After the Future

American Republic, Version 4.0?

The ancients thought that Democracy was the second worst form of government. Tyranny was the worst.  Democracy was second worst because democracies always evolved into tyrannies. In their observations, the demos--the people--were easily manipulated by demagogues who used them as the means to an end, which was the acquisition of tyrannical power. Has the American experiment in democracy proved the ancients wrong? 

The prognosis is unclear.  The patient is sick, but it remains to be seen whether the illness is terminal. Are we in a death spiral or are we suffering through a painful transitional period waiting awkwardly and confused until a new sense of who we are as a people emerges.  Waiting for the American Republic version 4.0.  Let me explain.

The American experiment was based on the idea that a self-reliant, well-informed, vigilant citizenry comprising mostly farmers, tradespeople, and small businessmen, had come of age on the American continent, and that it would be capable of governing itself.  A big part of the rationale behind the development of public education in the 19th century was to make good citizens of the increasing number of immigrants who had no idea about American traditions of democracy and self-rule.  The newcomers needed institutions to socialize them into the American way, and most of the newcomers embraced it because any healthy human being longs for the dignity and freedom that was embodied in this republican ideal of the American citizen.

We can argue about how much reality this ideal ever really had, but I would argue that it was something decent Americans understood as the ideal toward which the society aspired.  But now even this ideal has diminished in its power to be a guiding star, and the reasons for that are complicated.  The necessary embrace of cultural diversity and pluralism has diminished the whiggishness that was the inspiring cultural impulse at the heart of this ideal.  That whiggishness defined for a long time what it meant to be an American, and that has all but been lost. 

I don't think that there is any question that this is a something-gained-something-lost predicament, but that something has been lost needs to be acknowledged even if it can no longer be clung to. Nativists and people like Pat Buchanan have always feared that its loss meant a loss of American identity and with it the  traditions and the sober republican discipline that the traditional idea about what it meant to be an American acculturated in its citizens. I understand their concern, but it's akin to the concerns the imams who worry about the loss of Muslim identity as their societies modernize. 

Societies evolve, and with that evolution comes painful losses with the important gains.  Every society, including ours, must learn the trick of what to hold onto and what to let go of. It's not easy. The extreme cultural right is the party of hanging on no matter what; the extreme cultural left is the party of letting go no matter what.  Most people live mostly unconsciously in the conflict between the two tendencies, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other. Sane people in the middle have to find a way to consciously, artfully synthesize the two tendencies.  That's what it means to me to be a centrist--the center is defined by this integrationist project, which is very different from just splitting the difference between the extremes.  Integration in this sense is a spiritual activity, but that's a subject for another time.

I think the bigger reason for the weakening of the American republican ideal has to do with the huge structural changes in the economy as it industrialized, especially in the period following the Civil War.  This period between the Civil War and World War I is one in American history that hardly anybody knows anything about, and it was critical transitional era that dramatically changed what it meant to be an American citizen. Industrialization in every society, including ours, has meant the displacement of people who worked on the land transforming them into a traditionless, landless, powerless proletariat.  The proletariat that came into being as farmers and tradespeople were forced into becoming factory workers and created a different kind of citizen who was no longer self-reliant in the old sense.

This was Jefferson's nightmare, and we're still living it today. We've accepted it because it's a comfortable nightmare for most of us.  But few of us are self-reliant in the Founders idea of it.  We may not think of ourselves as among the proletariat, but most of us are workers for large corporate or governmental agencies, and we have little control over our economic destinies except to change jobs and work for other large corporate or governmental agencies. I know there are plenty of people who don't fit this description, but they do not play the major or dominant role in shaping our economic landscape, and in one way or the other they are implicated in and dependent on these huge systems. 

So we still have a democracy--our votes matter, sort of.  If nothing else, 2000 has made that clear (in the sense that if Gore had won, we would not be in the current mess). But the real power in these huge social systems have become Frankenstein like.  They are human creations but they operate according to a will of their own and resistant to human control. Is there anybody who thinks it's possible to control, for instance, this huge system we call the military-industrial complex?  Is there anybody really in charge of it, or is it that the people who think they are in charge are simply the system's most obedient servants? These systems have a way of promoting only those who will serve it and rejecting those who would try to rein it in.

So if power is the capacity to impose one's will, whose will is being served by a system like the military-industrial complex?  Was it the will of the American people, for instance, to invade Iraq?  Or was it the will of this system--its need to be fed--that demanded some rationale dutifully supplied by its servants du jour, the neocons, for the invasion?  Are the Democrats any more capable than the Republicans to control it? At best they have some ambivalence about it, but they know what happens to those who oppose it. It's this ambivalence that makes them vulnerable to be branded "weak on defense," which is a political death sentence. They know that the fulfillment of their political ambitions requires that they do their part to feed the beast. That's what it means these days to be a political realist.

But the point is that the will of the people really no longer plays a role in shaping American destiny because relative to the systems that control most of our lives, that will is powerless. The people are confused and disorganized, and their will is impotent.  As a people we are divided and conquered. And so these systems grow stronger by default. No counterforce is organized and powerful enough to control them. 

The realist in me just gives a shrug of the shoulders and says, "What can I do except live with it and carve out the best life I can for my family and me?" The idealist in me finds such collaborationist tendencies repugnant. But mostly I'm disturbed by the fundamental powerlessness of our situation in the face of what's happening.  We can't do anything about earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes--it's just duck and cover. But we should be able to exert some control over the social institutions that structure our lives, and yet in reality we are just as powerless in influencing them as we are in preventing the inevitability of these natural disasters.

During the holiday break, I've been watching the remarkable 1969 documentary about the genesis of the French resistance during WWII entitled "The Sorrow and the Pity."  One of the most surprising things I learned from it was how at the beginning the French people were generally pretty accepting of their defeat in June 1940 and of Petain's collaboration with the Germans.  "What can you do?" seemed to be the attitude. There were plenty of right-wing Frenchmen who were inclined to accept strongman rule, and lots of Frenchmen bought into German anti-British propaganda and the idea that the Germans were there to help the French to clean up the mess that the Third Republic had created.  Better to align with the the Catholic and Franco-like Petain than with Popular Front socialist Jews like Leon Blum or atheistic communists.

At the beginning, nobody had a clue how bad their situation had become.  But gradually many French people realized what had happened to them, and toward the end of 1942 a resistance movement emerged intent to win back what had been lost.  But those in the Resistance that we celebrate as heroes today was composed mostly of a minority of oddballs and communists, people who just couldn't get along or bend to authority.  According to those interviewed in the film, most of the French didn't think very highly of those in the resistance during the war. They were called "terrorists" at the time. DeGaulle was the symbol of Free France for some, but most French embraced the demagoguery that Petain as the saviour of the nation.

In France, it would seem, republics are easy come, easy go--they're up to five now and counting.  But maybe that's a sign that they are more adaptable than we Americans, and maybe eventually Americans must experience something similar --the dramatic loss of the democratic republic to tyranny in order for them to realize that they must fight to restore it. I've been arguing on this blog that we're in a situation much like that of the French in the early phase of their occupation in which they did not realize the true implications about what had happened to them, when most believe the Petainist propaganda. I know the U.S. is not occupied by a foreign power and that our freedoms have not been taken away from us by a dictator.  Nevertheless, they are being slowly eroded, and most of us Americans don't realize what is happening.  And my guess is that there will not be the will to do anything about it until things get uncomfortably bad.

The ancients were pretty smart about human nature, and they were probably more right than wrong in their assessment of democracy's poor track record in preserving human freedom.  The French went through several cycles to prove their point.  And maybe despite all the instability, the French are better off for it--it has made them more aware of how easily their freedoms can be lost, and they have learned to be more adaptable and experimental.   

I'm not knowledgeable enough to know whether the French Republic version 5.0 is a significant improvement over version 4.0, but insofar as the American republic is structured in such a way that it no longer reflects the real needs and the deeper will of the people, it needs an upgrade.  Perhaps you could argue that the post Civil War period in effect was version 2.0, and the New Deal was version 3.0.  But whatever version we're in now, it is stodgy, obsolete, and unresponsive.  Can the will to upgrade come only after we have the current version forcefully taken away as 3.0 was taken away from the French?  Or can we muster the will to make the changes because it's simply the right thing to do?

Update/Credit Where Credit is Due: After writing the above post I remembered that I probably got this idea of the different republics from Michael Lind's 1995 book, The Next American Nation, from which I have previous quoted.  See here.  I generally like Lind, but I don't remember what he said well enough to say whether I agree with his ideas about the what the fourth republic to be.  But it's probably worth another look.

The Republican Standard

While it does not address directly how Libertarianism is the new Social Darwinism, Bill Moyers indirectly argues the point in this post over at TomPaine. He's trying to explain how we let things get so out of control since Reagan--how the ordinary people in the middle let the wealthy and their interests drive policy:

What is finally at the root of these reactionary forces that have so disturbed the social fabric and threatened to undo the republic? If a $4 billion dollar investment in chattel labor was worth the price of civil war and 600,000 dead in 1860, is it really any wonder that the richest Americans would not suffer for too long a political consensus that pushed their share of national income down by a third, and held it there—about at the level of their counterparts in “socialist” Europe—for a generation? Make no mistake about it, from the days of the American Liberty League in 1936 (the group Franklin Roosevelt had in mind with his crowd-pleasing battle cry, “I welcome their hatred!”) they never gave up on returning to their former glory. They just failed to do it. Ordinary people had powerful institutions and laws on their side that thwarted them—unions, churches, and, yes, government programs that were ratified by large majorities decade after decade.

The scale of the disorder in our national priorities right now is truly staggering; it approaches moral anarchy. Alexander Hamilton, the conservative genius of the financial class, warned this could happen. Speaking to the New York State legislature in 1788, he said:

As riches increase and accumulate in few hands; as luxury prevails in society; virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature: It is what, neither the honorable member nor myself can correct. It is common misfortune, that awaits our state constitution, as well as others.

Conservatives who revere the founding fathers tend to stress the last point—that there is nothing to be done about this "common misfortune."  It is up to the rest of us, who see the founding fathers not as gods but as inspired although flawed human beings . . . to take on "the tendency of things " to "depart from the republican standard," and hold our country to its highest, and most humane, ideals.

As stewards of democracy, we, too, have a covenant—with one another.

The point I've been making over and over in this blog is that this tendency of things to depart from the republican standard is rooted in the need for the already rich and powerful to obtain more wealth and power.  It is precisely this human tendency that must have limits set upon it by any society which cherishes republican ideals, and the ordinary people in the middle have failed in their vigilance mainly because too many decent, thoughtful people have been seduced by the logic of Libertarianism. 

The problem with these Libertarians is that they think everyone is as decent and fairminded as they are, and don't realize how Libertarianism is essentially the ideology of the reactionary Liberty League that Roosevelt fought.  It's the ideology that seeks to remove the "limits" required to maintain the republican standard.  It's the ideology that provides justification for the rich and powerful to aggregate more wealth and power, and in doing so to subvert the Republic by transforming it into a plutocratic oligarchy. That's what Hamilton was talking about, and he was no leftist radical.  He was just talking common sense. 

Democrats are no less immune from this tendency in human nature than Republicans.  They were the more reliable party for most of the last century because they were beholden and responsive to the ordinary people, which composed their base.  But as the Republicans since the 1980s have become caricatures of themselves as the party representing the interests of the wealthy,  the Democrats have lost touch with that ordinary-people base (by suppporting things like NAFTA), much of that base has drifted into the Republican camp because the Dems no longer deliver, and they feel more comfortable with either the GOP's ability to somehow talk out both sides of their mouth with traditional values rhetoric on the one side and Libertarian rhetoric on the other.

Many hard-core Democrats persist in their belief that they are the voice of the people, but it's obvious (to me anyway) that the Dems natural constituency no longer feels all that comfortable in self-identifying as Dems.  If the non-wealthy no longer believe the Democrats can deliver on political and economic issues for them, they will vote for the party that they perceive or misperceive represents their cultural values and security interests. This is the point that Thomas Frank makes in What's the Matter with Kansas. He thinks it's irrational and self-defeating, but I think it comes from the very basic experience and perception tht the Dems simply don't deliver. I think ordinary Americans will vote for the party that represents their political and economic interests, but the Democrats have lost their credibility in being able to do that, and it remains to be seen whether they can win it back.

It's doubtful because as a voting block, the Democrats have become in effect Republicans lite.  They have become almost as beholden to the powerful moneyed interests as the Republicans have.  Why? Because they feel more pressure from those interests than they do, say, from the unions or advocacy groups for the poor.  And politics for your average Democratic politician is not about principles; it's about pressure.

And that's all our common misfortune right now if we are not wealthy. The non-wealthy don't have an effective voice to represent their interests because they are not organized to exert pressure that competes with the pressure exerted by wealth.  People can argue that the Dems were limited in what they could do because of their minority status, but that's no longer an excuse.  The two tests they must pass to earn all our respect are, first, to prevent Bush from getting his "surge" in Iraq, and, second, to repeal or radically revise the Military Commissions Act.

I haven't lost all hope that they will be able to do this, but if the Dem congress can't successfully defeat this discredited, unpopular, lame-duck on these two issues, what good is it to have a Democratic majority?

True Conservatism

In our political culture conservatism and being a rightist have been conflated.  They are quite different things, and I think we would all benefit from clarity that would come by making the distinction.  The true conservative is an honorable person deserving our respect; the rightist is a thuggish goon worthy only of our contempt. I've been on something of a crusade to delink the two. (It's a theme found throughout many posts, but see, for instance, here.)  To be a true, principled conservative means to conserve that which has been hard won by fighting off the forces that continually threaten to pull us back into a more primitive stage of social development. Those threats come from both the left and the right, but in our country at this moment the greater threat comes from the right.

The New Deal, for instance, delivered us from the primitivism of 19th Century, bare-knuckled capitalism and its Social Darwinist ideology.  The GOP ideology since Reagan has not been conservative--it has been bent on regressing us back to the 19th Century, and as I've argued here and here, Libertarianism is the new Social Darwinism that provides its ideological justification.  A true conservative would fight tooth and nail to preserve the New Deal social infrastructure against those who seek to dismantle it.

The GOP and Libertarianism have very little to do with true conservatism.  They are symptomatic of a drift within our political culture toward the authoritarian right.  They provide the cover for the mentality that is ok for the strong to  dominate the weak. For insofar as Libertarianism advocates removing regulatory constraints and canceling the redistributory effects of the tax code, it allows for the already rich and powerful to do as they please, and mostly they please to dominate the weak. It does so in the name of freedom, but it's the freedom that exists in the jungle, where the government doesn't interfere with the most powerful predators doing their thing.  In the jungle only the powerful are truly free. Libertarianism is a neo-primitivist ideology  that too many people buy into because of its "free-to-choose" and "let-the-market-decide" principles without really understanding its consequences. 

The GOP has become the party of the authoritarian right, and the basic spirit of the right is that "might makes right." Libertarianism is useful for hiding the ugly truth of this underlying spirit. The Republicans have become the front organization for a regressive, primitive, power-justifies-anything political ideology  that appeals that which is fearful and primitive in the human psyche.  No matter how intellectually sophisticated his rationale, a rightist sees everything in eat-or-be-eaten terms.  He is someone who thinks his survival is threatened on every front. He thinks anyone who doesn't think with his adrenaline-soaked brain is a naive, unpatriotic wimp who deserves to be crushed, and no dirty trick is too low. Unpatriotic because he doesn't understand the threat that the homeland faces within and without and which must be defended against no matter what the cost. No attitude could be more destructive to democratic ideals and the rule of law. No attitude could be more conducive to our regressing into an authoritarian state.  And no administration has been so blatant in my lifetime in its goal to regress us there than this Cheney/Bush regime.

Joe Conason echoes this in a piece  about Jim Webb's historical novel The Emperor's General in which he lays out how a military commission was nothing but a kangaroo court in the prosecution of Admiral Yamahita after Japan's defeat.  His main point is the following:

The true meaning of conservatism -- to defend and uphold the Constitution, as liberals and conservatives have sworn to do for the past two centuries -- will be tested in January 2007. That is when the Senate Judiciary Committee is likely to consider a bill introduced this week by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., titled the Effective Terrorists Prosecution Act, which would restore many of the rights and liberties abrogated by the Military Commissions Act. According to Dodd's office, his new bill would, among other things, restore habeas corpus protections to detainees, bar testimony obtained through torture, authorize due process for appeals, limit presidential authority to interpret the Geneva Conventions, and redefine the meaning of "unlawful enemy combatants."

Whether Dodd and future Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy can move that restorative legislation through the Senate remains to be seen. The Military Commissions Act passed with 65 votes last September, and most of the senators who approved it, including a dozen Democrats, will be in Congress next year. But should Webb remain true to his convictions, Dodd and Leahy will at least have a tough, eloquent and credible new comrade -- "conservative" or not.

That last sentence refers to Webb, who the more I learn about him, the more I like.

Bush, Kagan, & Kristol: Losers in Denial

Sidney Blumenthal's analysis in Salon of Bush's mindset is pretty close to my take on it, which is that his attitude toward the war in Iraq is no longer about what's in America's best interest, if it ever was, but what is in George Bush's self-interest, namely, to avoid confronting his failure:

The mere suggestion of doubt is fatally compromising. Any admission of doubt means complete loss, impotence and disgrace. Bush cannot entertain doubt and still function. He cannot keep two ideas in his head at the same time. Powell misunderstood when he said that the current war strategy lacks a clear mission. The war is Bush's mission.

No matter the setback it's always temporary, and the campaign can always be started from scratch in an endless series of new beginnings and offensives -- "the new way forward" -- just as in his earlier life no failure was irredeemable through his father's intervention. Now he has rejected his father's intervention in preference for the clean slate of a new scenario that depends only on his willpower.

Government by will of the executive?  He might be an elected official, but he's acting like a military dictator. 

Repudiated in the midterm elections, Bush has elevated himself above politics, and repeatedly says, "I am the commander in chief." With the crash of Rove's game plan for using his presidency as an instrument to leverage a permanent Republican majority, Bush is abandoning the role of political leader. He can't disengage militarily from Iraq because that would abolish his identity as a military leader, his default identity and now his only one.

Unlike the political leader, the commander in chief doesn't require persuasion; he rules through orders, deference and the obedience of those beneath him. By discarding the ISG report, Bush has rejected doubt, introspection, ambivalence and responsibility. By embracing the AEI manifesto, he asserts the warrior virtues of will, perseverance and resolve. The contest in Iraq is a struggle between will and doubt. Every day his defiance proves his superiority over lesser mortals. Even the Joint Chiefs have betrayed the martial virtues that he presumes to embody. He views those lacking his will with rising disdain. The more he stands up against those who tell him to change, the more virtuous he becomes. His ability to realize those qualities surpasses anyone else's and passes the character test.

But as I wrote last week, even the most irrational forces use reason to come up with a self-justifying rationales.  Blumenthal points to Fred Kagan's "Choosing Victory" as filling that role.  In it you will find the kind of thinking that makes clear we are dealing with people who think they are in the real world but really are not:

"Choosing Victory" is a prophetic document, a bugle call for an additional 30,000 troops to fight a decisive Napoleonic battle for Baghdad. (Its author, Kagan, has written a book on Napoleon.) It assumes that through this turning point the Shiite militias will melt away, the Sunni insurgents will suffer defeat and from the solid base of Baghdad security will radiate throughout the country. The plan also assumes that additional combat teams that actually take considerable time to assemble and train are instantly available for deployment. And it dismisses every diplomatic initiative proposed by the Iraq Study Group as dangerously softheaded. Foremost among the plan's assertions is that there is still a military solution in Iraq -- "victory."

The strategic premise of the entire document rests on the incredulous disbelief that the U.S. cannot enforce its will through force. "Victory is still an option in Iraq," it states. "America, a country of 300 million people with a GDP of $12 trillion, and more than 1 million soldiers and marines can regain control of Iraq, a state the size of California with a population of 25 million and a GDP under $100 billion." By these gross metrics, France should never have lost in Algeria and Vietnam. The U.S. experience in Vietnam goes unmentioned.

As does any number of insurgencies in the last century when an aroused local populations makes its mind up to throw out the foreign invader. Sure we have the power many times over to dominate Iraq--just as we had it in Vietnam.  But that line of thinking inevitably leads to the "destroy-it-to-save-it" approach.  The point is that we long ago lost the battle for the minds and hearts, and the only way to win now would be through brute force.

By the way, did you see Bill Kristol on "The Daily Show" the other night.   The guy's a snake, but he's a suave, slithery clever propagandist--and he had nothing.  It's the first time I've seen him look defensive, flummoxed, and stupid. The best he could come up with was to accuse Stewart of having the biases of the upper-west side liberal, which Stewart pointed out was a narrative that was only true in his own mind because he in fact did not live on the upper west side--Kristol does.   But not to quibble. 

And the best rationale he could offer for supporting the surge was that most Iraqis want peace and order. Again let me restate the obvious: Empowered, focused, well-organized minorities can easily dominate unorganized majorities.  It's true of the militias in Iraq, and it's true, even now, of the neocons in the American government. It doesn't matter what the majority wants if it doesn't have the power to obtain it. 

The majority of Americans doesn't want to send more troops to Iraq, but at this point it doesn't look like it can prevent Bush from persisting in his folly. I still have some faint hope that the combined forces of the ISG establishment and the Democratic congressional majority could rope Bush down, but support for the surge from people like Harry Reid seem to make it unlikely.  It would take an organized, united front and clearly that's not something that has gelled yet.

In any event, no one knows this principle regarding the power of organized minorities better than Kristol. So does he really believe that victory is still a possibility in Iraq, or is he, like Bush, mainly motivated by the desire to postpone for as long as possible his having to face the reality of his failure?

Drowning in the Desert II

Last week I put up a post entitled "Drowning in the Desert", which laid out my basic rationale for rejecting staying the course or surge strategies.  Lang and McGovern describe more concretely what this drowning will look like if Bush/McCain/Graham/Lieberman, et al. get their way, as it looks like they will:

Whether Robert Gates realizes it or not (but the generals should), once an "all or nothing" offensive like the "surge" contemplated has begun, there is no turning back. It will be "victory" over the insurgents and the Shia militias or palpable defeat, recognizable by all in Iraq and across the world.

Any conceivable surge would not turn the tide--would not even slow it. We should have learned that last summer when the dispatch of seven thousand U.S. troops to reinforce Baghdad brought a fierce "counter-surge"-and the highest number of casualties since the Pentagon began issuing quarterly reports in 2005. Those who believe still more troops will bring "victory" are living in a dangerous dream world and need to wake up.

A major buildup would commit the US Army and Marine Corps to decisive combat in which there would be no more strategic reserves to be sent to the front. As Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway pointed out on Monday, "If you commit your reserve for something other than a decisive win, or to stave off defeat, then you have essentially shot your bolt."

I would be a matter of win, or die in the attempt. In that situation, everyone in uniform on the ground would commit every ounce of their being to achieving "victory," and few measures would be shrunk from.

Analogies come to mind: Stalingrad, the Bulge, Dien Bien Phu, the Battle of Algiers. It would be total war with the likelihood of all the excesses and mass casualties that come with total war. To take up such a strategy and force our armed forces into it would be nothing short of immoral, in view of predictable troop losses and the huge number of Iraqis who would meet violent injury and death. And for what? If adopted, the surge strategy will turn out to be something we will spend a generation living down.

In other words, the best case scenario is that we'll have to destroy Baghdad to save it. Do I know for a fact that this will be the outcome?  No. But we all know it's the most likely outcome. Let's say there's a ten or even twenty percent chance that success is achievable.  Is it worth the cost?  For god's sake, even Hillary Clinton is against it.

What's at stake here?  American prestige and honor?  Any that we had has been long lost. We're universally perceived as fools and torturers.  Is it the need for stability in the region?  Well maybe this is one China shop that would be better served by the removal of the bull rather than straining to find ways to keep him in it.  Is it about access to all that Iraqi and Iranian oil?  That's the banana in the jar that the monkey can't let go of. But in the final analysis, this is about saving Bush's & Cheney's asses. They will do whatever they can to postpone the moment when they will have to be confronted with the enormity and criminality of their failure.   

Ask yourself, who really wants this war and whose interests are being served by it?  It's certainly not in the interests of the broad American public or of the soldiers who are being sent to fight it. What kind of a system of governance do we have that allows these proven failures to persist in their idiocy?

Greenfield: It Was Just a Joke

Lighten up.  No, I don't think so.  Digby explains why better than I:

We have found, among many other things, that there is an obsession among the press corps with a very peculiar form of gender stereotypes which they affix to the political parties. This may be a function of what seems to be their terminal immaturity (and perhaps it has simply become reflex after all this time), but it is also part of a long term political strategy on the right to paint the Democrats as being odd, untrustworthy, hysterical, overly sensitive and soft --- what neanderthals think of as traditionally negative female characteristics. Not only does this narrative feed into these negative sereotypes, which benefits traditonal power structures in general, it feeds into a positive male leadership archetype, which has been appropriated by the Republican Party. It is what allowed a halfwit, manchild to be elected as a "grown-up" while the real adult was derided as some sort of Blanche DuBois character who had lost his grip on reality. The kewl kidz laughed and laughed while the rest of stood there dumbfounded and paralyzed at this bizarre interpretation of reality. We aren't paralyzed anymore.

Is it a sin, in and of itself, that Greenfield trivialized Barack Obama for his wardrobe and compared him to a holocaust denying psychopath? Not really. Is it a major goof for Jeanne Moos to simultaneously go out on the street and ask people if they think his "weird" middle name means that he can't be elected? Probably not.

But you'll have to excuse us hotheads for reacting strongly when we see these things because the last time the media decided to have "fun" and tell "jokes," this way, enough people believed them that it ended up changing the world in the most dramatic and violent way possible. We are in this mess today at least partly because these people failed to do their duty and approached their jobs as if it were a seventh grade slumber party instead of the serious business of the most powerful nation on earth.

I don't know what is wrong with them and their social construct that makes them so susceptible to this, or why they fail to see how this bias toward phony Republican machismo distorts political reporting, but it's a big problem for this country. Whatever their psychological or political motivations, we cannot take the chance that these narratives will go unchallenged again. Bad things happen. Wars. Torture. Dead people.

Somebody in this culture has got to be the sober, factual, reality based journalists and it only stands to reason that those who are trained and paid to be sober, factual, reality based journalists would fill that role. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are very good at political humor. (Even Dennis Miller is funnier than Greenfield.) The late night comics do a great job at skewering politicians. Leave them to it.

Until the mainstream press recognizes the extent of their laziness and gullibility --- or pay a price for their political bias --- we will keep reminding them and their audiences of their transgressions even if that makes us thin-skinned hotheads who are trying to fill blogposts. We all have our jobs to do.

Greenfield is a cretin who epitomizes everything that is loathesome about the Beltway courtier class.  It would be impossible to take them seriously except that they have such influence in distorting public perceptions. And it is for that reason that they must be exposed and fought whenever they pull stunts like this one.

Sorry, but you have to be an idiot to think his sniggering is all just in good fun or that it has nothing to do with this larger script to which Digby refers.  Greenfield can't be naive enough not to know what he's up to, but he could very well be that cyncial and dishonest to hide behind the "it-was-just-a-joke' excuse.

Drowning in the Desert

In November 2005 I wrote about Jack Murtha's call for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq:

A couple of months ago I was deeply moved by the tragic story of two fathers and their ninth-grade daughters who were hiking in the Cascade mountains near Seattle. One of the girls while swimming in a river there got caught in a downcurrent near a waterfall.  Her father jumped in to save her, and he was also caught in the downcurrent.  The other father then jumped in, and he was caught as well.  All three drowned leaving one of the girls alone on the river bank. 

Does anyone reading this believe that the girl should have jumped in to try to save her father?   Does anybody believe that if there were another adult there, he should have jumped in? I hope not. And yet does anybody believe that if anyone were in that poor girl's position, he would question for the rest of his life whether he should have? That's the definition of survivor's guilt.  Making the sane decision, but always feeling that you made the wrong choice.   It's normal human psychology in such a situation.  It's not a good feeling.  We'd rather not have to have it.  We'd much rather a scenario in which were able to have done something actively to effect a more positive outcome.  But sometimes it just isn't possilbe, and you have to face facts sanely. Thank God that girl had enough sense not to jump in to try to save her father. The rest of her family and all of her friends are so grateful that she made the sane choice.

I think that we Americans are in a position similar to anyone left standing on that river bank.  We are moved by the nobility of those who have sacrificed their lives trying to do what they believed was the right thing, but  there comes a point  where further sacrifices are futile.  We don't honor the dead by pointlessly adding to their number.

This was a war that I never supported.  Once we entered Baghdad, I thought we had a responsibility to leave the place better than we found it.  I never trusted the Bush administration's motives; I never believed the war's neocon architects really cared about the Iraqi people.  I never thought, therefore, that they had the mentality to make a decent job of it there. This would have been an enormously difficult undertaking for even the most competent of administrations to have undertaken.  But you had to hope for the best, and I did. It's clear now that the Bush people never had a chance.

Our problem is that we have the wolf by the ears.  We can't hold it forever, and we can't let it go.  We need help, and this administration has put itself in a position in which nobody wants to give it.  His administration is neither liked nor trusted, and now it isn't even feared. This is why the sensible thing would have been to put Kerry, creep though he is, in office. He would have had at least some chance of developing a multilateral solution there--we're not the only ones who have an interest in stabilizing the region.  But Bush has no chance.

We're past hoping for the best now.  If there were any reasonable chance that this administration could make things better, there might be some sense in sticking it out.  But if there is no chance that we can do anything but make things worse, we should get out.  As long as Bush is in office, I am convinced that making things worse is the only possibility.  Perhaps another administration could have had a chance, but we chose to keep Bush in office.  As long as he's there, we are pointlessly sending our kids into the river to drown.  I think that's all Jack Murtha is saying.

Well, Bush is still holding the wolf by the ears, he's still isolated, and he's not strong enough or smart enough to kill it.  He's doing everything he can to postpone getting bit in the behind when inevitably he has to let it go and run for the nearest tree.

But the drowning metaphor is more to the point, especially from the Iraqi perspective.  Iraq is drowning, and George Bush is responsible for it because he released the floodgates naively thinking he was doing so to clean out some unwanted filth.  But like the sorcerer's apprentice, he was a fool who didn't know what he was doing, and things have gotten so far out of control, there's nothing he can do.  It's time for older wiser heads to come in and clean up the mess he's made.  Only problem is he's so stupid and stubborn, he won't let them.

I can understand why he cannot bring himself to acknowledge that nothing more can be done to "win" in Iraq.  How could he live with himself for the rest of his life knowing what he and his cronies have done.  The shame of it would be overwhelming. He's desperate not to have to face that kind of retirement. So that's why it shouldn't be up to him.  He's got personal reasons to want to keep fighting on, and he's the last person to be trusted with what's in the best interest of the country.  American policy right now should not have to be about saving Jr.'s ass.

That's why I'm glad he's delaying this Iraq policy speech.  We all know what's coming, something along the McCain line of idiocy about sending more troops to see if they can wrestle the wolf down. Such a policy will fail and it just postpones the inevitable.  But the longer he delays, the more time it gives for the Democratic opposition to develop some strength to oppose him.  I'm not sure it will, but that's the country's only hope. Bush will do everything in his power to postpone the day of reckoning.  And it won't come unless the Democrats in alliance with the grey heads in the ISG establishment force it.

I don't thing there's any question that we have a moral obligation to Iraq.  We opened the floodgates that destroyed their country, and we owe them big time. We can talk about what that means on a practical level another time, but ordering more soldiers to Iraq is like ordering that  girl to jump in the torrent to save her father and friends. It's tragic.  It's horrifying.  And all Americans who stood by, whether cheering or passively, and watched as this fool turned the wheel to release the flood are culpable, but we don't owe the Iraqis more futilely wasted American lives. And Bush, while he may have the technical legal authority,  no longer has the moral authority to send more Americans to their deaths to defend his foolishness. My fear is that I'll be posting this column from a year ago a year from now, and nothing will have changed.  Just the toll of the dead.

Obama Getting Gored

Have you seen this?  It's Jeff Greenfield reporting on the Blitzer show:

. . . But, in the case of Obama, he may be walking around with a sartorial time bomb. Ask yourself, is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of "GQ" to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable.

And maybe that's not the comparison a possible presidential contender really wants to evoke.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD: Now, it is one thing to have a last name that sounds like Osama and a middle name, Hussein, that is probably less than helpful. But an outfit that reminds people of a charter member of the axis of evil, why, this could leave his presidential hopes hanging by a thread. Or is that threads? -- Wolf.

Wow. Well at least he's not wearing earth tones.  See commentary by Drum and Digby. 

Listen, I have no idea whether Obama is for real.  I tend to doubt it, but he seems a decent enough guy as politicians go.  If I have my doubts it's because it's hard for me to believe that a decent, sane person would put himself and his family through the inevitable scurtiny and sliming that is just part of the deal. I think that's the main reason we wind up with such mediocre candidates election cycle after election cycle.  There has to be a screw loose somewhere in the psyches of people who actually choos to run. How else to explain why the pool of candidates is so consistently low quality? 

In any event, the system is allergic to anything that would bring it health.  If Obama or Feingold or anyone else were to emerge who actually represented healing healthful forces, I fear they would be violently rejected.  '08 will inevitably wind up being just another choice between two empty suits.  Something has to change in the broader culture before something more is possible.  But I am always open to the surprise.

Hitler Isn't George Bush

If you haven't seen it, be sure to read this piece on Billy Wilder's film "Stallag 17" by Chris Kelly at Huffpost.  Please read the whole thing, but for the impatient among you, here's the nub:

The prisoners get mail from home. They get visits from the Red Cross. They aren't even kept in cages. No one hoods them, or electrocutes them, or pretends to execute them, or places them in a "stress position" or walks them around on a leash. At one of the darkest points in the story, one of them is forced to stand for a few days without sleep. Like that even hurts.

Don't the guards want their country to win? These guys -- the prisoners -- are all members of an organization (The United States Army Air Force) that not only is thinking of using weapons of mass destruction, they actually are. Night after night. From planes.

They have information that could save German lives. But no one seems to have given their interrogators the tools they need to get it.

And now my stomach hurts. Because sometimes even sarcasm can only get you so far.

In real life, the Nazis did commit atrocities against American prisoners of war. At Malmedy. At Mauthausen. That's why we hate Nazis. Because they were bad.

In real life, bombing Germany killed a half million civilians, but interned American and British airmen were generally treated according to the Geneva Conventions. They weren't systematically tortured. They weren't deliberately humiliated. They weren't held in solitary cells. International organizations were given their names and their families were informed of their capture. Their mortality rate was less than 1%.

And they were being held by the worst government on earth.

It's almost like the hippies at MoveOn have it backwards. When it comes to protecting his country, Hitler isn't George Bush.

Dang, I keep forgetting.  9/11 changed everything. We're not dealing with human beings anymore, but with Muslim devils.  I'm sorry, but in my opinion there simply isn't enough outrage about what this administration has done ito those who would too gladly abuse human rights when it serves their interests. Too many Americans are still in the habit of thinking it must be ok if our democratically elected leaders say it's ok.  We're the good guys, so ipso facto everything we do is good.  Most Americans have yet to grasp the enormity of what this administration has done, nor do they understand the consequences. 

Getting it Right; Getting it Wrong

One of the big questions for me over the last six years has been how could so many smart, talented people get things so wrong. And one of my basic answers has been that  reason is not reasonable; reason serves irrational purposes. People, sometimes for the better or more often for the worse, are driven by irrational impulses, and they use reason to rationalize or justify their fundamentally irrational objectives. It's important to have a good mind, but the more important issue concerns the disposition of one's soul.

Reason is often like the clever trial lawyer hired to defend a guilty client. His purpose is to win, and his arguments have little to do with getting to the bottom of things. "Justice" as the TV lawyer says, "is God's problem." The lawyer's only concern, like reason's, is to use every trick in the book to serve his client's interests. He seizes on every scrap of evidence that supports his client, and denigrates or makes seem ambiguous and uncertain any evidence that undermines his case. The supra-rational transcendentals, truth and justice, are irrelevant to the process, and in our system, the lawyer would be guilty of malpractice if he were to make them the primary consideration when defending a guilty or predatory client.

I'm not knocking lawyers.  It's not their job to determine guilt or innocence--it's the jury's. But the jury often has a tough task to figure out the truth because the system is not set up to get to the truth but rather to provide two biased  and conflicting ways of connecting the evidence dots. The jury usually doesn't get to see all the evidence cleanly presented in the light of objectivity, and so making a  an objectively reasonable judgment is very rare. 

What faculties does the juror draw upon to make his or her judgment?  What is it in the human being that accepts or rejects one argument or comes up with a completely different way of connecting the dots? Is this ever a purely rational process? I don't think so.  Because a good juror has to sniff out the truth, and this sniffing out is not an objective, rational process; it requires in addition to the evidence presented by the defense and the prosecution the use of subjective faculties involving intuition and conscience. People who are good at this tend consistently to make good judgments in situations where the evidence is incomplete.  And let's face it, in real life we are forced continuously to make judgments when what we know for sure is far less than what there is to know.

Judgment is a faculty of the soul, not of the brain. We use the brain to organize the information, but ultimately judgment is a spiritual act, and everything depends on the habitual disposition of the soul. Is it inclined to take the evidence at face value, or is it intuitive and shrewd and capable of reading between the lines?  Is it lazy and just wants to take the path of least resistance? Is it biased in such a way that it is impervious to any evidence that does not fit into its preconceived notions?  Is it contrarian and goes in the opposite direction that the group goes regardless of well-established facts? 

The human reasoning faculty is endlessly ingenious in coming up with rationalizations to make any number of other flawed and distorting justifications seem reasonable.  The only way not to be seduced by the elegance of a well-presented false argument is to be able to discern the spirit that lies behind it. The people who are good at this are the one's that usually get it right.  If reading Christopher Hitchens doesn't send a chill down your spine or stand your hair on end, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. His arguments are often as elegant as they are bogus.

There is something about the disposition of all our souls that inclines us to get things wrong. None of us is immune from the enormously powerful subrational forces that distort our ability to see clearly the evidence that is right in front of our noses.  And so the more interesting question for me is not how we so often get things wrong--that's easy--but how some people get it consistently right, especially when they are dealing with the murky psychic soup of human motivation and behavior. That requires more than being smart; it requires wisdom, and wisdom only comes from having some understanding about the irrational topography of the human soul.

'Irrational', therefore, is not a bad word in my vocabulary, because while the irrational can be the cause of much foolishness and often enough downright evil,  wisdom is not a possibility unless one has made some attempt to embrace it.  When you read Shakespeare or Dostoyevski or Kierkegaard, you are entering a world dominated by the irrational, but you are also entering a world suffused by wisdom.  The difference, say, between Dostoyevski and F. Scott Fitzgerald has little to do with the reasonableness or talent of either writer, but rather with what either has to say about the dimensions and dynamics of the human soul.  Dostoyevski is a huge soul, and so the scope of what he writes is prodigiously wide in his probing the depths and reaching up toward the heights;  Fitzgerald is a little soul, and his scope is likewise very limited. Both tell the truth, but the the truth told by the former is deep and wise, and the truth told by the latter is at best an eloquent witness to the superficiality of his time. 

There's nothing wrong with Fitzgerald and others of lesser talent so long as we're clear about its limitations. One can enjoy a well-turned sentence in the same way he can admire a well-executed, noon-to-six curve ball.  Both take talent, but neither requires largeness or soundness of soul.

So the real question is not whether someone is smart or talented, but the kind of soul he or she has.  We are too impressed in our culture by intelligence and talent, and not enough impressed by the Forrest Gump (small IQ, large soul) in us all that despite the limitations we all face comes up with the right answer, the deeply human answer. 

***

The Theological Angle: The measure of one's good judgment is his track record in getting it right when getting it right means contributing something fruitful, whether large or small, that withstands the test of time. And that capacity for making good judgments comes down to what I believe is a basic spiritual faculty, which whether one is religious or not, is used by everybody when they make good judgments. And in my tradition that faculty is called the "discernment of spirits." It's the discipline of determining the source of the impulses that influence our moods, thinking, and behavior. 

These impulses can be broadly categorized as having either a subrational/instinctual or supra-rational origin, i.e., from the domain of grace and freedom. The discerner of spirits does not take the verbal content of anyone's speech at face value; rather he tries to understand the spirit that it serves--most broadly, the spirit of truth or the spirit of deception.  Anybody with a scintilla of common sense does this all the time when dealing with people, whether or not they think about it as spirits they are discerning.  And anybody with a scintilla of common sense cannot help but not take seriously anything he hears from most of the talking heads in the media.

The most common lie people tell is the one they believe themselves, when they ascribe noble motives to actions they perform that in reality were motivated by self-interested, subrational, instinctual needs. 

In the last year or so, I've become a fan of the Fox television series "House."  (See here for another piece I wrote about this show.) Gregory House is the tortured Ivan Karamazov in a shabby lab coat. He's  a physically and psychologically wounded but brilliant doctor who is an icon of the postmodern marriage of the rational/subrational.  In House's world everyone is a liar; everyone has something to hide, and often enough they are hiding it from themselves. In House's world there is no possibility for transcendent, supra-rational meaning, and he would accuse anybody who thinks there is such a thing of being a deluded jackass.

For him humans are simply talking animals whose sole purpose is to satisfy instinctual needs, and he cannot abide anybody who claims that he or she is motivated by ideals that point to anything higher. He ruthlessly skewers anyone who represents himself as motivated by higher ideals, and he has great fun showing people how their ideals are a self-serving denial system designed to cover up darker, self-serving motivations they avoid confronting so they can feel better about themselves. He is, in a limited way, an excellent discerner of spirits.  He usually gets it right, not because he is a rationalist, but because he understands and accepts the dark subrational part of the soul. His mistake lies in that he believes there is nothing else.

But that his picture of the human soul is limited does not mean that what he discerns is wrong. He is usually right about people, because no one is immune from these dark, self-serving, predatory impulses. It's what it means to be a human being in a fallen world. No matter what we do, our motives are never pure. None of us could withstand House's accusations that these self-serving motivations influence just about everything we do. And it would be pointless for us to defend ourselves against him. But pure motives are not necessary to do the right thing.  Purity isn't the goal; discerning and doing the right thing is--no matter how confusing our motivations might be.

Because House is right about about the omnipresence of darker motivations in the human soul does not mean that they cannot be redeemed by their being mixed in with higher, supra-rational motivations. House sees the one side and thinks that it explains everything, and it just doesn't. We are none of us 'either/or'; we are 'both and'.  Or as Martin Luther put it, we are "simul iustus, simul peccator"--at the same time justified and sinner. The iustus part might be harder to detect in many people, but it's there insofar as they are open to and work with the supra-rational. We all, if we are normal decent folk, are a mix of both. That the peccator part persists and often gets the better of us does not deny that we are also able to work out of the justus part.

I would disagree with Luther to the extent that I think it's possible for the iustus part to play a more dominant role in the souls of some people than the peccator part. It's rare, but it happens to the degree that a person becomes genuinely habitually disposed to the supra-rational. It's called being a saint. But nobody is more aware than the saint of what a prominent presence in his soul life the subrational peccator part plays, so he or she never feels like a saint. So for practical purposes, Luther is right.  If someone thinks of himself as a saint, it's a sure sign he's probably in the grip of the subrational inclination toward grandiosity that is fed by the power drive. 

(I'd like also to be clear that the subrational part of us is not in itself evil anymore than it is in the animals, but it leads to evil when elements in it take over the soul in obsessive or compulsive thoughts and behavior, when it drives the bus rather than the spirit self driving it. The well-dispositioned soul to which I referred in the opening paragraph is one in which all the elements in the soul, subrational and supra-rational alike, work together like the instruments in a well trained orchestra.  The spirit self is the conductor.)

***

So let's apply this line of thinking  to the human drama as it plays out on the political stage. The people who are attracted to politics are human beings who struggle with the same conflicts as the rest of us.  But if it's possible for the 'justus' part to play a dominant role in the soul lives of a rare few, it's more common for the 'peccator' part to play that role.  And in politics we too often find that to be the case.  Too often politicians are small souls, with predictably crude, self-serving ambitions, and their thinking and behavior follows from that. This is to be expected in House's world, and he would have no problem with it, so long as the politicians are honest about their motivations--they're just people being people. 

What he would not be fine with is the self-righteousness of the religious right and the insufferable sanctimony and naive idealism of so many on the liberal left.  And let's face it, isn't the debate between these two factions the baseline for 90% of what passes for political discourse in our society, whether in the legislatures, on the airwaves or in cyberspace?  Doesn't our our politics suffer from a kind of lowest-common-denominator syndrome in which crudest people grab the reins of power and set the agenda for everyone else?  And isn't it disgusting when they justify it by appealing to religious and democratic ideals?  I'm with House--the whole process is nauseating.

But unlike House, I don't think that because this is the way most politics is conducted that it's the only possibility.  Politics can be far more interesting and complex when it allows for the surprising to happen, and that surprise usually has an x-factor, i.e., supra-rational or spiritual origin. It happens more than we think in the ordinary course of things, but to understand it better you have to point to modern prodigies of the political x-factor: Gandhi, King, Mandela cannot be completely explained as subrational politics as usual. They, like all of us, are not immune from the influence of the subrational--nothing in human experience is pure. Nevertheless, they were working with something more than the same old predictable political motivations. I'm sure the Gregory Houses of the world would dispute it, but I will take them on in a debate any time, any day. 

I'm not saying that these men didn't use their wits to play the game; it's rather a question of in whose interests they played it. None of these men were saints. They were Davidic political figures, and like the flawed biblical King David, their greatness lay in the degree to which they were willing to work with the x-factor.  Other politicians throughout history have worked with it to a greater or lesser degree. At a lower level, I think Jack and Bobby Kennedy, while also profoundly flawed, had this Davidic quality, or were at least were waking up to it in a way that was unusual for such high-profile politicians. It is admittedly an arguable point, but I think it's a part of what made them unusual and memorable, and it's part of the reason that they were shot--the politics-as-usual folks understood what they represented, and did what they had to do to quash it.

I have been accused of being a liberal by people who think of themselves as conservatives.  They think of me in this way because of my vehement opposition to the crony-capitalist authoritarianism that now passes for conservatism in this country.  But I have argued that this is not really conservatism, and genuine, principled conservatives know it. I also resist the liberal label because I am temperamentally more conservative than I am liberal. I agree with the conservative perception about a certain kind of liberalism as being in a denial about metaphysical evil and the way it works in and through the subrational. That this kind of liberalism tends to be naive in its longing for peace and justice, that it overestimates the ability of human beings to get along: Let's just all have a big group hug and get teary-eyed while we sing Lennon's "Imagine."  No thanks.

Thoughtful conservatives tend to "get" evil in a way that this kind of liberalism seems immune to, and they understand that a liberal is a closet conservative who hasn't been mugged yet. That he is a Dennis Miller before 9/11 or a Michael Richards who thinks he's not a racist. Liberals, in other words, are people who are alienated from what is darkest in their own natures, and they tend to be blind to it in others as well.  They are naively optimistic about the human future, and think that all it takes is for people to be reasonable.

But the worst kind of conservative--Charles Krauthammer comes to mind--gives into the fear that follows from this recognition that evil is real, and goes into a quasi-paranoid delusory state that thinks no price is to steep to defend ourselves from this Evil, which they project onto anyone whom they perceive as a threat. This is a type of security-obsessed conservative I cannot take seriously.

I can, however, take seriously the best kind of conservative in the Burkean mold who recognizes that there is such a thing as the supra-rational, but that its victories are rare and hard fought, that there are no easy solutions to the persistent and intractable problems inherent to the human condition. Who realizes that politics offers no ultimate solutions, and that the scope of what is possible in the political sphere is limited to the scope of the collective soul in the cultural sphere.  That a politics of the common good is impossible so long as self-interest is the guiding principle around which all politics revolves. That there are no top-down progressive political solutions that can take hold in a society unless there have been changes in the cultural sphere that make the people receptive to them.  And that this receptivity is conditioned by the supra-rational, and yet that where the supra-rational is operative, anything is possible.

So why do we get it wrong?  Two things contribute most dramatically.  First, when we make judgments with incomplete evidence.  Second, when we are in the grip of subrational complexes that blind us to the evidence that is right in front of our noses.  The rationalist is at a disadvantage when it comes to making judgments that require evidence beyond what is objectively verifiable.  Rather the judgments of those who know how to navigate in the murky depths of the irrational are more valuable than those who are simply reasonable, especially if they are unaware, as they often tend to be, of how the subrational might have them in its grip. 

When do we get it right?  First, when we have the Gregory Houseian discernment to see through people's self-justifying b.s.  And second, we are more right when we discern and support those who speak in the spirit of truth, or to use Gandhi's word, satyagraha.  It's the only way we're ever going to move forward beyond the same old, same old, be it the same old left or the same old right.

Iraq Study Group: My Two Cents

I don't have a lot to say about it that isn't obvious already.  The angle that interests me, though, is whether this group, representing the country's power establishment, has any real power.  I'm not sure.  There seems to be a different dynamic going on here that makes this "commission" and its report different from, say, the toothless 9/11 commission and its report.  I really wonder if the President can ignore this one because it's a very strong signal that the nation's power elite are fed up with him.

Whatever one might think of the usefulness of the seventy-nine prescriptions for this illness, the diagnosis of the disease is pretty right on. And pretty surprising for its toughness.  That's what matters, not whether this or that  proposal will be implemented.  What can or cannot happen depends on where the power lies, and it will be interesting to see if Bush still has enough left to control the Middle East agenda in the next two years. 

This report is not significant for its remedies; rather it's significant as the moment the power establishment went public about its rejection of the Bush presidency.  It's a shot across the bow, and I might be wrong about this, but if it were just another b.s. commission report, I don't think it would have been so severe in its criticisms.  It's Bush bashing taken to an entirely new level.  These people don't do that kind of thing unless there's a point.  I"d be surprised if the power establishiment would be content to submit its report and just let Bush ignore it. 

So if it were left to the congressional Democrats to rope down the loose cannon that this presidency has become, I would not be too optimistic.  They might surprise me, but I doubt they are not going to grow a backbone overnight, even with the majorities they will have come January. And if it were just the ISG by itself, probably not much would happen. But it's the combination of the power establishment, represented by the ISG, and the shift in the congressional power balance that might be able to bring a measure of sanity and accountability back to the hall of mirrors otherwise know as our national capitol.

The nutcase right wing and the Israel-is-right-no-matter-what crowd will fight the ISG establishment/Democrat majority, and we'll hear all the clever arguments that miss the essential point:  the U.S. was outmaneuvered by Iran and the game is over.  To persist is folly. Iran is the waxing power in the region, and we have every reason to be concerned about its strategic goals.  But the last people in the world anybody wants dealing with the Iranian problem are these fools in the White House.

The new game has to start with the reality that we lost and get the best deal we can to minimize further losses, and in order to do that we have to negotiate with the winner whether we like it or not. It's not about what we'd like to happen in the Middle East; it's about what's possible. And that's why James Baker has been called onto the scene.  He's the go-to guy when the power establishment needs to negotiate, and they hope he will negotiate the best deal possible.  That's what it means to be a realist.

So come the new year we'll see if that's how the new game will be played or whether the Bush and McCain dead-enders still have enough clout to continue in we-can-still-win-this-thing idiocy.  These people have a far too inflated idea about the kind of power and influence we have in the region right now.  We have no credibility. We are perceived as fools and losers, and for good reason. Continuing to be foolish and continuing to lose makes no sense.  We're in the same position now we were in around 1972 in Vietnam.  The jig was up, but we persisted in thinking we could win, and the only result was more people getting killed.  The same fundamental dynamics are at work now in the Middle East.  If we had any clout to influence events there for the better, we've squandered it.

The American capacity for self-delusion seems limitless. The only thing that seems to snap us out of it is when the ugly truth can no longer be denied.  We're long past that in Iraq, and the ISG report is a sign that at least the power establishment gets that.  But it's still an open question who has the power: the fools or the realists.

UPDATE: An interesting angle presented by Juan Cole in a Salon article. The rift between Baker and Bush runs parallel to the rift between Sunnis and Shiites with Baker representing not just key players within the American power establishment but also the interests of the Sunni Saudis.  It will be very interesting to see how this plays out with Bush now pushed  into the embrace of the Shiites. Will that force Bush to change his attitude toward Iran? The Kurds don't like Baker either.

Who Lost Habeas Corpus?

I've been snowed under with work responsibilities for the last couple of weeks and simply have had no time to post anything worth reading here.  I am working on an essay that attempts to understand why so many smart people could get things so terribly wrong, and why they continue to do so.

But in the meanwhile I recommend this New Yorker New Yorker piece on habeas corpus. Nothing was more a more disturbing indication to me about how we have lost our way in the political sphere than the passage of the Military Commissions Act.  I am still astonished by it, and cannot understand how it could have passed so easily and with so little debate.  And with so little negative commentary in the MSM.  Think what you will of Olberman--I can understand why some people find him annoying--but he's the only talking head in the MSM I'm aware of who spoke out about this with the appropriate outrage. 

In any event, this is an issue we cannot allow to die into forgetfulness.  It's legislation that must be reversed in the next congress if it's not reversed in the courts.  And pieces like this one in the New Yorker are part of the educational effort needed to achieve that goal.  It's an object lesson in why you can never trust "moderates" if moderate means splitting the difference with tyranny.  Guys like Specter, McCain, Graham, and Warner--so-called moderates of that ilk, have been taken off my list of people I may disagree with but whom I can take seriously.  Specter's assumption that the courts will take care of it hardly absolves him of his gross irresponsibility in voting for this legislation.  He and the others are now where they probably always belonged--on the list of ordinary political hacks.