Feature of the Week
Now that Karl Rove’s ownership of US policy is finally being recognized with an official US government title, let’s look at how he might have handled policy during another crisis situation in US history, Victory at Gettysburg
02.12.05 @ 07:52 PM EDT [link]

Karl Really IS the Source of US Policy!
It’s now official! The Bush Administration has given political advisor Karl Rove an official US Government Title and an official US taxpayer-paid paycheck. He’s now a Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. He’s keeping his old job as political advisor, too. Basically what the change means is…well, not much! The first term Bush Administration was totally focused on a single goal: there being a second term Bush Administration. How do you make that happen? You get reelected. Who gets you reelected? Your Political Advisor, your Architect. How does he get you reelected? He ensures that the things the Administration does appeal to the right voters in the right states. In the case of the Bush Administration, it’s the Right voters in the Right states. What do we mean when we say “the Administration does…?” Well, what Administrations “do” is to implement policy. Karl was thus the brainiac in charge of coming up with all the policies that would appeal to the right number of Right voters in the Right and near-Right states. These policies didn’t necessarily have much to do with any kind of reality. Remember when Bush was talking about Karl’s idea of going to Mars? Quick – where would that mission launch from? The correct answer is “What is Florida, Alex?” Besides, talk of rocketry on that scale gets the military-industrial complex all atwitter. Much of that complex is located in Red States, as we’re finding out from the Administration’s furious attempts to preserve permanent tax cuts such that even Red State programs are being slashed, but not that one. There’s still money for at least getting started on a trip to Mars. A colleague of mine has described it as a “Military-Industrial Complex Budget.” It ignores the reality of deficits big enough to create a stack of bills to Mars! Here’s the bottom line. The fact that the policy guy now has an official government title is yet another indication of the real Bush agenda. The first term agenda was to get reelected, thus building political capital. The second term agenda is to leverage Rove’s finely-tuned political instincts to get up to ramming speed on George W’s radical assault on the imagined high-tax welfare state of his delusional fantasies. The big question is when GOP legislators, virtually all of whom have another election run in their future, will realize that their Engineer is thinking that his best shot at making it big in the history books is to do a Casey Jones.
02.11.05 @ 07:50 PM EDT [link]

Our Surreality-based Administration
I got a chance yesterday to catch two portions of Bush’ s speech to the Detroit Economic Club, first on the treadmill of the Manhattan health club I visit over lunchtime and a few minutes later at one of those places that is NYC’s answer to fast food, the places where you get precisely what you feel like eating and pay for its by its weight. In my opinion, the perfect system. I’m speaking of course about lunch, not the President’s ideas on economics. I have to confess to being struck by the absolute surrealism of his remarks. He spent a good portion of the portions of the speech that I saw talking about “our moral obligations to future generations.” This is the kind of phrase that catches my attention, considering how often you’ll find it on this site. So by what twist of fate could Bush be using SherWright phrases virtually word for word? I’d like to say that he’s finally seen the light and is facing the music, but we all know at this point how very unlikely that would be. No, he’s using those words because Karl has determined that these words are the best way to get their latest boon to the Base from Point A to Point B. You have to wonder how they’d possibly think these ideas would have any traction whatsoever. Here’s why: if anyone who listened to him cared about moral obligations to future generations, they would have stopped listening to him a long time ago! After all, this is the administration that turned into an art form the finding of innovative ways to benefit political supporters to the detriment of posterity. It was thus surreal to hear him talking about obligations that workers in forty years will potentially face if nothing is done when his policies have already imposed on these same workers the same level of burden he is calling immoral. Let’s consider one of the many specific examples that can be cited. He said that forty years from now workers will have to provide an extra $300 billion a year in taxes to provide the same level of benefits currently being provided. This amount will be needed to bring the 70-odd percent of benefits the system will be providing to the full 100% of benefits, a situation he colorfully describes as “bankrupt” and “flat broke.” By coincidence, $300 Billion was a bit less than the amount paid on interest on the national debt at the end of the Clinton term, a debt that has of course exploded because of Bushonomics. So how could the $300 billion in potential obligation forty years from now be an immoral burden while the interest and principal on trillions in debt not be? The philosophical evolution of the Administration is now clear to me. The prior 42 Presidents employed the reality-based approach to policy. In his first term, Bush introduced the faith-based approach, now evolved in his second term to a surreality-based approach.
02.10.05 @ 09:37 PM EDT [link]

The Lessons of Lent
I’m putting this out the evening of Ash Wednesday, so here’s an entry inspired by a relevant posting from last year. For further content and an opportunity to meditate on an important issue in interpretation of New Testament Scripture unaccountably missed by all of the politically-active Christian denominations, see Daily Scripture Exercise.
Three Gospels tell of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. This event has had a profound impact on Christianity, particularly Roman Catholic observance. For example, Christ fasted during those forty days. His example has been translated into modern living by Catholics as voluntary abstinence from meat on Fridays during the forty days of Lent. As another example, Christ rejected temptations by Satan. His example has been translated into modern living by Catholics as periodic reaffirmation of the rejection of “Satan and all his works and all his empty promises.” However, the final example from Christ’s temptation in the wilderness has been ignored in the practices of modern Christianity, including Catholic observance. This happens to be the most significant example in all of the scriptures of a Satanic temptation rejected by Christ, so its absence from Christian practice is curious indeed. This was the temptation of Jesus by Satan with “all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them” (Matthew 4:8). Specifically, Scripture (Luke 4) says "6: To you I will give all this authority and their glory; for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. 7: If you, then, will worship me, it shall all be yours." Translated into modern life, Satan’s offer of kingly authority equates to the power of kings to dictate the law of the land and to punish violators of that law as criminals. The modern term for this kind of power is “political power.” In contrast to Christ’s rejection of Satan’s empty promise of earthly power, many Christians would seek to wield the power of the State to enforce adherence by Christians and non-Christians alike to rules derived (often very indirectly) from interpretations of scripture found in other parts of the Bible. Apparently they find this particular Satanic promise to be less than empty. So who are they really worshiping when they pursue political power to criminalize practices they find heretical?
02.09.05 @ 08:24 PM EDT [link]

Poetic Justice
The outlines of the Bush budget have been leaking in advance of its formal publication yesterday. The reasoning behind this strung-out unveiling is now clear – to make the impact seem like a rising tide rather than a sudden tsunami. With the official fall of the budget hammer, it’s finally dawning on Bush voters that the free lunch they’ve had over the last four years is over. It was great for them while it lasted! Big tax cuts, and if they were skewed towards the wealthy, so what? “Maybe me or my kids will strike it rich - all it takes is a dollar and a dream - so tax cuts for fat cats might pay off for me too!” And it’s not like they cost anyone anything. People still kept getting all the government benefits they’d gotten used to, plus new ones like prescription drug benefits for Grandma. Such a deal! But now, suddenly, posterity won’t be footing so much of the bill, and the Red Ones are discovering that it’s not nearly so much fun to actually have to pay for the goodies they’ve been getting. And it’s more than shots at Blue programs. There were plenty of those, of course. You can bet that any program that primarily benefits Blue State residents (Amtrak, for example) had to be at the top of the hit list! Unfortunately for the Right, the Bush tax cuts (both the temporary ones he did before and the permanent ones he wants to do) are so over the top that he had to put cherished Red State programs on the block. For example, suddenly farm subsidies (AKA agribusiness corporate welfare) are being whacked. How about the steep increase in fees for veterans? If there’s really poetic justice the Swift Boat Boys would take the hardest hit, but most of them are fat cats, so they’ll be doing just fine! Indeed, we’re now finally seeing Bush’s real priorities. They were latent during the years of free lunch, when getting reelected was the priority. Now that the bill is being presented, it’s there for all to see that Bush’s first true love is his fat cat Base. All the other blocs in the Right Wing are just friends with occasional benefits. Poetic justice isn’t limited to fiscal issues, either. It’s just beginning to dawn on the Christian fundamentalists that so fervently supported the invasion of Iraq that things there aren’t playing out as a Crusade at all. What I mean is that they expected to see the Iraq adventure advancing Christian values, but what they’re actually seeing is a country that had a tradition of tolerance towards Christians heading towards Islamic theocracy. Since the invasion there have been a string of Church bombings, and there is an excellent chance that the winners in the recent election will declare Islam as the official religion - not a good outcome for Christian values in Iraq. I’m guessing that the mood is a bit subdued in that proportion of weekly prayer meetings (meetings I’ve personally seen) that are right wing political rallies in disguise!
02.08.05 @ 08:20 PM EDT [link]

The Bets Are Down; Now What?
I seem to have a different perspective on one aspect of the military situation in Iraq than any of the media talking heads. I seem to be at odds not only with the Right Wing heads but also the Left heads too. In my mind, everyone is falling all over themselves to get the hell out ASAP. In particular, the Administration is taking great pains to say we’ll only stay as long as the Iraqi regime in the process of being put in place wants us there. Those on the left seem to want to get out ASAP no matter what’s going on. Maybe it’s my Swiss/Scotch ancestry, but my take is that if we’re spending hundreds of billions in posterity’s money to take over Iraq, we owe them the courtesy of ensuring that when they’re old enough to be running the country that their money has actually bought them something. That guarantee can’t be made if we made a total exit at the first opportunity. In other words, I’m saying that we need to keep a presence in Iraq for the long haul. There is ample precedent for this, of course. The US still has bases in most and maybe all of the countries we defeated in WWII. I know this firsthand because I worked in one of them for four years, in beautiful Bavaria. While Iraqis may or may not be agitated over the long haul about a limited US presence, my attitude is that if they don’t like it, tough. My experience in Germany leads me to believe that the Germans probably weren’t initially thrilled about US soldiers being stationed there, but by the time I arrived in the mid-70s they seemed to be just fine about it. The biggest factor was the stability US forces provided, particularly in the face of the Soviet threat. There is a similar need for stability in Iraq, this time form the Iranian threat. Recall that Saddam invaded Iran, kicking off a brutal WWI style meat grinder of a war. I’m thinking Iran never got payback, so the bill’s still due. What if they get distressed about how their Shia brothers are being treated by the new Iraqi regime? If the US isn’t on site, what’s to stop Iran from rolling into Iraq and annexing the Shia portion (which happens to have a large proportion of Earth’s oil reserves)? Can we really afford to take the chance? Besides, those troops have to be somewhere, so why not a place where they can look after very strong US interests as opposed to a place like Germany that doesn’t need guarding anymore? Maybe it’s just me, but if I pay for something in Pottery Barn because I broke it, you can bet I’ll be taking it home to see what I can do with it!
02.07.05 @ 08:40 PM EDT [link]

The Track Record for Third World Islamic Democracy
Let’s look at a representative sample of Third World Islamic countries to determine what proportion of them have remained secure democracies. Islamic countries are the only examples that are relevant because Islam has a history and tradition of being a critical factor in the political outcomes of Islamic countries. That’s a nice way of saying that Islam is a 500 pound political gorilla. (This comes from Mohammed and the lesser key figures in the founding of Islam being rulers in addition to being its prophet and Imams). The Middle East is a good place to start, considering that this is where Iraq and most Islamic countries are located. The problem with starting there is that there really aren’t any democracies there except for Israel. Syria is ruled by the son of the longtime dictator that took power in a military coup. Lebanon is a puppet state of Syria. Iran is a theocracy with some cosmetic trappings of democracy. Saudi Arabia is a monarchy, as are the remainder of the Persian Gulf sheikdoms and Jordan. It looks like we’ll need to go beyond the Middle East to even have a starter set of democratic Islamic examples to consider. Pakistan has a president that is a close US ally, but he took power in a military coup. Indonesia’s most recent dictator, Suharto, ruled for 32 years, and himself succeeded dictator Sukarno. Malaysia is an Islamic monarchy. Now let’s consider Africa. Egypt has not had a leadership change since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981 (and has only three leaders in its entire history as an independent nation), so it clearly can’t be considered a mainstream democracy. Libya’s Qaddafi took power in a military coup. Sudan is just coming off a civil war that included genocide in Darfur. Algeria’s current president is its very first civilian head of state. Morocco is an Islamic kingdom. The present regime in Mali took power in a coup. Nigeria has suffered a long and interminable succession of military coups. Do we need to talk about Somalia? Summing this all up, we’re betting hundreds of billions of posterity’s money that something will happen that, across many attempts, has essentially never reliably succeeded, such that any Third World Islamic governments are secure from coup or civil war. Of course, the Right Wing would argue that this is a good bet because, on the one hand, there’s at least some possibility there will be a good outcome, and on the other, it’s not costing today’s voters a dime!
02.06.05 @ 08:43 PM EDT [link]