[Dialogue] {Spam?} FW: {Spam?} I liked this!

[Harry Wainwright]

From: KroegerD at aol.com [mailto:KroegerD at aol.com] 
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2007 4:41 PM
Cc: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
Subject: I liked this!

 

Yippie!!!  Where do I enlist?

 

Dick Kroeger

 

Published on Friday, June 8, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
<http://www.commondreams.org/>  


The Gore Door


by David Michael Green

It’s fair to say that this is not the very worst of times in American
history.

The British are not marching through the homeland, burning down the White
House. We are not murdering each other by the hundreds of thousands, as we
did during our Civil War. A fourth of us are not unemployed, as was the case
during the Great Depression. And Joseph McCarthy - though not necessarily
his techniques and his amorality - seems safely ensconced in his grave,
despite Ann Coulter’s attempt to revive him (wow, how sick is that?).

It could be worse, true. But this is, nevertheless, an ugly time in the
historical journey of this nation, and the peril of the present moment runs
far deeper than middle America has begun to appreciate. Just as a single
plane crash is often more horrifying to people than is the plethora of
everyday car wrecks ultimately inflicting much more carnage on the society
in total, so it is that far too many of us are not noticing our slow-motion
national wreck, even as it transpires before our eyes.

Make that wrecks, actually, for the crises are multiple, and they are
extensive.

You can play all the statistical games you want (Hey, have you heard?
National debt as a ratio to GDP over the population growth vector times the
inverse of Chinese export subsidy allowances is actually not at historic
highs!), but the truth is that we’re handing over an obscene pile of IOUs to
our own children. Right now, each American taxpayer owns about $60,000 worth
of federal debt, a number which is growing by about $2,000 with each year’s
additional deficit, and which is compounded each day by additional interest
on the loans as well.

You can bury your head so deep in the sand that the soles of your feet get
sunburned, but the idea that “we’re fighting them over there so we don’t
have to fight them here!” still cannot be made into a sensible conclusion
for sentient creatures. The nasty truth about Iraq will not go away. Every
additional day there is another day of fodder feeding the booming output for
the American hatred factory, as it stamps out enemies of the United States
faster than you can say “IED”. Even if we weren’t bankrupting ourselves in
Baghdad, and even if we hadn’t broken our Army there, as well as our
National Guard and Reserves meant for domestic crises, and even if we hadn’t
made the rest of the world hate us, this adventure would still be a crisis
of first proportions for the United States.

And, perhaps most historically egregious of all (which is really saying a
lot!), you can keep cranking up your air conditioner till the knob breaks
off in your hand, but that won’t change the facts about the environmental
destruction that a society in deep denial is causing to its one and only
life support system. Boy, is history going to judge us harshly on this one,
assuming there are any people left around to be historians. And, boy, will
we deserve that.

The list (sigh) goes on and on. From Florida to Ohio to the (In-)Justice
Department itself, American democracy is in crisis on more fronts than I
care to count. Our civil liberties are under siege. Jobs are flying out the
window. Our healthcare system is the pride of the planet, as long as you’re
willing to leave aside those pesky countries of the First and Second Worlds
(and even some of the Third). And so on, and so on.

It is truly a dark hour for America, and all roads lead to the same
explanatory address: the country has been hijacked by a movement of
regressive kleptocrats who have not governed well in large part because
their intention never was to govern well - but rather, instead, to liquidate
every asset from the beast before then dumping its tattered carcass in a
fire sale. There are no parallels for this in our political history. Only
the leveraged buyout does it justice. Think of this as the Gordon Gekko
model of governance. Woo-hoo.

Add to that, however, the political parallels that do exist. Bush embodies
the worst of all American presidencies (and notice they’re almost all
Republicans). If you took the drunken bungling of (Bush’s cousin) Franklin
Pierce, and combined it with the corruption of the Grant administration, the
imperialism of McKinley, the incompetence of Harding, the coldheartedness of
Hoover, the militarism of Eisenhower, Constitution-smashing of Nixon, the
nationalist arrogance of Reagan, and the ham-handedness of Poppy Bush, you
might begin to approximate the disaster of the current Resident. It’s as if
Doctor Frankenstein’s assistant not only brought back the sociopath’s brain
from the morgue, but every other part as well, and they stitched them all
together to make the present monster.

So, yeah, this is some pretty awful stuff, though we also don’t want to
overstate the case. This isn’t bad like Civil War bad. But it is still quite
disastrous, and it will get worse, even if we were to at least stanch the
bleeding today, without taking any remedial steps. Say impeachment were to
put an end right now to our lovely little national project of inflicting
greater and greater damage upon ourselves (one of “Rumsfeld’s Rules” - and,
man, should he ever know: “If you are in a hole, stop digging”). We’d still
be suffering for a long time to come. These guys have been so cynically
clever with their project from the beginning, and one of the smartest things
they’ve done is to temporally disengage consequences from their causes.
We’re going to pay huge costs for their mistakes, that’s for sure. But
they’ve made sure that those fees mostly come later, not during the time the
damages are being done. Kinda like Best Buy selling stereos. We have the “No
Payments Till January of 2009!” government, and it works. Turns out you can
sell wars, deficits and environmental destruction that way too, not just
appliances.

One of the many benefits of doing that (take careful notes here, all you
would-be Machiavellis) is that it produces a condition amongst the public in
which some substantial political wisdom and some real attention to
governance are required to recognize in the present tense how profoundly
destructive such regressive policies actually are. Regrettably, not many
Americans can claim either of those two qualities, let alone both.

Truly this is one of the worst of times. But, all that said, I actually
believe that we stand today on the precipice of a possible reversal of this
ugly chapter in our history, and one of considerable potential magnitude.
Call it a case of national-scale lemonade-making. Without question, there
are a lot of ifs involved for this to transpire. More challenging still is
that hitting a few of these conditionals is not enough - we more or less
have to do them all. But if we do - and I honestly don’t think that even the
collective series is all that improbable - there is real potential here for
something positive to happen. And not just a Clintonesque, non-Bushist,
version of kinder, gentler corporate marauding. I’m talking about something
more akin to a latter day revival of the New Deal. In short, a truly
progressive political agenda for America.

The first thing that has to happen to achieve this is more of the same of
what we’re experiencing right now. This is well more than possible - it’s
highly probable. I don’t think Bush and Cheney are going to be impeached and
convicted in the time remaining, and I know for sure they’re not going to
change their policy stripes in a last-ditch effort to save this presidency
from its unsalvageable fate as the worst in American history. The
fundamental mistake that Americans - even those who have come to revile this
administration - still make in assessing them is to believe that their
problem is incompetence, arrogance, ideological rigidity, political
aggressiveness or even petty corruption. All those things are true, of
course, in spades, but they also serve to mask a deeper core which is
significantly worse. Like Mugabe in Zimbabwe, this administration
fundamentally exists to steal the national patrimony from you and I and
deliver it into the hands of an already fabulously wealthy plutocracy.

Given that core mission, it is impossible to imagine them reversing the tax
giveaways to the rich. Indeed, Bush is seeking to make them permanent. Given
that raison d’être, it is impossible to imagine a serious effort on global
warming when so much oil and coal money is at stake. Given that purpose, it
is impossible to imagine a reversal on Iraq short of Republicans in Congress
dusting off their white robes and pointy hats and forming a little posse for
a brief cruise down Pennsylvania Avenue (which could happen if Bush
continues to be the one-man GOP unemployment machine that he’s become of
late). Short of that, however, what would Blackwater or Halliburton, let
alone ExxonMobil, say if we bailed on Iraq? No, John Bolton will be out
trick-or-treating for UNICEF before we see these guys change stripes.

Of the several things that need to happen for an American progressive
revival, you can count this one as a sure thing. Bush will certainly
continue to pursue his disastrous policies. Moreover, my gut has never been
surer of anything than that scandal in this administration runs deep and
wide. I doubt seriously that it can all continue to be bottled up, even
though the contemporary Democratic Party would probably attempt the
physiologically impossible act of running from its own spine, should it ever
happen to accidentally stumble across it tucked away in a broom closet
somewhere. Bush will keep pursuing his unpopular policies till the bitter
end. Scandals great and small will continue to emerge during the same
period. And the public’s attitude toward him will thus migrate from
exhausted disdain to active disgust to simmering anger to and perhaps even
to a bubbling boil. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a good thing for
those of us hoping to advance a progressive agenda in this country.

Bush’s follies will also, secondly, continue to increase the visceral unease
of America’s great apolitical center, a cohort which generally avoids
politics, and does so in part for good reason. These are the people who
could be readily persuaded that Saddam was a threat and that if the
president says we need to go to war, no doubt he knows best. They’re also
the people who think, four years later, that something was not right about
that whole Iraq thing, and that probably the troops ought to come home. More
importantly, they’re the people who generally see that the country is a
train gone off the rails. Indeed, that is the very question which pollsters
continually pose to them, and the proposition that America is on the right
track today has pathetically few subscribers. A whopping 25 percent of us
agree with that notion, with nearly three times as many disagreeing, the
worst it’s been in at least a decade, if not ever. Sixty percent of
Americans think things are going worse today than they were five years ago,
versus 18 percent who think they are better. More Americans think things
will be worse five years from now than think things will be better. More
Americans think the next generation will be worse off than think it will do
better. And 76 percent of us say they are angry about the way things are
going in the country, compared to only 21 percent who report themselves as
being content. The portrait these numbers paint is not exactly a picture of
health for any modern polity.

Most Americans couldn’t identify the exact source of their anger and their
anxiety, but they know that things are not working right, and they have lost
faith in the present government to solve these problems. To make the leap to
progressivism, there needs to be more of that, and given time there will be.
The flame underneath this kettle must be turned up, to the point where the
Bush administration and the regressive movement it leads are not only seen
as unable to solve the problem, but as its actual source. Maybe Reagan was
right, after all, at least if we slightly modify one of his most famous
aphorisms: “(This) government is not the solution, (this) government is the
problem.”

There is a third condition that is very much required in order for a
progressive renaissance to occur. It is an obvious one, but given the
Constitution shredding we’ve all lived through these last six years, it must
nevertheless be overtly articulated: Bush and Cheney must actually leave
office on January 20, 2009. I still have concerns about this, though fewer
than I did a few years back. It worries me, though, that we’ve taught these
reprobates an unfortunate lesson - namely, that you can steal elections,
trash the Bill of Rights, blow off Congress, manufacture a war, and steal
the national crown jewels - all without much more consequence than a bit of
photo-op grumbling by an anemic opposition party, the occasional off-script
question from an otherwise completely obsequious press, and the latent
hostility of a powerless public. After all that, would it be so much to fake
another international crisis and suspend elections? If you can kill habeas
corpus after nearly a millennium of it being woven deep into the fabric of
Western cultural tradition, could you not readily spike an election or two
under conditions of ‘national emergency’? And let us not be under any
illusions about the massive incentives that exist for them to stay in
office, not least of which is to avoid losing the ability to block
investigations of their crimes once they’re out of power. The Bush junta has
plenty of good reasons not to go when their (stolen) term expires. And then,
of course, there is the matter of that mysterious underground bunker Cheney
has been building, and the giant prison complexes recently constructed for
as-yet unspecified purposes


But let us assume that Bush and Cheney find a happy home for prolonged
pillaging in some scandal-waiting-to-happen corporation headquartered in
Dubai or somewhere. The obvious next set of conditions needed for a
progressive revival in America is that there is actually a bold progressive
candidate to replace them, that this person wins the election, and that he
or she does in fact then govern as a progressive.

>From what I can see, only one realistic possibility exists for this to
happen, and that is for Al Gore to make a run for the presidency.

Even leaving aside Gore’s resume, which makes him the ideal candidate in
terms of experience and preparation (and, man, have we ever learned how much
those things matter!), and even leaving aside that he has been out in front
of everybody in the mainstream on everything, including the two most
important issues of our time - Iraq and global warming - Gore is the ideal
candidate for other even more important reasons.

I could be wrong, but my take on Gore is that he’s walked away from the
bullshit part of politics, forever. I think that if he ran, he would run
with a sincerity and a passion for real issues that have been long and
tragically absent from an American political landscape far too frequently
populated with either scary sociopaths of the right or apolitical
opportunists of the center. Indeed, given what Gore has already committed to
the public record, both verbally and in print, he would almost have to run
as the sort of straight-talking candidate John McCain can only pretend to be
in countless consultant-crafted, focus-group tested, 30-second spots. And I
don’t think the importance of this quality, were it to actually show up,
should ever be underestimated. Even though they far too often cave-in to the
guy who tells them what they want to hear, Americans also desperately crave
authenticity in their politics. The first person to come along and really
speak honestly with the public is going to turn a lot of heads. First in
shock, then in admiration, finally in devoted support.

So is the first Democrat who can throw a punch, and doesn’t fall down the
minute a punk like George Bush or Newt Gingrich rolls out another
embarrassingly juvenile schoolyard taunt. Today, I look at Gore and I see a
man on fire. I see a guy who is not only angry, but angry for all the right
reasons. And I see a candidate who could be devastating in response to the
right-wing cheap shots sure to be tossed out by the GOP in 2008. I think
Gore would be willing to call out the purveyors of political filth on the
right, to dress down their facilitators in the media, and to publicly
humiliate both when they pull their egregious stunts. Indeed, I think he
knows that to do otherwise is political suicide. If he does run, I can’t
imagine him running the sort of weak campaign like the one he mounted in
2000, or the inexcusable disaster that Kerry (who absolutely should have
known better) put forth in 2004. I can’t imagine him not dismissing the GOP
and its surrogate pundits by saying “You’re the same folks who’ve gotten
everything imaginable wrong these last years, so shut up already. We’re done
with you and your disasters.”

Those previous Democratic bids were cautious campaigns of calculated
centrism, devoted to winning the presidency for the candidate, as opposed to
for any sort of cause. Today, I don’t think that is what animates Al Gore,
for he has been anything but the centrist candidate who is cautiously
building a foundation for one last run. Instead, he has more or less done
all the things you’re not supposed to do when you run for president
nowadays, especially as a Democrat. He’s called out the Bush administration
for the disaster that it is, and he did so early and without mincing words,
at a time when the Clintons and the Edwards of this world were voting for
the Iraq war resolution so they could run for president. He’s made noise
about a crucial issue everybody wanted to ignore, and did so at the cost of
being subjected to great personal ridicule. He has avoided all the political
pandering of pathetic politicians running hither and yon across Iowa and New
Hampshire, promising everything to everyone, and trying to be all things to
all people.

All of this is important, and for more reasons than simply electing a
non-regressive president in 2008. What we’ve learned in the last six years
is what regressives are capable of when they’re in power. What we’d already
seen, from the previous decade, is just how damaging they can be even when
out of power. It’s ludicrous to imagine that another Clinton presidency
would be any less hounded from the get-go than was the first one. And while
Hillary might be somewhat more effectual at countering the vast right-wing
conspiracy than Bill was, it will always be at the service of her personal
power and glory, never to serve a progressive policy agenda. For there to be
the possibility of a progressive revival in America, it will require a
candidate who gets in the face of the radical right during the campaign, in
order to lay the groundwork for doing the same during the presidency.
Hillary might be able to do that, but what distinguishes Gore is that he
goes even one better, doing it in service to a public agenda, rather than a
personal one. That brings a lot of people around behind him in support for
their champion.

The prospect of a good-natured, well-intentioned, highly qualified and
unintimidated presidential candidate - and, especially, president - scares
the hell out of regressives. It is both a measure of their fear, their
political and policy bankruptcy, and the correctly perceived threat of a
Gore candidacy that they’ve already begun hurling their cheapest pot shots
at him, though the guy is nowhere near having even announced yet. With more
than just echoes of the character assassination done on him in 2000,
columnists from the Washington Post and the New York Times have mocked Gore
and his new book, suggesting that he is arrogant, pompous and foolish. But
these ladies doth protest too much!

I think today’s Al Gore frightens these people very much. His presidency
would follow our era’s Pierce/Grant/McKinley/Hoover/Eisenhower/Nixon/Reagan
meltdown, thus setting the stage for maximum receptivity to real and
significant change. He likely would not be intimidated or shut down by
personal assaults or fabricated scandals. (In fact, if he was really smart,
he would inoculate himself against them by warning the public right from the
beginning to expect that they are coming, reminding them of what was done to
Clinton. Then each time another bogus scandal was proffered he could simply
offer a Reaganesque display of disdainful tedium, along the lines of “There
you go again”. He could also publicly challenge members of the media to also
investigate their sources, as well as the allegations of those sources, and
he could play a game of resignation brinksmanship with Republicans making
warrantless accusations, as in “If you’re right Senator, I’ll resign. If
you’re wrong, you resign. Agreed?”.) Gore would also likely not be afraid to
continue to explain to Americans the depth of the pit the GOP has dug for us
these last years, perhaps launching continuing investigations into war
profiteering and other scandals. In short, Gore could take progressives from
a position of playing weak defense to one of playing offense, and leave the
right stuck licking their wounds in a collapsing world of hurt. My own guess
is that regressives will completely crumble at the point anyone stands up to
them and starts hitting back, and thus the attacks already being mounted on
Gore - it is imperative to them that anyone who would do so be silenced,
preferably by means of ridicule. But I suspect Gore now well knows what so
many of us learned in kindergarten, that the best way to deal with a bully
is to push back. Hard.

The same is true when it comes to the matter of taming of press. I would
expect them to also fall apart the minute they are outted. Imagine if, when
they tried their usual deprecations, candidate Gore turned to the public,
going over the heads of the media, and simply said “When are you going to
investigate the Bush administration?” I think the American media knows full
well how culpable they are for the mess that is Bushism. I think they are
scared to death that anyone might expose them for their part in that
disaster, for their cowardice, their complicity and their cooptation. We
know for sure that the press can readily be bullied. A truth-speaking Al
Gore could keep them constantly on the defensive for their rightward bias,
their favoring of Bush, their savaging of Clinton and their complete failure
to do their job during the Bush administration. He could do what the right
has done for twenty years now - but using intimidation based on truth rather
than on lies - and make them self-conscious and self-editing, just as the
whole ‘liberal bias’ shtick has so successfully worked for the Dark Side.

But, of course, righting the wrongs of the last quarter-century is just the
beginning. There is a lot to say for that alone, but the point of governing
(as long as we are indulging our fantasies here) should be to advance an
agenda which positively serves the public interest, and here is where we can
envision the possibility of a progressive resurgence in America, without
first having to imbibe massive quantities of hallucinogens in order to make
it seem remotely plausible.

Lord knows I’ve had my heart broken by too many politicians not to be a bit
cautious. Moreover, the old Al Gore could sometimes make Bill Clinton look
positively liberal. But nowadays I think a Gore presidency would very likely
be different. I think it would be bold enough to end the war, to seriously
address global warming, to create a real universal national healthcare
program, to begin re-balancing the distribution of wealth in the United
States, to restore the Constitution, to appoint progressives to the federal
courts, to restore America’s participation in international institutions and
its reputation in world opinion, to implement a full-scale alternative
energy program, as well as job development, stem cell research, and a whole
lot more. I think the majority of the American public already wants all of
those things, and it might be very easy to achieve them under the combined
circumstances of a completely failed conservative experiment, a clearly
articulated progressive vision, and a bold agenda-setting president showing
aggressive and fearless leadership in pointing the way.

Which I think is precisely why Gore, the non-candidate, inspires such
over-the-top ridicule from conservatives and the press. His capacity to
expose them and their lies, to put a label on their failures, and to chart a
path toward a popular politics of potential watershed magnitude, makes him
nothing short of a regressive’s nightmare. This could be the second coming
of FDR, not only politically and ideologically, but in terms of a
generational-scale realignment, much as the New Deal coalition dominated
American politics for forty years.

No wonder they’ve already started savaging him, even while he says he has no
plans to run. Like a hurricane gathering energy at sea, they recognize his
potential.

And like a Potemkin village on the shore awaiting the storm’s devastation,
they also recognize the complete vacuousness, and therefore the utter
vulnerability, of their own project.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra
University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to his
articles (mailto:dmg at regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time
constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be
found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net
<http://www.regressiveantidote.net/> .

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