Friday, January 15, 2010

Haiti and Limbaugh

When will I hear a Republican repudiation of Rush Limbaugh? As I watch the news about people continuing to die in Port-au-Prince tonight for lack of medical supplies, I reflect that Rush Limbaugh is telling people to not contribute to White House-run efforts to save lives. He says we cannot trust the Obama administration to exhibit common decency. A classic case of projection, I suppose. For people like Limbaugh, the disaster in Haiti is not a real event, but rather more grist for their sick ideological mill.

There is a special place in hell waiting for this man, and most of us have known that for a long time.

But my question is, when am I going to hear a Republican voice telling this evil, evil man to shut up and go away?

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Cheney Accepts the Nobel Prize for Natural Selection (But Obama Should Have Won It)

Two of the most powerful Americans in recent history just delivered pronouncements on war and peace that not only addressed the topic at hand, but revealed a lot about their outlooks on life, religion, and survival of the fittest.

Dick Cheney and Barack Obama are popularly portrayed by the liberals as embodying the choice between fear and hope, and by conservatives as embodying the choice between strength and weakness.

Personally, I think the conservative juxtaposition is a lot more skewed than the liberal, but both oversimplify the differences between the two men’s positions. If you can read Obama’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize as simply his latest elaboration on the theme of “Yes, we can,” then I suspect you haven’t yet come down from the high of November 2008.

If you read Cheney’s latest blasting of Obama’s response to Muslim extremism as nothing but the crazed, discredited bleatings of a foreign-policy dinosaur, I think you underestimate the degree to which his viewpoint can be supported by rational calculation.

Sure, Cheney is a wacko coot, but the method behind his madness was summed up in the 17th century by the rationalist French philosopher Blaise Pascal. “Pascal’s wager,” as it’s called, famously decreed that given that we can’t be sure about the existence of God, the rational bet is to believe. If He doesn’t exist and we believe, then we’ve just wasted a lifetime of boring Sunday mornings in church; if He does exist and we bet he doesn’t, we burn for eternity in hell.

Cheney believes in the hell to pay at the hands of terrorists not taken seriously. If, in the process of avoiding that hell, we end up torturing a few innocent people or attacking countries that don’t harbor terrorists after all, then so be it. Better to be paranoid with blood on our hands than to be toast.

Cheney stands foursquare with our ancestor cavemen who judged that unexplained rustling in the bushes at midnight to be a wolf, rather than the ones who dismissed it as the wind. In those instances in which it really was a wolf, the paranoid cavemen survived to pass on their genes to millions of God-fearing, wolf-fearing, gay-fearing, French-fearing red-state voters.

Obama’s rather chilly defense of war in his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize was hardly the testament to wishful thinking that Cheney sees in the administration’s foreign policy, but it was genuinely hopeful in its insistence that mankind possesses the rationality required to figure out the difference between the wind in the bushes and the wolves, and devise rational, practical responses to the wolves.

Obama said in that speech, “I face the world as it is, and I cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of men and the limits of reason . . . So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another—that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy.”

Given the coexistence of these truths, Obama laid out “practical steps”—fostering agreements among nations, supporting human rights, promoting international economic development—he said could lead to an “evolution” of human institutions toward peace. He borrowed the idea and the word from John F. Kennedy, but, as he used it, it could have come directly from the mouth of Darwin.

The idea was that rational, step-by-step improvements in the exercise of international relations could be successful, and by succeeding could be replicated, replacing the paranoid lashing out at every stirring in the bushes that Cheney champions and that failed so miserably in the Awful Aughties.

Because, despite the urge toward global paranoia that persists in the American populace, it really did fail us badly under Bush and Cheney. People around the world came to hate Americans. We were behaving like the Germans in World War II, killing indiscriminately in the hopes of shocking and awing our enemies into submission. It didn’t work. It bred disgust among our friends and increased resistance among our enemies. It lost Republicans the last election.

Obama doesn’t say we have no enemies. He doesn’t tell us to surrender to them. He advocates the use of force against them. But he suggests that it is possible not only to do so in a measured, controlled, discriminating way, but to simultaneously work effectively to promote peaceful solutions to conflict and problems that can eventually become part of an evolution toward peace.

And in doing so, he advocates the replacement of fear with hope.

Friday, January 1, 2010

Pass Healthcare Reform So the Republicans Can Repeal It

It’s not often that I get the urge to give advice to the loyal opposition. For one thing, they are so obnoxiously disloyal, not merely as a matter of conviction, or even emotional gut revulsion at policies they dislike, but strictly from a coldly calculated tactical decision to derail the smooth workings of the government for their own political gain.

They’ve decided to gum up the national works and blame it on the Democrats.

They propose no alternatives to Democratic initiatives: their alternative is NO. Whatever it is, as Groucho Marx sang in the movie Horsefeathers, they’re against it.

On health care reform the tactic has come dangerously close to working. The longer the apparently interminable debate has dragged on, the lower support for reform drops in the polls. The present system is in trouble, it has to be changed now or the country will suffer, and the Republicans have decided to let the country suffer in order to see the Democrats fail.

Why offer help to people who are this creepy, and who seem to be getting what they want by being creepy?

I don’t know. They come up with such interestingly perverse reactions to reality that I have an almost irresistible urge to sign up as their life coach. I think, “These people really need help, but exactly how could anybody go about helping them?” It would be like trying to push someone’s buttons whose buttons are hooked up to an inner circuitry designed by Rube Goldberg.

For example, at the same time that they’re doing their calculating Richard Nixon machinations to get what they want no matter what the consequences, they retain a blissfully childlike belief in ideological notions that threaten all the fruit of their cold calculations. It’s a weird combination of ruthless effectiveness and bumbling naivete.

It leads them to repeatedly oppose any government action, based solely on the all-American fear of having the government do anything, even when it’s pretty clear, to even a slightly objective observer, that the government action is going to end up being wildly popular.

What political mileage does the Republican Party possibly get out of wanting to privatize Social Security, for example? None, nada. Will they ever drop this notion that most people realized was stupid somewhere around 1943? No, never, because to do so would be to deny the fairy tale of inevitable government fallibility.

So, yes, the Republicans are smart to oppose healthcare reform, and oppose it to the hilt. People are scared of hospitals, they don’t want to die, they don’t like the present system, but they’re even more nervous about any changes that involve the government. The longer you draw out the process of change, as the Republicans are doing, the less likely it is that change will happen, and the more likely people will be to blame the Democrats for not achieving the change they need and want and fear all at once. Perfect tactic for where we’re at right now.

But what do you do if healthcare reform passes? There’s a bunch of really smart Republican politicians, including Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, who say that if reform passes this month, the party should back repeal in November.

Who knows? In the fall of 2010, before reform is really in place, that might well work. But if healthcare reform is still in effect in 2016, the Republicans might as well back the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill, Medicare, Social Security as well. There’s a whole bunch of good ideas initially opposed by Republicans that the wisest among them have eventually embraced. That’s how a black man became head of the Republican National Committee.

If healthcare reform passes and people actually have enough experience of it by the fall to actually like it, the Republicans would be nuts to run on repeal. Party principles are useful to guide a political movement, rally the faithful, and even attract the undecided. It’s important to have an idea of where you want to go.

But the Buddhists have a principle for personal enlightenment that I think can also be valuable for mass political movements, particularly ones as dysfunctional as the Republican Party: don’t believe everything you think.