Talk Nice to the Conservatives

Some of my best friends aren’t necessarily Republicans, but I’ve recently had opportunities to discuss public policy with conservative acquaintances and family members. Because of the pre-existing relationships with these people, both sides make Obamian attempts to find common ground and not let discussion degenerate into in-your-face scream fests.

In one case we were talking about climate change, in the other health care policy, and in both instances I found these people espousing views so far to the left of Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin as to be immediately suspect.

Climate change has made formerly safe conversational gambits such as “Hot enough for you?” potentially dangerous. Having slipped into this area accidentally with my friend Dean, I decided to plough straight ahead, and told him I guessed he was perfectly at home with the heat.

“You know, don’t you, that I’m a long-time proponent of a carbon tax,” he replied.

“Me, too,” I said, “except it’s too straightforward to ever be passed into law.”

“Exactly,” he pounced, delighted to have coaxed me onto common ground, and proceeded into a 15-minute diatribe against cap-and-trade. I listened patiently. The longer he went on about it, the more I began to suspect that he wasn’t so much in favor of taking the most direct action against global warming, as he was against doing the one thing that had the best chance of actually happening.

Miami will be under water before any American Congress passes an anti-carbon initiative with the word “tax” in its name. It struck me that Dean is in favor of a carbon tax like he’s a stalwart proponent of rocket service to Jupiter—if it smooths the conversational waters, why the hell not be in favor of it?

Similarly, at another friend’s house liberal pundits came on the TV talking about how the health care bill was a giveaway to the insurance companies and Congress should junk the whole thing and start over. My host, a veteran of the ballot-counting brigades that descended on Florida in 2000 to save America from a Gore presidency, declared that the pundits on the tube were exactly right, and that what the country needed was a European-style single payer system.

“Right,” I said to myself, but not out loud, “and that’s the reason you’ve been voting Republican for 20 elections, to make sure we enjoy the benefits of a government-run health care system as soon as possible.”

Both of the talking heads on TV agreed that Obama had wimped out on health care, and while one guy said we should just go back to the drawing board (“If the Democrats lose control of Congress for six or 20 years, maybe they’ll learn not to kowtow to special interests next time they’re in power”), the other wasn’t so blithe about the political effects of failure this time around, and said the Democrats should hold their noses and pass the bill, public option or not.

“That’s what I think,” I told my in-law. He didn’t reply, and I didn’t keep going, though I had to bite my tongue to hold back. The Republican Party right now is in the hands of people who believe Obama is a foreigner trying to euthanize their grandmothers, and they’re handing away House seats that have been safe for Republicans forever (namely the one in upstate New York) if their nominee doesn’t happen to be as unhinged as they would like him to be.

Democrats should leave this kind of self-destructive behavior to the Republicans. The health care fight is about health care, and that matters, but it’s also about who runs the government and—given what a disaster a return to Republican government would be—that really matters. I’m glad my friends on the right claim to care about a safe and sound environment and the right to health care, and I’m happy to talk nice right back at them. But in the privacy of the voting booth, saving my own sweet ass continues to come first with me.

Gay Agenda Threatens to Devour Houston

According to my dictionary, an agenda is “a list, plan, outline, or the like, of things to be done, matters to be acted or voted upon.”

Sounds pretty harmless, doesn’t it? For years, I had thought an agenda offered about as much excitement and fascination as a 12-hour-long Powerpoint presentation. The word said, “city council meeting,” “flies buzzing interminably around a light fixture,” “the bailiff has gone to sleep and so has my fanny.”

Little did I realize all those years that an agenda was a thing of danger, like a concealed weapon, a conspiracy, a secret, ominous plan concocted by the forces of evil to seduce the kids into child prostitution, to kidnap the family dog and return him to my home as a double agent eavesdropping at the bathroom door and taking clandestine dumps in my houseslippers.

The word has fallen victim to the polarization of politics, highjacked by negative campaigners of all persuasions and transported out of the school board meeting into the paranoid fantasy world originally peopled by “fellow travelers,” “dupes,” and “pinkos.”

Once a brand name for boredom, now an agenda is tool of deception wielded by apparently benign but actually sinister agents attempting to slip a fast one by an unsuspecting public. Behind a candidate’s public platform is the real plan for subverting all our cherished ideals and poisoning our precious bodily fluids.

Are you scared, worried, anxious, insecure? You’d better be, because that seemingly charming candidate in the political commercial is really hiding a oozing, pus-filled, stinking agenda that will only become revealed when it’s too late to save yourself from its contagion.

Like Lennie in Of Mice and Men dying to hear about the rabbits, phobes of all stripes have come to expect and even yearn to be told about the agendas that will be sprung upon them, confirming all their worst fears.

Nothing fascinates and frightens Americans like sex, particularly sex that’s beyond the pale of majority behavior. That’s why Houston, our fourth-largest city, now finds itself in the grip of agendamania.

Annise Parker is running for mayor of Houston. A former city council member and city controller, she says she stands for the kind of things common to the old-fashioned, city council-style, safe-but-boring agenda—she wants responsible spending, she favors job creation, she’s against crime (I want to know when is some candidate going to show some courage and come out for encouraging crime).

But Annise Parker is gay. She has a female life partner with whom she is raising two children. Remarkably, in past campaigns, and in the present mayoral election until it went into a run-off, this was not an issue.

No longer. Local fundamentalist organizations have mobilized against Parker’s candidacy. The Houston Area Pastor Council has declared her an “open advocate of a gay agenda.” It says Parker will try to re-establish domestic partner benefits for city workers, even though she has said she has no such plans.

So great is the connotation of hidden evil conveyed by the word “agenda” that you can use it to make up your opponent’s agenda for them, falsely call it a declared plan, and when your opponent denies it, it looks like part of her perfidious scheme (“You don’t think she would admit it, do you?”).

The run-off election takes place Saturday, December 12. Parker has an open agenda to win a majority of the votes. We’ll see if she gets away with it.

Peace Prize

The Peace Prize established by Alfred Nobel (who also invented dynamite) will be picked up this week by Barack Obama (who is also running two wars in the Near East). Altogether a thing that makes you go “Hmmm” about guys who make things go “Booom!”

Want Change in Afghanistan? Wait 18 Months

When it comes to Afghanistan, President Obama delivers on his promises. In the 2008 campaign, he vowed to undo what he considered the Bush administration’s neglect of the Afghan war and take the fight to the Taliban, calling it “a war we have to win.”

In February of this year he sent 17,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan. This month he upped the ante again, committing another 30,000 troops to the conflict, which will bring the total number of troops in Afghanistan to more than 100,000.

Newspaper accounts indicate he believes the surge of troops in Iraq begun in 2006 by the Bush administration worked, and he wants to apply the same strategy in Iraq.

Many people who believe, as I do, that this country has essentially become addicted to war—if not against the Russians then against the Vietnamese, if not against the Vietnamese then against the Iraqis, if not against the Iraqis then against the Iranians, if not against the Iranians then against the Afghans—are despondent at this turn of events.

As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank and others pointed out this week, a lot of liberals bet the emotional farm on Obama and, regardless of his consistency of opinion and action on Afghanistan, feel betrayed and angry at his failure to pull out now.

Me, I’m taking the longer view, if for no other reason than that politically there’s no other option available. The country is effectively split down the middle on Afghanistan, and because of the weight of opinion, history, and money backing war in this country, the tie goes to the warmakers.

This country doesn’t pull out of wars easily. Put the troops in action overseas, and any movement to bring them home becomes a failure to support the troops, with heavy suggestions of weakness and even treason. We’re a country born of war, with a long history of fighting and winning wars, and have been since World War II the number one military power in the world.

Perhaps more importantly, military contractors, the industries that build the weapons systems used by our armies, have learned how to make sure the maximum number of jobs are dependent on continued military appropriations. When these companies learn how to parcel work on particular weapons systems out to a variety of key congressional districts spread across the country, ensuring the widest political backing for the programs possible, then you have weapons makers running the government. Once you’ve built the biggest war machine on earth, it’s hard not to use it.

So why is there any hope at all, long-term or short-term, for a change in Afghan policy?

Even if Obama is deluded now in relying on a surge in Afghanistan, the fact remains that his latest moves do represent change from the positions and policies he laid out in the past. In March of this year Obama backed outright defeat of the Taliban and creation of a stable democratic government in Kabul.

Obama is now telling journalists that he regrets that decision because it led his commanders to view the mission more “expansively” than he intended. Now he says all he is after is ensuring enough stability to keep pressure on Al Qaeda.

Where before he signaled a readiness to do what it took to build a democratic Afghan central government, now he’s talking about giving up on the corrupt Kabul government altogether if necessary and dealing mainly with more reliable local governments.

Where before he seemed ready to stay in Afghanistan as long as needed to beat the Taliban and set up democracy, now he is pushing his commanders to surge up as fast as possible in order to be able to get out as fast as possible.

It took George W. Bush six years to decide that Rumsfeld’s war on the cheap in Iraq was a failure and adopt the surge there, and even then it seemed as if he preferred to pretend that there was no change in policy. To admit there was a change would have meant that there was something wrong with what he’d been doing in the first place. Being George W. Bush, as we know, means never wanting to say you’re sorry.

If you choose to argue that Obama isn’t changing enough, OK. If you think Obama is trying to have it both ways at once, simultaneously advocating advance and retreat, fine. But you can’t say the guy has barricaded himself in the Alamo here. Next to Bush he looks as bendable as a reed, slippery as an eel, similes critics on the right have been using since he was inaugurated.

This guy will change if he sees a reason to do so. Whether we surge for 18 months or not, I believe Afghanistan is going to look pretty much as hopeless then as it looks right now. I believe it will be apparent at that point to everybody but the nutcase right that something’s got to give.

Precedent indicates that this guy is willing and able to recognize when change needs to happen and do it. I’m not relying on Obama to do the right thing now. But I’m not willing to bet against him doing the right thing in 18 months.