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.
One thing that the Bush Administration does very well is lie. We’ve long known, in a sort of mushy intuitive way, that pretty much every single thing they told us on the runup to the war in Iraq was false, but now we have documentary evidence that quantifies the breadth of the deception. A study by the Center for Public Integrity found that Bush and his minions lied to us 935 separate times while they were priming the country for war. Here’s a depressing chart:
You know what all the war apologists are going to say: we went with the information we had at the time; we’re not liars, we’re imbeciles; if loving your country is wrong then I don’t want to be right; and — most of all — all that stuff is in the past, we need to deal with the present. But this is more than an exercise in after-the-fact carping, and it’s more than simple gotcha journalism — it’s a remarkably detailed chronicle of how to go about deceiving an entire populace through the simple expedient of falsehoods constantly repeated and then propagated by a credulous media. A character from Le Carre’s Absolute Friends says it this way:
Every war is worse than the last one, Mr Mundy. But this war is the worst I ever saw if we’re talking about lies, which I am … Makes no difference the Cold War’s over. Makes no difference we’re globalized, multinational or what the hell. Soon as the tom-toms sound and the politicians roll out their lies, it’s bows and arrows and the flag and round-the-clock television for all loyal citizens. It’s three cheers for the big bangs and who gives a fuck about casualties as long as they’re the other guy’s?
What we have here is the Bushies’ playbook, opened for all of us to see, and we ignore it at our peril. These people are the masters, and we need to study their tricks — so that when their next incarnation rolls into town, we’ll be ready for them.
If this blighted decade in American political history has taught us nothing else, it’s taught us this: we are governed by a pack of cretinous monomaniacs.
This was brought forcefully home to me when I read about the stimulus package that Bush proposed last week, to save us from the recession he’s spent the last six years more or less guaranteeing we’re going to have. It’s an $140 billion package designed to put $800 in the pockets of consumers, in the hopes that they will immediately turn around and spend it, thus perpetuating the pathetic charlatan’s sleight-of-hand that the American economy has become: an economy kept afloat by rabid consumer spending and a punctured housing bubble whose ludicrous, speed-fueled mania served to obscure the rot at its core.
Framing the package as a tax rebate allows Bush to argue that the people who don’t make enough money to pay taxes shouldn’t get a piece of the pie, and that businesses should, thus doing his duty by the supply-side gods that Saint Reagan voodoo’d into existence, so many years ago.
So this proposal may be pretty stupid, but it’s not in the least bit surprising. Because the people who make these decisions have two basic solutions to every problem they encounter: go to war, or cut taxes. There’s nothing to attack here, really, so the only other option is to cut taxes. There you go. Simple. 1
I find it mind-boggling and sad that the huge, complex, fantastically expensive machinery of government should be employed in the service of these facile, binary decisions. Because when the question comes down to one of a very few options, you really don’t need that many people crunching the numbers. There’s a fairly basic algorithm at work here.
To wit — does it:
Speak a funny language? or
Not worship at the altar of capitalism? or
Not do what we tell it to do? or
Have something we want?
If yes, and it doesn’t supply us with oil, then attack.
Otherwise, cut taxes.
That’s it. I mean, yes, there’s a lot of rhetoric and propaganda that goes along with this stuff, crazy twisted ratiocinations, specious arguments, etc. But that’s basically it. A sampling:
Our economy is tanking! [Cut Taxes]
Iran might possibly get nuclear weapons, someday, maybe! [Attack!]
The government has too much money! [Cut Taxes]
The government has too little money! [Cut Taxes]
The government has exactly the right amount of money! [Cut Taxes]
It’s not just the Republicans, and it’s not just the politicians. The media, in their zeal to reduce everything to a series of buzzwords, lays waste to vast swathes of ambiguity. Evangelicals. Soccer Moms. NASCAR dads. Black people and white people and latinos. And so on. We’re all stripped of our humanity, pigeonholed, laminated, and laid bare on the tables of the punditocracy to dissect like the content-free abstractions that we’ve become.
Here’s hoping that whoever moves into the White House a year from now is enlightened enough to understand that the country’s problems are not a playground for their pet ideologies, and that policy grows up from a process of reasoned thought, not down from a small grab-bag of vetted, preordained solutions.
Well, that’s not entirely true. The Bushies actually kind of like going to war with abstractions (”War on Terror”, “War on Drugs”, etc) but the abstractions they’d have to deal with here — poverty, unemployment, class divisions, their own incompetence — are subjects they’d just as soon not call attention to. ↩
I just saw Christopher Hitchens — author of God Is Not Great — give a pretty amazing answer to a question about why the US is so much less receptive to atheism than Europe:
I think it’s hugely exaggerated. Everywhere I go, I find that everyone who comes to the meeting thinks that they’re the only other atheist, and they’re amazed to find that everyone else is one too.
Whereas if I’m in … my country of birth, in England, the queen is the head of the church as well as the head of the state. You have to pay for both. And when she dies, her slobbering weak-chinned dauphin of a son will be the head of the Church of England … and in Germany, you have to pay a tithe to a church, whether you want to or not.
We are very lucky in this country, we have a better tradition: we have Jefferson, we have Thomas Paine, we have the first amendment, we have the Virginia statute of religious freedom. We are the only country in the world that says that the state can’t back religion. We should appreciate it more.
I do a lot of bitching about Bush and his cronies, and with good reason. But the fact remains that all of their criminal insanity obscures a pretty amazing system of government. I’m not big into the cult of the Founding Fathers, but there’s no denying that they laid a foundation that institutionalized levels of freedom and tolerance that the world had rarely seen before. And that the constitution they wrote still reads very well, two hundred years later.
Yes, that original vision has been systematically subverted over the years — but it has always survived its batterings, more or less, and occasionally done better than survive. When the old dudes with the wigs said that all men are created equal, they may have been whispering “Except for black people, of course” under their breath — but what survives in our document is the original, unblemished proclamation, and the civil rights movement grew up and triumphed1 under its aegis — despite the efforts of all the evil bastards who struggled to circumvent the constitution’s mandate, even as they claimed to be upholding it.
But even a framework this enlightened is only as viable as its executors allow it to be. The constitution has certainly survived some pretty terrible caretakers in the past. My fear is that it won’t survive Bush.
Update: In comments, Carlo tells me that Hitchens’ allegation about tithes in Germany is untrue — you only have to tithe if you’re officially Christian.
Though I guess “triumphed” may be too strong a word. As the Jena 6 mess demonstrates, we still have a long way to go. ↩
It’s got to be hard being a Senate Republican these days. You’ve basically spent the last six years keeping your country embroiled in a ruinous, pointless war, despoiling the environment, sanctioning torture, and installing the apparatus for a police state. You’ve been as evil as you can possibly be. You’ve reached the pinnacle of nasty. Where do you go from here?
Perhaps recognizing this, the Republican mean-machine went into overdrive yesterday, and blocked three bills that would have:
Granted congressional representation to the residents of Washington, DC — 600,000 taxpayers in the heart of the cradle of democracy who, as punishment for the sin of being mostly Democrats, will remain disenfranchised.
I caught an incoherent rant on the radio the other day, some blathering bit of puff about how Palestinian children are indoctrinated from birth with anti-semitic hatred, brought up to kill Israelis, taught to disassemble a klashinkof before they learn to read. The barely unstated implication was that Palestinians are vessels of pure hatred, with terrorism baked into their bones, and are therefore responsible for everything that’s going wrong in the West Bank and Gaza.
What rankles about this particular brand of sophistry is what it leaves out. The Palestinians have been under occupation for forty years now, crammed into tiny, squalorous enclaves, subject to bombings, embargoes, imprisonment at the whim of their Israeli occupiers. If a large portion of the Palestinian population has been completely radicalized, you have to ask why. Yes, their leaders have been ineffectual and corrupt; yes, many of them subscribe to a religion that — in its current form — makes a fetish of violence in the service of belief; yes, they’re “supported” by Arab countries that run the gamut from corrupt dictatorship to brutal theocracy. All true, all relevant, and all completely besides the point. The Palestinian uprising is a direct result of the occupation. Period. This is just so freaking obvious that it blows my mind every time I hear one of these mincing apologists parroting the same lines we’ve been hearing for two decades now. And they’ve got it down to a science, pretty much, a toxic cocktail of lies, half-truths, and omissions: focus exclusively on proximate causes, stubbornly refuse to do any sort of complex analysis, and ignore those pesky bits of history that don’t substantiate your current manufactured argument. It’s blame the victim, on a massive scale, and it’s been this way for a long, long time.
But it’s a very effective technique, and it would be a shame to waste it all in one place. And so the Bush/Cheney combine, never ones to pass up new and exciting ways to lie to their constituents, have co-opted it for Iraq. In fact, it’s the only consistent Iraqi strategy they’ve ever had. They talk about their vast landscape of failure only when they have to, preferring to spend most of their time focusing monomaniacally on the “good news” — which, given the extreme rarity of anything even resembling non-tragedy in Iraq, leads inevitably to an inordinate fixation on things like new schools and meaningless pronouncements by toothless government organs. This is sort of like standing outside a burning house and commenting on how beautiful and inspirational that bit of bannister that hasn’t caught on fire yet is.
But the Bush people have added a new wrinkle to the old technique, a dodge as fullproof as it is pathetic: the future. Whenever they run out of tiny pseudo-successes to celebrate, they fall back on what Atrios has dubbed the Friedman Unit — six months of time after which things must change in some way, named after Thomas Friedman’s tendency to place serial six-month deadlines on this or that aspect of the disaster. The administration has been spouting Friedmans for years, the latest example being the new troop escalation (ie, surge), six months of which, we are told, may or not affect things in some significant but undisclosed way. We’ll have to see. As usual.
It gets better than that, though. When even Friedman Units don’t do the trick, they take the extremely long view. Things may look like a total clusterfuck right now, says Condie, or Don, or Dick, or George, but in thirty, forty, fifty years, the seeds we’re planting in this ravaged ruined landscape will blossom into a beautiful garden of peace and democracy. So you people will have to wait.
The thing is, bullshit this ridiculous only works with the tacit consent of its audience. We the people are as much complicit in the lies as the liars themselves. Their stories aren’t convincing, but they do give us the tools we need to validate our own preconceptions: to believe the unbelievable, to justify the unjustifiable, to permit the impermissible. We want to believe, and these people make it possible. That’s their great sin. But it’s also ours.
