Monthly Archives: October 2007

What Did They Expect?

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More on why Fred Thompson won’t be the GOP nominee, from Steve Benen.

Yesterday’s “Values Voter Summit,” the year’s largest religious right gathering, offered the actor/lobbyist/senator a chance to reconnect with the activists who’ve been slipping away. How’d he do? I spoke to several people who were on hand for the event, and everyone agreed that they were amazed at how awful he is on the stump.

And here Steve quotes from a New York Times article by Michael Luo:

[Thompson] spoke with his chin often buried in his chest, his voice largely monotone, and he cleared his throat or coughed repeatedly, prompting some to wonder if he might be ill.

“He didn’t look good,” said Ronald Sell, 63, a musician from New York City.

Mr. Sell said he initially had high hopes for Mr. Thompson but left disappointed and wondering why as an actor, Mr. Thompson did not “at least have his lines memorized.”

“If he was the candidate, we’d be in trouble,” Mr. Sell said.

Hopes were raised, then dashed. I sincerely believe a lot of people who got on the Thompson bandwagon confused him with the character he plays (woodenly) on Law & Order. The only question I have is, if Thompson really wanted the presidency enough to bother to run, why isn’t he making a better effort?

The Eroding GOP Base

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Going back to Paul Krugman’s column — the professor writes about the fact that the GOP is hurting at campaign fund raising, in part because Republicans are losing the support of Big Corporations.

… it’s not surprising that lobbyists are casting in their lot with the likely winners. But that’s not the whole story.

There’s also disgust, even in the corporate world, with the corruption and incompetence of the Bush years. People on the left often describe the Bush administration as an agent of corporate America; that’s giving it too much credit.

The truth is that while the administration has lavished favors on some powerful, established corporations, the biggest scandals have involved companies that were small or didn’t exist at all until they started getting huge contracts thanks to their political connections. Thus, Blackwater USA was a tiny business until it somehow became the leading supplier of mercenaries for the War on Terror™.

And the lethal amateurishness of these loyal Bushies on the make horrifies the corporate elite almost as much as it horrifies ordinary Americans.

Last but not least, even corporations are relieved to see the end of what amounted to a protection racket.

In a classic 2003 article in The Washington Monthly, Nicholas Confessore (now at The New York Times) described the efforts of people like former Senator Rick Santorum to turn K Street into an appendage of the Republican Party — not the other way around. “The corporate lobbyists who once ran the show, loyal only to the parochial interests of their employer,” wrote Mr. Confessore, “are being replaced by party activists who are loyal first and foremost to the G.O.P.”

But corporations weren’t happy. According to The Politico, “many C.E.O.’s” used the term “extortion” to describe “the annual shakedowns by committee chairmen with jurisdiction over their industries.” And now that Mr. Santorum is out of office, heading the America’s Enemies program at a right-wing think tank, the faint sound you hear from K Street is that of lobbyists singing: “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.”

I looked up the Nicholas Confessore article Krugman cites. It’s called “Welcome to the Machine,” and it was published in the July/August 2003 issue of Washington Monthly. It’s actually kind of fun to read it now. Even though the Machine is far from being dismantled, it ain’t what it was in 2003. This part exemplifies what Krugman is talking about regarding extortion:

But the flip side of the deal is that trade associations and corporations are expected to back the party’s initiatives even on occasions when doing so is not in their own best interest. When Bush’s recently passed dividends tax cut proposal was first announced, the life insurance industry complained that the bill would sharply reduce the tax advantage of annuities sold by insurance companies, potentially costing them hundreds of millions of dollars. The industry’s lobbyists were told to get behind the president’s proposal anyway–or lose any chance to plead their case. So they did. In mid-March, Frank Keating, the head of the industry’s trade group and a close friend of Bush’s, hand-delivered a letter to the White House co-signed by nearly 50 CEOs, endorsing the president’s proposal while meekly raising the hope that taxes on dividends from annuities would also be included in the final repeal (which they weren’t). Those firms that didn’t play ball on Bush’s pan paid the price. The Electronic Industries Alliance was one of the few big business lobbies that declined to back the tax cut, in large part because the high-tech companies that make up a good portion of its membership don’t even issue dividends. As a result, the trade group was frozen out of all tax discussions at the White House.

And here’s the final paragraph:

A little over a century ago, William McKinley–Karl Rove’s favorite president–positioned the Republican Party as a bulwark of the industrial revolution against the growing backlash from agrarian populists, led by Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. The new business titans flocked to McKinley’s side, providing him with an extraordinary financial advantage over Bryan. McKinley’s victory in 1896 ushered in a long period of government largely by and for industry (interrupted briefly, and impermanently, by the Progressive Era). But with vast power came, inevitably, arrogance and insularity. By the 1920s, Republican rule had degenerated into corruption and open larceny–and a government that, in the face of rapidly growing inequality and fantastic concentration of wealth and opportunity among the fortunate few, resisted public pressure for reform. It took a few more years, and the Great Depression, for the other shoe to drop. But in 1932 came the landslide election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the founding of the very structure of governance today’s Republicans hope to dismantle. Who knows? History may yet repeat itself.

Where have you gone, Franklin Roosevelt?

I want to go back to the notion that the Bushies are agents of corporate America, verses the “lethal amateurishness of these loyal Bushies” apparent now even to CEOs. I think the Bushies saw themselves as agents of corporate America, people who would “run the government like a business,” to recall a popular phrase of the 1990s. When the Bush Administration began the Bushies were full of the conceit that they were so much more disciplined and business-like than the Clintons they could work regular “business” hours. James Carney and John F. Dickerson, CNN, March 12, 2001:

Bush’s take-it-slow-and-easy approach is yet another rebuke to his predecessor. Clinton came to office promising to work for the people “until the last dog dies.” In Clinton’s world, working hard meant exhausting yourself, something the President and his staff did regularly, especially in his first term, when leaving the White House before midnight was viewed as proof of a lack of commitment. Clinton’s sheer effort was a key part of his message.

Not so President Bush. “I don’t like to sit around in meetings for hours and hours and hours,” he told TIME during the campaign. “People will tell you, I get to the point.” Meetings should be crisp and should end with decisions. Talking matters less than doing. “People who make up Republican White Houses come from the business world and are used to a business-like routine: getting in early, getting it done and going home,” says Bush spokes-man Ari Fleischer. By contrast, he adds, Democrats tend to come from “the world of government service, which is much more hectic and much less disciplined.”

I wrote a post last year about what bullshit that turned out to be. But one of the funny things about the loyal Bushies is that most of ’em made their bones in government service, academia, rightie think tanks or the Republican Party itself. The few who were genuine businessmen — like the original Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Snow O’Neill — were the first to go. Even Dick the Dick, though he was a CEO of Halliburton, was reportedly not allowed to make operational decisions in that capacity. He was an asset to Halliburton mostly because of his extensive contacts in government and the military-industrial complex.

In other words, these guys were of the “business world” in the same way the 101st Fighting Keyboarders are “warriors” — make believe.

The GOP is also losing the support of conservative evangelicals. Michael D. Shear and Perry Bacon Jr. write in today’s Washington Post:

For months, Republican presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and John McCain have courted evangelical Christians, meeting with religious leaders throughout the Midwest and the South.

Today, thousands of Christian conservatives will gather in Washington to confront the fact that none of the candidates has won them over. …

… “At the moment, there’s nothing but confusion every place I go,” said Chuck Colson, who runs the Prison Fellowship, a national Christian ministry. “They lament the fact that there’s no one candidate out there around whom evangelicals and conservative Catholics can sort of coalesce around and get excited about.”

He added: “Nobody has rung the bell yet.”

Giuliani’s too socially liberal, Romney’s a Mormon and therefore not Christian enough, Thompson lost points when he refused to endorse a federal ban on same-sex marriage and flubbed a question about Terri Schiavo, McCain has some bad history with evangelical leaders. I suppose Ron Paul is too antiwar. Brownback, who dropped out of the race this week, is Catholic, and in spite of the evangelical-Catholic alliance on abortion there is still much anti-papist sentiment among evangelicals, I suspect.

That leaves Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, and Alan Keyes, all of whom seem tailor made for evangelicals as far as I can tell. Keyes won’t get the racist vote, so he’s out, but it’s not clear to me why evangelicals aren’t rallying around one of the other three. Huckabee in particular seems reasonably marketable, and he’s even an ordained Baptist minister. Yet the big guns on the Religious Right — James Dobson, Bob Jones III, Pat Robertson, etc. — are either withholding endorsement or have endorsed one of the unpalatable frontrunners.

Bulworth writes,

Not that I mind the fact that the Christian Fascists are splintered, unhappy and forming circular firing squads. But this media narrative that fails to critically assess just what it is that the evangelical, fundy right really wants is annoying. They have candidates. But those candidates are not doing well in general, and are mysteriously not getting attention and support from “values voters” in particular. Moreover, some, perhaps many, of the Christianist’s movers and shakers are affiliated with one of the more “establishment” candidates. What does that say about the so-called “values voters” and their leaders?

I’m not sure what’s going on either. Maybe the leadership is holding out for a higher bid — someone who will promise them more power and perks. It’s possible evangelicals are starting to feel jerked around by these clowns, and the “Christian coalition” itself is coming unglued. Not that I’d mind.

Update: See also Pastor Dan.

Randi Rhodes

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I haven’t written anything before about Randi Rhodes’s unfortunate encounter with a New York City sidewalk, because I was waiting to find out what happened to her. The causes of the fall are still not clear. It is unfortunate that Jon Elliott and others assumed — based on very circumstantial evidence — that her injuries were due to a hate crime. It’s always galling to cede the moral high ground to righties, even for a little while, and the accusations fed the wingnuts’ victimization complex, which is bloated enough already.

However, the natural order of the universe is now restored. Righties are spreading the rumor — based on very circumstantial evidence — that Ms. Rhodes fell down because she was drunk. Those people couldn’t hang on to the moral high ground if you gave them a deed to it.

Update: Since righties tried to post more rumors about Ms. Rhodes’s phenomenal capacity for booze in the comments, I’m shutting them down.

Update 2: See also Ellen at News Hounds.

Update 3: See also Tbogg.

Out of the Fire, Into the Frying Pan

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In his column today, Paul Krugman explains why the GOP is losing the support of Big Business and Big Corporations, and I’d like to comment on that later today. But here’s the down side —

According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, in the current election cycle every one of the top 10 industries making political donations is giving more money to Democrats. Even industries that have in the past been overwhelmingly Republican, like insurance and pharmaceuticals, are now splitting their donations more or less evenly. Oil and gas is the only major industry that the G.O.P. can still call its own.

The sudden burst of corporate affection for Democrats is good news for the party’s campaign committees, but not necessarily good news for progressives. …

… Right now all the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination are running on strongly progressive platforms — especially on health care. But there remain real concerns about what they would actually do in office.

Here’s an example of the sort of thing that makes you wonder: yesterday ABC News reported on its Web site that the Clinton campaign is holding a “Rural Americans for Hillary” lunch and campaign briefing — at the offices of the Troutman Sanders Public Affairs Group, which lobbies for the agribusiness and biotech giant Monsanto. You don’t have to be a Naderite to feel uncomfortable about the implied closeness.

I’d put it this way: many progressives, myself included, hope that the next president will be another F.D.R. But we worry that he or she will turn out to be another Grover Cleveland instead — better-intentioned and much more competent than the current occupant of the White House, but too dependent on lobbyists’ money to seriously confront the excesses of our new Gilded Age.

Candidates Most Likely to Turn Into Grover Cleveland are, IMO, senators Clinton and Biden. Biden has little chance of being the nominee, however, so let’s talk about Senator Clinton.

Although I will support her if she’s the nominee, I’ve still got my fingers crossed that she isn’t. And I ask myself if I’m being unfair to her, or if I’ve been subliminally influenced by wingnut propaganda, and I honestly don’t think so. In fact, the animus the wingnuts have for her would tend to make me like her more, if anything.

A paragraph from a Gail Collins column (“None Dare Call It Child Care“), speaks volumes:

This is Hillary Clinton’s Women’s Week. On Tuesday, she gave a major speech on working mothers in New Hampshire, with stories about her struggles when Chelsea was a baby, a grab-bag of Clintonian mini-ideas (encourage telecommuting, give awards to family-friendly businesses) and a middle-sized proposal to expand family leave. Yesterday, she was in the company of some adorable 2- and 3-year-olds, speaking out for a bill on child care workers that has little chance of passage and would make almost no difference even if it did. Clinton most certainly gets it, but she wasn’t prepared to get any closer to the problems of working parents than a plan to help them stay home from work.

Clintonian mini-ideas! That should become an established catchphrase. Bill was good at those too, as I recall. Bill was a good manager and a political genius, but an FDR he was not.

But this is what I fear from a Hillary Clinton Administration: She’d be an effective manager of the office and certainly would patch up much of our soured international relations, but her domestic policy would amount to tweaks. And Big Business and Big Corporations would love her, for the obvious reasons, and the rest of us would benefit from the crumbs of whatever goodwill they feel moved to sprinkle upon us.

And if he’s still around, Ralph Nader would no doubt pick up votes in 2012.

I admit none of the nominees look like FDR to me, but Edwards and Dodd have the potential to be FDR Lite. It’s harder to say if Obama or Richardson would turn out to be other than corporate-sponsored tweakers. (I’m sorry to say that, for all his good intentions, I have major doubts about Kucinich’s management abilities, so I can’t take him seriously as a candidate. And I’m not entirely sure what planet Mike Gravel is from, although I’d love to have a beer with him.)

Eugene Robinson writes in his column today that lots of women across America are drawn to Clinton because she would be the first woman president. I wish I could share that excitement, but I don’t.

Update: Prairie Weather —

The Democratic party is both empty and overbearing. It lacks, as Matt Bai pointed out, a central “argument,” a driving ethos, any social and political passion that relates to America’s needs. Rove-like, the party has come to depend on stealing some issues from the Republican right and to mimic the hopes and passions of its own left. But that leaves an empty center. Most Americans have not the slightest clue whether Democrats can be trusted to do any more than a little better than George W. Bush.

This was not always true of the Dems, mind, although you have to be damn old to remember when it wasn’t. I wrote about how the change came about in “How the Democrats Lost, Period.”

No Room at the Maternity Ward

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The British National Health Service has big problems that, as I understand it, stem less from the system itself than from massive underfunding of the system. Brits are trying to get by on the cheap, and it shows. To illustrate, here is Figure One from the University of Maine’s “The U.S. Health Care System: The Best in the World, or Just the Most Expensive?” (PDF).

The figure shows spending for health care per capita in various nations, in 1998. I added “USA” and “UK.” In 1998, the U.S. was spending $4,178 per capita and the UK was spending $1,461 per capita. I understand that in recent years the Brits have been increasing their spending on NHS, but it takes a long time to make up for years of underfunding.

I bring this up because one cannot fairly compare the U.S. and U.K. systems without considering the funding issue. This does not, of course, stop righties from comparing them.

Today some righties are hyperventilating about a story in the Daily Mail — “Father delivered baby after partner was turned away from NHS hospital – TWICE.” A laboring woman was sent home because, she was told, there were no beds available in the maternity ward. Eventually her husband delivered the baby at home.

John Hawkins writes in “Will Hillarycare Mean Delivering Your Own Baby?“:

The Left’s push for socialized medicine in this country shows how dogmatic, impractical, and incapable of logical thinking that they have become. After hearing horror story after horror story like this one coming out of nations like Britain and Canada, why in the world do Democrats like Hillary Clinton want to emulate the health care systems that produced them?

Actually, no one I know of, including Senator Clinton — well, maybe Dennis Kucinich — is talking about emulating the Canadian single-payer system or the British NHS system, both of which have some snags. Senator Clinton’s health care proposal is entirely different; similar to the “Massachusetts” plan, which I understand is also similar to the way Switzerland handles health care. I still say the French model is the one to follow, however.

But I do love the way righties can’t let go of Canada and Britain whenever they go on a health care rampage.

Don Surber asks, “What kind of country has hospitals that turn down a pregnant woman like that?”

FYI, it’s standard procedure in most, if not all, U.S. hospitals to send laboring women home if the birth is judged to be several hours away. Women are told they will be more comfortable at home, but the real reason is to prevent laboring women from taking up too many beds. And sometimes, the hospital is wrong. This public attorney documents a District of Columbia case:

A pregant woman came to the hospital with labor pains and intermittent contractions. She was sent home and returned about two hours later in active labor. After she returned, there were signs of fetal distress. Experts for the family testified that patient should never have been sent home because the fetal monitor strip was nonreactive and that an emergency cesarean section should have been done when she returned to the hospital.

If you just start asking mothers about their childbirth experiences, it won’t take long before you hear the story about how she was sent home from the hospital, then went back later the same day to have the baby. It happens all the time. And sometimes they don’t make it back in time, and the baby is born in the back of the station wagon at the intersection of First and Pine.

Knee-slapper of the week: Kim Priestap writes at Wizbang:

Thank God I live in America where access to health care is plentiful.

LOL! Oh, that’s good. (Wipes eyes.) Those righties have some sense of humor.

Let’s talk about the number of hospital beds per capita, which is a nice indicator of who’s got “plentiful” access to health care. In fact, I found another chart.

Who’s Number One? Switzerland, with 18.3 hospital beds per 1,000 people.

France is #9, with 8.4 beds per 1,000 people .

The UK is way down the charts at #23 (4.1 per 1,000 people), followed at #25 by Canada (3.9 per 1,000 people).

And I’m proud to say the U.S. is, um — wait a minute, where is the U.S? — oh, there we are. Number Twenty-Seven. The U.S. has 3.6 hospital beds per 1,000 people.

You’ll be glad to know we beat Turkey and Mexico.

I’m so sorry that, as a leftie, I’m so dogmatic, impractical, and incapable of logical thinking on health care. I lack the clear-eyed vision of righties, which tells them “US Good, Everybody Else Bad.” That does make it simple. I have this compulsion to look at actual facts and data and stuff, which always confuses issues.

BTW, if you want to know how the Brits view our health care system, see Suzanne Goldenberg, “Expensive and divisive: how America is losing patience with a failing system” from The Guardian, September 13, 2007. Be sure to look at the pictures, too.

Fun and Games With FISA

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I haven’t been following the FISA legislation as closely as others, but it seems to me the whole issue is a damn mess that doesn’t make either party look good.

The Republicans clearly are not interested in actually protecting us from terrorism. Their sole objective is to spin FISA as an issue to bash Democrats. The Carpetbagger explains that Republicans offered silly, redundant amendments as means to insinuate that the Dems aren’t serious about preventing al Qaeda from attacking the U.S.

Got it? The Republicans are less interested in protecting Americans from terrorism than they are in accusing Democrats of not being serious about protecting Americans from terrorism.

The Carpetbagger:

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), a member of the Republican leadership, introduced an amendment to “clarify” that nothing in the bill “shall be construed to prohibit the intelligence community from conducting surveillance needed to prevent Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or any other foreign terrorist organization…from attacking the United States or any United States person.” The amendment lacked any and all substance — for the purposes of legislation, Cantor’s measure was a childish little game.

But it was a painful reminder that legislating like a child can sometimes be successful.

Cantor’s shallow amendment was ridiculous for a couple of reasons. First, it was obviously intended to scuttle the legislation. Lawmakers didn’t want to be in a position of voting for an amendment, no matter how ridiculous, that might be construed as “weak” on terrorism. But if the amendment passed, procedurally, it would sent the entire bill back to committee and delay the process considerably.

Second, Cantor’s little game was redundant — the legislation already included grown-up language that achieved the same goal.

    [I]t turns out that the FISA legislation may already accomplish what Cantor said he wanted to accomplish with his amendment — that is, it has provisions in it that allow the intelligence community to do whatever surveillance they need in the event of an imminent terror attack.

    Here’s what Dem Rep. Jerrold Nadler had to say in his recent statement announcing his backing of the bill: “It also includes emergency provisions, including the ability to get a warrant after the fact, to ensure that the government will never have to stop listening to a suspected terrorist plotting an attack.” […]

    Dem House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has just put out a statement reiterating this point, accusing the GOP of pushing an amendment that is “proposing language already provided in the bill.” And the Associated Press is equally unequivocal, saying that the bill “allows the unfettered surveillance of such groups.”

In other words, Cantor and the GOP were just being stupid, on purpose. As my friend A.L. put it, “The Republicans might as well have offered an amendment ‘clarifying’ that ‘anyone who votes against this amendment is gay.’ That’s about the level of maturity we’re talking about here. It’s the kind of stuff that would embarrass most seven-year-olds.”

But just to add insult to injury, the Republicans followed up with child-like bravado.

“House Democrats have pulled the FISA bill,” Cantor said. “They are so desperately against allowing our intelligence agencies to fight OBL and AQ, that they pulled the entire bill to prevent a vote.”

Got that? According to a House Republican leader, Democrats are treasonous, and pulled a surveillance bill in order to protect terrorists.

We’re dealing with children who are running a major political party in the House of Representatives. It’s painful to watch, in part because the children think they’re clever.

Then there’s the surprising headline in today’s Washington Post: “Senate and Bush Agree On Terms of Spying Bill.” Jonathan Weisman and Ellen Nakashima write,

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government’s domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.

The collapse marked the first time since Democrats took control of the chamber that a major bill was withdrawn from consideration before a scheduled vote. It was a victory for President Bush, whose aides lobbied heavily against the Democrats’ bill, and an embarrassment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had pushed for the measure’s passage.

The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee’s chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush’s director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.

Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants. Bush had repeatedly threatened to veto any legislation that lacked this provision.

Glenn Greenwald:

Let’s just describe very factually and dispassionately what has happened here. Congress — led by Senators, such as Jay Rockefeller, who have received huge payments from the telecom industry, and by privatized intelligence pioneer Mike McConnell, former Chairman of the secretive intelligence industry association that has been demanding telecom amnesty — is going to intervene directly in the pending lawsuits against AT&T and other telecoms and declare them the winners on the ground that they did nothing wrong. Because of their vast ties to the telecoms, neither Rockefeller nor McConnell could ever appropriately serve as an actual judge in those lawsuits. …

… The question of whether the telecoms acted in “good faith” in allowing warrantless government spying on their customers is already pending before a court of law. In fact, that is one of the central issues in the current lawsuits — one that AT&T has already lost in a federal court.

Yet that is the issue that Jay Rockefeller and Mike McConnell — operating in secret — are taking away from the courts by passing a law declaring the telecoms to have won.

As usual, Glenn provides a clear assessment of the legal and constitutional issues surrounding FISA and the telecoms; see also “The truth about telecom amnesty.”

Bizarro Nation

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Washington Post:

The Bush administration again has appointed a chief of family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has been critical of contraception.

Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings.

In a 2001 article in The Washington Post, Orr applauded a Bush proposal to stop requiring all health insurance plans for federal employees to cover a broad range of birth control. “We’re quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease,” said Orr, then an official with the Family Research Council.

I keep thinking of a line from “Addams Family Values.”

Debbie: These Addams men, where do you find them?

Morticia: It has to be damp.

Well, turn over a couple more rocks, and you can find Bush appointees.

Bush: “It’s All About Me”

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George Bush, on why he vetoed S-CHIP:

Q I wanted to ask you about S-CHIP and why you even let that get to a situation where it had to be a veto? Isn’t there a responsibility by both the President and congressional leadership to work on this common ground before it gets to a veto?

THE PRESIDENT: Right, as I said, we weren’t dialed in. And I don’t know why. But they just ran the bill, and I made it clear we weren’t going to accept it. That happens sometimes. In the past, when I — I said, look, make sure we’re a part of the process, and we were. In this case, this bill started heading our way, and I recognize Republicans in the Senate supported it. We made it clear we didn’t agree. They passed it anyway. And so now, hopefully, we’ll be in the process. That’s why the President has a veto. Sometimes the legislative branch wants to go on without the President, pass pieces of legislation, and the President then can use the veto to make sure he’s a part of the process. And that’s — as you know, I fully intend to do. I want to make sure — and that’s why, when I tell you I’m going to sprint to the finish, and finish this job strong, that’s one way to ensure that I am relevant; that’s one way to sure that I am in the process. And I intend to use the veto.

That certainly explains a lot. See also Dan Froomkin.

Dalai Lama Derangement Syndrome

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To his credit, President Bush defied the wrath of China to meet with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and present him with a Congressional Gold Medal. Suzanne Goldenberg reported yesterday for The Guardian:

The White House softened the slight to Beijing by keeping today’s meeting between the Dalai Lama and Mr Bush a distinctly private affair, and by previously assuring the president’s attendance at the 2008 summer Olympics in China.

However, Chinese officials today warned that the spectacle of President Bush standing by the side of the Dalai Lama as he is awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour could damage relations with Beijing.

China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, called on Mr Bush to stay away from the ceremony.

“We solemnly demand that the US cancel the extremely wrong arrangements,” Mr Yang told reporters in Beijing.

“It seriously violates the norm of international relations and seriously wounded the feelings of the Chinese people and interfered with China’s internal affairs.”

China also withdrew from an international strategy session on Iran scheduled for today in protest at the honour accorded to the Dalai Lama. A Chinese official said the timing of the meeting was “not suitable”. …

… The Dalai Lama’s journey to Washington this week will be his 12th visit to the White House since he led his people into exile in 1959. It will be his fourth encounter with Mr Bush. But tomorrow’s award ceremony will mark the first time Mr Bush, or any other serving US president, has appeared in public with the Tibetan leader and the White House was treading very carefully today to try to minimise the embarrassment to China.

Ward Harkavy writes for the Village Voice —

Today’s scheduled embrace of the Dalai Lama by George W. Bush represents a major change in foreigner policy by the White House.

Bush’s new plan: If you meet the Buddha on the road, get a photo-op with him.

That’s a shift from the Blackwater philosophy: If you meet an Iraqi on the road, shoot him.

In any case, plagued by a war that his own regime started, the president has chosen to burnish his image by meeting with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not Al Gore, who looks as if he’s won several pizza prizes since Bush’s operatives stole the presidency from him in 2000.

This Nobel winner is Tenzin Gyatso, who was proclaimed the Dalai Lama when he was only two years old and ruled Tibet until China ousted him years ago. Gyatso won the 1989 Nobel prize “for his consistent resistance to the use of violence.”

Snark.

It’s hard to comprehend why the Chinese get so bent out of shape over the Dalai Lama, known affectionately in Buddhist online forums as HHDL. My understanding is that HHDL has offered to concede Tibet as Chinese territory, so long as Tibetans get some say over what goes on in Tibet. I believe most of the world regards HHDL as a benign and pleasant sort, even if many are befuddled about exactly what he is. But the government of China suffers from Dalai Lama Derangement Syndrome.

Last week, Slavoj Zizek wrote in the New York Times:

THE Western liberal media had a laugh in August when China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs announced Order No. 5, a law covering “the management measures for the reincarnation of living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism.” This “important move to institutionalize management on reincarnation” basically prohibits Buddhist monks from returning from the dead without government permission: no one outside China can influence the reincarnation process; only monasteries in China can apply for permission.

Somewhere in the Bardo between death and rebirth, there’s a Chinese bureaucrat handing out forms.

The Chinese desire to control reincarnation has its unfunny side. Back in the day the second-highest spiritual ruler of Tibet was the Panchen Lama. The 10th Panchen Lama was held prisoner by Mao Tse Tung for ten years and repeatedly tortured to force him to recant his loyalty to the Dalai Lama. He was released in 1981 and died in 1989.

In 1995 a six-year-old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, was named the 11th Panchen Lama by HHDL. Two weeks later, the young boy and his family were taken into custody by the Chinese, and they have not been heard from since. After all this time, one suspects they were killed. Later in 1995, the Chinese government arranged to have the son of a Tibetan Communist Party functionary named the Panchen Lama. Buddhists in Tibet don’t have much choice but to go along with this, but the “official” Chinese Panchen Lama is not recognized as such by Tibetans in exile.

Slavoj Zizek writes that the Chinese are not really opposed to religion. “What bothers Chinese authorities are sects like Falun Gong that insist on independence from state control.” Given what they did to the Panchen Lama, I’m not seeing a distinction.

In recent years, the Chinese have changed their strategy in Tibet: in addition to military coercion, they increasingly rely on ethnic and economic colonization. Lhasa is transforming into a Chinese version of the capitalist Wild West, with karaoke bars and Disney-like Buddhist theme parks.

In short, the media image of brutal Chinese soldiers terrorizing Buddhist monks conceals a much more effective American-style socioeconomic transformation: in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States. Beijing finally learned the lesson: what is the oppressive power of secret police forces, camps and Red Guards destroying ancient monuments compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations?

No shit. But here Zizek shifts gears a bit:

It is all too easy to laugh at the idea of an atheist power regulating something that, in its eyes, doesn’t exist. However, do we believe in it? When in 2001 the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, many Westerners were outraged — but how many of them actually believed in the divinity of the Buddha? Rather, we were angered because the Taliban did not show appropriate respect for the “cultural heritage” of their country. Unlike us sophisticates, they really believed in their own religion, and thus had no great respect for the cultural value of the monuments of other religions.

Buddhists don’t believe in the divinity of the Buddha, either, since the concept of divinity as understood in the monotheistic religions doesn’t apply to Buddhism. The various iconic figures of Buddhist art are best understood as symbols of enlightenment, or sometimes as Jungian archetypes. On the other hand, my understanding is that Islam objects to depicting any living figure, human or animal, in art, because only God creates living creatures. This objection seems to have been ignored by Muslim artists from time to time, but there it is.

So the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas because they saw them as disrespectful to God. For the most part, Buddhist accepted the loss as a reminder of the Buddha’s teaching that everything’s gotta end sometime, and prayed for the Taliban.

The significant issue for the West here is not Buddhas and lamas, but what we mean when we refer to “culture.” All human sciences are turning into a branch of cultural studies. While there are of course many religious believers in the West, especially in the United States, vast numbers of our societal elite follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores of our tradition only out of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong: Christmas trees in shopping centers every December; neighborhood Easter egg hunts; Passover dinners celebrated by nonbelieving Jews.

“Culture” has commonly become the name for all those things we practice without really taking seriously. And this is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians” with a “medieval mindset”: they dare to take their beliefs seriously. Today, we seem to see the ultimate threat to culture as coming from those who live immediately in their culture, who lack the proper distance.

Except that, these days, it’s the fundies and religionists who confuse culture with religion. Take, for example, the annual War on Christmas that must be about to start, as I’m already getting Christmas catalogs. I say if the religionists were serious about keeping Christmas as a sacred observation of the birth of Jesus, they’d be opposed to the materialistic trappings and commercialism. Instead, they get bent out of shape if department store clerks say “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” In Wingnut World, the true meaning of Christmas is using it as an excuse to pick fights with people you don’t like.

In other words, it’s not the religious observance of Christmas that’s a problem. It’s the way the fundies toss Baby Jesus out of the manger so they can break it up into clubs that some of us find worrisome.

I haven’t found the text of HHDL’s remarks today, but the Washington Post has this quote: “All major religious traditions carry basically the same message: That is love, compassion and forgiveness.” Susan Jacoby dismissed this as “meaningless doggerel,” and I suppose it is. But then she says,

Is the Dalai Lama suggesting that the Taliban, which reduced ancient Buddhist statues to smithereens, was interpreting Islam in a way that carried a message of love?

A Buddhist could interpret the act that way, yes, or at least as an opportunity to practice forgiveness and non-attachment, although certainly a message of love wasn’t the Taliban’s conscious intent. But what HHDL said is verifiably true — you can find, in all the major religions, teachings about love, compassion and forgiveness. That those teachings are pretty much ignored isn’t his fault.

The Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, a lovely lady I met at Yearly Kos, says,

The Dalai Lama is right. All religious traditions do have messages of love, compassion, and forgiveness. Unfortunately, all religions also have messages of hate, cruelty and condemnation. The conundrum of religion, as we saw illustrated in the On Faith discussions with author and professional atheist Christopher Hitchens, is that for every claim that religion does good in the world, there are also the well-documented examples of religious messages of intolerance, moral callousness and judgmentalism, and the harm that they have caused.

The problem, however, is even more convoluted than simply that all religions proclaim contradictory messages. Love, compassion and forgiveness can be used against individuals and groups through certain kinds of religious interpretation. I have spent many years working and volunteering in the movement to end family violence. Battering husbands often accompany their violent acts with the language of love, citing the oft-quoted scripture that wives need to “submit” to their husbands. Battering parents do the same, telling their child that a violent punishment is “because I love you” and “for your own good.”

Violent people love violently, stupid people love stupidly, selfish people love selfishly and so forth. Love without justice can degenerate into sentimentalism and finally into narcissism.

Compassion is a widely respected religious virtue and rightly so. Yet compassion or empathy can keep us from confronting destructive behaviors in others. The virtue of compassion has been thrust upon women as their sole responsibility in relationships. Finally, empathy for others can erode the important and healthy sense of an integrated self that everyone, women and men, children and adults, needs to function as a separate individual.

And finally, forgiveness. Women are often urged to “forgive” their batterers. Many women have told me in counseling sessions that when they took their problem of domestic violence to their local preacher, they were urged to “forgive the beatings as Christ forgave us from the cross.” Forgiveness cannot be separated from the need of the one who is perpetrating the violence to confess the wrong and change. Then and only then does forgiveness become possible and sometimes still it takes a very long time for people to let go of the hurt that has been done to them, the deep meaning of forgiveness.

The Dalai Lama commands world-wide respect and admiration not only for his espousal of the virtues of love, compassion and forgiveness, but for his practice of them in a way that sets them in the context of peace and non-violence. Absent that context, these virtues can be corrupted beyond belief—corrupted as much as the machinations of their seeming opposites of hate, cruelty and condemnation.

I believe that the practice of peace and non-violence is the greatest religious lesson the Dalai Lama has to teach us all.

Amen, Sister Susan.