Blaming our country’s woes exclusively on the people who have most directly wrought them—Bush, Cheney, torture maven David Addington et al—becomes increasingly difficult in the face of the refusal by Democratic party leaders to confer accountability, let alone make any attempt to visit some sort of necessarily inadequate justice, upon the administration.

The party’s presidential candidate, who agreeably opposes impeaching Bush and Cheney and seems no more than mildly interested in examining the genesis of our sorrows should he and his party consolidate control of the two elective branches, has just come out foursquare in favor of expanding the reach of a government that already has its national security tentacles embedded in what should be some very uncomfortable places, and he has endorsed at least two Congressional figures—practicing war lover Joe Lieberman, who is receiving favorable mention as a possible Republican vice-presidential candidate, over the anti-occupation Ned Lamont in 2006, and reactionary Georgia representative John Barrow over his progressive primary opponent, Regina Thomas, this year—who represent the antithesis of Barack Obama’s watchwords, “hope” and “change”. To continue the cephalopod analogy, he seems fully sympathetic to the notion of redaction as a survival technique, if one takes “survival” to mean “convenience”.

Obama did not, however, lay the keystone of a national security state, or invade Iraq, or greenlight torture, or threaten to carpet bomb Iran, or minister to the armed forces with a sledgehammer, or weaken the economy to the point that it has become its own threat to our collective security, and neither did other Vichy Democrats such as Jay Rockefeller, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and dozens of other administration enablers. They only helped; anything more than to shave their heads and shun them could be seen as an overreaction.

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On Monday at the White House press briefing, Press Secretary Dana Perino declined to answer when I asked her whether the White House would apologize for last Friday’s raid by U.S. forces in Iraq that reportedly killed a relative of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The slain man, Ali Abdul Hussein al-Maliki, was described as the prime minister’s cousin in recent reports by McClatchy and the Washington Post. According to McClatchy, at the time of his death, the man was working as a security guard in a villa owned by the prime minister’s sister in Janaja, a town in Karbala Province. Responsibility for security in Karbala Province was supposedly handed over to the Iraqi government in October 2007, but Iraqi officials have claimed that last Friday’s raid was conducted without their knowledge or approval.

Here is my exchange with Ms. Perino:

Q U.S. forces in Iraq reportedly killed a relative of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during a raid last Friday on a villa belonging to the Prime Minister’s sister. The villa is in Karbala province, which is supposedly under full Iraqi control, and Iraqi officials said they were not informed about the raid in advance. Was that raid a mistake, and will you issue an apology?

MS. PERINO: I think you’ll need to call MNFI [Multi-National Force, Iraq]. I don’t have any information on that.

According to McClatchy, the U.S. military released a statement on Sunday that confirmed that coalition forces had shot and killed a man during what it described as an operation targeting “special groups” (a term it uses for Iranian-backed militant cells), and that the coalition forces learned only later that the man was a security guard. The U.S. statement continued: “Coalition forces deeply regret the loss of life and are conducting an investigation.”

The June 27 raid occurred at a sensitive point in negotiations of a Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq that will define the terms under which U.S. forces will operate in Iraq after a United Nations mandate expires in December 2008. Those negotiations, which began last January, have reportedly been deadlocked over disagreements concerning the extent of Iraqi sovereignty. Two weeks prior to the raid, on June 13, Prime Minister Maliki said:

“We have reached an impasse because when we opened these negotiations we did not realize that the US demands would so deeply affect Iraqi sovereignty, and this is something we can never accept. We cannot allow US forces to have the right to jail Iraqis or assume, alone, the responsibility of fighting against terrorism.”

That the U.S. would then proceed to unilaterally conduct a raid aimed at the prime minister’s family doesn’t bode well for the success of the Status of Forces Agreement negotiations. And neither does the fact that the White House won’t apologize.

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So Barack Obama is planning to become the first African-American president of the United States. The first black president. Or so we’re told. But wait just a second here. How come Obama is black? When someone is tagged “white,” it’s because s/he’s all white. Allegedly. If s/he has one drop of African-American blood, s/he’s black. Of course Obama is half-black. So it’s no contest: He’s all black. 

This is the One-Drop Rule of American race relations. We all follow this rule, with greater or lesser slavishness, whites and non-whites alike. I suppose it’s true for Latinos and Asians, too, though maybe not as much, and that’s a curious thing. Maybe it’s not so bad to have Hispanic or Asian heritage? Not so bad in white eyes anyway, and they’re the ones who seem to make all the rules about race, including the One-Drop. Well, guess what that says about whites. Chances are if you’re reading this, you’re white. And even if you’re black, you follow the rule. It’s just how it’s done. 

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The full quote from Thomas Jefferson reads, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Your job, dear readers, is to decide, using the frame of reference enjoyed by our elected national leadership and presidential aspirants, what constitutes the tree’s natural manure in this modern world. By way of example, one might go with something like “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with Agent Orange.”

The winning entry will be selected by the editors of this august publication, meaning me in consultation with one or more of our most cynical contributors. The winning entrant will receive a CD or book of my choosing, but not the defaced copy of Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope that I originally had in mind.

If you wish to participate, please leave your entry in the comments on this post. Multiple entries are fine. There are no conceptual or linguistic constraints, although we do ask that if you go with the scatalogical or obscene, you do it cleverly. If you actually want to receive something in return for your efforts when you win, use a valid email address so that we can contact you.

The contest is open to absolutely anyone, although preference will probably be given to US entrants because, frankly, I don’t know if I can afford the postage to send something overseas. If anyone wants to make a donation to help defray the admittedly minimal cost of this extravaganza, please feel free. We’ll close the contest when we receive enough entries to stave off utter humiliation.

Fire away, and good luck.

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Following on the heels of his courageous stand against the Constitution generally, and specifically the Fourth Amendment, with respect to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and immunity for law-breaking telecommunications firms, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has announced his support for widening the range of felonies subject to the death penalty and discarding the Eighth Amendment.

Although the case in question involved the rape of a child, one can safely presume that Obama will press for the death penalty, rather than the usual fines and minimal prison terms, in cases where financial chicanery results in the ruin of innocent men, women and children in their thousands. Of particular merit, no doubt, will be cases in which corporations and government officials steal or waste funds better spent supporting our brave men and women fighting for Dick Cheney in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The plain fact is that the US government and its various constituent parts simply do not kill enough people, and we applaud Senator Obama for taking a first step toward remedying the situation. Now if only we can persuade him to either attack Iran directly or provide support to Israel should that country attempt to shoulder the burden alone.

Run, Barack, run …

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The Honorary Consul, by Graham Greene
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (or Notre-Dame de Paris), by Victor Hugo

“He imagined that in this history there was much more of magic than of love, probably a sorceress, perhaps the devil; in short, a comedy, or to use the language of those days, a mystery, of a very disagreeable nature…”

I couldn’t be more pleased to put these two books side-by-side in a review. I can’t say I was down on romance when I picked up Graham Greene’s novel (nor am I now), but as a cynical, anti-love story, it’s a fine vehicle for immersing yourself in the selfish depths of the emotion, for the projection we mistake for empathy, for (as both authors manage to state it) the highly scripted comedy. I picked up Notre-Dame with only a mental outline how Victor Hugo hit the same themes 140 years earlier, but it was close in spirit, with perhaps the salient difference that Hugo’s pessimism is a lot funnier.

Greene and Hugo also have a lot to say about the comedy of Justice, and the more historical- and political-minded readers of Weldon’s blog may be interested to compare and contrast Stroessner’s Paraguay with Louis XI’s France, the shanties of Corrientes with the Cour de Miracles, the Catholic church as the enabler of dictatorial power or its opponent. (Fitting American foreign policy into such an exercise is just too damn depressing, however.)

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Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has followed the lead of House majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-AT&T) and House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Vichy) and endorsed a “compromise” electronic surveillance bill that legitimates the Nixon-Cheney belief that the presidency confers immunity from any law the current holder of it chooses to ignore. Even better, it offers the Midas-like power of extending that immunity to anyone the president touches by excusing telecommunications companies from any consequences of breaking the law at the president’s behest.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, or even much of a disappointment, to anyone who has been following the conduct of Democrats since they reclaimed majorities in both chambers of Congress in 2006. Pelosi’s preemptive refusal that year to even consider impeaching Bush and Cheney in the face of even then overwhelming evidence that the pair had already committed dozens of impeachable crimes bespoke a willingness to at least abide, if not actually further, any future ones.

Pelosi is, as we’ve noted before, at something of a disadvantage where prosecuting the Bush administration is concerned because she was briefed on and did nothing to stop their plans to torture suspected terrorists; a fact that could turn her into a codefendant of, or a witness against, the president and vice president. The institutional press were, of course, at considerable pains not to notice that the Washington Post had just implicated the top Democrat in Congress, along with several of her colleagues in both parties, in a conspiracy to commit war crimes. Shhhh.

Democrats who aren’t appalling scum are searching for answers to the question of why the ones who are are behaving as they do, with particular attention devoted to parsing the Obama script. Hullabaloo proprietor Digby expects that the warrantless wiretapping/corporate immunity fiasco was if not orchestrated by Obama, at least perpetrated with his blessing in order to avoid getting hammered by the GOP on national security issues during the upcoming campaign.

Possibly that’s true, although of course he’ll get hammered anyway; it would at any rate fit part and parcel with the omnipresent Democratic inability to explain their increasingly rare sensible positions, and the omnipresent tendency to invoke the most tortured, as it were, logic for voting against those positions when a simple statement—”We’re corrupt and we’re scared, in not quite equal measure”—would do.

Nonetheless, regardless and despite it all, Democrats who are disgusted by the behavior of Democrats will enunciate any number of reasons why it’s better to support the venal, corrupt and cowardly bastards and bitches than to stay home and wait for the Apocalypse. And it is true that almost no Democratic party-led government could be as bad as almost any Republican-led one. But you know, so what? The only genuinely gold-plated good reason to vote for Obama, who has begun his campaign to disillusion his supporters much earlier than (I) anticipated, perhaps deliberately, so as to prepare them for the greater disillusion to come, is that he can’t possibly appoint Supreme Court justices who will be as bad as the ones McCain would appoint.

This is assuming that a Democratic president can get a Democratic congress to confirm his appointments in the face of forty Republican senators shouting “Boo!” at the top of their lungs, an assumption that relies on facts not in evidence during the past two years and which would therefore be excluded from a court of law, at least pending the appointment of one or two additional psycho Supreme Court justices.

A McCain presidency would surely cost the nation dearly, perhaps even more than the Bush one has done. Millions of people would suffer and some of them would die and our babies would inherit our wind. But you know, I’m strongly leaning toward the “fuck it” camp, on the theory that Nancy Pelosi and her ilk, and John McCain and his, deserve each other more than the rest of us deserve Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton, had she won the nomination). Maybe the time is less ripe for America’s first doomed-to-disappoint black or female president than it is for our first barely closeted nihilist one. In any event, if I have a home by the first Tuesday in November then I plan to spend the entire day in it.

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The more we learn of the Bush administration’s proposed long-term security agreement with Iraq, the less sensible Iraqi acquiescence seems. In essence, it codifies the administration’s desire to turn Iraq into the world’s least seaworthy but largest, by many orders of magnitude, aircraft carrier. Under the Bush plan, the US would have massive, permanent basing privileges along with the authority to use Iraqi territory and airspace to launch strikes on virtually anyone within reach, for virtually any reason. (Iran, of course, is number one on everyone’s hit list, including presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and born-again Israelite Barack Obama.)

In essence the agreement would eliminate for its duration even the pretense that Iraq is a sovereign state. And along with the military provisions comes increased pressure on the Iraqi government to pass an administration-drafted oil law that would turn over the bulk of the country’s oil reserves, and the bulk of the profit from them, to US and multinational oil companies. That law, and the military agreement, would between them establish Iraq as a shell corporation serving US military and energy interests.

The administration see the agreement as a twin opportunity to declare victory in Iraq, as usual ignoring reality, and at the same time tie the hands of future administrations (not that future administrations, Republican or Democratic, would necessarily want to struggle against the bonds). Securing it is a high priority, and the administration are acting accordingly: they’re threatening to wreck Iraq’s fragile financial standing by embargoing nearly half of the country’s foreign cash reserves if they don’t get what they want.

US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported for the first time in this newspaper yesterday.

Iraq’s foreign reserves are currently protected by a presidential order giving them immunity from judicial attachment but the US side in the talks has suggested that if the UN mandate, under which the money is held, lapses and is not replaced by the new agreement, then Iraq’s funds would lose this immunity. The cost to Iraq of this happening would be the immediate loss of $20bn. The US is able to threaten Iraq with the loss of 40 per cent of its foreign exchange reserves because Iraq’s independence is still limited by the legacy of UN sanctions and restrictions imposed on Iraq since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the 1990s. This means that Iraq is still considered a threat to international security and stability under Chapter Seven of the UN charter. The US negotiators say the price of Iraq escaping Chapter Seven is to sign up to a new “strategic alliance” with the United States.

When an individual does it, that’s extortion. In the White House, it’s considered diplomacy.

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Back in 1999, then-Slate political correspondent Jacob Weisberg, now the online journalistic Cream of Wheat site’s editor, penned a story called “Why the Press Loves John McCain“. He opened it with a charmingly self-effacing and abashed confession:

Journalists go weak in the knees around the guy. The few who have attempted to write debunking pieces about him have failed miserably. When I set out to spend a few days with McCain last week, I promised my editor that I wouldn’t join in this collective swoon. That proved impossible. But perhaps I can redeem myself a bit by examining the phenomenon.

That was almost nine years ago, two years past the seven-year period that defines common-law marriages in most jurisdictions, and although the relationship between McCain and the press has frayed around the edges a bit—they occasionally quarrel now, as long-term couples sometimes do—it’s still going stronger than many celebrity marriages.

Some while back I suggested that once the Democratic nominee was finally ascertained, the McCain-press relationship would undergo a fundamental realignment. My thinking was that after McCain surrendered his opposition to torture, which had been a major talking point for his correspondents, and violated his own campaign finance law, the adoration would be hard to sustain during a general campaign in which his opponent would, presumably, be hammering on the flip-flops and hypocrisies (”presumably” because we are after all talking about a Democratic presidential campaign).

That prediction seems to have been off the mark, being as there is as yet no evidence whatsoever that actual issues will play any role in the press treatment of McCain. What’s coming, though, could be even worse for the pasty-faced senator: as in so many long-term relationships, adoration seems poised to transmogrify into a sort of affectionate contempt.

Unlike the previous prediction, evidence is accumulating behind this one, and never so evidently as in the wake of McCain’s epically awful speech on the occasion of Barack Obama’s graduation night. Josh Marshall put together a video intercutting the speech with desperate attempts by a completely flummoxed Fox News damage control team trying their level best to make lemonade from a heap of steaming compost, an effort that eventually dissolved into giggles.

The speech not only lacked substance but was delivered in an awkward-high-school-speaker style, replete with inappropriate pauses and facial tics, all in front of a few hundred apparently sedated supporters barely able to wave their signs and muster the occasional feeble cheer. When one commentator remarked that the McCain campaign had told him three weeks ago that the speech was timed with the intention of harshing Obama’s victory vibe, one of his colleagues expressed incredulity that what they had just seen reflected three weeks of preparation.

The press are the only thing standing between McCain and electoral annihilation, not counting a successful Clinton attempt on Obama’s life, so it can’t be comforting for the McCain camp to see them reduced to helpless laughter in the wake of what was supposed to be an important speech.

James Wolcott noted one particularly acrobatic bit of thrashing about on the part of McCain’s supporters, nailed by the National Review’s Kathryn Lopez:

Sean Hannity just offered some advice to McCain on Hannity & Colmes. If he wants to give an inspiring speech, the senator ought to look at Mitt Romney’s CPAC exit speech and Fred Thompson’s exit speech; they were both fantastic, conservative, uplifting speeches. And so, John McCain should make like he’s about to bow out of the race to find, as Hillary might put it, his voice.

A disbelieving Wolcott responds, “So let me see if I have this right. The way for John McCain to inspire conservatives is to echo the concession speeches of two guys he beat, charging into battle to the faint distant trumpets of a valedictory address?”

He could do worse, and may well. Either the press will continue to laugh at the contrast between his performances and Obama’s, or they’ll be so embarrassed on his behalf that they’ll overdo the excuses and make plain that they’re just being kind.

On the policy front, McCain is lost: even a desultory review of his stance on most issues reveals them to be carbon copies of the Bush administration’s policies, only more so. The exception is his acknowledgement that global warming is a fact of life that must be addressed, but in most other arenas there’s but a sliver of daylight between his positions and Bush’s.

By way of example, a month or two ago superannuated Washington Post hack David Broder tried to make the case that McCain’s major foreign policy address was the equivalent of Barack Obama’s speech on racial issues, a reading that gave both men too much credit but was particularly absurd with respect to McCain, who essentially reiterated the Bush/Rumsfeld/Rice line. For Broder, though, the fact that McCain touts democracy promotion and tough love for our authoritarian friends in the Middle East and Central Asia is qualitatively different because, you know, it’s McCain.

Broder says that McCain outlined “a vastly different approach from President Bush’s and one that might heal the wounds left here at home and abroad by the past seven years,” and that he “signaled not just a break with Bush but an abandonment of his own past preference for strongmen such as Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf by saying that time has run out on the U.S. “strategy of relying on autocrats to provide order and stability” in the greater Middle East.”

Here’s Condoleezza Rice speaking on the subject during her secretary of state confirmation hearings: “In the Middle East, President Bush has broken with six decades of excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the hope of purchasing stability at the price of liberty.” And here she is again, speaking as national security advisor on the eve of the 2004 G-8 summit, in which president Bush laid out his agenda for democracy in the Middle East: “”The idea that we were somehow buying stability by turning a blind eye to the absence of freedom has been exposed, and exposed in the form of extremism.”

Here’s Bush on the topic, speaking at the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy in November of 2003: “Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe — because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.”

Surely you can see the difference.

Fortunately, the level of cynicism among even casual followers of the news seems to have reached heights sufficient to innoculate most potential voters against the comity stylings of Broder and the Broderettes, and if talking heads such as those at Fox News continue to struggle in their efforts to take McCain seriously, Obama should have little to worry about.

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A lot of people are facing a tough November. Barack Obama seems certain to be the Democratic candidate for president. He’s a black guy in a country that continues to host a lot of people who don’t like black guys, especially ones that are smarter than they are and can talk rings around them.

John McCain would seem if not the ideal candidate for racists or anti-intellectuals, at least acceptable in a pinch. But he has a serious problem too: he’s a Republican, and more people dislike Republicans these days than dislike smarty-pants black guys.

That’s because Republicans, when they’re in power, tend to make a complete hash of things. Sometimes, as with Reagan, they more or less get away with it. Other times, as with the current Bush, they screw things up so badly that there’s simply no disguising it.

So the question here is whether Obama can get more mileage from people who are simply disgusted by Republicans than McCain can get from people who hate smart people or black guys or both.

In theory McCain has an advantage because until evolution makes their eyes glow red and their breath stink of sulphur, one can’t really tell just from looking at them that Republicans are walking train wrecks, while Obama, in vogue or out, is visibly a man of color and audibly very bright. So while voters who might have Republican urges have to stop and remind themselves that a vote for a Republican is a vote for chaos, debt, authoritarianism and government by hallucination, voters who are racist or uneasy around smart people are confronted with Obama’s ethnicity and intelligence full time.

Those are this year’s swing voters, if there actually are any: people whose attention spans are too short to remember what Republicans have done to the country during the past eight years, and people who can’t decide whether or not it’s worth voting for the black guy even when the only other option is total disaster. No sock puppet moms or disco dads or whatever.

My own estimate is that if Obama runs an even moderately competent campaign, McCain is toast: old, white, stale, moldy toast. That’s without making any judgements on which way the ADD/racist vote breaks. And that’s of course assuming Hillary Clinton doesn’t have Obama knocked off just as she did Vince Foster, something I’m told she has publicly announced herself to be considering.

Even if McCain sweeps those demographics, enough voters seem to have at least momentarily internalized Bush’s achievements—massive new debt, gobsmacking stupidity, thousands of American soldiers pointlessly killed, wounded and traumatized and etc.— that the race shouldn’t be especially close even with Chris Matthews and his ilk doing the color commentary.

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