Where Is Everyone?

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[Update: Macranger ought to have read my post all the way through before he linked to it. I don’t say what he seems to think I said.]

My impression is that yesterday’s antiwar protests got more news coverage than the big march around the White House in September 2005. And this is true in spite of the fact that the crowd showing up for the 2005 march was much bigger, estimated — conservatively — as between 100,000 and 200,000. From news stories (which, I realize, always lowball these things) it seems the turnout in Washington yesterday fell short of 100,000. Although nobody really knows.

More news coverage is not necessarily better news coverage. Take a look at the Washington Post story by Michael Ruane and Fredrick Kunkle:

A raucous and colorful multitude of protesters, led by some of the aging activists of the past, staged a series of rallies and a march on the Capitol yesterday to demand that the United States end its war in Iraq.

Under a blue sky with a pale midday moon, tens of thousands of people angry about the war and other policies of the Bush administration danced, sang, shouted and chanted their opposition.

They came from across the country and across the activist spectrum, with a wide array of grievances. Many seemed to be under 30, but there were others who said they had been at the famed war protests of the 1960s and ’70s.

Note especially —

Among the celebrities who appeared was Jane Fonda, the 69-year-old actress and activist who was criticized for sympathizing with the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. She told the crowd that this was the first time she had spoken at an antiwar rally in 34 years.

“I’ve been afraid that because of the lies that have been and continue to be spread about me and that war, that they would be used to hurt this new antiwar movement,” she told the crowd. “But silence is no longer an option.”

Dear Jane: Get a blog.

I didn’t watch television yesterday but I take it the television news was All About Jane. I don’t know that this hurt the cause — people still enflamed about Jane are likely to be Bush supporters, anyway — but I can’t see that it helped, either.

At the Agonist, Sean-Paul Kelly criticized Jane’s attendance and got slammed for it in comments. But I’m with Sean-Paul here. Public protests are about action in service to a cause. Whether Jane Fonda has a right to protest — of course she does — it not the point. Jane Fonda has a right to smear herself with molasses and sit on an anthill, but just because one has a right to do something doesn’t make it smart.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — good public protests are good public relations. Protest movements of the past were effective when they called attention to an issue and gained public sympathy for it. And the secret to doing this is what I call the “bigger asshole” rule — protests work when they make the protestees look like bigger assholes than the protesters. Martin Luther King’s marches made white racists look like assholes. Gandhi made the whole bleeping British Empire look like assholes.

The Vietnam-era antiwar protesters, on the other hand, more often than not shot themselves in the foot by coming across as bigger assholes than Richard Nixon and other Powers That Were. Steve Gilliard has a good post up today reaffirming my opinion that the Vietnam antiwar movement did little or nothing to actually stop the war.

And, m’dears, the point is to stop the war. It is not about expressing yourself, feeling good about yourself, or even “speaking truth to power.” It is about stopping the war. Action that does not advance the cause of stopping the war is not worth doing.

In fact, I wonder if these “raucous and colorful” public displays might be trivializing a deadly serious issue.

I disagree with protest defenders that any street protest is better than no street protest. Believe me; no street protesting is preferable to stupid street protesting. I have seen this with my own eyes. And these days there are plenty of ways to speak out against the war than to carry oversized puppets down a street.

That said, based on this video, the protest in Washington yesterday seemed a perfectly respectable protest, although not notably different from other protests of recent years. Some politicians actually turned out for this one, which was not true in September 2005. This is progress.

IRAQ WAR PROTEST – JAN. 27, 2007

John at AMERICAblog had mostly positive comments, also.

But will public protests like this change any minds that haven’t already been changed by events? I don’t see how.

That said, I want to respond to this post by Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House:

The May Day protest in Washington, D.C. sought to shut down the government. Some 50,000 hard core demonstrators would block the streets and intersections while putting up human barricades in front of federal offices. How exactly this would stop the war was kind of fuzzy. No matter. Nixon was ready with the army and National Guard and in the largest mass arrest in US history, clogged the jails of Washington with 10,000 kids.

Where are the clogged jails today? As I watch the demonstration on the mall today (much smaller than those in the past) I am thinking of the massive gulf between the self absorbed hodge podge of anti-globalist, pro-feminist, anti-capitalist, pro-abortion anti-war fruitcakes cheering on speakers lobbying for Palestinians, Katrina aid, and other causes not related to the war and the committed, determined bunch of kids who put their hides on the line, filling up the jails of dozens of cities, risking the billy clubs and tear gas of the police to stop what they saw as an unjust war.

The netnuts are fond of calling those of us who support the mission in Iraq chickenhawks. What do you call someone who sits on their ass in front of a keyboard, railing against the President, claiming that the United States is falling into a dictatorship, and writing about how awful this war is and yet refuses to practice the kinds of civil disobedience that their fathers and mothers used to actually bring the Viet Nam war to an end?

I call them what they are; rank cowards. There should be a million people on the mall today. Instead, there might be 50,000. Today’s antiwar left talks big but cowers in the corner. I have often written about how unserious the left is about what they believe. The reason is on the mall today. If they really thought that the United States was on the verge of becoming a dictatorship are you seriously trying to tell me that any patriotic American wouldn’t do everything in their power to prevent it rather than mouth idiotic platitudes and self serving bromides?

He as much as admits of the May Day (1971) protest, “How exactly this would stop the war was kind of fuzzy.” If I actually believed that getting myself arrested by blocking the door to the FBI building would help end the war, then I believe I would do it. But since I don’t see how such an arrest would make a damn bit of difference, except maybe get my glorious little self in the newspapers (and “no fly” lists), why would I do that? And why am I a “coward” for not doing it?

I haven’t yet smeared myself with molasses and sat on an anthill, either. Does that make me a coward? Or not crazy?

The other part of this post I want to respond to is his accusation that the antiwar left is “not serious.” He speaks of “the self absorbed hodge podge of anti-globalist, pro-feminist, anti-capitalist, pro-abortion anti-war fruitcakes cheering on speakers lobbying for Palestinians, Katrina aid, and other causes not related to the war,” and wonders why more of us don’t show up. Well, son, a lot of the reason more people don’t show up is in fact “the self absorbed hodge podge of anti-globalist, pro-feminist, anti-capitalist, pro-abortion anti-war fruitcakes cheering on speakers lobbying for Palestinians, Katrina aid, and other causes not related to the war.” It is damn frustrating for those of us serious about ending the war to spend the time and money to go somewhere for a protest and find our efforts diluted by the vocational protest crowd.

Moran is making the same error that Gary Kamiya made; he assumes that a “real” antiwar movement has to look and act just like the Vietnam-era antiwar movement. I say again, that movement failed. Why should we be emulating it today?

Moreover, claiming the left isn’t “serious” about ending the war because we’re not all engaging in pointless publicity stunts rather ignores what we are doing, and what we have accomplished. Remember the midterm elections?

Please, Rick Moran, get serious.

As for Mr. Moran’s question about people opposed to the war — “Where is everybody?” — I believe they’re here:

Lese majestie

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Ron Chusid of Liberal Values tells the story in the title: “Kerry Unleashed: US a Pariah Nation Under Bush; Authoritarian Right Upset.”

Speaking in Davos, Kerry spoke out against a major problem of the Bush foreign policy, that the United States has become “a sort of international pariah.” …

… Needless to say, the authoritarian right, who would lead this country to disaster before admitting that their leader is in error, is outraged. Little Green Fascists Footballs calls this “appalling blast at his own country,” having no understanding of the difference between one’s country and its leaders when wrong–a common trait among authoritarians.

The correction to the name Little Green Footballs is in Ron Chusid’s post. I’m glad he made it clear that this nonsense didn’t come from Little Green Fascists, which is a perfectly respectable blog.

The wingnuts can’t disprove anything Kerry said about Bush, of course; they’re just outraged he said it.

Along these lines, this was on the Guardian blog page a couple of days ago:

George Bush might have just given his state of the union address but here in Davos he’s definitely a lame duck.

One clue lies in the fact that no senior figures from the US administration are coming. In other circumstances that might be thought a snub to a meeting which aims to gather the world’s most powerful business and political leaders. But now it is just a recognition of reality. Power is shifting elsewhere and the conference organisers seem happy to acknowledge it.

There’s still lots of interest in the US, of course. Hillary Clinton, I am promised, isn’t coming – though don’t rule out a surprise. Her husband loves the place. The conference tried to persuade Barack Obama to show up, but he, too, is apparently too deep in his campaign on the otherside of the Atlantic to find the time. Maybe next year?

Still, John Kerry is coming and so is John McCain, who’s routinely described as the Republican frontrunner.

In the meantime, most people here seem to think of President Bush’s time in office as a mistake the world would do best to forget. There was even a small cheer at a session just now when a senior US business leader pointed out, with a smile, that he’ll be gone in two years. Amen to that.

See also “They’re broken men, so don’t let them take us to a new war” by Henry Porter.

Speedy Gonzales

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Marisa Taylor and Greg Gordon write for McClatchy Newspapers:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is transforming the ranks of the nation’s top federal prosecutors by firing some and appointing conservative loyalists from the Bush administration’s inner circle who critics say are unlikely to buck Washington.

The newly appointed U.S. attorneys all have impressive legal credentials, but most of them have few, if any, ties to the communities they’ve been appointed to serve, and some have had little experience as prosecutors.

For background on the U.S. Attorney scandal — it’s not generally acknowledged to be a scandal, but it should be — see old Mahablog posts U.S. Attorneys: It’s the Replacing, Stupid and The Purge. In a nutshell, the White House is using a provision inserted into the Patriot Act last year to fire U.S. attorneys and replace them without (constitutionally mandated) Senate approval.

U.S. attorneys usually are appointed at the beginning of a president’s term and serve for four years, after Senate confirmation. Firing in mid-term for reasons other than gross misconduct is extremely unusual, although not illegal. What is more fishy is that the White House has given itself the power to appoint “interim” attorneys who can serve indefinitely without confirmation by the Senate.

Taylor and Gordon of McClatchy continue,

The nine recent appointees identified by McClatchy Newspapers held high-level White House or Justice Department jobs, and most of them were handpicked by Gonzales under a little-noticed provision of the Patriot Act that became law in March. …

… Being named a U.S. attorney “has become a prize for doing the bidding of the White House or administration,” said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who’s now a professor at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “In the past, there had been a great deal of delegation to the local offices. Now, you have a consolidation of power in Washington.”

I like this part:

A Justice Department spokesman said it was “reckless” to suggest that politics had influenced the appointment process.

Sounds like a threat to me. Anyway, here are the nine new U.S. attorneys:

  • Tim Griffin, 37, the U.S. attorney for Arkansas, who was an aide to White House political adviser Karl Rove and a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.
  • Rachel Paulose, 33, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota, who served briefly as a counselor to the deputy attorney general and who, according to a former boss, has been a member of the secretive, ideologically conservative Federalist Society.
  • Jeff Taylor, 42, the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., who was an aide to Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and worked as a counselor to Gonzales and to former Attorney General John Ashcroft.
  • John Wood, U.S. attorney in Kansas City, who’s the husband of Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Julie Myers and an ex-deputy general counsel of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
  • Deborah Rhodes, 47, the U.S. attorney in Mobile, Ala., who was a Justice Department counselor.
  • Alexander Acosta, 37, the U.S. attorney in Miami, who was an assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division and a protege of conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
  • John Richter, 43, the U.S. attorney in Oklahoma City, who was the chief of staff for the Justice Department’s criminal division and acting assistant attorney general.
  • Edward McNally, the U.S. attorney in southern Illinois, who was a senior associate counsel to President Bush.
  • Matt Dummermuth, the U.S. attorney in Iowa, who was a Justice Department civil rights lawyer.


    • This is from an editorial in yesterday’s New York Times    :

    The federal investigation into Congressional corruption is approaching a crucial deadline and potential dead end. Feb. 15 is the last day on the job for United States Attorney Carol Lam of San Diego, the inquiry’s dedicated prosecutor, who is being purged by the Bush administration.

    Her investigation led to the imprisonment of former Representative Randy Cunningham, the California Republican who took millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for delivering lucrative government contracts. But just as Ms. Lam was digging into other possible wrongdoing, the White House decided to force her from office without explanation.

    Ms. Lam has been investigating the dealings of Brent Wilkes, a private contractor and deep-pocketed political contributor who was designated co-conspirator No. 1 in the Cunningham case. Mr. Wilkes developed other cozy relationships. Among other avenues, the inquiry has been looking into rich government contracts secured by corporations and lobbyists with ties to Representative Jerry Lewis — the former appropriations chairman — and his staff. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Mr. Wilkes could be indicted before Ms. Lam leaves office. The question now is whether her successor, as yet unnamed, will pursue the inquiry with the same dedication or will quietly smother it.

    I don’t yet know which of the nine people above is replacing Lam. In fact, I infer from the list of nine that nine U.S. attorneys are being replaced, but news organizations and Congress have only been able to identify seven. Not exactly transparent, huh?

    In the wake of the recent firings of a half-dozen U.S. attorneys, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, filed bills that would restore to federal judges the right to name interim appointees when vacancies develop. On Thursday, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., whose office has confirmed that he inserted language making the change in Patriot Act last year, gave his qualified support to Feinstein’s bill.

    Justice Department officials have refused to say how many prosecutors were fired or to explain the firings, but Feinstein has said she’s aware of the ouster of at least seven U.S. attorneys since March 2006.

    Not only should everyone in this White House be indicted and prosecuted, every politician and journalist/media personality who has ever once covered Bush’s butt in the past six years be indicted and prosecuted. However, there may not be enough honest and independent U.S. attorneys to do it.

    Patrick Fitzgerald is a U.S. attorney, btw. I bet ol’ Speedy is achin’ to force him out, too.

    CIA Torture: The True Story

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    The Talking Dog interviews journalist Stephen Grey, author of “Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program.” Excerpt:

    As to the CIA officers I spoke to, again, I was impressed with their honesty. They had no illusions that the people being sent to Egypt, Syria or Morocco would be tortured– they were realistic. They made it perfectly clear to the White House and the Justice Department that these people were tortured, but the higher ups in the American government proceeded to continue doing this anyway, and then insisted that the United States did not send people to places that torture.

    Subpoenaed: Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett

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    If you’re watching Countdown you already know this — Michael Isikoff reports for Newsweek:

    White House anxiety is mounting over the prospect that top officials—including deputy chief of staff Karl Rove and counselor Dan Bartlett-may be forced to provide potentially awkward testimony in the perjury and obstruction trial of Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

    Both Rove and Bartlett have already received trial subpoenas from Libby’s defense lawyers, according to lawyers close to the case who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters. While that is no guarantee they will be called, the odds increased this week after Libby’s lawyer, Ted Wells, laid out a defense resting on the idea that his client, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, had been made a “scapegoat” to protect Rove. Cheney is expected to provide the most crucial testimony to back up Wells’s assertion, one of the lawyers close to the case said. The vice president personally penned an October 2003 note in which he wrote, “Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the other.” The note, read aloud in court by Wells, implied that Libby was the one being sacrificed in an effort to clear Rove of any role in leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq war critic Joe Wilson. “Wow, for all the talk about this being a White House that prides itself on loyalty and discipline, you’re not seeing much of it,” the lawyer said.

    Juicy.

    Michael Isikoff on Countdown says Karl and Dan received their subpoenas “in recent weeks.”

    Why Politicians Seem Phony

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    Thomas LaFauci is a speechwriter who thought Jim Webb’s SOTU rebuttal was bad.

    The Democratic response to the State of the Union lay there, flat, dead, uninspired. It did not tell the real story or paint a picture of the last six years. It lacked the confident tone of a resurgent Democratic Party and rhetorical constructions that combine politics, policy, propaganda, and poetry to reveal who we are what we stand for, lift us up, or console us in times of tragedy and trouble. A great speech should reach into our collective soul and touch what is most human in the human spirit.

    I thought Webb’s rebuttal was the best political speech I’d heard on television in a long time. I found it thrilling, mostly because of its gut-level honesty. LaFauci hated it because it lacked soaring oratory.

    But soaring oratory is as common as sparrows. Gut-level honesty, from a politician, is a much rarer bird. That’s why it grabs our attention no matter how plain its feathers.

    We live in an age of collective psychological defense mechanisms. Too much of our public discourse amounts to denial, distortion, or delusional projection. News media and politicians alike tip-toe around ugly facts and work harder spinning rationalizations and maintaining pretty facades than facing reality.

    So when anyone in mass media looks us in the eyes and speaks the plain, unvarnished truth, it is astonishing.

    At the bottom of LaFauci’s column it says,

    Thomas LaFauci is a speechwriter who has written for former House Speaker Thomas S. Foley and Senators John Kerry and Joseph Biden. Jr.

    I say that pretty much speaks for itself.

    The Republican War on Workers

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    Yesterday some Senators attempted to eliminate a federal minimum wage entirely. Not just keep it at its current levels; they wanted to cut it loose and leave workers to the mercy of their states.

    Talk about being on the wrong side of history; according to a recent Associated Press-AOL News Poll, 80 percent of Americans are in favor of increasing the minimum wage.

    Just more proof the Republican Party ain’t workin’ for the people.

    Bob Geiger is all over this story; you can read about it here, here, and here.

    Along these lines — in his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman says the only way to rekindle true “bipartisanship” is to reverse economic polarization.

    You see, the nastiness of modern American politics isn’t the result of a random outbreak of bad manners. It’s a symptom of deeper factors — mainly the growing polarization of our economy. And history says that we’ll see a return to bipartisanship only if and when that economic polarization is reversed.

    After all, American politics has been nasty in the past. Before the New Deal, America was a nation with a vast gap between the rich and everyone else, and this gap was reflected in a sharp political divide. The Republican Party, in effect, represented the interests of the economic elite, and the Democratic Party, in an often confused way, represented the populist alternative.

    In that divided political system, the Democrats probably came much closer to representing the interests of the typical American. But the G.O.P.’s advantage in money, and the superior organization that money bought, usually allowed it to dominate national politics. “I am not a member of any organized party,” Will Rogers said. “I am a Democrat.”

    I wrote about the “Republican era” of the 1920s in A (Pretty) Short History of Wingnutism. The longer one looks at America in the 1920s, the more familiar it seems — corporate profits rising faster than worker earnings; a crackdown on immigration; culture wars led by an aggressive Christian fundamentalist movement; and tax cuts galore. If they’d had iPods back then, you’d hardly know the difference.

    As historian Eric Siegel wrote,

    According to what came to be known as “constitutional morality,” legislation supporting the right to unionize or limiting children’s working hours was an un-American form of group privilege. Laissez-faire conservatism reached its intellectual apogee in the 1920s. A critic complained that by 1924 you didn’t have to be a radical to be denounced as un-American: “according to the lights of Constitution worship you are no less a Red if you seek change through the very channels which the Constitution itself provides.”

    In Europe conservatism was based on hereditary classes; in America it was based on hereditary religious, ethnic, and racial groups. The GOP, a largely Protestant party, looked upon itself as the manifestation of the divine creed of Americanism revealed through the Constitution. To be a conservative, then, was to share in a religiously ordained vision of a largely stateless society of self-regulating individuals. [The Reader’s Companion to American History, edited by Eric Foner and John Garraty (Houghton Mifflin, 1991), p.222]

    But the accumulative effect of all this Republicanism was the Stock Market Crash of 1929 followed by the Great Depression, followed by the New Deal, as explained in the (Pretty) Short History. But then, Krugman says,

    It was only after F.D.R. had created a more equal society, and the old class warriors of the G.O.P. were replaced by “modern Republicans” who accepted the New Deal, that bipartisanship began to prevail.

    Eisenhower accepted the New Deal. Even Nixon accepted the New Deal. It was the Goldwater-Reagan wing of the GOP, which came to power in 1980, that opposed the New Deal.

    Krugman continues,

    The history of the last few decades has basically been the story of the New Deal in reverse. Income inequality has returned to levels not seen since the pre-New Deal era, and so have political divisions in Congress as the Republicans have moved right, once again becoming the party of the economic elite. The signature domestic policy initiatives of the Bush administration have been attempts to undo F.D.R.’s legacy, from slashing taxes on the rich to privatizing Social Security. And a bitter partisan gap has opened up between the G.O.P. and Democrats, who have tried to defend that legacy.

    What about the smear campaigns, like Karl Rove’s 2005 declaration that after 9/11 liberals wanted to “offer therapy and understanding for our attackers”? Well, they’re reminiscent of the vicious anti-Catholic propaganda used to defeat Al Smith in 1928: smear tactics are what a well-organized, well-financed party with a fundamentally unpopular domestic agenda uses to change the subject.

    Bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship means Dems lose.

    Krugman recalls something FDR said in 1936 about his struggles “with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. … Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.” And he concludes,

    But politicians who try to push forward the elements of a new New Deal, especially universal health care, are sure to face the hatred of a large bloc on the right — and they should welcome that hatred, not fear it.

    Now is the time. We’re seeing signs that the distractions are losing their power to distract; the threats of married gay people and wantonly unthawed blastocysts just didn’t seem to rally the voters in 2005 the way Iraq and economic fairness issues did. As Bob Geiger wrote,

    Senator Wayne Allard (R-CO), evidently convinced that he was beating a dead horse by continuing his quest to ban flag-burning and discriminate against gay people, announced this month that he would not seek reelection in 2008 and the thought of having so little time left to screw the working poor from a comfy U.S. Senate seat must have just been eating him alive.

    Allard, who has voted against a minimum wage increase more often than Fox News smears Barack Obama, went for broke this week and introduced a bill that would have eliminated the Federal Minimum Wage entirely and left the wage rate for the lowest-paid workers to each state.

    In Kansas, this would mean that workers would revert to the state-mandated minimum wage of $2.65 per hour, which is currently superseded by the federal minimum of $5.15.

    This is the last, desperate growl of a dying animal. Now’s the time for the Dems to kick Joe Lieberman aside and mount an openly partisan attack on wingnutism. It’s the only way Washington will ever see bipartisanship again.

    See also: Philosophers’ Playground.

    Dweebs in Space

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    WSJ Opinion Journal:

    To understand why the Founders put war powers in the hands of the Presidency, look no further than the current spectacle in Congress on Iraq. What we are witnessing is a Federalist Papers illustration of criticism and micromanagement without responsibility.

    The Founders gave war powers to Congress, dweeb. Article I, Section 8, paragraphs 11-14; see Findlaw. And if you want a Federalist Paper, try #69, by Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton made it clear that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, was to have much less war power than that of a British king. The declaring of war and the raising and regulating of armies and navies are powers given to Congress.

    The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first General and admiral of the Confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the DECLARING of war and to the RAISING and REGULATING of fleets and armies, all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.

    The dweeb at WSJ continues. He both upbraids the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the non-binding resolution it passed yesterday and taunts Congress that if it really believed the Iraq War is so bad it should do something more drastic, like cut off funds.

    By passing “non-binding resolutions,” they can assail Mr. Bush and put all of the burden of success or failure on his shoulders.

    I ‘spect that was the idea. It’s Bush’s War, dweeb. I’m hoping that if Congress can pass one non-binding resolution it will go on to something bolder.

    Minority Leader John Boehner is even asking Speaker Nancy Pelosi to create another special Congressional committee to look over the general’s shoulder. It’s a shame Ulysses S. Grant isn’t around to tell them where to put their special committee.

    I believe the point of the committees is to look over Bush’s shoulders, not the generals’, and I ‘spect General Grant would have been OK with that. Right now I don’t have time to look up what precedents there might have been during the Civil War and what Grant thought about them.

    Anyway, the dweeb continues,

    In addition to being feckless, all of this is unconstitutional. As Commander-in-Chief, the President has the sole Constitutional authority to manage the war effort. Congress has two explicit war powers: It has the power to declare war, which in the case of Iraq it essentially did with its resolution of 2003. It also has the power to appropriate funds.

    But Bush obtained that resolution on false pretenses, which as far as I’m concerned renders it null and void. The Iraq War we got was the result of a bait-and-switch. And while the President has the authority to manage the war effort, he does so with a military raised and managed by authority of Congress, and he goes to war only by the authority of Congress. To claim that a President can trick Congress into one war resolution and then treat that resolution as a carte blanch to make war as he pleases for the rest of his administration is stretching things a tad.

    Update:     Glenn Greenwald has more.

    Elmer Fudd Nation

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    What David Brooks wrote in his New York Times column today:

    The Democratic approach, as articulated by Senator Jim Webb — simply get out of Iraq “in short order” — is a howl of pain that takes no note of the long-term political and humanitarian consequences.

    What Jim Webb actually said in his rebuttal to the SOTU (emphasis added):

    The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military. We need a new direction. Not one step back from the war against international terrorism. Not a precipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos. But an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq’s cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.

    I know a lot of you don’t want to listen to any plan that doesn’t include a precipitous withdrawal, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But I want to bash David Brooks first. It’s been a while.

    BrooksWorld is a place where critical thinking (along with accuracy) is in short supply. He spends the first half of his column whining that violence and disorder in Iraq are getting worse. Then he whines that Democrats are bad people because they don’t support the strategies that have allowed violence and disorder in Iraq to get worse.

    “I for one have become disillusioned with dreams of transforming Iraqi society from the top down,” he says. “But it’s not too late to steer the situation in a less bad direction.” Coming from Brooks, that’s a big clue we’re looking at utter hopelessness. Then Brooks writes,

    Increased American forces can do good — they are still, as David Ignatius says, the biggest militia on the block — provided they are directed toward realistic goals.

    Ah yes, David Ignatius. How many ways has Ignatius been wrong on Iraq? I don’t know that numbers go that high. But here are some highlights of Ignatius’s Greatest Misses, compiled by Jeralyn of TalkLeft. Jeralyn concludes with some advice for Ignatius that we might also direct to Brooks. And a lot of other people who haven’t figured out when to STFU:

    Don’t worry about what the Democrats might do. Try and figure out how you got it so spectacularly wrong first and explain to us why you did. Once you do that, then maybe we can talk.

    Brooks admits that the Bush plan isn’t working —

    The weakness of the Bush surge plan is that it relies on the Maliki government to somehow be above this vortex. But there are no impartial institutions in Iraq, ready to foster reconciliation. As ABC’s Jonathan Karl notes in The Weekly Standard, the Shiite finance ministries now close banks that may finance Sunni investments. The Saadrist health ministries dismiss Sunni doctors. The sectarian vortex is not fomented by extremists who are appendages to society. The vortex is through and through.

    But Brooks has decided the way to straighten things out is by a “soft partition” of Iraq — dividing Iraq into separate sectarian sections to “restore order,” and then allowing the central government to “handle oil revenues and manage the currency, etc.” Exactly how that central government wouldn’t end up being dominated by Shiites, and exactly why those Shiites wouldn’t continue to make life hell for Sunnis, Brooks doesn’t say. He seems to think Iraqis are children who will settle down once they’re not sitting next to each other.

    Upper-class white men have pretty much dominated the planet for the past couple of centuries or so; much longer, in some places. If you spend much time reading history, you’ll notice that those upper-class white men had a deep and largely misplaced faith in their own superiority of judgment. Their tendency to think well of themselves came from racism, sexism, and the fact that people born into privileged circumstances usually are sheltered from the consequences of their own mistakes. Thus, a whole lot of global history from 1800 to the current day consists of greedy delusional white male assholes mucking things up.

    A large part of the crises we face in the world today — in Africa, the Middle East, Asia — can be traced back to The Day the White Man Came. Through the 19th and 20th centuries mostly European powers gained control of other nations, crushed their political and social infrastructures, stripped them of their resources, and left their people in abject poverty and political chaos.

    Indeed, the nation of Iraq came into existence at the hands of Europeans, who re-drew the political borders of the Middle East as they fought World War I. “The borders were thus based on British imperial and commercial interests and the fortunes of war rather than being drawn along traditional frontiers or historic tribal or ethnic lines,” says this guy.

    Juan Cole wrote in June 2002,

    Such adventures as the Soviets in Afghanistan, the French in Algeria, and the British in the Gulf, Palestine and South Asia have unexpectedly given birth to demons for our 21st century world. Imperialism depended on dominating, humiliating and exploiting others, and on drawing artificial boundaries for European strategic purposes. The way out is not, as some are now saying, a new wave of Western imperialism. That is how we got here in the first place. It is the fashioning of a world of equals in which Muslims receive the same rights as others, to self-determination or enough autonomy to foster self-respect. Only when the age of colonialism is truly over can the postcolonial wars end.

    Instead, we’ve got Brooks and Ignatius and others sitting in their leather chairs in their well-appointed offices and thinking that if we just keep tweaking, we’ll get those natives to settle down eventually.

    Juan Cole pointed out yesterday, “It is odd that US media seem completely uninterested in how Bush’s State of the Union speech was received in Iraq, where half of it would be implemented.” Not odd at all; we still think of the populations of non-white places not as people we should work with, but as a problem to solve.

    What’s rich about all this is that our country was founded after an overthrow of imperial rule. The indigenous populations of the Western Hemisphere were so decimated by war and disease that, in thirteen of the British colonies of North America, whites became the dominant and majority population. And lo, in the 18th century some of those whites felt that they were being jerked around and exploited by a far-away King, so they rebelled. As the colonies became a nation the former colonists adopted the mythos that Americans were better. Unlike the privileged dandies of Europe, Americans were tough and practical. Oh, and egalitarian, although how a people who kept slaves and marched the Cherokee to Oklahoma saw themselves as egalitarian is a testament to Man’s Capacity to Bullshit Himself. But we grew to love the Common Man, or so we thought, and to this day our political and business leaders just love to tell us how they rose from poverty and overcame hardship.

    (If they can’t tell us they rose from poverty, then they tell us about the simple virtues of their immigrant grandparents. Barring that, they pretend Jesus helped them overcome alcoholism. They’ve got to overcome something.)

    In American mythos European leaders were born in palaces, while our guys were born in log cabins. European leaders were a pack of inbred twits, while ours were street smart and hard working. They were Elmer Fudd; we were Bugs Bunny.

    But the joke is that, somehow, we grew an aristocracy anyway. Our public intellectuals — i.e., Brooks and Ignatius — are twits. That they are respected for their insight just shows we ain’t livin’ in a meritocracy. And the President of the United States is the pure distillation of inbred classism and the arrogance of unearned privilege, albeit with an affected Texas accent.

    Our government and its corporate backers treat the rest of the world and the poor of our own country with the same clueless arrogance we used to despise in Europeans. We aren’t Bugs Bunny any more.

    I agree with Juan Cole — Only when the age of colonialism is truly over can the postcolonial wars end. And, applying that to Iraq, I think we need to extract ourselves in the least imperialist way possible.

    And I think Webb (and Wesley Clark) is right that the first step to withdrawal is “an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy.” Just leaving is, I think, another form of imperialist arrogance. We need to consult — and that means listen to, not dictate — with the people who are going to be left with the mess. That includes the nations bordering Iraq, including Syria and Iran, as well as the various factions within Iraq.

    Of course we can’t allow ourselves to be bogged down in endless negotiations; withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq must begin as soon as possible. But if the U.S. started to show some genuine respect for the sovereign nations and people of the Middle East it would do both us and them a world of good.

    As for Brooks and Ignatius and the Bushies and the neocons — buy them some Risk board games and let them enjoy their fantasies in a less harmful way.