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?

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 17^th 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.

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.

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.