On Friday, on Democracy Now! Amy interviewed Eric Fuller, a 63-year old disabled veteran who was one of the wounded survivors of the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords. Shot once in the knee and once in the back (with shrapnel), Fuller was obviously not in a forgiving mood, just because Loughner's crazy rightwing views were not precisely the same as everyone else's crazy rightwing views:
ERIC FULLER: Once she walked up to me, she said, "I'll answer your questions, but you have to wait." And there was a line forming up there, so I went over and I sat down and looked over my questions... when I heard the sound of gunshots. And I looked over only about 10 or 15 feet away, where Gabrielle Giffords had been standing, and in her place was a very excited gunman who was athletically pumping out the rounds and pointing the gun at anybody that he could get a bead on.
People around me were being hit. I just dove for the ground. And while I was diving for the ground, a round hit me in the knee. I was conscious of that. And while I was on the ground, I guess another one, another round, hit me in the back. A fragment did; it hit me in the back. A woman went over and knocked the clip out of his hand. He was reloading. He had a Glock 9mm with a 30-round clip in it. And my thought on the ground was that he's going to come and finish us off. But this woman knocked the other clip out of his hand. Then a couple of guys came along, bystanders, and they tackled him, knocked him to the ground.
I was in shock, and I just wandered out into the parking lot. And a woman was pushing a cart full of groceries out there. And I said to her, "I've been shot." And she just looked at me like I was crazy. I was taken to the hospital. And even though I was sedated and everything, I stayed up--I was staying up, stayed most of the night. And I didn't know how to calm myself down, so I wrote down the Declaration of Independence, which I memorized some time ago. And that did help to organize my thoughts. And the first thing that I wrote down and what my reaction was to it was: "How many other people? How many other demented people are out there? It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target. Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled--senseless hatred leading to murder, lunatic fringe anarchism, subscribed to by John Boehner, mainstream rebels with vengeance for all, even nine-year-old girls." There was a little girl named Christina Green, nine years old, who is one of the deceased.
Another thing I wrote down was, "Can we have another fundraiser at the target range, Jesse Kelly?" Jesse Kelly ran against her in the election. And I've heard him speak several-a couple of times, and I couldn't believe he was a real candidate. I thought he was just like a fake candidate. It didn't seem like anybody would consider him seriously. He came within 4,000 votes of winning the election. One of his slogans was: "Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly." Kind of a very marginal personality and a low mentality.
I had wanted to write a diary about him, but didn't have the time & space Friday, so promised myself I'd write something today, about what a normal reaction he had had, given what he'd been through.
But then, over the weekend, I became aware that he'd been arrested for allegedly mumbling a threat under his breath--a sort of official vindication of the ludicrous claim that both sides are responsible for the climate of violence in today's politics. This occurred at an ABC-news-sponsored "town hall" to "promote healing", in response to a local Tea Party leader saying that any gun legislation should not be considered when people were still upset:
I grabbed the graphic because it's an arresting lead-in to the global warming interview on Democracy Now! yesterday with Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard University's Center for Health and the Global Environment, titled "From Snowstorms to Heat Waves, How Global Warming Causes Extreme Weather and Climate Instability." The idea that global warming contributes to snowstorms seems counter-intuitive, if you only think of global warming in terms of surface temperaturers--especially land surface temperatures. But when you realize--as the above chart shows--that the vast majority of warming goes into the oceans, which thus adds a great deal of energy to the world's weather system, then it's not that counter-intuitive at all. There's more energy for stronger snowstorms as well as hurricanes, tornadoes, whatever. But that's only the beginning of how Epstein paints a very different picture than that possessed by most lay people--even those who accept the science. Above all, the potential health impacts are broad, diverse, and potentially staggering. Details on the flip.
Tonight, HBO will air a new documentary, Wartorn: 1861-2010, on the history of war's after-effects on American veterans since the Civil War--"post-traumatic stress disored", as it is now known. Yesterday, Democracy Now featured an interview with filmmakers:
A new documentary, Wartorn 1861-2010, airing on HBO on Veterans Day, chronicles the lingering effects of war on military veterans throughout American history, from the Civil War through today's conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We speak with the filmmakers, Jon Alpert and Matt O'Neill, and with the parents of two soldiers who committed suicide after coming home from Iraq.
Guests:
Jon Alpert, 15-time Emmy winner and co-director of Wartorn 1861-2010. He is also the co-founder of Downtown Community Television.
Matt O'Neill, producer of Wartorn 1861-2010.
Cheryl Softich, her son, Noah Pierce, killed himself in July of 2007 after serving in Iraq.
Chris Scheuerman, his son, Jason Scheuerman, shot himself in 2005 after serving in Iraq.
Today, an issue of Random Lengths comes out dealing with WikiLeaks and its lack of impact on the midterm elections. I mention it because one of the main things WikiLeaks has done, IMHO, is substantiate the Winter Soldier testimony of Iraq and Afghanistan vets, which has also been almost totally ignored by corporate media and the political system. Much of what those vets testified about was related to war crimes, just like the original Winter Soldier hearings. The bottom line truth about war crimes is that--with few exceptions--they are driven from the top down. And the bottom line with PTSD is that its primary cause is that soldiers are human, and have a natural revulsion towards killing another human being. It's shooting people, not being shot at, that's the primary cause of PTSD, because those on the front lines are not war criminals at heart. They are being forced or tricked into carrying out the war crimes of their political and military "leaders." And they are, many of them, the last victims of the crimes they have been manipulated into committing.
On Friday, responding to Ken Silverstein's fairwell post as Harper's Washington editor (no hard feelings, he left to keep his sanity, shrewd dude to the end, he), digby dug up a highly prescient piece Silverstein wrote in 2006,"Barack Obama, Inc, the birth of a Washington machine". It's worth repeating the passage digby quotes in whole:
Since coming to Washington, Obama has advocated for the poor, most notably in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and has emerged as a champion of clean government. He has fought for restrictions on lobbying, even as most of his fellow Democrats postured on the issue while quietly seeking to gut real reform initiatives. In mid-September, Congress approved a bill he co-authored with Oklahoma's arch-conservative senator, Tom Coburn, requiring all federal contracts and earmarks to be published in an Internet database, a step that will better allow citizens to track the way the government spends their money.
Yet it is also startling to see how quickly Obama's senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington. He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on. For the staff post of policy director he hired Karen Kornbluh, a senior aide to Robert Rubin when the latter, as head of the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton, was a chief advocate for NAFTA and other free-trade policies that decimated the nation's manufacturing sector (and the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party). Obama's top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fund-raisers for Obama as well as donors), Wall Street financial houses (Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase), and big Chicago interests (Henry Crown and Company, an investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from telecommunications to defense). Obama immediately established a "leadership PAC," a vehicle through which a member of Congress can contribute to other politicians' campaigns-and one that political reform groups generally view as a slush fund through which congressional leaders can evade campaign-finance rules while raising their own political profiles.
Already considered a potential vice-presidential nominee in 2008, Obama clearly has abundant political ambitions. Hence he is playing not only to voters in Illinois--a reliably Democratic and generally liberal state--but to the broader national audience, as well as to the Democratic Party establishment, the Washington media, and large political donors. Perhaps for this reason, Obama has taken an approach to his policymaking that is notably cautious and nonconfrontational. "Since the founding, the American political tradition has been reformist, not revolutionary," he told me during an interview at his office on Capitol Hill this summer. "What that means is that for a political leader to get things done, he or she ideally should be ahead of the curve, but not too far ahead. I want to push the envelope but make sure I have enough folks with me that I'm not rendered politically impotent."
The question, though, is just how effective--let alone reformist--Obama's approach can be in a Washington grown hostile to reform and those who advocate it. After a quarter century when the Democratic Party to which he belongs has moved steadily to the right, and the political system in general has become thoroughly dominated by the corporate perspective, the first requirement of electoral success is now the ability to raise staggering sums of money. For Barack Obama, this means that mounting a successful career, especially one that may include a run for the presidency, cannot even be attempted without the kind of compromising and horse trading that may, in fact, render him impotent.
With reportage like that, one has to wonder why we ever needed anyone else covering DC while Silverstein was there. Did he miss anything? Not that I can see. More importantly, perhaps, did he blow any smoke, or drink any kool-aid? No, not a bit. But to broaden things out a bit to lessons that others might learn from Silverstein, just look at how much predictive power there was in simply noting who it was the Obama had chose to do business with. "He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on," Silverstein wrote, and then he proceeded to name names. By the time you came to the end of that paragraph, was there any possible way you could believe his transformational--sometimes even "revolutionary"--rhetoric was meant to be taken seriously? How could it, when these were the people Obama had already lined up to help him sell it? You'll note that there were no mavericky outsider geniuses in this bunch. James Carville would seem like a cross between Karl Marx and Dan Draper compared to the folks Obama hooked up with--a totally off-the-shelf entourage, just the same as his off-the-shelf Versailles Dem rhetoric about "be[ing] ahead of the curve, but not too far ahead."
Of course his campaign was way more exciting than that, thanks mostly to the contributions of his fans. When has show business ever been substantially different? Sales execs always think they're tragically hip. And these were--and still are--no different. But what they were actually doing was already a couple of decades old, as Naomi Klein pointed out on Democracy Now! last December, which I wrote about in a diary, "Naomi Klein nails brand 'Obama'". Here's the excerpt I quoted from the interview:
On Wednesday, Democracy Now! completed three days of coverage of Haiti six months after the earthquake. One segment served as a capstone: "Land Ownership at the Crux of Haiti's Stalled Reconstruction". Although it drew on other material, it was primarily an interview with Kim Ives, journalist with the newspaper Haiti Liberté. And what do you know, it turns out to be just one more example of the Shock Doctrine in action
First we start with the conditions people face, and how land is being used to funnel even more money to the haves:
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS:.... Well, the issue of land is at the crux of the recovery effort in Haiti. For the more than 1.5 million Haitians left homeless by the quake, plans for permanent housing are, to say the least, remote. Even plans for even just temporary shelters to get them out of the tent camps have not been drawn up. Where will all these people go? ....
AMY GOODMAN: .... We're now joined by Kim Ives.... In his latest article in Haiti Liberté, he writes that the earthquake, quote, "reveals that the principal fault-line in Haiti is not geological but one of class." Kim Ives is now back in Miami.
Kim, welcome to Democracy Now! Lay out this issue of land, which is not being raised very much.
KIM IVES: Well, Amy, as we saw, in fact, the wolves have been put in charge of the chicken coop. The bourgeoisie has been put in charge of resettling the squatters' camps, and they have the best land in suburban Port-au-Prince, the large tracts of land very suited to building cities of new cities, where people could have good houses. And there's dozens of proposals of how to build those houses. But the good land is not being given. What they've done is give a place like Corail, which they own, too, and they pay themselves handsomely for its use. And so, what they're doing is keeping their best land; selling, at a high profit, their worst land. And the people are paying the price.
Then we move on to how the anti-democratic emergency governance structure is overseeing everything. It's classic shock doctrine, "a coup without an army":
Yesterday, marking six months after the Haitian earthquake, Democracy Now! aired a nearly hour-long interview with Sean Penn, who has spent most of the time since the quake in Haiti managing a tent camp of 55,000 displaced Haitians. While it's become customary for Hollywood celebrities to become involved in charity work, there's a small subset that involves itself in relatively controversial, dangerous or difficult work, and Sean Penn has long been one of their number-as when he played a prominent role in trying to prevent the Iraq War. After the Haitian earthquake, however, without any fanfare, he took things to a whole other level, in terms of a personal commitment of time and energy. Here's part of how Democracy Now introduced their segment, and the first part of what Penn had to say:
AMY GOODMAN: Sean Penn first came to Haiti after the earthquake struck to help with immediate relief efforts. He decided to stay to finish what he started. He co-founded the J/P Haitian Relief Organization and is managing a tent camp on the Petionville golf-course that now shelters some 55,000 people. On Sunday night, we went to visit Sean Penn's camp. We walked in and asked to speak to him. We were ushered into a large tent and ended up sitting down with the Hollywood star for more than an hour talking about Haiti, recovery efforts and the lack of them, his life and what inspired him to do what he is doing.
Well Sean Penn, welcome to Democracy Now!, what are you doing here in Haiti?
SEAN PENN: Well, currently we're functioning as camp management for the Petionville club camp, what they call [inaudible]. We have 55,000 IDP population in the camp, its about 100 meters from here. And our job is to be principal coordinator of the other NGO actors in the camp, and to advocate for the camp, where we also function as a medical NGO and we also have a Class 3 Hospital on site. And now, we are currently beginning a project, we had done the first primary relocation, but I am careful to talk about that because there's approximately 1.8 million displaced people, and to date there has been a total of 7,000 people relocated citywide. By relocations we're talking about getting people out of spontaneous camps and into planned camps, that have better security, better services, and they're out of flood zones and that sort of thing. But long-term, the idea is to get people either to return to neighborhoods, making those neighborhoods functional, giving them services. Or for those camps on the outside, to become instead of considered planned camps, really be a model communities. And for hopefully businesses manufacturing, jobs to come into those areas. To go from tents into temporary shelters and utimately into housing, and hopefully into land ownership.
On the flip: What brought him there. Why he stayed. And a little bit more.
It's now been six months since the Haitian earthquake, in which more than 300,000 people died, but Haiti has virtually disappeared from public view, returning to the invisible status it has almost always had in America, except for when it periodically appears as an object of menace. One of the few national news programs to offer detailed coverage of Haiti on more than a crisis basis has been Democracy Now!, and so it's no surprise that Democracy Now! did a whole hour of programming on Haiti today, including an interview with Patrick Elie, a longtime Haitian democracy activist and Haiti's former Secretary of State for Public Security. This interview provides a good overview of the state of Haiti today, and how it fits into Haiti's history.
My own big-picture take is that South America has begun to free itself from the control of American imperialism (with the obvious exception of Colombia, of course), while Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean remain torn in a state of struggle that has certainly changed over the past few decades, but which remains largely in a state of limbo... except of course, for when it more closely resembles hell:
AMY GOODMAN: .... Six months ago was just days after the earthquake, January 12, 2010. One of the worst natural disasters in history. Over 300,000 people have died. Yet, since we saw him after the earthquake in Creole, known as Terre Tremble, the earth trembled, not much has changed. Thousands of people remain under the rubble. The rubble has hardly been moved. 1.7 million people are homeless. There are more than 1300 official refugee camps. Hundreds more dotting the country. People under tarps, under tents, outside their homes on baking plateaus, waiting, waiting for something to change here in Haiti. Today we will be speaking with a human rights attorney. We will go to one of those camps. But first, we are going to speak with the former Secretary of State for Public Affairs, a longtime pro-democracy activist. We are standing in the ruins of the Montana Hotel. Just behind me, one part of that hotel that was the site of international press for many years. 111 guests died, more than 200 people were killed in the earthquake, people who worked at the hotel. Today it continues to lie in ruins. Our guest is Patrick Elie We welcome you to Democracy Now!
PATRICK ELIE: Thank you for the invitation.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you first talk about your country?
Lest the brouhaha over Timothy Geithner's AIG coverup leave folks with the wrong impression this week, another story should make it perfectly clear that Geithner was simply acting according to the (admittedly corrupt) norms that now prevail amongst America's ruling elites.
In 2007, UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld blew the whistle on a massive international tax cheating scheme. Although thousands of wealthy tax cheats ended up paying fines, and UBS itself plead guilty and paid a $780 million fine, that was only a fraction of the total accounts UBS held, most of which were simply ignored. More importantly--and outrageously--the only person to go to jail in all this is Birkenfeld himself: a clear message that further whistleblowing is not wanted, and that wealthy tax cheats can once again rest easy.
The interview began with a setup from Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzales, columnist for the New York Daily News who had previously written a column about the case:
JUAN GONZALEZ: A former banker for the Swiss giant UBS who blew the whistle on the biggest tax evasion scheme in US history is preparing to head to prison tomorrow to begin serving a forty-month federal sentence.
Bradley Birkenfeld first came forward to US authorities in 2007 and began providing inside information on how UBS was helping thousands of Americans hide assets in secret Swiss accounts. UBS pleaded guilty last February and paid a $780 million fine. UBS has also agreed to turn over the names of the nearly 4,500 of its American clients to the Justice Department. That's only a portion of the 19,000 it claims the secret accounts of Americans it held. Meanwhile, thousands of other Americans with unreported offshore accounts have been allowed to belatedly disclose them and pay civil penalties.
On Wednesday, Democracy Now! featured an interview with Stan Brock, formerly with the long-running tv show, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, and founder of Remote Area Medical , "a non-profit, volunteer, airborne relief corps dedicated to serving mankind by providing free health care, dental care, eye care, veterinary services, and technical and educational assistance to people in remote areas of the United States and the world." Brock first got the idea when he had a bit of a mishap in the Amazon, and one of the Wapishana Indians with whom he was living told him, "Well, the nearest doctor is twenty-six days on foot from here." For years the organization served people around the world, but then Brock realized how many people here in America needed the exact same services. Today, he explained, "64 percent of everything we do is now right here in America."
Then, on Friday, Bill Moyers had an extended conversation with journalist Trudy Lieberman and Dr. Marcia Angell-- a remarkably blunt, straight-forward discussion that stood in stark contrast to almost everything else you'll see on tv about health care reform. Taken together, these two programs threw into sharp relief just how abysmally Obama has failed to deliver on his promise, and how easily he could have done much, much better.
First, there is Brock, telling us about his organization's patented field expeditions, and pointing out the tremendous media opportunity that Obama could take advantage of to galvanized public opinion... if only Obama were interested in that:
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what, for example, you're about to do this weekend, this expedition that you've got in Wise, Virginia. In fact, you're about to start sending off supplies just after we speak.
STAN BROCK: Yeah. Well, it will be the 575th Remote Area Medical expedition. The 574th ended just last Sunday. And we see many, many hundreds and often thousands of people at these operations. In fact, last year at Wise, Virginia, we did 5,586 patient encounters, with 1,584 volunteers in just two-and-a-half days. And to give you some idea of the volume of medical work that goes on in one of these RAM expeditions, we pulled 3,896 bad teeth there last year, but we did save 1,888 teeth by filling them, so that was an improvement over the year before.....
What I would like to suggest is that somebody from the administration, perhaps even President Obama himself-what an opportunity to come to one place where there will be-I'm going to give out 1,500 numbers every morning starting Friday and Saturday of this weekend. You're going to have thousands of patients all gathered in one place. You're going to have over 1,500 volunteers, doctors and support workers all in one place. What an opportunity to ask these people about their lives and what they need and their aspirations. But, unfortunately, so far, nobody seems to be taking notice of this. And we've done 574 of these opportunities.
Add to that Obama's oratory and charismatic presence, and you want to tell me he couldn't mobilize a powerful grassroots force to change the dynamics in Washington, if that were really what he wanted to do?
In the waning weeks of the Bush Administration, Tim DeChristopher disrupted a lease of public lands for oil and gas exploration by bidding up prices against those who intended to drill on the lands if oil or gas was found. (Democracy Now! reported on December 22, and I diaried about it here the following Sunday.)
The leases were subsequently invalidated, because the hurried process of bringing them to bid violated federal regulations. Although he had no money to pay for the leases when he bid on them, DeChristopher subsequently did get the money to cover them, as the result of becoming an instant folk hero. He was prepared to pay for the leases, but the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) couldn't accept the money, since the leases had been invalidated.
Now, however, DeChristopher is being charged with two felonies, even though the only reason he didn't make good on the payments is because the sales were withdrawn. Apparently, the act of exposing the rigged nature of the bidding was crime enough--"disrupting" the tacit collusion whereby bidding stopped well short of what the bidders were actually willing to pay.
And this is the Obama Department of Justice we're talking about now.
Yesterday, on Democracy Now!, Amy had an hour long interview with Breyten Breytenbach, one of South Africa's best-known public figures, a poet, writer, painter and anti-apartheid activist. This is actually the second hour-long interview Amy has done with Breytenbach in the last month-the first one was exactly one month earlier. She rarely does hour-long interviews. The fact that she's now done two within a month of one another with Breytenbach should tell you this is someone worth listening to.
So, why is that? Well, there's Breytenbach, the man himself, and there's the world situation right now. If we want to have a new relationship with the rest of the world, one that actually increases security and well-being for all, we're going to have to start with being a lot better listeners. And this is a place to start. This is a part of the world in which America could do a great deal of good for a tiny fraction of the money we have been wasting in Iraq, particularly if we listen carefully to their stories, and take guidance from them.
Why listen to Breytenbach in particular? First of all, he comes from as far inside the world of privilege, and has fought as hard against it, risking, and paying as much as anyone else in the anti-apartheid struggle. He was jailed for more than seven years under the apartheid regime, two of them in solitary confinement, the subject of probably his most famous book, the memoir, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. (At the same time, his oldest brother was the head of the special forces in South Africa.) So he speaks with an unusual degree of moral and artistic authority, strongly committed to social justice, with clear-eyed critiques of failed policies and missed opportunities. He remains deeply devoted to the transformation of South Africa, which he sees as a two-stage process, which has yet to seriously address the social and economic inequality underlying the political inequality of the apartheid era. He has a continent-wide perspective, and is quite perceptive in dissecting why the promise of liberation from colonial rule has not been realized, both in terms of continued European and American interference and in terms of internal political failures. He also has important insights into the very different nature of Islam in Africa as opposed to the imagery Americans have from the Middle East.
Breytenbach was described as the only example of a "nice South African" in the song "I've Never Met A Nice South African". The song was written by John Lloyd for the satirical British TV series, Spitting Image.
I've selected a few significant segments below the fold. I hope they'll pique your interest enough to read the whole transcript or listen online.
A continuing, quasi-controlled police riot has been unfolding for several days in Minneapolis. The arrest of Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman is merely the most visible example. Here's a video of Goodman's arrest:
On Tuesday, top Obama legal advisor Cass Sunstein appeared on Democracy Now! While it's not yet certain precisely what position he might occupy in an Obama Administration, he did clear up any doubts about his position in the afterlife, as those familiar with Dante's Inferno--Canto III, to be precise-- immediately realized. That is where Dante encountered "the melancholy souls of those/Who lived without infamy or praise," along with the angels who stood neutral between God and Satan. These are the moral triangulators between Good and Evil, and as Dante found them, they "Were naked, and were stung exceedingly / By gadflies and by hornets that were there."
Although they are not even within Hell, proper, Virgil tells Dante:
These have no longer any hope of death;
And this blind life of theirs is so debased,
They envious are of every other fate.
Sunstein is hardly alone, of course. But, first at Netroots Nation, then in his Democracy Now! debate with Glenn Greenwald, Sunstein has clearly staked out his leadership position in arguing against any sort of moral compass.
In his Democracy Now! appearance, Sunstein revealed three facets of the moral vacuum that lies disturbingly close to the heart of the Obama campaign. In the segment with Glenn Greenwald, he both defended Obama's FISA betrayal, and attacked the notion of any accountability for Bush Administration lawlessness. In a short followup segment on his book, Nudge (discussed by Matt in his diary yesterday here), Sunstein argued for an extreme minimalist approach in dealing with catastrophic market failures such as global warming.
What all three facets share in common is the basic acceptance of the rightwing hegemonic order established under Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Gingrich and Bush II. Under the rubric of listening to all sides, what is actually happening is that thoroughly discredited rightwing ideas are being accepted as defining the common sense framework inside of which Obama is proposing to make modest gestures in a progressive direction on one or another various issues. In short, Obama is trying to end the culture wars by surrenduring on the most basic of issues of defining political reality.
It's a truism that the GOP is going down in flames, and only John McCain can save them even a little bit, because he's not seen as a typical Republican. We all know that's bull, of course. But it does account for why he's not 20 points behind in the polls. In rather typical manner, Salon just recently published "How will Barack Obama get to 270?" by Paul Maslin, with the sub-head, "This November, a Democratic victory will probably hinge on the Electoral College votes of a handful of swing states. Howard Dean's pollster examines 17 fall battlegrounds, one by one."
But I don't think it will last. I think the blow-up around Bush's Knesset speech, and McSame's failed tag-team attempt is the shape of things to come. The reason is simple, really: McSame was a neocon darling long before Bush was. He was their man in 2000, before Bush beat him out. He's not a true neocon, not a Straussian. He's an old-fashioned imperialist with a hot temper. But that's easily close enough for politics, and easily just as bad. And since he knows (or cares) jack shit about the economy, he is, inevitably, going to rebrand himself as the uber-Bush--because that's exactly what he is.
I wrote about this all before, back in early February, largely just presenting a transcript of a Democracy Now interview with Matt Welch, author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. But it's newly relevant, so I'm going to shamelessly raid my old diary and add a few sharp observations on the flip.
The point now is not so much the need to connect McCain to Bush's foreign policy--but the virtually inevitable success of doing so.
The Bush Administration was wrong about the benefits of the war and it was wrong about the costs of the war. The president and his advisers expected a quick, inexpensive conflict. Instead, we have a war that is costing more than anyone could have imagined.
The cost of direct US military operations - not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans - already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.
Indeed, it is, they go on to say, more expensive than any other war we've ever fought, except for World War II.
There are so, so many lies surrounding the Iraq War, that it's hardly surprising the cost itself should be so wildly misrepresented.
It's not just that the operating costs are excluded from the normal budget process, or even that so much of the costs are deferred to the future in the form of caring for tens of thousands of military personel who will live out their lives with grave and costly injuries.
It's also, quite simply, that this war, unlike earlier ones, was designed from the start to appear utterly costless--look ma, no taxes!--when in fact it was anything but.
And that is why the truth about the cost of the war is anything but an incidental concern, but instead cuts to the very heart of the evil enterprise that Congress has yet to confront.
As Juan Gonzales reported on Democracy Now! yesterday, the Bush White House push-back has begun in earnest:
In response to the $3 trillion price estimate, the White House has gone on the offensive. White House spokesperson Tony Fratto told reporters, "People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure. One can't even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11."
So, in response to the truth about what the war cost, we get yet another re-telling of the lie that Iraq had anything at all to do with 9/11. Well, at least now we can do away with calling these "cheap lies." They are, no doubt, shoddy beyond all belief. But no one can call them, "cheap".
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