Rightwingers propagating lie of "Bush the Visionary"
by IseFire - Tue 03/22/05 6:07 am EST
A revisionist history of Bush the Visionary—a narrative in which Bush authored Middle East democracy over liberals’ objections—is being written right across the slackened faces of Democratic Party leaders.
Max Boot in the L.A. Times wrote recently, “In 2003…I wrote…that the forthcoming fall of Baghdad ‘may turn out to be one of those hinge moments in history…after which everything is different.…’ At the time, this kind of talk was dismissed…as neocon nuttiness. Well, who's the simpleton now? Those who dreamed of spreading democracy to the Arabs or those who denied that it could ever happen?”
Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe notes, “The Axis of Weasel is crying uncle….” He quotes Richard Gwyn of the Toronto Star: “It is time to set down in type the most difficult sentence in the English language…. It is this: Bush was right." Jacoby continues: “Claus Christian Malzahn in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel: 'Could George W. be right?’ And Guy Sorman in France's Le Figaro: ‘And if Bush was right?’ And NPR's Daniel Schorr in The Christian Science Monitor: ‘The Iraq effect? Bush may have had it right.’ And London's Independent, in a Page 1 headline on Monday: ‘Was Bush right after all?’”
The Visionary Bush is just a golden calf. Don’t be misled by the rhetorical jabs—“Well, who's the simpleton now?” “Was Bush right after all?” They beg more honest questions: Simplistic about what? Bush was right about what? Boot, Jacoby and other Bush hagiographers would have us believe that opposition to the invasion of Iraq was based on pessimism about democracy in the Middle East. That’s unfair and false. Bush (and Tony Blair in Britain) peddled liberation as a sorry second-choice excuse for invasion only after first insisting on a dubious al-Qaeda-Iraq link (quickly proved false and doubted all along by the intelligence community) and the imminent use of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (months ago deemed non-existent by the Administration’s own inspectors).
David Brooks in The New York Times takes a different tact. Instead of Bush, he gives us Wolfowitz, “the man who's been vilified by Michael Moore and the rest of the infantile left ….” Brooks is right that Wolfowitz has been misunderstood by some commentators, mostly on the left. He’s right that Michael Moore vilified him. (So what? The Swift Boat Vets vilified John Kerry, too, and no one ever said Fahrenheit 9/11 was really anything other than great polemic. Relax, Brooks. This is just how the game’s been played since the rightwing started pushing Clinton-killed-Vince-Foster “documentaries.”)
But in the run-up to the invasion, Wolfowitz was seldom if ever cited for any grand ideals he had about democracy in the Middle East. He was cited by invasion-backers largely for his preemptive strike doctrine. Again, it was the rationale of imminent attack and brazen, crass, deceitful attempts to link Iraq with 9/11 that were offered, not a great vision for spreading democracy at gunpoint.
Bush's vision was for an invasion, and he justified it with lies. A nobler vision was not what he offered; he presented the American people mostly with fear. He is, in fact, if a liberator at all, an accidental one.
Worries that dollar may lose glow abroad
by IseFire - Mon 03/21/05 8:01 am EST
From the AP:
"The [U.S.] shortfall on all trade and investment income with the rest of the world swelled to an all-time high of $665.9 billion in 2004, according to the Commerce Department.
'The United States has to get the money from somewhere and that is basically coming from foreigners,' said David Watt, senior economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns, about the current account deficit.
.....
In recent weeks, a South Korean official and the Japanese prime minister suggested that their countries might want to diversify their foreign holdings into currencies other than the dollar. Their words spooked currency investors and sent the dollar into a temporary nose dive.
.....
Those instances raised fresh worries about the appetite of foreign investors to finance the United State's twin deficits.
'At some point foreigners - just as any individual investors - may look at look at their portfolios and decide that they have too many dollars or U.S. financial markets aren't so attractive,' said Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Banc of America Capital Management."
Study: Abstinence Pledgers May Risk STDs
by IseFire - Sat 03/19/05 12:00 am EST
"Teens who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are more likely to take chances with other kinds of sex that increase the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, a study of 12,000 adolescents suggests. The report by Yale and Columbia University researchers could help explain their earlier findings that teens who pledged abstinence are just as likely to have STDs as their peers." (More here.)
To the Christian wingnutters--who are political conspiracy fiends even before they are any sort of Christian--this study will probably be dismissed because it's from that naughty liberal place, Yale (where Du[m]bya went, and his father); but, some other fundamentalist Christians will be pointing to the study as evidence of what I call "Levitical Drift," which they fear, and which is when behavior moves too far a field from the tightly proscribed norms dictated by the Jewish Law and its Levitical Priesthood. If it seems odd to mention Jewish Law and the Levitical Priesthood in a political discussion, that might be because those things are not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, the writings of our Founders, or the U.S. Constitution. But that hasn't stopped conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists from making such Levitical thinking and language suddenly vital to Republican Party planning, "philosophy," and propoganda.
Some excellent illustrations to the Jewish Law can be found here
(here).
BBC Newsnight: secret U.S. plans for Iraq oil pre-date 9/11
by IseFire - Fri 03/18/05 9:26 pm EST
"The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed." More here.
USPS exec opposes Bush's civil service retirement plan
by IseFire - Thu 03/17/05 8:09 am EST
"A U.S. Postal Service executive is urging the chairmen and ranking Democrats of the House and Senate Budget committees not to adopt the language regarding Civil Service Retirement System funding from President Bush's budget proposal into their budget resolutions." More here.
BBC: US blocks forest protection plan
by IseFire - Wed 03/16/05 1:00 pm EST
From the BBC: "A secret US plan to wreck Tony Blair's G8 initiative combating illegal logging in the world's threatened rainforests has been revealed in a State Department memo leaked to the BBC's Newsnight." More.
Meeting them where they're at
by IseFire - Wed 03/16/05 8:18 am EST
This was published on That's Another Fine Mess last week, and I wanted to cross-post here to keep the discussion going. (First, your relevant proof-texting for the day, in this case, as advice to Dems. "I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some." (I Corinthians 9:22b, NIV))
Democrats will continue to lose political power unless we start framing our core convictions in the language of morality in general and evangelical Christianity in particular.
With the mantra of, "Meet them where they're at," Americans of faith - mainly conservative evangelicals - have for more than 20 years been perfecting the use of the language and modes of popular culture to frame conservatism in palpable and ultimately compelling terms. It has worked well. Conservative evangelical culture - its worldview, its songs, its nomenclature, its literature - inform popular culture like never before, and shape the milieu in which even "non-believers" happily live...and increasingly vote Republican.
In today's America, the conservative evangelical Left Behind novels have sold 62,000,000 copies. Beginning this year, the publishing industry's annual BookExpo America will have a Religion Day. The theme song of Star Trek: Enterprise - a sci-fi show born of the buoyant humanist vision of secularist Gene Roddenbery - is "Faith of the Heart." From Mel Gibson's The Passion to pretty much any movie Keanu Reeves appears in, explicit or vaguely-Christian supernaturalism, however naturalistically or grittily rendered, comprises the very fabric of reality. It is no surprise then that a 2000 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 70 percent of Americans want their President to be a person of faith.
For Democrats to ignore this reality and not enter into an understanding of and use of the language of morals, values, religion - and even evangelical Christianity - would be as patently self-destructive as rejecting the use of Internet-based fundraising or voter registration drives. It would be to forego the use of a practical, effective messaging strategy.
When complaints come from within the Party - and they will - about using such language at all, our queasy comrades need to be patiently called on their fallacious reasoning, which is akin to bypassing television advertising on a premise that since Republicans dreamed up the brutally effective Fox News behemoth, we Democrats oughtn't have anything to do with such a form of media. Yes, by all means: since Fox is a television company, let's avoid TV and use smoke signals instead.
On the contrary: As periodically occurs in American history, religious language has become the bedrock of the current national language. Simply to cede that language to the Republicans is ludicrous. Or to put it another way: as conservative evangelicals have used popular culture's language to make their religion and values more acceptable in a secular nation, progressives and the Democratic Party need to use the language of religion and values to make progressive ideals more acceptable in an increasingly religious climate.
The DNC's new Chair, Gov. Howard Dean, M.D., seems to understand this. He recognizes the problem Democrats have communicating to huge sections of the electorate, including the religious, and in response has called on Democrats to articulate our issues as the moral issues they are. In a recent MoveOn.org question-and-answer forum, Gov. Dean proclaimed:
"A livable wage is a moral value. Affordable health care is a moral value. A decent education is a moral value. A common sense foreign policy is a moral value. A healthy environment is a moral value. The feeling of community that comes from full participation in our democracy is a moral value. It is a moral value to make sure that we do not saddle our children and grandchildren with our debt."
With convictions like this inspiring our Democratic message, I have hope that Democrats can reconnect with America, especially those who agree with us on many issues, but consistently vote Republican because Democrats literally haven't been speaking their language.
Nonetheless, successful outreach will call for more strident liberals within the Democratic Party to support the new moral framing of our issues - and not to mistake moral and religious language with moralistic or religious agendas, something they're prone to do. It will also call for Democratic centrists to support a reassertion of core progressive values - and to not equate progressive values with moral relativism, something they're prone to do. In recent years more arch liberals rightly cried against compromising centrists, "We mustn't be 'Republican-lite!'" and the centrists have been right to cry against the arch liberals, "We mustn't be religion-and-values-illiterates." The arch liberals sometimes miss the need for moral and religious framing to connect with voters; the centrists sometimes fail to see that moral and religious framing attracts voters to Republican candidates as much or more than the candidate's conservatism itself.
Howard Dean would probably never attempt to frame a key Democratic issue within a biblical allusion, because he's too smart and intellectually honest to even try. He realizes he would come across as authentically as Pat Robertson demonstrating yoga - or John Kerry pheasant hunting. After all, this is the man who said in a November 2003 Democratic debate, "[I] don't go to church very often. My religion doesn't inform my public policy." But he is giving the Party a chance to rediscover its populist roots and embrace popular values-laden language, to move forward secure in the knowledge that it is not necessarily core Democratic values that voters are rejecting, but our wonkish and sterile messaging that puts policy in place of vision.
When I attended a DNC forum in Manhattan recently, I heard a favorite story of Dean's that illustrates my point. The story, to the best of my memory, is this: At a fundraiser for Dean for America, hosted by a couple in their Virginia home, Dean and his supporters regaled each other about civil and reproductive rights, the separation of Church and State, and other core progressive values. But the room fell silent when a female supporter professed that, as an evangelical Christian, she opposed the "homosexual lifestyle" and was "pro-life." Dean asked her how she could support him - a candidate who supports civil unions for gay Americans and has strong convictions about women's reproductive rights. "Because Evangelical Christians are people of deep convictions," she explained, and Dean demonstrated the courage of his convictions, even if she disagreed with some of them. She said that as an evangelical, she would support for President only someone who, if crisis befell the nation, "will stand up and do what they think is right."
Conviction. Moral values. Such things are not popularly associated with Democrats. In part it is because rightwing vandals of radio, TV, and print misrepresent our Party and disfigure our candidates' records. But, it is also because we let them get away with it! As Gore Vidal once said, "It takes two to make an accident," and Democrats have themselves to blame as much as rightwing fat cats or conservative evangelicals for the GOP coming as close as it has to political hegemony. It didn't happen overnight, but only after years of sweat and tears on the part of conservatives, only after hundreds of millions of dollars and many years of investment in conservatism itself - think tanks, campus leadership training, communications research, and grassroots programs.
Dean is reminding us that Democrats can do the same. We can invest in progressivism itself and meet Americans at their point of need, at points of resonance, to take progressivism to their dinner tables and reintroduce them to the Democratic Party, to speak their language, to "meet them where they're at" for the sake of improving our shared destinies as Americans.
Secrecy, secrecy, secrey...
by IseFire - Sun 03/13/05 4:18 pm EST
So much secrecy because there's so much to hide. In the end, the Bush Administration does not trust the people, does not like the people, and manipulates them brilliantly.
(Your relevant anti-GOP proof-texting for the day. "God will judge the secrets of men through Christ Jesus." (Romans 2:16b, NASB))
Gov't reducing access to information:
"The locations of stores and restaurants that have received recalled meat, the names of detainees held by the U.S. overseas and details about Vice President Dick Cheney's 2001 energy policy task force are all among the records that the government isn't sharing with the public."
Watchdog details run-ins with Ridge:
"The Homeland Security Department's former independent watchdog says he was twice summoned to then-Secretary Tom Ridge's office last year and asked why his reports criticizing the agency were being sent to Congress and whether they could be presented more favorably to the department."
Poll shows concern about gov't secrecy:
"Americans feel strongly that good government depends on openness with the public, with seven out of 10 people concerned about government secrecy, a new poll says."
Hillary: Overheard
by IseFire - Fri 03/11/05 8:26 am EST
From the Web site Overheard In New York:
amNew York paper guy: "I wouldn't mind having [Hillary] as President. I just don't want her to turn every building in New York pink. But I'm all for having a woman as President."
--Hoyt-Schemerhorn station
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