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Echoes of the Pentagon Papers

Monday, July 26, 2010

Atrios suggests, in this tweet, that the ultimate reaction to the documents released by Wikileaks, about which Der Spiegel, The Guardian and the New York Times reported today, may be primarily about the propriety of the leak rather than the contents of the papers and what they say about our involvement in Afghanistan.

That may, in fact, seem to be the case in the short term, but long term these documents can only have a corrosive effect on this already justifiably unpopular war. The Obama administration will make a mistake, win or lose, if it attempts to either stop publication of the papers or prosecute the leakers, if it can find them. That’s the tack that Nixon took with the Pentagon Papers, which might have worked during WW II, but didn’t during the unpopular Vietnam War. They certainly tried to make it a fight about the leak and the publication. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which back then was a court of substance. It’s quite possible that today’s court would back even an effort to quash publication, though the fact that it would be Obama that was asking them to do it might be enough to stay their hand. They would certainly have no problems with criminal sanctions against the leakers, but convictions would be a Pyrrhic victory. The war is asymmetric in the extreme. We are spending ourselves into bankruptcy in pursuit of a victory we can’t even define. The American people can sense that. Obama will find himself on the wrong side of history if he continues to pursue this war. Truly time to declare victory and get out.

I might add that the only thing that might diminish the inevitable repercussions against Obama, for what is now truly his war, is the fact that for many Americans the war is an afterthought, with an acceptable level of casualties, particularly considering that the dying are not the sons and daughters of the middle class, but increasingly the cast-offs of our society, who “volunteer” for service because they have no hope of finding work anywhere else. This is not universally so, but it is increasingly the case.

But even the fact that the war is no direct threat to the average American young person, like it so directly was during Vietnam, will be enough to save it and its defenders from its eventual fate. Besides costing those expendable lives it is costing a lot of money; it is dragging on and it is becoming increasingly clear that it will drag forever unless we manage to disengage ourselves. Americans are rightfully tired of being mired down in un-winnable wars. I am 60 years old, and this country has been bogged down in unwinnable wars for half my life and counting. Obama has promised to disengage, but he’s promised a lot of things. He’ll be doing himself a favor if he keeps this promise, but those are the type of promises he seems to have the hardest time fulfilling.


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A prediction for the fall

Sunday, July 25, 2010

From Political Wire:

President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress “are setting the stage for a high-stakes battle over taxes in the final weeks before the November congressional elections, betting that their plan to eliminate tax breaks for the wealthy will resonate with voters who have lost houses and jobs to what many see as an era of Wall Street greed,” the Washington Post reports.

“Raising taxes is usually a perilous move. But Democrats, facing the potential loss of their majorities on Capitol Hill, believe that the strategy will both force Republicans to defend tax breaks for a tiny, wealthy minority and expose GOP hypocrisy on budget deficits.”

Here is what will happen. The Blue Dog Democrats, among whom are many recruited by Rahm Emanuel, will undermine the narrative in the House, and join a unanimous Republican caucus to extend the tax breaks, assuming Nancy Pelosi doesn’t pull an embarrassing about face and pull it from the floor. But she won’t do that, because the Republicans, without a hint of embarrassment, aided and abetted by the media that has never had a problem with Republican obstruction, will demand an up or down vote, because that’s the democratic way.

After the tax cut passes the House, it must pass the Senate, where, surely, one would think, even if it gets to the floor, there would at least be 41 Democrats with spine enough to filibuster it. But no, the Republicans, without a hint of embarrassment, aided and abetted by the media that has never had a problem with Republican obstruction, will demand an up or down vote, because that’s the democratic way.

The Democrats will cave, and the Republicans will get their tax break for the rich. Perhaps Obama will veto it, but don’t bet on it. Remember, this is the Bush tax cut for the rich, which will expire if Congress does nothing, which is precisely what Congress will not do. The Democrats will allow themselves to be manipulated into making this massive transfer from the middle class to the rich permanent.

All this, of course, will further dampen Democratic turnout (see, 2002, spineless Democrats voting to give Bush his war and consequent low Democratic turnout) turning the election into a blowout, and ushering in perhaps the most radical and irresponsible Congress in the history of the Republic.

The Democrats will learn the lesson that they are always learning: that they are not far enough to the right.

I hope and pray that I’m wrong. Only the Democratic Party could pull this off, but there’s no reason to think that they won’t.


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A mystery explained

Saturday, July 24, 2010

I love the Washington Monthly’s blog (Political Animal). I consider it required reading, and I think Steven Benen does some great reporting. Still, I marvel that a guy who has been following politics so long seems constantly mystified at the fact that neither the press nor politicians behave rationally; that politicians so often say things that are demonstrably untrue and the press so often covers stories with a mixture of ignorance and bias. Here’s the latest example:

I continue to marvel at this scandal. Here we have John Ensign, a “family values” conservative Republican, who had an extra-marital sexual relationship with his friend’s wife, while condemning others’ moral failings. Ensign’s parents offered to pay hush-money. He ignored ethics laws and tried to use his office to arrange lobbying jobs for his mistress’ husband. The likelihood of Ensign being indicted seems fairly high.

And yet, there’s no media frenzy. No reporters staked out in front of Ensign’s home. No op-eds speculating about the need for Ensign to resign in disgrace. Instead, the media’s fascinated with Charlie Rangel.

Rangel is facing a probe from the House ethics committee, while Ensign is under scrutiny from the FBI.

Why would Rangel “tarnish his whole party” in an election year, while Ensign’s sex-ethics-corruption scandal be deemed irrelevant to the Republican Party?

The answer to Benen’s question is really quite simple. Rangel is black. Rangel is a Democrat. Or, we might express it as follows: there is an unwritten, but rigidly observed rule: It’s (especially hypocrisy) okay if you’re a Republican.


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Ned Lamont comes to Groton

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Ned Lamont and Mary Glassman visited Groton today, holding a forum at the Groton Municipal Building.

I must say that I think Ned’s stump speech has improved, and I am more and more sure that he’s the better of the two candidates. I’m particularly disappointed that Malloy appears to have decided to go negative. How refreshing it would have been had both candidates been willing to recognize that it’s more important to get a Democrat in the governor’s office than that it be either one of them in particular.

Here are Ned’s remarks to the assembled multitude. The turnout was good, by the way. The council chambers, where the meeting was held, was full, albeit with the usual SE Connecticut suspects.

It would be refreshing to have a Democratic governor, particularly one who wasn’t afraid to take some chances. I’m not sure that any of our politicians, including Ned, are willing to think as much out of the box as the situation demands. Ned mentioned that electricity is outrageously expensive in this state. Municipal electric companies, and by extension, larger, publicly owned and operated electric companies, typically have lower rates than investor owned electric companies. At the risk of sounding like a (shudder) socialist, it seems to me that the state has a role in providing any service that is both a natural monopoly (or functionally equivalent) or is an absolute necessity. There’s not much distinction between water and electricity in my book, and if the state can provide either or both more efficiently and cheaper, which it can, then it should do so. End of digression.

Getting back to Ned, it was a good meeting. I have to include Ned in that small subset of politicians who are also reasonably nice people. I hope he’s able to stay nice and that the campaign doesn’t turn nasty, at least until after the primary.


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Friday Night Music

Friday, July 23, 2010

Have I already done Linda Ronstadt? I should keep a list. Well, she deserves an encore if I have, since she’s one of the few rock stars who could also actually, really, sing. Here’s a couple of songs from 1977 performances, Desperado and Blue Bayou:

And one more for good measure, since I’m a big Gershwin fan, and by way of proving that she really can sing: Someone to Watch Over Me.

I really do plan, by the way, to get back to serious political blogging at some point. I mentioned last week that I had been laid up with babesiosis, a particularly nasty tick borne disease. Even after the medications got rid of the worse symptoms, I found myself constantly tired. Turns out that the babesiosis rested on a base layer of Lyme Disease, so I am just starting treatment for that. I am somewhat reliably informed that I should feel fairly normal in another couple of days. Meanwhile, for every cloud, as they say. I have lost about 9 pounds since this all started, and I am allowing myself to fantasize that I can keep that weight off once I’m back to normal. Doubt is creeping in, however, since even now, with only slight improvement, I can feel the ice cream cravings coming back. In any event, I am hoping to regain my energy, and with it my outrage, in the next few days so I can start ranting again.


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Its own worst enemy

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

It is endlessly amazing that the Obama folks always seem to manufacture a distraction to keep the public eye off their accomplishments. You won’t be hearing much about Obama signing the Financial System Overhaul Act, because the media is all atwitter about the lightning fast firing of Shirley Sherrod at the command of Andrew Breitbart.

Just as with ACORN, the Administration just couldn’t wait to do this racist’s bidding. Why presume innocence, when you have the word of the master video editor? Unfortunately for the Administration, however, this time Breitbart’s story was disproven too quickly. The good guy was actually vindicated, much to the Administration’s chagrin.

This bodes very poorly for the Administration and the Nation should the Republicans take back Congress. The subpoenas will start flying the first day Congress is in session, and woe to the hapless civil servant to whom they are directed. This Administration will not have their back, nor will it have the guts to stonewall like Bush did.


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The Globe swallows Republican lies whole

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

From Today’s Globe:

Senate Democrats yesterday revived an extension of unemployment benefits for 2.5 million Americans, managing to break through a GOP deadlock rooted in deep disagreements over the economy.

There is not a shred of reliable evidence that the deadlock was “rooted in deep disagreements over the economy”. The deadlock resulted from a purely political decision, made by the Republicans, that it would be to their long term political advantage to block these benefits. While the Republicans may say that they have some sort of philosophical problem with extending unemployment benefits, that position is undercut by the fact that they voted for these extensions as a matter of routine in the past. It is wrong to report as fact what is, at best, highly debatable, and is, in actuality, beyond doubt untrue.


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Run against Bush, now and forever

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Why do we on the left insist on being rational, and believing, despite all the evidence, that our fellow creatures are rational. Given that those fellow creatures appear poised to give huge gains to the Republicans as a reward for preventing the enactment of an effective recovery plan, the idea that we will fail if our arguments are not logically precise seems rather absurd.

The immediate cause for this rant is this observation by Steve Benen, at the Washington Monthly:

The notion that Democrats would gain traction this year by tying Republican candidates to George W. Bush’s failed presidency has always seemed implausible to me. The GOP’s lack of popularity still stems from the previous administration’s catastrophes, but it seems challenging, at best, to keep connecting the party to Bush two years later.

As I observed at a recent Blumenthal event (I think it was a Blumenthal event), the Democrats, who were not constantly on their heels back then, were still running against Herbert Hoover well into the 50s, for I can remember his name being invoked by Democratic politicians when I was back there in Catholic school. Republicans were running against Jimmy Carter well into the nineties and they are still, in places, running against George McGovern. And we are to believe that we can’t run against the worst president in history a mere two years after he departed the stage? If we can’t, it’s because our above the fray president threw the opportunity away, opting instead for the fantasy of “bi-partisanship”, something only a deeply deluded person could believe in. I read today that many people confuse the Obama stimulus package with the Tarp plan. Only Democrats could have let that happen, what with the handily alliterative “Bush Bailout” ready at hand, a term we should have heard daily since November of 2008. The only way to remind people that we were brought to this pass by George Bush is to constantly rub their noses in it. It appears to have escaped the attention of the present day Democrats that the average American has the attention span of a gnat, but if you keep saying something, as the Republicans constantly prove, it will eventually sink in.

So it’s not implausible that the Democrats could successfully use George Bush against the Republicans. What’s implausible, yet apparently true, is that it does not have occurred to them to do so.


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Biggest unarmed robbery in history

Monday, July 19, 2010

In yesterday’s Times, Stanley Greenberg, who is supposed to be on our side, gives his prescription for the Obama battle plan against the Republicans after the Democrats hand them big victories in November:

The president will send up four big initiatives that have to be taken up on a bipartisan basis — or not at all. A Deficit Reduction Act that endorses his deficit commission’s proposed spending freeze, entitlement reforms, the purging of corporate loopholes and tax increases.

So do our betters blithely toss us overboard in pursuit of a political score-in this case by demanding that the Republicans help destroy Social Security.

For the deficit commission is not the Obama Deficit Commission, it is the Pete Peterson Social Security/Medicare Destruction Commission. Make no mistake, the only recommendations of substance that Commission will make will be aimed at Social Security and Medicare.

As economist Jamie Galbraith establishes here, Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit, yet Peterson’s commission has focused like a laser beam on Social Security.

Social Security is a transfer system. Part of the money earned by today’s workers is transferred to retired people, with the express promise that the workers of tomorrow will do likewise for the workers of today. Any excess in current payments, and currently there is plenty, is parked in government bonds until it is needed. As Galbreath puts it:

Social Security is a transfer program. It is not a spending program. A dollar “spent” on Social Security does not directly increase GDP. It merely reallocates a dollar from one potential final consumer (a taxpayer) to another (a retiree, a disabled person or a survivor). It also reallocates resources within both communities (taxpayers and beneficiaries). Specifically, benefits flow to the elderly and to survivors who do not have families that might otherwise support them, and costs are imposed on working people and other taxpayers who do not have dependents in their own families. Both types of transfer are fair and effective, greatly increasing security and reducing poverty — which is why Social Security and Medicare are such successful programs.

Transfers of this kind are also indefinitely sustainable — in fact there can intrinsically be no problem of sustainability with transfer programs. Apart from their effect on individual security, a true transfer program uses (by definition) no net economic resources. The only potential macroeconomic danger from “excessive” transfers is that the transfer function may be badly managed, leading to excessive total demand and to inflation. But there is no risk of this so long as the financial crisis remains uncured. Under present conditions Social Security and Medicare are bulwarks for stabilizing a total demand that would otherwise be highly deficient.

But, purely as a matter of ideology, folks like Peterson will refuse to see this basic truth, just as they somehow never see that the obvious solution to any long term problems Social Security itself might have is a rise in the level of income subject to the payroll tax, rather than a cut in benefits (raising the retirement age and/or changing the way benefits are calculated to make them lower). No, hard times demand hard choices, which always have a habit of requiring additional hardship on the poor or, in this case, middle class dupes. When, after all, was the last time you heard of a politician making a “hard choice” that involved imposing any inconvenience on the rich?

But there is a deficit related reason why it would be extremely handy for our aristocracy to cut social security benefits or, and this is the Holy Grail, destroy the program altogether. As I noted before, we working stiffs have been socking away excess social security payments for years, and during the past nine years the government, has been busily transferring that money to the rich in the form of the Bush tax cuts, which have been financed by government borrowing, including borrowing our collective pittances, which add up to a rather large amount when you put them all together. Peterson and his crew don’t want to give that money back. They prefer to steal from the poor to give to the rich and if we don’t watch out Obama and the Democrats will help them in order to score some debating points next year.


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Groton Bank Art Show

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Just a few pictures from the Art Show on Groton Bank, held yesterday. It seemed to me, and Audrey Heard, the event’s founder confirmed, that this was the biggest show ever, in terms of exhibitors. We arrived early, and attendance seemed to be good, but it was so hot yesterday that one has to wonder whether people showed up in the afternoon.

I probably should have made a point of getting the names of all the artists, but I’m a blogger, not a journalist, so I didn’t. The artist who painted the pictures below asked that I put her web address online (somehow she guessed the picture might end up on the web), which I was happy to do. According to her website her name is T. Miller, and her website is here.

This artist, whose name is Timothee (that’s all that’s on his card- no name, no address, no phone number, I guess he’s not interested in selling his stuff) was there last year as well. Last year Neal Young was featured, this year the late lamented Frank Zappa.

As I mentioned last week, the show was on the site of one of the only Revolutionary War battlefields, Fort Griswold, where Norwich’s least favorite son, Benedict Arnold, joined in a massacre of the fort’s defenders, before or after burning New London. The people of Groton erected a monument in 1826 (depicted below),

which is currently being renovated by our impoverished state, as can be seen here.

It’s supposed to re-open, better than ever, next Memorial Day.


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