Gurgle

London-based Privacy International has given Google its worst possible rating on issues of customer privacy after a survey of 23 of the web's top destinations.

The category is reserved for companies with "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy."

None of the 22 other surveyed companies - a group that included Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AOL - sunk to that level, according to Privacy International.

Google, of course, declares itself not guilty even though the findings are based on the company's own policies. A company statement noted that last year, Google

successfully fought a U.S. Justice Department subpoena demanding to review millions of search requests.

What's more, one of the giant's legal eagles said it was a "shame" that the report was published "before we had an opportunity to discuss our privacy practices with" the privacy group's researchers.

That defense might be persuasive but for three things: First, during that dispute last year, one of Google's big complaints was that the feds' request was "burdensome," i.e., it was too expensive and too much of a hassle. It's natural to wonder if "protecting privacy" was just the fall-back feel-good position that would sound nice in the press releases.

Second, the reason no one from Google talked with Privacy International about corporate privacy practices was because the company never answered PI's inquiry.

Last but not least,

[t]he scathing report is just the latest strike aimed at Google's privacy practices.

An independent European panel recently opened an inquiry into whether Google's policies abide by Europe's privacy rules.

Meanwhile, three consumer groups in the United States are pressuring the nation's regulators to make Google change some of its privacy policies as part of its proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of online ad service DoubleClick Inc., which also tracks Web surfers' behavior.

A summary of the report is here; a chart of the findings, in .pdf format, is here.

Footnote: Privacy International, which had previously issued complaints about Google's Gmail system, is accusing Google of launching a "smear campaign" against PI to discredit the report.

I remember when Gmail first started, I looked at the privacy policy and was appalled; calling it a "privacy" policy at all seemed a bizarre joke. I am still amazed that people signed up for it.

Just say no

Recently, the Nigerian government and that of the Nigerian state of Kano have filed suits against Pfizer seeking nearly $10 billion in damages. The suits accuse the New York City-based phamaceuticals giant of treating nearly 200 Nigerian children with an untested antibiotic called trovan floxacin without authorization during a meningitis outbreak in Kano in 1996. That was a year before the drug was approved for use in the US.

Some of the children treated have experienced recurring and persistent health problems in the years since; one father now describes Pfizer as "a vampire" that used the children as guinea pigs.

That there are problems with the drug is undeniable:

In 1999, US and European drug regulators took action on Trovan after reports of liver trouble and deaths, with the former restricting its use to serious adult cases and the Europeans recommending its suspension from that market - a decision that has been made permanent, according to the Pfizer website.

However, in regard to the suit,

Pfizer fought back Tuesday, saying the "1996 Trovan clinical study was conducted with the full knowledge of the Nigerian government and in a responsible and ethical way."

"Any allegations in these lawsuits to the contrary are simply untrue - they weren't valid when they were first raised years ago and they're not valid today," a company statement said.

Yeah, well, maybe. But here, again, is one of those nagging little things that get me: The company statement says the study was conducted with the full knowledge of the government. But it appears it doesn't say that it was conducted with the knowledge of the patients or their parents.

Apparently, their knowledge or consent was unnecessary. Just like, yes, guinea pigs. Or lab rats.

Footnote: More background on the Nigerian government report that sparked the suits can be found in this article from the Washington Post from a year ago. Note, too, that the French newspaper l'Humanite, in reporting on the suit on May 29, said that Pfizer

had to admit last year that the letter authorizing the trial by the Nigerian hospital had been backdated.

The treatment of lab rats is starting to look good by comparison.

Good news and bad news

The good news is that by a vote of 11-8, the Senate Judiciary Committee has passed out the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, which would repeal part of the heinous Military Commissions Act. Senate majority leader Harry Reid has promised to bring the bill to a vote within the month.

The principle that a prisoner must be held lawfully dates back at least 800 years. It was mentioned in the Magna Carta. It's enshrinement in the UK in the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 is regarded as a milestone in the establishment of legal rights there - and, of course, over 100 years later, the new nation of the United States, drawing on that tradition, made it part of its constitution.

In 1969, in the case Harris v. Nelson, our Supreme Court called habeas corpus "the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action" which must be "administered with the initiative and flexibility essential to insure that miscarriages of justice within its reach are surfaced and corrected."

That is not an understatement: Without the ability to challenge arbitrary imprisonment, other rights effectively become moot.

So while the bill doesn't go far enough, it is indeed good news that the committee has moved it and that it will soon be brought to the floor, offering the chance to undo some of the damage done.

The bad news is that eight members of the Senate Judiciary Committee of the United States - and we don't yet know how many other members of that august body - are prepared to burn this jewel of protection of liberty on an altar of reactionary paranoia, bigotry, and political pandering. They are, every one of them, disgraces to their offices, their oaths of office, and their country. That they exist is saddening, that there are that many of them (42% of the committee) is frightening.

Thanks to Digby for the link to Chris Dodd's post. Go to FindHabeas.com, a project of the ACLU, for more information and updates.

Just a passing thought

So there's been the technically-highly-improbable JFK attack and the pizza-delivery attack on Fort Dix to be added to the list of let's call them questionable plots to carry out acts of terrorism.

There has been a fair amount of discussion about how in neither of these new cases was anyone in danger, how the "plots" were "in the talking stage" and lacked both materials and money and, often, training.

All true. But here's what I was thinking: Suppose all of these supposed plots, both serious and farcical, were real in the sense that the conspirators were really committed to carrying out their plans and weren't just spinning fantasies. They all presented a real even if not immediate danger.

So far as I'm aware, in none of these cases have law enforcement agencies or prosecutors claimed that the arrests were the result of expanded powers given to them by the TRAITOR - excuse me, "PATRIOT" - Act. The arrests all resulted from old-fashioned police work.

The record to date, despite all the hyped cases, does not support the "need" for the TRAITOR Act, it undermines it. Which brings us back to where we started: That act is not about securing anything but increased power for the already powerful.

Of course, you already knew that. But it's always interesting when the prosecution's own case supports the defense.

Footnote to Chapter Four

The other day, in a Footnote to the fourth of my posts on my thoughts on electoral politics, I had some unkind words about Bill Clinton. Considering the topic of my post yesterday, I might have added the fact that while the growth in income inequality slowed during the Clinton administration, it did not stop.

However, what I wanted to note here is that John Aravosis at AmericaBlog.com is reporting that

[t]he Kerry Edwards 2004 campaign says Bill Clinton tried to throw gays under the bus. ...

Democratic political consultant Bob Shrum claims in his new book that during the 2004 elections, Bill Clinton advised John Kerry to support the Federal Marriage Amendment, i.e., the anti-gay amendment to the US Constitution that would have banned gay marriage....

Aravosis says he checked with both Clinton's office and the Kerry-Edwards 2004 campaign. Cinton's people denied it; the Kerry-Edwards campaign people said it's true. Aravosis tends to give Kerry-Edwards' people the benefit of the doubt, saying that neither they nor Shrum are thought to be liars while

it certainly "sounds" like something Clinton would say and do, and it sounds like something he'd subsequently deny.

I'm not entirely convinced, partly because the source in Clinton's office is named while the Kerry-Edwards campaign source remains anonymous and refers not to direct knowledge but to media reports of the time. But I do have to agree that the sort of cold political calculation involved (the Kerry-Edwards person said Clinton thought it would be a "grand master stroke to neutralize Bush's base") is indeed the kind of thing Clinton would do. And if it is true, it is yet another reason to refuse to wave the banner of "Democrats über alles."

One of those other parts of reality to worry about

The Economic Mobility Project is an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts to study, well, economic mobility. It includes people from the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and the Urban Institute. With that kind of make-up - two staunchly conservative, one centrist, one moderately liberal - you'd be entitled to greet its finding with a somewhat quizzical attitude. So it's noteworthy when it reports that

American men have less income than their fathers’ generation did at the same age....

According to the report, men who were in their thirties in 1974 had median incomes of about $40,000, while men of the same age in 2004 had median incomes of about $35,000 (adjusted for inflation). Thus, as a group, income for this generation of men is, on average, 12 percent lower than those of their fathers’ generation. ...

“The expectation that each generation will do better than their parents has become a fundamental part of what we call ‘The American Dream’, but this new analysis suggests this bedrock belief may be shifting under our feet,” said [John] Morton. [Morton, who co-authored the report, is managing director of Pew’s Economic Policy Initiatives and director of the Economic Mobility Project.] “Income is not the only factor in overall economic mobility, but it is clearly a key component and today’s data suggest that during a thirty-year period of economic expansion, a rising tide did not lift all boats.”

The report only covered men and co-author Isabel Sawhill, a Senior Fellow at Brookings, noted that while male incomes have declined, "family incomes have risen slightly because more women have gone to work, adding a second earner to the family.” That's true enough but when it takes two earners to provide for a family at just about the same level as one did 30 years ago, it still leaves us in the same fix as Alice, running as much as we can to stay in the same place.

However, what I wanted to point out was that Morton's definition of the American Dream, not as "having it all" or even as having more than you do but as your children being better off than you, is one I've used for some time now. Which in turns points up why the report is wrong to say that the "shifting" of that dream is something that "may" be happening. It is happening and it has been happening for some time.

Almost exactly 12 years ago, I wrote to a friend in the UK that

what’s happening to us is a loss of hope. Just a generation or two ago, we as a people had a certain native, even naïve, confidence that things would get better. Not necessarily any specific, identifiable thing, but, well, you know, things. More recently, that confidence has faded, to be replaced by the fallback position that “things” can get better. Now, even that limited faith has failed us.

And people feel - lost. ...

Perhaps never before in our history, certainly never before in this century, has such a large portion of our population (and not just those proverbial angry white guys, either) looked at their children and felt that those children will wind up worse off than they themselves are - felt, that is, like failures.

Three years later - right in the midst of the glory days of Bill Clinton to which we can only be so lucky as to return, if we're to believe the "lesser of the evil"ers - I responded to someone's denunciation of consumerism, in part, by saying that

[her] rage at the system, valid as it is, simply doesn’t go far enough. The problem here isn’t overarching acquisitiveness or an advertising-driven consumer feeding frenzy, it’s more people working longer hours and still winding up worse off than they used to be and coming to believe that - directly contrary to what I would maintain is the real “American dream” - that their children will be even worse off than they are. For the poor, a future that had looked bleak but, arguably, not utterly hopeless is now cloaked in impenetrable darkness. ...

Which means our response has to be far above “driv[ing] past the new car lot” and similar bromides that in any event are applicable only to a minority of families. More importantly, it means our anger should be directed away from those who are simply trying to protect their futures and those of their children from further shrinkage and towards the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people, which has resulted in the US becoming the most economically-stratified nation in the industrialized world, with a greater gulf between rich and poor than that found in the most traditionally “class-ridden” societies, such as the UK. (In 1992, the most recent figures available, the richest 1% of American households owned 45% of the wealth; the richest 20% owned 92%. During the 1980s, all of the increase in wealth went to the richest 20%.)

Was that attitude I sensed reflected in election or poll results? Well, according to exit polls from the November 2006 election, only 30% of Americans expect life for the next generation to be better than life today. And that is a figure that actually hasn't changed all that much since 1992. And actually, why should it? Within the ellipsis in that 1995 quote, I referred to

an unremitting stagnation in personal income that’s coming to look as though it has no end, that this is no “slump” or “downturn” that will eventually reverse itself, that rather this is the way it is and is going to be, that it’s not going to change, that work gets you nowhere and more work gets you more nowhere. (Of the six primary ethnic-gender groupings in the US - black, white, and Hispanic men and women - only one of them, white women, has made a clear gain in real median income over the last 20 years. The others have either stagnated or declined.)

Mr. Morton, Ms. Sawhill, I agree with your definition of the American Dream. But I must tell you, there is no "may" and there is no "shifting." That dream is collapsing into the cesspoll of increasing inequality. And it will take a hell of a lot more than "tut-tut"s and "oh-my"s to do anything about it. And one thing that will not do anything about it is electing another "lesser evil" corporatist Democrat.

Footnote: This is a link to the report.

Message discipline

The Washington Post reported on Monday that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals

tossed out an indecency ruling against Rupert Murdoch's Fox television network yesterday and broadly questioned whether the Federal Communications Commission has the right to police the airwaves for offensive language. ...

In 2004, the agency reversed years of policy and effectively branded even "fleeting," or one-time, use of an expletive off-limits on broadcast television and radio, angering Hollywood, which warned of a chilling effect on programming.

The court ruled yesterday that the FCC had not adequately, or constitutionally, explained why it changed its mind on the fleeting use of profanity and ordered the agency to retool its regulations,

calling the new policy "arbitrary and capricious."

Okay, personally I think it's a good thing that a TV station or network can't be fined for a "fleeting" shit or fuck (fines which could reach $350,000 per incident), especially since the most noted cases occurred on live TV, which is obviously much harder to police. (And using a tape delay for bleeping is more complex on TV than on radio, which involves only audio, not video.) But, as is often true, it's the little things that get me.

"I'm disappointed in the court's ruling," FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin said in an interview. "I think the commission had done the right thing in trying to protect families from that kind of language, and I think it's unfortunate that the court in New York has said that this kind of language is appropriate on TV." ...

The Parents Television Council, which has sent hundreds of thousands of indecency complaints to the FCC in recent years, criticized the ruling. The group's president, Tim Winter, said in a statement that "a court in New York City has cleared the way for television networks to use the f-word and s-word in front of children at any time of the day."

I was quite amused by the fact that both of these reactionaries, who apparently think that the occasional "fuck" is the most serious issue in public communications today, went out of their way to mention that the court was in (gasp!) New York City.

I was reminded of nothing so much as that a few years ago there was a series of TV commercials for Pace salsa, which revolved around these Old West cowboy types discovering that the "other" salsa was made in New York City. "NEW - YORK - CITY!" they scream in horror, with the ad mercifully ending before the inevitable physical assault on the poor schmuck who served the offending sauce. Martin and Winter would have fit right in with the cast.

Happily, which is partly why I can just be amused (the other part being the dictum that laughter is not only the best medicine, it is often the best weapon), those sorts of buttons just don't seem to be as hot as they once were. Even the "Hollywood" button is cooling off. Frankly, what with the war and other parts of reality to worry about, people just don't seem to get as worked up about winger nonsense as they used to.

Something I didn't know

Updated Thanks to Eli at Left I on the News, I have discovered that, dammit, we really are the cops of the world.

In response to a new report that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had purchased and smoked a Cuban cigar during a recent visit to Canada, U.S. Treasury Department spokeswoman Molly Millerwise said

"Persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction are prohibited from purchasing or importing Cuban cigars, regardless of where they are."

While it remained unclear whether anyone had ever been prosecuted for it, the fact remains that if a US citizen or permanent resident alien buys a Cuban cigar in another country and smokes it in that other country, we say they still can be fined up to $250,000 and/or imprisoned for up to 10 years per violation. The same applies to purchasing or consuming any other Cuban product, even if it's done entirely outside the US in a country where such purchase and use are entirely legal.

This apparently only applies, again, only to US citizens and permanent resident aliens, at which all others should let loose a sigh of relief. Because it could be even worse.

Y'see, I have to take back the part about having just discovered this, because while I was unaware of the particular inanity described in this case, the idea behind it is not new to me. Just over 15 years ago, in May 1992, in discussing a US demand that the suspects in the 1988 bombing of PanAm flight 103 be extradited to the US for trial, I said this:

It's believed the bomb was placed on the plane in Germany. The jet crashed into Lockerbie, Scotland. Clearly, both Germany and the UK have a basis to call for extradition. But we don't. No crime was committed on US soil. No US law was broken. By what right do we demand extradition?

Instead of addressing that basic question, political and legalistic gobbledygook is being strewn around like seed in a field, all of it boiling down to a single tenet: US law is universal. Anyone, anywhere, who who does something that's a crime in the US is subject to arrest by US agents and trial in a US court. We're more than the cops of the world, we're the arbiters of what is and isn't just, is and isn't illegal, will and won't be punished. We are supreme.

Consider Manuel Noriega: Nothing he was accused of doing was done within US jurisdiction. But that didn't matter. Indeed, Richard Gregorie, who supervised the framing of the indictment, said after the trial "we aren't going to be able to limit our law enforcement to within our own borders.... The message is, we will come get you." That "getting" Noriega meant invading Panama and killing thousands of innocent people is irrelevant: "It doesn't matter how he got back here, once here he's subject to prosecution." ...

We are in our foreign affairs a nation afflicted with arrogance and consumed with conceit, a nation whose musclebound commitment to its collective ego has lead it from the hope of being a light unto the world to the reality of being a blight unto the world. Among anyone with a conscience, the question must echo: By what right?

Now, I think Eli is rather too enamored of Castro, in precisely the same way that too many are too enamored of the US: embracing the good while ignoring or denying the bad. (Eli recently referred to "alleged" political prisoners in Cuba.) But when he notes the utter madness of US policy toward Cuba, he is spot on - and what it reveals about how our government views the rest of the world often goes far beyond the particular case.

Updated with a Footnote: Through JayV at Blazing Indiscretions, I hear that there was a gathering of Episcopal bishops from the US and the West Indies in New York the end of May. Newly-elected suffragans from Cuba were also invited, but they were denied entry into the US on the grounds that they are a danger to national security.

Housework

As I expect anyone who has read this blog on more than the odd occasion from following a link or some such knows, I am not one to spend any significant amount of time on personal matters. Personal opinions, yes, personal matters, no.

But I regret the recent sporadic nature of my posting and while it feels like an excuse, the fact of the matter is that I haven't been doing too well of late and I've been finding I just don't have the emotional energy for meeting any demands beyond the minimum requirements of work and errands.

Just please bear with me, check back every couple of days, and know that at some point I will be back full storm.

Electioneering, Chapter Four

This is taken from a talk I gave on the role of independent and third party candidates in the American political system in October, 1984.

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The importance of independent political candidacies in the American political process - in any republic or democracy - is their ability to raise issues that would otherwise not be raised, to push policies that would otherwise not be pushed, to discuss ideas that would otherwise not be discussed. The strength of such candidacies is their ability to do that without worrying about "offending" anyone. The major parties - and I'm sure you've seen this yourselves; you can see it in any campaign - spend as much time trying to avoid offending anyone as they do advocating their own ideas. Independents can't do that. You not only can, you have to advocate your own ideas without fear of offense; that is, after all, your reason for running and if you're going to avoid saying what you believe clearly and strongly, why bother?

The point is that almost all movements for social change start as minority positions, ignored if not actively repressed by the power structure of whatever society we're talking about. Those movements grow outside the political mainstream - and when their ideas are introduced into the electoral process, they're usually introduced by minor parties. Virtually all the programs and proposals you hear from the major parties were first brought up by independents.

The historical role of third parties has been to bring up ideas, establish constituencies for those ideas, and force the major parties to react to them, to take their positions into account. That's been the history: Third parties introduce new ideas, they grow, and eventually one or the other of the major parties has moved to absorb them by adopting their ideas - usually in watered-down form, but adopt them nonetheless.

The point is, a power structure that feels no pressure to change will not change. Independent political action is a way of bringing that pressure. Left to themselves, the major parties will tend to collapse toward the center. The Democrats, for example, will tend to take for granted the voters to their left - assuming the Democrats are to the left relative to the Republicans who are to the right relative to the Democrats - figuring those voters aren't going to go past them to vote for Republicans. So the Democrats will lean to the right, trying to pick up a few votes from the center to put themselves over the top to win.

The Republicans, for their part, will tend to do the same in the opposite direction and lean - or at least try to look like they're leaning - to the left. The result is they collapse toward the middle and our political debate becomes narrower and narrower, and indeed our political debate is very narrow compared to other Western nations and people on both sides of the political spectrum begin to feel left out, that their ideas and concerns are being ignored.

Third parties, by reflecting those concerns and showing a constituency for those ideas, prevent the major parties from collapsing completely to the center. They keep the political debate more fluid - and, in essence, keep the major parties honest.

What I'm interested in is change, hard, bottom-line political change. Not slogans, not philosophies, but getting-the-job-done type change. That's what I'm in this for: getting the changes I believe in acted on, and I really don't care who gets the credit.

Let me tell you one more story. Norman Thomas ran for President as the candidate of the Socialist Party six times. He never came close to winning. But he's been called the most successful presidential candidate in history, because virtually his entire platform was eventually enacted into law. When he first ran in the 1920's, he was called a threat to the American way of life for advocating things such as Social Security, Medicare, right of labor unions to organize, anti-monopoly legislation, child labor laws, and so on. Now if you suggested doing away with them you'd be called a threat to the American way of life. That's what I mean by shifting the political consensus. And that's what I'm after.

I'll leave you with the words of Eugene Debs, who said "I'd rather vote for what I want and not get it than vote for what I don't want and get it."

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Footnote: Some doubtless would argue that collapsing toward the center is not what's been happening more recently, which is to at least some extent true. But rather than a refutation, it illustrates another aspect of the argument. I described the goal as "shifting the political consensus." A combination of external circumstances, combined with the GOP playing to its base while the Democrats continued to take theirs for granted, enabled the GOP to move the political consensus to the right.

Instead of trying to challenge or alter that consensus, the Democrats embraced it and chased the GOP to the right to the point where Bill Clinton, he of crime bills and the federal death penalty, of "ending welfare as we know it," of bombings of Chad, Afghanistan, and Iraq, of 500,000 dead Iraqi children being "worth it," of "anti-terrorism" legislation that laid the groundwork for the Patriot Act, of the "Defense of Marriage Act," of judges more conservative than those named by Gerald Ford, of the labor-attacking, environmental-protection undermining, NAFTA, GATT, and MAI, yes that Bill Clinton, is regarded as the model of liberalism to which we should all aspire.

As Phil Ochs said (in a different context, admittedly), "pardon me if I refrain."

Electioneering, Chapter Three

This is from a paper I wrote for the Socialist Party, USA in August, 1983.

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The New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary of 1968 was the first electoral test for Senator Eugene McCarthy as he sought to challenge President Lyndon Johnson on a platform of opposition to the Vietnam War.

Unfortunately for the Senator, this first-of-the-season primary, the one that traditionally sets the pace for the remainder of the campaign, was being fought on what seemed to be Johnson territory: a generally conservative state, proud of its patriotism (“Live Free or Die” declared even its license plates), whose political leaders were almost solidly behind the war effort. The outlook, it was said, was for a resounding Johnson victory.

But when the votes were counted, the result sent shock waves through the political scene. There could no longer be any doubt that opposition to what had become known as “Johnson’s War” was so widespread that support for that war was no longer politically tenable. Lyndon Johnson’s position had been undermined to the point where his very ability to stay in office, indeed, even to get his party’s nomination, was openly questioned. There’s good reason to believe his political fate was sealed that February day in New Hampshire.

That story is likely familiar to many. What is often forgotten, however, is that Eugene McCarthy did not win that election. In fact, he lost in what would’ve otherwise been considered a landslide: Lyndon Johnson gathered some 60% of the vote to McCarthy’s 40%.

And therein lies an important lesson for socialists in judging our electoral efforts: the difference between “victory” and “success.” For while it’s true that Lyndon Johnson won 60% of the vote, he was expected to get 80% - and that fact that McCarthy was able to draw fully one-fourth of Johnson’s voters under what had to be nearly ideal conditions for the President was proof positive of a fundamental shift in the national debate on Vietnam, from “Do we get out?” to “When do we get out?”

In short, while Eugene McCarthy was not victorious in his challenge to Lyndon Johnson’s office, he made a highly successful challenge to LBJ’s policies.

We, as members of a minor political party, espousing what is in the US today an emphatically minority position, need to learn how to judge our efforts in terms of hard, bottom-line politics: Not in terms of who won or lost, or what parties won or lost, but of impact on policies. That’s the real issue for us.

When I first ran for Congress in 1980, I sent out a fund appeal which included the following:

“My decision to run was made neither hastily nor lightly. The hard political reality is that obstacles to a victorious campaign are likely insurmountable....

“But obstacles to a successful campaign are far less, because the proper measure of success isn’t victory but effectiveness in raising issues - challenges and, more importantly, alternatives....

“With energy and commitment, that success can be achieved: We can be heard and we can make a difference, and with your help I and those here working with me will make a difference.”

My total vote come November was small: less, in fact, than 1% and about a third of what I’d mentally been shooting for. A success or a failure? At first glance, a failure to almost qualify as an outright waste of time.

But consider this: The incumbent, a moderately-liberal Democrat in a moderately-conservative Republican district, had spent his entire political career looking, in a symbolic sense, over his right shoulder to see who was coming up from behind. Now, for the first time, he had to take an occasional glance over his left shoulder, concerned that a candidate with a clearly articulated platform (He wrote me after the election, saying “I admire your grasp of the issues.”) could gather enough of his supporters to threaten his position.

The result? In 1981, for the first time, he voted against the MX. In January 1982, he endorsed the nuclear freeze the very day petitions in its support were presented to him by constituents. He has become considerably more active in locally-significant environmental issues, particularly ocean dumping of industrial wastes and sewage. (Indeed, I’ve been told by people directly involved with the 1982 campaign that his office made specific promises to environmental groups of his support on certain issues - promises which, to his credit, he has kept - at least partly because a couple of those groups were considering endorsing me.) And his record on issues such as Central America and South Africa, while fair before, has gotten better.

Some of this, no doubt, can be chalked up to the fact that Republican Ronald Reagan is now president instead of Democrat Jimmy Carter; some of it, even, to coincidence, changes which would’ve occurred even had I not run. But even after allowing for that, I sincerely believe that it’s clear that my running had some impact: This particular member of Congress has been nudged slightly leftward; someone who I referred to during the 1982 campaign as “pretty good but not good enough” is a little bit better. And I call that success. Hard, bottom-line politics-type success.

Indeed, the Socialist Party can claim a fair measure of such success: Proposals from presidential campaign platforms from the early part of this century, denigrated and attacked at the time as threats to freedom and the “American way of life,” were later adopted (albeit in watered-down form), put into practice, and have become so much a part of the American scene that no one imagines being without them. Programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, unemployment insurance and jobs programs, Social Security, child labor laws, and many others are based on ideas originally espoused by socialists. Although we’re still a long way from a truly socialist, cooperative, just society, we have made progress - and progress is success.

This is, in fact, an area where we on the left have much to learn from the right. Another story:

It was the mid-1960s, and the race for Mayor of New York City had spawned three candidates: a liberal Republican, a moderate Democrat, and syndicated columnist William F. Buckley, running for the Conservative Party. In a televised debate, the three were asked what would be the first thing they’d do if elected. The Democrat and Republican gave typical, uninspired, politically correct statements. Buckley answered, “I’d demand a recount.”

The point was, Buckley went into that race knowing he had absolutely no chance of winning. Conservatives were prepared to run and lose, run and lose, over and over again, just trying to get their message out, measuring their successes by inches: a little more media attention here, a few more votes there, a “shift in the wind” somewhere else. Those successes, by virtue of continuing effort, built up - and conservatives began losing by smaller margins, then began winning a few, then finally, in 1980, they almost swept the boards. There were, of course, factors involved beyond earlier conservative election campaigns: the ineptitude and, more importantly, political cowardice of Jimmy Carter, double-digit inflation fired to a significant degree by soaring energy prices, and a socially intolerable sense of “drift,” or loss of “national purpose” among them. But it remains true that the astonishing tide of conservative victories from 1976 to 1980 could not have taken place had that earlier groundwork of acceptance of repeated defeats not been done. The victories were built on a long string of what could well be called successful losses.

We must learn how to make those judgments, how to recognize our successful losses and how to build on them. Impact is success, progress is success, respectful attention even if coupled with disagreement is success, change for the better, even if incremental, is success. Persistence in such successes in our source of future victories.

Always shoot for the victories, but judge your efforts in terms of your success, your hard, bottom-line political success - and never forget the difference.

Electioneering, Chapter Two

The following is excerpted from a talk I gave in the spring of 1983 on the subject "Why I Should Bother Voting for Someone."

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There are a number of reasons you hear as to why you should vote: from civic duty, exercising your freedom, and taking part in democracy, to "If you don't vote you've got no right to complain." I'm not going to refer to any of those reasons. I'm going to talk about why you should vote strictly in the context of producing social change and voting's part in that.

First, let me say that it's obvious that a great many people, young and old alike, are disaffected from voting. Only about half of those people who could register to vote do so, and only about half of those registered actually do vote - so even in a two-way race, a candidate could be elected with the support of as little as one-eighth the potential voting population. There are many reasons for this disaffection, some psychological, some sociological, some political, but I'm going to concern myself only with the latter.

The first, and perhaps the major, political reason for people's lack of interest in voting is that the failure of our system to produce high-quality leaders is all too obvious. For evidence we need look no further back than 1980, when after all the primaries, all the caucuses, all the commercials, all the hoopla, the best we could produce was a choice between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, or, as a letter I saw put it, between "an affable incompetent and a mugger in a three-piece suit."

Although it's not entirely a new phenomenon, the roots of this modern disaffection can be found, I believe, in the mid-1960s. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson campaigned for re-election against Barry Goldwater by playing on the public's fears of the latter as a militarist who would plunge us into war. Johnson, on the other hand, pledged "no wider war" in Vietnam and people voted for him as the "peace candidate," and he won in a landslide. But it was during Johnson's term, specifically 1965-1967, when the massive buildup of US troops in Vietnam took place. Many people felt totally betrayed.

Then in 1968, the race for the Democratic nomination featured Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, while Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller squared off for the Republican nomination. McCarthy and Kennedy, running on anti-war platforms, easily carried the Democratic primaries, and while the Republicans had no primaries, public opinion polls clearly showed that Rockefeller was the strong favorite among Republicans. Nonetheless, when the party conventions took place, the nominees were Humphrey and Nixon - because repaying political favors proved to have more weight than respecting the voters' obvious wishes. That experience turned off literally millions.

And it wasn't just election campaigns: For example, a big civil rights issue at the time was rat control programs for inner city areas. But when a bill to fund such a program was introduced in Congress in 1967, it was at first laughed down; indeed, one Senator was quoted as saying "I think the rat thing to do is vote down this rat bill rat now." The bill was later hurriedly passed - but with a much scaled-down appropriation - after riots erupted that summer.

In short, the government seemed extremely unresponsive to people's needs and demands - and it still seems so. People have concluded that it doesn't matter who you vote for, that it won't make any difference one way or the other, so why vote at all? Our recent history does seem to tell us that the wishes of the public are less important than the repayment of political favors and the power of money, leaving us, inevitably, with uninspiring, "lesser of two evils" choices.

And there's one other important reason for why people say "Why vote?" The fact is that most movements for social change began as clearly minority positions, ignored if not actually repressed by the power structure of whatever society we're talking about. They grew outside the mainstream, through non-electoral (and frequently non-legal) means: In our own history, the movement for American independence, including the Revolution, the anti-slavery and women's suffrage movements, and the struggle to establish labor unions all fit that description - as do, in more recent years, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the movements for civil rights, environmental protection, and feminism, and against the nuclear arms race, among others. The history is so clear that it's often said that "Congress merely ratifies what the people have already decided."

But it's here that the crux of the matter lies. How do we go about ratifying those changes? How do we make the progressive changes we've made a part of the social structure so we don't have to keep re-fighting the same battles from the ground up? In the case of the civil rights movement, how, for example, to make equal access to public facilities part of the social structure so the battle didn't have to be fought from square one over and over again, lunch counter by lunch counter by school by school?

That's what laws are for: to establish certain social standards to which everyone - at least theoretically - can be held. But to get laws passed, to establish those legal standards, takes political power - and that's where voting comes in. Voting is usually sold as an end in itself, as again, for example, a civic duty. But voting is not an end in itself; it's a means to an end. It's one of the ways, one of the tools that can be used, to obtain and exercise the political power necessary to ratify social change.

There are a limited number of ways to obtain political power: One, obviously, is outright insurrection - just take over and do it your way. A second method is social disruption on such a large scale that the power structure simply cannot afford to ignore your demands and must act favorably on them. Then there is moral suasion and the closely-related logical argument, through which you obtain power simply by convincing enough people or even the power structure itself that you are right. The fourth way is by changing, or at least threatening the position of, those in power. That latter method involves voting.

Most all movements for social change, to varying extents and in varying combinations, use all of the latter three tactics: disruption, persuasion, and voting. Again, most such movements start outside the political system, but most of them involve electoral politics eventually. Let me give you some examples:

The modern civil rights movement began in the streets of Selma and Montgomery, Alabama andat the lunch counters of Greensboro, North Carolina in the early 1960s. That activism, that social disruption, was a - probably the - main factor in securing passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. That was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act, and other subsequent laws making various types of discrimination illegal. Those laws naturally didn't end discrimination, but they gave legal force to the movement's principles and prevented its having to fight discrimination one single battle at a time. Those laws were then used to pursue those principles in the courts, whose decisions were used as spurs for further action in the streets. Now, we've obviously got a long way to go: There is still a great deal of racism and discrimination in this country. But those laws did provide certain extra tools to be used in the battle against it.

It's often forgotten that the civil rights movement changed the nature of political power: By 1964, in most places in this country a candidate who openly opposed civil rights and civil rights legislation could not hope to win election. The activism produced moral suasion, convincing people of the rightness of the cause. That changed the nature of the electoral arena, then voting changed the nature of Congress, and the changed Congress passed laws which were used as tools for further action. Voting was not the method of change, but it was a tool used in the process of change.

A second, more recent, example can be found in the movement for a nuclear freeze. To understand what follows, you should be aware that this past spring a resolution endorsing a nuclear freeze was defeated in the House of Representatives.

The nuclear freeze movement began with the issuance of a manifesto, a "call" for a nuclear freeze, authored largely by Randall Fosberg. She circulated it among professional acquaintances and obtained a few dozen signatures, at which point is was circulated through the peace movement, where the few dozen signatures quickly swelled to a few hundred and then to several thousands, escalating ultimately to the huge turnout of 800,000 or more on June 12[, 1982,] in New York City. The energy generated by these actions produced a number of local and statewide referendums on the question of a nuclear freeze. 38 such referendums were voted on November 2, plus one last spring for the state of Wisconsin. Of those 39 referendums, 38 passed. Randall Fosberg's few dozen colleagues had now swelled to 12 million votes in favor of a freeze.

The freeze became a major issue in dozens of Congressional races and was a deciding factor in at least several. The result: That same nuclear freeze resolution that failed last spring will pass this spring - and its success will hopefully be a basis for further non-electoral action.

My third example is the opposition to the Vietnam War. Such opposition was very small prior to 1964, but it - and demonstrations showing it - grew as our involvement grew. The social disruption and moral suasion from the movement were powerful enough to put real constraints on the government's ability to escalate the war further. According to David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest, in 1966 Pentagon officials told President Johnson that their computers told them the US could win the war if we sent 250,000 more troops to Vietnam. Johnson responded by telling them to go back and ask the computers "how long it would take half a million angry demonstrators to climb the White House wall and lynch their President."

Despite that, though, the policy didn't change; rather, the government was simply prevented from pursuing it as far as it wanted to. While that itself was of course a real success, it obviously wasn't enough. There were still over 500,000 US troops in Vietnam, the war continued to rage, and the bombs continued to fall.

In the spring of 1968, however, Lyndon Johnson shocked the nation by announcing that he would not run for re-election, was ordering a "pause" in the bombing of North Vietnam, and had agreed to begin peace talks with representatives of the North Vietnamese and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam. Why the change? One pivotal event was the New Hampshire presidential primary that'd taken place that February. Senator Eugene McCarthy, running against Johnson on an anti-war platform, proved conclusively through his results that Lyndon Johnson's political base was gone. The disaffection from what had become known as "Johnson's War" was so great that LBJ could not retain his office - and when that was proved through the use of voting as a means of expressing political power, Johnson gave up.

Opposition to the war was still a long struggle: The US was involved directly for nearly 5 more years and through military aid for more than 7. But the fact remains that a corner had been turned, and from then on it was the military rather than the peace movement that was on the defensive. Action in the streets had been translated into votes which forced a change in policy, which them prompted more street action, which translated into a stronger position for peace candidates, and the cycle continued.

A key point was that New Hampshire primary. A good question to ask ourselves is: Would there have been a real change in policy if Lyndon Johnson had been able to retain his office, if that threat not just to his political popularity but to his very ability to stay in office - a threat generated by votes - hadn't existed? Frankly, I doubt it.

And that brings us to the bottom line. David Harris, one of the leaders of the draft resistance movement during the Vietnam War, used to say that the State can put up with almost any number of people who simply say "no" - if you want to make changes, he would say, you must do "no," you must act on those beliefs. A power structure that feels no pressure, who's decision-makers feel no threat to their positions, have no reason to change their course.

I'm interested in change, change as measured by hard, bottom-line politics. Not slogans, not philosophies, but getting-the-job-done type change. And voting for what you believe in whenever that opportunity arises is one of the ways of bringing that pressure to bear. It's brought through publicity, through demonstrating the existence of a constituency for a position or an idea - and, when you're lucky, through changing a few faces.

So my answer to the question "Why should I ever vote for anybody?" is that voting can be part of a process of change. It's not the way to change and it rarely if ever initiates change, but it can be, and often is, part of the process of change. To decline to vote when, again, a referendum or a public question or a candidate offers a point of view that you can positively support is to freely surrender one of the tools, one of the nonviolent weapons, available to you for improving society.

Don't just give away one of your nonviolent weapons for change.

Electioneering, Chapter One

At Lean Left there has been something of a dust-up, largely but not exclusively between Tgirsch and me, over the issue of 3rd party candidacies versus voting for "the lesser of the evils." It started, innocently enough (or so I thought) with comment #18 at this post, where someone asked "So why exactly are people who don’t vote disqualified from having a legitimate opinion on the government?" I answered by making a distinction between those who just don't bother to vote and those who have given up in despair on the idea that voting can accomplish anything positive for their lives.

That provoked a strong rebuke from Tgirsch, who insisted anyone "paying attention" for "five whole minutes" would certainly be motivated to vote - but that voting for "a Nader or a Perot" is "pissing away" that vote. I called bullshit on the latter, declaring "It is never 'pissing away' your vote to vote for what you actually believe in." And off we went.

The discussion continued under this post but a couple of days ago I opted out for a time because it was shifting from heated to nasty. I just posted my summation, which will be my last word on the topic; I expect there will be replies.

The exchange has prompted me, however, to dig out some old stuff to more fully express my notions about political action in general and electoral politics in particular. The following three posts are from speeches and/or papers I did in the 1980s. Before or after looking at those, you might want to check out this post from April 2005 in which I laid out my "Area Under the Curve" philosophy of political activism. I'll only add that the talk on "The Individual in Political Action" mentioned there also included a section on electoral action both as a campaign worker and a candidate.

Bear in mind that the three posts following were covering overlapping topics and were addressed to different audiences at different times, so some repetition was inevitable. I tried to edit out as much of that as I could, but there is still some. Sorry.

Farewell

(Cross-posted to The Core 4.)

I'm sure you have all seen this.

I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called "Face" of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed.... Being called an "attention whore" and being told "good riddance" are some of the more milder rebukes. ...

I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party. ...

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."

Some of us did, Cindy. And some of us saw this coming. Back on January 14, I wrote this:

Ten days ago, Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel was holding a press conference announcing a Democratic measure intended to place a couple of largely meaningless but good-sounding restrictions on lobbyists. Cindy Sheehan and a group of fellow protesters disrupted the event with signs and chants calling for an end to the Iraq War - and she was roundly denounced for it by a variety of people who were more than willing to cheer her on when her target was Bush instead of Democrats. She was called “stupid, unthinking and politically naive” for staging a “circus.” She is “a fool,” we were assured, who is “against everyone but her own rabid fans” and whose “pompous spectacle,” backed by her “yappy, worshipping, poodle cult," was an "inept outburst" marked by "self-important impatience" and "shrill posturing." She was told to "shut up" and to "put a sock in it." ...

My first reaction was to say just who the flaming hell do you people think you are? Who among you has done a fraction of what Cindy Sheehan has, committed a fraction of the time or energy, either physical or emotional, to stopping this madness? What is she, just a tool, a convenience, to be discarded now that you've got what you want? "Hey, Democrats won the election. So shut up."

And then my second reaction set in: Yes, that's exactly what she is to you. Just a living press release, just another campaign commercial, a campaign that for you is now ended. For you, for way too many among us, including way too many of the so-called "liberal" or "progressive" bloggers, support for Cindy Sheehan or any other protesters was never actually about the war. It was about electing Democrats.

So now she needs to call it quits. Contrary to the expected post hoc vituperation and the milder opinions, I did not find her farewell "less than gracious," as one put it. I found it spot on. And I did not find it, as others did, bitter. Rather I found it an expression of pain born of a legitimate sense of betrayal by people she thought were friends and supporters - and who damn well should have been.

Interestingly, Sheehan writes that

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike.

But she also sees the US becoming "a fascist corporate wasteland" with a society "beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think," adding "I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A."

Cindy Sheehan, you are a radical, an honorable title to be worn proudly. Just like some of us were during Vietnam, you have been radicalized by the war, by the senseless, monstrous waste of it all. The scales have fallen from your eyes and you no longer "see through a glass darkly." You've seen truth, and know that Iraq can't be separated from the rest of US foreign and military policy, something to which those who condemned your visit to Venezuela still blind themselves, nor can those policies abroad be separated from those at home.

I know you said this:

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

But truth be told, I'm confident that after a rest you will be back. Likely in a quiet way, not out front, maybe even just on local matters, but you'll be back. Because you have been radicalized by reality. And from that, there is no turning back.

But for now, go in peace, Cindy, with gratitude (and admiration) for the stamina and courage you showed.

What goes around

The folks over at Lean Left have posts related to global warming on a fairly regular basis and it always turns into an argument in comments because a couple of the regulars in comments are among the nanny-nanny naysayers who just refuse to accept the inconvenient truth and yes that is a plug. Two recent examples are from May 20 and May 22.

The reason I mention this now is that just a couple of days ago I finished a book called Einstein's Jury. It's about the efforts of astronomers to test general relativity by confirming or refuting some of its key astronomical predictions, including bending of light in a gravitational field and gravitational redshift. The question wasn't regarded as completely settled for more than 15 years.

During the course of that debate, those who refused to accept general relativity found themselves working harder and harder to find a basis for disputing it. Not all of the evidence was clear, indeed not all of it was favorable to Einstein. But as the evidence kept coming in, the sheer mass of it supporting general relativity just kept growing larger. Opponents - some of who called themselves "irreconciliables" and a few of who never did, in fact, reconcile themselves to the theory - began arguing smaller and smaller points, nitpicking at details, claiming relatively small differences between theory and observation disproved the theory, arguing there wasn't "enough" proof, even paying people to produce papers refuting Einstein.

I invite you to go check out those linked threads and see how the same sort of clutching at straws and arguing small details feature in the arguments of the nanny-nanny naysayers. Some things, it seems, truly do not change.

Again with the head scratching

I'm unceasingly amazed at the ability of moderate Democrats to believe that any day now, any moment now, sanity is going to penetrate the dark, dank chambers of the conservative mind.

Two weeks ago it was the statement by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that if the Iraqi parliament said it wanted US forces to leave, "we'll be glad to comply." That was taken, even by some lefty blogs, as proof that GOPper support for Bush was collapsing and soon they'd be voting against the war in Congress.

As I pointed out at the time, what McConnell really offered in that interview was the same old bullshit talking points, just with the addition of the recent twist of blaming the Iraqis for any problems.

Still, the faith holds true: Now, Steve Benen at TalkingPointsMemo and Eric Kleefeld at the related TPMCafe have gotten excited by Senator Jeff Sessions' remark that

[b]y September, when General Petraeus is to make a report, I think most of the people in Congress believe, unless something extraordinary occurs, that we should be on a move to draw that surge number down.

He was, he said, prepared to look at bipartisan solutions.

Okay. In September, he could be prepared to look at bipartisan moves to draw down the surge. In other words, in something over three months from now he'll be willing to think about going back to where we were the end of last year.

And this is a major breakthrough exactly how?

Quiz time

A few days ago, a guy named Dale Franks had some "Questions for Our Liberal Friends" about Iraq addressed to "people like Oliver Willis." While some (such as Atrios) greeted the questions with "a contemptuous snort," Willis (who, I note, I stopped reading quite some time ago) tried to treat them respectfully. So I figured, why not get in on the fun and offer my own reactions. The questions and my answers follow; the questions have been edited slightly for space but their meaning is unchanged and none have been omitted.

- I have questions to which I'm curious to hear the answers. I'm not asking in a snarky way. I'm honestly interested.

No, you're not, you're posing what you imagine to be a bunch of "gotcha"s to advance an ideological position. At least be honest about it. Nonetheless, I'll take your gotchas on - primarily because showing there is no cha to be got will itself be useful.

- Let's dispense with silly arguments about whether we should've gone into Iraq in the first place. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. We are there. What do we do now?

Right off the top we can see where this is going. The roots of the war, the conduct of the war, all of that is off the table. Actual, existing right-wing screw-ups must not be mentioned, only hypothetical future left-wing screw-ups can be discussed. This is about serious consideration of Iraq? How do you propose to discuss where we should go from here without any consideration of how we got where we are? In fact, you don't; you hope rather to be like a prosecutor whose witnesses are never cross-examined. That may be useful on a partisan political level, but it's idiotic on a practical one, an example of a blatant refusal to learn from, even to admit the existence of, your mistakes. (Flashback to Shrub being stumped by the question about what mistakes he might have made.)

Still, I think we now understand the ground rules, so we'll plunge ahead.

- What do you think the result of an American withdrawal would be?

Since the rest of the questions are really expansions on this one, I'll leave it aside in favor of answering the rest except to note that it's unnecessary to ask the companion question of what the effect of continuing present policy would be since we've seen its results so far: chaos, civil war, hundreds of thousands dead and wounded - oops, wait, sorry, we're not allowed to talk about right-wing fiascos. Reality is out of bounds.

- Do you reject the "you broke it, you bought it" idea?

Yes. Period.

Okay, not period. Maybe semicolon. First, in the real world a better formulation would be "you broke it, you fix it." But "fixing" what you "broke" by definition can't involve breaking more stuff. Last December, in response to something I posted about the Iraq Study Group, I got this, very much along the same lines as your question:

When my kid messes up I don’t tell him “Oh, just give up and walk away.” I tell him “Go back and fix what you broke and let’s get it right.”

To which I replied:

I’m prepared to assume that “fixing it” does not involve first stomping on the broken pieces and smashing several more items into the same pile. But that is exactly what “fixing” Iraq with more troops and more combat means - except that in that case, the broken pieces are actually human lives which can and have been by the hundreds of thousands “broken” quite literally beyond repair.

And if we’re going to throw silly analogies around, I’d remind you of the old line about when you’re stuck in a hole you’ve dug, the first thing to do is to stop digging.

We have a moral responsibility to undertake a massive reconstruction and humanitarian relief effort in Iraq - but that can't be accomplished in the middle of a war. The best way to meet that responsibility is first to stop digging, that is, stop making things worse - that is, get out militarily. Then, be prepared to go back in, in civilian mode, as soon as the opportunity arises.

- I'm not opposed to punitive expeditions when they appear necessary, but punitive expeditions have never been a liberal "thing".

Suggesting that withdrawing from Iraq would turn the whole mess into a mere "punitive expedition" is absurd. Interestingly, though, the bombing Clinton inflicted on Iraq in 1998 much better fits the description of a "punitive expedition," which you say is not a "liberal 'thing.'" I'll remember that the next time some idiot right-winger wants to hang "even the liberal Clinton" around my neck for some asinine reason.

- Do you think the Iraqis will find a way to cobble their state together?

Actually, yes I do although I don't think it will be easy or pretty. I do know it will be much more likely once the Shias realize they can no longer count on US forces to prop up a Shia-dominated government and they'll have to make real compromises. I do, however, think it will be a federalist rather than a centralized system; any attempt to enforce a dominant central government would probably lead to Kurdish secession.

- Do you think it will descend into a civil bloodbath?

A deceptive and misleading question. It is already a civil bloodbath. The insistence of the government, the media, and especially the war-loving wingnuts on turning a blind eye to that fact is appalling.

So the real question should be if I think Iraq will descend into a worse bloodbath. I fear that initially it would.

- Why don't we have any responsibility to try to prevent it?

Because we can't. All we could do would be to temporarily repress it and that only by establishing a reign of brutality and terror that would make Saddam's Iraq look like Sweden. The hatreds our invasion unleashed are long-standing ones which the decades of Saddam's rule obviously did not cool. Unless you are proposing turning all of Iraq into one huge US military base to be patrolled in perpetuity, the idea that we can "prevent" a civil war, especially "prevent" one that has already started, is nonsensical.

I have said this before: Our leaving will not stop the violence. But the violence will not stop until we leave.

- What if Iraq turns into a Taliban-like cesspool, and becomes a base for terrorist operation against the US?

"What if?" Is there a more tendentious way to start a question? It's a way of suggesting anything and everything without having to offer any rational foundation for it. What if your grandmother had wheels? Then she'd be a wagon.

But I'll try anyway. First, I'm not sure what a "Taliban-like cesspool" means; during the Taliban reign, Afghanistan had relative quiet and stability for the first time in some years. This is not to defend the Taliban (although the US found it quite defensible when it was a convenient tool for tying the USSR down in Afghanistan. Wait, sorry, bringing up factual history again. Sorry.) but it is to wonder exactly what is meant by "cesspool."

Assuming the question is actually supposed to be about the supposed risk of Iraq becoming a terrorist "base," the chances are actually quite slim and the comparison to Afghanistan is feeble at best. First, al-Qaeda had been in Afghanistan, fighting the Soviets alongside the mujahadeen, for some time. It was well established there and, more importantly, well-connected to the government that emerged when the Soviets withdrew. Neither is true in Iraq.

Further, al-Qaeda is Sunni. Iraq is majority Shi'ite. Strong links to the government are, to put it politely, unlikely.

Third, even according to the US military, the number of so-called "foreign fighters" in Iraq is a relatively small portion of the resistance. And there are clear indications that they are not popular among Iraqis, who tolerate them only because they are opponents of the US occupation. Rather than creating a "base" for terrorists, our withdrawal from Iraq is more likely to see the Iraqis, who have seen enough of outsiders, turn on those other outsiders and say "Thanks for the help, but it's time for you to go. Now."

Fourth, there is another important point here: the implied equation between "terrorist" and "Islamic fundamentalist terrorist," as if there is no other kind. Well, strictly for and limited to the purposes of this discussion, I will stipulate that that is what we both mean by the term. But we must never forget that Eric Rudolph was not an Islamic fundamentalist. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were not Islamic fundamentalists. William Krar was not an Islamic fundamentalist. The Alabama militiamen are not Islamic fundamentalists. This list goes on.

- Do you think that the Iraqis can build a stable, functioning democratic state? If not, why? Are they not suited for democracy? If so, what are their deficiencies?

There are a great many assumptions in this question revolving around what constitutes a "functioning democratic state." I strongly suspect you mean one that looks a lot like us. But what about, say, Iran? We tend to - like to - forget that Iran has a functioning parliament which includes members of opposition parties who were freely elected. (The problem the opposition has is having candidates well-known enough to have a good chance of winning who can obtain approval to run from a board - one dominated by the mullahs - that screens them.) If Iraq came out looking like that, would that be a "functioning democratic state?" Or what about Afghanistan, which has a constitution containing a provision that says that no law can contradict Sharia law? Is that a "functioning democratic state?"

So given that the term is open to interpretation and variation, can they "build a stable, functioning democratic state" of some form or another? Yes. Will they? I have no clue. A lot of your questions seem to demand guarantees of things unknowable, a demand which you are not willing to apply to yourself. I do know that for most nations throughout history, achieving a "stable, functioning democratic state" has been the result of a struggle over time, a struggle that rarely if ever proceeds smoothly or in a straight line. And I know it is almost never successfully imposed from the outside. Yes, there have been examples - think Japan after World War II - but they are better regarded as the exceptions that prove the rule. And in the case of Japan, there was a pre-existing government which after its military defeat cooperated in maintaining order and in the creation of a new government, conditions which do not apply to Iraq.

As for the Iraqi deficiencies in this area? Just one: inexperience.

- Will it embolden terrorists?

A few individuals, I expect it will. Overall, no. Why should it? Seriously. That's the question that never gets asked. "Embolden," a word that almost owes its existence to current right-wing paranoia, is always assumed; it's always, as a friend of mine used to say, "proved by blatant assertion." Any terrorist group or leader or organizer or whatever, looking at a US withdrawal from Iraq, would reasonably conclude "Okay, in the short run this can look like a good thing. In the longer run, it's bad." For a couple of reasons why, see the following answers.

- Will our withdrawal make it more or less likely that terrorists will marshal forces for another 9/11 style attack? Why?

It'll make no difference one way or the other. Again, why should it? What is it with this nutso notion that having 150,000 troops in Iraq somehow makes it physically impossible for any terrorist group to make any plans to do anything anywhere else? How can you even get a grip on such a completely moronic concept?

- Will a withdrawal from Iraq help or hinder the Global War on Terror?

To the extent that the phrase War on Terror^{(c)(reg.)(pat.pend.)} has a discernible meaning, withdrawal will help. Our invasion of Iraq was a positive boon to every terrorist group in the entire region and perhaps beyond. It has been terrorism's recruiting poster. And now it emerges that it has turned into a cash cow for a resurgent al-Qaeda. Our military presence in Iraq is actively harming efforts to combat actual terrorism.

- Do we need to make an effort at all, other than some Special Ops stuff here and there, and intelligence, prevention, and law enforcement operations?

You make it sound like "some Special Ops stuff ... intelligence, prevention, and law enforcement operations" are not really trying. But contrary to the Jack Bauer fantasies of the right, the patient, steady work of intelligence and investigation has done and will do more to prevent and limit actual terrorism than all your bombing sorties combined. Ultimately, terrorism is a law enforcement issue. (Especially true if we go to a rational definition of "terrorist" rather than the artificially limited one used here.) And the traditional methods of law enforcement - that is, minus the secret prisons, the "enhanced interrogation techniques" (my new favorite euphemism), the expanded Traitor Act powers to invade privacy, the invasive, intrusive, rapidly-expanding databases, and so on - are the best weapons we have.

- What would be the US's military role after a withdrawal from Iraq?

In Iraq? None, except potentially for logistical support for future reconstruction and relief. Here? Pretty much what it was (or rather should have been) before the invasion: defense.

- Does the US military have much of a role beyond repelling an invasion?

Not really, no. Historically, it's role has been more to push US power outward and to protect US economic interests abroad than to "defend freedom." Remember General Smedley Butler's statement that

[w]ar is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

He also said

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. ... And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. ...

Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Yes, there have been arguable exceptions to that rule. (You did notice I used the modifier more rather than solely in describing the military's role over our history, yes?) But not many. And now that you've brought it up, why don't we start thinking about alternative defense?

- Are we doomed to fail at achieving anything worthwhile in Iraq?

Yes.

- Why? Is it something organic to Iraq, or simply a problem with the current president? Would another administration be able to achieve some reasonable level of peace and stability?

Because it's too late and has been all along. Because - you know, the hell with this "shoulda, woulda, coulda" being off the table crap and especially the hell with the bilge that it's a "silly" argument - because we blew it as soon as we invaded, an invasion I'm willing to bet you endorsed, which is why you want to avoid talking about it. Because we "broke it" beyond our ability to fix. Because we are invaders and occupiers and seen as such and will continue to be seen as such. Because our presence there has not contained civil violence, it has unleashed it. Because our presence there does not prevent conflict, it provokes it. Because our presence there does not reduce terrorism, it generates it - and, if terrorism can be defined as inflicting violence on innocent civilians in the pursuit of a political agenda, our presence there often enough is terrorism.

Is it a problem with this president? Not solely: We must not forget Madeline Albright's infamous comment that the deaths of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children as the result of sanctions was "worth it" to oppose Saddam. But this administration, with its ignorance, its monomaniacal obsession with Saddam Hussein, its power lust, its stubbornness, deceit, and hubris, its stupidity, has increased and continues to increase the problems geometrically.

Would a new president be able to change that? Only by getting out. It's not Bush that's at fault, it's the policies. Any administration pursuing those same policies would have wound up at the same place. Of course, it's hard to imagine any other administration doing so.

- One final question: What if you're wrong? Keep in mind that you are essentially betting the future of left-liberalism's credibility on national security on the outcome of that policy.

You sound like a lawyer for Microsoft trying to instill FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). Don't actually say there will be some dire consequence of a given course of action, of straying from the "stay the course," just suggest the possibility and let the other side's imagination do the rest.

Of course, like I've already said, there are no absolute guarantees on the future - something your side learned with its slam-dunk cakewalk. Or, rather, would have learned if you weren't so determined to avoid doing so. ("Silly argument" and "shoulda, woulda, coulda" indeed.) But your "bet" is one I'm quite willing to make with but one stipulation: By even laying it out you are admitting that by your own argument, right-conservatism's credibility on national security is already busted, because it has been wrong, wrong, and wrong again, with tragic consequences for thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of Iraqis, as well as squandering and continuing to squander hundreds of billions of dollars, actually advancing the interests of international terrorism, undermining our moral authority around the world, and creating a moral debt for reconstruction in Iraq that will take decades to repay.

- So, other than sunny optimism, what assurances can you give that the consequences of quick pullout from Iraq will be relatively painless?

You are in no position to accuse anyone of "sunny optimism" and the reference just shows how little those of your ilk actually listen to what's being said to them by their political opposites. Who the hell said anything about "relatively painless?" Because of practices and policies pursued by your side of the argument, there are, as has been widely said from this side, no good choices for Iraq. There are only less bad choices. The least bad choice is to get out as quickly as possible, aware of the pain that will follow, aware of our own role in creating that pain, and standing ready to do what we can to heal the wounds as soon as such healing is actually possible.

Those are all the questions asked, those are my answers. Now to wrap up, some questions for my conservative friends.

- What do you think the consequences of staying in Iraq will be? How many do you think will die in the next month, the next year, the next five years?

- Considering that one classic definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result, how can you argue that "staying the course" - and for all the talk about "new directions" and "surges" and all the rest, they're just minor variations on the same theme - is a rational plan?

- In fact, given the spectacular record of failure marked up by the right wing and the neocons since before the war began, how can you expect any argument, any prediction, any claim, any rant about "they're a threat to your children" to be taken seriously?

- Since you get to ask "what if" questions, so do I. What if Iraqis don't want to have a "stable, functioning democratic state" of a form of which you'd approve? Then what? I know it's a nice, safe, notion, one that makes us feel comfortably superior, to imagine everyone in the world wants to be at least more or less just like us - but what if that's not true? What if their notion of "freedom" does not encompass "democracy" as we would understand the term? What should we do then?

- Finally, other than sunny optimism, what assurances can you give that not pulling out of Iraq quickly will not result simply and solely in more pain, more suffering, more destruction, more loss of life and resources and moral standing and money and security, both here and there?

The bottom line is that despite your understandable desire to avoid "shoulda, woulda, coulda" discussions, there is an established record here, one more than clear enough, more than long enough, to shift the burden of proof: It is not up to us to justify pulling out of Iraq. It is up to you to justify staying, a justification that cannot rely on tales of the coming of the boogeyman, tales which did not have any rational relation to the invasion of Iraq and do not have any rational relation to continuing the carnage going on there now. That is a burden of proof you have not, and I am confident that before an impartial jury you could not, meet.

STDD&GTHO.

A few additional bits...

...about The Vote.

1) It turns out that only $1.6 billion in the supplemental bill is even subject to the non-existent, soon-to-be-waived "benchmarks." (Thanks to Eric Kleefeld at TPMCafe for the link.)

2) On "Countdown" on Friday, MSNBC analyst Craig Crawford said the Democrats got rolled by the GOPper spin about "abandoning the troops." It was of course nonsense, but the Democrats "could not [even] spin the truth," he marveled.

But that's all wrong. The Democrats didn't fail to beat the GOPper spin, they bought into it, straining to declare their utter fealty to and adoration of every single person in uniform as the very embodiment of all that is just and decent and good and brave and noble (so much for Abu Ghraib) and swearing they would never, ever, horrors no, "defund" the war, er, the troops.

Gary Trudeau expertly punctured that GOPper bs 'way back on April 1 in a strip in which a soldier muses that a cut-off of funding would require a withdrawal - so "supporting" the troops means he stays in the meat grinder while "opposing" the troops means he gets to go home. "Permission to think it through denied," he's told.

3) Rep. David Obey, despite being among the people who "negotiated" the "compromise," apparently joined the ranks of the "idiot liberals" he previously denounced and voted against the bill. In fact, 140 Democrats voted against it (along with two GOPpers) while only 86 voted for it.

“The anti-war Democrats have reached their tipping point,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), a leader of the Out of Iraq caucus, [the day before the vote]. “It’s going to take Republican votes to pass it.”

And so it did.

4) This is the kicker. MSNBC reported on Friday that

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell predicted a change [in Bush's Iraq policy], and said Bush would show the way.

"I think the handwriting is on the wall that we are going in a different direction in the fall and I think the president is going to lead it," he said.

So we already know the "surge" is a bust? The "give it time to work" brigade is just blowing smoke? And there's going to be a Plan - well, I started to say Plan B but they've got to be to Plan R (With a wing attack?) by now? Wouldn't it just be the ultimate, the true ultimate, in farce if in September the "different direction" was to withdraw and this whole thing with the funding really was just so Bush could say he decided to withdraw rather than that Congress made him do it?

No, I don't actually expect that, but like a car wreck at which despite yourself you keep looking, it's so phenomenally bizarre I can't stop thinking about it.

A wreck

So the vote has come, the "deal" has been made. Others have expressed their outrage, their frustration, their fury; some crudely, some eloquently, all passionately.

But I can't join them. I do feel some anger, yes, but not outrage. What I feel, rather, is disgust. Disgust and bitterness, the bitter weariness of the repeatedly jilted lover who responds to the latest plea of "I promise, honey, next time it really will be different!" by shaking their head and closing the door.

This is not to say that I didn't see this coming more than six weeks ago. (And of course I was hardly alone in that.) The hints of a "deal," laughably labeled a "compromise," involving no timetables, no commitments, no requirements, just vague "benchmarks" and "goals" that could be waived at the whim of Bush's bloodlust, had been there for some time, right there alongside the evidence that for Bush it was as much a matter of ego and "manhood" as policy.

Still, I kept some faith, kept up some hope, took some comfort in some of the moves and events, such as Rahm Emanuel's memo urging colleagues to not back down, Harry Reid's reference to the war as "lost," and the House's response to Bush's initial veto of passing a supplemental that only covered two months. But now that it's finally happened, now that the betrayal, the collapse, the craven captulation, is finally here, I just don't have the energy - I just don't feel the surprise - that generates outrage.

But disgust - of that feeling I have more than an ample supply. Disgust driven not only by the facts that both Rahm "Don't Back Down" Emanuel and Harry "The War is Lost" Reid backed down and supported spending another $100 billion and an unknown number of lives in pursuit of more loss, not only by the unconditional surrender of principle, but by the stomach-turning whining of the Dummycrat leadership that they had "no alternative" but to bow down and kiss the boot. For example, on May 24, the New York Times said that

Democrats said they did not relish the prospect of leaving Washington for a Memorial Day break - the second recess since the financing fight began - and leaving themselves vulnerable to White House attacks that they were again on vacation while the troops were wanting. That criticism seemed more politically threatening to them than the anger Democrats knew they would draw from the left by bowing to Mr. Bush.

Well, Dums, since you're shaking in your boots at the idea of being called nasty names by people to who the public is no longer listening while figuring you can ignore not only that antiwar majority but the people who goddam elected you toad-faced buffoons, here's an idea: Don't take the flipping recess! Say "We are not going to bullied into surrendering the desires and interests of the people to who we are responsible and we are especially not going to be lectured on 'responsibility' by a president who ignored warnings of 9/11, mislead the public about intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, declared "mission accomplished," and has taken more vacation time than any other president in our history. We are going to stay here and we are going to support the call of the people of the United States to get us out of Iraq." And have some leading Democrat with something to say along those lines out there every single damned day.

But no, you couldn't do that. I wonder if you even thought of it.

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe was quoting Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean as telling a fundraiser that the bill was actually a great achievement, even an outright win!

"We accomplished in five months what the Republicans refused to do or even try. We are holding President Bush and the Iraqi government accountable," said Dean. "He said he would never sign a bill with any accountability, and he will now have to do that."

Oh, it gets even better. Molly Ivins would have had a ball with this kind of material. Democrats were actually claiming that the bill really involves a timetable! Really! We swear! Harry Reid told MSNBC that

[w]e now have the timeline that the Republicans have set, and that’s this September. And that’s the very least, and then as I’ve indicated – the Defense authorization – we’re going to start right where we’ve left off with this bill, continuing our push to change direction in the War on Iraq.

So even though the bill calls only for pro forma reports on "requirements" that Bush can waive at will and the timetable was stripped out completely, still this is a clear case of both accountability and timetables!

And what's more, we're going to "continue our push!" The phrase "ratchet up the pressure" has probably seen more use in the last few weeks than in the previous 10 years. Because this is only the beginning! Or, in other words, "I promise, honey, next time it really will be different!"

But that brings us right back to the whining about not having any choice, a mewling whimpering whose self-pitying tears were based on the pout "we couldn't override a veto." Or, as the pundits like to put it, "they didn't have the votes." That is, the lack of a historically-rare veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress leaves the Dummycrat leadership impotent and helpless in the face of the childish petulance of an emotionally stunted president. "We had no alternative," they sob.

But of course there were alternatives. An alternative, for one, of not passing a bill. Of saying "That's is, no more, the end, finis. Use what's left from what's already been appropriated, use the contingency funds the Pentagon has, use them to withdraw the troops safely. There's more than enough available for that and you know it." Or an alternative of passing the same (or a similar) bill as before, complete with definitive timetables and benchmarks with actual teeth and telling the White House "We are not your piggy bank to be drawn on whenever you feel like it and we are under no damn obligation to do whatever you want. Here's your money. If you want it, you take it with the conditions. Or you leave it. That's the deal."

But no, that was apparently impossible because that would require, well, something vaguely akin to a backbone and those are rare in the hallowed halls of Congress. Instead, we got another chorus of "just wait until next time!"

"Next time," in this case and according to Reid, being the Defense Authorization Bill. Well, uh, excuse me, but this "don't have the votes" business is going to change exactly how between now and then? Assuming Congress does pass that bill with some provision that leads Shrub to pitch a hissy fit and veto it, are you telling us, Mr. Reid, that the unable-to-override-a-veto Congress will shrug and say "in that case, no bill?" Or will we instead get another tale of how gee whiz helpless you are and how your duty is not to the American people but to "pass[ing] something the president will sign," that is, to following not the will of the public but the whims of the president and so the provision gets dumped? Why should we believe it will be any different then than it was now?

Indeed, why should we believe it will be any different in September? In his prepared remarks before the vote, John Kerry said it well:

So the bottom line is that come September, we are probably going to be in the same position we are now, watching our kids get killed for a strategy that isn't producing real results in the only category that really matters: political progress. And what are we going to hear from this Administration? More of the same backward logic: the price of failure is so high that we must continue to pursue a strategy that is failing.

Glenn Greenwald puts it more sharply and in the wider context of the political non-debate among the self-proclaimed "serious" pundits:

[A]ll that is going to happen In September is that we are going to await with bated breath for General David Petraeus - he of infallible wisdom, judgment and honesty, and unquestionable objectivity - to descend upon Washington and reveal whether there is Real Progress being made (by him) in Iraq. ...

And, needless to say, General Petraeus will, cautiously though emphatically, declare that progress is being made, though there is much work that remains to be done. And therefore we must redouble our resolve and stay until The Job is Done. ...

[And so] it would be irresponsible and reckless (and terribly unserious) not to continue with our Great Progress, that we should leave such judgments to the Generals on the Ground, not Politicians in Washington. ...

And in September, when the great (though incomplete) progress is unveiled by General Petraeus, our pundit class will continue their canonization of The General, and thus, that there is Progress in Iraq will be the conventional wisdom which all serious and responsible people recognize....

Why are we supposed to think that argument, that received wisdom, that self-satisfied pomposity, combined with renewed cries of anyone daring to suggest otherwise is "anti-troop," will have any less sway in September than it had this time?

In fact, we shouldn't. We should rather assume that on its own Congress will take no steps to enforce a withdrawal, no steps for "benchmarks" with actual penalties attached, no steps for "goals" that can't be ignored or dismissed or simply, if that proves more convenient, lied about.

In sum, we are where we have been all along. I have said it and I say it again: What will stop this war is

tens of thousands of pissed-off Americans in the streets, over and over again, in the streets of DC, of New York, of Indianapolis, of Albuquerque, of Minot and Montpelier, Walla Walla and Wheeling, screaming "Out NOW!" Screaming it until the walls of Congress rock. Screaming it until Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have headaches. Screaming it until a withdrawal in 90 days or 120 days is the safe, "compromise" position.

Short of that, the best we can hope for - the best we can hope for - is a war like Afghanistan has become: one that grinds slowly on, month after month, year after year, and death after death. Until, finally, it can said of us, if it cannot already, that "they have made a wasteland and call it peace."

This does not mean abandoning legislative efforts. It does not mean abandoning lobbying. It does not mean you shouldn't "call your representative." It does mean we can't count on Congress to do anything that we don't force it to do, that nothing will truly change until the price of ignoring us - and in this case I mean that majority us, the "get us the hell out" majority us - is greater than the irrational, trembling fear of what omigod some White House aide might mutter to Matt Drudge. That is, Congress will act and act firmly only when it becomes clear that there is a genuine price to pay for doing otherwise, whether that price is a direct threat to their comfy positions or serious social disruption à la the notorious, demonized, but actually quite admirable '60s.

In short, do something! Then, and only then, Congress will follow along.