When has there been a weirder election, I ask you? It’s like upside-down land, or that planet on the far side 
of the sun that is an exact mirror image of the Earth, except that everyone eats corn on the cob up-and-down instead of side-to-side (apologies to Father Sarducci). On one side, a field of mostly white guys has narrowed to a woman and a brother; on the other, a 71-year-old “maverick” is winning out against religious and social conservatives. It took eight years of Dubya/Cheney to make this field look good to two historically cautious institutional parties. The Democrats haven’t even half-seriously advanced an African-American or female candidate for national office since 1984-88 – now it’s as if they figure, what the hell? And not choosing someone broadly approved by the Christian right is a very different kettle of fish for the G.O.P. Amazing. And yet, from a policy standpoint, we’re not looking at any radical departures here. The general election will be a clash of two orthodoxies – a choice between basically what we have now and a slightly more managed version of empire, with the winner building his/her administration from that same pool of a few hundred players they always draw on.
What about Obama? Painfully cautious man. Either that, or he really is a passionate centrist. I’m not sure it matters. To the extent that I want to invest any serious thought into the matter, I do mildly prefer him to the other people running, but it’s a kind of grudging preference. He does get people fired up and motivated to vote, and it would be at least nominally a new administration, if built from remnants of past administrations. Thing is, Obama could use his current standing to advance some badly needed political causes, but he won’t, either because he doesn’t agree with them or he feels they would cost him votes. The trouble with politicians on the center-left is that they’re always trying to take their half out of the middle of the electorate. Likely this is because they get most of their money from industry sources that reside there politically. If money wasn’t driving them, if they truly were a party of the poor and working class, they could win by taking bold positions. There is majority support in the U.S. for trading our current private health insurance casino in for a single-payer coverage system. They only thing lacking is a major party willing to take up that issue and that challenge. Obama, for instance, could but doesn’t. The reason may be money. (Just a guess.)
Then there’s Huckabee, Steven Colbert’s friend and invention (perhaps the candidate’s best attribute, aside from a television-friendly persona). Now he’s probably the friendliest guy who ever threatened to force millions of women to carry their pregnancies to term against their will. But hell, I’m sure if you met enough members of them, you’d find at least one Taliban who seemed likeable. I think the thing that gets me the most about Huck is not so much that he, for instance, doesn’t believe in evolution, but that he tends to adopt hare-brained policy positions like the national sales tax (known by its proponents as the “Fair Tax”). Aside from being massively regressive and favorable to the very wealthy, the “Fair Tax” promoters actually mask its true impact by claiming it’s a 23% tax (!!) when it’s actually more like a 30% tax (!!!!). (They do that by including the tax amount in the total – so for every dollar you spend, you add 30 cents… but that 30 cents is just 23% of the total $1.30 you just spent. Pretty tricky, huh?) But Huck has adopted it, so that must mean God wills it to be. Maybe they should just call it the “Jesus Tax”.
Still burning. Just in case anyone has forgotten, we’re still dropping enormous amounts of ordinance on Iraq – recently 19,000 pounds worth in Arab Jabour, south of the capital. Whoever you support for president, just make sure you hold their feet to the fire on this wretched enterprise.
luv u,
jp
you’re not so crazy about (or downright detest). That’s probably one reason why so many people don’t bother to vote at all. Myself, I always make it to the booth for major elections – seems only right since so many people died to gain the franchise back in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s-60s. I’m usually not at all happy with the options, as some of you know, and the prospect of a McCain vs. Clinton general election is a depressing one for me. Not that I invest all that much stomach lining into the question of who will occupy the White House. (Far be it from me to suggest that a vote every four years is all you should expect to have to do to make the world a better place.) But honestly, both of these people will make abysmal presidents. And while I would prefer not to lock-in another eight years of Republican party ascendancy, particularly the virulent strain of right-wing conservatism that has taken hold in recent decades, I can see that in a race such as that, we’re fucked one way or the other.
reactionary Republicans) has great defense / national security credentials. My reaction to the first point if fairly simple – what the hell does it matter that he’s honest and consistent (questionable premise, but nevertheless) when he is dead wrong nearly all of the time, like when he thought the Iraq war was such a great idea (an opinion he still clings to)? We’ve got “strong” and wrong already, and it’s not working so well. On the second point, it beats the hell out of me why he or any of his fellow Iraq war enthusiasts would retain national security credibility when their historic disaster in the middle east has made us all more vulnerable to terrorist attack by any reasonable measure. What the hell does it take to discredit these fuckers, anyway? The man is an ass who flag-waved us into the Iraq catastrophe, costing many thousands of lives and setting us up for decades of negative consequences. He would make a miserable president. (Yeah, but how do I really feel?)
speculate on. More than mass murder and dictatorship united them; they also share the posthumous praise of pundits and political leaders the world over, some of whom have every reason to know better. One can only assume these apologists hold a cynical appreciate of the blood-soaked Indonesian general’s ability to provide wealthy westerners with favorable investment opportunities in what was once seen as the super-domino of U.S. southeast Asia policy. Whatever the truth may be, news articles about Suharto’s passing referred to him as a “modernizer” who brought his country into the global market, though with some level of brutality. His rule was “controversial” due in part to his having eliminated as many as 1 million “alleged communists” during his 35-year rule (not to mention the perhaps 200,000 killed in East Timor). This, according to new Australian Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, amid “a period of significant growth and expansion,” though Rudd admits, “many have disagreed with his approach.” Including, presumably, the 1.2 million dead and their families. Can you imagine Pol Pot being so eulogized? (At least the syndicated article in my hometown newspaper compared Indonesia’s mass killings with those of Cambodia – a comparison that once drew howls of derision.)
A simple twist of fate would have had the corporate media and world leaders praising “Saddam the modernizer” at his graveside as well, were it not for his fateful transgression in 1990 (i.e. invading a country we’re friendly with). Instead, he alone of the three is condemned unconditionally as a mass murderer, though perhaps his worst crimes – deadly attacks against the Iranians, whose county he invaded – typically go unmentioned, despite the extensive use of chemical weapons. Clearly, neither mass murder, nor unprovoked invasion, nor the use of non-conventional weapons, is a problem for our leaders, since they have committed (in our names) crimes just as serious over the past few decades. Not surprisingly, British researchers have completed 
prices, the duopoly of federal office holders has decided to cut some checks and pass them out to us proles. Guess they figure we’re pissed off enough to warrant bribery at this point. In any case, a recession during an election year is bad news for either party in a divided government, so you are seeing the kind of “bipartisanship” that in another might be considered a mild form of totalitarianism. Sure, we’re blowing billions of dollars a month (to say nothing of lives lost) trying to hold on to our imperial stake in Iraq and perpetuating astounding economic inequality through a tax system heavily skewed in favor of the hyper-rich, but we’ll borrow even more money now for a one-shot payoff to the American people in hopes they’ll go out and shop and forget about how fucked up everything is. 
Doing this must gall Bush no end. He’s been going around for years repeating the same hackneyed talking points about the U.S. economy, about its “strong fundamentals” and its “resilience”, and never was heard a discouraging word. As recently as this week, his drone Condi “Supertanker” Rice was praising our economic strength at Davos. Lord knows, Bush despises having to reverse himself, like the Custer character in Little Big Man. (I wonder if his father and the old man’s somewhat embarrassing friend had to shame Dubya into it? Hmmmmm….) Whatever its genesis, this half-measure Keynesianism can be seen as the ownership class’s bulwark against much more meaningful adjustments, like restoring some measure of taxation to the extremely rich (i.e. those few who have benefited tremendously from the economic order of the past 25 years), or slapping an excess profits tax on the oil companies, or re-regulating the financial/banking sector, or dismantling the so-called “free trade” investors’ rights agreements. Not that any leading candidates from the nominal left are advocating this, but there’s always a chance someone will if people get mad enough.
and Michigan – and just as many winners. Good grief. One might only hope that it would continue along these lines, right up to their caveman convention. Still, I’m certain they’ll congeal around one of those disgusting blisters and proceed with their usual (and often successful) attempt to race-bait, terror-scam, and otherwise bluster their way into the White House for another term. Hardly matters who the actual candidate will be – whichever one takes his party’s grisly mantle, he will no doubt benefit enormously from television ads that open with an ominous low note and a blurry photograph of their opponent. Just hold out for a few more weeks, folks, then it’ll be open season. (They’re loading up the slime cannons right now.) And whoever emerges from the fray with the most votes this November… well, their savaged remains will take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
In one sense, this is the dynamic that drove Democratic support for the Iraq war authorization resolution back in 2002. Many war supporters wanted to inoculate themselves from being attacked as “soft on Saddam” and, more generally, “soft on terror”. I don’t believe for a moment that it was any great moral leap for Hillary Clinton to vote with the president on that. She practically out-Cheneyed Cheney on the Senate floor as they debated that ridiculous resolution. And my feeling is that she will take ownership of that vote again if circumstances allow her (and the administration) to act as though there’s something to celebrate in our Iraq policy. That’s why John McCain is strutting around like a turkey… because he feels like his brick-brained support for the invasion of Iraq is finally paying off. Hillary may end up playing that card as well. Never mind that their support for the war has led to the deaths of probably 750,000 to 1 million people and created 4 million refugees. That’s Rwanda territory, far outstripping Saddam’s record… and they can stack that atop the probably 500,000 who died as a result of U.S./U.K. -driven sanctions during the 1990s. And I don’t hear any convincing talk of withdrawal from either side, so it’s likely to add up to even more. 
Though one could hardly imagine a more flaccid and lackluster initiative than the one he has set in motion with the Annapolis conference. It took some real effort to sustain the delusion that the United States was some kind of honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton; with the current administration, the suggestion is merely laughable. For almost seven years, Bush has aligned himself with some of the most reactionary political forces in Israel. He called Sharon a “man of peace” even as he was smashing the life out of hundreds of Palestinians during the dark days of Spring 2002 (I recall a Newsday article by Ed Gargan from that time describing how IDF soldiers even vandalized a girl’s school, smashing windows, stealing musical instruments, and scrawling obscenities on blackboards). He backed that killer whale with arms, diplomatic support, and cash as settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem expanded and multiplied and the infrastructure of apartheid broke the Palestinian nation into a hundred pieces.
In any case, since when is an occupied people expected to negotiate their liberty from the power that illegally invaded and colonized them? Would this have been expected of Poland in the 1940s? Of Hungary in 1956? Shouldn’t we find the very idea morally repugnant, in addition to being a grave breach of international law? For chrissake, even if you could argue with any justice that the Israelis needed to occupy the territories beyond their pre-June 1967 borders for these forty years (a dubious notion), how can anybody… anybody justify the official policy of incentivizing Jewish-only settlements on those lands – a practice that has been in effect from the very beginning of the occupation? If Israelis feel that the very presence of Palestinians poses a danger to them, why do they insist on building colonial outposts in their midst? Palestinians would have to be utter morons to think that the state of Israel had no designs on their land… or that they had any serious intention of giving it back at some point. They would have to be insane to think that the U.S. – and particularly this president – which has financed, at least indirectly, the expansion of Israeli settlements and related infrastructure, will ever act as an honest broker. 
about his latest book – an extended satirical essay on how our national political leaders in Washington D.C. are a kind of species unto themselves, with their own language, culture, and value systems completely distinct from those of the rest of the country. I know he’s playing this for laughs, but this is the sort of fable that nourishes the very manner of political beast he parodies. I ask you – who runs for national office without attacking some aspect of Washington D.C.? Isn’t that the horse that Dubya rode into town on, as well as nearly all of his predecessors for the past 30 years? They all embark on this mission to clean up the mess in our nation’s capital. Even after seven years in the White House, junior is still reading from that same tired “outsider” script. The reason is simple – people don’t see their desires or priorities reflected in federal policies, so Washington itself is painted as the problem… and a damned convenient one at that.
I know you already know this, but I’ll say it anyway just to remind myself. Those people in Washington D.C. we so revile were sent there by us. They do what they do because they feel confident that between election days we’ll be too busy, too distracted, and too disengaged to have anything to do with the actual process of national governance. They assume (based on experience) that we can be bought off with a few pleasing tales (or by slinging a guitar and talking folksy), while they almost unfailingly serve the interests of those centers of concentrated wealth that own this country. And to a large extent, they are correct. The only way we can stand against those powerful institutions is by building our own popular institutions, by organizing and acting in our own common interests. Corporate America has nothing but money, and we have nothing but numbers – we can prevail if we are willing to abandon the notion that progress comes in a glossy package. 
spinning damage control for ex-general and president-for-as-long-as-he-likes Pervez Musharraf. Having invested so bullishly in this coup leader, Bush and company are reluctant to see his fortunes fall alongside the corpse of his chief political rival. In Pakistan as elsewhere, we build today’s disastrous policies on those of yesteryear, compounding tragedy with farce and playing with whole nations as if they were mere instruments of our global ambitions. For decades we’ve supported strongman military leaders in Pakistan because it served our purposes to do so (one-stop political shopping, in effect – less haggling with popular leaders). The rationale in the 1970s and 80s was the fight against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan, an effort that amounted to a kind of Ford Foundation for jihadist groups, funded in part by the Saudis and facilitated by the CIA and Pakistan’s I.S.I. intelligence service.
For our great leaders, the issue doesn’t even arise. We are directed to keep our gaze on the surface – just accept the most simplistic explanation… mindless violence by nihilistic fanatics who hate us for our freedom, our love of democracy, and our chewy goodness. That may work for domestic consumption, since the crime is so heinous, but it seems unlikely that the Pakistani people would accept this explanation. Political assassination is nothing new in Pakistan – Bhutto herself has been accused of employing this tactic in the past. Whatever her shortcomings, she was admired by a substantial number of people, many of whom see Musharraf as the party responsible for her killing. Our government has seen Bhutto only as a means of propping up Musharraf, who counts Cheney among his strongest advocates in the U.S. We are very closely associated with the President/General, and if he is seen as the despoiler of Pakistani’s hopes for a more open society, they may start hating us even more than they do already. 
right?) More than anybody anywhere in this vast country, your now have the ability to call the major party candidates on just about any topic, whether it’s torture of detainees, the war in Iraq, health care, whatever. What’s more, you have the opportunity to make a greater political impact than that of much larger populations in New York, California, and other major states. How so? Well, for one thing, you can choose from among nearly the entire field of candidates – by the time the race gets to New York, for instance, it will essentially be over. Sure, there may not be a lot of variety there, but it’s better than a ballot of one. And you – particularly those folks in Iowa – can stand in a not-too-crowded living room with one of these fuckers, challenge them with non pre-fabricated questions, and go mano-a-mano politically with ordinarily very isolated and well protected politicians.
withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq, b) abandon any plans for permanent bases in that country, and c) pay reparations for the crime we’ve committed against the Iraqi nation at a level of expenditure that at least approaches the amount it took to destroy that nation?
like. In a way, it reminds me of that classic board game, Clue, where there are three groups of cards – suspects, weapons, and locations – and at the start of the game one card from each group is taken out and secreted away; ultimately the winner is the first one to surmise which cards they are. Colonel Mustard did it in the Parlor with the Candlestick Holder, right? Well, particularly on the Republican side, you’ve got maybe three issues that all the major candidates demagogue about, based on G.O.P. polling data – say, immigration, detainee abuse, and the broader “war on terror”. So Rudy, Mitt, Fred, and Huck range about trying to guess what the winning positions will be. (Hmmm…. the Undocumented Mexican Gardener did it in the Anbar Awakening Council with Stress Positions.) They try to outdo each other to the point where it gets pretty ugly. Thus are major national policies born. 
Mitt’s crib on this topic comes from Cofer Black, former C.I.A. official and head of counter terrorism at the Agency (for 3 years, not 30, as