blony

General Wesley Clark probably delivered the most simple, clear and accurate assessment and rebuttal of a major premise, of the McCain presidential campaign:

I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

Of course, the fellow travelers of the Neocon regime, including main stream media which invested its skin from the earliest days leading up to the invasion of Iraq through the embedding of its personnel during the invasion is quick to expand the observation of General Clark to dimensions he did not address.

Will Barak Obama let Senators Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold, the Constitution and the relevance of law go down in flames?

“Why didn’t they do anything? Why didn’t they fight back? In June 2008, when no one could doubt anymore what the administration was doing—why did they sit on their hands?”
...
We can’t un-destroy the CIA’s interrogation tapes. We can’t un-pass the Military Commissions Act. We can’t un-speak Alberto Gonzales’s disgraceful testimony. We can’t un-torture innocent people. And perhaps, sadly, shamefully, we cannot stop retroactive immunity. We can’t un-do anything that has been done in the last six years for the cause of lawlessness and fear.

We cannot blot out that chapter. But we can begin the next one, even today. Let its first words read: “Finally, in June 2008, the Senate said: ‘Enough.’”

I implore my colleagues to write it with me. I implore my colleagues to vote against retroactive immunity and vote against cloture tomorrow morning.
Sen. Dodd's Must Read Speech

Thanks, largely to Senators Dodd and Feingold, the vote has been delayed and eyes turn to the man who would be POTUS.

It may be wise to avoid spitting into the wind as those who argue it is impossible to alter or defeat this bill suggest Barak Obama would be doing were he to join with Feingold, Dodd and much of the Democratic constituency.

For those people, including Obama's political advisors who think he would be diminished by championing and then losing this fight, no better argument can be made than:

Citizenship in a Republic, T. Roosevelt, 1910

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

This is the moment of challenge for Barak Obama, not merely to vote against the bill, but to exercise and demonstrate leadership, to rally the Senate to do the right thing.

One way or another, Obama will be defined; not by winning or losing but by whether he will enter the arena and join, even lead, the fight to uphold the Constitution and the principles of law.

Can you guess the feats of engineering that have delivered on their investments for thousands of years? If the word, aqueduct, begins to flood your mind along with California wild fires and mudslides and the perennial disasters in the floodplains of the midwest, give the idea some consideration.

The idea is as ancient as it has been effective and enduring. Though the modern use of aqueduct infrastructure systems such as the Central Arizona Project [CAP] have had mixed and unanticipated short term results, the long term results may play out over centuries.

I feel that CAP will one day be viewed in Arizona as the most important undertaking in state history.

[http://www.geocities.com/NapaValley/8339/CAP.html]

The CAP undertaking cost $4 billion - roughly equal to the yearly sum siphoned from US tax payers to underwrite the Zionist state of Israel and a mere 1/3 the estimated $12 billion per month cost of the Iraq War.

The cost of the Iraq War far exceeds the mere sum of dollars that are pouring through the George W. Bush Aqueduct System built according to the blueprint Al Quaeda learned during the USSR occupation of Afghanistan for draining the lifeblood of an enemy's economy into a black hole. The long term costs in what was not invested in US infrastructure and the cooperation of its citizens in collaborating via the framework of a government by the people, for the people to solve problems of national importance are incalculable.

Education, health care and social security, even the stalled recovery of NOLA, are small potatoes, however hot, compared to the inestimable loss of potential unable even to be envisioned by the citizens of the US whose mounting indebtedness, once thought to merely to saddle the youth of this country for decades, is now impacting the ability of the middle class to survive and impacting the world economy in ways Osama bin Laden could only dream of accomplishing without the help of the Bush administration.

Sounding clear as a bell and simple enough to be first principle, John McCain's 1974 thesis

The biggest factor in a man’s ability to perform credibly as a prisoner of war is a strong belief in the correctness of his nation’s foreign policy

applies not only to a prisoner of war but, importantly, to every man or woman serving in the military under oath to obey lawful orders.

At the time McCain was arguing that US Military personnel should be educated w.r.t. the correctness[i.e., necessity], of the use of deadly force in the conduct of foreign policy so their resolve in the face of contradictory argument [even evidence?] could not be shaken - even by imprisonment and torture.

McCain confused then and now

Why does McCain's assertion seem so compellingly sound and simply correct?

It is because it drops the context that foreign policy that consists of unnecessarily incinerating and slaughtering people in far off lands is wrong in the first place. It conflates Afghanistan and Iraq, WWII and Vietnam as being equally necessary, equally correct, foreign policy. They are not.

McCain was following orders in Vietnam. It was his duty as a young American Navy pilot. It was and remains compellingly critical to John McCain to have been doing the right thing. But McCain has been a Senator for many years now. He had and has a responsibility to ensure that the men and women of the US Military are not used and abused in the execution of foreign policy that is wrong, i.e. unnecessary, ill-planned, ill-executed invasion and occupation of a foreign country, in first place.

Deadly Denial

John McCain lies to himself and others by dropping context, switching context, and conflating the context of his feelings with the context of reality. In fact, McCain seems compelled to believe the Commander in Chief must be correct and must have been correct. The alternative, a negation of his experience, even his identity, is unthinkable to him. The untempered outbursts of John McCain are nearly as famous as his insistence upon the virtue of invading and occupying Iraq, the insistence that there is an enemy there to which the US Military could somehow surrender or the insistence that victory for the US Military somehow depends upon the hearts and minds of Shiite and Sunni Muslims who have been vying for millenia and are likely to struggle with each other for centuries to come. The world-view of John McCain is as fragile as , and because, it is false. It must be intensely defended and the best defense is a good offense.

But what if the foreign policy is wrong?

The US soldier and/or veteran lives with a familiar lament:

The US Military never lost a single battle in Vietnam but the US lost the war.

Accurately, they blame the civilian leadership - not for the fact that the war was unnecessary and wrong to the point of stupidity in the first place. Rather, they blame the civilians of the US - including its leadership, for not allowing them to completely defeat the enemy - millions of people fighting foreign forces on their homeland.

Even to one's friends it is necessary to reply, that is crazy. Massive, unnecessary genocide could never be turned into a victory no matter how many US soldiers had already been killed or maimed winning battles or been imprisoned and tortured to stop them from killing and turn them to denouncing what they had been engaged in.

The only thing to do when it is clear that a course is wrong is to change it.

McCain is stuck in too rigid a personage to accommodate and adapt to a reality wherein the Commander in Chief is a mere human being and doing the right thing in foreign policy or otherwise is not a matter of a soldier's view of victory or defeat.

John McCain has gotten older but he has failed to mature.

McCain's peers did not agree with him - not with respect to Vietnam and not with respect to Iraq. They could not, can still not, however, escape the search for responsibility when made the human hammer of wrongful use of deadly force in US Foreign policy.

If enough four-star generals had done that, would it have stopped the war?

“Yeah, we’d call it a coup d’etat, ... Do you want to have a coup d’etat? You kind of have to decide what you want. Do you like the Constitution, or are you so upset about the Iraq war that you’re willing to dismiss the Constitution in just this one instance and hopefully things will be O.K.? I don’t think so."
US Officers discuss responsibility

The individual soldier is accountable for obeying and executing his orders and, maybe, raising issues later.

In fact, the operative principle drummed into the mind of the US Military recruit is summed up in Vietnam era Marine Corps boot camp lore

Mine is not to reason why; mine is but to do or die.

and

When in doubt about the lawfulness of an order, your course should be, first, to obey the order and report its unlawfulness later.
[Also from Vietnam era Marine Corps boot camp training]

The Villain? It's Congress!

The responsibility for the wrongful use of lethal force and WMDs in US foreign policy does not belong to the Military or the Executive Branch.

But why has the US military, then as now, been put in the position where it has to examine and debate its responsibility? It is quite simple: Clearly the responsibility must exist. But it seems to have simply evaporated into thin air.

There is sound reason the Founders saddled Congress with the responsibility for deciding when and whether the US could/should/must wage war - or not. It was specifically to prevent the Executive Branch, the so-called, Commander in Chief of the US Military from making stupid or evil, lethal and costly decisions. Instead of playing its prescribed role in the constitutionally mandated separation of power, in the Vietnam era as now, Congress simply abdicated its responsibilty.

Can a Congress that passed the buck on its responsibility, not only to put the men and women of the US Military in harm's way but, also, to have them incinerate and slaughter thousands unnecessarily, be expected to exercise its responsibility to impeach the nitwit they passed it to?

We think there is a, largely subliminal but very important, foundation that supported Barak Obama through the Democratic Primary race and will play the same role in the presidential campaign: Obama has clean hands. His stance on the war was correct in the first place and, unlike the muddled Senators McCain and Clinton, he was not a member of the Congress that abdicated its responsibility to refrain from and restrain against unnecessary war.

It is clear why this Congress will not impeach the president and the vice president: The pot is afraid to call the kettle black.

Fortunately, the Constitution and the mechanics of the system of governance it buttresses have multiple lines of defense against long term wrongfulness. The citizens will have the opportunity to impeach the Congress that failed in 2002 and continues to fail to perform its constitutionally mandated role. The very process that replaces the existing president with a man of sound reason and obviously better judgment should replace the members of Congress who failed, and continue to fail, to perform their duty - be they Republican or Democrat.

From practically all quarters, with the notable exception of her primary opponent, an hysterical mob of pundits are attacking Sen. Hillary Clinton because she used history most are familiar with to point out that it is not so unusual for democratic primary campaigns to linger into June.

Few would consider Sen. Hillary Clinton stupid; most think she is brilliant. In spite of the ideologues on the right who demonize her, and anyone else they disagree with, neither the person nor her thoughts are evil.

How, why, would candidate Clinton unnecessarily make a remark that would, obviously in hindsight, arm her political enemies and incite even those who would normally be aligned with her political philosophy and, were it not for Barak Obama, support her candidacy against the party that has become the embodiment of an Evil Empire?

There is only one reasonable answer: Hillary Clinton is innocent. It simply didn't occur to her that stating something factual was going to be taken as her portentously suggesting the violent elimination of her opponent.

A synonym for innocence, of course, is naivete. A naive politician, as Senator Clinton herself has pointed out repeatedly, is not an effective candidate nor an effective leader in climate where an unintended nuance will be spun to unleash the frenzy of those who feed upon and inflate emotionally loaded vitriol to satisfy their own lust for relevance.

Shame on every such pundit from Olberman to the far right.

But, Senator Clinton, Hillary ... you have demonstrated that simple resolve, courage, a huge investment of personal effort, personal treasure, formulation of a viable platform and even being accurately truthful still leave you with a huge vulnerability as a politician. The very vulnerability you attributed to Barak Obama is your own. Obama looks more and more wise and politically sophisticated by comparison. You, who have the experience of decades in politics, who have lived near and with the presidency, have competed and served well in the Senate ... you have loosened the earth beneath your candidacy that is about to become part of a land slide. Somehow, you are not politically aware, sophisticated, savvy.

America needs Hillary Clinton and more like her. But earnest desire and hard work are not enough, not for President - not this time.

There's a case of apparent inaccuracy. There's the tiresome/tireless, depending on the perspective/agenda of the listener, hammering on the issue of illegal immigration. The repeated expressions of exasperation that frequently dissolve into tongue-tied head shaking, face contorted umm/uh-ing. There's the battles he's chosen versus the reticence on others a genuine populist should also be engaged in. There's a thinly veiled disdain for Barak Obama most manifest in the lop-sided emotional kiting and two centuries worth of context-dropping regarding a few statements by one Rev. Wright framed by a blaring silence regarding the excesses of the Elmer Gantry gang and the pandering of nearly all politicians to witch doctors at large. There's the patronizing of propagandist General David Grange absent any other position whatsoever on what is likely the most outrageously immoral and illegal transgression of the US government barring its tolerance of slavery and the ethnic cleansing of the native Americans. There's the absolute silence on Zionism/Palestine.

But ... for the battles he has chosen to wage against corporatism, wide open borders that are most manifest in people smuggling, drug smuggling, all out war among cartels and against the people and governments of Mexico and the US, against underhanded and blatant corruption in Congress, against the sordid incompetence and corruption of the Executive Branch of government - Dobbs is a voice that America needs to hear.

In particular, Dobbs is genuinely maligned and his position distorted and mis-presented on the issue of open borders and illegal immigration. There is a single important, accurate point that almost every dimension of his reporting/editorializing on the subject converges toward and he frequently articulates it concisely and unambiguously. He has been so very clear and unmistakably correct that even the co-sponsor of the incomprehensibly comprehensive, thankfully failed, attempt of the McCain/Kennedy/Bush administration to slap a putrid poultice of obfuscation over the many issues involved [McCain, of course] got it and seemed, till recently, to buy it and express it very clearly him self: There is absolutely no way to formulate and apply any regulation or program whether constraining or liberal, no way to enable free and safe passage of guest workers and commerce, no way to preclude illegal and harmful trafficking in drugs and humans unless there is a way to control the border in the first place.

There is nothing xenophobic, nothing extreme, nothing anti-Mexican, nothing anti-business in that position. It is pure sense and it is foundational to what Dobbs' most extreme critics most want. The position is not even anti-amnesty (though Dobbs is so in the current context and intent of the attempted immigration bill) - whether the 20 - 30 million illegal residents become citizens or not is as meaningless as it is for any other citizen of a country where anyone at all can traverse its borders for any purpose whatsoever at will.

Indeed, there could and should be voluminous legitimate commerce and safe passage for citizens of Mexico and the US, alike. Mexican workers in the US should be free to commute at will between their families and their jobs. Mexican workers should be paid fair wages. US citizens should be free and safe to visit and do business in Mexico. There should be no malevolence-free motive for smuggling humans or cargo through deserts and it should be nearly impossible to do so.

A secure border with adequate portals to handle all the legitimate volume in labor and cargo will benefit the interests of Mexican and US citizens and businesses, alike.

Given that simple foundation, many other issues begin to dissolve naturally and solutions for the tangled set of problems caused in the first place by the failure of the US government to perform its role begin to flow naturally.

Here we disagree with Lou Dobbs - for now

To the millions of Mexicans trapped in illegality by the winking-blinking-nodding US government and businesses who flaunt the law far more egregiously than any individual trying desperately to eke out a survival for self and family - yes, amnesty from prosecution and even from forced deportation. Register, get permits, come and go freely and without fear. US citizenship? You don't need it. If you want it, get in line.

Is this unfair to the rest of those who would and do immigrate and work in the US legally and frequently wait years to acquire citizenship? Not really - Mexico and Mexicans, Canada and Canadians are unique among foreign countries - they are our neighbors.

Would Dobbs disagree?

In the heat and haste of the debate there has been a legitimate need to hold the feet of the US government to the fire. Lou Dobbs has poured it on from nearly every angle of every dimension possible to focus attention on the obvious. However, Dobbs has been clear in his respect for the individual Mexican worker and has advocated fairness in the wages they earn. While he has railed against, so-called, amnesty - the context was in opposition to that incomprehensibly comprehensive mess that might well have become yet another dump truck full of manure-law poured over the root of the problem.

From what we've seen and heard of Dobbs on the subject, he'd be forthright in acknowledging that prosecution and forced deportation would be non issues in the first place if the US government had been doing its job instead of becoming culpable in the violation of law.

There's a similarity between retroactively prosecuting folks who'd safely turned right on red before it became commonly lawful and obviously imperative to reasonable traffic flow to do so, and prosecuting individuals who managed to do what they should have been safely and legally allowed to do in the first place.

Take away frustration at decades of stupidity, incompetence and needful framing of the debate in every way possible in order to counter those doing the same to obscure the root of the problem and we think Lou Dobbs would be among the first to hail the least harmful, most beneficial set of solutions to ensue from the foundation he has been fighting for.

What in the w-o-r-l-d is wrong with Lou Dobbs? Well, he is human. But there's less wrong with Dobbs on this particular one of his hallmark issues than is wrong with those who demonize the man and his arguments. In fact, he's right - as in correct, that is. Though there's a bifurcation that aligns some of his arguments with those of genuine xenophobes, racists, ethno-cultural elitists, etc. - those who would apply those sort of labels to Dobbs because of his position on illegal immigration are, mindfully or out of blind emotion, intellectually dishonest.

We do have bones to pick with the man - but that's how we started this post.

As Israelis prepare to acknowledge the 60th year of colonial Zionists having implemented a state without a constitution but with a, so-called, Jewish identity, Shmuel Rosner asks, Should Israel Remain Jewish? Somehow, Rosner then proceeds to portray the thoughtfully articulate writing of Amitai Etzioni, For the good of all its people, Israel must pursue diversity as an answer in the affirmative. This is done in spite of the foreshadowing sub-title to Etzioni's piece:

If Jews and Arabs alike had the right to practise their religions - or none at all - violence and hatred would be curbed.

In fact, Professor Etzioni makes an, albeit implicit, argument for an atheistic state (in the sense that an entity that is not theistic is atheistic). It is such a state that can be based upon a constitution that guarantees the civil rights, liberty and equality with respect to the law, of all its citizens.

It is only a state that guarantees freedom of, and freedom from, religious ideology in its laws and for its citizens that has a fit foundation for genuine democracy. Whereas early Americans fought a revolution inspired by the Declaration of Independence [Scalia and Thomas: That would be the definition of original intent] and crafted a Constitution and system of governance inspired by the principles articulated in that declaration they, nonetheless, understood it to be so important a principle that the laws and machinations of government be atheistic in nature, leaving matters of religion to the free will of its citizens ... to specifically prohibit in the foundational law of the land that some citizens might pervert the force, power, property and trappings of government to impose their particular brand of mysticism upon others.

As a state with a Jewish identity, Israel is far closer in nature to Iran and its Muslim-state neighbors than it is to the US. It is the citizens of the region who should be free to choose the nature of their own identity. Were that so, as Professor Enzioni points out, there would be far less cause for violence and hatred in the ME.

The rallying cry for Israelis and Palestinians and friends of both on the 60th anniversary of the establishment of Israel should be:

LIBERTY and EQUALITY! Give us a Constitutional Democracy that guarantees individual LIBERTY and EQUALITY for all citizens.

The Nation is featuring an essay, The Neo-Deal that is one of four finalists in a student essay contest on the New Deal. While we don't necessarily disagree with what the writer is arguing for, we wish he had framed his argument more completely, perhaps somewhat differently - depending on what he means.

Since its founding, America has been a country with a political philosophy based largely on negative rights - those rights that are best served when government checks itself against interfering with its citizenry. The Founding Fathers incorporated these rights into the Constitution, and this country has always cherished the liberty of the individual. Yet, negative rights have a limiting constraint, both from a philosophical and an economic perspective: the individual is sovereign only insofar as he can exert control over whatever affects him. That is, once things are out of the control of the individual, it is up to society, through the government, to assist the individual.

We think Thomas Jefferson best articulated individual Liberty as understood by the Framers:

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.

I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.

--Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819.

We suspect this understanding of individual rights is common to us and the essayist and, in fact, is the understanding alluded to by the 9th Amendment:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

-- Bill of Rights (9th Amendment)

We think our essayist's use of the term negative rights to describe the Constitution's protection of citizens' Liberty from abridgment by other entities, including the states and federal governments, is unfortunately chosen and damaging to the rest of his argument for what he terms positive rights.

All in all, the essayist seems to have fallen into what seems like a common misunderstanding of a government intended to be ... of the people, by the people and for the people in the first place. As such, it is quite in keeping with the point and purpose of the government that it be a framework by which U.S. citizens collaborate to address problems national in scope and common throughout our citizenry.

A Libertarian interpretation of positive rights would be that our essayist wants THE government to use force and power to entitle YOU to the fruits of MY time and energy. Our Libertarian will argue that is definitely an infringement upon what our essayist terms negative rights and Jefferson calls Liberty.

Our objective isn't mere pedantry: these, we think, misunderstandings are at the root of much dysfunctional polarization among our citizens and at the roots of dysfunction of OUR government. That is particularly true in the extremes of ideology used to frame arguments by so-called, Libertarians and, self-described conservatives. For the latter, of course, the confusion becomes somewhat schizoid, depending upon whether we are talking of personal Liberty they disagree with or we are talking economic Liberty.

We think, so-called, Liberals [those willing to rethink, learn new information, apply it and adapt], or Progressives if you prefer, unfortunately allow such arguments to be framed by, so-called, Libertarians and mis-called conservatives.

We, the people, have the right and the responsibility to use the framework of our government to address issues of national importance, domestically and in foreign relations. These issues include education, health care, employment, trade and, of course, the immoral, illegal and criminally stupid abuse of our military personnel, weaponry and treasure.

The argument is NOT whether individual citizens are entitled to, so-called, government handouts. The argument is NOT whether THE Federal Government funds and provides standards for equal schooling for our young or whether school boards in Kansas have the negative right to feed children mythology as science. The argument is NOT whether the factory worker caught up in the big sucking sound is entitled to a positive right of re-training or the CEO who earns millions is entitled to a negative right of outrageous income for roughly equivalent time and effort.

The argument is whether well intended, responsible and reasonable citizens are willing and able to use the framework of their government to address problems of importance to all of us - or whether that government and its policies are for sale to the lobbies of corporations, special interest groups and organizations of extreme ideology.

The dysfunction of our federal government is at the root of problems common to all citizens because we, as citizens, do not exercise our entitlement and responsibility to shape and control what it does and does not do.

There is no entitlement to good government. When it runs amuck, we have to take it apart and put it back together as a government of the people, by the people and for the people.