Try as they will, Conservatives have not really been able to make a good argument that Obama, by moving away from the failed foreign policies of the Bush Administration, has in reality made America less safe. Instead they have responded with a series of knee jerk reactions aimed at the obstruction and rejection of anything and everything that Obama has either done or proposed. Conservatives have fallen back on the now hackneyed idea that they alone are the ones who can keep America safe and that the Democrats in general and liberals in particular will, or deliberately want to, weaken America. In his last book “A Time to Fight” James Webb, decorated Vietnam veteran; former Reagan era SECNAV; Republican turned Democrat; and now Senator from Virginia, devoted an entire chapter to explaining how such an argument by Republicans was no longer tenable or one that they can legitimately promote. Obama has in reality kept in place much of the prior Administration’s policies and procedures that are embodied in the Patriot Act, the wiretapping law and the continued operation of Guantanamo. To date the Obama Administration has recaptured an American merchant ship from Somali Pirates and, in concert with federal and local authorities, uncovered a possible terror ring based in New York and Denver.
Anyone who has followed closely the events surrounding the War in Iraq knows that it is not, and was not, the central front in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Rather, it is the trans Afghanistan-Pakistan border where the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are and it is here that they continue to operate putting together attacks on London, Madrid, etc. It is from this region that they continue to attack our troops in Afghanistan and beyond that have destabilized large parts of Pakistan. Thus the point has already been proven. The central front in the G.W.O.T. is where the enemy is and not where Bush, Cheney, Coulter, Limbaugh, Malkin, O’Reilly or any other Conservative defines it to be. The ironic thing is that Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan was the only brilliant move of his eight years in office. He then went on to drop the ball by invading Iraq and leaving the enemy alone, allowing Al Qaeda to regroup and become as dangerous as they were on 9/10/01. There have been volumes written to the point that the invasion of Iraq did nothing to make America safer. The conclusion of the 9/11 Commission Report states that Iraq had played no part in the attacks of 9/11 and Bush himself would later admit so publicly and on national television. Seeing as it is generally agreed that Iraq was never a factor in the 9/11 attacks, and that Al Qaeda remains open for business on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, there is not much more to say in disproving Conservative claims that the actions of the present Administration, as currently carried out in Iraq, will necessarily jeopardize American security interests. If America is attacked by a resurgent Al Qaeda would that be the fault of the Obama Administration or a result of George Bush’s failure to consolidate his initial victory in Afghanistan? Had we spent 800 billion dollars in Afghanistan instead of Iraq what threat if any would we now face? While it is true that Obama has taken ownership of the trans AFPAK conflict, its also true that he inherited from the Bush Administration a set of circumstances there, which are fraught with difficult and dangerous choices, none of which are clear-cut or that guarantee American success.
Many Conservatives will go to the grave insisting that invading Iraq was the right thing to do because they fail to see that their ideas as to what makes America either safe or a great nation may not in fact be always and everywhere valid. There are those on the right who continue to try to make the case that we could have eventually won in Vietnam because we never lost a major combat action against the Communists. They will insist on this very narrow historical fact while at the same time being blind to, or ignoring the reality that Communism in Indochina, at that time, was a vehicle for the achievement of nationalist aims. In their myopic focus on combat capabilities they will continue to ignore the fact that successive South Vietnamese governments were too corrupt to act as a foundation for democracy. They will insist that “American Exceptionalism” would triumph over a people that first took up arms against a foreign invader a thousand years before William the Conqueror left Normandy to invade England in 1066.
If America is attacked again, it won’t automatically be the fault of the Barack Obama. What if the attacker was motivated to strike because of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or the loss of a family member during the occupation of Iraq? What if that attacker was moved to action as a result of the policies of the Bush Administration rather than Barack Obama’s decision to reduce troop levels in Iraq? Would that attack be attributed to the current administration or the last? Conservatives have made a big deal about saying that during the Bush years we were not attacked again, but as Richard Wolfe of Newsweek pointed out, terror attacks skyrocketed worldwide after we invaded Iraq. What about those American service personnel that were killed or wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan at the hands of those motivated to action by the invasion of Iraq, don’t they count as Americans that have been attacked? More to the point, this country was attacked when the Republicans controlled the Presidency, Congress, and the majority of statehouses. As David Sanger points out in his latest book, “The Inheritance”: “The plan for dealing with al Qaeda had been sitting on Condoleezza Rice’s desk on the morning of September 11, waiting for discussion.” In the final analysis it is almost impossible for Conservatives to make the argument that their policies have made us safer seeing as, according to the Center for International and Strategic Studies, the number of people recruited into Islamic terror organizations soared exponentially after the invasion of Iraq thereby dramatically increasing the number of our potential enemies. Conservatives like Ann Coulter would claim that Bush created “a flytrap for Islamic crazies in Iraq”, whereby they could be dispatched with by American forces. It would be more accurate to say that we created a trap of our own within which our troops were needlessly put in harms way for the sake of some misconceived NeoConservative pipe dream. Is it cheaper for a radicalized Muslim to scrape together the cost of a one way ticket to the United States, procure a passport and visa and then forage about this country in search of a terror cell or is it economically and in practical terms more effective to come up with bus fare to Syria and then walk across the border and join in an ongoing insurgency where one could even be paid to carry out attacks against Americans?
We were susceptible to an attack on 9/11 because, among other things, we never thought this sort of thing could happen. We became infinitely safer just by paying attention to security threats thereafter. If we get hit again it may very well be the case that we did so because we did not take the time and spend the money to “harden” critical strategic components of our infrastructure like rail systems, water and power supplies, ports and most importantly chemical plants. Have the failed policies of the Bush era created an opportunity for someone radicalized and now prone to action as a result of those policies to actually carry out an attack on America? If, in the words of Homeland Security expert Stephen Flynn, had we spent billions on infrastructure defense instead of wasting those resources in the Iraq misadventure, we would be infinitely safer. Who then would we legitimately blame for another attack on America, Barack Obama or George Bush and the NeoConservative claque that led us into the Iraq misadventure in the first place?
Steven J. Gulitti
Iron Workers Local # 697
New York City
10/17/2009
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Ann Coulter’s History Lesson
If only Ms. Coulter would be honest enough to admit that she is a bona-fide political satirist, in a tongue in cheek sort of way, her commentaries would be both funny and entertaining. However it is in her attempts at serious political commentary that she falls far short of the mark in saying anything that is either intelligent or historically accurate. Ms. Coulters’ latest attempt at analyzing military affairs in Southwest Asia shows just to what extent she has wandered out of her league and has now entered into a realm where she is neither a qualified or competent commentator.
Her recent article: “Natural Born Losers”; which appeared on 14 October, is just another case in point in a continuing litany of misconceived and misguided missives. In this latest attempt at maligning the Obama Administration, Coulter claims that Obama’s difficult choices in Afghanistan are his alone, uninfluenced by the previous administrations’ efforts there or the course of Afghanistan’s history. Coulter points out that President Bush had “removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan” as if they had been eradicated down to the last man and their ideology obliterated from every hollow and ridge in the region. Coulter tries to make the argument that Bush’s invasion of Iraq constitutes some sort of military masterstroke whereby he purposely created a showdown with Islamic extremists. In Coulter’s own words:” By design, Iraq was the central front on the war on terrorism” and that Iraq would become a “flytrap for Islamic crazies.” In reality, anyone who has taken the time to read any of the National Intelligence Estimates produced during the height of the Iraqi insurgency knows that the intelligence community never attributed Al Qaeda’ with more than a five to seven percent participation rate in the violence and mayhem that beset Iraq at that time. The cold fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the insurgents that we killed in Iraq were Iraqis and not fighters backed by or ideologically aligned with Al Qaeda. The argument that we were fighting them there so we would not have to fight them on the streets of America is as conceptually flawed today as it was during Vietnam. In reality some of our own occupation polices in Iraq would come to produce many of the Islamic extremists that we would face off against in this supposed “flytrap.” On this years’ anniversary of 9/11, General Charles C. Krulak, retired Commandant of the Marine Corp and a former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Central Command, General Joseph P. Hoar, took Vice president Cheney to task on policies of “enhanced interrogation and its affect on terrorist recruitment. To quote the Generals: “In the fear that followed 9/11, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to “take off the gloves.” As a former Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster. We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. And yet Mr. Cheney and others who orchestrated America’s disastrous trip to “the dark side” continue to assert – against all evidence -- that torture “worked” and that our country is better off for having gone there.”
Coulter claims: “ The most important part of warfare is picking your battlefield, and President Bush picked Iraq for a reason.” Well Bush may very well have had a reason for picking Iraq as a battlefield. But if it was for the purposes of eliminating those who were behind the 9/11 terror attacks he was as off course militarily as Coulter is in her attempts at political and military analysis. Consider the following lesson from the Second World War. In the run up to hostilities the Roosevelt Administration knew that Germany was the more formidable foe. A week after Pearl Harbor, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. At that time Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were Axis allies. Spain and Portugal were fascist neutrals who allowed their citizens to voluntarily serve with the Germans in Russia. Although we were initially attacked by Japan, we focused our primary war effort on the unconditional defeat of Germany and those of it’s European allies directly involved in the war. We did not invade Spain and Portugal on the pretense that they were in some way involved in the attack on the Pacific Fleet or that they would play a meaningful part in the European Theater. Invading Iraq as a follow on to 9/11 is about as conceptually valid an approach to defeating Islamic terror as an invasion of the Iberian Peninsula after the attack on Pearl Harbor would have been in defeating 20th Century Fascism.
Beyond Iraq, Coulter takes up the situation in Iran, trying to relate our present problems there to Jimmy Carter’s presiding over that country’s “regime change”, insinuating that a weak Carter abbetted the Iranian Revolution. She implies that the recent Iranian post election protests were in fact a drive for American style democracy that has been derailed by Barack Obama’s reluctance to insert himself into Iran’s politics and thereby employ the leverage of “American Exceptionalism”. She suggests that America can somehow create a democratic revolution in this nation that continues to harbor strong anti-American sentiment inspite of it’s internal political discord. But with Iran, like Iraq, Coulter again reveals her absence of an appreciation of history. She never attributes America’s role in the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew a legitimate government in Iran, and installed the repressive regime of the Shah, with the present antipithy Iranians feel twoards the United States. It doesn’t take an Arnold Toynbee to understand that this event alone would be enough to fuel a legacy of anti-American sentiment even if the Shah’s regime had not been one of the most repressive of the Cold War era. Coulter makes much of the recent Iranian street protests but never admits that the protestors were marching and fighting for a more perfect Iran and not for an overthrow of the existing political system. She is either blind to, or ignorant of the fact that the protestors choose the color green for their banners, green being the primary color of Islam.
For all of her syncophantic acclaim for the bygone era of George Bush and Dick Cheney, Coulter seems to ignore the real foreign policy legacy of the previous administration. David Sanger in his recent book, “The Inheritance” lays out a comprehensive analysis of the foreign policy mistakes of the Bush years and the consequences which we now must live with. Sanger points out that while we have been bogged down in Iraq, North Korea went from zero nuclear warheads to between three or five; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan; Al Qaeda has destabilized much of Pakistan; the Iranians are closer than ever to an atomic weapon and terror has surged across the rest of the Islamic world. So while George Bush had some semblance of a reason for invading Iraq, the end result is that America is now facing a world far more dangerous than it did on September 12, 2001. Ms. Coulter can employ all of the pretzel logic she wants to in trying to tie any and every foreign policy setback to Barack Obama for whatever justification she conjures up, but the more she tries the more she reveals her own shortcomings both in the realm of political analysis and that inherent in her lackluster grasp of history.
Steve Gulitti
New York City
10/15/09
Her recent article: “Natural Born Losers”; which appeared on 14 October, is just another case in point in a continuing litany of misconceived and misguided missives. In this latest attempt at maligning the Obama Administration, Coulter claims that Obama’s difficult choices in Afghanistan are his alone, uninfluenced by the previous administrations’ efforts there or the course of Afghanistan’s history. Coulter points out that President Bush had “removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan” as if they had been eradicated down to the last man and their ideology obliterated from every hollow and ridge in the region. Coulter tries to make the argument that Bush’s invasion of Iraq constitutes some sort of military masterstroke whereby he purposely created a showdown with Islamic extremists. In Coulter’s own words:” By design, Iraq was the central front on the war on terrorism” and that Iraq would become a “flytrap for Islamic crazies.” In reality, anyone who has taken the time to read any of the National Intelligence Estimates produced during the height of the Iraqi insurgency knows that the intelligence community never attributed Al Qaeda’ with more than a five to seven percent participation rate in the violence and mayhem that beset Iraq at that time. The cold fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the insurgents that we killed in Iraq were Iraqis and not fighters backed by or ideologically aligned with Al Qaeda. The argument that we were fighting them there so we would not have to fight them on the streets of America is as conceptually flawed today as it was during Vietnam. In reality some of our own occupation polices in Iraq would come to produce many of the Islamic extremists that we would face off against in this supposed “flytrap.” On this years’ anniversary of 9/11, General Charles C. Krulak, retired Commandant of the Marine Corp and a former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Central Command, General Joseph P. Hoar, took Vice president Cheney to task on policies of “enhanced interrogation and its affect on terrorist recruitment. To quote the Generals: “In the fear that followed 9/11, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to “take off the gloves.” As a former Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster. We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. And yet Mr. Cheney and others who orchestrated America’s disastrous trip to “the dark side” continue to assert – against all evidence -- that torture “worked” and that our country is better off for having gone there.”
Coulter claims: “ The most important part of warfare is picking your battlefield, and President Bush picked Iraq for a reason.” Well Bush may very well have had a reason for picking Iraq as a battlefield. But if it was for the purposes of eliminating those who were behind the 9/11 terror attacks he was as off course militarily as Coulter is in her attempts at political and military analysis. Consider the following lesson from the Second World War. In the run up to hostilities the Roosevelt Administration knew that Germany was the more formidable foe. A week after Pearl Harbor, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. At that time Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were Axis allies. Spain and Portugal were fascist neutrals who allowed their citizens to voluntarily serve with the Germans in Russia. Although we were initially attacked by Japan, we focused our primary war effort on the unconditional defeat of Germany and those of it’s European allies directly involved in the war. We did not invade Spain and Portugal on the pretense that they were in some way involved in the attack on the Pacific Fleet or that they would play a meaningful part in the European Theater. Invading Iraq as a follow on to 9/11 is about as conceptually valid an approach to defeating Islamic terror as an invasion of the Iberian Peninsula after the attack on Pearl Harbor would have been in defeating 20th Century Fascism.
Beyond Iraq, Coulter takes up the situation in Iran, trying to relate our present problems there to Jimmy Carter’s presiding over that country’s “regime change”, insinuating that a weak Carter abbetted the Iranian Revolution. She implies that the recent Iranian post election protests were in fact a drive for American style democracy that has been derailed by Barack Obama’s reluctance to insert himself into Iran’s politics and thereby employ the leverage of “American Exceptionalism”. She suggests that America can somehow create a democratic revolution in this nation that continues to harbor strong anti-American sentiment inspite of it’s internal political discord. But with Iran, like Iraq, Coulter again reveals her absence of an appreciation of history. She never attributes America’s role in the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew a legitimate government in Iran, and installed the repressive regime of the Shah, with the present antipithy Iranians feel twoards the United States. It doesn’t take an Arnold Toynbee to understand that this event alone would be enough to fuel a legacy of anti-American sentiment even if the Shah’s regime had not been one of the most repressive of the Cold War era. Coulter makes much of the recent Iranian street protests but never admits that the protestors were marching and fighting for a more perfect Iran and not for an overthrow of the existing political system. She is either blind to, or ignorant of the fact that the protestors choose the color green for their banners, green being the primary color of Islam.
For all of her syncophantic acclaim for the bygone era of George Bush and Dick Cheney, Coulter seems to ignore the real foreign policy legacy of the previous administration. David Sanger in his recent book, “The Inheritance” lays out a comprehensive analysis of the foreign policy mistakes of the Bush years and the consequences which we now must live with. Sanger points out that while we have been bogged down in Iraq, North Korea went from zero nuclear warheads to between three or five; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan; Al Qaeda has destabilized much of Pakistan; the Iranians are closer than ever to an atomic weapon and terror has surged across the rest of the Islamic world. So while George Bush had some semblance of a reason for invading Iraq, the end result is that America is now facing a world far more dangerous than it did on September 12, 2001. Ms. Coulter can employ all of the pretzel logic she wants to in trying to tie any and every foreign policy setback to Barack Obama for whatever justification she conjures up, but the more she tries the more she reveals her own shortcomings both in the realm of political analysis and that inherent in her lackluster grasp of history.
Steve Gulitti
New York City
10/15/09
Friday, July 3, 2009
The Political Suicide of Sarah Palin?
Sarah Palin’s departure from the forefront of American politics is just part and parcel of the continuing kaleidoscope of chaos on the right. In my opinion, her selection as a Vice Presidential candidate was nothing more than a political stunt aimed at capturing the disappointed female supporters of Hilary Clinton. As the current article in Vanity Fair reveals, prominent McCain staffers say that her being picked as a running mate was the single biggest mistake that McCain made in his bid for the presidency. Her selection may have actually led her to think that she had the heft and substance to be a major player on the national scene, but her comments and analytical viewpoints show that she was clearly out of her league and well off of the mark in possessing what it takes to be Vice President of the United States, or Chief Executive. During the 2008 race, Fred Thompson lauded Palin for her prowess as a hunter, saying that: “She could field dress a moose”. That would be a great leadership credential if we were living in the Stone Age, but it is nothing more than an interesting personal anecdote in the twenty first century.
Sarah Palin may well rile up the base of the Republican Party. That could be a liability as the base can actually derail the G.O.P. in upcoming elections. Republican strategist Mike Murphy recently said: “If the Sarah Palin we perceive today wins the nomination in 2012, the G.O.P. will lose. Most Americans don’t think Palin is ready to be President. The base loving you is not enough to get you elected.” Conservative columnist Michael Gerson, speaking on the News Hour said of Palin: “ She was not ready in 2008” and that,” She really alienated women and the college educated on both coasts and that is not how you rebuild the Republican Party.” The cold, hard reality is that the Republican Party cannot hope to win without the support of independent voters, whom Palin clearly alienates and whose ranks are now at a seventy-year high as a proportion of the electorate. Based on her chronic foot-in-mouth problems, it is not all that far fetched to say that Palin would be more likely to gain votes among independents by posing naked in Playboy than by taking the stage to promulgate her political views.
The real question is if Governor Palin has not just committed political suicide by leaving the political stage at a time when most political observers have suggested that her political future hinged on saying less and studying more so as to get up to speed with regard to the issues and substance that the top job in this country requires. After eight years of George Bush that” aw shucks” approach just doesn’t cut it anymore, unless your only goal is to appeal to the base of the Republican Party.
Steven J. Gulitti
July 3, 2009
New York City
Iron Workers Local # 697
Sarah Palin may well rile up the base of the Republican Party. That could be a liability as the base can actually derail the G.O.P. in upcoming elections. Republican strategist Mike Murphy recently said: “If the Sarah Palin we perceive today wins the nomination in 2012, the G.O.P. will lose. Most Americans don’t think Palin is ready to be President. The base loving you is not enough to get you elected.” Conservative columnist Michael Gerson, speaking on the News Hour said of Palin: “ She was not ready in 2008” and that,” She really alienated women and the college educated on both coasts and that is not how you rebuild the Republican Party.” The cold, hard reality is that the Republican Party cannot hope to win without the support of independent voters, whom Palin clearly alienates and whose ranks are now at a seventy-year high as a proportion of the electorate. Based on her chronic foot-in-mouth problems, it is not all that far fetched to say that Palin would be more likely to gain votes among independents by posing naked in Playboy than by taking the stage to promulgate her political views.
The real question is if Governor Palin has not just committed political suicide by leaving the political stage at a time when most political observers have suggested that her political future hinged on saying less and studying more so as to get up to speed with regard to the issues and substance that the top job in this country requires. After eight years of George Bush that” aw shucks” approach just doesn’t cut it anymore, unless your only goal is to appeal to the base of the Republican Party.
Steven J. Gulitti
July 3, 2009
New York City
Iron Workers Local # 697
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Dick Cheney: Flawed Messenger on National Security
As I sit here on May 25, 2009 and reflect on the meaning of this day, just as I do quietly and privately on every Memorial Day, I remember the service and sacrifice of those who went before me, including my own family’s not insignificant contributions in both World Wars and in Korea. Compared to them, my own twenty years of service as a reservist seems insignificant if not trivial. Nonetheless on a day like today, I can’t but help being galled by the recent “road show” undertaken by the former Vice President Dick Cheney with its theatrical, if not alarmist claim, that the current administration has undermined the security of the United States. Mr. Cheney has suggested that Barack Obama would set the country on a course where other Americans will once again find themselves in harms way. I find this political grandstanding nothing less than preposterous, when one stops to consider that it is coming from a man, who when it was his time to serve his country in Vietnam, opted out as he had, in his own words, “other priorities”. In his pursuit of “other priorities”, Dick Cheney would benefit from multiple deferments from military service while other Americans were fighting and dying in Southeast Asia. Cheney’s assertion that Obama has embarked on a “reckless” course of action in seeking to close Guantanamo should be seen as a rather curious statement when one considers that it was Cheney and his Neocon fellow travelers who advocated for a war with Iraq, on the most dubious grounds, thereby engineering the most reckless undertaking in American history.
I can give the Bush Administration a pass for operating beyond the pale of accepted rules of engagement in the period immediately after the September 11 attacks owing to the gravity of the situation and the unknowable state of national security which resulted from those attacks. I can also understand how American intelligence officers at that time, in an effort to forestall another attack, could chose to employ interrogation techniques that can only be categorized as torture. That said, as time passed and the threat environment was revealed to be far less dangerous than had been anticipated the justification for torture and detainment without due process became harder to justify. It is impossible to deny that the existence of the Guantanamo facility along with the abuses at Abu Ghraib would become key factors in the recruitment of new adherents to the radical Muslim jihad and thereby create new and more multifaceted threats to be addressed.
In an address to American troops in Europe during World War II, General George S. Patton would state:” You don’t win wars by dying for your country, you win wars by getting the other guy to die for his.” The corollary line of logic to Patton’s advice for our time is that you don’t win wars by creating new enemies. At this point in time it is a forgone conclusion that the existence of Guantanamo works against our national security interests, as it is the single best recruitment tool presently available to Al Qaeda, thereby contributing to the pool of available enemy combatants. For those who have taken the time to listen to the debate, there is bi-partisan agreement on this fact as evidenced by the recent comments of Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) along with the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, all of whom have agreed that Guantanamo needs to be closed. The crux of the argument revolves around how to relocate the detainees so as not to compromise our security.
With general agreement on the need to deal with the Guantanamo detainees in some other fashion, what then is the motive behind the Cheney “road show” other than the former Vice Presidents seeming need to redeem himself in the eyes of the American public? As has been speculated by the talking classes, Cheney is still smarting from the fact that he and his Neocon clique were marginalized and took a back seat to Condoleezza Rice and the State Department after the 2004 election. Why is it that Cheney just can’t accept that his version of national security may be inapplicable at this point in time or that it is perhaps, less than well founded given the current threat environment? After all, for all of the claims that Bush and Cheney prevented another attack on U.S. soil, the fact of the matter is that this country suffered it’s worst terrorist attack on their watch. In reality Dick Cheney, with his advocating for War in Iraq and his championing of “enhanced interrogation” and unlimited detention may have done more to endanger the security of the country than Obama ever could by closing down Guantanamo. What will Mr. Cheney have to say if individuals who carry out the next terror attack on the United States admit to interrogators that their motive for joining the jihad was the invasion of Iraq, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, or the existence of Guantanamo?
Steven J. Gulitti
Memorial Day 2009
I can give the Bush Administration a pass for operating beyond the pale of accepted rules of engagement in the period immediately after the September 11 attacks owing to the gravity of the situation and the unknowable state of national security which resulted from those attacks. I can also understand how American intelligence officers at that time, in an effort to forestall another attack, could chose to employ interrogation techniques that can only be categorized as torture. That said, as time passed and the threat environment was revealed to be far less dangerous than had been anticipated the justification for torture and detainment without due process became harder to justify. It is impossible to deny that the existence of the Guantanamo facility along with the abuses at Abu Ghraib would become key factors in the recruitment of new adherents to the radical Muslim jihad and thereby create new and more multifaceted threats to be addressed.
In an address to American troops in Europe during World War II, General George S. Patton would state:” You don’t win wars by dying for your country, you win wars by getting the other guy to die for his.” The corollary line of logic to Patton’s advice for our time is that you don’t win wars by creating new enemies. At this point in time it is a forgone conclusion that the existence of Guantanamo works against our national security interests, as it is the single best recruitment tool presently available to Al Qaeda, thereby contributing to the pool of available enemy combatants. For those who have taken the time to listen to the debate, there is bi-partisan agreement on this fact as evidenced by the recent comments of Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) along with the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, all of whom have agreed that Guantanamo needs to be closed. The crux of the argument revolves around how to relocate the detainees so as not to compromise our security.
With general agreement on the need to deal with the Guantanamo detainees in some other fashion, what then is the motive behind the Cheney “road show” other than the former Vice Presidents seeming need to redeem himself in the eyes of the American public? As has been speculated by the talking classes, Cheney is still smarting from the fact that he and his Neocon clique were marginalized and took a back seat to Condoleezza Rice and the State Department after the 2004 election. Why is it that Cheney just can’t accept that his version of national security may be inapplicable at this point in time or that it is perhaps, less than well founded given the current threat environment? After all, for all of the claims that Bush and Cheney prevented another attack on U.S. soil, the fact of the matter is that this country suffered it’s worst terrorist attack on their watch. In reality Dick Cheney, with his advocating for War in Iraq and his championing of “enhanced interrogation” and unlimited detention may have done more to endanger the security of the country than Obama ever could by closing down Guantanamo. What will Mr. Cheney have to say if individuals who carry out the next terror attack on the United States admit to interrogators that their motive for joining the jihad was the invasion of Iraq, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, or the existence of Guantanamo?
Steven J. Gulitti
Memorial Day 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
A Tempest in a Tea Party
Now that the topic of Tax Day Tea Parties has faded from even the blogosphere, it is important to examine what these protests were and what they were not. I personally watched Fox News on and off all that day and while some gatherings seemed well attended, many weren’t. The Boston gathering was rather sparse and in Washington D.C. conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingrham said that there were only about a thousand people in attendance when she was present. Of the 364 official Tea Parties, only seven logged attendance of 10,000 or more with the largest reported figure being 16,000 for San Antonio. Depending on what data source you reference, nationwide attendance fell somewhere within a range of 400,000 to 623,000 with one site claiming around 700,000 in total attendance. Leading anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform posted a figure of 578,000. Nowhere did I see a figure breaching the million participant mark. Even a website that billed itself as the online headquarters for the movement would claim that turnout was below one million: “On April 15th, hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered in more than 800 cities to voice their opposition to out of control spending at all levels of government.”
In a time of profound political change, no one should be surprised that there would be dissatisfied elements within the body politic, which from time to time, would resort to political protest to articulate their point of view. But as many in the pundit class would point out, the Tea Party phenomenon was an “orphan movement” with some degree of grass roots origin, which took the G.O.P. and the Conservative Establishment by surprise. While the protests were multifaceted with regard to the grab bag of grievances put forth, what they were not were a spontaneous revolt against the Obama Administration. While some in the ranks of far right media would attempt to paint the Tea Parties as the opening shot in a “citizens movement to stop the drift towards socialism in America”, the majority of conservative columnists pointed out that the Tea Parties were aimed at both political parties. Stephen Moore of the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal, which also owns Fox News, said that the anger behind the Tea Parties originated with opposition to the bailout of the banking sector and would have been there even if the GOP were in the White House on April 15. The organizer of the Chicago Tea Party, John O’Hara, of the conservative Heartland Institute, said it was a coincidence that the Tea Parties came to the surface during the Obama Administration because the problems predate the inauguration of Barack Obama and that both parties are at fault. “Politicians on both sides of the aisle need to listen up”, O’Hara said. Likewise, the leader of the House Republican Conference, Congressman Mike Pence (R-IN), echoed similar sentiments.
Some students of history might jump to the conclusion, that the 2009 Tax Day Tea Parties are only the beginning of a “citizens revolt”, but I for one see this train of thought as just another fantasy on the part of the disaffected along with the crackpots who quietly dream of a military coup to remove the current administration; Texas succeeding from the Union; or even more darkly, reversing course politically by an attempt on the President’s life. While some political revolutions have been spearheaded by a small cadre of activists, such as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, there was an underlying desire for change among the vast majority of people in Czarist Russia at that time. Even at the beginning of our own revolution only one third of the people supported the undertaking, while one third supported the British and the rest were undecided. America today in no way represents a country ready for revolution through any other means than the ballot box and those on the extremes of political life would do themselves a favor in coming to terms with that reality.
Historically, putting the Tea Parties in perspective is a relatively simple affair. Compared to the anti-war demonstrations of the 1960’s the overall Tax Day Tea Party turnout was miniscule for a nation that is supposed to be experiencing a swelling tide of anti-government sentiment. It is ironic, when you consider how the Right loves to belittle the environmentalists as “tree huggers”, that the turnout for the original Earth Day in 1970 was 20,000,000 or roughly ten percent of the American population at that time, whereas the total participation in the Tea Parties amounted to not even one percent of today’s population. If one uses the lower number of 400,000 as a benchmark of total Tea Party participation, the attendance at the first Earth Day was 50 times larger than that of all Tea Parties combined. If one uses the number of 700,000, which has not been widely substantiated, the number of those attending the first Earth Day is 28.5 times larger. No matter which metric you use it is hard to claim that the Tea Parties are any type of mass grass roots movement. Beyond Tea Party attendance figures, the current polling shows that Barack Obama continues to enjoy favorable ratings in the 60s with the overall Democratic Party having favorable ratings as high as 56% in some polls. Meanwhile the G.O.P. has an unfavorable rating of as high as 68% in some of the latest polling. The number of Americans polled who says the country is on the right track is presently at 45% up from 12% in October of 2008. This represents the greatest turnaround in this sentiment indicator outside of a period when the nation has been engaged in all out war.
Based on the inherent flaws of polling as evidenced in the 2008 New Hampshire Primary, one would assume that the ultimate poll, elections, would be proof positive in ascertaining the true sentiments of the voting public. It is in the special election of March 2009 to replace Kristen Gillibrand in the New York 20th Congressional District that we can most closely gauge to what extent the Tea Parties accurately measure the degree to which the public has, or is in the process of, rejecting the profound change of course that the nation has embarked upon. Politically New York State, outside of the downstate Metropolitan area and Erie County is generally Republican and the 20th is an upstate district, largely rural, predominately white, with a 70,000-voter registration advantage for the G.O.P. The 20th represents the only type of election district where the Republican Party actually made gains among voters in 2008. The race to replace Gillibrand, who took Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat, was framed as the first showdown between the policies of Barack Obama and the Republican Party’s platform of small government, low taxes and opposition to increased federal spending. The national G.O.P. spent heavily on this race, with Michael Steele making two trips to the district along with support on the ground from several top ranking national Republicans. Jim Tedesco, The Republican contender, began the race with a 20% advantage before he came out against the Obama Stimulus Plan. The relatively unknown Democratic contender, Scott Murphy, campaigned in support of the Stimulus from the start. The race, which should have been swept by the Republicans, based on the demographics involved, went down to a recount, which was eventually decided in Murphy’s favor by 726 votes. That said, where then is the empirical evidence of the deep-seated dissatisfaction that the Tea Parties are supposed to represent? What changed between the special election at the end of March and the 15th of April? In reality, the Tea Parties collectively represent the proverbial “tempest in a teapot” and would not have received the media attention they did had they not become a political football to be bandied about in the never ending cable television war between the left leaning MSNBC and it’s archrival on the right, Fox News which heavily promoted the Tea Parties and even hosted some of the biggest.
Steven J. Gulitti
May 11, 2009
New York City
Iron Workers Local # 697
In a time of profound political change, no one should be surprised that there would be dissatisfied elements within the body politic, which from time to time, would resort to political protest to articulate their point of view. But as many in the pundit class would point out, the Tea Party phenomenon was an “orphan movement” with some degree of grass roots origin, which took the G.O.P. and the Conservative Establishment by surprise. While the protests were multifaceted with regard to the grab bag of grievances put forth, what they were not were a spontaneous revolt against the Obama Administration. While some in the ranks of far right media would attempt to paint the Tea Parties as the opening shot in a “citizens movement to stop the drift towards socialism in America”, the majority of conservative columnists pointed out that the Tea Parties were aimed at both political parties. Stephen Moore of the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal, which also owns Fox News, said that the anger behind the Tea Parties originated with opposition to the bailout of the banking sector and would have been there even if the GOP were in the White House on April 15. The organizer of the Chicago Tea Party, John O’Hara, of the conservative Heartland Institute, said it was a coincidence that the Tea Parties came to the surface during the Obama Administration because the problems predate the inauguration of Barack Obama and that both parties are at fault. “Politicians on both sides of the aisle need to listen up”, O’Hara said. Likewise, the leader of the House Republican Conference, Congressman Mike Pence (R-IN), echoed similar sentiments.
Some students of history might jump to the conclusion, that the 2009 Tax Day Tea Parties are only the beginning of a “citizens revolt”, but I for one see this train of thought as just another fantasy on the part of the disaffected along with the crackpots who quietly dream of a military coup to remove the current administration; Texas succeeding from the Union; or even more darkly, reversing course politically by an attempt on the President’s life. While some political revolutions have been spearheaded by a small cadre of activists, such as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, there was an underlying desire for change among the vast majority of people in Czarist Russia at that time. Even at the beginning of our own revolution only one third of the people supported the undertaking, while one third supported the British and the rest were undecided. America today in no way represents a country ready for revolution through any other means than the ballot box and those on the extremes of political life would do themselves a favor in coming to terms with that reality.
Historically, putting the Tea Parties in perspective is a relatively simple affair. Compared to the anti-war demonstrations of the 1960’s the overall Tax Day Tea Party turnout was miniscule for a nation that is supposed to be experiencing a swelling tide of anti-government sentiment. It is ironic, when you consider how the Right loves to belittle the environmentalists as “tree huggers”, that the turnout for the original Earth Day in 1970 was 20,000,000 or roughly ten percent of the American population at that time, whereas the total participation in the Tea Parties amounted to not even one percent of today’s population. If one uses the lower number of 400,000 as a benchmark of total Tea Party participation, the attendance at the first Earth Day was 50 times larger than that of all Tea Parties combined. If one uses the number of 700,000, which has not been widely substantiated, the number of those attending the first Earth Day is 28.5 times larger. No matter which metric you use it is hard to claim that the Tea Parties are any type of mass grass roots movement. Beyond Tea Party attendance figures, the current polling shows that Barack Obama continues to enjoy favorable ratings in the 60s with the overall Democratic Party having favorable ratings as high as 56% in some polls. Meanwhile the G.O.P. has an unfavorable rating of as high as 68% in some of the latest polling. The number of Americans polled who says the country is on the right track is presently at 45% up from 12% in October of 2008. This represents the greatest turnaround in this sentiment indicator outside of a period when the nation has been engaged in all out war.
Based on the inherent flaws of polling as evidenced in the 2008 New Hampshire Primary, one would assume that the ultimate poll, elections, would be proof positive in ascertaining the true sentiments of the voting public. It is in the special election of March 2009 to replace Kristen Gillibrand in the New York 20th Congressional District that we can most closely gauge to what extent the Tea Parties accurately measure the degree to which the public has, or is in the process of, rejecting the profound change of course that the nation has embarked upon. Politically New York State, outside of the downstate Metropolitan area and Erie County is generally Republican and the 20th is an upstate district, largely rural, predominately white, with a 70,000-voter registration advantage for the G.O.P. The 20th represents the only type of election district where the Republican Party actually made gains among voters in 2008. The race to replace Gillibrand, who took Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat, was framed as the first showdown between the policies of Barack Obama and the Republican Party’s platform of small government, low taxes and opposition to increased federal spending. The national G.O.P. spent heavily on this race, with Michael Steele making two trips to the district along with support on the ground from several top ranking national Republicans. Jim Tedesco, The Republican contender, began the race with a 20% advantage before he came out against the Obama Stimulus Plan. The relatively unknown Democratic contender, Scott Murphy, campaigned in support of the Stimulus from the start. The race, which should have been swept by the Republicans, based on the demographics involved, went down to a recount, which was eventually decided in Murphy’s favor by 726 votes. That said, where then is the empirical evidence of the deep-seated dissatisfaction that the Tea Parties are supposed to represent? What changed between the special election at the end of March and the 15th of April? In reality, the Tea Parties collectively represent the proverbial “tempest in a teapot” and would not have received the media attention they did had they not become a political football to be bandied about in the never ending cable television war between the left leaning MSNBC and it’s archrival on the right, Fox News which heavily promoted the Tea Parties and even hosted some of the biggest.
Steven J. Gulitti
May 11, 2009
New York City
Iron Workers Local # 697
Thursday, March 5, 2009
A 21st Century Ghost Dance: Rush Limbaugh, The Radical Right and the Politics of Obstruction
In the closing days of the 1880s, beset by far reaching societal change, the Indians of the American West embraced a messianic practice called the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance religion, put forth by a Paiute medicine man named Wovoka, foretold of the destruction of the existing world and its replacement with the old order where only the Indians would occupy the landscape. The buffalo would return in great numbers and those Indian warriors who had died fighting the white man would be resurrected. This new world order would be hastened by the performance of the Ghost Dance ritual and the wearing of shirts blessed to repel the bullets of the American Army.
Listening to the rhetoric flowing out of CPAC 2009 one could conclude that the Conservative Movement has embraced its own version of a 21st Century Ghost Dance, led by its own modern day Wovoka in the person of Rush Limbaugh. It is as if by reiterating ideology, invoking the memory of Reagan and maligning the Obama recovery effort as “socialist”, that Conservatives will somehow forestall imminent political change. In an attempt to heighten alarm Limbaugh lays claim to the idea that life, liberty and freedom are under assault. He states that Barack Obama will eliminate capitalism and individual liberty as the cornerstone of American life. Limbaugh makes such a claim in spite of the historical fact that the government has been intimately involved in economic affairs since 1819 with no appreciable loss of personal liberty to date. Nonetheless Limbaugh has put the failure of the Obama recovery program at the top of his personal political agenda because he thinks that such failure will bring about a return to a glorious (imagined) past. Limbaugh defiantly rejects the 2008 election as proof positive that Americans want a change in direction because the electoral results don’t square with his vision of America. All this from a man who, somewhere on the spectrum between ideological purist and buffoon, doesn’t know the Declaration of Independence from the Constitution when it comes to a quote regarding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Somehow talk of “true patriotism” rings hollow coming from a man who had more draft deferments during the Vietnam War than some soldiers had combat action medals. As CPAC continued, Mike Huckabee claimed, “Lenin and Stalin would love the Obama program” leading one to believe that the former presidential candidate knows less about history than does Sarah Palin. Anyone who thinks that the Obama recovery plans bear any resemblance to Soviet economic polices of the last century is either irresponsibly playing with words for the sake of incitement or just lacks the background required to engage in intelligent political discourse.
Beyond Limbaugh and CPAC the hysteria over the “slide into socialism” continues unabated in conservative media. Harry R Jackson, Jr. intones that: “a war for the soul of the nation” is raging. Pat Buchanan declared the Obama budget a “declaration of war on the Right.” The latest piece from Dick Morris is entitled “Waging War on Prosperity.” Limbaugh’s own brother David has gone so far as to say that media attacks leveled at Rush are really aimed at those who support him, the “true patriots” that oppose Obama’s “Marxist agenda and Stalinist tactics.” Newsmax suggests some on the Right may consider armed violent resistance to the Obama Administration, which to me represents a new high watermark in rightwing hysteria surpassing the previous one left behind by the Terri Schiavo case. The “patriot game” was of little use to Republicans in the last election cycle and except for the low- information voter should prove equally useless this time around.
Progressive political thinkers might ask themselves what intellectual ammunition would be of use in countering this 21st Century Ghost Dance. My suggestion is to start with facts. Socialism is defined as the “collective or government ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” That definition encompasses the entirety of economic activity. While the present breakdown in the economy has necessitated a large degree of government involvement in economic affairs, nowhere is there any evidence that Barack Obama is advocating government oversight of economic activity beyond those sectors where the free market has failed. Ironically, it was House Republicans that advocated a partial socialization of banking in the financial bailout of 2008. How hypocritical to oppose the very ideas they once promoted. Having dispensed with the allegation that the Obama Administration aims to affect a wholesale socialization of the economy we can skip past the Stalinist / Leninist rhetoric altogether.
Conservative media is obsessed with the idea that Barack Obama wants to punish success and has declared a war on prosperity. For all of the Conservative rhetoric regarding government policy and the economy, it is an established fact that in the post World War II period the economy has generally done better under Democrats than Republicans. Democratic administrations have outperformed their Republican counterparts across the board on average in terms of annualized job creation, GDP and GDP per capita growth rates. Despite all of the talk of taxing the wealthy and its effect on the economy, under Democratic administrations the wealthiest have done almost as well as they have under Republicans. It is noteworthy that Barack Obama won the majority of those earning over $200,000.00 in spite of the fact that Republicans constantly warned voters of the prospect of higher taxes. While Conservatives bend over backwards in arguing for lower tax rates for the rich and businesses, they remain silent on the subject of tax fairness. In 1980 the amount of national wealth received by the top one percent of wage earners was eight percent of the total wealth created in the United States whereas in 2008 it was twenty six percent. Changes in tax laws since the Reagan era have led to the shifting of the national tax burden from wealth to labor resulting in the largest redistribution of wealth upwards since the 1920s. Likewise, the past eight years have seen the percentage of national wealth that accrues to the working American fall to the lowest percentage on record. Median family income, based on Census Bureau findings, actually declined between 2000 and 2007 when adjusted for inflation while at the same time productivity, profits and executive compensation registered strong gains. That said, what are the real arguments to be made for maintaining the status quo with regard to tax policy and the distribution of income as it relates to the economic well being of the people who actually go to work every day and create the goods and services of a modern economy? Somehow, Conservative thinking as it relates to tax policy and prosperity has either missed or ignored eighty percent of the population while obsessing on the well being of the business community and entrepreneurs. Owing to the fact that the “prosperity” of the past eight years was largely fueled by financial engineering, debt accumulation and the housing bubble rather than income growth, where in this time period can we find evidence of the validity of a conservative economic theory which promotes growth through lower taxes?
In their nostalgia for the Reagan era, Conservatives have adhered to an image of the man based on his rhetoric as opposed to his actual record in office. The federal government actually grew under Reagan as he added a new cabinet level department and various other executive level bureaus. While he argued the virtues of limited spending he embarked on a massive military buildup, much of it in excess of what the threat level of that time required. Large-scale military buildups are public spending just the way bridge and highway projects are, it’s only the products that differ. Both ultimately aid overall economic activity. In spite of supposed strength of conservative economic theories, the recession of 1981-1983 was the worst downturn since the Great Depression, until today, with unemployment topping ten percent. While Reagan talked tough with the Soviets he reached out to them and successfully concluded an arms treaty. He was far more bipartisan than are the Republicans of today. He was largely silent on the issue of abortion.
While those in the pro-Obama mainstream media, along with Rahm Emanuel and his Democratic allies, will continue to publicly bait Limbaugh for their own obvious benefit, there is a growing chorus of concern among Republicans inside and outside of government as to how to defuse the extremists on the far right. Former Republican Congressmen Tom DeLay and Vin Weber have been quick to point out that Limbaugh is not the head of the GOP nor is he its spokesman. Former Republican Congressman and talk show host Joe Scarborough has pointed to a need for the GOP to formulate a constructive strategy for the future and to ignore Limbaugh altogether. Former RNCC Chairman Tom Cole of Oklahoma summed up the GOP’s current predicament with the following observation: “The politics of the country are changing profoundly and rapidly, much as they did in 1932 and 1980.” While Rush Limbaugh intones that Conservative principles are essentially unalterable and forever, moderate Republican observers will argue that those principals need to be modernized or else Republicans are looking at a future with their party in permanent minority status.
Limbaugh and his CPAC acolytes argue that “Americans are conservative by instinct”, but empirically it is hard to make such an argument. A November 2008 poll by Pew Research would show that only 38 percent of Americans identify as conservatives. More importantly the most recent NYT/CBS tracking poll of political identification shows only 28 percent of Americans consider themselves Republican. On a county-by-county basis the 2008 presidential election reveals a significant shift towards the Democratic Party, even in many of the states that went for McCain. With the exception of an arc running roughly from Oklahoma through Arkansas, Tennessee and into Appalachia, most of the rest of the country shows an overall rise in the numbers of people who voted Democrat. Current opinion polls also show that in the face of stubborn opposition from the Right, Obama’s overall approval ratings remain high. With a 60 percent favorable rating overall, the President does even better when polling becomes more specific. On topics like withdrawing from Iraq or whether the economic crisis is his fault or inherited, his ratings exceed 80 percent, whereas for Republicans 56 percent of respondents say they are playing politics rather than standing on principles. In terms of the direction the country, 41 percent say it is on the right track, up from 12 percent who felt that way in October of 2008. Currently, Congressional Republicans have an approval rating below that of their Democrat counterparts. Meanwhile among those below the age of 40, Mr. Limbaugh receives a paltry 11 percent approval rating. His audience and his appeal among independent voters is essentially nonexistent.
While this modern day Conservative Ghost Dance wends its way across the political landscape, its ultimate destination remains a mystery. Given the current political climate it does not seem that Rush Limbaugh, his acolytes and his defacto, if not unwilling, Republican allies will return to majority status or the seat of power anytime soon. While Conservatives are venerating an imagined past, the number of people identifying with the Republican Party or willing to vote for its program is shrinking. The GOP is seen more and more as the party of the South and one that is only gaining adherents among the less educated living in the most rural regions of the country. While the core beliefs and principles of the Right seem out of date or inapplicable in this current climate of worldwide economic crisis, there has to be more to the movement than the politics of obstruction. Absent a new message and a program that attracts independents, the only hope that Conservatives and Republicans have is to bank on Democratic failure, which is neither creative nor compelling in the eyes of the voters. Beyond this paucity of new ideas the more immediate concern is that Limbaugh, the Radical Right and the politics of obstruction will derail the GOP’s electoral chances altogether in the next election cycle. After all 2010 will be here before we know it.
Steven J. Gulitti
New York City
March 5, 2009
Iron Workers Local # 697
Listening to the rhetoric flowing out of CPAC 2009 one could conclude that the Conservative Movement has embraced its own version of a 21st Century Ghost Dance, led by its own modern day Wovoka in the person of Rush Limbaugh. It is as if by reiterating ideology, invoking the memory of Reagan and maligning the Obama recovery effort as “socialist”, that Conservatives will somehow forestall imminent political change. In an attempt to heighten alarm Limbaugh lays claim to the idea that life, liberty and freedom are under assault. He states that Barack Obama will eliminate capitalism and individual liberty as the cornerstone of American life. Limbaugh makes such a claim in spite of the historical fact that the government has been intimately involved in economic affairs since 1819 with no appreciable loss of personal liberty to date. Nonetheless Limbaugh has put the failure of the Obama recovery program at the top of his personal political agenda because he thinks that such failure will bring about a return to a glorious (imagined) past. Limbaugh defiantly rejects the 2008 election as proof positive that Americans want a change in direction because the electoral results don’t square with his vision of America. All this from a man who, somewhere on the spectrum between ideological purist and buffoon, doesn’t know the Declaration of Independence from the Constitution when it comes to a quote regarding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Somehow talk of “true patriotism” rings hollow coming from a man who had more draft deferments during the Vietnam War than some soldiers had combat action medals. As CPAC continued, Mike Huckabee claimed, “Lenin and Stalin would love the Obama program” leading one to believe that the former presidential candidate knows less about history than does Sarah Palin. Anyone who thinks that the Obama recovery plans bear any resemblance to Soviet economic polices of the last century is either irresponsibly playing with words for the sake of incitement or just lacks the background required to engage in intelligent political discourse.
Beyond Limbaugh and CPAC the hysteria over the “slide into socialism” continues unabated in conservative media. Harry R Jackson, Jr. intones that: “a war for the soul of the nation” is raging. Pat Buchanan declared the Obama budget a “declaration of war on the Right.” The latest piece from Dick Morris is entitled “Waging War on Prosperity.” Limbaugh’s own brother David has gone so far as to say that media attacks leveled at Rush are really aimed at those who support him, the “true patriots” that oppose Obama’s “Marxist agenda and Stalinist tactics.” Newsmax suggests some on the Right may consider armed violent resistance to the Obama Administration, which to me represents a new high watermark in rightwing hysteria surpassing the previous one left behind by the Terri Schiavo case. The “patriot game” was of little use to Republicans in the last election cycle and except for the low- information voter should prove equally useless this time around.
Progressive political thinkers might ask themselves what intellectual ammunition would be of use in countering this 21st Century Ghost Dance. My suggestion is to start with facts. Socialism is defined as the “collective or government ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” That definition encompasses the entirety of economic activity. While the present breakdown in the economy has necessitated a large degree of government involvement in economic affairs, nowhere is there any evidence that Barack Obama is advocating government oversight of economic activity beyond those sectors where the free market has failed. Ironically, it was House Republicans that advocated a partial socialization of banking in the financial bailout of 2008. How hypocritical to oppose the very ideas they once promoted. Having dispensed with the allegation that the Obama Administration aims to affect a wholesale socialization of the economy we can skip past the Stalinist / Leninist rhetoric altogether.
Conservative media is obsessed with the idea that Barack Obama wants to punish success and has declared a war on prosperity. For all of the Conservative rhetoric regarding government policy and the economy, it is an established fact that in the post World War II period the economy has generally done better under Democrats than Republicans. Democratic administrations have outperformed their Republican counterparts across the board on average in terms of annualized job creation, GDP and GDP per capita growth rates. Despite all of the talk of taxing the wealthy and its effect on the economy, under Democratic administrations the wealthiest have done almost as well as they have under Republicans. It is noteworthy that Barack Obama won the majority of those earning over $200,000.00 in spite of the fact that Republicans constantly warned voters of the prospect of higher taxes. While Conservatives bend over backwards in arguing for lower tax rates for the rich and businesses, they remain silent on the subject of tax fairness. In 1980 the amount of national wealth received by the top one percent of wage earners was eight percent of the total wealth created in the United States whereas in 2008 it was twenty six percent. Changes in tax laws since the Reagan era have led to the shifting of the national tax burden from wealth to labor resulting in the largest redistribution of wealth upwards since the 1920s. Likewise, the past eight years have seen the percentage of national wealth that accrues to the working American fall to the lowest percentage on record. Median family income, based on Census Bureau findings, actually declined between 2000 and 2007 when adjusted for inflation while at the same time productivity, profits and executive compensation registered strong gains. That said, what are the real arguments to be made for maintaining the status quo with regard to tax policy and the distribution of income as it relates to the economic well being of the people who actually go to work every day and create the goods and services of a modern economy? Somehow, Conservative thinking as it relates to tax policy and prosperity has either missed or ignored eighty percent of the population while obsessing on the well being of the business community and entrepreneurs. Owing to the fact that the “prosperity” of the past eight years was largely fueled by financial engineering, debt accumulation and the housing bubble rather than income growth, where in this time period can we find evidence of the validity of a conservative economic theory which promotes growth through lower taxes?
In their nostalgia for the Reagan era, Conservatives have adhered to an image of the man based on his rhetoric as opposed to his actual record in office. The federal government actually grew under Reagan as he added a new cabinet level department and various other executive level bureaus. While he argued the virtues of limited spending he embarked on a massive military buildup, much of it in excess of what the threat level of that time required. Large-scale military buildups are public spending just the way bridge and highway projects are, it’s only the products that differ. Both ultimately aid overall economic activity. In spite of supposed strength of conservative economic theories, the recession of 1981-1983 was the worst downturn since the Great Depression, until today, with unemployment topping ten percent. While Reagan talked tough with the Soviets he reached out to them and successfully concluded an arms treaty. He was far more bipartisan than are the Republicans of today. He was largely silent on the issue of abortion.
While those in the pro-Obama mainstream media, along with Rahm Emanuel and his Democratic allies, will continue to publicly bait Limbaugh for their own obvious benefit, there is a growing chorus of concern among Republicans inside and outside of government as to how to defuse the extremists on the far right. Former Republican Congressmen Tom DeLay and Vin Weber have been quick to point out that Limbaugh is not the head of the GOP nor is he its spokesman. Former Republican Congressman and talk show host Joe Scarborough has pointed to a need for the GOP to formulate a constructive strategy for the future and to ignore Limbaugh altogether. Former RNCC Chairman Tom Cole of Oklahoma summed up the GOP’s current predicament with the following observation: “The politics of the country are changing profoundly and rapidly, much as they did in 1932 and 1980.” While Rush Limbaugh intones that Conservative principles are essentially unalterable and forever, moderate Republican observers will argue that those principals need to be modernized or else Republicans are looking at a future with their party in permanent minority status.
Limbaugh and his CPAC acolytes argue that “Americans are conservative by instinct”, but empirically it is hard to make such an argument. A November 2008 poll by Pew Research would show that only 38 percent of Americans identify as conservatives. More importantly the most recent NYT/CBS tracking poll of political identification shows only 28 percent of Americans consider themselves Republican. On a county-by-county basis the 2008 presidential election reveals a significant shift towards the Democratic Party, even in many of the states that went for McCain. With the exception of an arc running roughly from Oklahoma through Arkansas, Tennessee and into Appalachia, most of the rest of the country shows an overall rise in the numbers of people who voted Democrat. Current opinion polls also show that in the face of stubborn opposition from the Right, Obama’s overall approval ratings remain high. With a 60 percent favorable rating overall, the President does even better when polling becomes more specific. On topics like withdrawing from Iraq or whether the economic crisis is his fault or inherited, his ratings exceed 80 percent, whereas for Republicans 56 percent of respondents say they are playing politics rather than standing on principles. In terms of the direction the country, 41 percent say it is on the right track, up from 12 percent who felt that way in October of 2008. Currently, Congressional Republicans have an approval rating below that of their Democrat counterparts. Meanwhile among those below the age of 40, Mr. Limbaugh receives a paltry 11 percent approval rating. His audience and his appeal among independent voters is essentially nonexistent.
While this modern day Conservative Ghost Dance wends its way across the political landscape, its ultimate destination remains a mystery. Given the current political climate it does not seem that Rush Limbaugh, his acolytes and his defacto, if not unwilling, Republican allies will return to majority status or the seat of power anytime soon. While Conservatives are venerating an imagined past, the number of people identifying with the Republican Party or willing to vote for its program is shrinking. The GOP is seen more and more as the party of the South and one that is only gaining adherents among the less educated living in the most rural regions of the country. While the core beliefs and principles of the Right seem out of date or inapplicable in this current climate of worldwide economic crisis, there has to be more to the movement than the politics of obstruction. Absent a new message and a program that attracts independents, the only hope that Conservatives and Republicans have is to bank on Democratic failure, which is neither creative nor compelling in the eyes of the voters. Beyond this paucity of new ideas the more immediate concern is that Limbaugh, the Radical Right and the politics of obstruction will derail the GOP’s electoral chances altogether in the next election cycle. After all 2010 will be here before we know it.
Steven J. Gulitti
New York City
March 5, 2009
Iron Workers Local # 697
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Revving Up The Kamikazes On The Right
In 1281 medieval Japan was spared a Mongolian invasion thanks to a massive typhoon that swept across Kyushu Island, thereby destroying the invading fleet and drowning the Mongolian warriors. The storm was deemed a divine wind or kamikaze, sent by the gods to save the Japanese. In the waning days of the Second World War, Imperial Japan would invoke the legacy of the 1281 typhoon in an attempt to forestall defeat in the Pacific by crashing wave upon wave of kamikazes into allied invasion fleets as they made their way toward the Japanese home islands. Today an ideologically challenged G.O.P. is failing in its effort to forestall the current administration’s recovery plan. Many commentators on the right have chosen to meet the new political reality with waves of virtual kamikaze attacks through all manner of media. The recent New York Post comic portraying a monkey shot by two policemen and insinuating that the monkey is Barack Obama is the latest, and most tasteless, example of the Right’s desperation.
Lead by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Phyllis Schlafly and even the venerable Tony Blankley and Pat Buchanan, the public has been bombarded with dire warnings about “the end of America as we know it.” Readers of Town Hall have been treated to a RED ALERT, which warns: “Economic Collapse is Imminent”. Meanwhile, the conservative website Newsmax is soliciting money for the defeat of the three Republican Senators that supported the stimulus, portraying them as “traitors”. While I am all in favor of intelligent political arguments aimed at maintaining some semblance of fiscal sanity and reigning in wasteful government growth, we are at a time and place that requires a course change in our political economy and drastic remedial actions aimed at economic fundamentals. The reiteration of conservative theories for theory’s sake just doesn’t cut it now. Neither does a partisan reinterpretation of the New Deal do much to guide us out of the current economic abyss into which we have stumbled. Conservatives are wont to say that it was World War II that ended the Depression and not the New Deal; in doing so they fail to point out that spending for armaments as well as for public works are one in the same as both are public spending. Consumers don’t purchase bridges nor do they buy aircraft carriers only governments purchase those kinds of products. Maniacal attacks and fear mongering about “collectivism”, “economic crapshoots” and “savior based economics” do absolutely nothing to get us out of our current predicament and appear only to be aimed at undermining the present administration for political ends. Conservative columnist Lorie Byrd’s recent piece entitled “Obama Voters’ Remorse” appeared on a day when polling averages showed Obama with a 65 percent approval rating, a Congressional Republican approval rating of 34 percent and Democrats on Capitol Hill garnering an approval rating of 48 percent. The day before, while conservative commentators railed against the stimulus package, 80 percent of those polled by Gallup said that passing the stimulus package was either important or very important. Linda Chavez in a piece entitled: “The Audacity of Hope” would claim: ”Indeed, investors have been noticeably bearish since the election.” trying to blame Obama for the current dissatisfaction between Main Street and Wall Street. While the Dow has lost 1327 points since Election Day, it lost 4317 points between May 2008 and November 11th. Can we really blame the current administration for our dissatisfaction with Wall Street or is Ms. Chavez just playing games with facts in an effort to undermine Barack Obama for political reasons?
There is a curious trichotomy on the right today. First and foremost, there is something disingenuous in the GOP’s newfound conservative fiscal ethos. For the first six years of the last administration the national debt doubled with George Bush amassing more debt than the previous forty two presidents combined and Dick Cheney claiming: “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” The very Republicans who opposed the stimulus package were more than eager to spend public money during most of the Bush presidency. That said, in spite of their opposition to the Obama recovery plan, Republicans on Capitol Hill know that given the current situation, increased government involvement in the economy is inevitable. Let us not forget that it was House Republicans that insisted on a partial socialization of banking in the autumn of 2008. Is the newfound Republican devotion to fiscal responsibility real or merely a political ploy affected to procure the support of the party faithful? Meanwhile, outside of the Beltway there is considerable support for the Obama recovery plan among Republican Governors. But like the suicide pilots of 1945, many conservative commentators seem unwilling to admit that political change is upon us and instead have chosen to incessantly--if not at times recklessly and dishonestly--attack Barack Obama at a time of deepening national crisis. While many of these attacks are cloaked in the garment of “true patriotism” this conservative media assault may very well have the net affect of further undermining the GOP’s appeal among moderate voters without which the party cannot hope to return to power. To quote political commentator Steve McMahon: ”The Republican leadership is stuck between Rush Limbaugh and the American people who want an end to partisan bickering.” In the past, when Republicans have suffered an election defeat when running a pragmatic candidate, they have chosen to turn to ideological purists in the next election cycle. That may be a formula for defeat in 2010, but the G.O.P. may be driven in that direction anyway thanks to a base that is riled up by a conservative media that seems more interested in undermining a popular president for imagined political advantage. Many conservative commentators are now beholden to a misguided belief that conservative dogmatic purity and ideological zealotry are ends in their own right. While the “true believers” may feel tremendous satisfaction in their ideological purity, just as kamikaze pilots did sixty-four years ago, their chances of driving a wedge between the greater body politic and the Obama Administration are less than a sure strategy for victory and may very well derail the Republican Party when voters head to the polls in 2010.
Steven J. Gulitti
New York City
February 22, 2009
Iron Workers Local # 697
Lead by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Phyllis Schlafly and even the venerable Tony Blankley and Pat Buchanan, the public has been bombarded with dire warnings about “the end of America as we know it.” Readers of Town Hall have been treated to a RED ALERT, which warns: “Economic Collapse is Imminent”. Meanwhile, the conservative website Newsmax is soliciting money for the defeat of the three Republican Senators that supported the stimulus, portraying them as “traitors”. While I am all in favor of intelligent political arguments aimed at maintaining some semblance of fiscal sanity and reigning in wasteful government growth, we are at a time and place that requires a course change in our political economy and drastic remedial actions aimed at economic fundamentals. The reiteration of conservative theories for theory’s sake just doesn’t cut it now. Neither does a partisan reinterpretation of the New Deal do much to guide us out of the current economic abyss into which we have stumbled. Conservatives are wont to say that it was World War II that ended the Depression and not the New Deal; in doing so they fail to point out that spending for armaments as well as for public works are one in the same as both are public spending. Consumers don’t purchase bridges nor do they buy aircraft carriers only governments purchase those kinds of products. Maniacal attacks and fear mongering about “collectivism”, “economic crapshoots” and “savior based economics” do absolutely nothing to get us out of our current predicament and appear only to be aimed at undermining the present administration for political ends. Conservative columnist Lorie Byrd’s recent piece entitled “Obama Voters’ Remorse” appeared on a day when polling averages showed Obama with a 65 percent approval rating, a Congressional Republican approval rating of 34 percent and Democrats on Capitol Hill garnering an approval rating of 48 percent. The day before, while conservative commentators railed against the stimulus package, 80 percent of those polled by Gallup said that passing the stimulus package was either important or very important. Linda Chavez in a piece entitled: “The Audacity of Hope” would claim: ”Indeed, investors have been noticeably bearish since the election.” trying to blame Obama for the current dissatisfaction between Main Street and Wall Street. While the Dow has lost 1327 points since Election Day, it lost 4317 points between May 2008 and November 11th. Can we really blame the current administration for our dissatisfaction with Wall Street or is Ms. Chavez just playing games with facts in an effort to undermine Barack Obama for political reasons?
There is a curious trichotomy on the right today. First and foremost, there is something disingenuous in the GOP’s newfound conservative fiscal ethos. For the first six years of the last administration the national debt doubled with George Bush amassing more debt than the previous forty two presidents combined and Dick Cheney claiming: “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” The very Republicans who opposed the stimulus package were more than eager to spend public money during most of the Bush presidency. That said, in spite of their opposition to the Obama recovery plan, Republicans on Capitol Hill know that given the current situation, increased government involvement in the economy is inevitable. Let us not forget that it was House Republicans that insisted on a partial socialization of banking in the autumn of 2008. Is the newfound Republican devotion to fiscal responsibility real or merely a political ploy affected to procure the support of the party faithful? Meanwhile, outside of the Beltway there is considerable support for the Obama recovery plan among Republican Governors. But like the suicide pilots of 1945, many conservative commentators seem unwilling to admit that political change is upon us and instead have chosen to incessantly--if not at times recklessly and dishonestly--attack Barack Obama at a time of deepening national crisis. While many of these attacks are cloaked in the garment of “true patriotism” this conservative media assault may very well have the net affect of further undermining the GOP’s appeal among moderate voters without which the party cannot hope to return to power. To quote political commentator Steve McMahon: ”The Republican leadership is stuck between Rush Limbaugh and the American people who want an end to partisan bickering.” In the past, when Republicans have suffered an election defeat when running a pragmatic candidate, they have chosen to turn to ideological purists in the next election cycle. That may be a formula for defeat in 2010, but the G.O.P. may be driven in that direction anyway thanks to a base that is riled up by a conservative media that seems more interested in undermining a popular president for imagined political advantage. Many conservative commentators are now beholden to a misguided belief that conservative dogmatic purity and ideological zealotry are ends in their own right. While the “true believers” may feel tremendous satisfaction in their ideological purity, just as kamikaze pilots did sixty-four years ago, their chances of driving a wedge between the greater body politic and the Obama Administration are less than a sure strategy for victory and may very well derail the Republican Party when voters head to the polls in 2010.
Steven J. Gulitti
New York City
February 22, 2009
Iron Workers Local # 697
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