is that the administration and other hawks don’t want to nail down what victory in Iraq looks like because the issues involved are far too complex to be reduced to such a simple formulation (i.e. only 3 car bombings a year means we’ve won!). I think the truth is they don’t want to talk about it because they have no intention of ever leaving Iraq. There is simply no point in discussing it as far as they are concerned. The notion of staying in Iraq permanently is deeply unpopular with the American public, so it doesn’t make a good talking point. Instead, they need to resort to blather about “kinetic” power and force projection capabilities, blah-blah-blah, so that people’s eyes will glaze over before they catch on that what’s really being discussed here is the architecture of a very, very long-term U.S. presence in country. Of course, this propensity is not limited to McCain’s people or the G.O.P. as a whole – I recently heard the New York Times Baghdad bureau chief talking about how 60 U.S. bases in Iraq isn’t all that many, really. (Oh, sure… 60’s nothing, unless you’re talking about Iranian bases in, say, Mexico.)

Five years into the occupation there is a strong institutional disposition toward maintaining the Iraq enterprise. While the Republicans express this in terms of continuing the current policy, in essence, the Democrats will talk about a residual force to protect the massive U.S. embassy (forbidden city, really), train Iraqi soldiers and police, and “fight terrorism” in case al Qaeda raises its profile again. That’s what the Obama camp is saying – not exactly a radical departure. This isn’t anything new, of course. The U.S. presence in Vietnam involved a substantial institutional investment that almost no American politician wanted to completely back away from. (The French colonial experience in Vietnam perhaps even more so.) So don’t think pulling the lever for the O-man is going to end this war. The war will end only when we insist upon:

1. a complete withdrawal of our military and associated contractors from Iraq;
2. dismantling and abandoning the bases we’ve built over the past five years;
3. using some of the money NOT spent on the occupation to help Iraqis put their country back together again (to the extent that that’s possible).

Basically the McGovern-Polk plan, which neither party endorses. Same old same old.

Whoever wins this fall, we will need to push for an end to this war… and push harder than any of us might have thought necessary. Otherwise it will continue, with grim consequences we have to fully realize.

luv u,

jp

Dubya – or as Jon Stewart calls him, “still-President Bush” – pulled another grand tour this past week, dropping in on our various European allies, mugging with the crypto-fascist Sarkozy (perhaps comparing notes on how to be slightly less unpopular than he is right now), and generally doing all he can to undermine any chance of a reduction in international tensions. He took a few ceremonial swings at the Iranian punching bag, made some thinly veiled threats against Syria, etc. Quite a performance. What a pity he has to come home so soon. Wouldn’t it be great if he just kept traveling until after inauguration day? Though I suppose it doesn’t do any harm for people to see him around the White House with some regularity, if only to serve as a grim reminder of how idiotic we were to put him there in the first place. Not that a simple trip to the gas station shouldn’t be enough to accomplish that.

One place he hasn’t stopped in on lately is the failed state he created out of what was once Iraq. Whereas they managed to drop his wife into a section of Afghanistan that wasn’t blowing up long enough for her to say how sweet it is there, no surprise visit to Baghdad was conjured for junior himself. It’s almost as though they don’t want to draw too much attention to the conflict; that people are now focused on other difficulties closer to home, and that’s the way they like it. They can pursue their deeply unpopular (on both sides of the ocean) agenda without undue scrutiny, such as their status of forces agreement that would essentially authorize permanent U.S. bases in Iraq, with highly favorable terms towards American defense contractors. They’re probably hoping we won’t be thinking about that when we march into the voting booth – that we’ll instead be obsessing over Obama’s ex-preacher for his persistent blackness, or pondering how Cindy-Lou McCain looks like a refugee from Petticoat Junction (at least when she’s visiting the heartland).

Bush did spare a half-hour or so to play consoler-in-chief in the flood ravaged mid-west. (“You’ll come back better,” he reportedly told some Iowans – don’t know about them, but I was certainly scratching my head over that one.) If nothing else, he’s becoming the master of disaster; a kind of political Irwin Allen. It’s almost as if things were just waiting for him to arrive before they started totally falling apart. (Some things, of course, took a little coaxing.) Hell, even his “success stories” are disasters. More U.S. soldiers are dying in Afghanistan, for instance, than in Iraq. And while they are portraying Iraq as quiet and safe, it is still too dangerous for any of the 4.5 million refugees to return home, as Amnesty International has pointed out. For many, there are no homes to go to. They brought about a Bosnian-style ethnic cleansing, and now that it’s over, they call it success. Except that we can’t leave… because it’s not over. Got all that?

I’ve said it before – we’re not staying in Iraq to achieve some lofty goal. They’re merely inventing lofty goals because they intend to stay. That was always the intention, and so it remains. So wherever Bush goes from now on, he’ll always be in Iraq… and if we do nothing to stop it, so will we.

luv u,

jp

This seems like a good time to talk about all of the reasons why we should stay and fight in Vietnam. No, that’s not a typo nor a brain fart – Vietnam is exactly what I mean. Totally different war, of course, but the reasoning in both the public and the internal planning spheres is very much the same. It’s kind of instructive to look back at how that war was sold to us – swap a few nouns around and you’ve got the Iraq narrative, post 2003. Interestingly enough, opportunity presented itself this past week in the shape of various remembrances of Robert Kennedy on the 40th anniversary of his assassination. Amy Goodman played a tape of a talk RFK gave at St. Lawrence University in 1966 (I believe my cousin was at that event, as it happens) in which the senator responded to a question about Vietnam with a somewhat lengthy defense of LBJ’s escalation policy, in progress at the time. His justification, in essence, was the contention that the Vietcong (NLF), Hanoi, and China were hoping that the U.S. was going to “turn and run from Vietnam” and that to pull out would be “disastrous”.

Now, if you go to the speech and substitute “Mahdi Army” for “Vietcong”, “Syria” for “Hanoi”, “Iran” for “the Chinese”, and “cut and run” for “turn and run”, you’d swear he was speaking for the Bush administration circa, I don’t know, last week. This, recall, is an iconic liberal talking – people like Ronald Reagan were advocating flattening the place, paving it over, and painting stripes on it at that time (I kid you not), which is not so different from what some have said recently about Iran in polite company, come to think of it. Goodman also played an excerpt of a speech Kennedy made two years later, during a presidential campaign stop, when he had turned against the war. Much of what he said on that occasion reflects the kind of pragmatic opposition you often hear from liberals about the Iraq war these days – that it was a “mistake”, that it has been mismanaged, and that we have not been sufficiently insistent on the client government to clean up its act. Remarkably similar rhetoric.

RFK said a lot of things that year, some of it more principled, and you had the feeling that there was some movement in him along the lines of what the entire country was going through. Really, today, we have less of an excuse than folks did in those days – we have the experience of Vietnam to draw on, whereas this was new territory politically in the 1960s. And I suppose, for sentimental reasons, I always assumed that he would have ended that war sooner if elected, though I have very little concrete to go on in that regard. Same thing with Obama. His statements on Iraq carry a certain amount of equivocation, and it’s hard to say with any certainty that he will bring the Iraq hell-disaster to a close. One thing we can be sure of – the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) being foisted on Iraq as we speak reflects the actual planning goals of this war more accurately than any public statements from our fearless leaders. That document will set us up for the long term military presence the war’s authors sought from the very beginning – a goal that’s very unpopular in the U.S. and in Iraq… which is why they’re not talking about it much.

So… from Bush/Cheney/McCain’s point of view, the war is nearly won, whether they’ll say so or not. That SOFA is the brass ring – worth the lives of all the U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed thus far and yet to be killed in its defense. Let’s call Washington and tell them we want no part of it.

luv u,

jp

Had to kind of shake my head a few times this week at the thought that Robert Kennedy’s assassination was 40 years ago. I mostly remember the morning after he died of his wounds, more than a day after the actual shooting, I woke to the sight of my mom pulling the Kennedy bumper sticker off my bedroom door, her grave expression rendering the news superfluous. A sliver of the sticker remained on that door for some time. Nasty days indeed.

So are these, of course, only the pain seems more concentrated in the lower echelons of society than it was in 1968, as polarized as we were in those days. Today, only volunteers are sent to war, and they are drawn overwhelmingly from the working class and poor… so a needless war like the one we started in Iraq can grind on year after year without any sign of ending, just arrogant squawkery about how much more successfully the enterprise is proceeding. Likewise, income inequality is now so extreme that those with the greatest insecurity are hobbled by even moderate rises in fuel prices, for instance, while those at the top reap the benefits of unprecedented corporate profits.

There is such a profound separation between the rulers and the ruled in this country that it seems there’s no longer any expectation on the part of ordinary people that they will have any significant voice in the conduct of public affairs. Our political leaders can literally get away with mass murder, flaunt their guilt, and remain confident in their immunity from sanction. How much more does anyone need to know about what was said and done in the lead up to the Iraq war? Is there really, really any question remaining about the Bush administration’s distortions and misrepresentations of intelligence on WMDs and Saddam’s purported links to Al Qaeda? And yet no attempt is made to hold these people accountable – not even symbolic gestures. The Bushes, Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Abramses, and Rices of the world assume that we will do nothing. Thus far, they’ve been right – probably one of the only things they’ve gotten right up to now.

We need to fix this – this tendency we have to sit on our hands while outrageous crimes are committed in our names. We need to stand up when we’re being ripped off by the pirates and speculators whose representatives currently occupy the White House and halls of Congress. Failure to do so only encourages them to continue doing the same thing. Even now they’re talking about Iran almost constantly; even now they’re blackmailing the Iraqi government into allowing permanent U.S. bases in that country. They feel confident in doing all this (and more) because, aside from a little harmless unpopularity, their crimes have cost them nothing.

Time to crash Bush’s party. Can you say “censure”? How about “The Hague”?

luv you,

jp

Mercifully, I have a short drive to just about anywhere I’m likely to go. My day job is minutes away, my mom lives across the street, my sisters the next street over… in fact, none of my immediate relatives live more than 15 or 20 miles away, and they all work within spitting distance of where I live. Both of my wife’s and my vehicles, while ancient, are four-cylinder sedans, only one of which we drive with any regularity. If we clock 5,000 miles in a year’s time, that’s a lot for us, so I’m filling the tank of my ’93 Accord probably once every two weeks. A year ago, that cost around $30; now it’s $40 or so – manageable, thus far. But these precipitous price increases on gasoline are killing most people I know (and most of those I don’t know), and there appears no end in sight. It would be bad enough if it just hit you at the gas pump, but it affects everything else as well. The food you buy, the employer you work for, the community you live in – every aspect of our lives, it seems, is built on the assumption of cheap and plentiful fuel. Take that away, and our economy starts to scream.

I often wonder how many of my fellow Americans connect this phenomenon to the fact that our nation is run by rogues and oil men, including an administration that spent its first six years encouraging and facilitating rampant consumption of gasoline. How many see the connection between the single-passenger Hummer in the lane next to them and the skyrocketing prices at the pump? Yes, there’s increased demand from developing countries like China and India, but for chrissake… look at the freaking vehicles we drive! People have been driving trucks as passenger cars in mass numbers for over a decade now, and we’re feeling the effects. Back in the mid eighties, after nearly ten years of emphasis on making fuel-efficient vehicles, there was a worldwide oil glut even in the thick of the Iran-Iraq war. Oil fell to about $12 a barrel because (wait for it) WE WERE USING LESS OF IT.

Today people use more fuel because we have been relentlessly encouraged to do so over the past twenty years. Not sure if anyone recalls, but there was tremendous resistance to improving fuel efficiency standards back in the late eighties and through the nineties, with horror stories about how U.S. auto manufacturers would lay off thousands of workers, etc. (an important talking point in Dan Quayle’s bizarro performance during the 1992 Vice Presidential debate). Of course, the auto manufacturers shed enormous numbers of workers anyway in the years that followed, even with fuel standards that allowed massive V-8 engines and SUV’s that look like passenger trains. Most states – including my own state, under Gov. George Pataki – allowed the speed limit to move up to 65, causing greater fuel consumption (55 mph was determined decades ago to be an optimum speed for fuel efficiency). And who can forget the current administration deploying Ari Fleischer and others to defend gas-guzzling as central to the American way of life? This is a failure of leadership, to be sure… but it is also enabled by the goofy choices we make.

Not sure who the next president will be (though the next creepy Veep could be Mitt Romney, for chrissake) or who will control the Congress, but whichever way it goes, it will take some real pressure from below to get this monster under control.

luv u,

jp

Israelis celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of statehood this week. The festivities drew our lame duck president like a moth to flame, so in a sense, the Israelis gave us a gift for their birthday, by taking custody of Mr. 28% for a few precious days. Dubya was able to find people who adore him there – principally a bunch of failed politicians who wouldn’t last a week in office were it not for our massive decades-long investment in the ongoing stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians. The press dutifully played Bush’s visit as an effort to move the “peace process” forward (even as he pushed for war with Iran), but any child can see that there is no chance for a meaningful settlement under the current conditions… namely the fact that Israeli politicians have built their careers on the occupation and American politicians have built theirs, in part, on supporting and underwriting it. It is a hideous and corrosive symbiosis that those folks smiling about, whatever the people in the streets of Tel Aviv may be celebrating.

Sixty years ago a historic wrong was committed against the Palestinians, some 750,000 of whom were driven from their homes and into squalid refugee camps likely intended to provide shelter for no more than a stretch of months. Many are still there, along with their progeny, waiting for the dream of Palestinian nationhood to become a reality – a diaspora of several million now for whom the only hope of deliverance lies within the 22% of historic Palestine comprised by the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. It is a hope that has consistently been squelched by Israel and the United States, which have invested fully in the policy of stalemate hatched by the Nixon administration back in the early 1970s. The two-state solution most recently re-introduced by the Saudis has in fact been on the table since that time and before; it has been accepted in principle by Palestinians, many (if not most) Israelis, and the rest of the world. But Washington and Tel Aviv have continually blocked this option, masking their rejectionism with advocacy for a vaguely defined version of Palestinian sovereignty that allows Israel to continue building on its interconnected settlement blocks in the West Bank, retain its control of the Jordan Valley, and incorporate East Jerusalem into Israel – a Potemkin Village peace plan that merely validates the ever-expanding occupation.

The spectacle of Bush and Olmert congratulating one another on this historic failure is enough to make anyone nauseous, apart from the dwindling number of people in either country who support these men. For myself, I can only swallow hard and make a few simple observations on this anniversary. First, Israel is a nation as legitimate (and as illegitimate, founded on violence and dispossession like the U.S.) as any other and, as such, has the same rights and responsibilities as any other. Second, in the territories it occupies beyond the Green Line, it has no rights, only responsibilities, as Noam Chomsky and others have frequently pointed out. This is true of any foreign occupier, so it is true of Israel. Third, the practice of meting out collective punishment and dictating terms to an occupied people is intolerable and a very serious war crime by any reasonable standard of international law, as is the continuing practice of colonizing occupied territory, which Israel has pursued for 40 years, through good times and bad. That this has been allowed to continue unchecked is no cause for celebration, in my opinion.

Those who hope for a U.S. brokered solution will likely be disappointed – whatever our sentiments, we behave like a nation of sheep, led by jackals who gladly sacrifice thousands of lives for political gain. It seems the only hope lies with the Israelis themselves – that they take the initiative and tell their leaders to end this occupation before their nation gets a single year older.

luv u,

jp

We’re dropping bombs on a ghetto. That is the kind of triumphant mission the Iraq war has devolved into – using high-tech air-delivered munitions on people who live on less than a dollar a day, hitting hospitals, killing children, all by accident (of course), though how you can drop bombs on a densely populated slum and not presume that you’re going to kill innocent people is beyond my understanding. (By the standards established at Nuremberg, this doesn’t hold any water as an excuse.) We’re also dropping bombs on Somalia, the other other war – the one in which we took the side of an invader, the repressive government of Ethiopia, and played a key role in bringing Somalia back to the brink of famine and chaos. The UN and NGOs are issuing warnings about hunger in that sorry object of our attentions. They are also putting out grim advisories on Gaza, where relief programs are being stymied by the siege Israel is imposing on that territory’s citizens, cutting off fuel supplies at a time of critical need… with our full support, of course.

This is looking more and more like a war on the poor. Much as Bush, McCain, and other madmen try to make this out as a titanic struggle against fanatics set on destroying our way of life, this global conflict always seems to target the destitute, the powerless, and the inconvenient. If it were just a matter of poor folks counting for nothing in the eyes of the powerful, that would be bad enough. But this is too consistent with past practice in conflicts dating back to European colonialism for this to be characterized as collateral injury. When the disenfranchised have leaders who do not toe the imperial line, it is the rank and file who pay the price. In Vietnam, we targeted peasants whose siblings, cousins, parents, neighbors, etc., belonged to the National Liberation Front. Same type of thing in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s – Drain the pond and the fish will die. Now it’s Iraq’s turn. Say what you want about Al Sadr, he’s more of an Iraqi nationalist than anyone in the U.S.-supported government. He wants foreign troops out – that’s why we hate him.

Rest assured, our president is thinking very, very deeply about the implications of this policy. (“We’re killing them,” he was recently heard to say.) He represents the worst case of senioritis I have ever seen, and I’ve seen a few. Far from “sprinting to the finish,” Bush is drifting through his last year, letting the dishes pile up in the kitchen sink, watching the lawn go to hell, and saving his dirty laundry for the trip home. Just bobbing along, not a care in the world. Let me tell you, friends – there’s going to be one hell of a party chez Bush when January 21 gets here… get your tickets now. As a warm-up, Dubya will continue to lob explosives at the neediest, building separation walls around Sadr City, and sending his legions into that sprawling slum that is home to 2.5 million – close to 10% of the total Iraqi population. No party for them.

And no party for us, either. Don’t think this will stop when Dubya lands in Crawford.

luv u,

jp

Anyone not hear about the Reverend Wright this week? I don’t see any hands (except my own, on the keyboard, of course). This campaign is beyond inane – too insipid to even qualify as absurd. Does anyone really, really, really care about what Barack Obama’s former preacher thinks? Is Wright running for president? Is anyone taking a microscope to the sermons and unrelated public statements of any other politician’s spiritual mentors, friends, associates, neighbors, etc.? Has anyone, for instance, taken a close look at Franklin Graham, who offered prayer at Bush’s inauguration and lectured us all on being squeamish about the use of nuclear weapons? No controversy there. And if Obama’s time on a board with Bill Ayers is fair game, why not Hillary’s time on the board of Wal-Mart? After all, Bill Ayers just talked about demolishing things – Wal-Mart has demolished hundreds of small town shopping districts and driven virtual slave labor in the countries that produce the garbage they sell. Is that all good?

Sure enough, the reason you hear about Obama’s associations so much is because the Clintons want to return to the presidency, and they want it very badly. So badly, in fact, that they’re willing to throw the rest of us under the bus to get themselves there. If they really cared about the relative well-being of working people, they would stop investing so much energy in attacks against their fellow party members. (Not that Democrats are huge champions of the proletariat – just better, generally speaking, than the Republicans.) The Clintons claim that they are only confronting Obama with the kinds of salvos that the Republicans will proffer in the fall, but that is a pretty hollow contention. If their aim – like that of the party as a whole, it appears – is to shut the G.O.P. out of the White House this time around, they shouldn’t be ripping other Dems a third corn chute. Campaigning vigorously doesn’t mean making Democratic victory impossible, should things fail to go precisely your way… but the tactics they’re using threaten to damage both candidates and polarize the party in a way that will discourage turnout no matter who wins the primaries.

Then there’s just plain garden-variety demagoguery, like Clinton’s adoption of McCain’s harebrained gas tax holiday scheme. I expect this kind of idiocy from someone like McCain (pictured here in front of an American flag, by pure coincidence). Clinton’s take on it is a bit more ludicrous, because she is playing it as a working man vs. Big Oil issue – i.e. we’re going to make the oil companies pay the tax all summer, via a windfall profits tax. My ass. Anyone who thinks that that piece of legislation would pass through congress and be signed into law by Mr. 28 Percent before the annual weekend at Myrtle Beach is seriously on crack. Far more likely is that the tax would be dropped and then never added back again (lest Congress members, facing election, be accused of “raising taxes”). I haven’t heard this mentioned more than maybe once since this issue was raised, but the gas tax is a feeble attempt at addressing the actual cost of our car-based economy, with the revenue going to maintaining and repairing highways and bridges. This infrastructure is falling apart now, even with the revenue – without it, the neglect will be considerably worse. And with oil prices steadily climbing, the slight price reduction at the pump will disappear in a matter of weeks, particularly with the summer driving season kicking in.

Long story short, this is all about getting people elected, not making things better. No surprises there.

luv u,

jp