OlsonOnline

'Tough love' for Obama

I consider my frequent critiques of some of President Obama's policies --the misguided ones-- a form of "tough love." After all, I voted for him. And he wants to hear from his supporters, right?

Here's the Progressive Congressional Caucus' Donna Edwards urging progressives to "find their voices."

Here's the line I like:

"As progressives we haven't quite found our voice in terms of offering the appropriate critique of this administration.  And you know what?  He needs us to do it.  And the reason he needs us is because it will make him  a stronger and better President.  It will make him more progressive.  It will make him less likely to have to always bow to the conservative wings not just of the Republican Party but of the Democratic Party. 

Paul Karsh is one progressive who has raised his voice "to let [Obama] know where we need to hear his voice" with this open letter. It reads in part:

"I need your voice to stand up against torture and stand for the rule of law. ...

"I need your voice to do something about service people who have served our country with honor and distinction, and who have skills that our services desperately need, being discharged for being openly gay. ...

"I need your voice to allow the option of single-payer to be part of the discussion of health care reform."

Friedman pulls a Broder

Insufferable columnist Tom Friedman agrees with the insufferable David Broder that sanctioning torture should NOT be prosecuted as the crime that it clearly is under both international and domestic law.  He therefore applauds Obama for saying that the torture policy crafted by the Bush administration was a "mistake", not a crime warranting investigation and prosecution.

In short, Obama is doing precisely the right thing.  Friedman's reasons?  Prosecuting Bush would "rip the country apart."  Friedman also argues that Al Qaeda is such "a unique enemy" that it remains "undeterred by normal means."

What does that mean?  As near as I can tell, it means that any detainee associated with Al Qaeda deserved to be tortured, and to hell with the laws and international treaties that prohibit it.

Glenn Greenwald begs to differ: 

"Obama is currently and simultaneously advocating these positions:

* Bush officials ordered torture.

* Torture is a crime.

* Nobody is above the law.

"Unless you're David Broder, Fred Hiatt, Peggy Noonan or Tom Friedman, those premises of Obama's, as a matter of logical reasoning, all necessarily lead to one conclusion (hint:  it's not:  'This is a time for reflection, not retribution')."

I prefer Greenwald's logic to Friedman's 'tortured' reasoning. 

The most consistent critic of Obama's refusal to acknowledge torture as a crime has been Rachel Maddow regular and George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.  Turley has said that not only is torture a crime, but that there is no option but to investigate and then, if evidence warrants, to prosecute those responsible for initiating the torture policy. 

Obama's "tortured" politics

The case for investigating the torture of 'detainees' and prosecuting those responsible is clear and irrefutable.  Here's U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak in an interview with Glenn Greenwald:

"The United States of America is a party to the United Nations Convention Against Torture from 1984, which clearly contains the obligation to make torture a criminal offense under domestic law... . ...

"...whoever practices torture shall be brought before an independent criminal court and be held accountable. That is, the torturer, him or herself, but also those who are ordering torture practices, or in any other way participating in the practice of torture. This is a general obligation, and it applies to everybody; there are no exceptions in the Convention."

Those opposed to "looking backward" call the prosecution of war criminals --e.g. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld-- a political exercise in vengeance.  David Broder in today's Oregonian, for example, asks of the Obama administration:  "Do they now go back and investigate or indict their predecessors?

No, he says:

"That way, inevitably, lies endless political warfare. It would set the precedent for turning all future policy disagreements into political or criminal vendettas. That way lies untold bitterness -- and injustice."

"Policy disagreements?"  No, David Broder.  The authorization of torture is no simple policy disagreement.  It's a criminal violation of both domestic and international law.  The United States is obligated to investigate and then, if evidence of criminal wrongdoing is found, prosecute those responsible.

There is no morally acceptable alternative.

So what's Obama afraid of?  The collapse of bipartisanship?  What bipartisanship?  The Republicans will oppose Obama no matter what he does, so why bother with the charade?

I think the real issue for Obama is the fear of these guys, nominally Democrats, but otherwise quite conservative on most of the issues that matter to Obama (health care is a big one.) 

My advice to Obama is to do the right thing.  Let the Congressional committees hold their hearings on torture.  Let the justice department investigate.  If it comes to it, allow without objection the appointment of a special prosecutor. 

In other words, Mr. President, take the moral high road.  Ignore the 'advice' of the insufferable David Broder*. 

*(Glenn Greenwald, who may be the best online columnist/blogger out there, called Broder's op-ed piece a "truly wretched screed":

"The very same pundits and establishment journalists who today are demanding that we forget all about it, not look back, not hold anyone accountable, are the very same people who -- like Broder -- played key roles in hiding, enabling and defending these crimes."

Rush Limbaugh botches history at CPAC

Since I was busy all weekend installing a new (tankless) water heater --the old one rusted out-- I paid no attention to the conclusion of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and its last speaker, Rush Limbaugh. 

But thanks to my brother, who did pay attention, I'm now aware of how Limbaugh managed to not only confuse the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution, he also misquoted the former to suit his conservative ideology. 

Here's what he said:

"We want every American to be the best he or she chooses to be. We recognize that we are all individuals. We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, freedom -- and the pursuit of happiness."

Note the addition of the word "freedom", which appears nowhere in the Declaration, let alone in the "quoted" passage. 

As my brother concludes, "Democrats can rest easy" when conservatives trust their fate to a man who can't "get his historic references right."

Speaking of Limbaugh and other dittohead global warming deniers, my new tankless water heater not only runs on natural gas, which is far less damaging to the environment than other fossil fuels like petroleum and coal, it also runs efficiently, meaning that it uses much less gas than the old one.  It therefore qualifies me for a $300 federal tax credit.

WooHoo!

Who is Kirsten Gillibrand, and why did New York's Paterson appoint her to the U.S. Senate?

Governor David Paterson of New York, who inherited the position after the Eliott Spitzer sex scandal, is legally blind.  I say that he's also legally dumb.

How else to explain the perplexing appointment of Kirsten Gillibrand to the U.S. Senate?  I mean this woman is a Democrat In Name Only if there ever was one.  She's a Blue Dog through and through.

How is this woman supposed to help usher through the Senate the supposedly progressive legislation that Obama has promised?

I mean, Gillibrand proudly touts her conservative voting record.  She even supports a continuation of the Bush tax cuts. 

John Nichols thinks that the appointment, which Jonathan Tasini called "an affront to the people of New York", is all about politics.  David Patterson wants to hold on to the job that he stumbled into.  To do that, he thinks he needs the support of the more conservative upstate New York voters.  Thus he gives us ...Kirsten Giilibrand, a darling of the National Rifle Association.

And you thought Rod Blagojevich was bad.

Here's hoping that both Patterson and Gillibrand get thumped in their upcoming election bids.

Redefining terrorism

I'm often reminded by people smarter than me that terrorists are those who deliberately target civilians, the implication being that armies which "accidentally" kill hundreds, even thousands, of civilians in search of "legitimate" military targets cannot, by definition, be labeled terrorist organizations.

I've argued to the contrary that any country using overwhelming military force to bludgeon a far weaker country into submission, killing lots of "innocent" civilians in the process, is equally guilty of terrorism.  So maybe it's time to redefine the word.

Let's use the Iraq War as an example.  More specifically, let's look at the war through the eyes of epidemiologist, Les Roberts, who in 2000 correctly estimated that the civilian death toll in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was not 50,000, but a "staggering" 1.7 million.  The same sampling techniques --what Roberts called "conflict epidemiology"-- were applied to Kosovo, Darfur, and Sierra Leone, even retroactively to wars long past, like Vietnam. 

Roberts' samplings and the civilian casualty estimates they yield have been widely accepted around the world, just about everywhere, in fact.

Everywhere, that is, except in Iraq.  

In 2004, Roberts traveled to Iraq, did his surveys, crunched the numbers, and concluded that in the first 18 months after the invasion, the Iraqi death toll was 100,000, a number which far exceeded the Iraq Body Count's 19,000.  A subsequent survey in 2006 raised the number of Iraqi deaths to 655,000.  A World Health Organization survey done at the same time came up with 397,000 Iraqi dead. 

Of course the Bush administration and other war backers have dismissed such numbers as "bunk".  Or propaganda.  Roberts, you see, admitted that he had opposed the American invasion of Iraq. 

Whatever the precise number --Roberts' "confidence level" ranges from 393,000 to 943,000 Iraqi dead-- it's probable that the American invasion of Iraq has been responsible for hundreds of thousands of primarily civilian deaths. 

The terrorist attacks in 2001 killed fewer than 3000 innocent American civilians.

In terms of the sheer number of civilians killed by the American military through the indiscriminate use of technologically superior force, including so-called "smart bombs", America meets my definition of a "terrorist" nation. 

America, of course, has a long history of terrorizing weaker countries.  It can be argued --in fact it has been argued-- that the secret bombing of Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger led directly to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the slaughter of a million Cambodians.  The same two --Nixon and Kissinger-- approved the assassination of Chilean President Salvador Allende which led to Pinochet's reign of "disappearing" thousands of those he deemed a threat to his rule. 

And throughout Central America, America has long had its bloody hand in coups, rebellions, death squads, and the brutal suppression of leftist threats to American economic interests.  Who knows how many innocent civilians died as a result?

I'm no defender of terrorist tactics.  But I'm convinced that the strong as well as the weak are culpable in the slaughter of innocent civilians. 

Brand Obama

Turns out that Barack Obama may be less the brilliant politician (as I have argued) than  master of marketing.  That would explain why he was named "marketer of the year" for 2008 by Advertising Age. 

Or perhaps in this American day and age there is no difference between electioneering and marketing.

It also turns out that Obama raised far less of his record-breaking campaign cash from small donors than originally reported.  According to the Campaign Finance Institute, only about a quarter of his haul came from donations of $200 or less, about the same as George W. Bush in 2004, and far less than the 38% for Howard Dean in that same year. 

So much for the grass roots uprising that supposedly carried Obama to victory.  Like most winning politicians, he outspent his opponents.  And he outmarketed them.

In a speech given in Boston recently, Noam Chomsky called Obama's "grass roots" backers essentially a recruited army of enthusiasts.  So did the press. There's a big difference, says Chomsky, between a "recruited army" and a true grass roots movement:

"...the army is supposed to take instructions, not to implement, introduce, develop programs and call on its own candidate to implement them. That's critical. If the army keeps to that condition, nothing much will change."

In the 60's, bottom up movements created the impetus for change in the treatment of blacks and women.  Movement protests turned public opinion against the Vietnam War.  More recently, an indigenous uprising in Bolivia brought one of its own, Evo Morales, to power.  Chomsky explains it this way:

"How did he get in? Well, he got in because there [was] again, a mass popular movement, which elected their own representative. And they are the source of the programs, which are serious ones. There's real issues, And people know them. Control over resources, cultural rights, social justice and so on."

The recent election here was quite different.  It wasn't so much about real issues as it was about character and personality.  Even the pundits have acknowledged that.  Why?  Because, in Chomsky's words, "...on a host of major issues both parties are well to the right of the population.  That's one good reason to keep issues off the table."

I don't blame Obama.  "Keeping issues off the table" is how modern political campaigns work.  If you want to get elected, you don't get bogged down in thoughtful discussions of the issues. You avoid the specifics.  Instead you market yourself with advertising placards that read Change!  Or Hope!  

Commercial advertising, as we all know, deflects attention from the actual product.  It surrounds the product, whether it's beer or cars, with an image that has nothing to do with the actual quality of the product. The message in an advertising spot is intended not to inform, but to delude.

The same is true of political advertising, except the product being hawked is the candidate.  The message is no more concrete.  The image is what counts.

Who knew, based on his campaign and his claim to "compassionate conservatism" and to be a "uniter, not a divider", that the presidency of George W. Bush would prove such a disaster?  (Well I did, but not to this extent.) 

We were all deluded in 2000, some more than others.  Let's hope that we haven't been so badly misinformed --"sold a bill of goods", so to speak-- this time around.

Matt Damon --and Roger Ebert-- on Sarah Palin

On the day of Charles Gibson's interview with Sarah Palin, I thought I'd share the views of two "Hollywood" elites on McCain's vice-presidential choice.

First, Matt Damon --Harvard dropout-- compares the Sarah Palin story to a "bad Disney movie":

Roger Ebert likewise urges Americans to "see through Palin" and, come November, "save the Republic".

Ok. that's it. I'll try really hard to never mention Sarah Palin's name again.

Maybe Darragh Murphy, though.

The rap on Arafat

In my Joe's School posts of March 22 and April 23, I wrote about the clear connection between the terrorism that resurrected a moribund Bush presidency and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which the Bush Administration apparently has no intention of doing anything about (except making it worse):

"Now we have reports (click here and here) about the rage among Arabs over the American decision to back Ariel Sharon in his desire to keep some settlements in the Palestinian
West Bank, and, perhaps more significantly, as the Reuters article said, 'that Palestinian refugees should not expect to reclaim their homes in what is now Israel.' In other words, Bush has flip-flopped on the Palestinian right of return."

The death of Yasser Arafat has returned the issue to center stage in the ongoing drama/tragedy of American intervention into the Arab-Islamic world.  Those who viewed Arafat as the primary obstacle to peace, including Bush and most of the American press, now see opportunities for finally resolving the conflict.  But the question remains:  On whose terms, and to whose benefit?  The answer to both parts of the question, of course, at least from the American perspective, is Israel.  That bias towards Israel is the reason that Arafat has been described relentlessly as a "terrorist, a tyrant, a murderer, and a thief." 

Charles Krauthammer, with whom I never agree, may have nevertheless provided a more accurate assessment of Arafat in his latest column.  Here's the essence of what he says:

"Yasser Arafat was supremely decisive and single-minded. He was not complex and, regarding Israel's fate, never conflicted. Indeed the reason for his success, such as it was -- creating the Palestinian movement from which he derived fortune, fame and reverence -- was precisely his single-mindedness. Not about Palestinian statehood -- if that was his objective, he could have had his state years ago -- but about the elimination of Jewish statehood."  

One may argue that Arafat's position on Israel had changed after his acceptance of the Oslo Accords in 1993, but one also has to accept the possibility that Krauthammer is right.  On the other hand, one can, and should, disagree with his characterization of the 2000 Camp David proposal, worked out with Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak, which Arafat rejected, as "the deal of the century."  In fact, it's become CW--conventional wisdom-- in the American media that the arrangement brokered by Clinton was the "best deal" Arafat could ever get, and that turning it down revealed the true Arafat-- a terrorist opposed to peace, or a coward, afraid of assassination at the hands of Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

Here's an example:  On MSNBC's (pretty much right-wing) Scarborough Country, host Joe Scarborough says this:

"During the Clinton administration and the first Bush administration, nine specific proposals were given to him.  In each case, it got closer to the ultimate of what anyone could have expected from Israel.  And each was rejected.  And we just concluded four years of an intifada which has been the bloodiest of all.  And it could not be in the interests of anyone who seeks peace in this world and social justice to be behind terrorists."

So Scarborough follows the CW and calls Arafat a terrorist.  Fortunately Pat Buchanan  is on the show and he attempts to set the record straight:

"I think you‘re mistaken, Joe.  In the Middle East, the beginning of terrorism occurred in 1946, when Menachem Begin blew up the King David Hotel which killed a lot of British nurses.  It began even earlier when Yitzhak Shamir, a future prime minister of Israel, shot to death Lord Edward Moyne in Cairo in 1944 and then murdered Count Bernadotte. .....

"I think every single national liberation movement of post-World War II has at one time or another used terrorism, which is the murder of the innocents for political ends. ......

"Arafat is clearly this.  He is the embodiment of a Palestinian cause for nationhood and statehood for the stateless Palestinian people, who, in the 35 or 40 years, recent years, has put that cause on the map, and who, if a Palestinian state comes into being, which even President Bush now supports—and America did not used to—he will be the man given historic credit for moving that out of the shadows on to the national and global agenda."

So what about the so-called "best deal" offered by Clinton and Barak at Camp David?  Here are the details as explained by Sylvia Shihadeh and Robert Jensen:

"To understand that requires clearing away the obfuscation around the so-called 'generous offer' of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak that Arafat refused at Camp David in 2000. That offer included Israeli withdrawal from Gaza but would have allowed Israel to annex valuable and strategically crucial sections of the West Bank and retain 'security control' over other parts, including all Palestinian borders. The net effect would have been to institutionalize some of the worst aspects of the occupation. Arafat could not, and should not, have accepted it."

Baruch Himmerling of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem goes further in this detailed analysis, accusing Clinton and Barak of conspiring beforehand to advance Israeli causes:

"Prior to the Camp David talks, Barak and Clinton had agreed that every move would be coordinated in advance between the United States and Israel; and that if the summit failed, Israel would not take the blame. Clinton stood by this, as did most of his subordinates."

He also describes clearly the Israeli strategy of creating a Palestinian state consisting of, in effect,  separate "cantons", or "bantustans", as Palestinians called them after the South African model. 

It's no wonder that Arafat rejected this "95% solution."

The departure of Colin Powell as Secretary of State will only further entrench the hardline pro-Ariel Sharon, anti Palestinian policies of the Bush Administration.

That does not bode well for peace in the Middle East.  Nor for success in the war on terrorism.

Terrorism, and the welcome resignation of Rod Paige

This letter in today's Oregonian reminds me of my take on terrorism in this April 29 post, for which I was criticized, then "corrected", by my brother, who works for the State Department:

Terror, not freedom, on march

Violence for political ends is terrorism, whether perpetrated outside state authority or financed and carried out by a state. Terror is the common bond.

Both rip flesh, shatter bones, shred lives. Both intend death, dismemberment, fear, sorrow, hatred and despair.

The child with her legs blown off, the baby whose body is burned, the boy sobbing as red life flows out of his mother know that brutal truth. Convince them that death and horror wreaked by one side is more moral than by the other. There is no morality in chaos, death and mayhem, no moral high ground to be claimed.

Furious rebels battle an army of furious occupiers in Fallujah today. How many boys and girls will die in their carnage? Your son or daughter? Mine?

There will be no winner here. Freedom is not on the march in Fallujah. Terror is.

BETSY TOLL Southeast Portland

In that post I mentioned Secretary of Education Rod Paige, who accused members of the National Education Association--teachers, in other words-- of being terrorists.

The AP article in today's paper announcing Paige's intended resignation spoke of his "rise to prominence as an award-winning superintendent in Houston", but failed to say anything about his role in the well-documented fraud that came to be known as the Texas Education Miracle.  The so-called Texas miracle became the blueprint for the No Child Left Behind act and made the fraudulent Paige its chief advocate and spokesman. 

My May 20 post-- "The whistle blower from Houston"-- recounts the sordid details and explains why I, and probably most teachers, are happy that Paige is gone.

Too bad that the AP writer, whether through ignorance or laziness, didn't tell the true story of the unfortunate Dr. Paige.