The Wisdom of Doubt, Part I

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There’s an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald’s new book (A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, to be published June 26) in Salon today. Here’s just a snip:

One of the principal dangers of vesting power in a leader who is convinced of his own righteousness — who believes that, by virtue of his ascension to political power, he has been called to a crusade against Evil — is that the moral imperative driving the mission will justify any and all means used to achieve it. …

… Intoxicated by his own righteousness and therefore immune from doubt, the Manichean warrior becomes capable of acts of moral monstrousness that would be unthinkable in the absence of such unquestionable moral conviction. One who believes himself to be leading a supreme war against Evil on behalf of Good will be incapable of understanding any claims that he himself is acting immorally.

Glenn’s point of view nicely tracks what’s been rattling around in my own head for the past few days. As I’ve mentioned I’m going to be part of a religion panel at the Yearly Kos convention in August. After I got the invitation I began to think about what I might say, and write it down, and I am up to about a three-hour sermon at this point. I suppose I might have to boil that down a little. But the primary point I hope to make is this: What the world needs now is doubt.

Yeah, I know the song goes “What the world needs now is love.” That, too. But I think we should work on the doubt first.

These days religious people want to be called “people of faith.” But I object to the practice of using the word faith as a synonym for religion. Faith is a component of religion, to one degree or another, but not religion itself.

Zen students are told that the path of Zen takes “great faith, great doubt, and great determination. I found a dharma talk about this by Sensei Sevan Ross, who is the director of the Chicago Zen Center, called “The Distance Between Faith and Doubt.” Here’s just a bit:

Great Faith and Great Doubt are two ends of a spiritual walking stick. We grip one end with the grasp given to us by our Great Determination. We poke into the underbrush in the dark on our spiritual journey. This act is real spiritual practice – gripping the Faith end and poking ahead with the Doubt end of the stick. If we have no Faith, we have no Doubt. If we have no Determination, we never pick up the stick in the first place.

Faith and doubt are supposed to be opposites, but the Sensei says “if we have no faith, we have no doubt.” I would say, also, that true faith requires true doubt; without doubt, faith is not faith. This is exactly the sort of paradox that permeates philosophical Taoism and its cousin, Zen Buddhism, but which is alien to the way most westerners understand faith and doubt.

Zennies are, I admit, not exactly in the mainstream of American religion. Zennies were never all that mainstream in Asian religion, for that matter. Even so, in the histories of the major monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — you can find many great theologians, scholars, rabbis, contemplatives, and mystics whose religious understanding came from wrestling with their doubts.

I found an online Catholic encyclopedia that defined doubt as:

A state in which the mind is suspended between two contradictory propositions and unable to assent to either of them. … Doubt is opposed to certitude, or the adhesion of the mind to a proposition without misgiving as to its truth; and again to opinion, or a mental adhesion to a proposition together with such a misgiving.

I like that definition. To religious seekers and mystics, “A state in which the mind is suspended between two contradictory propositions and unable to assent to either of them” is a fertile place from which profound understanding may grow. Certainty, on other hand, is a sterile rock that grows nothing.

Unfortunately, religious institutions tend to be run by dogmatists, not seekers. And dogmatists don’t like doubt. This same attitude spills over into non-religious beliefs and ideologies. Some people (me, for example) enjoy diving into a nice, messy paradox or conundrum to get to the bottom of it. Others hate ambiguity and want easily digestible bumper-sticker answers for everything. We call the latter sort of people “conservatives.”

This Psychology Today article by Jay Dixit discusses the psychology of political opinion. Here’s a bit:

The most comprehensive review of personality and political orientation to date is a 2003 meta-analysis of 88 prior studies involving 22,000 participants. The researchers–John Jost of NYU, Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland, and Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway of Berkeley–found that conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.

The study’s authors also concluded that conservatives have less tolerance for ambiguity, a trait they say is exemplified when George Bush says things like, “Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think,” and “I’m the decider.” Those who think the world is highly dangerous and those with the greatest fear of death are the most likely to be conservative.

Liberals, on the other hand, are “more likely to see gray areas and reconcile seemingly conflicting information,” says Jost. As a result, liberals like John Kerry, who see many sides to every issue, are portrayed as flip-floppers. “Whatever the cause, Bush and Kerry exemplify the cognitive styles we see in the research,” says Jack Glaser, one of the study’s authors, “Bush in appearing more rigid in his thinking and intolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity, and Kerry in appearing more open to ambiguity and to considering alternative positions.”

I’m not sure I would have picked John Kerry as an example of a liberal truth-seeker, but I think the point is valid. Conservatives objected to this study, claiming that the authors are liberals and therefore biased in spite of their rigorous methodology. “Liberal bias” is, of course, one of the Right’s favorite bumper sticker answers to any fact that challenges their assumptions.

Our culture looks at doubt as something to overcome. Being without doubt is celebrated as a virtue, and if you do have doubts you are supposed to replace them with certainties as soon as possible. But I say the ideal is to have faith and doubt in balance. This includes faith in and doubt about yourself. Too much doubt is crippling, but so is not enough doubt, although in a different way.

Our President, for example, is a man without doubt. This may be the single biggest reason he’s a disaster at his job.

Recently Peter Birkenhead wrote a piece for Salon called “Better to Be Hamlet Than King George.” We have created a culture, he said, that confuses leadership with “an almost psychotic form of false optimism.” I’d leave out the “almost.” The Bush Administration, Birkenhead continued, is riddled with people who lack the wisdom of doubt, the grace of humility, and the simple ability to learn from mistakes.

Let’s face it, George Bush doesn’t have to doubt himself, any more than Donald Trump or Tom Cruise or Mitt Romney do. We live in a culture where they will never be forced to examine their prejudices or flaws. Of course, they have been denied the true confidence of people who are brave enough to face their doubts and who know there are worse things than feeling insecure. Like, say, feeling too secure. Pumped up by steroidic pseudo-confidence and anesthetized by doubt-free sentimentality, they are incapable of feeling anything authentic and experiencing the world. But that hasn’t stopped them, and won’t stop others, from succeeding in a society that is more enamored of a non-reality-based conception of leadership than previous generations were.

The neocons and others who surround President Bush ought to be rounded up by psychologists for intensive study. Truly, P.T. Barnum himself couldn’t have imagined these creatures. No matter how many times their predictions are proved wrong and their grand theories fall apart in the face of reality, their faith in themselves remains absolute. They, and only they, understand what’s wrong with the world and know how to fix it. They, and only they, are so perfect they are above the rule of law itself.

Although the neocons’ worldview is not thought of as religious, in fact it comes from the same pathological certainty that fueled the Inquisition and the destruction of the World Trade Center. Wisdom comes from facing not only one’s doubts but also the many ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in human life. People who refuse to walk that path are what we call “fools.”

Naturally I’m just getting wound up, but I think I’ll stop here for now. Am I making sense, so far?

Update: Glenn has a blog post up about the excerpt and responses to it so far. People are commenting that Bush doesn’t really believe the moral and religious shit he spouts. He just spouts this as part of his Evil Conspiracy to Take Over the World, they say. Glenn responds to this nicely. I only want to add that while no one can know what evil lurks in the heart of Bush, it’s plain as day that a big chunk of the American public has bought into this good-versus-evil, all-faith-all-the-time worldview, and you find it reflected in mass media day in and day out.

Support Your Local Progressive Infrastructure

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Mara Liasson of NPR reports on building a progressive movement.

Democrats and the progressive groups that support them have for years looked with envy at the political infrastructure built by conservatives. What they saw was a disciplined apparatus of foundations, think tanks, media outlets and advocacy groups working together to advance a right-wing agenda.

Now, liberal groups have developed a whole new infrastructure of their own — call it the vast, left-wing conspiracy. …

… In the past four years, dozens of new, progressive think tanks, media watchdog groups, publications and grass-roots organizations have been created to amplify the Democrats’ message, and, perhaps, more importantly, oppose the policies of the Bush administration.

I cannot stress how important this is. Right-wing extremism didn’t come to dominate American politics by accident. It happened because many years ago a cadre of wealthy right wingers built a huge infrastructure to muscle everyone else out of the way. This infrastructure not only allows the Right to dominate our national political debates; it also mentors and develops “talent” so that there are always plenty of presentable spokespeople for the Cause who don’t have to get day jobs.

Parts of the new progressive infrastructure you’ve heard of — Moveon.org, Media Matters for America, Center for American Progress. Here in New York, there’s the Drum Major Institute, which is a nonprofit think tank dedicated to fueling progressive ideas. This Thursday, June 21, DMI is holding its annual benefit at Cipriani 23rd Street. This year’s honorees are NYC Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Tavis Smiley.

Last year’s party was a blast, although it’s a bittersweet memory now because Steve Gilliard was there.

Anyway, I appreciate DMI because it focuses on the basic progressive issues that sometimes get lost in the struggle over the war in Iraq — labor, health care, education, progressive immigration policy, etc. The war in Iraq will end, someday, one way or another; but domestic issues are forever. Or at least will be around as long as we’re around. They also provide support and training for area activists through fellowships and internships.

I invite you to cruise around the DMI web site to see what they do. Buy a ticket to the benefit or make a donation if you can. You may be tired of being hit up for money (I need some too, btw). But the fact is that taking back America requires hard work and infrastructure.

Fighting Them There …

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Yesterday Brian Ross of ABC reported:

Large teams of newly trained suicide bombers are being sent to the United States and Europe, according to evidence contained on a new videotape obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

U.S. intelligence officials said the video was part of “an aggressive and sophisticated propaganda campaign” that shouldn’t frighten us. Instead, we are supposed to be frightened by damnfools with grandiose but unworkable plans to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. Actually, if U.S. intelligence officials are telling us not to worry, maybe we should worry. Brian Ross continues,

“It doesn’t take too many who are willing to actually do it and be able to slip through the net and get into the United States or England and cause a lot of damage,” said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism official.

The possibility of suicide bombers has been at the back of my mind since 9/11. First, because New York (where my children and I live) is the first place they’ll come to. And second, because as much as the nation went off the deep end after 9/11, I don’t even want to think of the insanity that will arise if suicide bombers start detonating themselves in random locations. (Of course, if the suicide bombers concentrate on New York City, the righties will blame us New Yorkers somehow.)

And I know you’re all thinking what I’m thinking — so much for “fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here.”

Anyway, the alarm brought a quick and decisive response from crack rightie idiocy squads. For example, La Boobala of Atlas Shrugs wrote,

Watch the dhimmicrats blame Bush. “He created the jihadis!” They love anyone or anything that hates America.

Love immigration or hate immigration, you must enforce the borders and get a grip already on who is here and why. This aint no Mudd club, no CBGB, this aint no foolin around. …

… After all, anyone could come over our southern border and then be home free.

Another rightie, Gina Cobb, writes,

By the way, how do you feel about border security now?

I should explain that righties live in an alternative universe in which “evil libruhls” and “dhimmicrats” rule America and are against border security. In our common reality, of course, both parties are all in favor of border security but differ on how it can be accomplished.

Allahpundit finds it remarkable that one man in the video — allegedly the leader of the group bound for Britain — spoke English. Apparently no one outside an English-speaking country ever learns English unless they are up to no good.

Jeff G. writes at Protein Wisdom:

And by “U.S. intelligence officials,” Ross presumably means those same folks who believed 911 would never happen, that Islamic terrorism was a phantom threat (cough cough Larry Johnson cough), and who, in a show of political gamesmanship, sent lazy gadfly and CIA house husband Joe Wilson off to uncover the “truth” about Saddam’s nuclear ambitions and connections to terror states.

No, Jeff. The people who thought 9/11 would never happen and who didn’t take Islamic terrorism seriously were “White House officials.” Intelligence officials were the ones desperately trying to get George and Condi and Rummy to haul their heads out of their asses and pay attention to the threat before 9/11.

I have no idea what “cough cough Larry Johnson cough” refers to. I assume that somewhere the righties found an old quote from Larry Johnson saying that Islamic terrorism was a phantom threat, but I googled for this and couldn’t find it. If anyone can interpret this for me I’d be grateful. And it looks like some people still won’t admit that Joe Wilson reported the truth.

Remarkably, Little Lulu — she who waxes hysterical over every phony “plot” the Bush Administration announces — has been silent on this one. Word may have come down from on high to downplay suicide bombers. This worries me.

The September Club

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I’m not sure exactly when September became the unofficial deadline for Congress to make up its mind about Iraq. The White House might have moved the first down marker to September at some point — they move it so much it’s hard to keep up. Or, it might have been the report from Andrea Mitchell last April that “the moderate center of the Republican caucus” had decided to give the President until Labor Day to show some progress. “After that, if it doesn’t work, they’re running.”

Lots of people don’t believe September will matter, and they could be right. I think some Republicans will jump ship in September, but I have no idea if enough of them will jump ship to make a real difference. Reaching a veto-proof majority would require approximately a third of Republicans in the House and Senate to vote with the Dem majority against the war (if all the Dems in the House voted against the war it would take somewhat less than a third, but so far the House Dems haven’t been unanimous).

The claim that the decision to stay or go rests with Gen. Petraeus’ September report has never been anything other than a rhetorical device. The real “report” will be in the form of campaign poll numbers. As the 2008 election season approaches, all but the most reptilian-brained Republicans will be re-evaluating their positions in Iraq vis à vis their future political careers. As unpopular as the war is, however, it’s going to take a huge leap into the unknown for Republicans to abandon the President and the Faux Snooze team and vote against the war.

We do make fun of Democrats for being spineless wonders. But both parties are like old dogs still doing the few tricks they learned when they were puppies. Democrats are “spineless” because they don’t work together to throw their collective weight around. But Republicans for years have been powerful because they’ve been monolithic. They’re a tightly packed herd always moving in the same direction, stomping everything in its path. This has been true for so long that most (if not all) Republicans now serving in Congress don’t comprehend any other way to be a congressional Republican. So you’ve got a whole generation of Republicans whose only tricks are to recite GOP talking points and vote as the party tells them to vote.

In other words, although the GOP herd is mighty, as individuals Republicans probably are just as spineless as the Dems. So most of ’em will stampede off the cliff with the rest of the herd. Conversely, if enough Republicans do split from the herd — and I have no idea what number “enough” is — more may choose to follow.

And if the herd breaks with Bush over the immigration issue, which it seems to be doing, would that not make it easier for it to break with him on Iraq, also?

The bottom line is that many things are possible these days. Our political situation is more fluid than it has been in years. All that’s holding the old status quo together is a failure of nerve, and a refusal to understand changing realities, among politicians of both parties.

In the past few days it has become obvious even to war supporters that the situation in Iraq won’t be better by September. If anything, it will be worse. So now they’re frantically shoving the goal posts as far into the distance as they can; clear out of the stadium and into another zip code, if possible.

Around the beginning of June the Great New Talking Point trickling out of the White House and dutifully repeated by Bushie operatives everywhere was “the Korea model.” David Sanger reported for the New York Times on June 3:

For the first time, the Bush administration is beginning publicly to discuss basing U.S. troops in Iraq for years, even decades to come, a subject so fraught with political land mines that officials are tiptoeing around the inevitable questions about what the long-term mission would be there.

President George W. Bush has long talked about the need to maintain a U.S. military presence in the region, without saying exactly where. Several visitors to the White House say that in private, he has sounded intrigued by what he calls the “Korea model,” a reference to the large U.S. presence in South Korea for the 54 years since the armistice that ended open hostilities between North and South Korea.

But it was not until Wednesday that Bush’s spokesman, Tony Snow, publicly reached for the Korea example in talking about Iraq – setting off an analogy war between the White House and critics who charged that the administration was again disconnected from the realities of Iraq.

Snow said Korea was one way to think about how the mission could evolve into an “over-the-horizon support role” whenever U.S. troops are no longer patrolling the streets of Baghdad.

The next day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates also mentioned Korea, saying that establishing a long-term garrison was a lot smarter than how the United States handled its departure from Vietnam, “where we just left lock, stock and barrel.”

Bush must really, really like “the Korea model,” because the Bushies are sticking with it. Never mind that the Iraq situation resembles the Korean situation about as much as soap resembles spinach. With righties, rhetoric is reality, and a catchy talking point is worth a thousand pages of policy.

But you know they’re desperate, because many of the arguments they had hoped to postpone until after the August brush harvest at Crawford are already being argued. Arianna Huffington writes that “The battle for September has already begun.” Gen. Petraeus himself is already saying there will be no progress by September.

Meaning, the Bushies are pulling out all the stops to defuse the notion that September represents some kind of deadline. That’s a good enough reason for Democrats to continue to talk about a September deadline. Dems should be getting in front of cameras and microphones every bleeping day between now and Labor Day quoting every Republican who said anything about making a decision in September. Club Republicans over the head vigorously with the September deadline. And if Republicans wimp out, club them some more. Real hard.

See also: Steven Simon and Ray Takeyh, “We’ve Lost. Here’s How to Handle It“; and Andrew J. Bacevich, “More Troops, More Troubles.”

Heresies

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This morning I heard a Buddhist teacher give a talk that referred to a teisho (something like a sermon) on the Beatitudes given by Taizan Maezumi Roshi. So when I got home I looked for the teisho on the Web; here it is. You probably know (because you are smarter than three-fourths of the nation’s population) that the Beatitudes are from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Maezumi was an old-school Japanese Zen master. So it’s interesting (to me, anyway) to see what Maezumi did with the Beatitudes. He treated them very respectfully, and (while acknowleding that Christians might understand them differently) compared them to nearly identical Buddhist teachings. They’d make good koans, the roshi said.

As a human being, what is the difference between you and me, or between Buddhist and Christian? Even among Buddhists and among Christians there are different ways of approaching it. But what we appreciate should not be different — however, we say it — being one with God, or saved by God, or liberated by God, or even condemned by God. If we can really selfless feel the existence of that, I am sure we will know the savior.

By “savior” Maezumi did not mean Jesus, although he also did not not mean Jesus. And there’s another koan for you.

In today’s Seattle Times, Janet I. Tu writes about an Episcopal priest who recently converted to Islam, although she is also still an Episcopal priest. This is causing a certain amount of consternation among some righties. Scott Johnson of Power Tools sniffs that the priest couldn’t have been “a believing Christian” before the conversion, even though she has been a priest for 20 years and the conversion happened just 15 months ago.

I used to be what Mr. Johnson calls “a believing Christian,” and now I’m not. It’s not an unusual phenomenon. Sometimes as people grow and mature they find they need to move on to other things. And yet I don’t say that Christians are wrong. We religious people are all thrashing around trying to comprehend the incomprehensible in our own imperfect way. Religion itself is just an interface.

The Rev. Ann Holmes Redding, the Muslim-Episcopalian priest, says,

Redding doesn’t feel she has to resolve all the contradictions. People within one religion can’t even agree on all the details, she said. “So why would I spend time to try to reconcile all of Christian belief with all of Islam?

“At the most basic level, I understand the two religions to be compatible. That’s all I need.”

She says she felt an inexplicable call to become Muslim, and to surrender to God — the meaning of the word “Islam.”

“It wasn’t about intellect,” she said. “All I know is the calling of my heart to Islam was very much something about my identity and who I am supposed to be.

“I could not not be a Muslim.”

Zen generally takes a dim view of religion-as-identity and any sentence that includes the phrase “who I am supposed to be,” but even so I can relate to what she says. I’ve known people in a conversion process to keep a toe in both pools for a time. It’s common to meet people in formal Zen training who still considered themselves to be Christians or Jews and who practice a kind of fusion religion. Eventually some might experience an epiphany-kensho and choose to take just one seat or the other. Some might not. In any event, all such people I have known have been incredibly sincere, and they thought and worked deeply at their religious practices.

They didn’t just believe what they were supposed to believe out of tribal loyalty, in other words.

Yesterday I found a fascinating article at the Guardian Comment Is Free site. Chris Duggan writes,

In a world dominated by Middle East conflicts, it is more urgent than ever that words and creeds emerge from the trenches and dare to divest themselves of the armour that is designed to shore up a reassuring sense of identity, under the guise of religious faith. This process has always been a central concern of the mystical tradition of all the world religions: those who penetrate to the heart of their faith invite their coreligionists to go beyond words and concepts to a level of experience that escapes definition.

Exactly. And I recommend reading all of Chris Duggan’s article.

The Rev. Ms. Redding’s bishop is wise enough to give her space to follow her bliss and let whatever process she is going through play itself out. It’s true that there are some essential doctrinal conflicts between Christianity and Islam, and eventually she may choose one or the other. That’s something she needs to work out for herself. That kind of work is the essence of what religion actually is. Adopting a belief system dictated to you by a religious institution is something that passes for religion, but IMO that’s a tepid and watered-down imitation of the real thing.

I read in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy about Saint Anselm of Canterbury. Saint Anselm was “the outstanding Christian philosopher and theologian of the eleventh century,” it says.

Anselm’s motto is “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum). … Faith for Anselm is more a volitional state than an epistemic state: it is love for God and a drive to act as God wills. In fact, Anselm describes the sort of faith that “merely believes what it ought to believe” as “dead.” … So “faith seeking understanding” means something like “an active love of God seeking a deeper knowledge of God.”

I admit that the word epistemic gives me a headache, but it has to do with the validity of knowledge and belief. So Anselm’s approach to faith is not about trying to get his belief system validated. Beliefs by themselves have no purpose. Faith is not an end in itself. Rather, Anselm says, faith is a means for seeking a deeper knowledge of God (or the Dharmakaya, or the Great Absolute Whatever). A religion that isn’t looking past the dogmas to a deeper truth is a dead religion. And I say people with dead religions shouldn’t throw stones.

Ways and Wills

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A commenter to the last post wrote “If there is a will to stop illegal immigration, then there is a way to do it. The trouble is that there is no will to do it.” For the record, I don’t buy into the “if there’s a will, there’s a way” notion. It may be that illegal immigration can be much reduced, but when you are dealing with human behaviors absolute control is never possible. As long as there’s a will to enter the U.S. illegally, someone will find a way.

Seems to me the key to reducing illegal immigration is to focus on the “will” part of the equation. As long as illegals can get jobs more easily here than they can at home, they’ll have the will. Ah, but that’s the rub. Money is being made on the backs of illegals, m’dears, and where money is involved all that homeland, mother, God and flag stuff flies out the window.

Illegal labor is not some rogue thing outside the system. Illegal labor is built into the system. “The System” has decided we need those people to pick fruit and watch the kids. “The System” turned a blind eye when federal contractors recruited illegal aliens to do the dirty work in New Orleans for slave wages.

Paul Krugman wrote in his March 27 column —

…many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration — especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren’t for Mexican immigration.

That’s why it’s intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does, that immigrants do ”jobs that Americans will not do.” The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays — and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants.

And we’re all complicit in this, y’know. I remember a few months ago, during a crackdown on illegal aliens, there were news stories about fruit orchard owners watching their lovely crop rot, unpicked, because there were no illegal aliens to pick the fruit. I assume if they’d rounded up legal workers and paid them minimum wage, the orchard owners would have suffered a net loss. This is basic Wal Mart economics; you offer lower prices in exchange for lower wages.

Howard Fineman made an interesting observation last week. No, really. He wrote,

Though I’ve never heard him use the term, my guess is that George W. Bush sees himself as a hacendado, an estate owner in Old Mexico.

That would give him a sense of Southwestern noblesse, duty-bound not just to work “his” people, but to protect them as well.

His advisor, Carlo Rove, has explained that a system called “democracy” now gives peasants something called “the vote.” It would be shrewd, Rove said, for hacendados to grant their workers’ citizenship.

That’s the best explanation I have for why Bush is in the midst of what may be a suicide mission on immigration policy—embarrassing for him and ruinous for his party.

I suspect there’s something to that. For all his affected folksiness, Dubya is the child of privilege. He sees illegal immigrants as a resource to be exploited, not as competition for his wages. He probably doesn’t comprehend why the base is so up in arms about illegal immigration.

But for many, many years — going back at least to the 1960s and the revolt of white southern Democrats against the Civil Rights movement — the Republican Party has oh, so carefully nurtured its base by cultivating racism and xenophobia. And you can’t feed something for fifty years and then expect it to turn off like an electric lamp. Digby wrote,

All the gains that Bush made over the years to securing the Latino population with appeals to traditional values are being wiped out by the racist id of the Republican base.

But what did he expect? That they would sit still for his “compassionate” outreach to a bunch of brown people just because the corporations want cheap labor? Of course not. Live by racism, die by racism. But they had no choice, really. Karl Rove knows that without being able to carry at least a large minority of Latino votes, they cannot cobble together a majority. As Florida goes … well, let’s just say they have a problem. George Bush is not desperately pushing this bill just because of big agriculture or the restaurant lobby. He’s pushing it on behalf of all big business — his real base — because if the neanderthals in the GOP base are successful at seriously alienating the Latino vote, the ship is going down

And if the GOP loses the knee jerk loyalty of racists and xenophobes, the ship also is going down. In short, the GOP is wedging itself.

Give Up

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Congress is going to take another shot at a comprehensive immigration bill next week. This is mostly because President Bush wants them to. But no good will come of this, unless it’s a total revolt of the Right against Bush.

No sensible immigration bill can be written in the current political climate. There is way too much hysteria coming from the Right. As it says in an editorial in today’s New York Times:

Congress’s struggle with immigration reform has been a horror movie, with one false ending after another, and there is still no telling what the monster will look like when the lights finally come up. People who have been watching through their fingers are right to be worried; the bill was harsh and has gotten harsher, a reflection of the rigidity of those who have vowed to kill any reform they consider amnesty.

Republicans are playing immigration bill poker, upping the ante by tossing harsher and harsher amendment proposals into the pot.

Lindsey Graham, who has spoken movingly about the need for reasonable, decent treatment of immigrants, especially immigrant families, has been trying to take the debate back to the dark days of Representative Jim Sensenbrenner’s anti-immigrant bill, with an amendment that would turn people who overstay their visas into criminals subject to minimum 60-day prison sentences.

It seems likely that Mr. Graham, who is one of the “grand bargainers” and is up for re-election next year, has been burned by the uproar on the hard right and feels the need to act tough, lest he be saddled — as Representative Steve King of Iowa has urged — with the scarlet letter A, for amnesty.

Any comprehensive immigration bill written by the current Congress is likely to be a monstrosity that future congresses will have dismantle.

CNN reports that rightie bloggers are in maximum snit mode, which of course we all knew. Some of them are asking Congress to secure the borders first, before going on to other immigration measures. That might not be a bad idea. Although normally I’d advocate tackling an issue comprehensively, if that’s not possible now (and it isn’t) it would be better to bite of whatever piece of the bill Congress is able to chew. And rightie fantasies about the Open Borders Lobby aside, securing the borders is, in principle, something both parties can agree on.

How to secure the borders is another matter, of course. But even a stupid border security bill would be less damaging to the nation, long-term, than whatever legislative atrocity the comprehensive immigration bill is likely to become now.

Then, we can hope, in a little while the hysteria will die down and Dems will have a larger majority in Congress. And then maybe it will be possible to create an immigration policy that is not a reflection of our worst xenophobic impulses.

The White House Jive

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Yesterday we learned the “surge” isn’t working. Big surprise. Today, Eugene Robinson says the White House is pulling a bait-and-switch.

White House spokesman Tony Snow was purposeful on Wednesday in stomping, trampling, tap-dancing upon and otherwise giving a definitive beat-down to any expectations of a serious, fact-based reassessment of Iraq policy in the fall. Never mind that the White House raised those expectations in the first place.

The September scenario has been a rhetorical mainstay for the administration and its supporters, a major argument for ignoring all the bad news from Iraq and giving Bush’s troop escalation a chance to work. Let’s wait for Gen. David H. Petraeus, the man who’s now running the war, to submit his progress report. At that point, went the White House argument, the “way forward” would become clear.

The fog of war seems to have closed back in. “I have warned from the very beginning about expecting some sort of magical thing to happen in September,” Snow told the White House press corps, whose collective recollection was somewhat different. “What I’m saying is, in September you’ll have an opportunity to have metrics.”

Just doin’ the White House jive.

This is not about what’s good for America, or for Iraq. It’s not about bringing Democracy to anyone. It’s not about victory. It’s not even about defeating terrorism.

It’s about Bush’s ego. It’s about keeping troops in Iraq as long as he is President so he doesn’t have to admit he has failed.

I’ve said many times that the whole point of the “surge” was to short-circuit support on Capitol Hill for the Baker Iraq Study Group plan. The ISG plan, tepid as it was, might very well have been supported by a veto-proof majority in Congress. If it had, it would have meant that Bush no longer had total control of the U.S. military action in Iraq. And that’s the one and only reason the ISG was kneecapped by the White House.

Now, my suspicion is that at least some Democrats in Congress realize this. I can’t prove it, but I believe it to be so. They just don’t think they have the political capital to come out and say “the President of the United States is a psychopath.” So they keep making speeches about how they hope the President will see reason and start playing well with others, knowing full well he’s not capable of either. These speeches are not for Bush, but for the media and the constituents.

There’s not much else the White House can do to postpone the inevitable except kick the can down the road, and they hope they can keep kicking that can until January 2009. You might recall that less than a month ago the White House was talking about a “post-surge” strategy. And this “new” strategy, as explained by David Ignatius, sounded remarkably like the same shit that was in the old “Strategy for Victory” they trotted out in December 2005. And that strategy was just the same old talking points, warmed over, that they’d been repeating since, oh, about summer of 2003, as I recall.

But this most recent “new” strategy was run up a flagpole just about three weeks ago, and I guess no one saluted. It was so lame even the hawks didn’t pay much attention to it. The terminally clueless David Ignatius wrote on May 22, 2007 (this year, note):

The post-surge policy would, in many ways, track the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report, which senior administration officials say the president now supports. It also reflects the administration’s recognition that, given political realities in Washington, some policy adjustments must be made. The goal is an approach that would have sufficient bipartisan support so it could be sustained even after the Bush administration leaves office in early 2009.

Notice they even tried to package the “post-surge” plan as something like ISG Lite (less filling! tastes great!) just to increase its marketing appeal, even though it resembled the Baker-Hamilton report about as much as a table resembles a horse.

Senior officials discussed the outlines of a “post-surge” policy late last week in what they said was an effort to build bipartisan support from Congress and the American public. Their comments appeared to be a trial balloon aimed at testing whether a Baker-Hamilton approach could gain traction in Washington. The description of a post-surge policy focused on elements that Democrats say they would continue to support, such as training the Iraqi military and hunting al-Qaeda, even as they set a timetable for withdrawing combat forces.

As I said, it was so lame, and so obviously just the same old hash in a new can, that even Republicans in Congress brushed it off. So now in less than three weeks the White House has gone from talking “post-surge” to kicking the surge can further down the road. It’s all they’ve got left.

Every now and then someone will demand to know what Petraeus could possibly say in September that will make a dime’s worth of difference to anybody. And the answer is, nothing. The “September strategy” never had anything to do with what Patraeus might say. It’s all just theater.

Waiting for General Petraeus’s September report is a bit like watching the first act of Il barbiere di Siviglia and waiting for the bass/baritone playing Figaro to trot out and sing “Largo al factotum.” Except without the orchestra, of course. You know exactly when he’s supposed to enter and every note he’s supposed to sing. The only question is whether he can get through all the “Pronto prontissimo” stuff without tying his tongue up in knots. It’s just a role, in other words.

I see that Arianna Huffington is writing about Petraeus ex machina. I think it’s closer to say the role was originally envisioned to be ex machina, but the script is already in rewrite. Whatever he says, Bush supporters will spin it as “preliminary” and the detractors will say enough is enough. Harry Reid is already calling Petraeus “out of touch.”

I say the real drama is doing on in the head’s of Republicans in Congress. Will they stand by Bush, or cut him loose? They’ve got the summer to think it over and make up their minds. The bloodshed, of course, continues.