Jak's View From Vancouver

A Plan To Attack Iran

The wingnuts in the Bush Administration -- and outside it -- have clearly determined that an attack on Iran is required.  Norman Podhoretz (now Giuliani's foreign affairs mentor) almost demands it.  Bush in his press conference today talked of World War III.  They have just 15 months to get this done, though, before the next Democratic President sweeps into office.

But I don't think Bush will have the balls for it.  I think he will worry about his historical place, having already weakened the US military through his commander-in-chief blunders in Afghanistan and Iraq.  But I think he still wants to attack Iran.  A quandary, unless ... Bush resigns and allows Cheney to run the balance of his term. 

Cheney, of course, has nothing but a negative legacy to protect, so why would he worry?  On Day One he moves his furniture in, on day two he sends the Marines and the bombers into Iran.

Nightmare?

The Far Rights' Values

At the far-right's "Value Voters Debate" the other night, the program began with a singing of "God Bless America". However, the lyrics were changed to the following:

Why should God bless America?
She’s forgotten he exists
And has turned her back
On everything that made her what she is

Why should God stand beside her
Through the night with the light from his hand?
God have mercy on America
Forgive her sin and heal our land

The courts ruled prayer out of our schools
In June of ‘62
Told the children “you are your own God now
So you can make the rules”
O say can you see what that choice
Has cost us to this day
America, one nation under God, has gone astray

Why should God bless America?
Shes’s forgotten he exists
And has turned her back on everything
That made her what she is

Why should God stand beside her
Through the night with the light from his hand?
God have mercy on America
Forgive her sins and heal our land

In ‘73 the Courts said we
Could take the unborn lives
The choice is yours don’t worry now
It’s not a wrong, it’s your right

But just because they made it law
Does not change God’s command
The most that we can hope for is
God’s mercy on our land

Why should God bless America?
She’s forgotten he exists
And has turned her back on everything
That made her what she is

Why should God stand beside her
Through the night with the light from his hand?
God have mercy on America
Forgive her sins and heal our land

This is what the core republicans truly believe about America today. They hate it. They hate you and your friends for making it what it is.  They are desperately filled with hate and self-loathing, and thet will continue to thrash about until someone gets hurt.

That's scary enough. But can you imagine the vitriol from O'Reilly and Hannity and Coulter and the others had a Democrat changed the song to meet "liberal" views?  But the hypocrites are silent, of course.

I guess Giuliani, Romney, McCain and Thompson deserve some sort of credit for  refusing to take part in this  charade debate.

Joe Biden the Loser

I'm watching the AFL-CIO Democratic Presidential Forum and Joe Biden just blew it.

At the end of the first segment, during which Keith Olberman asked questions, there was a vigorous debate regarding Barrack Obama's weekend statements about invading Pakistan to attack al Qaeda.  Obama was attacked by almost everyone else, he defended himself strongly, and a good time was had by all.  Except, it seems, for Joe Biden.

The second half of the "debate" had questions asked by union members in the audience.  The very first question was asked by a woman from West Virginia who identified herself as having lost her husband in the Sago mine disaster last year.  Her question was about industrial safety and was addressed to Joe Biden.  After a single sentence of sympathy, Biden ignored her question -- and thus her pain -- and insisted on getting in the last word on Pakistan. 

It was incredible.  This was an experienced politician who, in his singular desire to pat himself on the back, seemed entirely to forget that he was faced by a tragic union widow, in front of a fully union audience, at a time when six miners are once again lost underground in Utah.  He never returned to her question and was rightly booed by sections of the audience.

Biden was never going to be a player in this contest but when he does finally fall off the stage, I hope that this moment of crass selfish stupidity will be remembered as one of its causes.

* * *

PS:  It is 10:20pm PDT and I just looked at the home page of CNN US. Looking at that page it would not be possible to know that the Democrats (one of whom is likely to be the next President) are debating tonight.  Bizarre, no?

The Bigger Picture on the Attorney Scandal

Many of us have been following with interest the twists and turns in the Attorneys scandal in the United States.  What many of us have missed -- mainly because the mainstream media have failed to pick up on it -- is the bigger picture:  The attempt by the Bush regime to use electoral laws and US Attorneys to create an environment specifically better for Republican voters than for Democrats.

McClatchy's Washington Bureau has an excellent and detailed overview of the situation today -- it really is a MUST READ.   

One quote stood out for me.  It stood out because it was not made by a Democratic politician or someone in the "liberal" blogosphere.  It was made by Joseph Rich, who left his job as chief of Justice Department's Voters Rights Section in 2005.  He said the actions of the Bush regime fit a definite pattern:

"As more information becomes available about the administration's priority on combating alleged, but not well substantiated, voter fraud, the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens."

None of this comes as a shock to those of us who have believed for decades that the western electoral system is a crock.  It must however be upsetting to any regular American who has the naivete to believe that the DOJ and its various "Rights" sections are there to actually protect them.

Family Values

The Republican nomination battle has already turned into a race to the Right, with social issues (from a fundamentalist perspective) up front and centre.  This isn't surprising considering the mess the Right has made of foreign affairs in the last 7 years.

However, talking about affairs, Joe Klein and Greg Sargent have noticed that Family Values are a long way away from the GOP candidates' resumes.  In fact, while the leading Democratic contenders have ZERO divorces among them, the leading Republicans have NINE! 

Bible belching hypocites the lot of them!

Two Bad Choices

When did the left disappear in America?  Did it indeed ever have a genuine space in mainstream American political life?  It may have been that old heartache Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society movement in the middle 60s that was the last kick of a left-of-centre can in the United States.  Certainly the Democrats in 2000 and 2004 ran as the centrist wing of the Republican Party.  They  lost, as the voters decided to go with the real thing.

If the Liberal Party in Canada, say, or the Labour Party in Great Britain, had lost the recent election, they would have three options:  to move even further to the right to try to capture Republican votes; to stay where they are and simply change the messenger; or to move left to offer a distinct alternative.  In the United States, however, that third option is simply not available: a century of vigourous directed cultural propaganda has ensured that the average American believes anything "left of centre" is evil, probably foreign, and definitely not for them.  This leaves only bad choices for the Democratic Party.

The Democrats could move even further right, taking up that space left vacant as the fundy-neocon alliance drags the GOP into the deep weeds of the righthand margin.  But the last two elections, most especially that of 2004, have shown that the American electorate is attracted to the genuine article, probably because the message is clearer and without apparent guile.   The Democrats, who now find themselves well to the right of Richard Nixon, by contrast sound as if they'd rather be someplace else.

Or, they can stay roughly where they are (still to the right of Nixon) and choose a more charismatic leader.  In this scenario, they will blame the flat and elitist Kerry for the defeat, thus saving themselves the bother of intellectual effort, and then start the search for the next Great White Hope. We've been here before with Dukakis and Kerry.  It worked with Bill Clinton, but a true Democratic bubba with half a brain is hard to find.  Hilary probably starts out favourite, but it will be a messy internal fight and, in the end, likely useless. 

In any sensible situation, the ground should be perfect for a new party to storm up the left wing, scooping up all those Democrats who are crying in their beer, and seizing the youth of the country in a new and exciting movement for progressive reform.  However, the American political landscape doesn't appear all that sensible right now and I have no hope that such a movement can either be formed or made to run.  But, in 2009 ....

Bennett in '08

Someone who has neither virtue nor reason, and yet who feels it necessary to tell me what my style of liberty should be (in thrall to the corporatist idol, of course) is William J. Bennett. So, hold on to your gag reflex when turning to "Why We Fight", his latest spew in National Review Online.

Bennett tells us that the "moral equivalence, and the adjectival equivalence, needs to end now." He tells us this immediately after telling us that the murder of Nicholas Berg is "inhuman" and therefore evil, while the murder of detainees in US custody is only "inhumane" and therefore somehow not so bad. He blames the media for showing the prison abuse pictures in full but editing the Berg execution video.

He complains that the media have censored out of existence pictures of Americans jumping from the Two Towers on 9/11. I guess he wants us to watch them regularly to top up our supply of indignant revenge. But I bet he supports the President's decision to censor images of American flag-draped coffins.

He is a journeyman ideologue, with immense power and yet no stink of the "professional politician" sticks to him. I'll wager ten bucks that Mr William J. Bennett will be one of the far right's candidates for President in 2008.