After the Future

Torture and Vengeance

I hear Bill Kristol is ok with investigating and prosecuting torturers so long as we throw in some Democrats. Well, yeah, if Dems are implicated in the design and implementation of this policy, they, too, should be held accountable. If it can be shown that Dem leaders signed off on this, they should, indeed, be exposed and prosecuted. But if they did, and it's by no means clear that they or others did, theirs are sins of omission and cowardice rather than commission, of being to weak to resist evil rather than being its active proponents.

But whatever the truth might be, we know that Kristol/Limbaugh/Hannity crowd will do everything it can to brand lawful investigations and prosecutions a vengeance-driven witch hunt unless an equal number of Dems and Republicans are prosecuted. As we saw during the Clinton years they are experts in the high art of the moralistic witch hunt designed for no other purpose but political payback. And that's all they know.  A principled, lawful attempt to get to the bottom of this is not even a possibility in their imaginations; it's certainly not something they'd ever do. But why should we care what they think?  Why should they have any credibility at this point with anyone in this country who is sane and serious and who cares about the country's future?

Garrison Keillor is a Liberal and generally a sane and serious person, but he, too,  writes today that we should just move on. Does his argument open up new ground not already explored by elite defenders of existing power?  I don't think so:

What's needed here is not punishment, but truth. When I hear Democrats talk about "holding them responsible," I smell the sour righteousness of the victorious lording it over the vanquished. The guy they really want to put on trial is the old brush-cutter of Crawford, or else the old grouse hunter of Wyoming. They're the guys who signed off on those memos authorizing torture. The buck stopped at their desks.

Holding the Bush administration responsible for torture would give us some high political drama that would feed the media goat for the next two years and also sap the body politic. The healthcare system would go unfixed, schools would crumble, basic public services would deteriorate, all so that the left could have at the right. I am an old museum-quality Northern liberal, and I know something about the righteousness of my confreres. I've been with old lefty friends who can get emotional about the Haymarket bombing in Chicago and the innocent men railroaded to the gallows, but dear hearts, it happened in 1886. Let's move on.

Retribution is not smart politics. That's part of what killed Rudy Giuliani's run for president, the voters' sense that he was possessed of a cruel urge to pay back old debts. He was meaner than we want a president to be. I agree with Sen. John McCain when he says, "We need to put this behind us; we need to move forward."

I generally find Keillor a sensible commentator, but he's just wrong here. He calls himself a museum-quality, old Northern Liberal, and it's precisely the wishy-washy unprincipled, aw-shucks, let-bygones-be-bygones attitude he demonstrates that is at the heart of why Liberals are such pushovers by people on the right who mean business. This is precisely why sensible Americans see Liberals as weak and unprincipled. The people who mean business feed off this weakness, and the designers of torture policy, if nothing else, they are people who mean business.

Maybe I'm naive to think that vengeance isn't really the issue here for most people, and that because there are some fanatics on the left, like those on the right, operate only in this context of political payback, that's reason enough to prevent the law from taking its course. It doesn't matter that Keillor or anyone else sniffs vengeance in some of the left-leaning types he knows. The real issue, and it's so obvious I cannot believe it isn't even mentioned in his argument, lies in that we cannot allow such an egregious flouting of American and International law to go unprosecuted.

To do so sets a terrible precedent for the future that insures that future flouters will know that they have nothing to worry about. It also sends a terrible message to the rest of the world that we are no longer a country of laws, but a country dominated by an elite class that gets to do anything it wants with impunity. What astonishes me about liberals like Keillor is that he probably thinks this Bush-era torture policy an aberration, and now that we have Democrats in office again we don't have to worry because these aberrants will never again assume influential positions in the government. It's astonishingly short-sighted.

I, like most Americans, have no interest in vengeance. I just want to make sure this never, ever happens again. If you have an argument that shows clearly how we can let these crimes go unprosecuted and not fear that as soon as Republicans come into power that such policies won't be once again implemented, I'll listen. But no argument I've heard yet defending "moving on" has done that. So the people on the right like Kristol and Limbaugh will scream bloody murder about the unfairness of it all does not mean that it is unfair or that it is solely motivated by political payback. It means letting the law take its course, and sane Americans know the difference.

Spectering On

I don't like Arlen Specter.  His name has become associated in my mind with saying the right thing and doing the wrong thing. He's all posture and no substance. He is the emptiest of empty suits, a soulmate to the likes of Joe Lieberman. In that his reputation for moderation lies, for we live in a time when to be a fatuous empty suit is the essence of political moderation. His moving to the Democrats may be a bad day for Republicans, but it's not a good day for Democrats. Specter would have likely lost his primary to a movement conservative, and the movement conservative Republican would have been easily defeated by a real Democrat, not an expedient one like Specter.

Nevertheless, this news points to a trend from which we can draw some solace, which is that the hard right is slowly but surely destroying the GOP and insuring the long-term irrelevancy of both. So that's good news for America, even if the corporate media are slow to recognize it as such. Republican spokespersons will soon, let us hope, have no more relevancy in shaping the public debate as other fringe parties, and we will see more and more sane Republicans, who understand what the GOP has become, follow Specter into the Democratic Party.

That's a realignment that will be good for us as a nation. The far right has too long been taken too seriously, and it is finally moving to a long-deserved de-legitimization.  For now the only legitimate debate in this country is between the right and left within the Democratic Party--between the Blue Dogs/DLC on the right and the Progressive caucuses on the Left. Perhaps in time new parties will emerge that will reflect a broader pluralism of political interests--maybe we will even see a place for the Nader/Chomsky left to get into the mainstream conversation.

(That would, of course, require that such a conversation not be controlled by Beltway media types, who have no problem giving the radical right a media megaphone, while making sure the serious hard left critics of the American power arrangements never get even the occasional sound bite. Perhaps new media will emerge as a potent enough alternative to mainstream media to allow this to happen, but for now, I don't see seriouls critics of American power and wealth arrangments getting a mainstream platform.)

So for now, the Dems are where it's at, and we have to hold their feet to the fire. The Republicans in the short run have no agenda except to obstruct themselves into irrelvancy.

Torture: The Week in Review (Updated)

If I had one belief in politics, it would be that the freedoms secured by the modern West are worth fighting for. Absolutely central to those freedoms is barring the executive branch from torturing people. No power is more fatal to freedom and the rule of law than torture. It is like Tolkien's ring: no society remains free, if its rulers use it. Its power is banned because it is a solvent to the rule of law, the establishment of truth, and the limits of government. For an administration to secretly and illegally unleash this weapon - against citizens and non-citizens alike - and to demand that it not be subsequently called to account, that it be allowed to get away with it under some absurd notion that it's too divisive to hold war criminals accountable for their crimes is and was an outrage. Punishing those responsible for war crimes is not "scapegoating". You know what scapegoating is? It's throwing Lynndie England in jail for following orders given by George W. Bush, while leaving him to the luxury of a Texan suburb.

The precedent of a torturing American president must be reversed. That means it cannot be allowed to stand. --Andrew Sullivan

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President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.  --Frank Rich

This is bigger than Obama or anybody else, and it will take on--it already has taken on--a life of its own.  Nothing in the memos Obama released tells people who have been paying attention what they did not already know.  It's just official now, and the media can't ignore it anymore, no matter how much David Broder or Peggy Noonan wish they would. 

The future of American politics will be largely determined by which side of this issue you are on. The mentality of the people who defend torture deserves only contempt. It is a mentality rooted in fear, rather than courage and poise, and it is dishonorable for any of us to let our fears get the better of us. This kind of thinking can be given no quarter. To paraphrase Shepherd Smith: We're Americans, and we don't torture.

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UPDATE: I was listening to Cokie Roberts on NPR this morning and then read Greenwald's piece on John Meacham about how only the hard left wants investigations and prosecutions on this torture horror. Meacham thinks that it would be a bad precedent. Let's hope this evolves in such a way that some day he will re-read what he wrote about this issue and be mortified. The fatuousness of every argument proposed to defend or overlook what has happened regarding U.S. torture policy is obvious to anybody who lives outside the influence of the Beltway bubble. 

I don't think these torture defenders are bad people; I just think they really don't do much more than to reflect the groupthink within their "set".  These are smart, ambitious people, but their career success has depended not on their independent, principled thinking but on their ability to become what their bosses were looking for, and their bosses rose to their positions of power and influence by proving that they will be defenders of the existing paradigm of power and influence.  It's just common sense--well-established systems of power filter out anybody who poses the least threat to it. Challenge that paradigm, and your career dead-ends. We all know that this is the way it works, and that's why we should take the opinions of these careerists as being hardly worthy of our attention.

And so what is the worth of their opinion that prosecuting torturers is a bad precedent? The fatuousness of such thinking can only be measured by how it costs us in other ways. How as a precedent does it compare against the precedent of designing an official torture policy?  Why isn't that a problem for these people?  Do they really believe the mentality that gave birth to this policy will go away if we just look the other way? It's become a right-wing talking point that torture should be used if it works--and it will become official policy if the GOP gets into power again any time soon. How does this bad precedent of prosecuting torturers compare against the cost of destroying whatever good will and moral leadership this country enjoyed in the eyes of the world? How does it compare against the cost of not regaining it and our honor unless we go through a lawful process which demonstrates to the world that we are a nation that respects the rule of law and not the rule of elites?

The integrity of the Beltway pundits can be evaluated on where they come down on this issue. Any one of them who defends torture or who defends the idea of "moving on" makes clear to the rest of us that they just don't get it, most likely because  they care more about their status among the power elite than they care about principle or the precedent we should all truly be caring about. They can go into deep denial about this but the rest of the world outside their bubble will not.

Were the people in this "set" complaining about what a bad precedent it was to impeach Bill Clinton for a relative triviality? No, that was ok. That was good entertainment, and their bosses loved it. But the bosses don't like it when the ugly truth about how power operates in this country and who wields it is exposed to the public. So all the courtiers now are circling the wagons. What a nauseating spectacle. The sooner new media puts these big media moral infantilists out of business the better.

Jane Harman: Civil Libertarian

Greenwald today:

Behold Jane Harman's overnight transformation from Very Serious Champion of the Lawless Surveillance State to shrill civil liberties extremist.

But I'm really wondering:  as serious as it is when a member of Congress is the target of government eavesdropping, can we really afford to investigate this?  After all, we have so many very important things to do.  It really seems like we need to be looking forward, not backwards.  The Bush administration is gone.  This all happened in 2005 -- years ago.  Is this really a time to be pursuing grudges, to be re-litigating old disputes?  What kind of partisan witch hunt is Harman after?  We can, and surely should, reflect on what happened to her -- in fact, let us now pause together for a moment of quiet reflection on what was done to Jane Harman -- but this is not a time for retribution or looking back.  "Most Americans" want the people's business done, not "abuse of power" investigations.  . . .

I wonder how long it's going to be before Harman joins the ACLU?  What's that old saying -- a "civil liberties extremist" is a former Bush-enabling, Surveillance State-defending Blue Dog who learns that their own personal conversations were intercepted by the same government that they demanded be vested with unchecked power

How is it possible that we take people like Harman, Boehner, Cheney and so many others seriously? How did it get this bad that people as transparently corrupt and just plain wrong as so many of these pols are be given any responsibility for our governance at all? As Jon Stewart asked last night regarding Cheney: Why does he have any credibility at this point? Asking his advice or opinion about anything is like asking Wile E. Coyote's  advice on how to catch road runners.The really frightening thing is that their stupidity or corruption are more the rule than the exception.  Or perhaps more accurately, they set the rules, and every one else has to fall into step with their stupidity and corruption if they want to be players. 

But we will put up with it as long as the media gives them a platform, and they will continue to give them a platform because idiots like this represent the interests of big media more than people like Russ Feingold or Gleen Greenwald.

Of Smoking Guns (Updated)

It's not so important that the CIA agents or uniformed people following orders to torture be prosecuted as that those who gave the orders be. We can argue about whether that's right or wrong, but the more important issue by far is to prosecute the Addingtons, Yoos, Gonzales, Bybees, and any of the civilian political leaders who sanctioned and promoted torture policy.

The political problem is not external; it's internal. Most Americans and world opinion would support these prosecutions. It would be a major plus from an public relations image point of view.  But public opinion is not nearly so potent as internally entrenched Beltway power, which will do everything it can to protect its own. And the Beltway establishment doesn't want to put itself through this. Beltway power sanctioned the Clinton impeachment as entertaining distraction about sex. But the Bush era crimes were about power and money, and entrenched power will viciously protect its prerogatives in those areas. That cuts too close to the bone.

So yes, it's disappointing that Obama keeps talking about looking forward and not backward. What kind of future will we have if future government officials know that they can do anything they want because they will never be prosecuted by Democrats whondon't have the will to buck entrenched power to enforce the law? 

But it doesn't matter what Obama says; it matters what he does, and he did something very important in his releasing those memos--he has given the world the official smoking gun. And now that's done, this torture business will take on a life of its own--special prosecutors, congressional investigations, etc.  It should be an even bigger deal than Watergate. It should be, but that might be wishful thinking on my part. We'll see.

The argument put out by Beltway types is simply that releasing these memos or pursuing prosecutions will aid the terrorists or weaken the country is ridiculous. Just hear it as entrenched power saying what it can to protect its own--not the country's--interests because it's obvious that not to prosecute is weakness. The world already knows that we had an official torture policy; they are waiting to see if we will repudiate it.  We remain weak so long as we refuse to take the steps to expunge it root and branch. That can only be done if we show the world that the people who designed this program will be prosecuted for war crimes and suitably punished if convicted. 

In his memo, Bybee pointed out that no one had ever been prosecuted under the torture statutes on the books. A guy like this--a lawyer, and now a Federal district judge--is a mockery of our country's commitment to the rule of law. He should be the first prosecuted under the law he so blithely dismissed.

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UPDATE: Rahm Emmanuel and everybody else who says we can't look backward with recrimination about this torture business is clearly an accessory to a cover up. The people who were behind designing and promoting this torture regime must be flushed out and prosecuted.

Politics is hardly ever about doing the right thing, and if it is it's because it coincides with a particulaly powerful group. What Emmanuel is saying is that the price to pay for outing torturers is too steep a price to pay, and I believe he and everybody else who thinks so is miscalculating.

The torturers are people who still have enormous power within the Beltway system, and you can be sure they are using every bit of it to protect themmselves. So  the administration is fighting investigations on this because they are feeling the heat from these power sources and hope it will go away, but it miscalculates if it thinks it will go away.  It won't.

So stonewalling on this now is just going to make it worse for the administration in the long run.  At best it will look bad in terms of its political judgment which will undermine its trustworthiness, not just with the Democratic base, but with all decent Americans.  And at worst, it will appear as collusion with the criminals who were behind this policy. No matter what the reasons for adminstration resistance to getting to the bottom of this, it cannot be successfully stonewalled, and it won't be.

Torture Memos

It's a good day. We're not learning anything we didn't really know already about the Bush/Cheney torture regime.  The good news lies in learning that the Obama people are not going to collude with the Bushies to stonewall in the name of protecting establishment interests (aka national security) from legal action. There has been every reason to doubt that he would, and it's a relief that he has made this gesture toward transparency. This could just be a bone they're tossing to the civil liberties types, but I hope it's the first dribble of water coming through a leaking dyke.  We all know there is so much more ugliness to be revealed; let's just get it over with and move on. 

Obama says he won't prosecute, but that's a bone he's tossing to the CIA; he won't have a choice if there's enough pressure to shame him into it. This idea of forgetting the past and looking to the future is nonsense, and he knows it. Not to prosecute is to collude. It's not about recriminations; it's about sending a message to future torturers that you will not get away with this.  Nothing could be clearer or simpler.

There's enormous pressure on him to stonewall, and I imagine there are vicious debates going on within the White House, pro and con whether to let the chips fall where they may or to try to damage control. I hope this is the beginning of a shift in the administration's stance here if for no other reason than that the administration recognizes that secrecy and stonewalling is a losing strategy no matter what price the administration must pay in the way of internal bureaucratic blowback.

Now what?

The Crazies We Shall Have Always with Us

Republicans have become embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people. Better, perhaps, to focus on the real policy debates, which are all among Democrats.

But here’s the thing: the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans from taking control of both Congress and the White House. And they could return to power if the Democrats stumble. So it behooves us to look closely at the state of what is, after all, one of our nation’s two great political parties.

The GOP ten or fifteen years ago were just as crazy as they are now, and they were taken with disturbing seriousness by too many people who should have known better. And ten or fifteen years from now, if not sooner, the crazies in the GOP will be taken seriously again and will be back in the driver's seat. There's too much money and power that benefits from the crazies gumming up the works. There's too much money and power that will be directed toward insuring that sanity and the common good be ridiculed and discredited. The Democrats are themselves cynically compromised by that money and power, but at least some of them are sane and educable, and now their feet must be held to the fire by a principled radical center. 

That's why the most important issue--before healthcare, before fixing the economy, before terrorism--is to restore transparency and the rule of law. The long-term health of the country requires it. Programs and policy are important, but not nearly so important as the underlying constitutional infrastructure. Because when the crazy people get back in power, as inevitably they will, they will pickup where Cheney/Bush left off.

Sideshow

All this nonsense about teabagging and the antics of wingnuttiana is a sideshow.  We should be asking about what's going on in the Obama DOJ.  Every time you look around, we learn something disturbing. The crazy right we shall have always with us, but our hope for the future lies in rolling back the Bush doctrine concerning how the executive is above the law, and Obama doesn't seem to want to do that.  It is also disturbing that Holder is unwilling to review the Siegelman case. It raises a very important question:  Whose side are these guys on?  I mean really.

I know, there are things we don't know, and it's complicated, and there may be good reasons, but where's the good news?  The pattern that is forming here is confirming my worst fears about how it's too late.

American Popular Opinion: Its Irrelevancy

Polling about attitudes on issues that concern Americans  is close to irrelevant, because the only opinions that matter are the opinions of Beltway Insiders who stay in place from administration to administration, no matter which party gets elected. People like Greenwald complain about how Beltway media types talk about their own opinions as if they represented the majority of Americans. He has shown repeatedly that if they do, it's a coincidence because Beltway insiders don't care what mainstream Americans think about; they only care about what entrenched power thinks about.

And they're probably right. Elite opinion mostly doesn't align with broad popular opinion, but what difference does it make?  We elect a congress to get us out of Iraq; nothing happens.  We elect Obama to redress the abuses of power perpetrated by the Bush administration, and he and Holder decide they are going to hold onto the executive privileges that have accrued to office through precedents established by Bush. It even looks like he's pushing executive privilege beyond what Bush demanded. Why shouldn't he?  If it's a political calculation, he risks more by alienating the power elite than he does the Greenwalds of the world. He or I or anybody can criticize him as much as we want, but what are we going to do next election, vote for Nader and throw the Presidency to the Republicans? The left is being played by establishment Democrats in the same way that the religious right was being played by establishment Republicans.

Is this what Obama wants?  Probably not, at least not personally. He perceived it as the political reality that defines the world that he has to work in. He's being told by elite opinion that he can't give up executive power--just not done.  Looks weak, or whatever. Have to play the turf game to avoid appearing the doormat Congress or anybody else can walk all over. Undermines the image of executive strength the president must project to a world full predators waiting to exploit any appearance of weakness.  I don't know that that's what Obama's being told, but I think it's a reasonable deduction that follows from a basic understanding about how bureaucracies and the people who serve them think. Obama knows that only a minority of people care about abstract issues regarding executive power, state secrets privilege, and constitutional principle, and he hopes that the people who do care about those issues will forget about this and come to support him on other issues they care about like health care, veterans rights, education, and support for the middle class.

Obama may not egregiously abuse his executive powers, and he may try to do some good programmatic things that Republicans would never do, but when the right inevitably regains the White House the infrastructure put in place by Bush and left intact by Obama, we can be sure that it will be abused. If Obama turns out to be nothing more than a tool of entrenched elite power, then it's proof that we really have devolved into nothing more than a ceremonial democracy.  Fundamental power does not lie with the people; it lies with elites who can be pushed a little this way or that, but nothing fundamental changes about how power works.

I've said this before, but I didn't want to believe it, and I wanted to give Obama a chance. My hope was that Obama would be able to deliver on his promise not to just bring some policy changes but to change the way Washington thinks.  I still reserve some hope, because it's early, and there may be strategic reasons for his administration taking these positions on secrecy and executive privilege in the short run. But as each day passes, it appears more and more that even if Obama wants to, that to think he will be able to bring change in any fundamental way is just wishful thinking. The power system rules to benefit its own entrenched interest; elected officials serve it or are destroyed.

Good Luck with That (Updated)

From today's WaPo:

Roger T. Cole, the central bank's head of banking supervision, told Congress two weeks ago that one lesson among many is that regulators must no longer be lulled by good times or put off by industry arguments.

"When bankers are particularly confident, when the industry and others are especially vocal about the costs of regulatory burden and international competitiveness, and when supervisors cannot yet cite recognized losses or write-downs," Cole said, "we must have even firmer resolve to hold firms accountable for prudent risk management."

Easy to say now when it's too late. The rest of the article talks about Geithner's feeble attempts to do just that when he was head of the New York Federal Reserve. 

Everybody knows that real life in the mainstream America is just an extension of high school, and Geithner is like the nerd appointed monitor with the task to make the jocks on the football team behave during homeroom. Not gonna happen. Powerful people get what they want unless people with more power stop them.

It seems that for this Wall Street crowd you need people with a police or prosecutor's mentality to play the regulator's role--not some chummy wannabe. I suppose there are people who are the financial regulator equivalents of a Patrick Fitzgerald, but they would never get appointed during a Republican administration.  Let's see if Obama finally changes things up so that it's not just the rules that are tough, but also the people who are appointed to enforce them.

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UPDATE: As if in answer to my question where is the Patrick Fitzgerald for the financial industry,  Moyers interviews William K. Black, who is that guy. He strongly indicts both the fraudulent behavior of America's elite bankers and the Obama administration for covering up their fraud. If a sledgehammer is what is needed to take down the corrupted Wall Street system, he's one guy we should all call upon to swing it.