Letters to the Editor
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Gee, Sidney
Thanks for the uplifting note to end the day with.
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reporting the news
"...where did Musharraf get his warped idea of Lincoln as dictator and America as an example of tyranny? Not quite from diligent study of American history."
and where did salon get the idea that a "composite photo" is a substitute for reporting and illustrating the news?
http://images.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/11/08/musharraf_bush/story.jpg
this is cheesy journalism, using a form of mockery to illustrate a very serious story.
salon's editors have good journalistic backgrounds -- this kind of display is a real lapse in judgment, i think.
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Well put, Sid
There is really not much more that can or should be said about this. GWB is a failure on a proportion that we cannot yet imagine, but are beginning to find out.
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Lessons from Britain
Time to start brushing up on the Suez Crisis or various other examples as the juddering British Empire finally disintegrated in the postwar years.
The next couple decades will be very interesting.
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Thank You for Another Brilliant Article
The breadth of damage done by this fool will profoundly impact the life of every American. The payback is just beginning. I do not think we will come out as well as Great Britain did in its decline.
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Politically motivated charges
Great piece, as ever, Mr. Blumenthal. One thing...
Indeed, under Bush, the administration has equated international law, the system of justice, and lawyers with terrorism.
In fairness to Bush, it was Bill Clinton who first stymied the drive for the international war crimes court (or at least for American participation in it -- check out NYT 15 July 1998, "U.S. Presses Allies to Rein in Proposed War Crimes Court" for an example), which set the stage for our current pariah status.
Clinton dropped the ball by seeking to exempt the US from the court's jurisdiction, for the oft-heralded fear of "politically motivated charges" being levied against American troops. Bush just picked up the ball Clinton left on the field and chucked it into the stands.
The Clinton Administration would be willing to sign a treaty, but only if it was tightly tailored to protect American soldiers from any risk of prosecution.
(from the NYT piece). By setting that exemption precedent, the US set the stage for itself operating outside international law, something Bush/Cheney were all too happy to embrace.
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Same old same old
Some shadowy arm of foreign policy is probably backing Bhutto, and some are backing Musharraf, but who is who remains the real question. Islamabad is a long way from Baghdad. Right now some secretive plan probably exists to bring out the nuclear weapons. Bhutto may be the bag man, or woman.
We were going to bomb them back to the Stone Age, if they didn't sign on to our ideas on the war on terror. No reason to believe the NeoCons will quit now. As usual the liberal press raises the banner of hope, the Democratic leadership will probably drop the ball. Has anyone noticed Nancy on Nancy? Pelosi on Nord, Consumer Product Safety Commission? We can't even impeach her. Sad sad sad. I love to read this stuff Sidney, especially with no Daily Show, but nothing is going to happen until 2008 and maybe not even then.
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Wish it were true..
In the eyes of the American people (on both sides), it is only G.W. Bush who has been discredited, not the neocon agenda.
These policies are still valid, its just that Bush didn't implement them properly. It is up to a real neocon, like Rudy, to do things right.
Has the neoconservative movement been discredited? I wish.
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Salon, please fix this article
From the second-to-last paragraph:
According to a lawyers and shut down the courts, while halting offensive military action against terrorists.
???
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Hollow men
"Habeas lawyers" as an epitaph or even a joke is chilling. The path to there, from Bush Sr.'s recent emotional, moving depiction of Gulf War standards toward a captured enemy ("We're not going to harm you, we're American soldiers."), is deeply disturbing. How so far, so fast?
It's not just the perfect vacuum that Bush Jr. sets at the center of our malaise, it's the anti-sterling quality of those who push their rotten agendas through his unaware, uncaring void.
It's the qualities they are not: Kagan is not the cocksure predator he wants to be; Max Boot is not enlightened; Musharraf is not Nixon, much less Lincoln; Rice is nowhere near Acheson. Only Cheney is who he really is, hiding in plain sight - a complete and utter user, and villain, where the rest are just fools.
"Habeas lawyers." Can we ever recover from that?
Thankyou Mr. Blumenthal for underscoring that particularly nasty truth so well.
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It makes the choice easier for 2008
It seems the only question you have to ask each presidential candidate - loudly, urgently and repeatedly - is "How are YOU going to fix this?"
If he or she has to ask what "this" is...the death of the Republic itself...well, then, you'll know they're the wrong one.
Because everything else pales by comparison.
I feel like bawling my eyes out.
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A sense of total despondency
Much as it is clear that this self-serving bunch of yahoos and economic vandals be thrown out of the White House - that eloquent nincompoopery of some rightwing columnists be recognised for what it is, idiocy chamoflaged by a layer of faux erudition -- that genuine professionalism again prevail over the self arrogated expert status of the neocons, how much can this change really achieve.
On every level the Republican Party, all of it, not just George Bush and Cheney, has left the US so deeply mired in the shit that it could take decades to repair the damage. The mess is really quite profound, so many things are FUBAR (which I will revise to F*cked Up Beyond All Repair/Reversal.) At this point it really is desperately hard to see how even the best President the US could elect, the best Congress could fix this mess. Genuinely, it is hard to see what of the disasters the Republicans have so gleefully wrought can even be remotely undone. I mean consider even a few of the issues:
Iraq –
Stay or go, it is going to be a disaster. Stay and watch the body-bags come home, leave and there will be a bloodbath, which will end up with the Turks in Northern Iraq, and most of the rest under Iranian hegemony.
Afghanistan –
The Taliban are back, reconstruction has made little progress, and Pakistan is falling apart next door.
Pakistan –
The US is now totally between a rock and a hard place – Musharref cannot be supported in his coup, but if he goes there is a genuine risk of civil war and radicalisation. The mess in Afghanistan and Iraq are key contributing factors to the situation in Pakistan. What choices does the US have now – no good ones.
Israel/Palestine
Israelis are poised to swing rightward, perhaps re-electing Netenyahu, demonstrating that the phrase “when in a hole stop digging” is not known or understood in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Meanwhile US and Israeli recklessness have left them bereft of an interlocutor on the Palestinian side who has any credibility with his own people – they have made negotiating for a Palestinian a steady stream of demands to sellout for illusory consideration, or even the mere offer that Israel might consider doing what it is morally obliged to do (or stop doing what is morally wrong.) Put simply, the Palestinian view is “what’s the point of negotiating . . . all that happens is we get f*cked with the US’s blessing.” No interlocutor means no peace.
Lebanon
Oh god – where do you start. In encouraging the Israeli invasion, re-supplying the bombing for weeks, admonishing Blair and the Brits to shut up, in the tortured statements of Condeleeza Rice (Cheney’s sockpuppet in this instance) designed to stay on the fence until Israel wrecked Lebanon, what was achieved was to reverse a situation where the Syrian hegenomy in Lebanon was being steadily rolled back to one where Lebanon is close to being a Hezbollah/Syria/Iran suzerainity. Heck of a job Condi! How does none fix that . . . who the hell knows!
Iran
What can the US do. Sanction against a major oil producer when oil is heading for $100 a barrel. Bush blew the opportunity to negotiate in 2003/4 when the US looked strong, now impotence seems borne out by the evidence.
US Influence
Despite Sarkozy’s visit, for foreign leaders being a friend of GWB is like announcing you have a social disease in a singles bar. More important is the objective data from say the Pew Global Attitudes Project http://people-press.org/ which shows how negatively the US is viewed around the world. Being unpopular equals losing influence, and the Bush administration and the Republicans tossed the US’ worldwide reputation in the toilet and spent 7 years flushing repeatedly; what buoyancy it may have displayed is pretty overwhelmed by now.
Fiscal
By 2006, while the Neocons mocked and jeered at the French and Germans, they ignored an interesting and salient detail, that the US public debt, at 64.7% of GDP was EQUAL to that of France and Germany. Anyone looked at the dollar lately, it is over 40% down against the Euro, the currency of “Old Europe.” The US is close to where the UK was in the loan negotiations of 1946 – when the US terms basically ended Sterlings status as the world reserve currency, replacing it with the dollar, a currency even supermodels are not dim enough to take in their contracts. More realistically, any new President and administration is going to have to get the US’ fiscal situation under control, there will have to be tax cuts and spending cuts. The proportion of US debt that is external has also soared, from somewhere around the 20-30% range in 2000 to 60-70% today – China, Japan and the oil exporting countries own the US now.
What can be done – how can someone fix this mess?