There are basically two ways to react to the news that something you vociferously advocated for turned out to be a really, really bad idea: you can either admit your mistake and learn from it, or you can double down. Here’s Tom Friedman doubling down:
It’s been a while since I’ve heard someone so intelligent say so many breathtakingly unintelligent things. Did one of our most high-profile pundits really say “Hey terrorists, suck on this?” Yes, yes he did. Did he just draw a painfully weak, attenuated analogy between economic bubbles and “terrorist bubbles”? Indeed. Can this possibly be the same guy who wrote From Beirut to Jerusalem? Somehow, it is.
Another beautiful speech from Obama, this one in Berlin:
One line in particular struck a real chord with me:
I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen – a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.
This is the exact opposite of everything that our government has stood for in the past eight years, and a complete rejection of the kind of American exceptionalism, insularity, and neo-imperialism that Bush has embraced since he decided he was the decider. It’s a promise to engage with the rest of humanity, rather than bully it into submission.
The right wing has produced its usual stream of daft bullshit in response — everything from complaints about the poster his campaign came up with for the event (OMG it’s got a picture of Obama in profile … just like Hitler!) to his unpatriotic inclusiveness (he said non-Americans also died on 9/11! why does he hate the troops?) to the fact that he gave the speech at all when he should be back home, eating at the Sausage Haus and lying about shit. But all of that is just the reflexive gnarling of a dumb, frightened animal. It’s ignorable, I think1.
What bugs me more is the assertion, from some quarters, that the speech was too light on substance. That’s also bullshit, but it’s a meme that might have legs. Look: it’s true that there aren’t any concrete policy proposals here, but specificity isn’t the point of a speech like this: you don’t go to a different country, as a presidential candidate, and get into details. That stuff comes later. It’s much more important — especially now — to set the tone. What he needs to do, first, is reassure the rest of the world that we can produce politicians who are both charismatic and sane; and, second, that he sees America not as a giant imperialist child swinging reflexively at everything that frightens it, but as a global citizen. As a part of the world’s community.
This doesn’t make him weak, ok? It makes him strong, in all the ways that matter. Him, and us.
I remember being shocked and nauseated when I first saw this, but it’s taken on a whole new resonance in the past few months, as McCain has steadily jettisoned everything that made him worthwhile and honorable as a candidate, in order to embrace the Bush Way, in all its jingoistic, pitiless incoherence. I still believe he’s better, and smarter, than the things he’s saying — but that just makes his myriad capitulations worse.
I was a big McCain guy back in 2000, so I was crushed when this picture started making the rounds. But these days it looks about right.
If there’s any silver lining to the outrageous FISA bill that the Democrats rammed through congress today, it’s this: we now know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the government doesn’t give a shit about our privacy. That doesn’t go for everyone in government, of course1, but the don’t-give-a-shit contingent is almost always larger than the give-a-shits, and they almost always win.
The bad guys here are split into two basic camps: (1) the ones who consider the right to free, unmonitored communications a fairly trifling thing, easily sacrificed on the altar of political expediency; and (2) the ones who consider that right an existential threat that must be suppressed at all costs.
We saw both of those forces at work today, I think: thuggish Bush/Cheney sycophants deathly afraid of the notion of free, unfettered networks, and craven opportunists who don’t much care either way, but will happily throw our rights overboard in exchange for perceived political safety (I’m looking at you, Stenny). Either way, the effect is the same. A network that grows more regulated, and less free, every year. The original, anarchic promise of the internet stillborn. It’s depressing as hell.
But at least we know. The only way we get a free internet is if we wrest it from the hands of the government that regulates it, and the corporations that run it2. This country was founded on a fundamental mistrust of power, and a clear-eyed understanding of the monster that power will always become if it’s left to its own devices. The system the founders put in place to keep that monster at bay seems to be unraveling, though, with its three co-equal branches often acting more like chummy old golf buddies than the checks and balances they’re supposed to be.
So, basically, the network needs to be a force of nature — an irreducible, uncontrollable constant, like gravity. It’s possible to use gravity to do bad things, of course — drop pianos on people, say, or throw them off of buildings — but you can’t control it. You can’t suspend gravity, you can’t bend it to your will. And that’s the key. A free internet will still be subject to many of the same outrages that we see today — the RIAA monitoring P2P networks and issuing automated lawsuits against hapless grandmothers; criminals sniffing packets off of wireless streams; corporations spying on employee email — but it won’t be vulnerable to the ultimate outrage, total control. It won’t be possible to install snoops in data centers that filter all incoming traffic, or shut down access to sites that your ideology rejects, or build a surveillance wall around an entire country.
I don’t know if it’s possible to create a free network — and, if it is, whether it’s at all feasible any more. But one thing is abundantly clear — without it, the entire notion of privacy is a farce.
In particular, the newly-christened representative of my district, Donna Edwards, voted with the angels. Yay Donna! ↩
I realize that the distinction between government and industry is rapidly becoming a quaint anachronism, but the old fogy in me still likes to pretend it’s there. ↩
Congressional democrats are about to cave in again, and this time it’s serious. They’ve apparently come to a “compromise” on the telecom amnesty bill, which gives the telecommunications companies who have been spying on us for the last six years — listening to our calls, reading our emails, monitoring our browsing, all at the government’s behest — complete immunity from prosecution. In exchange we, the American people, will get absolutely nothing.
It’s pretty clear that political reality has evolved beyond the old, tired, definition of the word “compromise”. Time for a new one:
Compromise (com-pro-MIZE): See capitulation.
Just to be absolutely clear: this is a congressionally-approved get out of jail free card, which not only absolves these criminals of all wrong-doing, but also clears the way for future privacy-killing accords between government and industry. They’ve apparently installed some sort of pathetic speedbump on this road to amnesty, a rubberstamp from a district court, but I doubt that the machinery of the police state will even slow down when they hit it. There are rights to be trampled, by god!
This approaches terrifying. The one thing that we really need to be afraid of in this country is collusion between the corporations that have been quietly, steadily insinuating themselves into our lives and the government that’s supposed to be protecting us from them. They’re not in bed yet, but they’re sitting together on the porch swing, holding hands, gazing dreamily into each others eyes.
Time to pry these monstrous lovers apart. Call your representative.
So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words — the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists — and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was.
That’s the “compromise” Steny Hoyer negotiated and which he is now — according to very credible reports — pressuring every member of the Democratic caucus to support. It’s full-scale, unconditional amnesty with no inquiry into whether anyone broke the law. In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we’ll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it — the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected.
Update 2: Well, it happened. A bill negotiated in secrecy, revealed in a sideshow magician’s cloud of euphemism and outright lies, then hastily rammed through the next day. This stuff makes a mockery of the whole notion of democracy.
Update 3: Obama weighs in, at last, with his own carefully-parsed, mushy-mouthed capitulation. This this gets sadder and sadder.
No political ideology lives in isolation. We judge communism by how Mao and Stalin implemented it, we judge 60s-era liberalism by how LBJ and the Democratic Party implemented it, and we judge social democracy by how Western Europe has implemented it. That’s how you judge movements: by how their real-life adherents put them into practice, not by reference to a utopian vision of how they should be implemented if only we lived in the best of all possible worlds.
There’s been a lot of this kind of thing coming out of the craven brood of neoconservatives who’ve spent the last seven years systematically driving this country into the ground. They’ve been working hard to disassociate themselves from the policies that they fomented, on the grounds that the standard-bearers of their ideology just did it wrong. This is how loathsome scraps of vile like Richard Pearl and Doug Feith justify themselves these days: the war was right, and we were right. Bush just fucked it all up.
Well, this is worse than ridiculous — it’s dangerous. It’s fantasy in the face of demonstrable fact.
I have to admit to some respect for the communist movement that grew up in this country at the turn of the century, in response to the capitalist reign of terror that reduced huge swathes of the population to nothing more than subsistence rats. The communists did lots of good work back then, and persevered in the face of terrible persecution — and defeat after defeat — at the hands of their employers and their government. However — there’s just no denying that every experiment with pure communism has ended in dictatorship and misery. Which isn’t to say that there’s definitely a causal relationship between communism and despotism — just that every attempt has demonstrated one, and we can’t afford to risk trying anymore.
I’d say the same thing about the brand of scorched-earth neoconservatism that found its way to the levers of power with the ascension of the Bushies. An economy in the tank, a falling dollar, an endless war, a burgeoning surveillance society: these are the fruits of the neoconservative revolution.
So give it a rest guys. We tried it your way, and suffered for it. Time to move on.
You know how, in the old Road Runner cartoons, Wile E Coyote, in hot pursuit, would routinely careen off the side of a cliff and then spend ten seconds running through thin air before he realized that there was nothing under his feet? And then fall? That’s Hillary Clinton’s campaign, more or less — except she stubbornly refuses to fall.
I don’t know why she’s doing this, or how — but I am sure that she won’t be able to keep it up. There is no mathematical way for her to win this nomination. None. You can suspend gravity for a while, but you can’t beat it. Ever. So it seem to me that a rational coyote/candidate, given an inexplicable reprieve from the laws of physics, would sort of creep carefully back onto terra firma and concede defeat. You may not have your road runner, but at least you’re not a tiny puff of smoke at the bottom of a ravine.
But … no. She seems absolutely intent on doing as much damage to herself as possible. A couple of weeks ago she donned her Cheney hat and said that obliterating an entire people (Iranian people, in this case) was “on the table”, in the current parlance of American jingoism. This week, after her should-have-been-decisive defeat/worthless victory in North Carolina and Indiana, she said, basically, that she’s a better candidate than Obama because she’s white, and poor white people like other white people more than they like black people.
Both of these statement are reprehensible, of course, but they’re also deeply strange coming from Hillary Clinton. She’s better, and smarter, than this. Her language smacks of desperation, yes, but also of insanity. She’s clearly come unhinged. Someone very close to her needs to lean over, and whisper into her ear, and lead her back to solid ground. Before she damages herself, and her legacy, beyond repair.
Fascist! is a word that gets thrown around a lot by abstractly angry people who don’t like what their governments are doing. But sometimes those people don’t really know what “fascist” means. People like me, for example. The word has a viscerally ugly ring to it, and suggests all sorts of nonspecific nastiness, and it’s kind of fun to say. But it’s occurred to me recently that someone might ask me what exactly I mean when I say fascist, and I’d have to stammer something like: “You know … fascist! It’s sort of like an asshole, but meaner.” And that would be super embarrassing. So I decided to look it up:
Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers the individual subordinate to the interests of the state, party or society as a whole. Fascists seek to forge a type of national unity, usually based on (but not limited to) ethnic, cultural, racial, religious attributes. Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: patriotism, nationalism, statism, militarism, totalitarianism, anti-communism, corporatism, populism, collectivism, autocracy and opposition to political and economic liberalism.
What the fuck. No wonder I’m confused. Fascism seems like an umbrella term for every species of government-fomented evil, ridiculously broad-ranging in its scope. There are lots of governments around that satisfy some of these criteria, but there can’t be one that satisfies all of them, can there? Because, seriously, where would you look to find a group of people who use a particularly pernicious form of faux-populism to whip up nationalist feelings in order to justify their impulses toward militaristic totalitarianism and anti-individualistic corporatism? Who will use all statist/autocratic means at their disposal to quash any efforts toward liberalism and sanity?
Hmmm. Let’s see. Think think think.
Oh, that’s right:
These guys have done more to wreck our democracy than anyone in recent memory. But whenever you tick down the list of outrages, they invoke the judgment of “history”. Bush in particular. Truman left office with a 24% approval rating, he says, and now he’s one of the most respected statesmen in the 20th century. That’s me, he says. I’m basically a brush-clearing version of Truman.
Unless history develops a pretty severe case of amnesia, this is doubtful. Here’s what it’s going to look back on:
A fruitless and unnecessary war that plunged a country into chaos, killed
a hundred thousand Iraqis and over 3000 Americans (so far), cost us a trillion
dollars — all in pursuit of an objective that turned out to be
completely illusory.
An economy in shambles, the result of ill-advised tax cuts (that chiefly
benefited very rich people) and out-of-control spending.
The elimination of many of the civil liberties that made us the beacon of
freedom that Bush still talks about. It is now possible for the federal
government to incarcerate American citizens for any reason, hold them
indefinitely without charge, and torture them.
The establishment of an entrenched surveillance society. It’s a matter
of record, now, that the government has used its ties with the telecom
community to monitor our phone calls, our email, our browsing habits.
They’ve used National Security Letters to peruse the books we’ve checked
out of the library. They’re stealthily building a national database
that aggregates all of the details of our lives in one place.
The merging of government and corporate interests. Installing corporate
lobbyists in government agencies that are supposed to monitor their
former clients, bringing in a rogues gallery of serial polluters to vet
energy bills, enshrining legal immunities into law to protect their
corporate allies from being sued for spying on their customers.
I don’t mean to say that we live under the thumb of fascism right now. But most of the new elements that these guys have introduced into our government and our lives are the ingredients for the formation of a fascist state. If history looks at all this and still comes to the conclusion that Bushco did a bang-up job, then history’s an idiot.
My guess is that, in thirty years or so, the textbooks will say something like this:
The Bush Era (2000-2008) marked a low point in American history. President Bush and his neo-conservative allies ushered in a series of changes that were designed to enshrine the executive branch as kind of oligarchical dictatorship, answerable to no one but their corporate partners and the bankrupt ideology that drove them.
Mr Bush used the time-honored method of fear and endless war to cow the American populace into allowing many of their rights to be taken away, in the interests of defending the nation against “evil-doers” in an ongoing, and never-ending, “war on terror”. It is a matter of considerable debate among historians whether the trajectory that the neo-conservative agenda placed the country on would have eventually resulted in the establishment of a de-facto Fascist state, in which the Executive “branch” became the sole wielder of power, with the legislative and judicial reduced to nothing more than puppets.
Thankfully, this is all speculation. President Obama’s first acts in office were to turn back most of the Bush Administration’s more egregious policies. Civil liberties regained their place of primacy, signing statement were banned, corporate influence waned, and the balance of powers that had sustained the country since the Revolution was restored.
If that last bit seems a little strained, it’s because it’s me being optimistic. I’m not very good at optimistic. But without that paragraph, things become pretty much unthinkable — the same passage, for example, would look something like this:
The Bush Era (2000-2008) marked [ REDACTED FOR REASONS OF NATIONAL SECURITY ]
Maybe that’s why Bush keeps insisting that history will judge him favorably — because he knows that his ideological descendants are going to make sure it does.
