marccooper

"In-Crowd" Politics: Not enough [Updated: "Is Moore Blind -- or a Coward?"]

Matthew Rothschild, editor of the venerable Madison-based The Progressive magazine weighs in on Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 911 saying he came away “disappointed.” Matt’s a smart and gutsy guy who doesn’t submit meekly to leftist orthodoxies in spite of his mag’s radical pedigree (which makes him an authentic radical).

His take on Moore’s flick, I think, resonates beyond mere movie criticism and touches upon many of the political vulnerabilities of the anti-Bush forces. Matt says he found F-911, at times, “gripping” and “courageous." And so:

Hats off to him.

But he had a great movie on his hands, and he couldn't leave well enough alone.

Instead, he intruded, as is his trademark, too much into his own film. He used a sledgehammer approach when a dagger would have done the job, and he tarnished his whole enterprise with a tone that will be off-putting to all but the Moveon.org crowd.

Make no mistake: This was an in-crowd movie.

I’ll let you read the rest. Please do. But I like that line: “an in-crowd movie.” Reminds me of the Howard Dean campaign. A series of in-crowd campaign rallies that convinced itself it was a mounting majority.

That’s what so worrisome about the oppositional politics of the last four years. Too often smug and smart-alecky, convinced that moral superiority and a putatively higher IQ is enough to beat Bush.

Not by a long-shot. You’re gonna need more than movie ticket stubs to do the job. Read the new CBS News Poll: George W. Bush’s popularity ratings continue to sag at 42% but he’s running dead even with John Kerry, merely a point behind at 44 to 45%. That’s a 7 point gain for Bush in just one month.

The Moveon.org/Michael Moore mindset – insisting that Bush is a liar and suggesting all sorts of dark conspiracies involving Halliburton, oil pipelines, the Saudis, or The Carlyle Group—ain’t gonna cut it. People want some pro-active, positive reasons to vote for someone else.

Where are they? Time’s getting short.

UPDATE: Anotehr lefty writer-blogger, Bob Dreyfuss, also voices dissatisfaction with Moore's movie. Moore must be "eiher blind, or a coward" concludes Dreyfus because in spending so much time trashing the Saudis in film he totally ignores the much more powerful role of ISRAEL in shaping U.S. policy:

Here are some questions for Moore: If Bush is so “in the pocket” of Saudi Arabia, why is he Ariel Sharon’s strongest backer? Why, when he had Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah down at the Texas ranch a few years ago, did he flip off the Saudi’s peace plan? And most important, why did he invade Iraq—since Saudi Arabia was strongly opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq? Why did he launch his Iraqi adventure over Saudi objections, with many of his advisers chortling that Saudi Arabia would be “next”? Why did he stock his administration with militant neocon crusaders who see Saudi Arabia as the main enemy? Why, Michael?

I have to conclude the Michael Moore is either blind, or a coward. Blind, if he can’t see Bush’s craven ties to Israel, driven by the neocons and the Christian Zionists and Bible-thumping fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell, who consider Israel Jesus’ next stop and see Saudi Arabia as Satanic. Or cowardly, because he knows it and decided not to mention it. Is that because attacking Israel is too hard?

Some great insight revealing Moore's central argument to be as muddled as some of the more preposterous theses in Bowling for Columbine. Like I said before, Michael Moore is a political dunce.

Later, Nader

Ralph Nader’s attempted bank shot to run for President around the Green Party but to nevertheless pick up its endorsement and get on its ballot line in 22 states crashed this past weekend. Nader was outmaneuvered by Texas lawyer David Cobb (who?) who was chosen to be the party’s official candidate at its national convention in Milwaukee. Made no difference that Ralph had, at the last minute, opportunistically picked Green apparatchik Peter Camejo as his running mate, the assembled delegates twinkled their fingers and –poof! – picked Cobb.

It’s a humiliating defeat for Nader – though he has not recognized it. I mean, to boot the Green Party endorsement? Only defeat I can think of like that is when Tom Hayden, after two decades in the California state legislature, failed to win a L.A. City Council seat a few years back.

One of my new favorite writers, Garance Franke-Ruta, has the only complete behind-the-curtain rundown of how Nader lost the Greens. It’s pretty amusing reading -- revealing how Nader has become so politically tone deaf that he refused to even properly fight for a Green endorsement that easily could have been his:

Make no mistake: Had Nader chosen to fight for it over the past year, he could have easily walked away with the Green Party nomination on Saturday. But he didn't. "The Nader campaign has intentionally avoided trying to influence the outcome," said Zeese as the balloting was about to start. "We'll see what the outcome is." His words suggested a kind of equanimity, but he sounded nervous.

Into the political vacuum left by Nader's arms-length campaigning jumped Cobb, running on a platform of support for state parties and local candidates. For a party that draws heavily from the ranks of the alienated and disaffected -- people who already feel ignored by politicians -- Nader's decisions to eschew Green membership, not participate in the presidential-primary process, and avoid the Milwaukee convention were decisive. Nader, perhaps thinking himself a sure thing, or so outsize a figure that a fair fight would require him to tie one hand behind his back, failed to mount a campaign sufficient to win.

I’m pretty much left cold by all these events. I voted for Nader in 2000 – though I thought the Greens to be rather silly and ineffectual. Nader did little in the last four years to build on his couple of million votes. As I wrote earlier, while I think he has the perfect right to run again, this year’s election is one where it’s obvious a third party candidacy is doomed. So I found Ralph’s 2004 quest rather off. But I was equally put off by the Democratic Party hacks trying to invalidate his ballot status.

The victorious David Cobb and his supporters, meanwhile, are going to run what they call a “strategic” campaign i.e. they will stay out of Kerry’s way. Says Franke-Ruta:

That means that, in about a dozen swing states where they plan to campaign, they want George W. Bush out and will not demand that voters choose Greens instead of Kerry. "The voter has now been placed in a position where the president of their country is a threat to the entire world," said LaMarche of this mixed-campaigning strategy. "It's not about being a benefit to Kerry. It's about being a benefit to the voter."

Already, Cobb seems to be trying to combine the radical Green anti-Kerry critique with some coded pro-Kerry messages. "I'm not embarrassed to say I get weepy-eyed about what America can be," Cobb said in his final speech Saturday, citing the Langston Hughes poem "Let America be America Again" as inspiration. Which is, of course, the new Kerry campaign slogan.

All this raises the bigger question of what’s the point of the Green Party, anyway? The new Cobb campaign looks like just one more difficult, acrobatic way to essentially be a Democrat. This is perhaps an inevitable product of the way the Greens have positioned themselves. The Nader and Cobb factions have one thing in common: they define the Greens as a party “to the left of” the Democrats, an oasis for “real” progressives. To me that makes little sense, actually NO sense in our winner-take-all political system. It condemns the Greens to being perpetually marginal (or perpetually a spoiler), having to settle for a city council position in this or that college town – unless, that is, you believe that one fine Tuesday a majority somewhere is going to vote that far to the left.

Nader’s flirtation with the Greens offered the potential for a different strategy, a cross-ideological populist position that would have run not to the left of the Democrats, but, if you will, over and around both parties on a platform of citizen empowerment. Something like Jesse Ventura With A Brain. Instead, the Nader 2000 campaign was mostly a feel-good holding tank for disgruntled lefties and the long-time non-partisan consumer activist became little more than one more speaker at Green campaign “super-rallies” that detoured into advocacy for Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal and macro-biotics. This time around, it appears, neither Nader nor the Cobbite Greens are going anywhere of much interest.

LATimes' Kinsley On Iraq: Beyond the Blazing Straddle

After two false starts, finally something impressive from the new editorial page director of the Los Angeles Times, Michael Kinsley. His aborted debut ten days ago was an ill-conceived piece trying to extract some facile allegory about Hollywood from the gruesome June 15 decapitation murder of 91 year old former blacklisted screenwriter Bobby Lees. Bobby was a good old friend of mine and of hundreds of others who appreciated his humor, wit, warmth and courage. We were all devastated by his barbaric murder.

Kinsley’s maiden piece pushing off that atrocity was tasteless and plain stupid as it ruminated on the general headlesness of Hollywood and he was smart enough to withdraw it before it went into print.

Then the first of what will be Kinsley’s weekly signed columns appeared last week and frankly, it wasn’t much better. A light-headed meditation on the false promises of political optimism it was a typical “editor’s story” i.e. a concept-driven piece with NO substance.

Now Kinsley has redeemed himself. The entire editorial well of Sunday's L..A. Times was taken up with an unusually bold unsigned piece slamming administration Iraq policy titled “The Disaster of Failed Policy." It goes markedly beyond the usual “blazing straddle” yes/but pabulum of editorial page language and Kinsley should be rightfully credited:

All the main justifications for the invasion offered beforehand by the Bush administration and its supporters — weapons of mass destruction, close ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq, a chance to make Baghdad a fountain of democracy that would spread through the region — turned out to be baseless.

Weeks of suicide car bombings, assassinations of political leaders and attacks on oil pipelines vital to the country's economy have preceded the handover.

On Thursday alone, car bombs and street fighting in five cities claimed more than 100 lives. Iraqis no longer fear torture or death at the hands of Hussein's brutal thugs, but many fear leaving their homes because of the violence.

The U.S. is also poorer after the war, in lives lost, billions spent and terrorists given new fuel for their rage. The initial fighting was easy; the occupation has been a disaster, with Pentagon civilians arrogantly ignoring expert advice on the difficulty of the task and necessary steps for success.

The Times editorial even proposes a clear remedy -- internationalize the conflict as much and as quickly as possible and then withdraw all American troops as soon as that move is less destabilizing than keeping them there:

Iraqis say they want the Americans out, but most understand they will need the foreign forces for many more months. A U.S. troop presence in Iraq should not be indefinite, even if the Iraqis request it. By the end of 2005, Iraq should have enough trained police, soldiers, border guards and other forces to be able to defend the country and put down insurgencies but not threaten neighboring countries.

The Bush administration should push NATO nations to help with the training. Once the Iraqis have a new constitution, an elected government and sufficient security forces, the U.S. should withdraw its troops. That does not mean setting a definite date, because the U.S. cannot walk away from what it created. But it should set realistic goals for Iraq to reach on its own, at which time the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad becomes just another diplomatic outpost. It also means living up to promises to let Iraq choose its own government, even well short of democracy.

Good for Kinsley. More editorials like this and fewer of his gossamer-weight columns.

More On Moore: Genius, Liar, Panderer or Propagandist? (Three Out of Four Ain't Bad) [Updated]

I’m going to let all you folks see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and then report back to me, thank you very much. It’s enough that I have to wallow through Bill Clinton’s bloated self-apologia this weekend. I don’t think I could stand an additional two hours of political hectoring from the likes of Michael Moore (who, by the way, has hired Clintonite political hit-men Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani as his own...um.. PR hit-men ).

But I’ve had a whale of a good time reading the reviews of Moore’s latest, especially the really nasty trashings. At the top of that list is Christopher Hitchens' startlingly well-written piece. Here's just a brief whiff of Hitch's overall dump:

Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This was, he said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified. Something-I cannot guess what, since we knew as much then as we do now-has since apparently persuaded Moore that Osama Bin Laden is as guilty as hell. Indeed, Osama is suddenly so guilty and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any other topic is a dangerous "distraction" from the fight against him. I believe that I understand the convenience of this late conversion.

I can take this a step further. As of January of this year, Moore was still decrying the intervention in Afghanistan thereby rendering his current position one of absolute opportunism. But do yourself a favor and read Hitch's entire piece. Even if you disagree, you must admire the force of argument and the elegance of his writing.

I also very much enjoyed Ella Taylor's more postive review in the L.A. Weekly. But allow me to highlight one of the more negative passages:

Moore shows us a pre-war Baghdad of kids playing in the streets and smiling men eating in sidewalk cafés - I guess it was harder to get footage of the thousands who disappeared into Saddam Hussein's torture chambers - and of Iraq now, with wounded children screaming in pain from the ruins of their bombed houses.

No kidding. I was in Iraq in 1991 and let me tell you the predominant mood had little to do with kite-flying. Of three-score countries I have visited, Saddam’s little show was by far the most oppressive I had experienced. I went in with a group of religious pacifists who were hosted by Saddam and we still had machine-gun toting thugs as our minders. People were universally scared to death to open their mouths. The peace that dominated Iraq was the peace of the graveyard. Oh, well.

The quirkiest and in some ways most aesthetically informed review of Fahrenheit 9/11, however, comes from Armond White in the New York Press. This is a must-read. No excuses. And White does an intriguing job of pairing Moore's film with another documentary currently screening, Control Room -- a celluloid valentine to Al Jazeera:

These films play too loosely with the passions aroused by the war, pandering to liberal Americans' kick-me guilt. That partly explains the Cannes debacle—many liberals simply want their prejudices entertained. This reduces the Palm d'Or to the level of the MTV Movie Awards…

…Moore doesn't understand the link between the Entertainment Industrial Complex and the Military Industrial Complex, and his dumbed-down method of turning political tragedy into comedy is part of the problem. It's a class vice in which the media elite can exercise disdain while pitying the underclass who must pay the price. Fahrenheit 9/11 becomes infuriating every time Moore uses a poor or black person to symbolize Bush's homeland victims (the same arrogance the Coen brothers pointed out with the Mother Jones gag in The Ladykillers). He returns to Flint, MI (the setting for Roger & Me) for sociological cheap shots but misses the real story of the post-9/11 experience-such as life among Muslim immigrants in Detroit where suspicion and opportunism mix. Or even the middle-American discomfort explained in Neil Young's Greendale, a vastly more revealing film.

Propaganda like Fahrenheit 9/11 won't help today's moviegoers gain political insight. Moore's condescension settles on young GIs wounded in Iraq, now in a veterans' hospital (where they face lost funding and benefits). One vet gives Moore what he wants: "I'm going to be very active this year and make sure that the Democrats take power." We're not supposed to remember the opening sequence that showed Democrats complicit with Bush's ascension and the invasion of Iraq. Moore, as desultory as Jerry Bruckheimer, simply wants to get a rise out of us. Like Tarantino, he's uninterested in making movies that show how the world really works.

Now, a simple ground-rule. If you’ve seen Moore’s film and what to comment on it, fine. If you want to refer to these reviews, however, I ask you to read them in their entirety before opining as the excerpts I have chosen in no way reveal their full significance or nuance.

Update: I also found Jeff Jarvis' take worth reading. Lots of real wrestling with Moore's techinque. A few graphs:

The real problem with the film, the really offensive thing about it, is that in Fahrenheit 9/11, we -- Americans from the President on down -- are portrayed at the bad guys. If there's something wrong about bin Laden it's that his estranged family has ties with -- cue the uh-oh music -- the Bush family. Saddam? Nothing wrong with him. No mention of torture and terror and tyranny. Moore shows scenes of Baghdad before the invasion (read: liberation) and in his weltanschauung, it's a place filled with nothing but happy, smiling, giggly, overjoyed Baghdadis. No pain and suffering there. No rape, murder, gassing, imprisoning, silencing of the citizens in these scenes. When he exploits and lingers on the tears of a mother who lost her soldier-son in Iraq, and she wails, "Why did yo have to take him?" Moore does not cut to images of the murderers/terrorists (pardon me, "insurgents") in Iraq or killed him -- or even to God; he cuts to George Bush. When the soldier's father says the young man died and "for what?", Moore doesn't show liberated Iraqis to reply, he cuts instead to an image of Halliburton.

He doesn't try, not for one second, to have a discussion, to show the other side -- and then cut that other side down to size with facts and figures and the slightest effort at argument. No, he just shows the one side. And that, really, is a tragedy. It would be good if we had a discussion. It would be good to have a movie that made us think and reconsider and talk.

But polemics don't do that. They're only made of two-by-fours...After leaving the theater and walking by the black man now shaking his head at what Moore had wrought and the people with bring-down-Bush clipboards, I made my way back to New Jersey through the PATH train at the World Trade Center where, most of you know, I was on 9/11. And now I was shaking my head. Michael Moore did not present bin Laden and the terrorists and religious fanatics (from other lands) as the enemy who did this. No, to him, our enemy is within. To him, our enemy is us. And that's worse than stupid and sad and it's most certainly not entertaining. It's disgusting.

Re-Update: Thanks to reader Rosedog we toss in for consideration The New Yorker's David Denby who says that in the world Moore depicts:

"There are, apparently, no justifiable fears, only hysterical fears manipulated by the authorities, whose every act is purposive and conspiratorial. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Moore that people like Tom Ridge may simply not know what they’re doing and are desperately trying to appear on top of the situation.

Moore can’t resist amusing his campus and conspiracy-nut following, along with the gleeful sophomore in all of us, but, as the man said, when you aim at the king you had better kill him. At the moment, the stakes may be too high for shenanigans. “Fahrenheit 9/11” offers the thrill of a coherent explanation for everything, but parts of the movie are no better than a wild, lunging grab at a supposed master plan. Did Bush, as Moore implies, allow Osama bin Laden to survive because of American financial ties to Osama’s protectors, the Taliban? (If so, the Pentagon war planners were part of the plot.) Moore is a genuine populist, but what he can’t deal with is the unpleasant possibility that Bush, as people used to say of Nixon, has made a shrewd assessment of the lack of virtue and curiosity in the American public. A lot of Americans still admire the ignorant, smirking, chest-out, crotch-forward triumphalism. Michael Moore has become a sensational entertainer of the already converted, but his enduring problem as a political artist is that he has never known how to change anyone’s politics. "

Arnold, California and The Rise of the (Slot) Machines

My latest L.A. Weekly column has just been posted. I invite you to take a read. An odd alliance of the Governator, liberal Democrats and organized labor are backing new deals with Indian gambling tribes. California and its communities will now get back more from the Indian casinos. In return, California may now become the new gambling capital of America.

Jailing Journalists: The Ethos of Abu Ghraib

British writer Elena Lappin tells a harrowing tale of how she got tossed into 26 hours of detention last month by paranoic U.S. officials when she flew into LAX without the new visa for foreign journalists demanded by Homeland Security. The piece came out a few weeks ago in the Guardian but I hadn’t seen it until a friend sent it to me today.

It is an infuriating, frightful account of the sort of shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality that has become way too pervasive since 9/11. Being on alert against terrorism doesn’t have to make you an arrogant, abusive asshole. But apparently some officials can’t resist the temptation.

Lappin winged into L.A. last May 3 from London with a free-lance assignment from the British daily Guardian. Though her husband is an American and her daughter was born in New York and she has resided for long periods on the East Coast, Lappin didn’t learn of a revision in immigration policy that required her to first seek a special foreign journalist via to enter on assignment (I might add here that after reporting in 60 countries around the world the only two governments that required me to seek such a visa were Communist Cuba and Apartheid South Africa).

Now, as useless as the visa rule might be (and it is useless) let’s concede that a job is a job and that the immigration cops at LAX had no choice but to bar her entry. Ok. But then the immigration officer in charge proceeded to treat her as if she were a criminal. Or a terrorist. All because she failed to fill out a bureaucratic form where she should have declared she had a writing assignment:

My protestations that I had not noticed this caveat, nor been alerted to it, that I had travelled to the US on many occasions, both for work and pleasure, that I had, in fact, lived there as a permanent resident and that my husband was a US citizen, as was my New York-born daughter, all fell on deaf ears. He grinned. "You don't care, do you?" I said, with controlled anger. Then I backtracked, and assumed a begging, apologetic mode. In response, he told me I would have to be "interviewed", and that a decision would then be taken by yet another superior. This sounded hopeful…

But the interview lasted several hours and probed every corner of her personal and professional life. Then came a luggage search. Next a mugshot. Then three female officers arrived to conduct a body search. Then Lappin was escorted to an airport detention room. And then came a final blow – lock-up:

Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.

After 26 hours of this ordeal, Lappin was deported. The whole affair should be deeply disturbing to anyone – right or left—who values freedom. That every traveler coming into the U.S. might now be viewed as a potential threat, I suppose, is an understandable if exaggerated reflex. But once an official has determined that the subject, in this case, is a former U.S. resident with a traceable past, is indeed a commissioned journalist, and one from our key allied country, no less, and that her only error was bureaucratic, I think shaking her down, stripping her, tossing her into stir and deporting her might be just a bit over the top, no? They couldn't have held her in a waiting lounge? Or how about just warning her and letting her go?

Lappin writes that even though “my experience was far removed from the images of real torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it was also, as one American friend put it, ‘conceptually related’, at distant ends of the same continuum and dictated by a disregard for the humanity of those deemed ‘in the wrong.’"

I think she’s right.

Nader's Nadir

What’s up with Ralph Nader? He’s making less sense every day. While he eschewed the Green Party this time around to run an “independent” presidential campaign, and even as he insists he’s capable of peeling off substantial numbers of disgruntled Republican voters, Nader nevertheless tapped Peter Camejo, a Green Party honcho with an exclusively leftist appeal, as his VP choice today.

Camejo, a Bay Area-based fund manager, has been a dusty fixture on the radical left for literally decades. Back in the sixties, Camejo ran for president on the ticket of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. Camejo got 5% of the vote as the 2002 Green Party candidate for California Governor. Last fall he ran again in the recall election but by the end of the race was mostly polishing the apples of doomed Democratic candidate Cruz Bustamante.

If Camejo could muster more than 100 Republican or conservative votes (disgruntled or not) nationwide it would be a miracle. So much for Nader’s notion of appealing across ideological lines.

The Nader campaign – what there is of it—now seems to be driven by the same bureaucratic imperatives of any traditional campaign, albeit on a micro scale. Ralph now just wants to get on as many ballots as he can, at whatever cost, and with whomever it takes to get there.

My colleague Dougie Ireland, already outlined earlier this year Nader’s grim alliance with whacko cultists – a marriage cooked up to get Ralph on the New York ballot. Now Nader’s choice of hack Camejo is aimed not at winning any serious number of voters but rather at picking up the Green Party’s formal endorsement, along with its ballot line in 22 states.

The Greens meet in convention this week where in between “twinkling” at each other they will decide whom if anybody to nominate for president. Lawyer David Cobb has been leading with a plurality of delegates promising to run a “strategic” campaign that would not draw votes from John Kerry in key toss-up "battleground" states. But Nader now might also pick up the delegates that had been pledged to Camejo.

Nader could very well then finish this weekend as, once again, the official Green nominee. But the Party itself is almost certain to emerge from the convention weakened and split.

I don’t think much of this matters very much as I wrote earlier this year. The Green Party, like Western Civilization, is a good idea that never really got off the ground. Nader, meanwhile, seems to be rapidly squandering a lifetime’s worth of well-earned respect. Running a third party campaign during this election cycle would have been tough enough even if conceived and implemented in the most thought-out, strategic, and serious manner. Now, with Camejo as his running mate, Nader’s lonely quest threatens to turn into nothing more than a carnival sideshow.

A Dime's Difference?

I’ve made it a point of principle that my “private” politics perfectly coincides with my public positions. I think the truth, nettlesome as it might be, always has priority and that nothing is ever gained from a pulled punch.

This campaign season, however, is a torturous test. Thinking to myself, I am drawn every day closer to the quite uncomfortable conclusion that it’s going to matter very little, if it all, who is elected in November. But such a notion is now taboo, an unthinkable, unspeakable heresy. With each passing day there’s a building fervor that no sacrifice is too much to defeat George W. Bush.

I’m glad, therefore, that I don’t have to publicly utter my darkest thoughts. In today’s Los Angeles Times Opinion section, long-time military analyst Bill Arkin does it for me in a piece titled Kerry: A Lighter Shade of Bush:

"I would love nothing better than to see Bush out of office, but Kerry is a gloomy alternative. Worse yet, in the short term, his "me too, only better" approach to the war on terrorism could actually serve to make the United States less safe.

Kerry's defense plans might be a slam-dunk for the atherosclerotic set in the national security community, but here is the alternative that the senator offers to Democrats and people of liberal values in November:

• no plan to withdraw from Iraq, not even the kind of "secret plan" the late President Nixon offered on Vietnam, and no change in Afghanistan;

• continuation of Bush's preemption policy;

• a larger military with many more special operations units, plus accelerated spending on "transformation," which in today's defense jargon means creation of greater capability to intervene around the world on short notice;

• a new domestic intelligence agency and a vastly beefed-up homeland security program."

Arkin also writes off Kerry’s homeland security proposals as “pandering” and ultimately “defeatist.” But, Arkin, says the worst part of Kerry’s vision is that it is no vision at all, at least none that departs significantly from that of the current President. Kerry’s proposals to build up Army troop strength, Arkin concludes, stems from an analysis that is identical to that of Bush and one that seriously misreads the international situation.

"Kerry proposes these buildups because he accepts the central premise of the Bush administration: Terrorists are so threatening that we must sacrifice our liberties, change our government and military and, ultimately, our way of life in order to fight them.

In this 60th anniversary year of D-day, I find it astounding that anyone could be so callous and ahistorical as to point to the threat we faced from a Nazi foe that truly had the capacity to destroy our way of life and compare it to a few thousand or even a few tens of thousands of terrorists who, at their worst, can do no more than threaten to panic Western society with random bloodshed. It is equally absurd to compare the war on terrorism to the Cold War, when the United States could literally have been destroyed by thousands of nuclear weapons (a possibility, though not a threat, that persists today from Russian and Chinese nukes…Intelligent people, and I assume that includes Kerry, must begin to challenge the basic premise behind the post-9/11 hysteria. Terrorists may be a growing threat, and we may be unprepared to deal with the challenges they pose, but they have no hope of destroying our society. Only we can do that.

By overstating the threat and overreacting to incidents, we not only give terrorists exactly what they seek, but we seem to create a panicked environment that clouds our judgment when it comes to intelligence, propels us into military adventures abroad and distorts our priorities at home.

Americans should demand a certain level of competence and accountability from their government to protect them, but the Bush (and Kerry) approach is not securing a peaceful future. In fact, the entire war on terrorism, based on the false assumption that it is a war for our survival, seems to be feeding hatred and aggravating the fault lines.

We need to rethink this problem, pure and simple, and Kerry needs to unburden himself from the conventional wisdom…"

I share many of Arkin’s sentiments. I’ve more than had it with George W. Bush and it would be impossible for him to get my vote (Duh!). But John Kerry, on a good day, leaves me icy cold. On bad days, it scares the Bejezus out of me that our choices have come down to this. And it makes me serious question just where we’re going to be the morning after the election. The very suggestion that a Kerry victory would signal that we’ve somehow “taken back America” seems pathetic, if not delusional.

Dick-ing Around

Just back from a week of reporting in the Palm Springs-Indio area on Governor Terminator’s tough-love dealings with Indian gambling tribes topped off by a morning fishing trip out of Ensenada, Baja California. (Fish Report: 2 anglers, 16 calico bass, 35 barracuda, 1 [20lb] white sea bass).

Now, back to politics. I haven’t been shy about voicing my life-long disgust with Dick Gephardt. So, I find it difficult to believe the many reports that he is the only man left sagging (along with John Edwards) on John Kerry’s potential VP short list. Can Kerry be that tone-deaf? (Answer: yes!).

As the American Prospect’s senior editor Garance Franke-Ruta argues in a just-posted essay, not only would the Big Dick fail to produce voter energy, he would actively turn-off Democratic voters. She demolishes the current media-driven mythology that Gephardt is the golden boy of organized labor. Drawing from first hand-reporting during the early primary season, Garance recalls that, indeed, the most vibrant and cutting-edge unions went out of their way to NOT support Gephardt. Here’s a brief excerpt, but if you are at all serious about understanding the 2004 Democratic campaign read her entire piece:

In the final days of the Iowa contest, Gephardt was a lackluster campaigner, incapable of drawing an audience and equally incapable of inspiring one. His union friends were loyal to the very end, but he was a one-trick pony. In the end most of his allies in Iowa seemed to be union members who'd come in from out of state. The working-class energy was all with Edwards; when the exit polls came in, Kerry had won the union households tally, while Edwards and Gephardt ran even. The difference was that both Edwards and Kerry also did well with non-union households, while Gephardt drew only about a third as much support from non-union caucus-goers as he did from the house of labor. Nor were all unions his supporters during the primary season; the most rapidly growing and powerful national unions, AFSCME and SEIU, did not back Gephardt. In the end it was the man who had fewer formal ties to labor who beat the two labor-backed candidates, Gephardt and Dean.

Franke-Ruta also reminds Democrats that Gephardt can claim responsibility for the lowest point of the current campaign-- an incident burned into the memort of many a party activist.

... Gephardt and Dean may have made up by the end of the primaries, but during his campaign to destroy Dean, Gephardt was responsible for the only unforgivable act of the entire primary season. Gephardt's cronies put together a 527 committee that hid its donors and ran a TV advertisement in South Carolina effectively comparing Howard Dean to Osama bin Laden. There are few lines any longer in politics, but Gephardt's allies crossed a pretty big one. Most people have probably forgotten this ad, but -- trust me here -- many Dean supporters have not. Rather than bringing the leftmost wing of the party back into the fold, a Gephardt candidacy would drive anti-war voters and not a few former Deaniacs right into the waiting arms of Ralph Nader. That he'd be able to do this while simultaneously turning off moderates and failing to rouse anyone outside of the unions would be a neat trick, indeed.

I’ve kept an eye on Franke-Ruta’s writing over the last few years and she has consistently proven to be one of the most insightful among a young generation of political analysts. A piece she did nearly two years ago was a positively devastating critique (from the left) of Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. Read it!

"No One Died When Clinton Lied" -- Except The Democrats

This is a rather long (but hopefully provocative) posting so make yourself comfortable.

As the media frenzy around Bill Clinton’s biography cranks into high gear I’m reminded just how much I despise the man. And, more importantly, how much you should as well, especially if you (like me) find yourself disgusted with the Bush administration.

A non sequitur? Hardly. Indeed, Bill Clinton (and those who defended him) should be held directly responsible for the election of George W. Bush in November 2000. A quick refresher course:

Back in the summer of 1998, as Clinton was to testify before the Grand Jury, Monicagate was coming to a boil. The Republicans were howling for impeachment. The Democrats (and even “pwogessive” voices like The Nation) were claiming he was a victim of “sexual McCarthyism.”

Both were wrong. Clinton’s transgressions didn’t rise to a crime against the state. But he was nevertheless a moral and political embarrassment. A born trimmer, his personal behavior was a perfect match with his feckless public opportunism. He lied (not as a witness) but as a defendant in a sexual harassment case; he plotted to obstruct justice; he clearly suborned perjury; and he was porking an intern less than half his age in the Oval Office.

Simply, Bill Clinton should have resigned. And if not, then the Democratic congressional leadership should have publicly demanded his stepping down. I’m proud to say that – allotted by The Nation in October 1998 a scant 700 word island in a months-wide sea of otherwise Clinton apologia-- Micah Sifry, Doug Ireland and I (none of us Democrats) jointly editorialized for Clinton to hand in his resignation.

No way. The Democrats rallied to Slick Willie and the rest is history. If Clinton, however, had stepped down and Al Gore had become President in the fall of 1998, I’d bet the farm that he’d won two years later in a landslide.

No one better than former Republican-strategist-turned-populist Kevin Phillips in his new book on the Bush Dynasty details how widespread voter repulsion with Clinton allowed a pipsqueak like Dubya to even have a shot at winning.

But in that crucial last half of 1998 Democrats whipped themselves into a lather demonizing Kenneth Starr instead of questioning the viability of their own leader and the future of their own party. A few Democrats, however, got it. Very few. One of them was Henry Ruth, a former Watergate prosecutor who voted for Clinton both times. Writing in the Wall Street Journal on December 10, 1998 (not available online), Ruth as much as predicted the coming Democratic defeat in November 2000:

“This shameless dust campaign demeans us," Ruth wrote. "Mr. Clinton's defenders tell us that our national heroes have always lied about sex. They trash seriatim a new hero-offender every week: Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK and LBJ. None of these men committed perjury or obstruction of justice. All trumpeted noble ideals and called on citizens to sacrifice for the sake of freedom. Can the same be said of Mr. Clinton?"

Ruth then quoted a quip from Rep. Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, who asked, "What did the president touch and when did he touch it?" Ruth answered the question this way:

"Mr. Clinton has touched all us Democrats in ways that, although we may not realize it now, we most certainly will in November 2000 if we continue to denigrate the presidency and ignore presidential perjury and obstruction. When the 'game' is over and competition makes way for contemplation, and if the Republicans choose a candidate who is thoughtful and ethical, Democrats and independents will rebel against a presidency that rejects individual responsibility and has no ideal higher than the lowest common denominator."

Ruth got it right. Dubya had little to campaign on except a promise to “restore integrity to the White House.” It turned out to be just enough—give or take a few thousand votes in Florida. Democrats still didn’t learn the lesson. Instead of accepting responsibility for their own failures –and those of Bill Clinton and Al Gore—they scapegoated the rather insignicant Ralph Nader.

Frankly, I never fully understood the liberal ass-kissing of Clinton. But, oh, how they went in the tank for him! Just like they will in the coming weeks when they scoop up his book and wax nostalgic about the glory days in the era before Bush.

Allow me, then, also a few minutes of nostalgia. A few weeks after Henry Ruth’s piece appeared, I teamed up with former Democratic strategist Pat Caddell and in the Wall Street Journal we wrote of our dismay over the lack of liberal outrage against Clinton. Here is an extended excerpt:

“In the past six years, liberals have continued their defense of the Clinton presidency, paying a staggering price: unconditional surrender of their ideals.

Where was the Democratic outrage when in the first months of the Clinton administration 83 men, women and children were immolated by federal agents at Waco? The same Democrats now bleating about the violation of Mr. Clinton's rights were eerily silent when, as the 1996 re-election campaign was beginning, the president signed the Effective Death Penalty Act--a dastardly law that quashes nearly all legal appeals from death row.

Democrats denounce the violation of the president's right to privacy. But they have nothing to say when his administration proposes to legalize "roving" wiretaps. They are equally mum on the immigration bill signed by Mr. Clinton that virtually abolished due process and this year alone has resulted in more than 30,000 summary deportations, in many cases of long-term legal residents. And when Mr. Clinton signed the 1996 welfare bill, which requires unwed mothers to name their children's fathers on pain of prosecution, it was left to Jesse Jackson to snuff out the moral fires. When liberals pondered their options of protest at the 1996 Democratic Convention, Mr. Jackson loudly barked the stray dissenters back into the fold.

Likewise, in the current Monicagate fiasco, mainstream feminist organizations have shredded two decades of hard-earned gains in sexual harassment law. True, Paula Jones's case was exploited by Clinton haters. But that's no excuse for the White House to attack her as "trailer trash" or for Mr. Clinton, as a defendant in a sexual harassment case, to lie under oath. Since when is it the task of liberal feminists to intentionally confuse this repugnant act of perjury with what they disingenuously call "just lying about sex"?

But the most disturbing consequence of the surrender to Clinton has been the self-strangulation of the Democratic peace constituency. In August Mr. Clinton ordered missile attacks in Afghanistan and Sudan within days of his disastrous speech about Monicagate. When credible news reports surfaced that the plant demolished by U.S. rockets in the Sudan was a benign pharmaceuticals factory, former President Carter courageously called for an investigation. But Democratic officeholders ignored Mr. Carter's call.

The refusal to speak out on the possible Sudan deception led us directly to last week's tragedy of Operation Desert Fox. As the missiles exploded in Iraq, Democrats cheered. House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt and Minority Whip David Bonior--both of whom voted against the 1991 Gulf War and argued for the right to publicly challenge the wisdom of George Bush's decision--this time pontificated shamelessly about threats to national security. The low point came when Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D., R.I.) on the House floor resurrected--nearly word for word-- the scurrilous language LBJ White House's used in 1966 when it questioned the patriotism of his uncle, Robert F. Kennedy, who had begun to speak out against the Vietnam War. Rep. Kennedy even suggested that Congress should ask the CIA for permission to go ahead with the impeachment debate.

As last week came to close, American liberals staged a bizarre televised pageant of moral suicide. On one channel you could view a third wave of a suspiciously timed American air attack rain down on Baghdad, cruise missiles exploding at a million dollars a pop. On another channel, at the same moment, there were the Rev. Mr. Jackson and the cream of liberalism rallying on the Capitol steps, joining hands and intoning "We Shall Overcome"--praying not for the victims of our ordnance, but for the prevaricating president who signed their death warrant.”

I take back not a word of the above, thank you very much. And now I can do little except brace for the festival of adoration that liberals are about to once again rain down on Clinton. I think few have learned the lesson. Just tonight, driving down I-10 near Palm Springs I came upon a sleek, black Lexus in front of me. It bore two bumperstickers. One was a simple “John Kerry for President” sticker. The other read: “No One Died When Clinton Lied.”

What a staggeringly stupid slogan: Our Liar Is Less Of A Liar than Your Liar. And then Democrats wonder where the outrage is over the many lies of George W. Bush!

In the meantime, if you happen to bump into Bill Clinton in a Borders bookstore somewhere over the next three or four weeks, make sure to thank him. Thank him for helping to elect President Bush.