[Dialogue] New Yorker endorses Kerry

Ann Shafer asgoodasitgets at earthlink.net
Tue Oct 26 17:50:09 EDT 2004


Oh, for more than one vote. Thank you, thank you. Ann Stewart Shafer
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <KroegerD at aol.com>
To: <Dialogue at wedgeblade.net>; <MICAH6-8 at topica.com>
Cc: <Ackroeger at aol.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 4:01 PM
Subject: [Dialogue] New Yorker endorses Kerry


> I had several comments from list members expressing thanks for Bishop
Spong's message I rcently posted.
>
> It seemed to help some of us realize the level of hatred (including ours)
on both sides of this US presidential campaign.
>
> Although I still remain mystified as to how any thinking person can
support Bush, the following endorsement from the grandaddy of all
intellectual mags (their first endorsement in 80 years), helps me a little
bit to understand my hatred of the Bush administration.
>
> Now my struggle is to understand how to turn such hatred into witnessing
and justing love.
>
> Here it it---
>
> COMMENT
> THE CHOICE
> by The Editors
> The New Yorker
> Issue of 2004-11-01
> This Presidential campaign has been as ugly and as bitter as any in
American memory. The ugliness has flowed mostly in one direction, reaching
its apotheosis in the effort, undertaken by a supposedly independent group
financed by friends of the incumbent, to portray the challenger—who in his
mid-twenties was an exemplary combatant in both the Vietnam War and the
movement to end that war—as a coward and a traitor. The bitterness has been
felt mostly by the challenger’s adherents; yet there has been more than
enough to go around. This is one campaign in which no one thinks of having
the band strike up “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
>
> The heightened emotions of the race that (with any luck) will end on
November 2, 2004, are rooted in the events of three previous Tuesdays. On
Tuesday, November 7, 2000, more than a hundred and five million Americans
went to the polls and, by a small but indisputable plurality, voted to make
Al Gore President of the United States. Because of the way the votes were
distributed, however, the outcome in the electoral college turned on the
outcome in Florida. In that state, George W. Bush held a lead of some five
hundred votes, one one-thousandth of Gore’s national margin; irregularities,
and there were many, all had the effect of taking votes away from Gore; and
the state’s electoral machinery was in the hands of Bush’s brother, who was
the governor, and one of Bush’s state campaign co-chairs, who was the
Florida secretary of state.
> Bush sued to stop any recounting of the votes, and, on Tuesday, December
12th, the United States Supreme Court gave him what he wanted. Bush v. Gore
was so shoddily reasoned and transparently partisan that the five justices
who endorsed the decision declined to put their names on it, while the four
dissenters did not bother to conceal their disgust. There are rules for
settling electoral disputes of this kind, in federal and state law and in
the Constitution itself. By ignoring them—by cutting off the process and
installing Bush by fiat—the Court made a mockery not only of popular
democracy but also of constitutional republicanism.
> A result so inimical to both majority rule and individual civic equality
was bound to inflict damage on the fabric of comity. But the damage would
have been far less severe if the new President had made some effort to take
account of the special circumstances of his election—in the composition of
his Cabinet, in the way that he pursued his policy goals, perhaps even in
the goals themselves. He made no such effort. According to Bob Woodward in
“Plan of Attack,” Vice-President Dick Cheney put it this way: “From the very
day we walked in the building, a notion of sort of a restrained presidency
because it was such a close election, that lasted maybe thirty seconds. It
was not contemplated for any length of time. We had an agenda, we ran on
that agenda, we won the election—full speed ahead.”
> The new President’s main order of business was to push through Congress a
program of tax reductions overwhelmingly skewed to favor the very rich. The
policies he pursued through executive action, such as weakening
environmental protection and cutting off funds for international
family-planning efforts, were mostly unpopular outside what became known (in
English, not Arabic) as “the base,” which is to say the conservative
movement and, especially, its evangelical component. The President’s
enthusiastic embrace of that movement was such that, four months into the
Administration, the defection of a moderate senator from Vermont, Jim
Jeffords, cost his party control of the Senate. And, four months after that,
the President’s political fortunes appeared to be coasting into a gentle but
inexorable decline. Then came the blackest Tuesday of all.
> September 11, 2001, brought with it one positive gift: a surge of
solidarity, global and national—solidarity with and solidarity within the
United States. This extraordinary outpouring provided Bush with a second
opportunity to create something like a government of national unity. Again,
he brushed the opportunity aside, choosing to use the political capital
handed to him by Osama bin Laden to push through more elements of his
unmandated domestic program. A year after 9/11, in the midterm elections, he
increased his majority in the House and recaptured control of the Senate by
portraying selected Democrats as friends of terrorism. Is it any wonder that
the anger felt by many Democrats is even greater than can be explained by
the profound differences in outlook between the two candidates and their
parties?
> The Bush Administration has had success in carrying out its policies and
implementing its intentions, aided by majorities—political and, apparently,
ideological—in both Houses of Congress. Substantively, however, its record
has been one of failure, arrogance, and—strikingly for a team that prided
itself on crisp professionalism—incompetence.
> In January, 2001, just after Bush’s inauguration, the nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office published its budget outlook for the coming
decade. It showed a cumulative surplus of more than five trillion dollars.
At the time, there was a lot of talk about what to do with the anticipated
bounty, a discussion that now seems antique. Last year’s federal deficit was
three hundred and seventy-five billion dollars; this year’s will top four
hundred billion. According to the C.B.O., which came out with its latest
projection in September, the period from 2005 to 2014 will see a cumulative
shortfall of $2.3 trillion.
> Even this seven-trillion-dollar turnaround underestimates the looming
fiscal disaster. In doing its calculations, the C.B.O. assumed that most of
the Bush tax cuts would expire in 2011, as specified in the legislation that
enacted them. However, nobody in Washington expects them to go away on
schedule; they were designated as temporary only to make their ultimate
results look less scary. If Congress extends the expiration deadlines—a
near-certainty if Bush wins and the Republicans retain control of
Congress—then, according to the C.B.O., the cumulative deficit between 2005
and 2014 will nearly double, to $4.5 trillion.
> What has the country received in return for mortgaging its future? The
President says that his tax cuts lifted the economy before and after 9/11,
thereby moderating the downturn that began with the Nasdaq’s collapse in
April, 2000. It’s true that even badly designed tax cuts can give the
economy a momentary jolt. But this doesn’t make them wise policy. “Most of
the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans,” Bush said during his
final debate with Senator John Kerry. This is false—a lie, actually—though
at least it suggests some dim awareness that the reverse Robin Hood approach
to tax cuts is politically and morally repugnant. But for tax cuts to
stimulate economic activity quickly and efficiently they should go to people
who will spend the extra money. Largely at the insistence of Democrats and
moderate Republicans, the Bush cuts gave middle-class families some relief
in the form of refunds, bigger child credits, and a smaller marriage
penalty. Still, the rich do better, to put it mildly. Citizens for Tax
Justice, a Washington research group whose findings have proved highly
dependable, notes that, this year, a typical person in the lowest fifth of
the income distribution will get a tax cut of ninety-one dollars, a typical
person in the middle fifth will pocket eight hundred and sixty-three
dollars, and a typical person in the top one per cent will collect a
windfall of fifty-nine thousand two hundred and ninety-two dollars.
> These disparities help explain the familiar charge that Bush will likely
be the first chief executive since Hoover to preside over a net loss of
American jobs. This Administration’s most unshakable commitment has been to
shifting the burden of taxation away from the sort of income that rewards
wealth and onto the sort that rewards work. The Institute on Taxation and
Economic Policy, another Washington research group, estimates that the
average federal tax rate on income generated from corporate dividends and
capital gains is now about ten per cent. On wages and salaries it’s about
twenty-three per cent. The President promises, in a second term, to expand
tax-free savings accounts, cut taxes further on dividends and capital gains,
and permanently abolish the estate tax—all of which will widen the widening
gap between the richest and the rest.
> Bush signalled his approach toward the environment a few weeks into his
term, when he reneged on a campaign pledge to regulate carbon-dioxide
emissions, the primary cause of global warming. His record since then has
been dictated, sometimes literally, by the industries affected. In 2002, the
Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding a key provision of the
Clean Air Act known as “new source review,” which requires power-plant
operators to install modern pollution controls when upgrading older
facilities. The change, it turned out, had been recommended by some of the
nation’s largest polluters, in e-mails to the Energy Task Force, which was
chaired by Vice-President Cheney. More recently, the Administration proposed
new rules that would significantly weaken controls on mercury emissions from
power plants. The E.P.A.’s regulation drafters had copied, in some instances
verbatim, memos sent to it by a law firm representing the utility industry.
> “I guess you’d say I’m a good steward of the land,” Bush mused dreamily
during debate No. 2. Or maybe you’d say nothing of the kind. The President
has so far been unable to persuade the Senate to allow oil drilling in the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but vast stretches of accessible wilderness
have been opened up to development. By stripping away restrictions on the
use of federal lands, often through little-advertised rule changes, the
Administration has potentially opened up sixty million acres, an area larger
than Indiana and Iowa combined, to logging, mining, and oil exploration.
> During the fevered period immediately after September 11th, the
Administration rushed what it was pleased to call the U.S.A. Patriot Act
through a compliant Congress. Some of the reaction to that law has been
excessive. Many of its provisions, such as allowing broader
information-sharing among investigative agencies, are sensible. About others
there are legitimate concerns. Section 215 of the law, for example, permits
government investigators to obtain—without a subpoena or a search warrant
based on probable cause—a court order entitling them to records from
libraries, bookstores, doctors, universities, and Internet service
providers, among other public and private entities. Officials of the
Department of Justice say that they have used Section 215 with restraint,
and that they have not, so far, sought information from libraries or
bookstores. Their avowals of good faith would be more reassuring if their
record were not otherwise so troubling.
> Secrecy and arrogance have been the touchstones of the Justice Department
under Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft. Seven weeks after the
9/11 attacks, the Administration announced that its investigation had
resulted in nearly twelve hundred arrests. The arrests have continued, but
eventually the Administration simply stopped saying how many people were and
are being held. In any event, not one of the detainees has been convicted of
anything resembling a terrorist act. At least as reprehensible is the way
that foreign nationals living in the United States have been treated. Since
September 11th, some five thousand have been rounded up and more than five
hundred have been deported, all for immigration infractions, after hearings
that, in line with a novel doctrine asserted by Ashcroft, were held in
secret. Since it is official policy not to deport terrorism suspects, it is
unclear what legitimate anti-terror purpose these secret hearings serve.
> President Bush often complains about Democratic obstructionism, but the
truth is that he has made considerable progress, if that’s the right word,
toward the goal of stocking the federal courts with conservative ideologues.
The Senate has confirmed two hundred and one of his judicial nominees, more
than the per-term averages for Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Bush senior.
Senate Republicans blocked more than sixty of Clinton’s nominees; Senate
Democrats have blocked only ten of Bush’s. (Those ten, by the way, got
exactly what they deserved. Some of them—such as Carolyn Kuhl, who devoted
years of her career to trying to preserve tax breaks for colleges that
practice racial discrimination, and Brett Kavanaugh, a thirty-eight-year-old
with no judicial or courtroom experience who co-wrote the Starr Report—rank
among the worst judicial appointments ever attempted.)
> Even so, to the extent that Bush and Ashcroft have been thwarted it has
been due largely to our still vigorous federal judiciary, especially the
Supreme Court. Like some of the Court’s worst decisions of the past four
years (Bush v. Gore again comes to mind), most of its best—salvaging
affirmative action, upholding civil liberties for terrorist suspects,
striking down Texas’s anti-sodomy law, banning executions of the mentally
retarded—were reached by one- or two-vote majorities. (Roe v. Wade is two
justices removed from reversal.) All but one of the sitting justices are
senior citizens, ranging in age from sixty-five to eighty-four, and the gap
since the last appointment—ten years—is the longest since 1821. Bush has
said more than once that Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are his favorite
justices. In a second Bush term, the Court could be remade in their images.
> The record is similarly dismal in other areas of domestic policy. An
executive order giving former Presidents the power to keep their papers
indefinitely sealed is one example among many of a mania for secrecy that
long antedates 9/11. The President’s hostility to science, exemplified by
his decision to place crippling limits on federal support of stem-cell
research and by a systematic willingness to distort or suppress scientific
findings discomfiting to “the base,” is such that scores of eminent
scientists who are normally indifferent to politics have called for his
defeat. The Administration’s energy policies, especially its resistance to
increasing fuel-efficiency requirements, are of a piece with its
environmental irresponsibility. Even the highly touted No Child Left Behind
education program, enacted with the support of the liberal lion Edward
Kennedy, is being allowed to fail, on account of grossly inadequate funding.
Some of the money that has been pumped into it has been leached from other
education programs, dozens of which are slated for cuts next year.
> Ordinarily, such a record would be what lawyers call dispositive. But this
election is anything but ordinary. Jobs, health care, education, and the
rest may not count for much when weighed against the prospect of large-scale
terrorist attack. The most important Presidential responsibility of the next
four years, as of the past three, is the “war on terror”—more precisely, the
struggle against a brand of Islamist fundamentalist totalitarianism that
uses particularly ruthless forms of terrorism as its main weapon.
> Bush’s immediate reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, was an
almost palpable bewilderment and anxiety. Within a few days, to the
universal relief of his fellow-citizens, he seemed to find his focus. His
decision to use American military power to topple the Taliban rulers of
Afghanistan, who had turned their country into the principal base of
operations for the perpetrators of the attacks, earned the near-unanimous
support of the American people and of America’s allies. Troops from Britain,
France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Norway, and Spain are serving alongside
Americans in Afghanistan to this day.
> The determination of ordinary Afghans to vote in last month’s Presidential
election, for which the votes are still being counted, is clearly a positive
sign. Yet the job in Afghanistan has been left undone, despite fervent
promises at the outset that the chaos that was allowed to develop after the
defeat of the Soviet occupation in the nineteen-eighties would not be
repeated. The Taliban has regrouped in eastern and southern regions. Bin
Laden’s organization continues to enjoy sanctuary and support from Afghans
as well as Pakistanis on both sides of their common border. Warlords control
much of Afghanistan outside the capital of Kabul, which is the extent of the
territorial writ of the decent but beleaguered President Hamid Karzai. Opium
production has increased fortyfold.
> The White House’s real priorities were elsewhere from the start. According
to the former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, in a Situation Room
crisis meeting on September 12, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld suggested launching
retaliatory strikes against Iraq. When Clarke and others pointed out to him
that Al Qaeda—the presumed culprit—was based in Afghanistan, not Iraq,
Rumsfeld is said to have remarked that there were better targets in Iraq.
The bottom line, as Bush’s former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has said,
was that the Bush-Cheney team had been planning to carry out regime change
in Baghdad well before September 11th—one way or another, come what may.
> At all three debates, President Bush defended the Iraq war by saying that
without it Saddam Hussein would still be in power. This is probably true,
and Saddam’s record of colossal cruelty--of murder, oppression, and regional
aggression--was such that even those who doubted the war’s wisdom
acknowledged his fall as an occasion for satisfaction. But the removal of
Saddam has not been the war’s only consequence; and, as we now know, his
power, however fearsome to the millions directly under its sway, was far
less of a threat to the United States and the rest of the world than it
pretended—and, more important, was made out—to be.
> As a variety of memoirs and journalistic accounts have made plain, Bush
seldom entertains contrary opinion. He boasts that he listens to no outside
advisers, and inside advisers who dare to express unwelcome views are met
with anger or disdain. He lives and works within a self-created bubble of
faith-based affirmation. Nowhere has his solipsism been more damaging than
in the case of Iraq. The arguments and warnings of analysts in the State
Department, in the Central Intelligence Agency, in the uniformed military
services, and in the chanceries of sympathetic foreign governments had no
more effect than the chants of millions of marchers.
> The decision to invade and occupy Iraq was made on the basis of four
assumptions: first, that Saddam’s regime was on the verge of acquiring
nuclear explosives and had already amassed stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons; second, that the regime had meaningful links with Al
Qaeda and (as was repeatedly suggested by the Vice-President and others)
might have had something to do with 9/11; third, that within Iraq the regime
’s fall would be followed by prolonged celebration and rapid and peaceful
democratization; and, fourth, that a similar democratic transformation would
be precipitated elsewhere in the region, accompanied by a new eagerness
among Arab governments and publics to make peace between Israel and a
presumptive Palestinian state. The first two of these assumptions have been
shown to be entirely baseless. As for the second two, if the wishes behind
them do someday come true, it may not be clear that the invasion of Iraq was
a help rather than a hindrance.
> In Bush’s rhetoric, the Iraq war began on March 20, 2003, with precision
bombings of government buildings in Baghdad, and ended exactly three weeks
later, with the iconic statue pulldown. That military operation was indeed a
success. But the cakewalk led over a cliff, to a succession of heedless and
disastrous mistakes that leave one wondering, at the very least, how the
Pentagon’s civilian leadership remains intact and the President’s sense of
infallibility undisturbed. The failure, against the advice of such leaders
as General Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, to deploy an
adequate protective force led to unchallenged looting of government
buildings, hospitals, museums, and—most inexcusable of all—arms depots.
(“Stuff happens,” Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld explained, though no stuff
happened to the oil ministry.) The Pentagon all but ignored the State
Department’s postwar plans, compiled by its Future of Iraq project, which
warned not only of looting but also of the potential for insurgencies and
the folly of relying on exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi; the project’s head,
Thomas Warrick, was sidelined. The White House counsel’s disparagement of
the Geneva Conventions and of prohibitions on torture as “quaint” opened the
way to systematic and spectacular abuses at Abu Ghraib and other
American-run prisons--a moral and political catastrophe for which, in a
pattern characteristic of the Administration’s management style, no one in a
policymaking position has been held accountable. And, no matter how Bush may
cleave to his arguments about a grand coalition (“What’s he say to Tony
Blair?” “He forgot Poland!”), the coalition he assembled was anything but
grand, and it has been steadily melting away in Iraq’s cauldron of violence.
> By the end of the current fiscal year, the financial cost of this war will
be two hundred billion dollars (the figure projected by Lawrence Lindsey,
who headed the President’s Council of Economic Advisers until, like numerous
other bearers of unpalatable news, he was cashiered) and rising. And there
are other, more serious costs that were unforeseen by the dominant factions
in the Administration (although there were plenty of people who did foresee
them). The United States has become mired in a low-intensity guerrilla war
that has taken more lives since the mission was declared to be accomplished
than before. American military deaths have mounted to more than a thousand,
a number that underplays the real level of suffering: among the eight
thousand wounded are many who have been left seriously maimed. The toll of
Iraqi dead and wounded is of an order of magnitude greater than the
American. Al Qaeda, previously an insignificant presence in Iraq, is an
important one now. Before this war, we had persuaded ourselves and the world
that our military might was effectively infinite. Now it is overstretched, a
reality obvious to all. And, if the exposure of American weakness encourages
our enemies, surely the blame lies with those who created the reality, not
with those who, like Senator Kerry, acknowledge it as a necessary step
toward changing it.
> When the Administration’s geopolitical, national-interest, and
anti-terrorism justifications for the Iraq war collapsed, it groped for an
argument from altruism: postwar chaos, violence, unemployment, and brownouts
notwithstanding, the war has purchased freedoms for the people of Iraq which
they could not have had without Saddam’s fall. That is true. But a sad and
ironic consequence of this war is that its fumbling prosecution has
undermined its only even arguably meritorious rationale—and, as a further
consequence, the salience of idealism in American foreign policy has been
likewise undermined. Foreign-policy idealism has taken many forms—Wilson’s
aborted world federalism, Carter’s human-rights jawboning, and Reagan’s
flirtation with total nuclear disarmament, among others. The failed armed
intervention in Somalia and the successful ones in the Balkans are other
examples. The neoconservative version ascendant in the Bush Administration,
post-9/11, draws partly on these strains. There is surely idealistic purpose
in envisioning a Middle East finally relieved of its autocracies and
dictatorships. Yet this Administration’s adventure in Iraq is so gravely
flawed and its credibility so badly damaged that in the future, faced with
yet another moral dilemma abroad, it can be expected to retreat, a victim of
its own Iraq Syndrome.
> The damage visited upon America, and upon America’s standing in the world,
by the Bush Administration’s reckless mishandling of the public trust will
not easily be undone. And for many voters the desire to see the damage
arrested is reason enough to vote for John Kerry. But the challenger has
more to offer than the fact that he is not George W. Bush. In every crucial
area of concern to Americans (the economy, health care, the environment,
Social Security, the judiciary, national security, foreign policy, the war
in Iraq, the fight against terrorism), Kerry offers a clear, corrective
alternative to Bush’s curious blend of smugness, radicalism, and
demagoguery. Pollsters like to ask voters which candidate they’d most like
to have a beer with, and on that metric Bush always wins. We prefer to ask
which candidate is better suited to the governance of our nation.
> Throughout his long career in public service, John Kerry has demonstrated
steadiness and sturdiness of character. The physical courage he showed in
combat in Vietnam was matched by moral courage when he raised his voice
against the war, a choice that has carried political costs from his first
run for Congress, lost in 1972 to a campaign of character assassination from
a local newspaper that could not forgive his antiwar stand, right through
this year’s Swift Boat ads. As a senator, Kerry helped expose the mischief
of the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, a money-laundering
operation that favored terrorists and criminal cartels; when his
investigation forced him to confront corruption among fellow-Democrats, he
rejected the cronyism of colleagues and brought down power brokers of his
own party with the same dedication that he showed in going after Oliver
North in the Iran-Contra scandal. His leadership, with John McCain, of the
bipartisan effort to put to rest the toxic debate over Vietnam-era P.O.W.s
and M.I.A.s and to lay the diplomatic groundwork for Washington’s
normalization of relations with Hanoi, in the mid-nineties, was the signal
accomplishment of his twenty years on Capitol Hill, and it is emblematic of
his fairness of mind and independence of spirit. Kerry has made mistakes
(most notably, in hindsight at least, his initial opposition to the Gulf War
in 1990), but—in contrast to the President, who touts his imperviousness to
changing realities as a virtue—he has learned from them.
> Kerry’s performance on the stump has been uneven, and his public groping
for a firm explanation of his position on Iraq was discouraging to behold.
He can be cautious to a fault, overeager to acknowledge every angle of an
issue; and his reluctance to expose the Administration’s appalling record
bluntly and relentlessly until very late in the race was a missed
opportunity. But when his foes sought to destroy him rather than to debate
him they found no scandals and no evidence of bad faith in his past. In the
face of infuriating and scurrilous calumnies, he kept the sort of cool that
the thin-skinned and painfully insecure incumbent cannot even feign during
the unprogrammed give-and-take of an electoral debate. Kerry’s mettle has
been tested under fire—the fire of real bullets and the political fire that
will surely not abate but, rather, intensify if he is elected—and he has
shown himself to be tough, resilient, and possessed of a properly
Presidential dose of dignified authority. While Bush has pandered
relentlessly to the narrowest urges of his base, Kerry has sought to appeal
broadly to the American center. In a time of primitive partisanship, he has
exhibited a fundamentally undogmatic temperament. In campaigning for America
’s mainstream restoration, Kerry has insisted that this election ought to be
decided on the urgent issues of our moment, the issues that will define
American life for the coming half century. That insistence is a measure of
his character. He is plainly the better choice. As observers, reporters, and
commentators we will hold him to the highest standards of honesty and
performance. For now, as citizens, we hope for his victory.
>
>
> -- 
> Dick Kroeger
>


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