Cheney’s Chutzpa

Dick Cheney's credibility has more holes in it than a Russian submarine. The former vice-president was a central figure in what is widely acknowledged as the most incompetent administration in modern American history. Yet, the man who once shot his hunting partner in the face has the temerity to launch a fusillade against the Obama administration for supposedly ducking the "war on terror" metaphor.

Cheney's latest broadside follows on the heels of an unsuccessful al-Qaeda plot to blow up an airliner on Christmas, which follows on the heels of the Fort Hood Massacre where a disturbed U.S. Army psychiatrist (who happened to be Muslim) opened fire on his fellow soldiers.

Both incidents, in fact, were carried out by devout Muslims who could best be characterized as unmarried social misfits deeply opposed to America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Major Hasan both illustrate the unconventional nature of the jihadist threat. Neither man was following orders as a part of a formal hierarchical organization. Rather, each was inspired by al-Qaeda's ideology to initiate attacks of their own choosing. Hasan and Abduulmutallab may have received "spiritual guidance" which reinforced their impulses to unleash terrorist violence against "infidels." However, the clerics that recruit, counsel, and radicalize lost souls like these probably do not dirty their hands by planning or coordinating specific acts of terrorism.

Al-Qaeda is arguably the ultimate "virtual community," a collection of loosely affiliated groups and cells comprised of career criminals, paramilitaries, religious zealots, and loner terrorist wannabes.

Osama bin Laden is a charismatic figurehead who is the spiritual locus of al-Qaeda, but he largely irrelevant from an operational or managerial point of view. The Bush administration claimed that bin Laden had been neutralized because he could not plan or conduct operations. This view is self-serving and erroneous. Simply put, nothing would deflate al-Qaeda more than the death or capture of their charismatic spiritual leader, who has supposedly evaded U.S. forces thanks to Allah's protection.

The failure to kill or capture bin Laden at Tora Bora (U.S. resources were being diverted to Iraq at the time) must rank very high on the list of the Bush administration's missed opportunities. Killing bin Laden would not have ended terrorism as a technique, but it could have delivered a knockout blow to al-Qaeda.

The Bush administration instigated one of the greatest strategic blunders in military history when it invaded Iraq. Toppling Saddam Hussein was supposed to be the first step in a wave of democratization that would sweep and transform the Middle East. Instead, the misguided and mismanaged Iraq War became a recruitment tool that radicalized an entire generation of Muslims.

The Islamic extremists that are plotting to blow up airliners and attack Western targets are convinced that the U.S. is waging a war against Islam. Bellicose rhetoric from the Bush administration regarding the "war on terror" proved to be self-defeating because it reinforced al-Qaeda's deluded ideology, which paints the Muslim world as the victim of America's imperial aggression. The Obama administration is right in downplaying such rhetoric because the struggle against Islamic extremism is an ideological struggle to convince ordinary Muslims that America is on the side of human dignity and social justice.

America won the Cold War against the Soviet Union because it contained Communism and won the ideological battle for hearts and minds of mankind. At the height of the Cold War, however, there were those on the extreme right who insisted that the only way to defeat Communism was to launch a pre-emptive nuclear war against the "Evil Empire." Recently, right-wing extremists like Dick Cheney took America down a path that included pre-emptive war, torture, and other Constitutional abuses. As a result, America's reputation sank and the country nearly drowned in a financial crisis caused in no small measure by the failed economic policies of the Bush/Cheney administration. Dick Cheney's credibility on national security matters is unsalvageable.

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Barack Obama’s Half a Loaf

Barack Obama is drawing the ire of both the far right and the reflexive left. This is probably a sign the president is governing well.

The historian Arnold Toynbee believed civilizations had life cycles. In Toynbee's view, societies pass through the phases of youthful vitality, vigorous middle age, and senescent rigidity. The intellectual bankruptcy, paranoia, and inflexible crankiness that characterize today's conservative movement would seem to exemplify the social dementia Toynbee believed afflicted societies entering their terminal phases.

Thankfully, the conservative movement has been largely marginalized following the disastrous reign of the epically incompetent Bush administration. Solving America's formidable domestic and foreign policy challenges will require flexibility, creativity, and pragmatism, qualities that are in short supply among conservatives.

The far left, however, can be every bit as obtuse as the far right. For example, President Obama has taken heat from the left for his supposed failure to end America's involvement in Afghanistan and for supposedly getting rolled into supporting a flawed healthcare bill. In fact, Obama made a sound decision on Afghanistan. And the Democratic health reform bill represents a real social achievement in that it establishes the principle that all Americans are entitled to decent healthcare.

Regarding Afghanistan, the president's critics fail to understand that ending America's involvement prematurely would pose intolerable risks. To begin with, quitting Afghanistan with an ascendant Taliban would almost certainly consign the country to civil war, which would destabilize Pakistan (a country with nuclear weapons). Further, Islamic extremists would interpret America's withdrawal as a victory over a weakened superpower, a narrative that would embolden jihadists worldwide.

Exiting Afghanistan on America's terms is imperative. Sending additional U.S. troops is not an ideal option, but it is the least bad of truly terrible options. Likewise, the Democratic healthcare bill is terribly flawed, but it may be the best reform that a broken political system is capable of generating at the moment. Critics on the left (like Howard Dean) who insisted that it would be better to vote against the bill and start over, are oblivious to consequences of their idealistic folly. If Republicans had succeeded in stymieing health reform again it would have been a mortal blow to Obama and the Democratic Party. In all likelihood, the failure of health reform would pave the way for Republican victories in 2010 and 2012. Consequently, it would be years if not decades before anyone attempted to reform the healthcare system again.

Barack Obama is a pragmatist who'd rather come away with half a loaf than no loaf at all. Right-wing activists who contend that Obama is socialist who wants to redistribute wealth are certifiably delusional. In fact, the crony capitalism championed by Bush and Cheney amounted socialism for the wealthy as military contractors like Halliburton, the financial industry, and political contributors fed at the public trough until the entire economic system nearly collapsed.

In reality, President Obama is a centrist and an incrementalist. Indeed, he seems to be employing conservative means towards moderately liberal ends. He may be taking flak from both the rabid-right and the utopian-left, but it is probably a good sign that he's steering a course that displeases the insensate fringes of our political system.

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Pantheism versus Theism

The poet William Blake saw Heaven in a wildflower and he found eternity in an hour. Poets are quite mad, of course. But as Plato recognized, the madness of the gods is to be preferred over the sanity of men.
Poets tend to be heretics too. After all, shattering dogmas so that fresh truths can be perceived is part of a poet’s reason for being.

The poet Czeslaw Miloz once wrote, “You ask me how to pray to someone who is not. All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge. And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard.”

Miloz, I believe, captured a great truth about prayer and religion. The traditional conception of God as a personal deity who created the world and intervenes in human affairs is no longer intellectually, theologically, or philosophically persuasive. Nikos Kazantzakis, put it well when said, praying to God is like knocking on the door of a deaf man.

The paradox in Miloz’s poem, On Prayer, is that although our prayers almost certainly fall on deaf ears they are nevertheless spiritually empowering. Faced with the dark night of the soul, a time when we are acutely aware of our limitations, we instinctively turn to a power greater than ourselves. This is when we are at our most authentic, even divine-like. The power of prayer lies not in catching the attention of some supreme being, who then intervenes on our behalf, but in the way a truthful and heartfelt inner dialogue, fortifies us to meet life’s most formidable challenges.

The root meaning of the word religion is to link back. Both pantheists and deists share the belief that man has sprung from a transcendental source. For pantheists, this source is Nature, which is a reflection of a slumbering but cosmic intelligence. We humans are a reflection of this unconscious and impersonal intelligence. Nature has emerged into consciousness through us and we are quite literally the eyes and ears of the world. Nature, of course, can be terrifying and awe-inspiring. However, discerning the broad brushstrokes of beauty and harmony against the backdrop of individual suffering can be an aesthetic experience that offers a poetic respite from the harshness of the natural order.

Schopenhauer believed that aesthetic arrest represents a moment when a human being temporarily transcends the limitations of their suffering ego and recognizes (however dimly or faintly) their ultimate identity with the noumenal ground of being.

Seeing Nature as a work of art is no easy task. Great poets demonstrate that an immersion in nature need not be some sort of escapist regression, as The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat implies in his Op-Ed, Heaven and Nature. Put simply, the kernels of insight and enlightenment that poets like Blake convey have the power to recreate in us the same “Ah ah” experience that stirred the soul of poets in the first place.

In contrast, abstract conceptions of an all-good Almighty -- whose sole remaining function these days is to save His creatures from the evils of His own Creation – seems like an escapist fantasy at best and pernicious nonsense at worst. There is nothing more painful than false belief. And I fear that much of the anger that seems to be consuming the religious right in America at the moment stems from frustration that invariably develops when a person’s worldview is at complete variance with the world he or she inhabits.

Ross Douthat theistic apologia is rhetorically brilliant, but his logic is unpersuasive. His chief argument in favor of theism is that pantheism cannot deliver man from the evils and suffering of this world. But using Hollywood homages to pantheism as proverbial straw men allows Douthat to paint “nature worship” in superficial way.

Wittgenstein was famous for dissolving – not solving – philosophical conundrums. His insight, still not widely appreciated, is that the way we use (and misuse) language generates pseudo-problems. For instance, to say, “It is raining” does not mean there is some entity “It” that is raining. In a similar way, theism generates many false problems by positing literal entities – A savior God, Heaven, and Hell – which are not ontologically real. Pursuing mirages is bound to create angst. Ultimately, it may be that theism creates the malady it purports to cure.

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Politics, Professional Wrestling, & Fox News

Politics is like professional wrestling, only it's more entertaining but less edifying. Perhaps that explains why cable "news" personalities like Glen Beck deliberately blur the lines between entertainment and current events.

The social critic Neil Postman once entitled a book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is a rather apt description of the carnivalesque antics the clownish Beck and his ilk have imported into the journalistic profession. War, recession, and national decline are a lot more bearable if our media jesters can somehow divert us from an increasingly unpleasant reality with their foolishness.

Lear called upon his Fool to cheer him up as his psyche and his kingdom crumbled. His fool was wise in a way our media fools are not. Lear's jester traded in the kind of wisdom and insight that surpassed men's understanding; our media fools pander to the lowest common denominator while peddling propaganda and sophistry as if they were the highest forms of sagacity.

What is so objectionable about the likes of Beck, Sean Hannity, and others at Fox News? Fox News is built on two principles: 1) promoting the reactionary agenda of Rupert Murdoch and 2) telling an audience what they want to hear.

Orwell warned that the function of propaganda is to sell the notion that war is peace, that slavery is freedom. Fox News, the "fair and balanced" network – is in the business of selling similar contradictions.

The anchors and hosts on Fox News are not in the business of objective journalism. Rather, they are master sophists. They aim not at truth, but persuasion. Socrates noted that the sophists in ancient Greece were so skilled in rhetoric that they could make the worse argument appear the better. Unlike Socrates' dialectical method, which examines presuppositions, sophists begin with preconceptions and end with them.

Fox News, like Narcissus, is smitten with itself. When you think about it, it's rather perverse for a news organization to spend so much time reporting on itself. Journalists are supposed to report the news, not make it. However, Fox's personality-driven programming is centered on a simple premise: convince credulous audiences that their anchors and hosts speak for them. Fox News calls attention to itself at every turn because it has set itself up as proxy for beleaguered Americans.

War is force that gives us meaning. An Axis-of- Spin – Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly -- promote the notion that the Obama has declared war on the news agency because it plays into the narrative Fox is peddling, namely that Fox is the champion of the besieged masses.

Fox recognizes that a rumble with the Obama administration will attract viewers looking for an entertaining spectacle and an outlet through which they can vent their frustrations and aggressions. Like the World Wrestling Federation, Fox News has a stock of buffoonish characters who aim at stirring up their audiences with over-the-top antics. Similarly, with Fox News reality is beside the point, ratings are everything, and discourse is tailored towards third-graders.

When I think of Fox News I think of Sean Hannity fawning over President Bush; Bill O'Reilly excusing the abuses at Guantanamo; Glenn Beck ridiculing the scientific consensus on global warming; and Neil Cavuto tossing softball questions to a corporate honcho who would soon be convicted of a massive fraud. Are these anchors journalists or propagandists? You decide.

Fox News, like professional wrestling, traffics in entertainment not edification. Both Fox and the WWF create arenas where self-reference abounds and objectivity is obliterated. Climbing into the ring with Fox News is degrading, even for politicians.

 

 

 

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The Death of Michael Jackson and the Demise of Sarah Palin (and what it all means for America)

Few individuals are weirder than the late Michael Jackson, but Sarah Palin comes mighty close. The former Republican VP candidate shocked the political world by announcing that she is resigning her Alaska governorship. True to form, her quirky, unscripted, and incoherent news conference performance left nearly everyone scratching their heads. Palin’s surprise resignation, however, caps a great week for Democrats; Al Franken is finally declared the winner in Minnesota’s senate race, Republican governor Mark Sanford derails his presidential ambitions by admitting to infidelity, and Sarah Palin zany rationale for quitting her post reinforces the perception that the GOP is fatally unhinged. In truth, the Republican Party has even less of a pulse than Michael Jackson, who at least has the chance of making a posthumous comeback.

Sarah Palin’s rationale for leaving office is about as convincing as Dick Cheney’s defense of water boarding. In fact, Palin displayed a smorgasbord of verbal and emotional tics during her news conference that are symptomatic of the GOP’s decline. For example, the Alaska governor seemed constitutionally incapable of stringing together coherent thoughts and arguments, but she had no trouble spouting a train of mind-numbing clichés to explain her decision. She didn’t want to be a “lame duck” and “collect a paycheck” and “kind of milk it.” No, Palin isn’t one “to go with the flow” because “only dead fish go with the flow.” Sarah “Barracuda” Palin is a self-described maverick, but her thought processes seem composed from a string of lifeless banalities and worn out clichés.

There is also an eerie dissonance between the chirpy cheeriness she tries to project and the anxiety and unease betrayed by her body language. Bush displayed a similar incongruity; the exaggerated macho swagger of a bully compensating for his obvious sense of inadequacy. Incidentally, watch just about any of clip of Bush from several years back and I bet you’ll be struck by how fake he comes across. It’s not only the chasm between his words and reality that alarm, Bush’s body language, tone, and demeanor betray disingenuousness.

Palin tried to sell her departure as a selfless act done for the good of Alaskans and the Republican Party. But her strained explanation and incongruous delivery appear to be masking a truth she cannot admit. She strikes me – and apparently many others – as a quintessential narcissist. That is, she has a grandiose sense of self coupled with an inability to accept criticism, acknowledge mistakes, or empathize with others. Do these qualities remind you of another recent Republican leader? (Hint, think flight suit, bring em’ on, and the guy strumming a guitar while New Orleans drowned).

In fact, conservatives have extolled and exemplified a national form of narcissism for some time. This vanity was enshrined in the Bush Doctrine: The United States represents the culmination of human history, is utterly unique, and is charged with a messianic mission to spread liberty all across the globe. As far as the neocons were concerned, our system of democratic capitalism was supposed to the model for all peoples at all times. The rise of China and the near meltdown of America’s financial system have gone a long way to puncture that conceit.

The conservative disdain for the notion that empathy is a desirable quality in judges fits with this pattern of narcissism. Along these lines, Sarah Palin disparaged Barack Obama’s efforts as a community organizer; ridicule being the polar opposite of empathy. Think of a national Republican leader – Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter come to mind – and the last quality you will think of is empathy. Sarah Palin is merely a symptom of cultural malady that is afflicting a conservative movement that is in the process of self-destruction. There is a psychological law at work here; those with an inflated sense tend to destroy themselves and everything they touch. Tragically, this was the fate of Michael Jackson, but at least he possessed the talent to create a legacy that will survive him. George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, on the other hand, are the type that tends to leave a trail of disappointment and destruction in their wake.

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Torturing Pelosi

"If everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty." Time and again, Conservatives have succeeded in implicating Democrats for crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration. John Kerry was supposedly in favor of the Iraq War before he was against it. Democrats saw the same WMD intelligence the Bush White House saw before rubber stamping the Iraq War. And now, Nancy Pelosi supposedly tacitly approved of water boarding before she found it politically expedient to criticize the practice.

Nancy Pelosi has become the proverbial red herring that has been used to bait – hook, line, and sinker – a frenzy of media sharks. "What did Speaker Pelosi know? And when did she know it?" This is a loaded question that has managed to convict the hapless Pelosi, at least in the court of public opinion, of Constitutional crimes conceived and executed by her political adversaries in the Bush administration.

Bush & Cheney proved to be inept when it came to managing our wars, the economy, or Katrina, but they were geniuses when it came to managing public opinion. Put simply, they have a knack for tailoring their arguments to the lowest common denominator. If someone opposed "enhanced interrogation methods," then it must be because they cared about the rights of terrorists more than they cared about the safety of the American people. Such either/or reasoning invariably involved false choices and was deliberately meant to be divisive.

The use of water boarding has proven to be a cataclysmic failure. To begin with, embracing torture decimated America's moral standing, served as a recruiting device for al-Qaeda, and led to false confessions that helped lead us into war with Iraq. Further, U.S. commanders agree that photos of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo did more to instigate attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq than any single factor. Dick Cheney claims torture saved lives, but the available evidence contradicts his assertions.

The fact that Dick Cheney vouches for torture is not enough to discredit the practice. However, the vast majority of counterterrorism experts insist that abusive interrogation techniques lead to a conundrum: it is exceedingly difficult to disentangle good intelligence from bad. In contrast, more refined interrogation techniques, which use subtle techniques to co-opt terror suspects, have a superior track record according to the most credible experts.

The use of torture must be weighed against the clear downsides the practice entails: unreliable information, the pernicious effects of institutionalizing barbarity, and the obvious fact that the law must be tortured beyond recognition before it is legal to torture individuals.

The problems with Bush & Cheney's policy of using torture are clear. Simply put, the use of torture has put U.S. service men and women at greater risk; rationalizing torture has perverted our legal system; and condoning torture has diminished America's soft power. Additionally, the Bush administration policies have led to the detention, torture, and deaths of innocents.

There is no doubt – none whatsoever – that water boarding prisoners is a war crime under International Law, the Geneva Convention, and U.S. Law. Nancy Pelosi is a sideshow in all of this.

The principles that animate the U.S. constitution are clear – all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, which include the right to some form of due process. These rights are not granted by any government. Therefore, they cannot be taken away by any government. But this is exactly what George W. Bush did when he insisted he had the authority to designate any individual an enemy combatant who could then be held indefinitely and without charges in a legal limbo. Bush's power grab was a brazen assault on the most fundamental of Constitutional ideals. The perverse notion that the President was a law unto himself opened the door to an illegal war based on false pretenses and the barbarous and depraved treatment of detainees.

Bush and Cheney have long habit of shirking responsibility and spreading blame for their failures. They also have an army of apologists and propagandists trying to revise history and implicate others in the Bush administration's misdeeds. However, the central fact remains: Bush and Cheney authorized what have traditionally and universally been regarded as war crimes and crimes against humanity. History will hold them accountable and so should we.

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Bush’s Big Lie

“This government does not torture people.”
-- George W. Bush

George Bush’s credibility has sunk further and deeper than a Russian submarine. Invariably, the divergence of Bush’s rhetoric from reality has been excused as the result of sincere and honest error. Bush may have misled, the apologists insisted, but he did not lie to the American people. The latter offence of course, is considered far graver than the former, especially by Bush’s Christian base, which tends to take Commandments like “Thou Shalt Not Lie’ very seriously.

Personally, I agree with the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, author of the classic, The Art of War, that a statesman is better off lying if doing so will keep us out of war. Statecraft is an art, not a science. And the same can be said about morality.

Bush, however, stands revealed a complete charlatan, a hypocrite, and a war criminal. He and Dick Cheney ran on a platform that was heavy on things liberals supposedly lacked: namely, moral clarity and accountability. When it came to crafting torture memos, however, Bush & Cheney utterly failed to draw bright moral lines against techniques that have been recognized by U.S and International Law as torture for centuries. Put simply, Japanese officials who used water boarding during WWII were prosecuted and found guilty for committing war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials. What the Bush administration’s torture memos did, of course, was to torture the law until interrogators could use any abusive technique Bush, Cheney, & Rumsfeld wanted to authorize.

Defining torture out of existence, by insisting all practices that didn’t lead directly to organ failure or death were acceptable, is the epitome of moral vacuity and evasiveness. In essence, Bush & Cheney thought they could evade moral culpability through legal locutions and hairsplitting: Sure, water boarding is fine, just as long as the water temperature isn’t too hot or cold, and the victim has a pillow, and is tied down with nylon rope that he doesn’t burn his wrists.

Bush & Cheney are intent on evading responsibility in a no less cowardly way. For years they have feigned outrage at lower-level military personnel for committing abuses that they in fact authorized. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice not only lied when they insisted the U.S. did not utilize torture. They lied in the most self-serving way by allowing low-level military personnel to pay the price for the crimes they knowingly sanctioned. The way Bush and Cheney evaded military service in Vietnam was less than honorable; the way Bush & Cheney are evading responsibility for the abusive techniques they authorized is cowardly and despicable.

The release of the torture memos indisputably show that top administration officials – including the president himself – repeatedly lied to the American people. Their deceptions were not aimed at protecting national security, but avoiding responsibility for policies they knew crossed the line into war crimes.

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