The Lesser of Two Evils is Evil

The recent capitulation of major democrats to Mr Bush and his idiot war is being touted as “good politics.” Because the war is such a total failure, its continuation will doom all war-supporting repubs in future elections. So, the thinking goes, dems were smart to approve new war funding, simultaneously tieing the war around the necks of the republicans while avoiding being labelled as “soft on terrorism.”

Only two problems with the strategy. First, it is immoral to lend approval to an ongoing carnage for individual political gains. The only way to halt the cycle of violence is to STOP.

But even worse (for the dems), they will surely lose votes for such blatant political posturing:

Voters don’t like pollster-driven politics or politicians, and with good reason: They want to know what their leaders’ values are, because if they know their values, they know how they’re likely to represent them — not just on today’s issues, but on tomorrow’s, about which we may have no inkling today.

Political scientists have found that people prefer to vote for candidates who share their values, but they prefer a candidate who is strong in his or her convictions — even if they don’t share those convictions — to one whose convictions are hidden in the fine print. Being strong and principled isn’t about being left, center, or right. The fact that voters associate values with the right reflects the fact that conservatives wear their values proudly on their sleeves, and they display their principles in their voting records.

Conservatives don’t vote for bills they don’t believe in. If the public associates principles and values with the GOP, it’s time Democrats start showing voters that there’s another set of principles and values out there: theirs.

Principle number one: no more money for immoral wars.

Principle number two: all wars are immoral.

June 13th, 2007 || PermaLink

Joe Bomberman

How anyone can look at the middle east and all that’s gone wrong these past six years and opine that high altitude bombing of yet another country makes sense is beyond me. Says Joe Lieberman:

I think we’ve got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq. And to me, that would include a strike into… over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers.

Now, Joe is smart enough to realize that, for multiple reasons, we can’t invade Iran. Must be very frustrating for him. But, not to worry, let’s just drop a few thousand bombs on them:

I think you could probably do a lot of it from the air.

Since the first Gulf Slaughter this has increasingly been the golden rule of war-think: Why risk the deaths of American soldiers when you can destroy the enemy at little risk with high altitude bombers. True, it means that most of the people you kill are innocent civilians. If they didn’t want to be bombed they should have thought of that before they were born in a small third-world country with leaders that piss off America.

June 12th, 2007 || PermaLink

Saving the Internet

AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre is retiring soon and in a good bye address to his shareholders he declared:

There’s a problem. It’s called Net Neutrality. Well, frankly, we say to hell with that. We’re gonna put up some toll booths and start charging admission.

In Thinking Peace I make the case that the Internet is the best hope that we have as a planet for getting through the hard times ahead. Nothing matters more than keeping a free flow of information to all people, regardless of income. If the Whitacre’s of the world — the rich elites — get their way, information will be parcelled out on an ability-to-pay basis only.

We need to keep the Internet as free and open as possible. For more, go to Save the Internet.

June 11th, 2007 || PermaLink

Bush in Fantasyland

Joseph Cirincione deconstructs Bush’s recent attempts to start a new arms race:

President Bush is rushing to deploy a technology that does not work against a threat that does not exist. Iran is at least 5 to 10 years away from the capability to build a nuclear weapon and at least that far from having a missile that could hit Europe let alone the US. And anti-missile systems are still nowhere near working despite $150 billion spent since the 1983 Star Wars program started and years of phony tests staged to demonstrate ‘progress’ and ’success.

As in the past when Bush has gone after non-existing threats — those missing WMD in Iraq — we are once again being told one thing and sold another. In Iraq, the purpose all along was to get rid of Saddam and install a permanent US presence in the region to control Iraq’s oil. Reviving Star Wars has less to do with keeping America safe than with keeping weapons manufacturers busy and prospering. And, rhetoric aside, it has nothing to do with helping the Europeans or anyone else.

The fact is the Czechs don’t want the radar, the Europeans don’t trust his explanations and deplore his unilateralism, the Congress has already cut the funds on purely programmatic grounds. This was a dumb idea before, now it is yet another foreign policy disaster.

But a potential golden feather in the cap of Bush and his corporate cronies, a policy that will go on paying huge dividends long after he’s out of office.

June 10th, 2007 || PermaLink

Nobody But Gore

David Michael Green makes a convincing case for  a Gore presidency, starting with a sober assessment of the mess we’re in:

It is truly a dark hour for America, and all roads lead to the same explanatory address: the country has been hijacked by a movement of regressive kleptocrats who have not governed well in large part because their intention never was to govern well - but rather, instead, to liquidate every asset from the beast before then dumping its tattered carcass in a fire sale. There are no parallels for this in our political history. Only the leveraged buyout does it justice. Think of this as the Gordon Gekko model of governance. Woo-hoo.

Bad as things have gotten, only Al Gore has the experience, passion, and commitment to really push for solutions, rather than political expediencies.

Lord knows I’ve had my heart broken by too many politicians not to be a bit cautious. Moreover, the old Al Gore could sometimes make Bill Clinton look positively liberal. But nowadays I think a Gore presidency would very likely be different. I think it would be bold enough to end the war, to seriously address global warming, to create a real universal national healthcare program, to begin re-balancing the distribution of wealth in the United States, to restore the Constitution, to appoint progressives to the federal courts, to restore America’s participation in international institutions and its reputation in world opinion, to implement a full-scale alternative energy program, as well as job development, stem cell research, and a whole lot more. I think the majority of the American public already wants all of those things, and it might be very easy to achieve them under the combined circumstances of a completely failed conservative experiment, a clearly articulated progressive vision, and a bold agenda-setting president showing aggressive and fearless leadership in pointing the way.

Which I think is precisely why Gore, the non-candidate, inspires such over-the-top ridicule from conservatives and the press. His capacity to expose them and their lies, to put a label on their failures, and to chart a path toward a popular politics of potential watershed magnitude, makes him nothing short of a regressive’s nightmare. This could be the second coming of FDR, not only politically and ideologically, but in terms of a generational-scale realignment, much as the New Deal coalition dominated American politics for forty years.

No wonder they’ve already started savaging him, even while he says he has no plans to run. Like a hurricane gathering energy at sea, they recognize his potential.

And like a Potemkin village on the shore awaiting the storm’s devastation, they also recognize the complete vacuousness, and therefore the utter vulnerability, of their own project.

June 9th, 2007 || PermaLink

Bush’s policies are accelerating climate change

Joseph Stiglitz,  chief economist at the World Bank from 1997 to 1999, and current chief critic of globalization, on why today’s G8 meetings will accomplish nothing regarding climate change:

So far the United States has refused to join other industrialized nations to find a reasonable solution to protect the climate. There are serious efforts in every industrialized nation to do something about protecting the environment — just not in the United States. I want to see the heads of state in Heiligendamm confront President Bush and say: “We need an international set of regulations, and you, as the world’s most powerful man, have an obligation to be part of it!”

The problem, as ever, our my-way-or-the-highway President.

Talking is always good. But President Bush has proven to be extremely obstinate in the past. His guiding principle has always been that his policy would ultimately prevail, no matter what the issue — and no matter how his policies affected the rest of the world.

June 8th, 2007 || PermaLink

The Forever War

Months ago Seymour Hersh warned that the Bush administration was determined to go to war with Iran. And that, just as they had with Iraq, all they were waiting for was some sort of attack on America that they could use as a pretext.

At the time, most people dismissed his claims. “No way they would try the same scam twice, especially with Iraq going so poorly,” went the conventional wisdom.

But of course, wisdom has nothing to do with it.

Following revelations of a George W. Bush administration policy to hold Iran responsible for any al Qaeda attack on the U.S. that could be portrayed as planned on Iranian soil, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi warned last week that Washington might use such an incident as a pretext to bomb Iran.

Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 through 1980 and the most senior Democratic Party figure on national security policy, told a private meeting sponsored by the non-partisan Committee for the Republic in Washington May 30 that an al Qaeda terrorist attack in the United States intended to provoke war between the U.S. and Iran was a possibility that must be taken seriously, and that the Bush administration might accuse Iran of responsibility for such an attack and use it to justify carrying out an attack on Iran.

June 7th, 2007 || PermaLink