Back in the days of Jim Crow laws, African-Americans were by law entitled to vote, but were barred from doing so in many southern states by "literacy tests" and other dodges. Those laws are thankfully a thing of the past, but at least one commentator is apparently looking back on them with fond nostalgia.
Jonah Goldberg, an editor at National Review, wrote a column this week in which he decries how so many people are ignorant of the workings of government:
A very high percentage of the U.S. electorate isn't very well qualified to vote, if by "qualified" you mean having a basic understanding of our government, its functions and its challenges. Almost half of the American public doesn't know that each state gets two senators. More than two thirds can’t explain the gist of what the Food and Drug Administration does.
This is certainly a valid concern - no democracy can survive if the people aren't basically aware of how it functions. But rather than make a point about improving education, or how government should be more accessible to its citizens, Goldberg instead argues for restricting who can vote: "Instead of making it easier to vote, maybe we should be making it harder. Why not test people on the basic functions of government? Immigrants have to pass a test to vote; why not all citizens?"
I had to read it more than once just to make sure I wasn't seeing things.
Does Goldberg really understand what he's saying? Such tests were used back in the bad old days to keep "undesirables" from exercising their democratic rights. Does he really want to go back to that?
His suggestion is fundamentally un-American. In a democracy, all citizens have the right to vote. It's as simple as that. Does Goldberg really believe that a certain class of people should be excluded from any say in how our society functions, instead leaving it up to the "philosopher-kings" of Plato's Republic?
Of course, he also hates the very notion of public education, as he wrote in a June column. So the two notions actually dovetail nicely - deny schooling to all but the wealthiest to guarantee a permanently ignorant underclass, then use that same lack of schooling to keep them from voting.
It's diabolical, really. Too bad such a bright person has to be so wrong.
Once upon a time, the Bush Administration tried to put a happy face on the Iraq War by pointing out all the good things we were doing to the Iraqi people - other than killing them, that is. New schools, hospitals, water treatment plants, etc, were loudly touted as George W. Bush bringing enlightenment to the Iraqi masses. The fact that it was based largely on mercenary "contractors" and truly obscene war-profiteering was politely unmentioned by most of the media.
But reality, as Stephen Colbert so memorably pointed out, has a well-known liberal bias. It soon became apparent that the benefits of civilization weren't quite as advertised. The reconstruction projects were handed out mostly on the basis of political patronage, and billions upon billions of our tax dollars were wasted or simply stolen. Many of the projects were never actually built, and many others were built so shoddily that they're unusable. (It's not surprising that with such a track record, White House propaganda has returned to the fear-and-smear tactics of old, attacking anyone who criticizes our occupation of Iraq as Osama bin Laden's cabana boy.)
For example, electricity supplies in Baghdad, in the middle of that country's baking summer weather, have dropped from six or so hours daily to just one or two hours a day. Which means that in 130-degree heat, there is no lighting, no air conditioning and no refrigeration for most of the day. Now, piddling details such as this are supposed to be included in the State Department's weekly status report to Congress on conditions in Iraq - but the Los Angeles Times reported that the Administration quietly changed it some months ago. Instead, the White House now reports the total amount of electricity generated in the country, regardless of whether that electricity actually reaches the people of Iraq.
Even given the dismal state of the Administration's war efforts, the latest revelation is a doozy. After all, generating electricity doesn't make a bit of difference if it doesn't get to you and you can't turn the lights on. It also fits perfectly into the Administration's habit of hiding or otherwise disguising bad news rather than dealing with it. Either way, while the total-electricity-generated figure might be strictly legitimate, it's also profoundly dishonest.
Assuming, of course, that the electricity was actually generated. Given the record of fraud and theft on the part of profiteering contractors, it's certainly possible that even the misleading figures given to Congress are a mirage. It's like something out of George Orwell's 1984:
But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been over-fulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small.
As we are unable to even keep the lights on in the capital on any reasonable schedule, President Bush and his inner circle must be clinically delusional and actively hiding from reality. That's the only explanation as to how they are still surprised that the Iraqi people want us out.
"The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
- Constitution of the United States, Article II, Section 4
Enough is enough.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has shown over and over again that he will warp justice, perjure himself before Congress and drag the Justice Department into the mud to protect the political interests of President Bush and the Republican Party. His latest antics before the Senate Judiciary Committee did nothing to change that perception.
Back in 2004, half the Justice Department's top leadership threatened to resign over the Bush Administration's blatantly illegal secret-spying program, and stayed only because the White House agreed to rein in its more outrageous aspects. Testifying before the Senate last week, Gonzales claimed that the dispute was not over the innocuously-named "Terrorist Surveillance Program," but over another spying program.
The only problem was that former Assistant Attorney General James Comey, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, and internal DOJ documents all showed that Gonzales was lying through his teeth. It could have been lifted right out of the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup - "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"
The farce achieved further Marxian proportions when Press Secretary Tony Snow insisted that "nobody has really laid a glove on" Gonzales, despite even loyal Republicans publicly saying that the Attorney General is more trouble than he's worth.
This is about more than just a matter of this spy program vs. that spy program. It is about the Bush Administration putting itself above the law, and an Attorney General who still sees himself as the President's personal attorney and not as chief law enforcement officer of the country.
What we already know is dismaying enough:
Just imagine what we haven't yet learned.
Bush has already said that he has no intention of firing Gonzales or letting him resign which, while disastrous, actually makes a bizarre sort of sense from a political standpoint. A vacancy at the top of DOJ means Bush would have to nominate a replacement, which means confirmation hearings. And that means that the White House would be forced to reveal, slowly and painfully, all the corruption and machinations that have so tainted the Justice Department under Gonzales.
But there is another way of getting rid of him - impeachment. The Constitution clearly provides for impeachment and removal of government officials other than the President.
Congress must step up and demand the return of honesty and accountability to the Justice Department and, by extension, the entire Administration. Gonzales has to go.
"We never argued that [Saddam Hussein] played a role in 9/11; political opponents manufactured the claim to question the president's integrity."
- White House press secretary Tony Snow telling a bald-faced lie in USA Today; the reality is that in the run-up to the Iraq War the Bush Administration deliberately conflated Hussein, al Qaeda and 9/11 to the point where a solid majority of Americans believed Hussein to have been behind the attacks
"The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that's why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home."
- President Bush, hoping to fool the public just one more time while not bothering to mention that the group calling itself "al Qaeda in Iraq:"
"In other words, the whole plan has got to be to bring more accountability into health care, to make the consumer more responsible for making proper and rational decisions. That's what accountability does."
- President Bush, suggesting that sick people be required to shop around and get prices - and that they're SOL if they don't make "proper and rational decisions"
We already know that the Bush Administration values politics above all else - war, peace, common decency, etc. But something about Dr. Richard Carmona's Congressional testimony on Tuesday struck a nerve.
Maybe it was that when he was Surgeon General he was directed not to say anything about the dangers of second-hand smoke. Or that he was gagged about health care in prisons. Or that he was told to stress abstinence-only sex education while ignoring the numerous studies which say it just doesn't work.
Maybe it's the simple crassness of being transformed into yet another mindless White House cheer-bot, ordered to mention President Bush no fewer than three times on every page of every speech he made. (At a press gaggle the next day, Tony Snow blithely said that "if you, in fact, serve at the pleasure of the President, you have some obligation to share his policies.")
No, I think the disgusting nadir was being "discouraged" from attending a Special Olympics event. Who could possibly have anything against helping disabled kids? The Bush Administration does, apparently - and for no other reason than the group was started and run by the Kennedy family. "I was specifically told by a senior person, 'Why would you want to help those people?'" Carmona said.
And yet he was "encouraged" to travel around the country speaking at various GOP events.
This is more than simple pettiness. This is actively politicizing every function of government, even something as supposedly above politics as health care.
And it's only getting worse. The White House's nominee for the new Surgeon General, Dr. James Holsinger, is not an advocate of better health care for everyone. Rather, he's an anti-gay partisan who in 1991 wrote a scary-sounding but badly-grounded report for the United Methodist Church. Titled "Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality," he claimed that gay sex was inherently dangerous and should not be tolerated within the church.
Enough is enough. As Carmona testified on Tuesday, "the job of the Surgeon General is to be the doctor of the nation, not the doctor of a political party." It's high time to get politics out of health care.
After waffling on the sidelines for a week or so regarding the prosecutor purge scandal, President Bush has waded in with both fists. When Congressional Democrats said they would ask Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and other White House officials to testify, Bush responded with defiance, saying any testimony could take place only behind closed doors, not under oath and with no transcript. He practically dared Congress to subpoena them, saying he would fight any such move.
Fine by me. Bush has broken the law and committed outrages against democratic governance so many times that we need a good, bruising Constitutional showdown.
What is causing his sudden go-screw-yourself attitude? Is it simple antipathy towards anything that infringes on his vision of himself as Maximum Leader of the nation? Or is he trying to hide real crimes in his Administration, even more than what we already know?
I suspect the latter. Something must have come up in the morass of documents studied by White House counsel Fred Fielding that raised a very large red flag, something that has to be kept secret at all costs. What could it be? Written instructions to go after prominent Democrats? Explicit orders to drop cases against prominent Republicans?
We will find out.
Let's face it - Alberto Gonzales was not appointed Attorney General because of his devotion to enforcing federal laws. Rather, he got the job because of his long history of fealty to George W. Bush no matter what. Whenever following the law has come into conflict with following Bush's personal whims, the latter has won out every time. He was able to get away with it as long as Congress was in Republican hands, but now that adults are back in charge on Capitol Hill and oversight is no longer a dirty word, he's in real trouble.
The prosecutor purge, of course, is exhibit A. Conspiring with Karl Rove and other Justice Department and White House higher-ups, Gonzales axed eight U.S. Attorneys who were seen as insufficiently subservient to Maximum Leader Bush and the Republican Party. The reasons are varied, but all stink to high heaven.
One sent GOP Rep. Duke Cunningham to jail for taking bribes from defense contractors and was investigating CIA officials in the same scandal. Another refused to manufacture a phony "voter fraud" case to harass the Democratic winner of a closely contested election. Still another was pressured by a GOP Senator and Representative to indict a prominent local Democrat before the 2006 election. A fourth was fired simply to make room for a Rove crony. And so on and so forth.
The GOP has fallen back on its ABC defense - Always Blame Clinton. Since Bill Clinton replaced all 93 prosecutors at the beginning of his term, they say, Bush was just doing the same thing by ousting eight of them. The excuse is, of course, fake; incoming Presidents have always appointed their own stable of prosecutors. Bush's actions were very different in that he fired prosecutors to further politically-motivated probes or to punish those who took prosecutorial independence seriously.
And if all that wasn't bad enough, the National Journal reported late last week on Gonzales' role in shutting down the investigation into the Bush Administration's wholesale spying on the American people. You may recall that in late 2005, the New York Times revealed that the White House secretly ordered wiretaps and other snooping on American citizens without bothering to get the judicial approval required by the Constitution and statute law. DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility, the department's internal watchdog, started to investigate the revelations only to be blocked when Bush refused to approve security clearances for the probers. It was Gonzales who recommended that the clearances be denied.
The problem was that at the time he made his recommendation, Gonzales was fully aware that he himself was to be a target of the investigation based on his actions as White House counsel. At the very least, shutting down a probe of himself is a pretty serious conflict of interest; at most, it goes all the way up to obstruction of justice, a felony.
Alberto Gonzales should never have become Attorney General. He is a partisan hack, slavishly loyal to his benefactor at the expense of all else. He should resign immediately, and take his fellow toadies with him.
Earlier this month, the citizens of Minnesota's 5th Congressional District elected Keith Ellison to be their Representative, and in doing so sent the first Muslim to Congress. This has caused some of the wiggier elements of America's right wing to go completely nuts. Good Lord, you'd think Ellison demanded that Nancy Pelosi be required to wear a burqa on the House floor. But he is actually quite moderate and not at all like the hate-crazed, suicide-bombing, honor-killing stereotype stamped into our national psyche.
But to the real fruitcakes, Islam itself is the enemy. And any American Muslims are traitors.
For example, take Glenn Beck, a O'Reilly-esque right-wing blowhard given a nightly talk show on CNN Headline News to counter the America-haters who otherwise dominate the network's talking-head lineup. (What's that? There aren't any? Oh well, maybe it'll draw some viewers from Fox.) When Beck had Ellison on his show, he showed off his inability to tell one Muslim from another, challenging the Representative-elect to "prove to me that you are not working with our enemies."
Now Dennis Prager, a columnist who moonlights as the religious right's token Jew, has gotten into the act as well. In his latest column for the TownHall website, he worked himself into a fine snit over Ellison's request to take his ceremonial oath of office on a copy of the Koran instead of the Bible. This request should be denied, he froths, "because the act undermines American civilization," and wonders what would happen if a racist asks to take the oath on Hitler's Mein Kampf. (Why not ask Trent Lott?) And if that weren't enough, he darkly warns that Ellison's request "will embolden Islamic extremists and make new ones."
Prager and Beck, and others like them, expose themselves as pure idiots whose bigoted rantings should embarrass thinking Americans everywhere. All Muslims are not the enemy, no matter what they think.
President Bush may talk the talk about "supporting the troops," but let's face it, it's just an act. He doesn't really seem to give a damn about the men and women he sent over to fight and die in the desert for his grand delusions.
Earlier this month, Bush hosted a White House reception for newly-elected members of Congress. It just so happens that James Webb, who defeated George "Macaca" Allen in Virginia's Senatorial election, has a son serving in Iraq as a lance corporal in the Marines. Bush asked Webb how his son was doing, and Webb responded by saying he wanted his son to come home.
"I didn't ask you that," Bush snapped back testily. "I asked how he's doing."
Webb naturally took exception to this display of pure callousness and later told a friend he wanted to "slug" the President, but refrained from doing so. I can think of quite a few parents who would not have been so restrained.
Especially those whose kids will never come home.
Way to go, George.
During the 2000 election campaign, then-Governor Bush made a talking point out of deriding President Clinton's (in)famous habit of constantly changing his positions as the situation warranted, calling it "waffling." He promised that as President, he would stick with it no matter what.
Well, he was right about that.
President Bush, the man who never ever ever changes his mind, has forcefully responded to the Iraqi civil war and the spectacle of American men and women caught in the crossfire as Sunnis and Shi'ites slaughter each other by the thousands. "There's one thing I'm not going to do," he talked tough in Latvia. "I'm not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete."
Which begs the question: what exactly is "the mission?" Frankly, that depends on which day it is.
Once upon a time, it was Saddam Hussein's gigantic WMD stockpiles. When it became painfully clear that such stockpiles did not in fact exist, the purpose of the invasion changed into Saddam's connections with al Qaeda. Nope, those didn't exist either. From there, the definition of "the mission" has wandered all over the place, from building democracy to defeating terrorism to controlling Iraq's oil - the last one being an extremely rare example of Bush actually being honest about something. Now, it has settled into this vague, amorphous mass of "finishing the job" and "completing the mission."
The simple truth appears to be that Bush et al have no idea what to do in Iraq other than staying the course. Except it's no longer called "staying the course." If our supposed leaders really have no clue what we're doing there anymore, it's a pretty good bet that it's time to get out. Now.
Someone over at News Corporation - chairman Rupert Murdoch, for one - should have realized a long time ago that this would end badly. Very badly.
HarperCollins, a publishing company owned by Murdoch, announced that they would publish If I Did It, by former football star/actor/double murderer O.J. Simpson. And Fox, a television network also owned by Murdoch, announced that they would air a two-part interview billed as his "confession."
Yes, O.J. Simpson, You know, the guy whose "Trial of the Century" for killing Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, his ex-wife and her friend, captivated America during the mid-nineties. The guy who to this day scours the golf courses of Florida looking for "the real killers." That O.J. Simpson.
Where most Americans see someone who literally got away with murder, HarperCollins publisher Judith Regan saw dollar signs. More dollar signs, in fact, because she was the person who would have interviewed Simpson for the Fox special. Indeed, the entire spectacle reeked of greed, ratings and publicity.
Not only that, there are reports that News Corporation attempted to buy the Brown family's silence with millions of dollars in hush money. And the company is reportedly attempting to sell the book to another publisher.
Granted, bad taste has never stopped Murdoch before. After all, his Fox network brought us such televised abominations as:
But something about this one struck a public nerve. It was so crass, so tacky, so tasteless, that America responded with one gigantic retch.
For once, Murdoch listened. The TV special will not be aired. The book will not be published, although a couple of already-shipped copies are reportedly for sale on eBay.
Maybe it was because we're sick unto death of O.J. smugly insisting that he's innocent, all the while smirking at the thought there are some rubes out there who fall for it. Maybe it's the reported $3 million price tag, surely a low point in checkbook journalism. And maybe it was the sheer cheek of tabloid TV and tabloid publishing attempting to get away with ever more outrageous publicity stunts.
But whatever the reason, the American people have spoken, loudly and plainly. And good on us for it.
"Well, if you'd been part of the President's motorcade as we've shuttled back and forth over the course of the day...the President has been doing a lot of waving and getting a lot of waving and smiles... So I think the President has a very good sense and will go back to the United States and tell the American people that these are a people that are very open to and solicitous of good relations with the United States."
-- National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley on President Bush, who was kept far away from average Vietnamese during his blink-and-you-miss-it trip to Vietnam
The Bush Administration, led by the man in the Oval Office, is notorious for refusing to face reality. It is well known that President Bush and his inner circle are content to live in their own little fantasy world, where everything works properly and everyone loves us. (Of course, this gets an Orwellian makeover around election time, when the world is suddenly transformed into a mortal threat.) This goes a long way towards explaining Bush's poll numbers, which haven't seen the sunny side of 50% in months.
For anyone who reads the news and pays attention, it has been obvious for a very long time that our Iraq strategy of "stay the course" just isn't working. Our soldiers are getting slaughtered on a daily basis trying to keep the peace in a land where there is no peace. Indeed, American military commanders admit that we cannot even secure the capital city of Baghdad, much less the rest of the country.
Bush took to the cameras this morning for a rare press conference which was billed as a major announcement but which turned out to be - well, more of the same. No change in strategy, no realization that the (official) goal of a democratic Iraq is in ruins, no meaningful deviation from "stay the course." In fact, the only change of sorts is that Bush abandoned the macho "stay the course" slogan while continuing to embrace the disastrous "stay the course" mentality.
How typical for a White House which sees failing policies not as evidence that the policy needs to be changed, but rather that a new sales pitch is needed as the old one wasn't working.
He did claim that we "are constantly adjusting our tactics to stay ahead of our enemies." He did not, of course, mention that if the overall goal is unattainable and the strategy doesn't work, all the tactical adjustments in the world aren't going to make the slightest bit of difference.
In a very small concession to reality, he grudgingly admitted that "some of the Iraqi security forces have performed below expectations." In fact, the fledgling Iraqi army has been the source of many if not most of the sectarian death squads bringing so much killing and misery to the "wrong" Iraqis.
Overall, it was little more than the same stuff we've been hearing for years. "My administration will carefully consider any proposal that will help us achieve victory," Bush said. This appears on its face to be moderation, but here's the catch - he defines victory, so he defines anything that will help him "achieve victory." Anything that disagrees with his version of victory is by definition anti-victory and will therefore be ignored, just like all the other experts he brought in for photo ops and then tossed aside once their usefulness had been exhausted.
But let's face it - Bush's audience was not the soldiers he put in harm's way, nor their families, nor the Iraqi people. His audience was the American voting public, whom he is terrified will finally deprive him of his rubber stamp on Capitol Hill and replace it with a Congress which stands up to him for a change.
