GOP fail

Now that the Republicans have sufficiently embarrassed themselves while managing to embarrass the country with their dangerous game of brinkmanship, it’s safe to say, as does this New York Times blog post, the strategy of using the federal default to win political battles in Washington is probably all but dead in the water, much like the GOP will be if it doesn’t purge itself of the Tea Party and toe a somewhat more moderate line a la Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

In addition to appearing not only unprofessional but sophomoric in their attempts to hold the government hostage until their demands were met, Republicans in the House also looked incredibly weak since the strategy, as we all know now, failed and failed miserably. President Obama and the Democrats were not going to flinch on defunding Obamacare, a bill that was considered, vetted and passed by a democratically elected House and Senate and upheld by the Supreme Court.

Syria and presidential power

Jack Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, made a compelling case today in The Atlantic that regardless of whether President Barack Obama gets Congressional approval for some kind of military strike in Syria, he will have effectively increased presidential power to declare war, rather than, as some have contended, scaled it back:

If Congress says no to Obama, it will not significantly restrain future presidents from using military force. At best, it will preserve current understandings about presidential power. If Congress says yes, it may bestow significant new powers on future presidents — and it will also commit the United States to violating international law. For Obama plans to violate the United Nations Charter, and he wants Congress to give him its blessing.

According to the straight forward United Nations Charter — Syria is a member state — a U.N. security council, not an individual nation,

shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security. — Chapter VII, Article 39

and according to articles 41 and 42 of the same chapter,

41. The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.

42. Should the Security Council consider that measures provided for in Article 41 would be inadequate or have proved to be inadequate, it may take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security. Such action may include demonstrations, blockade, and other operations by air, sea, or land forces of Members of the United Nations.

This clearly states that other measures of mitigation should be attempted before any military strikes can occur, and if and when the Security Council determines that force is necessary,

46. Plans for the application of armed force shall be made by the Security Council with the assistance of the Military Staff Committee.

What is conspicuously missing from the charter is that individual member states may not decide independently and out of the purview of the United Nations Security Council — which is the United States in the case with Syria — that military action should be taken against another member state. Further, Syria has not threatened the U.S., so there has not been an act of aggression in theory or in practice. Still, Obama has said given the U.N.’s apparent ineptness in holding Syria accountable, the U.S. has the authority to take action.

Not so, said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon:

The use of force is lawful only when in exercise of self-defense in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations charter and/or when the Security Council approves of such action. That is a firm principle of the United Nations.

With or without Congressional approval, Obama seems resigned to move forward with plans to crack down on Syria, and I would wager that if he does, future American presidents will have near limitless power to police the world. George W. Bush’s notorious authorization for the use of military force in Iraq still stands as a black eye in American foreign policy. A new AUMF has been issued on Syria.

Here is Balkin again:

… the Syria episode offers Obama­ and future presidents­ new opportunities for increasing presidential power. Obama has submitted a fairly broad authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) proposal to Congress. It is not limited either temporally or geographically; it does not specifically exclude the use of ground troops; and it requires only that the president determine that there is a plausible connection between his use of force and the use of weapons of mass destruction in the Syrian civil war. If Congress adopts this proposal, President Obama ­and every future president ­can simply add it to the existing body of AUMFs and congressional authorizations.

While I’m not an isolationist by any stretch and think that the United States has a role to play on the world stage, we may be peering into the diplomatic abyss on this one. America should be partnering with other developed nations in identifying the best steps on moving forward when issues like the one in Syria arises instead of going it alone. Unfortunately, Obama’s star seems to be fading, even after finding and killing Osama bin Laden and avenging the lives of 3,000 Americans, and he seems to need or want another strong military success on which to hang his legacy, particularly after the Benghazi debacle. One has to ask: Where is the Obama who castigated Bush for his strong arm approach to foreign policy and where is the Obama who touted the use of diplomacy over force? Was that not essentially his raison d’être on foreign policy?

***

Addendum: Chapter 1, Article 2, number 4 of the United Nations charter makes it illegal for member states to wage strikes against other member states:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

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My brief thoughts on Syria

With President Barack Obama apparently resigned to intervene in Syria and waiting for authorization from Congress, I’m about as conflicted as one can be on this issue.

In more cynical moments, I think: Let the place rot. After George Bush’s unconstitutional invasion of Iraq, after we poured billions into defense contractor pockets and after seeing mixed results to this day — the Sunnis and the Shiites still can’t, nor will they ever, learn to play nice — the success of a new military operation in yet another Middle Eastern nation is far from certain. While the Middle East is shrouded in oppression, tyranny, ignorance and religious fervor, violence and subjugation will never be eradicated from the region, and no amount of American intervention is going to change that. Only Turkey has managed to create a somewhat secular state with some success. The rest, it seems to me, is resigned and happy to exist in a sort of cosmic no man’s land between democracy and religious sectarianism and violence. In these moments, I think that they are getting exactly what they deserve.

Proponents of isolationism also point to the many problems we have here at home. Why are we trying to solve problems overseas, they say, when we have starving and suffering people here in the States who need help? Let’s address our problems at home, they say. Of course, many of those same people don’t think the government has a role to play in public life, so that sort of argument is self-defeating.

On the other hand, a gross injustice has apparently taken place in which the Syrian government has used chemical weapons on its own people. The question is this: Does America want to continue to be the world police and stand against oppression and international crimes wherever they may happen or does America want to concern itself with improving the lives of Americans? I am highly conflicted on the Syrian issue and others like it because I feel that if the United States has the resources to improve the lives of thousands of people, that is the morally right thing to do, regardless of nationality. Yet, thousands of Americans are suffering in poverty or sickness at this very moment, and we could divert the resources that might be sent to Syria to the States. The plot thickens, though, because even if we chose a completely isolationist approach to Syria and the Middle East, there’s no guarantees that the Know Nothings in Washington would even pass meaningful legislation to help people at home. Why? Because, for some reason, they feel that, while the federal government does have a role to play on the international stage — playing Big Brother for the world — we should just let folks at home rot away in poverty, illness and debt. Makes perfect sense.

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Obama on MLK: ‘His words belong to the ages’

I’m not going to say a lot about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, mostly because the newspaper for which I write just published a lengthy column of mine on the topic, and as a practice, I generally don’t blog about topics that I cover for the paper. Suffice it to say that King’s abilities in oratory and rhetoric, his intelligence and his command of an audience and a microphone rivaled that of any American past or present. His power to inspire shook the nation’s conscience to its core, changed the social and political landscape for the better and bent the course of history toward freedom more so than anyone since Abraham Lincoln.

His “I Have a Dream” speech, in particular, is a study in rhetoric and should be required reading for all American students. One doesn’t even have to watch the video of the speech from 1963 to feel King’s rhetorical and emotive power; genuine tears flow just from reading the text. If you watch closely in his speeches, when he concludes, he looks completely exhausted as if he had just harnessed some immense force in delivering his timeless message of nonviolent resistance, equality and mutual trust and respect among people all of races.

Here is the video from 1963, along with the last part of his last speech, known as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” sermon, which was delivered April 3, 1968, the night before he was killed.


Poverty in America

I largely agreed with the first 1,600 words of this speech by Newt Gingrich that examines the continued persistence of racism, poverty and crime in the inner cities here in the 21st century and the fact that President Barack Obama’s high-minded rhetoric, inspiring though it may be, does not call for “real solutions.” The speech, which was originally made in 2008 after an address by Obama, was reposted by CNN this week after Obama’s most recent speech on race in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting and the unjust George Zimmerman not-guilty verdict.

In the earlier part of the speech, Gingrich quotes Obama then makes a cogent statement with which I can agree:

Obama said, and I quote:

“This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn, that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids; they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st-century economy. Not this time.”

Let me suggest to all of you that if you set aside the normal partisanship and cynicism of politics, that that’s a very powerful paragraph, and a paragraph worthy of response at the same level. I take up this opportunity, both to reject cynicism, but also to suggest that we find real solutions. But to find real solutions, I would argue, we have to have real honesty and a serious dialogue in which unpleasant facts are put on the table and bold proposals are discussed.

The latter half of the speech, however, goes off the rails when Gingrich uses the well-worn Republican strategy of partisanship and ignoring the facts, to make his case. The derailment begins when Gingrich, like so many in the GOP camp, criticized Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society programs and ignored the sweeping impact the legislation made on poverty in the inner cities at the time.

Gingrich ignores the fact that Nixon and Reagan in something akin to blasphemy spent a good deal of their time dismantling various parts of the Great Society, thus disintegrating years of hard-won work by Johnson, Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders who led the nation, even white America, to get behind equality and social justice at an unprecedented level, so much so that all but the most odious, racist, segregationist white politicians in Washington sat with their indifferent arms folded.

He ignores the results that the Great Society had on poverty at the time. Johnson aided Joseph A. Califano Jr. addressed the myth that the Great Society was a failure in his 1999 essay, “What Was Really Great About The Great Society:”

If there is a prize for the political scam of the 20th century, it should go to the conservatives for propagating as conventional wisdom that the Great Society programs of the 1960s were a misguided and failed social experiment that wasted taxpayers’ money.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century. Since then, the poverty rate has hovered at about the 13 percent level and sits at 13.3 percent today, still a disgraceful level in the context of the greatest economic boom in our history. But if the Great Society had not achieved that dramatic reduction in poverty, and the nation had not maintained it, 24 million more Americans would today be living below the poverty level.

This reduction in poverty did not just happen. It was the result of a focused, tenacious effort to revolutionize the role of the federal government with a series of interventions that enriched the lives of millions of Americans. In those tumultuous Great Society years, the President submitted, and Congress enacted, more than 100 major proposals in each of the 89th and 90th Congresses. In that era of do-it-now optimism, government was neither a bad man to be tarred and feathered nor a bag man to collect campaign contributions, but an instrument to help the most vulnerable in our society.

I’m aware that Califano would, of course, want to defend the president for whom he worked, but the proof is in the pudding:

poverty

I shouldn’t need to point it out but I will, that poverty plummeted drastically in the mid-1960s as the chart shows and rose during the ill-begotten Nixon and Reagan administrations.

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The do-nothings

If any of us thought there was any chance for the GOP to grow up and move past partisanship in order to get something done in Washington during Obama’s remaining years in office, we might as well dream on. This do-nothing bunch of Republican lawmakers seem dead set on not only inaction, but attempting work against the administration, no matter how detrimental this might be to the nation itself or people’s faith in the political process.

Here’s part of an article from Slate:

In the past couple weeks, in interviews with House and Senate staffers for the Republican leadership, there has been a depressing message: Nothing is going to get done for the next four years. Again and again, the same mantra could be heard. Partisanship and election jockeying for 2014 and 2016 is going to keep everything locked up.

Watching the live feed from the White House on Friday it became hard to argue otherwise. President Obama held an event with mothers defending the Affordable Care Act, the start of a monthslong effort to protect his signature achievement, which Republicans have promised to fight all the way to the 2014 elections and beyond. Then, shortly thereafter, White House press secretary Jay Carney jumped between answering questions about the administration’s response to the attacks in Benghazi to the Internal Revenue Service targeting the Tea Party and other conservative political groups for audits.

It’s going to take some time to get to the bottom of these controversies, but we can conclude the pessimists are probably right. Nothing is going to get done in this siege environment.

This New York Times editorial also highlighted this pervasive tone within the GOP camp in Washington. The paper even goes so far as to recommend that Obama outright abandon any attempts to extend an olive branch to the Republicans:

It is time for President Obama to abandon his hopes of reaching a grand budget bargain with Republicans.

At every opportunity since they took over the House in 2011, Republicans have made it clear that they have no interest in reaching a compromise with the White House. For two years, they held sham negotiations with Democrats that only dragged down the economy with cuts; this year, they are refusing even to sit down at the table.

I can’t say that I disagree, but we should also remember that on at least one piece of important legislation, the Affordable Care Act, Obama and the Washington Democrats moved forward and did the right thing without GOP support. The Republicans have not been interested in actual leadership the past four years, only interested thwarting Obama’s policies, and they even seem willing to let the nation default on its debt to make a point. This is not nasty, cut throat maneuvering; it’s childish school yard politics.

Here is how The Times concluded its editorial:

Republican lawmakers have become reflexive in rejecting every extended hand from the administration, even if the ideas were ones that they themselves once welcomed. Under the circumstances, Mr. Obama would be best advised to stop making peace offerings. Only when the Republican Party feels public pressure to become a serious partner can the real work of governing begin.

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‘The Bible’ turning off believers?

Some folks within the nonbelieving community have suggested that the History Channel’s series, “The Bible,” may produce an adverse effect than what its creators may have anticipated, as “casual” believers or fence-sitters see depictions of the mass murders and other atrocities that Yahweh in the Old Testament either caused directly or ordered through his followers. It just occurred to me that today we call the deaths of thousands of people, like on Sept. 11, 2001, a tragedy. Yet, God orders the mass slaughter of nonbelievers in the OT, and no one raises an eyebrow. Some of the people murdered on Sept. 11 were believers; some were not. Their deaths were, by all accounts that I have heard the last 10 years, tragic. Yet, a deity can order the slaughter of thousands of nonbelievers and somehow that’s OK. Today, we would call that terrorism. I’m amazed at religion’s power to desensitize so-called “morally upright believers” to violence, rape, incest and genocide.

But in any case, a question over at Bunch has been raised whether “The Bible” will turn off believers because of the many deaths the series depicts that are directly attributable to Yahweh. Matt O. wrote:

I suspect, and I might be wrong, that History’s The Bible mini-series might be one of the best things for atheism to happen in a long time. As the Bible is actively read by some 16% of Christians this is giving millions an opportunity to see parts of the cannon that are morally objectionable attributed to their god.

And he then listed numerous scenes in “The Bible” in which Yahweh wipes out mass amounts of people from Earth in the OT, to which I replied:

It may turn off some “casual” believers, but it won’t make much difference to the “church every Sunday” crowd. They know full well what Yahweh did and commanded that his followers do in the OT, and they believe anyway because any amount of wickedness or depravity can be justified in their eyes since we supposedly live in a fallen world and God’s law is supreme no matter how morally bankrupt it appears to us.

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Just when we thought Glenn Beck couldn’t get crazier …

Beck goes and makes a comparison between what appears to me to be an ill-cast Satan character in the History Channel series, “The Bible” and Barack Obama. Here’s a side-by-side:

Screenshot/AP

From Beck’s perspective, this was just another opportunity — he doesn’t really pass up any — to take a jab at Obama and vilify the president by any means necessary. In fact, this is a good summation of the general program of conservative right wing radio in general.

As for the Satan character, I always pictured Satan, were he to take human form, as a young and attractive alpha male kind of figure. Does the History Channel really want to go on record as casting the most evil being of all time as an old black man? The History Channel? Oh well. Looks like that die has been cast.

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Torture, terror and the neverending war

While the full implications surrounding the “War on Terror” that was initially waged by George W. Bush after Sept. 11, 2001, have been brought to light many times before (here, here and here), Ta-Nehisi Coates with The Atlantic recently asked some hard questions that, because of Bush’s declaration and the United States’ commitment to ending terror, don’t admit to any easy answers.

Credit: Image of a woodcut depicting waterboarding included in J. Damhoudère's Praxis Rerum Criminalium, Antwerp, 1556.

One of the most important and morally gray questions: does torture work, and if so, should we be willing to use it to extract information that is vital to national security.  Coates notes some of the inconsistencies surrounding President Obama’s own policy on fighting terror:

The president is anti-torture — which is to say he thinks the water-boarding of actual confirmed terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was wrong. He thinks it was wrong, no matter the goal — which is to say the president would not countenance the torture of an actual terrorist to foil a plot against the country he’s sworn to protect. But the president would countenance the collateral killing of innocent men, women and children by drone in pursuit of an actual terrorist. What is the morality that holds the body of a captured enemy inviolable, but not the body of those who happen to be in the way? (Italics mine.)

I don’t have an answer to that last question. Critics of torture never tire of arguing — and as Quentin Tarantino argues in Reservoir Dogs — a person will say anything to make the pain stop. Or, in the infallible logic of Nice Guy Eddie:

If you fucking beat this prick long enough, he’ll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago fire, now that don’t necessarily make it fucking so!

Or, perhaps Mr. White’s rather nuanced view is correct:

Now if it’s a manager, that’s a different story. Managers know better than to fuck around, so if you get one that’s giving you static, he probably thinks he’s a real cowboy, so you gotta break that son of a bitch in two. If you wanna know something and he won’t tell you, cut off one of his fingers. The little one. Then tell him his thumb’s next. After that he’ll tell you if he wears ladies underwear. I’m hungry. Let’s get a taco.

What about the view of Creasy from Man on Fire:

I am going to ask questions. If you don’t answer fully and truthfully, you will suffer much more than you have to. I’m going to cut your fingers off. One by one, if I have to.

Or, how about Jack Bauer:

Jack Bauer: Ibraham Hadad had targeted a bus carrying over forty-five people, ten of which were children. The truth, Senator, is that I stopped that attack from happening.

Sen. Blaine Mayer: By torturing Mr. Hadad!

Jack Bauer: By doing what I deemed necessary to protect innocent lives.

Sen. Blaine Mayer: So basically, what you’re saying, Mr. Bauer, is that the ends justify the means, and that you are above the law.

Jack Bauer: When I am activated, when I am brought into a situation, there is a reason, and that reason is to complete the objectives of my mission at all costs.

Sen. Blaine Mayer: Even if it means breaking the law.

Jack Bauer: For a combat soldier, the difference between success and failure is your ability to adapt to your enemy. The people that I deal with, they don’t care about your rules. All they care about is results. My job is to stop them from accomplishing their objectives. I simply adapted. In answer to your question, am I above the law? No, sir. I am more than willing to be judged by the people you claim to represent. I will let them decide what price I should pay. But please, do not sit there with that smug look on your face and expect me to regret the decisions I have made. Because sir, the truth is … I don’t. (“Day 7: 8:00am-9:00am“)

I realize these are just arguments from the minds of entertainment writers, but the questions and concerns aren’t going away because of the Pandora’s Box that Bush opened when he first uttered the words “War on Terror.” Remember his remarks from 2007:

On every battlefront we’re on the offense, keeping constant pressure. And in this war on terror, we will not rest or retreat or withdraw from the fight until this threat to civilization has been removed.

Admittedly, the extremism would have arisen and grown with or without Bush; the president simply committed the United States and its allies to the impossible task of wiping terrorism in its totality off the map. That was the critical mistake that Bush made. The threat of violence from extremists will never be removed as long as zealots and extremists cultivate the idea that a religion or a powerful leader can rise to such heights that any amount of death and suffering are justified in order to protect them. This is why John Lennon’s song, “Imagine,” was so important, and why we should never forget his lyrics:

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people living life in peace

As long as zealots have something to kill or die for, they most certainly will because in their deluded and splintered minds, it gives them something, ironically, to live for.

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Cue the white fear

After the U.S. Census Bureau reported earlier this year that white newborn babies were now in the minority camp, the agency is now indicating that whites as a whole in America will be a minority by 2043, a reality that, while it certainly shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, will no doubt raise anxieties among some white folks, especially in the South.

Witness some of these odious responses on the News-Sentinel website:

TOLDYOUSO: Oh goodie, then we can race bait like jesse and al.

GOJO: Then whites will get preferential treatment as a minority.

transplantedhillbilly: There goes the neighborhood! Now they will be burning crosses on OUR lawns!

activehollow: white history month…finally!

ragebucket: When whites are no longer the majority, can we have white pride month?

As Matthew Yglesias pointed out in May after the report on newborns, the actual figures related to demographics in America aren’t as black and white as we might believe. People technically of Hispanic origin but have lived in the United States since infanthood may be just as well feel comfortable checking the “white” box if other branches of their family tree find their roots in say, Eastern Europe, like Yglesias. What about people with Hispanic origins whose families have lived in the United States for multiple generations, and they have no immediate connection to Mexico, Cuba or elsewhere.

Here is Yglesias:

As books like How The Irish Became White and How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America make clear, whiteness in America has always been a somewhat elastic concept.

It’s conceivable that 40 years from now nobody will care about race at all. But if they do still care, it will still be the case that—by definition—whiteness is the racial definition of the sociocultural majority. If the only way for that to happen is to recruit large swathes of the Hispanic and fractionally Asian population into whiteness, then surely it will happen.

… The future of American whiteness will likely evolve to include a larger share of ancestry from Asia and Latin America, just as in the past it’s expanded to include people from eastern and southern Europe. The idea that every single person with a single non-white ancestor counts as non-white will look as ridiculous as Elizabeth Warren’s past claim of Cherokee identity.

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