Monday, March 22, 2004
For the first time in nearly a century more than a quarter of US voters are not registered as either Republicans or Democrats. We need an electoral system that accommodates and indeed celebrates our country's diverse views. It's no accident that Howard Dean drew his strongest support among young people. Like Dennis Kucinich, he embraced instant runoff voting and stressed the importance of reforms that allow the range of voices and choices found in democracies with more modern voting systems.
Both Dean and Kucinich, like Nader, know that our two major parties have effectively colluded to dramatically narrow voter options. But there's nothing in American political culture that mandates the present system. It's an artifact of self-protection by the two party duopoly that at this point is particularly damaging to Democrats.
But there's a new budget reality that even some conservative economists can't ignore. A massive and growing federal budget deficit now looks increasingly hard to tame without raising more government revenue. That's another word for tax hike.
"It's inevitable," says Bruce Bartlett, a senior fellow at the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis in Washington.
Norman Behravesh agrees. The chief economist of Global Insight, a consulting firm in Waltham, Mass., holds that, notwithstanding election-year rhetoric, the next president will have to raise taxes to deal with the deficit.
Higher taxes, of course, go against the political soul of Bush and many other Republicans. But their hand may be forced, some experts say, if rising deficits fuel worries about inflation. That could scare the bond market and foreign investors into demanding higher interest rates. (Foreign investors now buy a large percentage of federal debt.)
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talks about more schools and marketplaces in Iraq, and less terrorism. Asked on CNN's "Late Edition" if the war was worth the lives of the 564 U.S. soldiers killed, Rumsfeld said, "Oh, my goodness, yes. There's just no question ... 25 million people in Iraq are free."
Each new day adds more names to the Americans casualty list, leaving us to wonder how many U.S. soldiers the Pentagon thinks should be sacrificed to liberate countries like North Korea, Burma, Sudan, or even Cuba. Even exempting China, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, and Equatorial Guinea from the top ten countries under tyranny as those that also serve as useful allies, Rumsfeld's false calculus of more than 500 dead Americans to "free" 25 million people could be quite expensive for many American families. The 73-year-old Rumsfeld should know very well that bloodied, maimed or dead American soldiers can never equate to politicized abstractions like "Iraqi freedom."
Condoleezza Rice recently repeated that Saddam had represented "the most dangerous regime in the world's most dangerous region." More dangerous than North Korea in terms of direct destructive threat to US soldiers parked on the DMZ and Americans at home on the West Coast. More dangerous than Pakistan or Iran, or even Israel, in terms of weapons technology proliferation. More dangerous than the decentralized al Qaeda organization responsible for 9-11, with its leader Bin Laden still not captured. That's what she said.
For the soldiers doing the dangerous and largely thankless duty in Iraq, these hopeful – if not entirely convincing – words of Powell and Rumsfeld are important. Our soldiers must focus on their work, and cling to the idea that, indeed, this is a liberation, a new democratic founding, in order to return home mentally – and hopefully physically – whole.
They do not have the luxury of a logical and honest assessment of the flawed Bush Doctrine of global militarism first, permanent unwanted occupations later.
According to counter-insurgency experts, the goal must be to remove the causes of the broader political anger, isolate the hard-core enemy and gradually transform a war into a police action. A major part of defeating terrorism, therefore, is satisfying legitimate grievances that may be stoking its fires. To do so may require making practical concessions and reasonable accommodations, just the things that Bush has ruled out.
In contrast to these experts, Bush sees crushing terrorism – or "evil" as he frequently puts it – as a religious duty that must be carried out regardless of the costs.
In his March 19 speech, Bush employed quasi-religious language when he said the war on terror “is an inescapable calling of our generation.” The concept of a “calling” has a powerful meaning among Bush's fundamentalist Christian political base, meaning a divine duty, much like Bush's earlier characterization of his wars in the Middle East as a “crusade.”
In other words, Bush's strategy is not about a practical means to reduce tensions, resolve political differences and gradually ease the hardliners to the sidelines. It's about the opposite, elevating a low-intensity conflict into a full-scale war with a goal of not simply prevailing over a foe but of eradicating evil itself. It is an undertaking that reeks of hubris and totalitarianism.
If the United States were a healthy democracy, Bush’s speech would have been cause for alarm, possibly outrage, certainly a fierce debate.
But Bush’s grim vision has been greeted with remarkably little debate in the United States even though it could have calamitous real-life consequences: generations of young Americans dying in a worldwide version of a Hundred Years War; the U.S. national treasury drained; and the Founding Fathers’ grand experiment of a democratic Republic ended....
The final, bitter irony of Bush's strategy for the “war on terror,” however, is that his approach is almost certain to fail. His swaggering style, along with his simplistic tactics, have alienated people across the globe and most deeply in the Middle East. Rather than working toward stability in that explosive region, Bush has chosen to do the opposite while invoking as his justification some quasi-religious Christian “calling” or “crusade.”
Taken in its totality, Bush’s vision carries logical consequences of the gravest order: Military strategy will overwhelm diplomacy; root causes of Middle Eastern terrorism, such as the plight of the Palestinians, will go unattended so as not to “appease” the terrorists; civil liberties at home and abroad will be set aside in the name of security; Bush’s allies, no matter how brutal and autocratic, will be hailed for their moral virtues; critics of Bush, including longtime Western allies such as France, Germany and now Spain, will be derided as “soft on terror”; lying, spin and intimidation will be the currency of the U.S. public debate.
And the adverse consequences are only just beginning. The world’s cultural divisions are deepening, world commerce is being disrupted, and economic conditions for billions of people are growing more desperate. The grinding poverty and the perceived injustices are creating the perfect conditions for breeding more senseless violence, not less.
If the American people follow Bush as an avenging angel descending into this worldly hell, terrorism eventually could become a universal voice of international despair, violence begetting only more violence and more despair. It is a future that does not need to happen, but it is one that is looming if the United States can’t figure out how to have a realistic and honest debate about terrorism.
But the real story is far different, as the following internal Department of Justice (DoJ) documents obtained by the Center for American Progress demonstrate. The Bush Administration actually reversed the Clinton Administration's strong emphasis on counterterrorism and counterintelligence. Attorney General John Ashcroft not only moved aggressively to reduce DoJ's anti-terrorist budget but also shift DoJ's mission in spirit to emphasize its role as a domestic police force and anti-drug force. These changes in mission were just as critical as the budget changes, with Ashcroft, in effect, guiding the day to day decisions made by field officers and agents. And all of this while the Administration was receiving repeated warnings about potential terrorist attacks.
Let's just start counting off the top of our heads: George W. Bush was opposed to a commission to investigate how and why 9-11 occurred, but then he changed his mind and backed it. (Political pressure.) He was certainly opposed to a commission to investigate the intelligence failures on Iraq, but then he changed his mind and backed it. (Political pressure.) He now brags, "I went to the U.N. (before invading Iraq)"? Who recalls why he changed his mind about doing that? He originally said he not only did not need to consult the United Nations, he said he did not even have to consult the U.S. Congress.
As you know, it's now been revealed that the White House threatened the top government Medicare actuary that he'd be fired if he revealed the true costs of the Medicare reform passed last year.
What struck me most about this story was how generally muted the reaction to it was.
I don't think this was because it wasn't reported widely or because people didn't take note. I think people just aren't that surprised that this administration would practice deceit in such a casual, even routine, manner.
It's just not surprising anymore. It's expected. (Pat Moynihan died to soon to see the most bracing example of defining -- governmental -- deviancy down.)
In any case, now we have another example from the latest Bush campaign ad.
This one uses last year's $87 billion Iraq supplemental, and the fact that Kerry voted against it, to accuse him of voting against each of the various line items for troop funding included in the bill.
Now, this is inherently misleading since I believe Kerry, like many other Dems, voted for an alternative bill which would have funded these needs by rescinding part of Bush tax cuts. So to say he voted against these particulars is really a distortion of the legislative process.
(Admittedly, it's not quite as bad as what they tried to pull last week, but still pretty bad. In that case, the President charged Kerry with a reckless plan to cut Intelligence spending in 1995, without mentioning that the agency targeted was was mismanaging the funds in question or, much more importantly, that the Congress, then under Republican control, voted a substantially larger cut than the one Kerry had proposed.)
What's more, the commercial highlights three budget items, each of which were ones the president opposed and had to be bullied into supporting -- by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
The text narration says: ""No body armor for troops in combat. No higher combat pay. No to better health care for reservists and their families. No -- wrong on defense."
What's most bracing about this narration is that this is actually a pretty factual statement if the target is the president, not Kerry.
Now, one claim really stands out here. The ad says Kerry voted no to "higher combat pay."
This is truly a milestone in the long bilious history of gall.
If you watched this debate at the time you'll remember that last summer the Bush administration went to great lengths to cut combat pay for troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to save money for other priorities. They only relented when Democrats, Republicans and most of all military-oriented publications like Army Times expressed so much outrage that they had no choice but abandon the effort.
Here's a snippet from an article which appeared on August 15th, 2003 in the San Francisco Chronicle which gives a brief glimpse of their ignominious retreat ...
The White House quickly backpedaled Thursday on Pentagon plans to cut the combat pay of the 157,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan after disclosure of the idea quickly became a political embarrassment.
The Pentagon's support for the idea of rolling back "imminent danger pay" by $75 a month and "family separation allowances" for the American forces by $150 a month collapsed after a story in The Chronicle Thursday generated intense criticism from military families, veterans groups and Democratic candidates seeking to unseat President Bush in 2004.
And so the White House which was pushing to save money by reducing combat pay for troops currently serving in two combat zones is now challenging Kerry's national security bona-fides by alleging that he opposed increases in combat pay.
Sometimes you try to dress it up or package it in some artful way. But the truth is irreducibly blunt: lying and indifference to a factual record often no further away than the google web site is the hallmark of this administration.
Up is down.
[Talking Points Memo] 
