Dana Blankenhorn

This President's First Big Blunder

If it is true that, as Rahm Emanuel says here, President Obama has no stomach for prosecution of past war crimes, because it would be "looking backward," it is the first enormous mistake of his Administration.

It could fatally wound his place in history.

We have seen this movie before. After the depredations of Richard Nixon, President Gerald Ford decided to give the former President a full pardon, so that the country could move on.

Yet it was Ford's own chief of staff, Richard Cheney, who then devised and executed the policies of lies, of torture and of unprovoked war that now burden us. It's now clear that, in some cases, this had nothing to do with getting information. It was sadism.

Let's review. The refusal to prosecute, or even fully investigate, the relatively petty crimes of Richard Nixon led directly to the torture regime of Richard Cheney.

What might that torture regime lead to?

The Constitution today lies in tatters. Just write a memo calling it meaningless, on any excuse, and do what you want. That's the precedent Cheney used from Nixon's claim that  "If the President does it it's not illegal."

What might the next generation do with Cheney's precedent?

We already have that answer. We have it in the rhetoric of the teabaggers, whose hatred  knows no bounds. We have it in the attitudes of Republicans, who think they can turn their principles on a dime, doing precisely what they opposed a year ago, and never pay a penalty for it. We have it in the rejection of elections by Norm Coleman and Jim Tedisco.

What we have seen in the last several months is the impotent rage of Republicans coalesce into something far more dark and sinister, namely a rejection of everything Americans have believed in. The Southern Strategy has become a Confederacy of Dunces.

We can ignore it today, freely ignore it, because Republicans are now deeply unpopular, largely as a result of their continuing lunacy. But they are the "other" party today, just as they were the "other" party in the wake of the 1974 Congressional blow-out, and the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter. 

The wheel of history continued to spin. It will turn, turn, turn again. What will it turn to?

Until evil tendencies are confronted, directly, and put down, completely, they will metastasize like a cancer. We have seen this in our own time. The profoundly undemocratic attitudes that caused the Supreme Court to stop a recount, that caused Bush to lie us into war, that created the torture regime, the systematic wiretapping of political adversaries and the use of that for policy advantage, it didn't come from thin air.

It came from our past refusal to confront evil head-on, from our normal desire to "move on" from the previous crisis this mindset caused. 

Confederate People

What do you do when your belief system has been rejected, after you were told for generations that those who objected to it were illegitimate? (Picture from Firedoglake.)

What do you do when people you respect say that there is nothing to be done now but take up arms to defend your rights and your lifestyle, or public officials you trust tell you to be armed and dangerous?

We saw what happens once before. War happened, in 10,000 places, a conflict that transformed us from united States to the United States.

For the generations which followed the result of final defeat was not quite so violent. Populists melted back into the Democratic Party. Progressives melted back into the Republican Party. Hippies grew up. There were a few fringe elements, a few incidents, but generally civil peace was kept, and the country moved forward.

Will that happen this time? The evidence so far:

• 5.5 million background checks on new buyers of firearms since November.
• A heavily-armed gunman in Alabama who lived with his mother killed 10 using two military assault rifles, a handgun and a shotgun.
• A man in North Carolina shot up a nursing home where his estranged wife worked, leaving 7 dead.
• 14 died in Binghampton, New York when a right-wing fanatic opened fire on an immigration center. His parents had been immigrants. 
• Three cops were killed by a heavily-armed right-wing fanatic in Pittsburgh, their bodies bled out because he also had body armor.

Maybe the words of the leaders are just talk. Maybe these are just isolated incidents.

Or maybe it's the start of something larger.

The Second Mexican War

What history will call the Second Mexican War had been going on for over a year before the President decided this week to enter the fray.

Republicans can whine all they want about the President's policy being "insufficient" but the fact is we're on both sides in this one.  It's our drug market being used to buy our guns which are smuggled across our border to kill Mexicans. Increasingly, that trade is taking American lives, as American addicts seek the money for the drugs and the Mexican gangs fight for American territory.

What is insufficient, frankly, is the Secretary of State's statement that we bear "co-responsibility" for the violence. What has Mexico done wrong? They not only ban the same drugs, and seek to enforce that law with the full weight of their military might. But they also ban the guns being used to kill their people.

And where do those guns come from? From Georgia, from Texas, from everywhere in the USA where the NRA holds sway.

If Mexico a failed state? If it is, it's because the United States destroyed it. If it is, then the only way to "win" is to do to Mexico what we did to Iraq. Oh, and to do to the United States what we did to Iraq. If you don't have the appetite for that then you have to find another way.

New War for Europe

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 10 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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A quiet economic war is now being fought and the future of Europe hangs in the balance.

As with much of the Cold War this struggle is mostly happening in secret. Unlike the Cold War (until, as my son would note, the end) this war is economic, not military.

At the center of the struggle is AIG. Reporters here are desperate to find out "who are the AIG counter parties?" That is, who holds the other end of the trade on the phony insurance AIG gave to Big Shitpile, without collateral -- the black sinkhole into which the world economy is rapidly falling.

In his testimony to the Senate this week, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner refused to answer the question. Some facts are leaking out, but these are mainly the names of American banks that are already getting government aid.

Here is what Geithner can't say. Europe. Banks in both Eastern and Western Europe were heavy buyers of Big Shitpile, lured into thinking they were getting AAA paper rather than junk by the AIG insurance.

Why was this done? My guess is that the Bush Administration was covering up the real costs of Iraq by creating a housing bubble, and that the bonds were also meant to create a "co-dependence" in Europe tieing those governments to U.S. policies. Pushing these bonds overseas helped increase the supply of free capital here for housing, and the AIG "insurance" made these deals look safe.

In fact, AIG was running a Ponzi scheme that made Bernie Madoff look like a two-bit grifter. Instead of putting up capital against its "insurance" AIG just pocketed the proceeds. Rather than price this insurance against the real risk of default AIG ignored its own underwriting rules. Was it done out of greed or under political pressure? I don't know. My guess is a little of both, along with "honest" patriotism -- your government asks and you act.

Why can't Geithner admit to this? Because, as we saw with Citicorp, which crashed as the government pumped its books with capital, the market will act on knowledge by running away from the counter-parties. So we keep Estonia, Hungary and the rest afloat on the sly, and we're forced by circumstances to bail everyone else out as well.

The danger is that this is a hole that can't be filled. Estimates of the value of mortgages at risk on this crap range from $2.5-7 trillion. At its height Credit Default Swaps were a $70 trillion business.

That's the real reason the President is going to Europe. All this springtime in Paris talk is a cover.

But wait. It gets worse.

There Will Be Blood

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 9 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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At ZDNet Healthcare I get this kind of crap all the time:

obama is a liar and traitor to his oath of office.
dems are traitors to the US Constitution, helped by RINOs.
the world will pay the price for the election of this communist TRAITOR.
it will be a price paid in the blood of the millions that are going to die in the wars fools like obama start, just as was done before WW2.
God help us all....

This was in response to a piece of journalism where I looked at the Obama health plan, using a study OMB head Peter Orszag later cited repeatedly on the TV.

Rejectionist, even hateful rhetoric has become the common currency of the right even as their power wanes. The reason I began this piece as I did was to show that it's not a top-down phenomenon. It is coming from the bottom up.

My critics will note how leftist rejectionism was a hallmark of post-1968 rhetoric from the Left. "We're all Nixon's niggers now," said George Carlin. "Nixon's had an asshole transplant. Have you seen the stop-press? The asshole's rejected him," from Monty Python.

And, of course, the Weathermen, along with a host of red terrorists running to the Symbionese Liberation Army. Leftist violence, at least in this country, gradually devolved into self-parody, with those who might have supported it dropping out into the world of drugs, sex, and rock that culminated in disco.

Right wing violence is not like that. Even in the 1990s, when the Clinton AntiThesis was merely leaning against the Nixon Thesis, we had Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the Oklahoma City bombing.

What can we expect now, with a President truly dedicated to building a new Thesis, something akin to the Roosevelt Thesis of Unity, what I have named the Obama Thesis of Consensus?

A lot worse.

Obama's Lincoln

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 7 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Every crisis President adopts Abraham Lincoln as their personal political savior.

The first Roosevelt wore a ring with a lock his his hair, the second hired a Lincoln biographer to write his speeches. Nixon talked to Lincoln's portrait.

What these Presidents were looking for from Lincoln was strength. Lincoln was hated in his time, both north and south. His own Republican partisans distrusted him as weak, and many southerners still consider him a war criminal.

Barack Obama has identified heavily with Lincoln. You may joke he's got the lobes for it. Both are long and lanky Illinoisians who seemed to come from nowhere at a time of crisis. For most that's all they see.

Today, in the Capitol Rotunda, the President revealed which of the many Lincolns of our imagination he is talking about.

The reconciler:

In the war's final weeks, aboard Grant's flagship, The River Queen, President Lincoln was asked what was to be done with the rebel armies once General Lee surrendered. With victory at hand, Lincoln could have sought revenge. He could have forced the South to pay a steep price for their rebellion. But despite all the bloodshed and all the misery that each side had exacted upon the other, and despite his absolute certainty in the rightness of the cause of ending slavery, no Confederate soldier was to be punished, Lincoln ordered. They were to be treated, as he put it, "liberally all round."

Note that the President did not quote any of the man's great speeches, just an off-hand comment that spoke to what the country most needed, a true peace of the heart.

The Real Manchurian Candidate

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 2 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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As we reach the final days of the Bush Junta's misrule, it appears (more and more often) that he and his family have never worked for America but for its enemies.

In The Manchurian Candidate, this was done through a complex  plot involving the brainwashing of a young Army officer (Laurence Harvey), a ruthless double agent (Angela Lansbury) and her fool of a husband (James Gregory). Spoiler alert. It was Gregory (the one on the left here) who was the candidate, a drunk and incurious fool whose rise was driven by attacking the very people he would work for.

The movie's most vivid image is of a playing card, the Queen of Hearts, which Lansbury would show Harvey in order to hypnotize him and give him his orders.

In real life we had no Harvey, and no Frank Sinatra to save us. The plot succeeded. The evidence is all around you.

Those tempted to show a Queen of Hearts to George W. Bush at one of his last press conferences are missing the point. He's Gregory, not Harvey. He never required a lot of handling. Just point him where you want and he goes.

In the real version of this horror show Dick Cheney is Lansbury (or is it possible his father, George H.W. Bush, is Lansbury), and there is no real underground plot, no playing card at all. Everyone is doing what they are doing with their eyes wide open. Because they are not working for North Korea. They're not Communists.

They're Arabists.

Evolution in Reverse

I have been loathe to comment on Israel's invasion of Gaza because, for now, both sides are getting what they want.

• Israeli extremists get to dehumanize Hamas, to kill Gazans by the hundreds and claim the high ground in American public opinion.
• Hamas extremists get Israeli boots on their ground, where they're easier to kill by the hundreds, and they claim the high ground in Arab public opinion.

Hard to discuss a war, or end one, where both sides think they are winning. (The picture is of a Liger, a cross between a lion and a tiger. It should not be yet, like so much of man's creation, there it is.)

In fact this has to end at some point. Reverse the situation, put Jews in Gaza and Arabs in the rest of what's now Israel, and I can't see the Jews acting any differently, only looking to an American lifeline instead of one on the Arab street.

All this points to what seems like an important fact.

Civilization puts evolution into reverse.

Hate Fuels Hate

It's easy to see how the Mumbai terrorists need to be fought, because we're over here and they're over there.

The lesson is simple, obvious, and it tastes like bile if you're being told to administer it. It's precisely what we didn't do after 9-11, and precisely what led us down the road to today.

1. Use police methods to decapitate the leaders.
2. Use media to expose the methods.
3. Use popular will to improve security.
4. Use social methods to reduce the foe.

Joy Amid the Ruins

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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There is a feeling felt by earthquake and hurricane survivors, in common with those who have made it through war or a terrifying disease.

Joy amid the ruins. (Love Among the Ruins is a painting by Edward Burns-Jones.)

We are thankful for having made it through. We have life and (hopefully) people who care about us, still. Everything narrows to that fine point. We dare not look around at the devastation all around us. We concentrate on what we have, and we pray that the storm really has passed, that the rebuilding can now begin.

Yeah, it's the election. But also the post-election. (UPDATE: Don't assume every terrorist attack is all about you.)

For a generation Americans have been playing a zero-sum game with power, even while evidence of its futility piles up around us. We have felt hopeless, cynical. We have believed that tossing out one bunch of bums merely means another bunch of bums, that all we can do is trade hates, that life is nothing but conflict, the idea of political peace an illusion.

It takes great events to jolt Americans out of their complacency, forcing us into a search for unity and renewed purpose. Each disaster in our history has provided such an opportunity. At the end of each conflict we have promised, never again. And then again happens, again.

We have spent the last decade building a bridge to the 19th century. It has been fueled by our own hatreds, one for the other, our own hubris, our own fear. This only accelerated with the end of the Cold War, the latest "last time" in our history, and I have argued it happened precisely as a result of that event.

Most Americans came here, or has ancestors who came here, due to unacceptable conditions somewhere else. Whether it was over the Bering land bridge thousands of years ago, on ships hundreds of years ago, or by plane just decades ago, you saw in America a new chance to make a new start, and to do it different this time. (And if you are descended from West African slaves, you may have been given that chance by relatives still living. Thank them.)

But the better angels of our nature are easy to vanquish. They are easily distracted -- maybe our better angels have ADD. Comfort can distract them. Theories can distract them. Religion can distract them. Desire can distract them. Every generation has had its excuse for taking its eye off what mattered, and focusing instead on threats, on the other.

Even the Greatest Generation succumbed. It was our parents who saw the value of uniting against Depression and War, who built our prosperity and who then let themselves be distracted, by harsh words and oppresion overseas, into thinking that "killing is the only thing they understand." Never mind that resolution and defense are not the same thing as war, and containment was not meant as an excuse to send young men off to die.