Key words

Obama signaled two very positive things last night at his 100-days news conference that went some way to restoring my somewhat wobbling faith in his approach to governing.

The most curious was the announcement that his administration’s slavish adherence to Bush-era doctrine on state secrets, roundly blasted by Glenn Greenwald at slate.com, could be reexamined. Obama admitted that they hadn’t taken time to review the issue upon entering office, which suggests that they were taken aback by the ferociously negative reaction to his Bush-ite assertion of blanket presidential privilege.

This welcome backpedaling could be particularly significant as it shows that Obama’s instinct for papering over ‘controversy’ is more pragmatic than ideological and that he’s open to challenge on matters of principle. That’s a relief. For the record, torture, arbitrary executive power, illegal wiretapping and vastly expanded police powers are not mere ‘controversies’ that we can resolve over lunch; they are burning issues of democratic life that a lot of people are determined to defend against Bush, Cheney and, yes, Obama himself if need be.

The president also was rhetorically generous on the issue of immigration reform, avoiding the inflammatory ‘illegal aliens’ phrase and focusing on immigrants as working people rather than criminals. What a breath of fresh air. We can now hope it will be translated into some sober thinking and talking about the issue so that public discourse can be recaptured from the screaming demagogues and race-baiting nativists. The Republican obstructionists will have a collective coronary over it, as they should, which could nicely illustrate how their tub-thumping nastiness on immigration is exactly of a piece with their defense of white, male, rich-guy privilege on every other issue.

Weather-vanity

So Arlen Specter’s switch is being read off by his erstwhile Republican colleagues as crass political opportunism. Oh my, how shocking! The idea that a professional politician would stoop to this, cravenly to seek short-term electoral advantage at the cost of abandoning Principle. . . I am breathless with astonishment.

Specter’s flying leap recalls the crossover by traditional Southern Democrats to the G.O.P. in the post-civil rights era, later hastened by the advent of Saint Ronald at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. It deepens the feeling that 2008 was indeed a transitional election year and that Obama’s play-nice strategy has some potential for a long-term payoff.

The spectacle of his bosses-until-yesterday sputtering that Senator Specter is not a nice person was particularly hilarious. These are the same guys insisting that real men are ready to swallow their wuss-ant scruples and torture the flack out of anyone who looks dangerous. With an outlook like that, it’s hard to be taken seriously when you denounce cynicism.

That pathetic hack William Kristol insists in today’s Washington Post that the Republicans should be glad they’re a shrinking minority because now they get to blame everything on the other guys. Oh right, that was such consolation to all of us over the last decade.

Goofy party chairman Michael Steele added a dignified and sober note by accusing Specter of ‘flipping the bird’ to his ex-buds. I guess that’s urban street patois, sure to catch fire among all those minority voters sour on Barack and Michelle.

So it’s fun to gloat, but a note of caution is also in order given that Specter was a loyal accomplice of the worst acts of the Bush presidency, including the conquest of Iraq, the security police state, tax cuts for the rich and unwavering support for the most repulsive Bush appointees like Michael Mukasey. The best we can hope for is that Specter’s refined nose for shifting political winds will drag him kicking and screaming into less reactionary positions. But seeing the Democrats welcome this creep into their fold reminds me why I don’t care to crawl under that tentflap myself.

Swine epidemic

Slow death by pigs didn’t just begin, and it didn’t originate in Mexico either. We’ve been under assault by the porkermeisters for years now including the first 100 days of the Obama Administration. But unfortunately we continue to be blocked by his chief hog-swill salesman, Timotheus Geithner, now appropriately de-pantsed by the New York Times for being a charter member of the massively bloated, decades-long Wall Street hamfest.

Geither was merrily exposed Sunday as the worst sort of schmoozie buddy-boy of all the banker types he was supposed to be regulating as the top Fed officer for the New York region. Instead of maintaining a prudent distance, he regularly enjoyed a bountiful lunch with them while vigorouly defending their interests in all his high-paying jobs, for which he forgot to pay his taxes.

The narrative is nauseatingly reminiscent of the Rita Lavelle scandal of the early 1980s when this Reagan appointee at the Environmental Protection Agency was caught supping and dining regularly with every industry lobbyist whose business she was supposed to be overseeing. I had the time of my life covering the hilarious spectacle of Lavelle being confronted with the inconvenient facts of her busy datebook in a congressional hearing in 1982. She was forced out and much later did time for perjury in a case involving an attempt to swinishly swindle Superfund money—dubbed “Sewergate.”

Also appropriate is the de-skirting of the opportunistic Susan Collins of Maine who led the charge against wasteful ‘pork’ spending in the Obama stimulus package by excising nearly $1 billion in preparedness money for. . . a flu outbreak! Collins, wielding the carving tools like she was deboning a shoat carcass, played to the Republican rafters as a fiscal tough-girl to solidify her base among frugal Mainers. These are the Republican ‘moderates’ we should get all weepy over as they slowly fade and dissolve into nothingness throughout the Northeast.

So it’s perfectly hilarious that Arlen Specter should choose this moment to jettison the party of Greedy Old Reprobates especially since Specter just shoehorned a shitpotful of new cash into medical research as the price of his vote for the February stimulus package.

I wonder if the governor of Texas is going to refuse swine flu meds for the residents of his state in a noble defense of his newly secessionist principles. Hey, this might be a good moment to build the wall around the place and start making Texans apply for visas to the upper 49 given their proximity to all those disease-afflicted border towns.

Let's (not) be reasonable

It’s annoying to hear Obama’s invocation of qualities like ‘reflection’ and magnanimity (as in avoiding ‘retribution’) to justify his refusal to confront the mess left behind by his predecessor. He insists that being oh-so-reasonable is required because a thorough airing of criminal activity and official torture will somehow interfere with his reform plans.

In fact, there is every reason to believe that the exact opposite is the case—that the failure to go after the Bush legacy full throttle has emboldened its partisans to dig in ever deeper and defend their nauseating record from the rooftops. Trying again and again to reach for that elusive, non-partisan, forward-looking, equanimous tone assumes that Dick Cheney and the screamers on Fox News have a real interest in formulating a viable national health strategy or getting people back to work. Maybe it’s a good communications strategy, guys, but don’t start believing your own rhetoric.

Meanwhile, seeing the bombs go off daily in Baghdad once again and the strewn body parts of dozens of slaughtered Iraqis reminds me that all the morally repugnant defense of torture emanating from our TV screens rests on the purported goal of protecting Americans from violence—exactly what Bush and the entire U.S. military apparatus was and is unable to provide the Iraqis they ‘liberated’. There is something particularly grotesque and nasty about a country that can placidly contemplate tying people up and torturing them out of an abstract concern for their own safety while not even noticing that the nation it conquered enjoys none.

Another aspect of the torture discussion left out: what exactly are we going to say when American soldiers are trussed up and waterboarded by foreign enemies? That it’s not fair? After all, these military personnel are entirely likely to possess valuable ‘actionable’ intelligence about where bombs are going to drop on Pakistani villages or Colombian coca fields. If those are the criteria we apply, we better get ready to have them turned around and thrown in our faces.

Cheney: Torture is good

The torture issue has whipsawed back and hit the Obama Administration in the face despite O’s best efforts to keep the guilty happy by traipsing out to CIA headquarters in Langley and reassuring the spooks. But the revelations of exactly what has been happening in our government-run secret dungeons is just too ugly to brush under the rug.

Congress now looks likely to dig deeper and bring out more unsavory facts, and the intellectual authors may face scrutiny and perhaps sanctions for their role in ordering prisoners to be tortured. In any case, the national debate will continue despite Emanuel Rahm’s frantic insistence that we focus attention on today’s deals and away from yesterday’s crimes.

But Obama and his team need to grow a pair and find a way to answer the Dan Burton’s and the Dick Cheney’s who are insisting that torturing defenseless prisoners was and is something to be proud of. ‘Serving America’ is the catchword, I believe.

So yes, let’s take Cheney up on the offer to review all the results of the systematic use of torture and objectively examine how much or how little protection it provided us. Then let’s set that data against the moral rot that has set in to our society due to its use. Let’s include the failure to pay attention to the terrorist threats in the first year of Bush’s reign, too, since the 9/11 incident and the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario continue to be the justifications for using torture. And why not throw in the use of torture-derived ‘intelligence’ to drum up support for the Iraq debacle, too, given that the next terrorist act may well be a direct result of that catastrophe.

All that would not fit Obama’s fantasy about looking forward and avoiding ‘retribution’, a desire clearly not shared by his enemies.

Obama’s appeal was post-partisan, post-racial and post-Washington-slugfest, but he was foolishly naïve to think that just wanting to do what’s best for the country was going to attract cooperation from the organized criminal racket that has been in power there. The Cheneyoid opposition is the gang that seized power as a minority in 2000 and used that non-mandate to radically shift the nation’s course. They ignored our safety and cynically manipulated patriotic fervor to launch foolhardy wars of conquest, bankrupt the national treasury and push us closer to a police state. Pelosi, Obama and Reid seem to have forgotten that the Democrats were painted as virtual traitors for voicing opposition to any of this.

These ideologues seem downright eager to see another terrorist attack occur so that they can score political points against Obama as a softie. Making verbal nice with them as if they care about solving economic, energy, diplomatic or other policy problems is fine as long as Obama is not so lulled by his own rhetoric that he fails to notice his raging partisan enemies are winking at calls to secede from the union and the frantic buying up of assault rifles. It’s not the time to look or act weak, and letting these bug-eyed hysterics set the terms of the debate on torture is potentially Obama’s worst mistake so far.

Torture Glen Beck

I am forced to concede that I was wrong on the torture issue—the talk-show pundits have convinced me that, yes, we do need to do everything possible to assure that Americans are safe from future terrorist crimes.

I have serious moral qualms about inflicting agonizing pain on another human being. However, as George Will stated Sunday, ‘intelligent people of good will’ will agree that the president must do whatever he deems necessary to defend our country.

That is why with a heavy heart I have concluded that we have no choice but to immediately seize Glen Beck and proceed to interrogate him in an ‘enhanced’ fashion.

It is an unfortunate fact that after 4/19—yesterday was the Oklahoma City bombing anniversary in case you missed it—we are at risk more than ever from vicious, terroristic assaults on Americans employed on federal government property, putting innocent lives at risk. There’s a pretty good chance that someone as openly hostile to America as Beck knows about what plans are being cooked up at this time to repeat that infamy and kill more Americans.

So I don’t see any way around the necessity of biting the bullet and putting to use some of the ‘alternative interrogation procedures’ that former Vice President Cheney knows helped to head off crimes during the seven peaceful years we enjoyed under the Bush Administration—before Obama put us all at risk by pulling back from these essential tactics.

I think it would be perfectly humane to start out by placing a large plastic brace around Mr Beck’s neck and carefully slamming his head against the wall of his cell. As Brit Hume of Fox News pointed out on a Sunday talk show, ‘It’s a soft wall that gives way. I’m not at all sure that’s torture’.

Doh! Of course it isn’t, but that technical term hardly matters when we’re talking about American lives. I think it’s way past time to give Mr Beck this incentive to come clean before it’s too late, and bombs are going off all over the place.

As a ‘high-value’ detainee, Mr Beck would be expected to attempt to resist sharing the information he has most likely collected in his role as a public mouthpiece for extremist groups. He may even attempt to confuse interrogators by pretending to cooperate or sending them astray with false information.

But I suspect a few days hung by his wrists in a ‘stress position’ aided by the removal of his clothes, freezing temperatures and blaring rock music, accompanied by frequent inspection visits from female guards, might give him a thing or two to think about. In all fairness these loyal women serving their country should be given access to PTSD specialists after performing that operation.

I know, some namby-pamby Chardonnay-drinkers will complain that Beck might be completely innocent. Okay fine, you tell me you’re ready to have innocent Americans receiving anthrax-laced envelopes and drinking from poisoned wells! Heaven forbid we should violate the precious rights of criminals and terrorist sympathizers. Gimme a break, you scum!

Anyway, I think all this panty-twisting about people being tortured is way exaggerated. I mean, just read the big-deal secret memos—it’s all laid out there with careful guidelines so that no one goes overboard with the waterboard, heh heh. It’s like getting a blast from a squirt gun—get over it!

Anyway, our country doesn’t ‘torture’ anyone and never has. Anyone who has nothing to hide has nothing to fear. Including Glen Beck.

Adults and kiddies

Despite serious shortcomings in the domestic department, Obama’s handling of the country’s affairs on the road has been masterful. Diplomacy obviously taps his major strengths like calm reasonableness, empathy and charm and exploits his celebrity status. W gave him a terrific honeymoon set-up, too, by being such an asshole. All he needs to do is show up and ask an informed question, and he looks great.

We don’t know how he’ll respond to the inevitable conflicts, but the Somali pirate episode suggests a low-key public stance and competent management. The Fox News wacko brigade plays right into his style by responding with instant hysteria to everything and looking like schoolchildren. They score points with their base, but those of us who don’t put on tinfoil hats each morning can feel that our affairs are being handled by an adult.


Speaking of wackos, I’m not sure what to make of the secession talk from Texas and elsewhere especially since I spend a lot of time in the South where that kind of talk led to civil war and half a million deaths a while back. It’s rather amazing that defending our civil liberties post-9/11 was considered treasonous, but open sedition by the losing side in an election is taken to be amusingly folkloric.

Reports of the resuscitation of ultra-conservative and neofascist groups is always disturbing, too, but that and the secession fantasy all suggest the dying yelps of the beaten who know they can’t get back on top through argument or the electoral process and can only dream of coups or Alamo-style self-immolations. The Republican Party’s kneejerk obstructionism fits this mindset, and while they undoubtedly can run substantial interference, they look petulant and nasty and clueless about why people turned against them.