Surprise, surprise, surprise!

Raw Story has an article here about G.I. Joe Lieberman calling today for a preemptive attack on Yemen.


The world is full of bad people who want to inflict violence on others, and some of those bad people are members of the US Senate. Joe Lieberman is the leading incumbent neocon warmonger zombie in the Western World, and his flights from reality become more and more desperate and degenerate as he wears out his welcome in decent society and his circle of influence shrinks and fades. He never saw an American use of force that he did not like, nor an Israeli strike that he did not want to back up with American funds, blood and credibility. As is well known, he wants -- as a matter of high principle -- to dramatically increase the American commitment and footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan, he wants Iran attacked big, bad, and soon, and now he heaves and froths with bloodlust for that well-known military threat to America, Yemen.


I wonder who Joe and his neocon colleagues think will lend us the money for this noble effort. To hear them tell it we have no money for anything but creating useless trouble for ourselves and everyone else. For that, money grows on trees.

Osama Bin-Laden wanted to create a spectacular enough attack so that Americans like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would impulsively jump into a quagmire with both feet. He read the neocons well and succeeded beyond any reasonable hopes. To this day, Senators like Lieberman, McCain, Kyl, and Spectre, and their allied jackals of the press -- Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and George Will, among others -- press every opportunity to call for bleeding this country a little more in some fruitless, senseless, vile vanity of an empire in decay, decline, debt and denial. If not here, then there will do just as well.

The good news is that the influence of the neocons is almost certainly over with. The bad news is that they have been creating a lot of trouble for a long time and we still have to clean it up, and G.I. Joe and his ilk can't seem to keep their mouths shut. And here we are, about hip-deep in the big muddy and a long, long way to go.

Reflecting on slavery, Thomas Jefferson said "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." He could not have imagined the suffering, the destitution, the malignant violence and chaos and insanity that his worlds presaged. What kind of blowback are we asking for? What price are we gonna have to pay when we have to pay it, as we surely will? What horrors are we giving birth to in the name of some half-bright overdignified revenge fantasy? Does Joe know, or care?


Joe Lieberman is not the problem but it is very important to understand what he is. He and his philosophical cohort represent a kind of American who has always gotten us, and everyone else, into a lot of trouble. He is not a clown or a fool. He is a clever zealot in a high place, a true believer who thinks he might actually be going down and intends to make an awful lot of noise on the way out, consequences be damned. Like Joe McCarthy, he has a gifted eye for the most attention-getting and outrageous stunts, and he revels in being thought of as a problem. He has at least the rest of his Senate term to say stupid things publicly, annoy his grownup Senate colleagues, and court the long-term affections of defense contractors, insurance conglomerates, and Fox News. Not a bad gig, if you really weren't raised to know better.

During the 2000 Presidential election, Ralph Nader said that there was no meaningful difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. That was, and is, nonsense. But in retrospect, to put someone like Joe Lieberman on the ticket as nominee for Vice-President speaks so poorly of Al Gore's judgement and values that it is almost impossible to care very much any more.

During the 2000 Vice Presidential debate, Cheney and Lieberman made a big to-do about what close friends they were and how much they agreed on things. Cheney said that he loved having dinner with Lieberman at the table of Lieberman's mom, which he had done many times -- because he was so close to his buddy Joe. That about says it all.

A justly managed Hell would make sure that Joe Lieberman would spend eternity selling life insurance door-to-door in the bad part of Baltimore in the winter. He is less scrupulous than W.C. Fields, less sane than Howard Hughes, less responsible than Inspector Cleuseau, and he has the moral compass and high public purpose of Spiro Agnew. His career and persona will stand forever as a monument to how corrupt, inbred and cynical the American political system has become by the year 2010. One look at his bland, insincere face is all you need to know how foul and viscous the rot really is at the bottom of the barrel.

When Joe McCarthy's hubris and insanity caught up with him, the Senate, too slowly as usual, condemned him publicly. A consensus had formed that McCarthy was so outrageously irresponsible and out of control that he was on the verge of destroying the reputation of the Senate and the cause of anti-communism. Ralph Flanders of Vermont led the charge with a ringing and a courageous speech that included this soundbite: "If the junior Senator from Wisconsin was a paid communist, he could not have done a better job for them." When the bill really comes due for the folly and the crimes of the neocons, something like that will have to be said for Joe Lieberman.

America and the world are long overdue for a vacation from each other.

There's a fear down here we can't forget, hasn't got a name just yet

KUMBAYAH MOMENT II

Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn't merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.... When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.

---Jiddu Krishnamurti

Car bombs, snipers, drone missiles, death penalty. Parents screaming at children, children being cruel to each other. Layoffs, drive-bys, planes crashing into buildings, being rude in public. Cruelty to animals, hate groups, gang wars, death camps. Neglect, indifference, torture, exploitation.

We are taught to use all types of violence -- emotional, economic, psychological, physical -- as tools with which to manage our way in the world. Every cold word, every implied threat, every refusal to consider the outstretched hand or needs of another, every dismissal of an overture, are all violent abuses, and worse they coarsen the world and teach others that violence is the ordinary, natural, given way. We are taught, falsely, that the proper use of this or that technique of violence will allow us to dominate, or manipulate, or exploit circumstances to our advantage. In many ways that is the very heart of our civilization All brutality, all acts of violence, all efforts to intimidate and bully, are in essence the same. To destroy another human being with a gun, coldly and wantonly, is more heinous and a greater crime than a harsh word, but in intent and character they are the same. And they are both what keeps the world locked in its accelerating descent into the abyss of hell. Sometimes one act of violence is preferable to another -- for instance in the case of a just war, or to protect a helpless person. But this is very unusual. And to take part in violence reinforces, in our minds, one of the greatest illusions of all: that we are using violence, instead of the violence using us.Ordinarily, if we are are at all awake, we realize -- almost always too late -- that the violence we have thought of as a tool for our use is, more often than not, making us do its bidding. The violence uses us; we are its tools. We either inflict it or suffer it, or both. We can be mean, or miserable, or we can be both. But it goes on, growing and refining itself into ever more cruel and lethal permutations. From slings to bows and arrows to catapults to muskets to grenades to V-2 rockets to H-bombs to God knows what is next. And whether in a given instance we are inflicting the violence or suffering it, the violence itself, regardless of what side we are on, isolates us and utterly impoverishes out inner world. Violence is dehumanizing, degrading, and crippling to everyone it touches. And we are all implicated. What is more important than confronting this problem?

Unforgiven.is one of the finest American films ever made, and it is self-consciously a meditation on the nature and consequences of violence. A Clint Eastwood Western, the film begins with a banal but painful insult: a saloon prostitute makes fun of a cowboy's genitalia. Enraged and humiliated, he retaliates by cutting her face. That altercation begins a furious cycle of retaliation and escalation, braggadocio and opportunism, power grabs and score settling, tall tales and yellow journalism, that ends in an orgy of murder so devastating and final that it is possible to imagine the whole world dead or dying. The climactic moment of the film is the final murder. Clint Eastwood has arrived in the classic saloon, and confronts the man he came for. "I'm William Munny," he says. "I've killed women and children. I've killed everything that walks or crawls at one time or another. And now I'm here to kill you, LIttle Bill." Moments later, most of the men in the saloon are dead, and Little Bill lays on the floor, looking up the barrell of Eastwood's rifle. Little Bill pleads for his life: "I don't deserve this. I was building a house."

"Deserve's got nothing to do with it," Eastwood says. And he pulls the trigger.

And that is the largest truth. Trying to use violence is like trying to use a tornado or an earthquake. Violence goes through the human race like an electric current spitting out from a fallen power line, hissing and twisting this way and that until it decides, for its own reasons, to stop. And it maims and destroys people without regard to what they deserve, or do, or have, or are. It just gets the people who are there, because they are there. Once violence is truly loose, we are helpless, faceless, and nameless...lost and broken people adrift in a lost and broken world.

But are we also hopeless?. History is full of leaders, saviors, teachers, all of whom have tried to lead humanity out of its violence from the top down. It has not worked; our violence and our potential for violence have only increased. Perhaps the answer lies in the other direction, in the direction of bottom up, from the individual hearts and minds of each individual resisting the impulse to use any kind of violence at all. I don't know. Do you?

John Lennon is not dead

Some people do not die. Martin Luther King is not dead. Thomas Paine is not dead. William Shakespeare is not dead. And John Lennon is not dead.

Abraham Lincoln said, upon the death of his beloved son Willy, "Our poor boy. He was too good for this world." Contemplating the demise of certain persons, the world understands. Like all parents, the Lincolns could never really let go of their son; and for 29 years as of tonight, the world has refused to let go of John Lennon. In life, his impact was massive, inescapable, relentless. In death, he has become a secular, omnipresent Saint of the World, with more authority in more places with more people than any other artist, living or dead. But his is not top-down authority; it is the authority of the sincerely angry and affronted rebel of intellect and integrity, demanding that all tyrants and brutes, of the world and of the soul, be denounced and dethroned. He was always insistent that he and Yoko were artists first, not revolutionaries; but to him, that made his obligations -- to tell the truth, to live the truth, and to take the next step that truth required -- greater, not lesser. Feeling stuck in the fishbowl of Beatle-era publicity, he turned his honeymoon into an attention-getting gimmick for peace. The first years of his post-Beatle career produced as many, if not more, memorable interviews as songs -- all straightforward and earnest discussions of his views on war and peace, women's equality, art in politics, and drug culture. The charm of those interviews is the undeniable openness and spontaneity he displays, and it seems entirely plausible that his series of interviews --particularly those with Mike Douglass and Dick Cavett -- were so different from everything before, so off the cuff, so obviously -- forgive me -- live, that they led inexorably to what we now think of as Phil Donahue and Oprah. Media to the People, Right On!!!!!

Those interviews in particular display what gives him his continuing power and stature as an artist and a human being. He never, even before the Beatles, pretended to feel what he didn't feel, to want what he didn't want, to see what he didn't see. He called it as he saw it and damn the consequences, but more often than not his good nature made him think that the Truth -- his Truth, your Truth, any Truth -- could, in the long run, only set you Free, and the more Free, the better. He would put on a suit and tie for more money, and then tell the audience at the Royal Command Performance "Those of you in the cheap seats clap. The rest of you rattle your jewelry." The audience laughed politely enough, but everyone in the room suddenly knew where the real power was. That was a truthful joke, and a profoundly rebellious one. His emotional letdown and weight gain after the first huge wave of Beatlemania became the muse for the profoundly personal and moving "Help!" Hating himself for backtracking after the "Bigger than Jesus" episode, he let it all hang out and was perhaps a little too public about drugs, sex, nudity. The lyrics of his best work dwell on his inner state and betray a martyr complex: "I'm so tired," "they're gonna crucify me," "I'm only sleeping," and the longing for redemption of the Two Virgins concept and "Starting Over." To him, the blunt Truth about his life, as he found it on whatever Day in the Life he found it, was always the best fodder for his art and explains the personal power his persona and his work contains. He was never into silly love songs (to coin a phrase) for their own sake. The truthfulness of his art is the source of its power and immediacy, and it keeps him alive today.

He did not think of Art as a hammer with which to shape society, but he found himself an an accomplished artist who wanted change in the world, and he communicated that if he were a dentist or a landscaper or a waiter he would be equally obligated to try, and since he was an artist he would do what he could with his art, but all the people who were not artists had an obligation as well to do what they could, and if enough people saw through the lies and the brutality and the dull stupid worship of useless petty authority figures that there was a chance that the world could save itself and create the paradise it naturally deserved.

Like the man said.: Imagine.

There's nothing you can do that can't be done

There's nothing you can sing that can't be sung

Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game

It's easy

There's nothing you can make that can't be made

No one you can save that can't be saved

Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time

It's easy

All you need is love......

Two words that he is not using

President Obama is going through the motions of a "jobs summit" today -- la de da. He has to do it, but does anyone think this is anything more than PR?

What he is doing that matters, though, is what he does very well: he is letting the populist pot boil Out There and in the Congress....Barney Frank and Ron Paul have actually put some fear into big banks with their financial reform bill...Bernie Sanders has put a hold on Barneke's renomination, and the realization is sinking in that this may be more than a mere affront to "China Ben"'s dignity...contrary to all expectations as recently as the end of summer, there is very little question that a heathcare reform bill is actually gonna become law, and it may be somewhat different from the pig-with-lipstick that Big Pharma and the Insurance Cartel have paid for...318 members of the House, and some 18 Senators, have signed letters of intent to support legislation to require the renegotiation of NAFTA...surprising numbers of Blue Dog Democrats, Wall Street Democrats, and Corporatist Republicans are suddenly deciding this is a good time to retire...and there is more news along these lines, and this time next week, there will be more still.

This Gathering Storm was not part of the Program that Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan et al had promised their patrons in the upper 1%. If you listen carefully, you can hear the spleens chafing all over Wall Street....WHAT IS GOING ON? And Barak Obama has figured some kind of a way to stay above it all and not get in the way . No one knows what he really thinks. Like Lincoln, he is the Benign Sphinx. At a meeting in the Cabinet Room, he famously, and with a certain deliberate and detached silkiness, told the assembled leaders of the finance industry, "Gentlemen, my Administration is all that is standing between you and the pitchforks."

I'll bet you they remember that.

As unemployment and the fear of unemployment ramps up during the holiday season and after, as the 2010 political cycle gets going, and as class consciousness continues its explosive and vengeful return, there will be widespread demand for populist and regulatory reform that will make Ralph Nader look like Phil Graham, and corporate prosecutors like Elliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo are going to be very, very popular in about a year....Cuomo is almost guaranteed to be Governor of New York.

This momentum is growing every day, and so far Obama has not gotten his hands dirty.

If he wants to create good jobs for Americans, he will concentrate on two words that have been absent from political conversation, in a meaningful way, since about the time of Jimmy Carter: TRADE and WAGES. Those words are coming back, and for now, the best thing Obama can do is not do anything to upset the momentum.

Man, who cares about Tiger Woods and his girlfriends?

I don't.

President Obama, mystery man

Sometimes, Presidential rhetoric is about blunt truths, boldly proclaimed. And sometimes, a different approach is best.

FDR said to a campaign audience in 1940 "Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." In that campaign, he famously said "I hate war." To us, it is clear that both times he plainly, obviously, blatantly, was saying the opposite of what he meant and what he wanted; that he knew he was saying the opposite of what he meant and wanted; that he felt a higher good -- his continued service in a war he knew was coming -- gave him licence to misrepresent his thinking like this; that he felt, and he was probably right, that in some byzantine metaphysical crafty way he was, by these very prevarications, helping the country lead itself to the conclusion he had already long since reached. Arguably, among the results of this attitude was Unconditional Surrender on both sides of the world.





Dwight Eisenhower, regarded by most Americans at the time at the distilled essence of the benign, decent and straightforward Ordinary American, was indeed that and, in addition to that, was as shrewd, subtle, ruthless, and cunning a leader and orator as American history has produced. His is not called the Hidden Hand Presidency for nothing. Referring to Ike's routinely circular stream-of-consciousness outbursts at press conferences, Garry Wills writes in Nixon Agonistes:




What, then, is one to make of those famous meanderings at press conferences? They were a proof of Eisenhower's sense of priorities. He was intensely briefed by twenty or thirty staff experts before each press conference. He went into each session with certain things clearly in mind -- things he was determined to say, and the way they should be said; things he was determined not to say, and ways to circle around them. And he got the job done. The rest was fluff and filler -- but fluff under control. Even Hughes, Eisenhower's critic, grants that he "made not one politically significant verbal blunder throughout eight years of press conferences and public addresses."...Eisenhower revealed his conscious strategy in these matters during the tense days of the Quemoy-Matsu crisis. His press secretary, James Hagerty, advised him to take a no-comment stand. " 'Don't worry, Jim,' I told him as we went out the door. 'If that question comes up, I'll just confuse them.' "






The Eisenhower era is defined by this kind of calculated, soothing playacting, and so successful was it that many reputable historians still fall for the canard that Ike's Presidency was one of passivity, of indifference to results, of snoozy self-satisfaction -- almost the opposite of the plain record. John Kennedy based his Presidential campaign on it.

And Kennedy in his Inaugural Address gave an example of the other kind of Presidential leadership. Bluntly, shrilly, and stridently, he proclaimed a new era and a new kind of Total War that trapped the New Frontier, and his successors, in a bloody and expensive box. The famous passage "pay any price, bear any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe" defined his Presidency and left no room for the creative uncertainty, for the calming pause, for the relaxation of tension that can enhance perspective and broaden available prospects and options. That he and his court thought this kind of soaring bellicose rhetoric was in any way useful or constructive is in retrospect an alarming indication of their lack of preparation for high office, and explains much of what followed in Kennedy's conduct -- often reckless, impulsive, and ill-informed -- of foreign policy.




Wednesday night, from West Point, Obama delivered his formal rational for his decision to send some 30,000 more American military personnel to Afghanistan, coupled with an apparently firm 18-month drop dead date. A masterpiece of Presidential half-and-half, the speech left no one really certain what he thinks or is inclined to do. To be fair, it was consistent with his campaign rhetoric. In 2008 he said clearly and prominently that the "real war" was in Afghanistan and that our intervention in Iraq was a distraction as well as wrong and impractical. He believes it, and has in fact substantially drawn down America's footprint in Iraq and committed his Presidency to a complete evacuation by mid-2011. Given what is at stake in Pakistan, it should not be surprising that exiting Afghanistan is a more delicate matter.





Nonetheless, to those Americans like me who long for the day that America will leave Afghanistan and Iraq (not to mention many, many other places)-- thinking it long, long overdue even today -- the decision to send more troops is objectively a serious disappointment and a dismaying, perplexing setback. It is very easy to conclude, in the context of many other seeming compromises of principle, that he simply caved in to personal pressure from demanding Generals. To propose what is in effect a surge when increasing numbers of people in the country and the Congress can barely stomach being there (yesterday a Pew poll reported that 49% of Americans -- the highest number ever -- agree with the statement that "America should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can") can only provoke the impulse to get out. But while getting out is a great big change from staying there without a surge, it is a bigger change still with a surge.


If, as many anguished liberals are starting to say out loud, Barak Obama is a pushover, a sellout, a compromiser of convenience, a man who cannot bear to tell anyone something that will make them stop smiling; if he has found his comfort zone in a pattern of capitulating to Republicans; if, indeed, he is a man with no convictions stronger than his own narcissism and relentless self-promotion -- and I would be the last to say there is no chance that any of the foregoing is, to one degree or another, true -- then his Presidency is indeed lost, all his supporters have been bitterly betrayed, and the right-wing reaction will be swift in coming and terrible to behold. And of course, that would be bad.



But perhaps things are not really the way they seem on the surface. In the same speech were these words:

As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, our or interests. And I must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces. I do not have the luxury of committing to just one. Indeed, I am mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who - in discussing our national security - said, "Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs."

Over the past several years, we have lost that balance, and failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. In the wake of an economic crisis, too many of our friends and neighbors are out of work and struggle to pay the bills, and too many Americans are worried about the future facing our children. Meanwhile, competition within the global economy has grown more fierce. So we simply cannot afford to ignore the price of these wars.

All told, by the time I took office the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan approached a trillion dollars. Going forward, I am committed to addressing these costs openly and honestly. Our new approach in Afghanistan is likely to cost us roughly 30 billion dollars for the military this year, and I will work closely with Congress to address these costs as we work to bring down our deficit.

But as we end the war in Iraq and transition to Afghan responsibility, we must rebuild our strength here at home. Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people, and allows investment in new industry. And it will allow us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the last. That is why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended - because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own.

Barak Obama has been paying careful attention to the thinking of the nation. The schizophrenic nature of the speech -- melding Bush-esqe boilerplate about the Taliban with the growing anti-interventionist sentiment of the nation -- does not clarify anything about the President's thinking or future intent. But that was not the purpose of the speech. The purpose of the speech was to raise further questions about what the country wants in the future in the way of a foreign policy, and to do so in a fashion that the power centers in Washington cannot ignore. He has dramatically expanded the boundaries of permissible and relevant discussion, and all in the direction of "Come home, America."


Obama is emerging as a master at subtle techniques of discrete leadership. He is quietly and patiently guiding the re-emergence of populist agitation and making the Beltway respect it. He really is going to send the additional troops to Afghanistan, just like Roosevelt really could not prematurely rearm the nation; but as sentiment hardens and reality sets in, public support will identify him as the guy who honestly thought this through along with the nation. That is an enourmous asset to a President who may, after all, have to call for more sacrifice.

George W. Bush believed in the direct, full-frontal assault on questions and problems. And here we are. If Obama listened to his far-left base and pulled out of Afghanistan without sufficient Republican and right-wing cover, and without the certain concurrence of the people, he would be blamed for any and all consequences and the blowback could be bad enough to put the far right in power for a generation. The Democratic base has to wait a little while so Obama can be assured of enough national support that doing the right thing in this case does not, in the end, make Dick Cheney President.

There really are crazies out there who might soon get nukes. How does that translate into this country, of all countries on Earth, doing all the heavy lifting of trying to stop it while nations like China and Russia -- much closer to the danger zone -- sit on the sidelines and feather their nest? If we face dangers from that part of the world, is it not true that the nations there face at least as great a danger? That is the growing attitude of this country, and that is where the momentum is. President Obama has put his finger on the pulse of the nation.