The Death Penalty and the True Measure of George Bush's Character
Unmerciful Judge, Merry Executioners
By LESLEY BRILL
Weekend Edition October 16 / 17, 2004
As the 2004 election looms, the incumbent President's detractors and defenders have returned their attention to Mr. Bush's equivocal stint in the Texas Air National Guard during the early 1970s. As has been repeatedly pointed out, his service record-or non-record-in a capacity that allowed him to avoid combat in the Viet Nam conflict was remarkably little investigated during his first run for President. The documentation relevant to that service remains somewhat ambiguous, in part because some of it seems to have been destroyed or concealed while he was in the Texas Governor's Mansion. There is another aspect of the President's past, however, little emphasized during the election of 2000, that is perfectly unambiguous in documentation and at least as revealing of Mr. Bush's character. It may be found in his handling of the numerous death sentence reviews that reached his desk as a part of his governorship.
During George W. Bush's first campaign for the presidency, reporters actually uncovered considerable information about executions in Texas and about Governor Bush's performance as the final reviewer of those sentences. What they learned was often ghastly: incompetent public defenders, oblivious judges, mentally retarded defendants, patently unreliable testimony, prosecutorial perjury, and so forth. Reporters' discoveries about Bush's role were also unsettling, and fell broadly into two categories: obvious lies about the system and his oversight of it; and his evident indifference to justice and human life. Although Governor Bush claimed to have spent significant time and energy on the appeals that came to his desk, and although he repeatedly assured voters that he could vouch for the care and accuracy of the judicial system that condemns the convicted to death in Texas, investigations showed only too clearly that he could not have given much thought to the condemned persons whose cases came before him; nor could he have plausibly claimed that death sentencing in Texas was remotely equitable, let alone carefully and dependably administered.
The national electorate-and, with the exception of a few enterprising reporters, most of the media-took little interest in these matters. The Democratic candidate, Vice-President Gore, favored capital punishment and thus was in no very good position to make an issue of Bush's and Texas's record of state killing; a majority of U.S. voters at that time favored capital punishment; Bush's role appeared to be essentially bureaucratic-that is to say, mechanical, mindless, automatic. And so we wound up with ("elected" has never seemed the right word) a President and an Administration whose penchant for shedding blood has led the U.S. down paths that are bellicose and costly, dismissive of other nations, and manifestly dangerous to our own.
What might we have learned had we taken more notice of George W. Bush's supervision of his state's executions? Could we have predicted the character of the future President and the kind of actions influential members of his administration would promote (despite their self-description as practitioners of "compassionate conservatism")? To help answer these questions, let us turn to a thinker few Americans have ever read (although he won the Novel Prize for Literature in 1981), Elias Canetti.
When Canetti published his great meditation on human nature, Masse und Macht (1960, trans. Crowds and Power 1962), he identified as humankind's most dangerous inheritance, "its curse and perhaps its destruction," a kind of leader that he called "der Überlebende." Usually translated as "Survivor," but perhaps more accurately rendered as "Outliver," die Überlebenden wish not just to survive, but also to outlive all those around them. Consciously or not, they wish, Canetti wrote, "to survive alone."
To achieve this outliving, die Überlebenden embrace power. Their particular conception of power pivots on a fulcrum of paranoia. The world of the Outliver teems with enemies, often disguised, who must be exposed, judged, and crushed. Ultimately, Canetti argues, even allies of Outlivers will be classified as enemies, because they will have been subjected to and resent the Outliver's commands. "Beneath every command, the death sentence and its pitiless horror show through" (358). Those who have obeyed rulers' commands, then, have suffered the threat of a death sentence and the rulers must assume that the commanded will seize any opportunity to retaliate against that threat. As the orders that rulers have given accumulate, so too does what Canetti calls "the anxiety of command." In particular, "whoever gets hold of such a system [of command] through too brief a service or to whom it has otherwise been given, is by the very nature of his position burdened with the anxiety of command and must seek to free himself of it. [One recalls how little time George W. Bush has spent in lower echelon jobs.] The means of his release, which he seizes with some hesitation but which he can nonetheless not do without, is to issue a sudden command for mass death" (558-9).
Since assuming power through a disputed and bizarrely concluded election, the second Bush Administration has consistently made choices and exhibited behavior characteristic of Canetti's Outlivers-of Outlivers, moreover, heavily laden with the anxiety of command. It has preferred modalities of power to judicial or legislative processes, and has reflexively acted out a mania for secrecy. Mistrustful of other nations, it has withdrawn from, defied, and refused to participate in numerous international treaties. With the curious exception of North Korea, it has preferred bilateral to multilateral diplomacy, and it has cooperated with multi-national organizations like NATO and the UN only as long as those groups endorse conclusions it has already reached. It has unhesitatingly put at risk hundreds of thousands of U.S. military personnel and has hardly seemed to notice the thousands of foreign nationals it has killed, wounded, and imprisoned.
Individually, these actions have various explanations: a pronounced bias toward supporting the interests of large corporations-from which many in the Administration come and to which it is indebted for massive financial support; a desire to assert more U.S. control over the huge oil reserves of the Middle East (now all but openly treated as a recalcitrant American protectorate); distrust of science, especially when it brings commercial or industrial practices into question; the imperial ideology of "The American Century"; and so forth. Such individual tactical and strategic inclinations, however, do not fully explain the consistency and coherence of the pattern of decisions and actions taken by the current Administration. To account for that pattern we need to look more deeply and to consider what we might call the personality of the G. W. Bush Administration.
Concealment, the desire to "go it alone," and a predisposition to regard difference or dissent as enmity have, from January 2000, characterized this Administration. Since 9/11/2001, numerous arrests and detentions without charges or legal recourse have been executed in the name of the war on terrorism. These actions reflect both the raw exercise of force and the paranoid supposition that others wear the masks and pursue the conspiracies that power knows intimately from its own practices. Consonant with this mind-set is the desire for an enlarged "Patriot Act," in order to uncover the multitude of enemies presumed to be concealed among us. That the U.S. faces serious dangers is indisputable; that the actions of the Bush Administration are effective, safe, or legal responses to that danger is profoundly doubtful.
Prominent in the personality of this Administration is its obsession with the power of governments to kill. Discussing "The Ruler as Outliver," Canetti observed that his "first and decisive feature is his legal power over life and death. It is the seal of his power, which is absolute only as long as his right to impose death remains undisputed" (273). The eagerness of the Bush Administration that the death penalty should be more widely and frequently sought in federal courts reflects the Outliver's craving for absolute power. In pursuit of more death-penalty prosecutions, Attorney General Ashcroft has repeatedly overruled recommendations of his own prosecutors; and the executions already accomplished under Ashcroft's urging are the first of federal death row prisoners in thirty-eight years. Equally suggestive is the Administration's fondness, when speaking of foreign enemies, to promise, "They will be captured, or killed." To make the latter more probable, Administration warriors urge development of tactical nuclear weapons designed to inflict lethal American might upon those who try to escape in mountain caves or buried concrete bunkers. Whether such actions violate international law and assumptions of innocence, or re-escalate a nuclear arms race, does not seem to merit discussion.
The assassination of Uday and Qusay Hussein offered a vivid example of this Administration's passion for killing. The attack on the home in which they were trapped was simply murderous-overwhelming cannon fire and rockets against a few cornered opponents. As Peter Davis noted in The Nation, there was "no waiting them out, no disabling gas lobbed into the house At the end they were impotent, helpless, and the order of the day-which no one here doubts came from Washington-was Exterminate the Brutes." When given a choice between capture and kill, those in charge evidently hardly considered the former.
For the paranoid leader, "every execution for which he is responsible bestows some strength. He obtains the power of the Outliver" (274). Given that no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found in Iraq (as of September, 2004) and that, if they eventually appear, they are unlikely to have posed a substantial threat to the U.S., Canetti's next sentences are especially germane: "His victims may not have actually been lined up against him, but they might have been able to do so. His fear transforms them, at first retrospectively perhaps, into enemies that have struggled against him. He has sentenced them; they have been brought low; he has outlived them" (274). Unself-consciously, Bush gloated in his 2003 State of the Union address, "All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way-they are no longer a problem." The implications of the adjective "suspected" for the imprisonment and killing seem to have escaped him (and applauding legislators). Similarly, the regime of Saddam Hussein, whether it had weapons of mass destruction or not, is "no longer a problem." So we have been told; but ongoing casualties render increasingly questionable the famous "mission accomplished" boast.
Since declaring that the U.S. is engaged in a global war on terrorism, the President has shown fondness for his alternative title, "Commander-in-Chief." Considering that he evaded the hazards of Vietnam by enrolling in (and perhaps deserting) the Texas Air National Guard, his identification of himself with those who actually bomb and shoot is incongruous. Arriving by fighter jet for his triumphal speech on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, "Bush emerged in a green flight suit, carrying his helmet, and shouted to reporters, 'Yes, I flew it!'" As Commander, Bush can order soldiers to kill the enemy or-almost as satisfying-to die in the attempt. Moreover, soldiers, and such enemy combatants as he chooses to designate, may themselves be sentenced to death through military courts, for which the Bush Administration has shown unambivalent enthusiasm.
A sentence of death is easier to achieve in such courts than in civil ones, since they have relaxed rules of evidence and do not require judicial unanimity to win a sentence to kill. Such courts are now threatened for some of the persons caged in Guantanamo. Captive there, incommunicado and without legal representation or advice, their plight must be especially gratifying for the Administration's Outlivers. Beyond reach of the outside world, the prisoners are as if dead. Yet they nonetheless await sentencing, as by God on the Day of Final Judgment. They can be killed-again, so to speak-or restored to life. The power of resurrection, Canetti observed, is the greatest power imaginable. For the Outliver, having that power but refusing to exercise it may well be its ultimate expression.
This brings us back to Governor Bush and his record of reviewing and granting-or, virtually always, not granting-clemency for the 152 condemned persons whose cases came before him in Texas. The score: thumbs up, 1; thumbs down, 151. Long before he entered the White House, George W. Bush exhibited what Chris Matthews of MSNBC observed about him after his ascension-that he has "an almost giddy readiness to kill." That proclivity had not gone unnoticed with respect to Bush's actions and attitudes in the Texas Governor's mansion. Time observed in August, 2000, that "George W. Bush, who has had more executions during his five-year tenure in Austin than any other governor in the nation since capital punishment was reinstated, has made his support for executing mentally retarded inmates clear." According to CNN, Bush was criticized for laughing during a televised debate when asked about a pending execution. Reporting on his interview with Bush for Talk magazine, Tucker Carlson described him mimicking a woman's final plea for her life: " 'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.' " The woman whose plea Bush was mocking was Karla Faye Tucker, a convicted murderer whose conversion to Christianity led her to become a spiritual leader for other death row inmates and on whose behalf many individuals and organizations-including the Pope, Amnesty International, the UN, and the European Parliament-had petitioned Governor Bush to mitigate her sentence to life imprisonment. But, as in 99.3% of the other cases that came before this man, the command to kill prevailed.
As startling as Bush's "smirking" about the plea of a woman whom he had consigned to execution, is the fact that the exchange between Larry King and Tucker that Bush recreated for his interviewer "never took place, at least on television"-which is where Bush claimed to have seen it. Tucker's groveling answer to Larry King's "hard questions" appears to be a creation of Bush's imagination. To the query, "What would you say to Governor Bush?"-if King ever asked it-the Governor invents the reply most satisfying to an all-powerful Überlebende, "Please don't kill me." Uday and Qusay couldn't have said it better.
As slangy adolescents, my friends and I liked to refer to favorite things and people as "killers." "That's a killer car your Dad's got," for example. Now I find myself wondering if the U.S. has a killer President. Have we in the White House "humankind's curse and perhaps its destruction"? Have the extraordinary events of the last presidential election left us with the sort of leader Canetti warned of? Is the President of the United States such a person; and has he surrounded himself with kindred spirits, kindred Überlebenden?
Obviously, one very much hopes not, but the evidence has been distressingly consistent. Because George W. Bush and many of his key officers lean strongly toward the type that Canetti called Outlivers, American citizens and the world must take seriously the threats they pose. As the U.S. electorate confronts the claims and counter-claims of another presidential election, the incessant assertions of the Bush Administration that dire circumstances exist, that "bad guys" abound and will continue to exist indefinitely, must be viewed with vigilant skepticism. For Outlivers find nothing more convenient to justify the exercise of their power than the specter of omnipresent enemies.
Denouncing bombings in Baghdad, the President declared of the perpetrators, "They hate freedom, they love terror." (October 28, 2003) As one whose speeches constantly parade various threats before his countrymen and who urges Congress to pass another, even more intrusive and confining "Patriot Act," Bush's typically simple formulation would seem to apply at least as revealingly to his Administration as to those who carried out the attacks in Iraq.
What can we who unhappily watch the spectacle of our bellicose government and its nominated enemies do about all this? For starters, we must still remember-whether George Bush manages to claim the White House again or not-to cherish the civil liberties that remain to us and to guard against the unstinting promoters of "fear itself," be they foreign or domestic. For die Überlebende must by their very nature truly "hate freedom love terror."
Leslie Brill is a professor and former Chair in the Department of English at Wayne State University. Brill can be reached at: aa4525@wayne.edu
Bush's presidency has been a historic disaster. There's still time to rectify his Iraq blunder -- but first, he has to go.
By Gary Kamiya
Nov. 1, 2004 / "The pure products of America go crazy," wrote William Carlos Williams. The words could serve as a motto for the age of Bush. In years to come historians will likely judge the Bush presidency one of the worst in the history of the republic -- an amalgam of arrogance, radicalism and folly so egregious it's almost laughable. Abandoning common sense in foreign affairs, weakening the rule of law, handing the nation's wealth over to the super-rich, and squandering the friendship and sympathy of the world in rigid pursuit of a chimerical dream of a world that cannot threaten us, the Bush presidency has betrayed the nation's deepest principles, both liberal and conservative.
Alarmed and outraged, half of a bitterly divided nation protested, but it did so alone. Cowed by 9/11 and intimidated by a right-wing media machine that wielded the flag like a spear, Congress and the media, the institutions that should have checked Bush's mad rush to war, abandoned their posts until it was too late. From its dubious beginning to its fear-mongering, vote-suppressing end (one hopes), the Bush era has been a perfect storm in which all the worst aspects of our national temper -- insularity, empty swagger and ignorance -- have come together.
Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the whole sorry chapter has been the collapse of national memory and accountability. One outrage follows the next with dreamlike regularity, lies about aluminum tubes to 9/11 revelations to Ahmed Chalabi to Joseph Wilson to cooked intel to Abu Ghraib to illegal detentions to lost explosives, and nothing ever happens, no one is ever punished, everything is for the best in the best of all possible six-gun-brandishing worlds. In an age of reality-TV war, where nothing is asked of Americans except that they rage and fear on color-coded command, the death of responsibility offers a happy ending to all -- except for those killed in Iraq.
Yes, everything changed after Sept. 11: The country lost its mind. Heretical as it is to say, the terror attacks proved that it is possible to overreact -- more specifically, to react foolishly -- to an attack that left 3,000 dead. Bush launched America upon a rash and pointless war that is likely to go down in history as one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in U.S. history. The war achieved exactly what it was designed to prevent: It has strengthened radical Islam and increased the number of terrorists. The explosives debacle at Al-Qaqaa perfectly encapsulates this bitter irony: We invaded Iraq to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of terrorists, but the invasion put those weapons in their hands. In Greek tragedy, this is a classic punishment for hubris. In "The Twilight Zone," it's a favorite plot twist. The Bush presidency has been a tale out of Aeschylus, adapted by Rod Serling.
When Bush invaded Afghanistan, the world approved. That failed state, run by a brutal theocracy that harbored al-Qaida, was a legitimate state target in the so-called war on terror. But when Bush expanded that "war" to include Iraq, he proved himself to be not a warrior but a crusader -- a zealot who dragged the nation on a weird, obsessive quest that combined political calculation, nationalist fervor and anti-Arab ideology. With tawdry mendacity, that crusade (Bush actually called it that before advisors pointed out that the word could have negative associations in the Middle East) was sold to the American people as a preemptive act of self-defense, as Congress rolled over and the media credulously passed on lies and half-truths from "senior government officials [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/international/middleeast/03tube.html ]." The administration and its mouthpieces in the media shamelessly exploited the fear, patriotism and anger stirred by the 9/11 terror attacks to stifle serious debate about the war, painting opponents as Neville Chamberlains who lacked the backbone to fight "evil."
Launched against a regime that posed no more threat than a host of others around the world, the Iraq war represented a radically lower standard for what constitutes a just war. As Eugenia C. Kiesling, a historian at the U.S. Military Academy, has written, "The Iraq war ... was caused largely by the U.S. demand for unrealistically absolute security. Not since the Romans has any polity justified preventive wars on the grounds that no military threat be permitted to exist." It was a gratuitous war, a strategic aggression whose grandiose goals -- democratizing the Middle East, resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, defeating "terrorism" -- were bizarrely disconnected from reality.
The results of that bungled war have been catastrophic. Yes, we removed a loathsome dictator, a feat worthy of celebration [ http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/04/11/liberation/ ], but the mountain of Iraqi bodies we are piling up in the process is growing so high -- a reliable study [ http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=a5qWDoyceuDI&refer=us ] claims 100,000 civilians have been killed in the war -- and the future of that tortured land so dark, that it is no longer clear whether the invasion will ultimately be morally justifiable. (In the context of a war now justified as a liberation, the administration's refusal to count civilian Iraqi casualties is disgraceful.) Even if Iraq staggers its way through and manages to establish some form of democratic governance, the United States will not be seen as a liberator. Too much Iraqi blood has been shed.
In any case, assessing the morality of this war requires looking beyond the fate of the Iraqis -- a fact overlooked by the liberal hawks, intoxicated by the rare sensation of playing John Wayne in a fight with the bad guys. A nation's first responsibility is to its own citizens. The price for saving Iraq -- if in fact we end up saving it and not destroying it -- has been to greatly strengthen [ http://www.shalomctr.org/index.cfm/action/read/section/IsPal/article/article693.html ] radical Islam around the world, end the lives of more than a thousand Americans, and make America, and the rest of the world, less safe. That is not a price worth paying.
And what of Bush's Utopian dream of transforming the Middle East? Making war, it turns out, is a highly problematic way of bringing heaven to earth.
The Iraq blunder has endangered America not just because we have exponentially multiplied the number of Muslims and Arabs willing to take up the sword of jihad against us -- and given them a convenient failed state to work with -- but also because we have weakened our standing in the world. By declaring ourselves exempt from irritating encumbrances like the United Nations and the Geneva Convention, Bush has essentially embraced the law of the jungle. Might makes right: If the U.S. government says someone is an "enemy combatant," whether or not there is any evidence to support that claim, then he is one, and he has no rights. If the secretary of defense and the administration's top legal advisors decide it's acceptable to use torture to break "terrorists," we will. (If they turn out not to be terrorists, but common criminals or innocent civilians, too bad for them.) The widespread torture of Iraqi prisoners and the suspension of due process at Guantánamo are dual blots on our national honor that may take generations to remove.
Of all the shameful episodes that have marked the "war on terror," one of the worst -- and least protested -- has been the administration's tacit admission that they had no case, and never had a case, against most of the Guantánamo detainees. Once the Supreme Court ruled against the administration's claim that it had the right to do whatever it wanted with the detainees, it quietly folded its hand and began preparing to release them. Thus ended the Salem witch trials, not with a bang but a whimper.
From its insistence on cutting taxes for the rich in the middle of a war to its ugly environmental record to its hostility to science to its corruption of the intelligence community to its stealth assault on abortion rights, the Bush presidency has been an unmitigated disaster. But the inescapable subject is Iraq. Bush's decision to invade Iraq was not only the defining event of his presidency, but a hinge in time -- an event so momentous that history arranges itself around it.
The administration justified the war as a necessary strike against Islamic terrorism. Its mantra is "9/11 changed everything": The horrific image of the twin towers falling is the Bush administration's visceral trump card. If Bush regains the White House, it will be because he has succeeded in convincing enough Americans that, as he argued in the debates, the best way to defeat terrorism is to take the fight to "the terrorists," and that he alone, not the vacillating Kerry, has the guts to do that.
In the eyes of Bush and his supporters, the "war on terror" requires simplicity, not complexity; courage, not brains; patriotism, not alliance-building. For them, 9/11/01 was really 9/1/39; the planes hitting the towers were the Nazis invading Poland. You don't think about the meaning of the Panzers, you react to them, hard and ruthlessly, across the board. Anyone who dreams that there is any alternative to a fight to the finish is a woolly-headed idealist. The hatred of the terrorists for us is implacable, metaphysical, as unchangeable as that felt by the Muslims for the Crusaders. Any sign of weakness on our part encourages them in their single-minded pursuit of our destruction. The terrorists hope for a Kerry victory because he's weak. They fear Bush because he will smash them in the mouth and keep smashing until they're all dead.
In the aftermath of 9/11, this view of "the terrorists" (a group never clearly defined) dominated the public discourse. It was aggressively promulgated by the White House and assented to by Congress and the media, both liberal and conservative. To question it was to risk being denounced as an appeaser, even a fifth columnist. The belief that it represented mainstream American thinking was why wavering Democrats signed off on the resolution giving Bush the power to invade. And even now, after Iraq has become a bloody quagmire, this view is held by most Americans who support Bush.
There are powerful reasons for its popularity. It appeals to primordial instincts -- self-preservation, anger, revenge, patriotism. It derives its power from a hypnotic and inescapable image, like a hideous Tarot card that turns up again and again: the apocalyptic vision of the towers collapsing. And there are elements of truth in its assessment of the enemy. There are indeed fanatical Islamists whose hatred of America, although it may have had political origins, has become essentially religious, i.e. absolute. They cannot be reasoned with; they must be fought.
But this analysis is profoundly and dangerously mistaken. It is based on a misreading of the Arab-Muslim world. In its high-minded guise it posits a reified Islam, monolithic in its theocratic piety, reflexively opposed to modernity and democracy. In its vulgar form it is historically ignorant and racist. And it is frequently, though not necessarily, associated with either a deep-seated pro-Israeli bias or a triumphalist belief in America's mission civilisatrice, or both. In the case of the Bush administration, emphatically both.
Above all, it is a view that is driven by emotion, not thought -- in fact, it's positively hostile to thought. It reached its reductio ad absurdum in conservative columnist David Brooks' Saturday column in the New York Times, in which he argued that Bush was a better choice to lead the "War on Terror" than Kerry because Bush really, really hated bin Laden -- hated him so much, Brooks notes approvingly, that he was "consumed" by hatred. Brooks and his ilk would do well to go to more fights. Fighters consumed by hatred, who throw wild haymakers, are inevitably cut down by fighters who know how to box. Brooks and his hate-filled hero could take some lessons from Muhammad Ali.
The very phrase "war on terror" betrays the extremist ideology that has driven the Bush administration. This is not a war against al-Qaida, or against a specific group of terrorists: This is a war against terror. But "terror" is not an enemy; it is a tactic. What Bush is waging war on is not the tactic of terrorism, which as all students of military history know cannot be defeated, but evil itself -- and not just any evil, but Arab-Muslim evil. The "war on terror" is really the "war on Arab-Muslim evil." Bush is too discreet to call it that, but the more fervent of his supporters have no such problem: Neoconservative godfather Richard Perle and former Bush speechwriter David Frum titled their frightening book [ http://www.salon.com/books/review/2004/01/30/frum_perle/ ] (in which, among other modest proposals, they advocate that Israel annex the West Bank and the United States invade Iran and Syria) "An End to Evil."
For the Bush administration, there's no evil like Arab-Muslim evil. It pays lip service to the junior-varsity version found in North Korea, but its heart isn't in it. The Middle East is the bull's-eye of evil. Bush persistently insisted that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were connected even though they had no relationship and loathed each other: They're both evil, and they're both Muslims. Ergo, they're both equal representatives of Muslim evil, and both must be destroyed.
For obvious reasons, this view of the Middle East is profoundly informed by the Bush administration's passionately and unprecedentedly pro-Israel stance, which Bush announced to a baffled National Security Council [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?ex=1099195200&en=3f4aa3f33cffa0e6&ei=... ] at his first meeting. ("Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things," Bush said, explaining why he was going to let Sharon do whatever he wanted.) The Iraq war was not fought "for" Israel, although removing a threat to Israel's existence and weakening the Palestinians were seen as important benefits. But the administration's mind-set simply assumed that America's interests and Israel's are identical -- an obviously false position that became much easier to sell to the American people after 9/11, and that was aided by the taboo against raising any criticism of Israel. Bush and his policymakers saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not as an asymmetrical war driven by issues but as a battle between Israeli good and Palestinian evil. And that moralistic, ahistorical assessment carried over into their views of the Arab and Muslim world, and clearly informed the decision to invade Iraq.
To this day, to raise the inconvenient fact that the Arab and Muslim world have legitimate historical grievances against the U.S. -- even though no grievance, however great, could justify 9/11 -- is to invite charges of appeasement, if not treason. Yet it is precisely a knowledge of history, and a lucid analysis of its consequences, that is called for now. We are dealing not just with one individual and his followers, but with a region and a deeply religious culture that has boiled over, and boiled over in such a horrific way that it is understandable that many Americans have followed Bush in seeing that region and that culture as evil, fanatical, and medieval. Osama bin Laden is surely all those things, and he and his followers must be captured or killed. But the larger Arab world, which shares his grievances, is not merely fanatical or medieval. It has real and just grievances, which we must try to understand and, if possible, ameliorate. The Iraq war has done precisely the opposite.
To be sure, the Arab world desperately needs to clean its own house. The 2003 Arab Human Development Report -- a far more important document than any bin Laden video or disgusting, blasphemous snuff film hawked on the streets of Baghdad -- points out that the region is economically backward, politically unfree, poorly educated, and repressive towards women. With commendable honesty, the 26 Arab scholars who authored the report refuse to blame the West -- the region's favorite whipping-boy -- for these shortcomings. And these factors -- and some perhaps having to do with Islam itself, a religion "programmed for victory," as the scholar Malise Ruthven has noted -- help to explain the virulence of Muslim rage.
But they don't explain all of it. There are real, legitimate issues that have brought Arab and Muslim blood to a boil, and that explain why even pleasant taxi drivers and shopkeepers in Lebanon or Egypt, who denounce 9/11 as appalling and contrary to Islam, still say they understand it. Unfortunately, those issues cannot be honestly or fully raised in America's political dialogue, because they all ultimately circle back to a single subject: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And that subject is a third rail. No major American politician, and few journalists, dare touch it. It is the elephant in the room that everyone has to ignore.
This is not just a bizarre situation, it is a dangerous one. We are locked in a struggle whose stakes are incalculably high -- not because any Arab or Muslim state could ever threaten us militarily, but because if we continue on the course we are now on, which is to essentially make the United States indistinguishable from Israel in Arab and Muslim eyes, we will end up living in their nightmare [ http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/03/26/mideastmisery/print.html ], a fortress nation surrounded by a sea of hatred. Which I'm sure is not a fate that any of my Israeli or Palestinian friends would wish on their worst enemy. This is our situation -- and yet we cannot discuss the single issue that is most critical to resolving it.
Certain aberrations in a nation's behavior can be explained only by ideological conviction. The ideology that inspired Bush's bizarre Iraq adventure, indeed his entire "war on terror," is a specific view of the Arab-Muslim world, one deeply informed by both an unreflective, stark, almost Biblical response to 9/11 and by an extreme pro-Israeli bias. It finds its scholarly expression in the work of Bernard Lewis, employs tactics that mirror those of the hard-line Revisionist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, and was put into practice by a peculiar group consisting of unreconstructed Cold Warriors, cynical political Machiavels, idealistic-unto-blindness liberals, hardcore supporters of Israel's Likud Party and born-again Christians. Although few Middle East experts or academics subscribe to it, its bumper-sticker simplicity has made it easy to sell to an angry and uninformed public.
This view can be summarized thus: The Islamic world is enraged at America and the West not because of American foreign policy, namely, our complicity with Israel in its 37-year occupation of Palestinian land and our oil-driven coziness with various Arab despots (whose number once included none other than Saddam Hussein), but because of what Bernard Lewis called "a feeling of humiliation -- a growing awareness, among the heirs of an old, proud, and long dominant civilization, of having been overtaken, overborne, and overwhelmed by those whom they regarded as their inferiors." Muslims hate America because our very existence is a constant reminder to them that they have failed. Unable to deal constructively with their shortcomings, in large part because Islam has been historically antithetical to secular pursuits like science, the Muslim world turns on the West and seeks to lay it low. Nietzschean ressentiment smashed the airplanes into the twin towers.
What should America do, faced with an enemy whose only "grievance" is our very existence? (Or, to cite Bush's dumbed-down, flag-waving version: "They hate our freedom.") Here Lewis' views dovetail with those of Vladimir Jabotinsky, pre-state leader of Revisionist Zionism and the intellectual father of Israel's Likud Party. Jabotinsky believed that the only way to deal with the Arabs -- whose nationalism he in fact respected -- was with force. Jabotinsky famously advocated building an "Iron Wall" between Jews and Arabs. In similar fashion, Lewis argued that radical Muslims had come to regard the United States as a paper tiger and that only brute force would get their attention.
(Hesitant pro-war liberal Thomas L. Friedman, probably the most widely read American commentator on the Middle East in the world, made the same argument before the war, although he added that it was essential that the United States also nurture Arab moderates and broker a fair Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Friedman is bitterly disillusioned with the Bush administration, which does not explain why he ever had any illusions about it in the first place, or why he was willing to roll the dice on a war that stood a high chance of catastrophic failure even if America had done everything right.)
Not surprisingly, Lewis urged the United States to invade Iraq, where he said U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. Also not surprisingly, Lewis' views were extraordinarily influential with the Bush administration, which invited him to speak at the White House. The Wall Street Journal wrote that "the Lewis doctrine, in effect, had become U.S. policy." As one of the world's eminent scholars of Islam, he provided opinions that gave intellectual respectability to the Bush administration neoconservatives and Cold Warriors who pushed the Iraq war.
Like most grand theories, Lewis' contains considerable truth. Arab-Muslim backwardness, coupled with religious fervor, can indeed lead to a sense of murderous humiliation. Religion plays a far larger role in civic life in Muslim countries than it does in the West (ironically, Bush is doing his best to reverse that trend), and under the right set of circumstances, passions that might have been channeled into secular pursuits can only find outlets in holy rage. The burning anger of Sayyid Qutb, the father of modern Islamism, derived from his pious horror at what he perceived as the decadence of 20th century America. (In addition to being outraged by America's loose sexual mores and spiritual vacuity, he was also troubled by the attention that the residents of Greeley, Colo., paid to their lawns.) It was not just the Israeli-Palestinian crisis (and, he now says, the Israeli bombing of Beirut) but the presence of infidel American forces on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, home of the Prophet, that pushed Osama bin Laden to order the 9/11 attacks. To deny that there is an element of the "clash of civilizations" -- the term was originally coined by Lewis, not Samuel Huntington -- in the confrontation between Islamists and America would be myopic.
But Lewis' view is fatally flawed, because it radically underestimates the importance of history. His Islam is a medieval world preserved in amber, outside of time. In the dialectic between nature and nurture, it's all nature, no nurture. Religion and "civilization" are absolute; the West's long and sordid history of colonizing and exploiting the Middle East, and its responsibility for open wounds like the Palestinian tragedy, are downplayed. His optimism about the aftermath of the invasion was a logical consequence of these views.
Lewis' message was what the Bush administration wanted to hear. And just as it has ignored critical voices on any of its policies -- Bush and Karl Rove decided early on that a pose of Papal Infallibility worked best -- it ignored the numerous dissenting voices that warned of trouble ahead.
One of the most eloquent of those voices was that of Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American scholar who wrote a valuable book titled "Resurrecting Empire" around the time of the invasion. Khalidi points out that the caricature of Islam as antithetical to democracy betrays historical ignorance of the many pioneering Middle Eastern experiments with democracy -- which, he adds, were persistently undermined by Western powers.
He also reminds Americans that people in the Middle East have a long memory. The British rulers (who, like the Americans, claimed they just wanted to "liberate" the Iraqis) were able to put down an Iraqi revolt in the 1920s only by an intense aerial bombing of civilians. Iraqis have not forgotten this. Khalidi also pointed out the obvious fact that nationalism, a word banished from discussions of post-invasion Iraq because it didn't fit the uplifting "liberation" paradigm, would be inspired by an invasion. In short, Khalidi's argument is that it was historically naive for the United States, even assuming its intentions were pure, to discount the region's painful, historically recent experience of Western "liberators" in judging how it would be greeted.
Some of the most influential pro-war voices also sounded alarms. Thomas Friedman, to his credit, warned U.S. policymakers that if they wanted to win the war, not just the battle, they would not only have to pour massive resources into rebuilding Iraq, they would also have to take an active, good-faith role in resolving the Palestine-Israel crisis. Kenneth Pollack, whose "Threatening Storm [ http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2002/10/07/bushwar/ ]" was the least ideological and most convincing book advocating war (he has since apologized, saying -- not completely convincingly -- that he based his call to arms on "faulty intelligence"), hedged his pro-war arguments by warning that the postwar period would be more difficult than the war and that a massive U.S. troop presence would be needed for success.
But the Bush administration ignored all of those warnings. Drunk on ideology, it saw an opportunity to run the table -- rearrange the Middle East to Israel's advantage, remove a dangerous regional despot who they imagined threatened America, put the fear of God into the Saudis, Iranians and Syrians, open the spigots to Iraqi oil on favorable terms, create new American military bases in the Middle East, and in the mystical ways discussed above somehow scare terrorists into submission -- all while assuring Bush's reelection by picking up evangelical and Jewish votes and turning him into a war president, George of Baghdad. And so it launched the most momentous war in half a century based on bogus intelligence provided by a wily con man, with grossly inadequate troop levels, no postwar planning, and only one significant ally. We know the results.
If it was the Bush administration's secret desire to turn America into Israel in the eyes of the Arab and Muslim world, it has gone a long way to succeeding. A devastating recent poll [ http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2004/3/AD2A6E1C-FCB0-4680-ACC5-0C17BDD0841C.html ] shows a precipitous decline in America's popularity in the Arab world: Even in moderate countries like Jordan and Morocco, Osama bin Laden is more popular than Bush, and majorities in both countries said suicide bombing against U.S. troops in Iraq was justifiable. The aerial bombardment of Fallujah last spring was not seen by the Arab world as a liberating blow against terrorists but as the American equivalent of Israeli strikes against Palestinian cities. The new U.S. use of targeted assassinations, a tactic employed by the Israelis but one we had always rejected before, has only strengthened the association.
Not surprisingly, jihad is on the rise. European Muslims are now making their way to Iraq to fight. And things seem likely to get worse. This is the Bush legacy, whether he wins or loses on Election Day.
The terrorists who hit America on Sept. 11 were filled with religious clarity. And in another perverse historical irony, they passed that clarity on to Bush. A floundering president suddenly found his mission, handed down by God. I am not, of course, equating the actions of Mohamed Atta with those of Bush. But there are reasons to be as suspicious of the president's divine clarity as of the hijacker's. By launching his own crusade against bin Laden's, Bush allowed the fight to take place on the terrorist's terms. It was not a wise idea.
If John Kerry is elected president, he will have to clean up a disastrous mess. The first question, of course, is what to do about Iraq. The likelihood that free, fair and general elections will take place as planned next year grows fainter by the day, which raises the question: At what point should the United States decide that its mere presence in the country is harming the Iraqi people and their future more than its absence? There is no way to answer that question. But it must be asked.
The second issue is the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, which Bush has simply handed over to Ariel Sharon and his extremist counterparts on the Palestinian side. America's eyes are understandably fixed on Iraq, but what happens in Ramallah and Jerusalem is just as important to America's security as what happens in Ramadi. Indeed, the Iraq debacle, and the attendant rise in anti-American rage, has only made resolving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis more urgent. Sharon's Gaza disengagement plan could hold promise, but only if he is prevented from trading Gaza for the West Bank, effectively locking the Palestinians up in Bantustans -- a policy that his top aide recently acknowledged, indeed bragged about. The precarious state of Yasser Arafat's health also demands that America immediately act: Post-Arafat, the Palestinian leadership could degenerate into even worse anarchy than now threatens it. Without a real political plan, the two-state solution, already endangered, would become impossible. And that outcome would be disastrous for Israel, for the Palestinians, and for America.
It is still possible to rectify Bush's mistakes. It is not too late to restore America's standing in the world in general, and the Arab world in particular. But time is running out. And first of all, he must be removed from an office he has proven manifestly incompetent to hold. It is hard to believe, at this point, that even those who subscribe to Bush's ideology could possibly vote for him.
A pious, foolish and poorly educated man, surrounded by zealots and knaves, dreamed of smiting the evildoers, but instead put a sword into their hands. He imagined that by invading a state in the heart of the Arab world, he would cut through the Gordian knot, but he entangled his army in writhing coils. He fantasized that an all-powerful America would stand atop a grateful world, but he made his nation despised everywhere, and particularly in the one region of the world where it is most important that we not be despised. This is the world Bush left us. We must make a new one.
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About the writer Gary Kamiya is Salon's executive editor.
Posted by background n015e at 9:11 PM Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Ars Oblivionalis, the Art of Forgetting, is a term coined by Umberto Eco. He claimed it did not exist because active forgetting was impossible.
Despite the presumed impossibility of that feat, this administration and its apologists practice the Art of Forgetting on a daily basis. While they may have convinced themselves they create their own reality, the fact is they do not. Unfortunately, they will continue deluding themselves and those around them into thinking that is true as long as we remain quiet. That is why we have to actively remember, to hold up the mirror of reality and force them to confront the consequences of their madness. Ironically, this is where the dead truly find their voice. Speaking of the dead sets the stage for the first act.
===============
Act I: Today's newspaper.
Pat's Story
A congressional investigation into how the Bush administration handled the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman "was frustrated by a near universal lack of recall" from top White House and Pentagon officials, a House committee's staff report concluded Monday.
You would think folks who championed the poster-boy for Serving Your Country might remember when they learned of his death, the aftermath and the impact. You would think that after several previous investigations, including seven conducted by the military, that showed top officers misled Tillman's family and the public about his death someone might remember how the White House reacted to this. It would be reasonable to expect that somewhere in more than 1,500 pages of e-mails and other documents about Tillman generated by the White House one would find at least one mention of friendly-fire as the cause of death. If you were expecting to find anything there, you can forget about that.
Fortunately, the committee was able to interview several White House officials, including communications chiefs Scott McClellan and Dan Bartlett and speechwriter Michael Gerson. Surprisingly, none could recall when they or Bush learned about the fratricide. When you consider McClellan's recent book, chock full of details, this spectacular display of Ars Oblivionalis is more than notable, it is breathtaking.
The issue of who knew what and when did they know it matters because Bush was publicly lauding Tillman's sacrifice while making completely unsubstantiated claims about him, even after Major Gen. Stanley McChrystal told higher-ups in a memo that friendly fire was "highly possible" in Tillman's death, and specifically warned that Bush and others should be careful in any speeches they made about the incident. Like so many other warnings from commanders in the field, this warning was ignored. After all, it would have marred a perfectly choreographed nationally televised memorial service and the message of the day. You can forget about this president allowing that to happen. Speaking of public memorial services for dead soldiers brings us to the next act.
==============================
Act II: Arlington National Cemetery
Gina's Story
Unlike Pat Tillman, Gina Gray was not a Ranger. She was a mere Staff Sargeant in the Army. However, Gina believed in adhering to the seven virtues essential for effective soldiering - loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honour, integrity, and personal courage. Like Pat, Gina believed she was serving the nation by upholding the constitution.
As the public affairs director at Arlington National Cemetery ... she discovered that cemetery officials were attempting to impose new limits on media coverage of funerals of the Iraq war dead -- even after the fallen warriors' families granted permission for the coverage.
Gray attempted to honor the wishes of the families of the dead soldiers and permit media coverage of the funerals. Because she would not allow us to forget, Gray was fired. Of course that was not the official reason she was fired. According to her termination memo, Gray was informed by her supervisor, Phyllis White, that Gray was being fired because she "failed to act in an inappropriate manner." Wow. As the ever-snarky Dana Milbank noted, "Only at Arlington National Cemetery could it be considered a firing offense to act appropriately." Speaking of appropriate behavior brings us to the final act.
==================
Act III: A stage that no longer exists
George's Story
Unlike Pat and Gina, George Carlin never served in the Army. He served in the Air Force. Ever the truth-teller, Carlin was no stranger to controversy. He thought it very appropriate to point out the foibles and lies we hide behind when we want to paint rosy pictures over blighted landscapes. But now he is gone and no longer able to defend himself so you can expect the "angry" George to disappear from memory. He will be replaced with the cartoon of a mildly quirky but affable wordsmith famous for seven words from decades past. The reality is his latter works centered around a different set of words:
The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged.
And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.
Good, honest, hard working people. Blue collar, white collar, doesn't matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard working people continue... these are people of modest means... continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about them. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't care about you. At all. At all. At all.
And nobody seems to notice. And nobody seems to care.
That's what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will remain wilfully ignorant about the big red, white and blue dick that is being shoved up their ass every day. Because the owners know the truth. It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
If that is more reality than you are used to seeing on your TV, don't let it bother you. You can do what everyone else does; change the channel and forget about it.
and generally, as always in addition to (items linked in) the post to which this post is a reply and preceding and (other) following, see also (items linked in):
American savant .. Matt Savage plays "Blues in 33/8" in New York
American conservative presidento! .. from yours ..
.. "I'm the commander-see, I don't need to explain-I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
That is an interesting take on the accountability of the chief executive under the Constitution, to be sure. And the President offered Woodward the following strategic insight, so redolent of neoconservative influence, about Afghanistan:
"Look, our strategy is to create chaos, to create a vacuum."
Finally, Woodward recounted a statement from the President that is hard to reconcile with Compassionate Conservatism:
"We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great nation."
My life on the Republican right—and how I saw it all go wrong.
By Bruce Bartlett • November 26, 2012
I know that it’s unattractive and bad form to say “I told you so” when one’s advice was ignored yet ultimately proved correct. But in the wake of the Republican election debacle, it’s essential that conservatives undertake a clear-eyed assessment of who on their side was right and who was wrong. Those who were wrong should be purged and ignored; those who were right, especially those who inflicted maximum discomfort on movement conservatives in being right, ought to get credit for it and become regular reading for them once again.
I’m not going to beat around the bush and pretend I don’t have a vested interest here. Frankly, I think I’m at ground zero in the saga of Republicans closing their eyes to any facts or evidence that conflict with their dogma. Rather than listen to me, they threw me under a bus. To this day, I don’t think they understand that my motives were to help them avoid the permanent decline that now seems inevitable.
For more than 30 years, I was very comfortable within the conservative wing of the Republican Party. I still recall supporting Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater as a schoolchild. As a student, I was a member of Young Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom at the height of the Vietnam War, when conservatives on college campuses mostly kept their heads down.
In graduate school, I wrote a master’s thesis on how Franklin Roosevelt covered up his responsibility for the Pearl Harbor attack—long a right-wing obsession. My first real job out of graduate school was working for Ron Paul the first time he was elected to Congress in a special election in 1976. (He lost that same year and came back two years later.) In those days, he was the only Tea Party-type Republican in Congress.
After Paul’s defeat, I went to work for Congressman Jack Kemp and helped draft the famous Kemp-Roth tax bill, which Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1981. I made important contributions to the development of supply-side economics and detailed my research in a 1981 book, Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action.
After Reagan’s victory, I chose to stay on Capitol Hill, where I was staff director for the Joint Economic Committee and thought I would have more impact. I left to work for Jude Wanniski’s consulting company in 1984, but missed Washington and came back the following year. Jude was, of course, the founding father of supply-side economics, the man who discovered the economists Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer and made them famous.
I went to work for the Heritage Foundation, but left in 1987 to join the White House staff. I was recruited by Gary Bauer, who was Reagan’s principal domestic policy adviser. Gary remains well known among religious conservatives. Late in the administration I moved over to the Treasury Department, where I remained throughout the George H.W. Bush administration.
Afterwards I worked for the Cato Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank based in Dallas. I wrote regularly for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review, and other conservative publications. For 12 years I wrote a syndicated column that ran in the Washington Times, Investor’s Business Daily, the New York Sun, and other conservative newspapers.
I supported George W. Bush in 2000, and many close friends served in high-level administration positions. I was especially close to the Council of Economic Advisers and often wrote columns based on input and suggestions from its chairmen, all of whom were friends of mine. Once I even briefed Vice President Dick Cheney on the economy.
*
But as the Bush 43 administration progressed, I developed an increasingly uneasy feeling about its direction. Its tax policy was incoherent, and it had an extremely lackadaisical attitude toward spending. In November 2003, I had an intellectual crisis.
All during the summer of that year, an expansion of Medicare to pay for prescription drugs for seniors was under discussion. I thought this was a dreadful idea since Medicare was already broke, but I understood that it was very popular politically. I talked myself into believing that Karl Rove was so smart that he had concocted an extremely clever plan—Bush would endorse the new benefit but do nothing to bring competing House and Senate versions of the legislation together. That way he could get credit for supporting a popular new spending program, but it would never actually be enacted.
I was shocked beyond belief when it turned out that Bush really wanted a massive, budget-busting new entitlement program after all, apparently to buy himself re-election in 2004. He put all the pressure the White House could muster on House Republicans to vote for Medicare Part D and even suppressed internal administration estimates that it would cost far more than Congress believed. After holding the vote open for an unprecedented three hours, with Bush himself awakened in the middle of the night to apply pressure, the House Republican leadership was successful in ramming the legislation through after a few cowardly conservatives switched their votes.
It’s worth remembering that Paul Ryan, among other so-called fiscal hawks, voted for this irresponsible, unfunded expansion of government.
Suddenly, I felt adrift, politically and intellectually. I now saw many things I had long had misgivings about, such as all the Republican pork-barrel projects that Bush refused to veto, in sharper relief. They were no longer exceptions to conservative governance but its core during the Bush 43 years.
I began writing columns that were highly critical of Bush’s policies and those of Republicans in Congress—all based on solid conservative principles. In other words, I was criticizing them from the inside, from the right.
In 2004 I got to know the journalist Ron Suskind, whose book The Price of Loyalty I had praised in a column. He and I shared an interest in trying to figure out what made Bush tick. Neither of us ever figured it out.
A couple of weeks before the 2004 election, Suskind wrote a long article [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html (at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=4311465 )] for the New York Times Magazine that quoted some of my comments to him that were highly critical of Bush and the drift of Republican policy. The article is best remembered for his quote from an anonymous White House official dismissing critics like me for being “the reality-based community.”
The day after the article appeared, my boss called to chew me out, saying that Karl Rove had called him personally to complain about it. I promised to be more circumspect in the future.
Interestingly, a couple of days after the Suskind article appeared, I happened to be at a reception for some right-wing organization that many of my think tank friends were also attending. I assumed I would get a lot of grief for my comments in the Suskind article and was surprised when there was none at all.
Finally, I started asking people about it. Not one person had read it or cared in the slightest what the New York Times had to say about anything. They all viewed it as having as much credibility as Pravda and a similar political philosophy as well. Some were indignant that I would even suspect them of reading a left-wing rag such as the New York Times.
I was flabbergasted. Until that moment I had not realized how closed the right-wing mind had become. Even assuming that my friends’ view of the Times’ philosophy was correct, which it most certainly was not, why would they not want to know what their enemy was thinking? This was my first exposure to what has been called “epistemic closure [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/books/28conserv.html ]” among conservatives—living in their own bubble where nonsensical ideas circulate with no contradiction.
My growing alienation from the right created problems for me and my employer. I was read the riot act and told to lay off Bush because my criticism was threatening contributions from right-wing millionaires in Dallas, many of whom were close personal friends of his. I decided to stick to writing columns on topics where I didn’t have to take issue with Republican policies and to channel my concerns into a book.
I naïvely thought that a conservative critique of Bush when he was unable to run for reelection would be welcomed on the right since it would do no electoral harm. I also thought that once past the election, conservatives would turn on Bush to ensure that the 2008 Republican nomination would go to someone who would not make his mistakes.
As I wrote the book, however, my utter disdain for Bush grew, as I recalled forgotten screw-ups and researched topics that hadn’t crossed my radar screen. I grew to totally despise the man for his stupidity, cockiness, arrogance, ignorance, and general cluelessness. I also lost any respect for conservatives who continued to glorify Bush as the second coming of Ronald Reagan and as a man they would gladly follow to the gates of hell. This was either gross, willful ignorance or total insanity, I thought.
My book, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, was published in February 2006. I had been summarily fired by the think tank I worked for back in October 2005. Although the book was then only in manuscript, my boss falsely claimed that it was already costing the organization contributions. He never detailed, nor has anyone, any factual or analytical error in the book.
Among the interesting reactions to my book is that I was banned from Fox News. My publicist was told that orders had come down from on high that it was to receive no publicity whatsoever, not even attacks. Whoever gave that order was smart; attacks from the right would have sold books. Being ignored was poison for sales.
I later learned that the order to ignore me extended throughout Rupert Murdoch’s empire. For example, I stopped being quoted in the Wall Street Journal.* Awhile back, a reporter who left the Journal confirmed to me that the paper had given her orders not to mention me. Other dissident conservatives, such as David Frum and Andrew Sullivan, have told me that they are banned from Fox as well. More epistemic closure.
Seeing the demographic trends toward an increasingly nonwhite electorate, which were obvious in easily available census projections, I decided to write a book about how Republicans could deal with it. I concluded that the anti-immigrant attitude among the Republican base was too severe for the party to reach out meaningfully to the fast-growing Latino community. Recall that Bush’s proposal for immigration reform was soundly rejected by his own party.
If Republicans had no hope of attracting Latino votes, what other nonwhite group could they attract? Maybe the time had come for them to make a major play for the black vote. I thought that blacks and Latinos were natural political and economic competitors, and I saw in poll data that blacks were receptive to a hardline position on illegal immigration. I also knew that many blacks felt ignored by Democrats, who simply took their votes for granted—as Republicans did for 60 years after the Civil War.
If Republicans could only increase their share of the black vote from 10 percent, which it had been since Goldwater, to the 30 percent level that Dwight Eisenhower enjoyed, it would have major electoral ramifications.
The best way to get Republicans to read a book about reaching out for the black vote, I thought, was to detail the Democratic Party’s long history of maltreatment of blacks. After all, the party was based in the South for 100 years after the war, and all of the ugly racism we associate with that region was enacted and enforced by Democratic politicians. I was surprised that such a book didn’t already exist.
I thought knowing the Democratic Party’s pre-1964 history of racism, which is indisputable, would give Republicans a story to tell when they went before black groups to solicit votes. I thought it would also make Republicans more sympathetic to the problems of the black community, many of which are historical in their origins. Analyses by economists and sociologists show that historical racism still holds back African-Americans even though it has diminished radically since the 1960s.
So I wrote Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. Unfortunately, it was published the day Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses. But I still held out hope that Hillary Clinton, who was pandering to the white working class in unsubtle racial terms, would capture the Democratic nomination. The anger among blacks at having the nomination effectively stolen from Obama would make them highly receptive to GOP outreach, I believed. I even met with John McCain’s staff about this.
As we know, McCain took a sharp right turn after Obama won the Democratic nomination. The Arizona senator abandoned any pretense of being a moderate or “maverick” and spent the campaign pandering to the Republican Party’s lowest common denominator. His decision to put the grossly unqualified Sarah Palin on his ticket was nothing short of irresponsible. Perhaps more importantly, it didn’t work, and Obama won easily.
*
After the failure of my race book, I turned my attention again to economics. I had written an op-ed [ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/opinion/06bartlett.html ] for the New York Times in 2007 suggesting that it was time to retire “supply-side economics” as a school of thought. Having been deeply involved in its development, I felt that everything important the supply-siders had to say had now been fully incorporated into mainstream economics. All that was left was nutty stuff like the Laffer Curve that alienated academic economists who were otherwise sympathetic to the supply-side view. I said the supply-siders should declare victory and go home.
I decided to write a book elaborating my argument. I thought I had a nice thesis to put forward. All successful schools of economic thought follow a progression of being outsiders and revolutionaries, achieving success when economic circumstances cannot be explained by orthodox theory, acceptance for the dissidents, followed by inevitable failure when new circumstances arise that don’t fit the model, leading to the rise of a fresh school of thought. It was basically a Thomas Kuhnian view of economic theory.
I thought I had two perfect examples that fit my model of the rise and fall of economic ideas: Keynesian economics and supply-side economics. I thought at first I knew enough about the former to say what I wanted to say, but eventually I found the research I had previously done to be wanting. It was based too much on what academics thought and not enough on how Keynesian ideas penetrated the policymaking community.
I hit upon the idea of ignoring the academic journals and looking instead at what economists like John Maynard Keynes, Irving Fisher, and others said in newspaper interviews and articles for popular publications. Recently computerized databases made such investigation far easier than it previously had been.
After careful research along these lines, I came to the annoying conclusion that Keynes had been 100 percent right in the 1930s. Previously, I had thought the opposite. But facts were facts and there was no denying my conclusion. It didn’t affect the argument in my book, which was only about the rise and fall of ideas. The fact that Keynesian ideas were correct as well as popular simply made my thesis stronger.
I finished the book just as the economy was collapsing in the fall of 2008. This created another intellectual crisis for me. Having just finished a careful study of the 1930s, it was immediately obvious to me that the economy was suffering from the very same problem, a lack of aggregate demand. We needed Keynesian policies again, which completely ruined my nice rise-and-fall thesis. Keynesian ideas had arisen from the intellectual grave.
The book needed to be rethought and rewritten from scratch in light of new developments. Unfortunately, my publisher insisted on publishing it on schedule. I tried to repair the damage as best I could, but in the end the book was a mishmash of competing ideas with no clear narrative. It sold poorly.
On the plus side, I think I had a very clear understanding of the economic crisis from day one. I even wrote another op-ed [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/opinion/24bartlett.html ] for the New York Times in December 2008 advocating a Keynesian cure that holds up very well in light of history. Annoyingly, however, I found myself joined at the hip to Paul Krugman, whose analysis was identical to my own. I had previously viewed Krugman as an intellectual enemy and attacked him rather colorfully in an old column that he still remembers.
For the record, no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman. The blind hatred for him on the right simply pushed me further away from my old allies and comrades.
The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.
At this point, I lost every last friend I had on the right. Some have been known to pass me in silence at the supermarket or even to cross the street when they see me coming. People who were as close to me as brothers and sisters have disowned me.
I think they believe they are just disciplining me, hoping I will admit error and ask for forgiveness. They clearly don’t know me very well. My attitude is that anyone who puts politics above friendship is not someone I care to have in my life.
*
So here we are, post-election 2012. All the stupidity and closed-mindedness that right-wingers have displayed over the last 10 years has come back to haunt them. It is now widely understood that the nation may be center-left after all, not center-right as conservatives thought. Overwhelming losses by Republicans to all the nation’s nonwhite voters have created a Democratic coalition that will govern the nation for the foreseeable future.
Tellingly, a key reason for Obama’s victory, according to exit polls, is none other than George W. Bush, whom 60 percent of voters primarily blame for the nation’s economic woes—an extraordinary fact when he has been out of office for four years. Even though they didn’t read my Impostor book, voters still absorbed its message.
Although the approach I suggested in my race book was ill-timed, the underlying theory is more true than ever. If Republicans can’t bring blacks into their coalition, they are finished at the presidential level, given the rapid rise of the Latino population. Perhaps after 2016, they may be willing to put my strategy into operation
The economy continues to conform to textbook Keynesianism. We still need more aggregate demand, and the Republican idea that tax cuts for the rich will save us becomes more ridiculous by the day. People will long remember Mitt Romney’s politically tone-deaf attack on half the nation’s population for being losers, leeches, and moochers because he accurately articulated the right-wing worldview.
At least a few conservatives now recognize that Republicans suffer for epistemic closure. They were genuinely shocked at Romney’s loss because they ignored every poll not produced by a right-wing pollster such as Rasmussen or approved by right-wing pundits such as the perpetually wrong Dick Morris. Living in the Fox News cocoon, most Republicans had no clue that they were losing or that their ideas were both stupid and politically unpopular.
I am disinclined to think that Republicans are yet ready for a serious questioning of their philosophy or strategy. They comfort themselves with the fact that they held the House (due to gerrymandering) and think that just improving their get-out-the-vote system and throwing a few bones to the Latino community will fix their problem. There appears to be no recognition that their defects are far, far deeper and will require serious introspection and rethinking of how Republicans can win going forward. The alternative is permanent loss of the White House and probably the Senate as well, which means they can only temporarily block Democratic initiatives and never advance their own.
I’ve paid a heavy price, both personal and financial, for my evolution from comfortably within the Republican Party and conservative movement to a less than comfortable position somewhere on the center-left. Honest to God, I am not a liberal or a Democrat. But these days, they are the only people who will listen to me. When Republicans and conservatives once again start asking my opinion, I will know they are on the road to recovery.
* Gerald Seib, Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, has contacted me to say that it is flatly untrue that Journal reporters are prohibited from quoting me. I take him at his word and do not doubt his sincerity.
Bruce Bartlett is the author of The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform—Why We Need It and What It Will Take.
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