Wick Allison was Editor in Chief of The National Review from 1990 through 1993.  Allison donated a lot of money to John McCain during the primaries, but he is now endorsing Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States:

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

Allison concludes his endorsement by commenting on what has happened to conservatism by using a quote of Eric Hoffer:  “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

For those of you who haven’t experienced Rolling Stone assassin Matt Taibbi’s uncompromising, pointy and funny-as-heck style, first cop this excerpt from his Palin pwnage piece on 27 September …

It even crossed my mind that there was an element of weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain’s decision to cave in to his party’s right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps he was responding to being ordered by party elders away from a tepid, ideologically promiscuous hack like Joe Lieberman — reportedly his real preference — by picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-thumping buffoon. As in: You want me to rally the base? Fine, I’ll rally the base. Here, I’ll choose this rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil pipelines. Happy now?

… and then go and read the whole thing.

Heh heh, ” … serially pregnant moose-killer … ” That’s gold!

How many posts at this site have been about the election? I haven’t counted them, but there are so many that it almost seems like an obsessive pursuit. It’s almost a little embarrassing, especially for a website that does not present itself as a current events or news commentary site.

On the other hand, the upcoming election is compelling to many of the authors at this site (I am the most guilty), because John McCain and Sarah Palin embody so many of the characteristics that inspired the creation of this blog in the first place.

Back in 2004, a handful of my acquaintances became emboldened by the national political mood and came fully out of the closet with their fundamentalist explanations for how the world works and how it must be changed. The positions were strikingly uninformed and one-sided. They were proud of their lack of any basis for the conclusions other than the Bible or their version of our “Christian” government. They showed no ability to understand the basis for the beliefs of people who disagreed with them. They quoted the Bible incessantly without showing any understanding of the historical development of the Bible as a book of stories, many of them entertaining or inspiring, but many others disturbing and self-contradictory.

I took advantage of this opportunity, just as I still do today, to question such beliefs.  Because I was hearing such silliness out of the mouths of real human beings, I was inspired to write, research, converse, and write some more, in an attempt to figure out what was going on. I wanted to know if my worldview was utterly and starkly disconnected from that of fundamentalists and neocons or whether there was some possible translation by which we could still communicate with each other.  In those early days of this blog, I remember feeling frustrated, sometimes angry with fundamentalism of all stripes.  I now realize that good-hearted people who happened to have traditional religious beliefs (but who were not fundamentalists) got caught up in my frustration. It’s not that I don’t have differences of opinion with non-fundamentalists religious believers, but I have gradually come to the conclusion that it is fundamentalism that is the real problem.  I am now fully aware that there are many good hearted people who sincerely believe in a sentient God who are my full-fledged allies, despite our many differences in the way we respond to the mysteries of life.

One way of illustrating my re-orientation is to consider that there are many agnostics, ignostics and atheists out there with whom I have less in common than with many good-hearted and thoughtful believers in gods and religions. This becomes all the more clear when I articulate what really should be our main concern as inhabitants on this planet: to get along with each other and to make the community a better place for all people.  Yes, many nonbelievers are also good-hearted (Ebonmuse of Daylight Atheism is one of my favorites), but not all nonbelievers are good-hearted. The ultimate question is to ask with whom I would have more in common: a goodhearted thoughtful believer in “God” or a self-centered and intolerant nonbeliever?  Because the answer to that question is clearly the former group, this means that I am not here to wage a war on religion itself.  It is my firm belief that each of us acts on beliefs that we cannot prove. My attack is on destructive impulses, regardless of the manner in which someone packages his or her destructive belief system.

I will continue to explore why people who claim to believe in God make their (to me untenable) supernatural claims. This is a fascinating topic that deserves the increased amount of discussion that it is now getting.  It is clear to me, however, that thoughtful and kind-hearted people who believe in gods and who belong to religions are not a threat to my way of life, whereas fundamentalism is a threat because it shuts down the brain in a way that prevents meaningful discussion of real-life issues and all too often inspires heavy-handedness, reckless and insensitive conduct. Fundamentalism is usually based upon out-of-control anxiety and fear, hyper-groupishness, obeisance to authority, and intolerance to the differences of others. It is also clear to me that fundamentalism comes in a variety of flavors, the most visible being religious fundamentalism (there are Christian, Muslim versions, for example). There is also political fundamentalism, of course. Those who are neoconservatives represent an especially dangerous version. It is my belief that the highly visible decay of the United States is due to the rise of both political and religious fundamentalism.

I started this site back in 2006 because I realized that humans need a constant and a healthy dose of skepticism to keep themselves from falling prey to various types of fundamentalism.  This self-vigilance needs to be unrelenting, but our inner personal battles also need to be fought intelligently. Those of us who are too skeptical become paralyzed with doubts and we thus fail to reach back out into the world to actually make the world a better place. For fundamentalists–those who reject skepticism–there will be lots of reaching out in the community because movement always seems like progress, but there is a huge difference between changing one’s community and intelligently changing one’s community. There is no better example than the US invasion of Iraq, where our political and social leaders were anxious for some sort of tangible activity that would “respond” to the 9/11 attacks.  It is clear now that what we got is an extremely expensive (in terms of money and lives) endeavor which made the world and the United States worse off and completely failed to “respond” to the 9/11 attacks.

John McCain and Sarah Palin now assert that they are different than George W. Bush.  It is equally clear that they wish to continue the same failed policies of the current Administration, especially the war-mongering.  Based on the kinds of answers they are giving to questions posed to them, it is also clear that McCain and Palin are political fundamentalists who reject any evidence that does not fit in their pre-conceived notion of how the world works.  We can’t afford any more leaders who reject the importance of inconvenient evidence.  We desperately need leaders who are self-critical and who are not embarassed to admit this.

It is without apology, then, that we will continue to take an unrelenting side-excursion into politics, at least until November, because it is really not detour at all. Rather, the current campaign is allowing us to see, in a tangible and high-stakes way, the intellectual concerns raised in this site ever since we appeared in 2006.

At the debate last night, McCain scolded Obama for some allegedly irresponsible statements regarding a possible U.S. military incursion into Pakistan.  Obama responded by mentioning McCain’s singing of a song about bombing Iran.   This video has been around for quite awhile on the Internet, but I am posting it here because I think it says something deep and disturbing about McCain that he would make light of dropping bombs on any country for any reason.

Jon Stewart’s team does a great job of editing George W. Bush speeches from five years ago and from recent days.   It does seem to be the same speech.

Consider this earlier post, and the opening lines from the BBC’s terrific documentary: “The Power of Nightmares: The Shadows In The Cave.”

In the past, the power of politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people.

. . . Politicians were seen simply as managers of public life. But now they have discovered a new role that restores their apparent authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us . . . from nightmares.

To be clear, I do believe that the American economy is in horrendous shape, primarily because we are hemorrhaging in debt.  We are running massive trade deficits and budget deficits.  This is a problem that has been going on for many years, and it’s been obvious to all honest economists.  Essentially, our “solution,” has been that we are financing long term debt with short term notes.  It’s inexcusable.  We are so extremely vulnerable.  All that has to happen to throw this country over the edge is that our “pushers,” those foreign countries that are continuing to finance our irresponsible ways, decide to stop doing business with us.  That is what our big problem is, and it has been big for many years, extending all the way back to Bush I and Reagan.

Consider this statement by economist John Bogel, being interviewed here by Bill Moyers in September 2007:

But you don’t have to be an economist to know that a great deal of or a minimum in our economy is coming from borrowed money. People are spending at a higher rate than they’re earning, and we’re starting to pay a price for that now. Particularly in the mortgage side. But, eventually, that could easily spread and people won’t be able to do that anymore. You can’t keep spending money you don’t have. It gets a lot of it, you know, and it wasn’t that many years ago — maybe a couple of generations ago — that if you wanted something, you saved for it. And when you completed saving for it, you bought it. Imagine that. And that wasn’t so bad. But, now, we know that we can have the instant gratification and pay for it with interest payments, of course, over time, which is not an unfair way to do it. We’re going to pay a big price for the excessive debt we’ve accumulated in this society both in the public side and the private side.

And it’s no secret that this lack of savings in our economy — just about zero — is putting us at the mercy of foreign countries. China owns — I don’t know the exact number — but, let me say about 25 percent of our federal debt. China does. What happens when they start to buy our corporations with all those extra dollars they’ve got there? I mean, I think that’s very– these problems are long term, are very much worrisome and very much intractable.

Nothing about the current economic “fix” is going to protect us from that danger.  In fact, the current “fix” is to put the country $700 Billion further into debt, because we don’t have $700 Billion.  We’re either borrowing it or we’re diluting the dollar by printing lots and lots of paper dollars.  I’m no economist, but the current “fix” sounds like a Band-Aid, and the big financial corporations will be back for more in six months because the “fix” is not a long-term solution of any sort.  Rather, it’s like a “fix” of cocaine, something to get us through the next couple of months.  Something to allow us to pretend that there’s not a huge problem, much bigger than the one that is obsessing us at the moment, that we are refusing to acknowledge.

I didn’t realize that Jesus had said these things (click on the image for a larger version):

Empathy, anyone?

Back in the mid-1980’s, two graduates of Mercy High School (located in University City, Missouri) drew deeply on that Catholic education and decided to get together every week or so in order to create cartoons.   Whew!  That was more than twenty years ago.  Our plan was to make cartoons so insightful and/or funny that publishers would buy them and then we would never need to get real jobs.  It didn’t quite turn out that way.   Mike Harty was the guy who could draw and I was the guy who couldn’t, but who was willing to offer lots and lots of ideas until Mike found one worth drawing.  This brings to mind the idea of Linus Pauling:  “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”

Mike and I are both baby-boomers.  We drew these in the midst of Ronald Reagan’s second term–cold war politics often worked its way into our cartoons.  As did death and “meaning of life,” and God, and incongruity.  We really didn’t have a plan other than to do something that resonated.  After reading these, you’ll probably pick up on the reason why Mike and I weren’t as popular as the football stars in high school . . .

We worked at drawing and scheming and creating, week after week, until we had created a couple hundred cartoons.  I recently spoke with Mike and asked whether it would be OK to publish some of them at DI.  He was delighted.  Tonight, I dug out my box of cartoon archives and selected several cartoons that still “resonated” with me.  Most of these need no explanation (I hope!).  The exception is the first cartoon.  We drew it in 1986, when scientists and engineers were struggling to figure out how to make the space shuttle safe (the Challenger space shuttle had exploded a few months earlier).  this was also an era when Christian fundamentalism was on the rise.

If anyone wants to buy the rights to publish these cartoons in a big magazine (so that we can finally retire), please let us know.

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Quite predictably, FOX didn’ “hear” any of these protesters address any real issues.  That’s because FOX doesn’t want to hear things like “Stop the War” and “Stop the torture.”  

FOX got exactly the chant it deserved at the end of this video.   That’s some free speech for you, FOX.  Nonetheless, the studio newscaster is worried about the well-being of the reporter on the street.  What’s she worried about?  That he might actually have an unbiased thought?

Just when we thought it was a good time to buy one of those magnificent, Soviet-era dachas in Georgia, this happens.

We’re getting the updates on the most spectacular round of this event, but the fact is this has been brewing since the break up of the Soviet Union.  Georgia couldn’t wait to get out from under Russia’s thumb, where it had been for two centuries at least.  That they could not understand the desire on the part of the Ossetians and Abkhazzians to get out from under their thumb is proof that willful blindness, when politically inspired, is alive in all parts of the world.  Georgia has been conducting low-level warfare in these two regions since 1993 at least.  What has prompted this present crisis is Georgia’s president decision—due to a promise he made in his election campaign—to settle the issue once and for all and bloody well take the two provinces in question.  In anyone’s lexicon of who to blame, Georgia is here the equivalent of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its decision to annex Kuwait (or China in its decision to annex Tibet—but for diplomatic reasons we don’t wish to draw such comparisons).

By that calculus, Russia has acted the part of the United States by invading Georgia and beating it about the head and shoulders until leaves Ossetia and Abkhazzia alone.

So why are we condemning Russia?

Because Georgia is the poster-child for America’s post-Soviet ambitions to see democracies spring up and flourish all over the former superpower.  Saakhashvilli won a more or less open election with a staggering landslide (something the Republicans claim often but never achieve for themselves) and Georgia has every appearance of becoming a successful democracy.

We’ve made commitments, at least verbally.  We told Georgia we’d back them.  Doesn’t that sound familiar?

Just what does that mean, though?  Back them how?  Cheer?  Send money?  Troops?

We are organizing humanitarian aid.  We want to use our military to deliver it.  This would put U.S. troops on the ground in Georgia, sort of a glove on the ground in front of Russia, a school yard dare.  If Bush plays this right, we may be in a shooting conflict with Russia before he leaves office.  McCain’s rhetoric seems to support the idea that we should push Russia out.  Diplomatically, of course (if possible).

But the fact remains that Georgia was the bad guy first.  We should have told Saakhashvilli to leave those two little breakaway states alone.  Democracy being our religion, our missionary zeal should have inspired us to take the side of the underdog.  Or in this case the under-underdog.

I am not so naive as to believe that the reasons for saying this and not saying that in a political situation are not complex.  But the consequences of policy can often surprise and embarrass us.  Damnit, why can’t the allies we back just behave?

Saakhashvilli and Vladimir Putin have also had a running cut fight going on since they got in each others’ faces.  There is no love lost between these two.  At times it has been juvenile, with references to height or brains.  Doubtless Putin welcomed an opportunity to humiliate Saakhashvilli and that, too, is bad public policy.  As I say, juvenile.

Doesn’t this all remind us of someone else, though?

The real tragedy is that here we have a president who has squandered whatever moral authority he had by essentially behaving in more or less the same way—naked aggression, overt regime change, nation building, using any excuse to send in troops, etc etc—trying to shake his finger, school-principle-wise, in Russia’s face, scolding them in a classic “Do what I say, not what I do” moment.

Now, for their part, Russia has a problem it will need to get over.  What Putin really doesn’t want is for Georgia to become a member of NATO.  Bad enough to have all the former Eastern Bloc countries signing up in what Russia can only perceive as a competitor organization—not necessarily the enemy, but surely we can understand their sentiment in feeling that Europe, not to mention the United States, may still feel a bit of concern over Russia’s ambitions and the bases of her fears?  So it is reasonable to see Russia’s attack on Georgia as—also—a warning.  Russia is saying, “Look, we can overrun this pissant democracy whenever we want, so have a care what kind of deals you make with them.”  This is a form of gunboat diplomacy.  Russia is probably saying more to us than to Georgia, which they consider a nuissance more than a threat.  But they would like to keep it a nuissance.  By joining NATO and allying itself with the West in such an overt way, Georgia does become a threat.

So what?  If Georgia wants to join NATO and we want them, so be it.  But we really ought to be more careful what kind of commitments we make to what kind of leaders and we ought to be willing publicly to chastise such leaders when they become antithetical to the stated goals of American policy.

In point of fact, the state department told Saakhashvilli not to go into Osettia.  We knew he was about to do it.  We suggested in very strong terms that this would not be a very good idea.  He ignored it.  We’re downplaying that now.  Maybe we shouldn’t.  Maybe we should let some of these sorts hang out to dry when they go against what we not only believe but in fact told them about.

It all goes back to what kind of promises got made.  And man we need to be more careful with those.

I’ve heard mention of Teddy Roosevelt with regards to Bush’s ideas on foreign policy.  Bush seems to like the Big Stick approach.  But take note—Teddy said  “Speak softly” first.  He rarely used the Stick.  It was a warning as much as a prescription.  For all his bombast, Teddy Roosevelt was a cautious diplomatist.  He had a grasp, as they say.

This guy doesn’t.

Apparently neither do many of his allies.

By now, everyone knows of Russia’s military invasion of Georgia.

Seeing the Straw in the Eye of Others
Dario Castillejos, Dario La Crisis

Bush Moral High Ground
Paul Zanetti, Australia

[Admin note: All Cartoons are being published at DI with full permission by Cagle Cartoons]

John McCain is…

1.) Ignorant on the economy. And see here.

2.) Ignorant on foreign policy. And see here.

3.) Ignorant on birth control.

4.) Ignorant of the truth. And see here and here.

5.) Ignorant of what’s important to veterans and votes against veterans.

6.) Ignorant of the laws of our sovereign allies (or just doesn’t care!)

7.) Ignorant of what constitutes torture.

8.) Ignorant of how to show up and vote as a United States Senator. And see here.

9.) Ignorant of the campaign finance laws of the United States. And see here.

10.) Ignorant of what is an “elitist.” And see here, here, here, here, and here.

11.) Ignorant of how people who steal drugs and other people’s property should go to jail. And see here.

12.) Ignorant of loyalty and love to the mother of his first children who suffered a terrible car accident and took care of his family while he was a POW.

13.) Ignorant of how to control his temper. And see here.

14.) Ignorant of the wholly radical and extremist views of persons who he seeks to endorse his campaign, or McCain is an anti-American, anti-Catholic, anti-Muslim bigot. And see here and here.

15.) Ignorant of key environmental issues, sometimes voting against important legislation and later trying to take credit for its passage. And see here and here.

John McCain has attempted to pull the wool over the eyes of Americans. McCain’s plan cannot be succeeding because what we hear from him now is the standard KKKarl Rove attack message juxtaposing Senator Obama with two white blondes.

America cannot afford to have anyone so monumentally ignorant as President.

John McCain is too ignorant to be President of the United States.

McCain, trying to score a few desperate points against Obama, gets the Iraq time line drastically wrong. CBS does its part to cover up fr McCain.

Why would we elect one of the prisoners at Guantanamo as the next President of the United States? Well, the logic is becoming quite clear to anyone who has followed the corporate news media for the past few days. Prisoners at Guantanamo have that special ingredient that John McCain has that makes him an especially good candidate to be president. He was a prisoner and he was tortured! According to many pundits, this confined torture makes McCain a better candidate than Barack Obama.

What provoked this discussion? Recent statements of Wesley Clark that John McCain’s military service doesn’t make him better qualified to be President:

He hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron . . . I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

Please note, however, Clark’s additional words indicating that Clark nonetheless honored McCain’s military service:

I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands of millions of others in the Armed Forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he has traveled all over the world.” Clark continued: “But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in Air — in the Navy that he commanded, it wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, ‘I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it publicly?’ He hasn’t made those calls, Bob. [Addressed to interviewer Bob Schieffer of Face the Nation].

Invoking only the Clark’s comments that question whether McCain’s military service makes him a better candidate for President (but not Clark’s acknowledgement that McCain was a war hero), the national media is especially going wild making two false claims:

A) That Wesley Clark disparaged John McCain’s military record; and
B) That doing the sorts of things McCain did in the military make him a better Presidential candidate.

I’m not exaggerating when I suggest that the media is going crazy hawking these falsehoods. Watch this compilation and see for yourself:

The commentators in this video have come to John McCain’s rescue, noting that McCain has special experience and character because he did military service. In fact, some of them claim that McCain’s military service especially qualifies him to be President because McCain was tortured and held prisoner during the Vietnam War.

These shrieking commentators are intentionally ignoring Clark’s praise of McCain’s military record, i.e., they are lying. This is backdoor swiftboating by falsely accusing others of swiftboating. It is an attempt to draw attention to Barack Obama’s lack of military service, a clever way of making a groundless argument that Obama is not qualified to be President. This is all especially crazy when the sitting president went AWOL while in the military. Shouldn’t that fact alone make us pause to ask ourselves whether military service per se makes one better prepared to be president? Shouldn’t we go one more step and ask what types of military service might make one a better President? Very little chance of a rational discussion of that sort these days . . .

This whole dispute about McCain’s military service is especially strange, given that the President has many duties, and being Commander in Chief is only one of those duties. An equally important duty is using diplomacy to avoid going to war. Presidents also set the domestic agenda, often by using the bully pulpit to speak out on energy issues, environmental issues, economic issues, administration of justice issues, and social justice issues. Legally speaking, the powers (and therefore the duties) of the President are contained in Article II of the U.S. Constitution.

But back to the fray. Relatively few news personalities are addressing Clark’s real point: Does serving in the military make a person a better candidate for President? It’s true that many Presidents have served in the military, but it is a logical fallacy to argue that being in the military thus makes one a better President. It’s as silly as saying that because all Presidents have been Caucasian (or men) that being Caucasian (or a man) is a prerequisite to being President. Maybe being in the military is good for a career for reasons other than the training to make one a fighting machine. The military is far more than a fighting machine. It’s also a giant social club. Perhaps serving in the military enables one to make lots of social connections with others who served when one chooses to run for office.

Consider, too, that there are both pro’s and con’s to being in the military. Perhaps serving in the military makes a person too uni-dimensional to be President. After all, there are all of those other Constitutional powers and duties, very few of them furthered by being trained in the art of war.

I would agree with Clark that some types of military service might prepare one to be President (e.g., having “executive responsibility”). I would also agree with Clark that many types of military service do not necessarily make a person better qualified to be President (when compared with someone who has no military experience).

It should be patently obvious that being a prisoner or being tortured doesn’t prepare one to be president. If so, sitting Presidents should all go on special retreats where they are imprisoned and tortured so that they were better prepared for office. If anything, being tortured causes long-term injuries and psychological damage—not an obvious asset for a person aspiring to be President.

Torture subjects often suffer from a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Their strong feelings of hate, rage, terror, guilt, shame, and sorrow are also typical of subjects of mobbing, childhood abuse, domestic violence, domestic vice, rape and incest. They feel anxious because the perpetrator’s behavior is seemingly arbitrary and unpredictable—or mechanically and inhumanly regular.

As much as the pro-McCain pundits might not like it (possibly because they love McCain’s barbecues so much), there are real questions about McCain’s ability to act appropriately under pressure.

What about flying planes or getting shot down while flying an airplane? Do these activities make you a better President? I don’t see any connection at all. I know people who fly airplanes who would make terrible Presidents, whether or not they’ve ever been shot down.

And what about flipping the switch to drop big bombs on people from the cockpit of a plane? This was one of McCain’s jobs in the military. Did this make him a better candidate for President?

Consider, further, McCain’s attitude regarding the bombs he dropped:

McCain knew that what he was doing was wrong. Three months before he fell into that Hanoi lake, he barely survived when his fellow sailors accidentally fired a missile at his plane while it was getting ready to take off from his ship. The blast set off bombs and ordnance across the deck of the aircraft carrier. The conflagration, which took 24 hours to bring under control, killed 132 sailors. A few days later, a shaken McCain told a New York Times reporter in Saigon: “Now that I’ve seen what the bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I’m not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam.”

Yet he did.

“I am a war criminal,” McCain said on “60 Minutes” in 1997. “I bombed innocent women and children.” Although it came too late to save the Vietnamese he’d killed 30 years earlier, it was a brave statement. Nevertheless, he smiles agreeably as he hears himself described as a “war hero” as he arrives at rallies in a bus marked “No Surrender.”

[Since writing this post, I have searched for the original transcript of the "60 Minutes" admission.   Here are some links.  Based on the transcript, I think that the above-quoted Common Dreams passage should have made clear that McCain made this confession while in a North Vietnamese prison.   He stated that he regretted making the statement and that he broke under torture.   Now, however, I'm curious whether McCain would deny that he dropped bombs on innocent women and children.  In short, does he merely regret saying that he did this or does he regret doing it?]

When you do things soldiers do, does it really make you a better President?  What about climbing a rope, cleaning a gun or learning how to salute? Do these things make you a better President?

What about going through boot camp? Does that make you a better candidate to be President? Think about it. Going through boot camp breaks down your sense of individuality. How can that make you a better leader of an allegedly free country? Yet many conservatives are arguing that military service makes one a better president. Consider the many leaders conservatives admire. How many of them have ever seen any combat? Not Ronald Reagan. Not Dick Cheney. Not Dan Quayle, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Phil Gramm, Clarence Thomas, or George Will—all of them conservative Republicans who were of draft age during the Vietnam era yet none of whom served in the conflict.

This claim that military service makes one a superior candidate for President is so utterly ridiculous that it brings to mind this Monty Python video (from their movie “The Meaning of Life”). If you believe the pundits currently hammering on Wesley Clark, here is vignette featuring a person who is especially well qualified to be President:

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What happens when the executive branch is allowed to operate in secrecy and without constraint? This was answered in 1976, by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church:

The natural tendency of Government is toward abuse of power. Men entrusted with power, even those aware of its dangers, tend, particularly when pressured, to slight liberty. Our constitutional system guards against this tendency. It establishes many different checks upon power. It is those wise restraints which ‘keep men free. In the field of intelligence those restraints have too often been ignored.

The three main departures in the intelligence field from the constitutional plan for controlling abuse of power have been: (a) Excessive Executive Power.

In a sense the growth of domestic intelligence activities mirrored the growth of presidential power generally. But more than any other activity, more even than exercise of the war power, intelligence activities have been left to the control of the Executive.

For decades Congress and the courts as well as the press and the public have accepted the notion that the control of intelligence activities was the exclusive prerogative of the Chief Executive and his surrogates. The exercise of this power was not questioned or even inquired into by outsiders. Indeed, at times the power was seen as flowing not from the law, but as inherent, in the Presidency.

Whatever the theory, the fact was that intelligence activities were essentially exempted from the normal system of checks and balances. Such Executive power, not founded in law or checked by Congress or the courts, contained the seeds of abuse and its growth was to be expected.

(b) Excessive Secrecy.

Abuse thrives on secrecy. Obviously, public disclosure, of matters such as the names of intelligence agents or the technological details of collection methods is inappropriate. But in the field of intelligence, secrecy has been extended to inhibit review of the basic programs and practices themselves.

Those within the Executive branch and the Congress who would exercise their responsibilities wisely must be fully informed. The American public, as well, should know enough about intelligence activities to be able to apply its good sense to the underlying issues of policy and morality.

Knowledge is the key to control. Secrecy should no longer be allowed to shield the existence of constitutional, legal and moral problems from the scrutiny of all three branches of government or from the American people themselves.

(c) Avoidance of the Rule of Law.

Lawlessness by Government breeds corrosive cynicism among the people and erodes the trust upon which government depends.

Here, there is no sovereign who stands above the law. Each of us, from presidents to the most disadvantaged citizen, must obey the law. As intelligence operations developed, however, rationalizations were fashioned to immunize them from the restraints of the Bill of Rights and the specific prohibitions of the criminal code. The experience of our investigation leads us to conclude that such rationalizations are a dangerous delusion.

As you can see, the Committee pointed its finger at the government, the public and the press.  Attitudes needed to be changed all around.

This is yet another parallel between modern times and the the Vietnam War era (I realize that that war had ceased by 1976).  Many other parallels were detailed by the movie “War Made Easy.”

The above passage is analyzed in more detail at Common Dreams.

Hardly a day goes by when you don’t hear yet another Republican claiming that the “surge” is working in Iraq. And see here and here.

If the surge is really working, let’s see daily videotape showing Western reporters strolling freely through Baghdad’s neighborhoods, outside of the Green Zone, chatting with Iraqis.   Better yet, let’s celebrate the “surge” by having a parade in downtown Baghdad. Perhaps George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and John McCain can lead the parade.  Let’s count the number of McDonald’s in Iraq.  Let’s consider the number of Westerners going to Iraq for vacations.  Consider, also, that strong-arming the Iraqi government to build 58 permanent military bases in Iraq. That’s our long term “solution.”  Isn’t that like saying domestic violence is a “solution” in an abusive relationship?

More important, let’s count the number of Iraqis who have been permanently displaced.  If the surge is working, why are so many Iraqis still living in places like Syria?  Consider this report from DemocracyNow:

Refugees International estimates that up to five million Iraqis have been displaced since 2003. That’s one-in-five Iraqis who have had to flee their homes since the US-led invasion of their country. Two-and-a-half million Iraqis have been internally displaced, and an equal number have managed to leave the country to Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, the Gulf States and, most of all, Syria, which hosts 1.5 million Iraqis.

Consider, too, how the “surge” is working. You won’t see this in the American corporate press.  You’ll hear a host of lies, including lies from the mouth of John McCain.

American citizens are now being conned about the “surge” just like they were conned about WMD.  Here’s the truth about the “surge.”  If we dared to freely publish photos from Iraq for only one week, that “war” would be over and the American soldiers would be on their way home.

McClatchy News is reporting this:

Iraqi lawmakers say the United States is demanding 58 bases as part of a proposed “status of forces” agreement that will allow U.S. troops to remain in the country indefinitely.

Leading members of the two ruling Shiite parties said in a series of interviews the Iraqi government rejected this proposal along with another U.S. demand that would have effectively handed over to the United States the power to determine if a hostile act from another country is aggression against Iraq. Lawmakers said they fear this power would drag Iraq into a war between the United States and Iran.

“The points that were put forth by the Americans were more abominable than the occupation,” said Jalal al Din al Saghir, a leading lawmaker from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. “We were occupied by order of the Security Council,” he said, referring to the 2004 Resolution mandating a U.S. military occupation in Iraq at the head of an international coalition. “But now we are being asked to sign for our own occupation. That is why we have absolutely refused all that we have seen so far.”

Other conditions sought by the United States include control over Iraqi air space up to 30,000 feet and immunity from prosecution for U.S. troops and private military contractors.

Glenn Greenwald of Salon provides a detailed commentary on this latest revelation, documenting that back in 2003, the Bush Administration vehemently denied having any intentions of permanently occupying Iraq.

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against the government in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, finding that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay have the right to file habeas corpus petitions in federal court. This decision strikes down a key section of the Military Commissions Act, the horrible piece of legislation passed by Congress in October 2006 that sought to condemn detainees to indefinite imprisonment with no real right to challenge their detention.

The MCA provided only for “Combatant Status Review Tribunals”, a farce trial that makes a mockery of the protections given by the Constitution to an accused person. Detainees are tried before military officers, rather than neutral judges. In these tribunals, they have no right to a lawyer, they can be barred from seeing the evidence against them, and they cannot call witnesses in their defense. In a number of cases, when the first CSRT concluded an inmate was not an enemy combatant, the government simply ignored the ruling and convened a second one to reach the decision it preferred.

These inquisitorial, rigged “trials” give further evidence of why the writ of habeas corpus is so vitally important. For over 700 years, it’s protected people against arbitrary and capricious imprisonment by their government. By forcing the government to publicly show the reasons why it has detained someone before a neutral magistrate, habeas corpus turns imprisonment into a tool of justice, rather than a tool of tyranny.

The U.S. Constitution provides that Congress may suspend habeas corpus, but only in cases of “rebellion or invasion”, when it is vital to protect public safety. Clearly, neither of these conditions is in effect at the moment. Thus, the MCA’s suspension of habeas corpus for detainees was unconstitutional, and the Court was absolutely in the right to strike it down.

The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been in detention, in some cases, for over six years without ever being given the chance to prove their innocence. The Bush administration’s attempt to put them into a legal black hole, beyond the reach of all law, is anathema to everything the American justice system stands for. It’s long overdue that this injustice was corrected. If any of these detainees are terrorists or have committed war crimes against the United States, then let the government prove that in a court of law. Our justice system has served us well against those who would harm us for over two hundred years, and it will continue to do so. On the other hand, if any of these detainees are innocent - a very likely circumstance, given the dragnet-like way in which they were swept up - then their detention is an outrageous evil, and they should immediately be released.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, concluded that neither the President nor Congress may “switch the Constitution on or off at will“. The Court rejected the legal fiction that, because Guantanamo Bay is technically part of Cuba, the detainees have no recourse under the U.S. Constitution.

This is a great victory for due process and for the American legal system, and a bright day for friends of liberty everywhere. The only dark spot on this decision is that it was by a narrow, 5-to-4 majority. (Scalia’s dissent begins “America is at war with radical Islamists” and goes on to cry about how the terrorists will kill us if we don’t lock people up indefinitely with no trial. I am not joking.) If John McCain is elected president and has the chance to make the next few appointments to the Supreme Court, the fragile constitutional bulwarks which still stand against arbitrary government power will be in extremely serious jeopardy.

In 2006, Norman Solomon wrote War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. His book detailed the information tactics the American government uses to launch wars.

War Made Easy has been such an influential book that it has now been made into a movie of the same name. You can view it here or you can order a copy of the DVD here.

I was able to attend a viewing of “War Made Easy” last Saturday night at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis (NCMR2008). This crisply edited movie was narrated by Sean Penn. Much of what keeps this movie engaging are the dozens of carefully chosen news media clips generated during various American wars for the past 50 years, including large numbers of videos clips from the Vietnam war and the Iraq occupation. The magic of “War Made Easy” is that the directors carefully edited and arranged these clips to show us that nothing much has really changed: If an American president has decided that he wants to go to war, the watchdog American media is likely to become a lapdog and we will inevitably go to war.

Following the screening of “War Made Easy,” I attended a discussion of the movie led by media critic Norman Solomon and the co-director and producer of the movie, Loretta Alper. The following morning, Ms. Alper granted me the opportunity to interview her further regarding the making of “War Made Easy.”

Whenever we Americans go to war, we get there through a well-documented series of stages. As I watched “War Made Easy,” I saw better than ever that these stages are entirely predictable in the context of America’s warmongering ways.

Perhaps this characterization of America sounds too shrill, but just look around. The evidence is everywhere that war is a sport in America just as sports are warlike. Our TV shows and movies overflow with violence as a first-rate method of dealing with conflict. The toys we foist on our boys extol violence as the most obvious way of settling disputes. We challenge each other with statements like “support the troops,” no matter what those troops are doing (and see here ). We are all too ready to invoke the word “war,” because that word triggers a ready-made conceptual frame for freely and guiltlessly expressing ourselves with bullets, bombs and blood. In America, this frame of war is such an incredibly effective filter that we proceed to consider only the “benefits” of war and we ignore the massive damages inflicted on both war-zone civilians and upon millions of Americans (and see here).

For most Americans, it is difficult to see that we are truly a nation of warmongers. After all, we are so absolutely used to being the way we are that even the most obvious things have become difficult to see. As George Orwell once noted, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Before seeing “War Made Easy,” I was already familiar with the FAIR study documenting the manner in which our media rolled over rather than risk being accused of being unpatriotic. How much does the media roll over? So much so, that Americans see only an extremely filtered set of images representing the war. We see pictures of happy soldiers shipping out to “do their duty.” Pictures of dismembered civilian children are much too inconvenient for American patriotism, however.

Yes, Americans have become warriors looking for wars. America is a place where the thinnest of excuses will get the whole war machine revved. It is one of the points made by “War Made Easy” that America is gasoline needing only a small spark of an excuse to get us exploding off to war. Almost any excuse will do, it seems, and it doesn’t matter whether that excuse entirely false. In the 1960s, all it would took was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, an incident which never actually happened at all (based upon a recently declassified NSA document and other evidence). Nonetheless, the claim of the Gulf of Tonkin incident opened the floodgates to the American military buildup in Vietnam.

In 1993, all it took was a few well-placed public officials to stir up worries about “weapons of mass destruction” that didn’t exist. At that point, the confirmation bias and the herd instinct take over. How warped has our national perspective become? Whatever any perceived outsider does, we will see in the worst possible light and we will make damned sure that every other American becomes equally xenophobic. When this level of dysfunction occurs in an individual, we call that individual mentally ill. When it occurs nationwide, we call it “patriotism.”

The above observations are necessary prelude to my understanding of “War Made Easy.” I needed to consider these issues because of a question I had trouble getting past: Why isn’t going to war easy for most countries other than the United States? One obvious answer is that most other countries have not invested in a massive military infrastructure. The U.S. is physically able go to war at the push of a button, while most other would first require a long-term military buildup. The next obvious question, though, is why most other countries have not invested in their military might to the same extent as the United States. My unfortunate conclusion is that the U.S. has a warmonger mentality. When the President of the U.S. says we need to go to war, the citizens are already half-primed to agree. This would not be the case with, for example, the Prime Minister of Norway.

“War Made Easy” is an illustration of the predictable steps that will occur as soon as the spark of a false threat hits the gasoline of American militaristic exceptionalism. We see this same pattern over and over. Here are some of the predictable steps that occur when an American president presses for war. All of these are well substantiated by “War Made Easy.”

I. Public dialogue becomes simplistic. Consider Pat Buchanan’s warning that “When the war begins, the debate ends.” The media clips offered by “War Made Easy” substantiate the claim that once war is under way, there is no more media coverage for the rationale for the war, but only for the progress of the war. Once war is under way, it is produced like a TV show. The information from the war zone is tightly controlled by the government. The media does not protest this tight control, because it desperately craves the access and the market share. Therefore, whatever labels the government gives to a battle or a war (e.g., “Shock and Awe”), the media readily embraces it.

II. The President’s case for war is always built upon deception; the official story is false or it omits numerous key facts. Instead, the case is made primarily upon spin.

III. Americans are portrayed as “reluctant fighters.” We’d rather not go to war, but circumstances are allegedly forcing our hand. (more…)

Tonight, I had the privilege to attend a private screening of Phil Donahue’s new movie, “Body of War.” The film was shown to several hundred people attending the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In his introduction to the film, Donahue indicated that “We have the most sanitized war in our history.” His point was that the American people cannot deal appropriately about this war if they can’t see the images related to the war. He implored, “Show the people the sacrifices the men and women of this country are making.” The American people cannot feel the pain caused by this war, because the full story of the war is not available to them, thanks to the continuing media blackout of all inconvenient images and stories. Instead of learning about what’s really happening in Iraq, the American people keep getting distracted with things like entertainment parading as news or tax cuts.

Donahue stated that the US involvement in Iraq has caused more than 20,000 “grievous injuries,” a fact which he finds “beyond horrible.”

What are the kinds of images that the American people are denied? Everyone knows about the government’s attempt to keep Americans from seeing pictures of coffins of soldiers returning from Iraq. There are equally dramatic pictures available, however. One of those was briefly shown in the film, and it was run only in the Rocky Mountain News. It is a photo of a woman who wanted to sleep next to the coffin of her husband (James Cathey, an Iraq soldier) while military guards stood by. This was to be her last night with him. She slept on a little mattress almost underneath the coffin.

Donahue’s point is straightforward. “Show us the war. We are adults. We can then decide if you want to end this damn war now.”

Donahue learned of the subject of the movi