Top Ten Jobs for Bill and Hillary Clinton in an Obama Administration

10). Obama should immediately appoint Bill and Hillary to the Supreme Court. Hey, those black gowns will work a lot better for Hillary than her candy-colored pantsuits. And I bet Bill and Clarence Thomas will enjoy discussing legal theories concerning the Constitutionality of adult videos.

9). Since Hillary has shown an inclination to work till 3am, why not assign her to the top job at the White House switchboard?

8). Hillary’s vivid accounts of dodging sniper fire and mortar rounds indicate she would make her an ideal candidate for America’s top ambassador to the Green Zone in Baghdad.

7). Hillary talks about being a fighter a lot so why not give her five stars and appoint her as Secretary of War? I bet the Iranians will think twice about enriching uranium when she’s got the top slot at the Pentagon because they’ll know Hillary has a penchant for proving she’s man enough for any job.

6). If I were Obama, I’d appoint Hillary and Bill as goodwill ambassadors to the international space station.

5). Bill and Hillary have proven they’ll do anything it takes to get back to the White House. Hillary has downed shots of vodka, visited NASCAR, and passed herself off as a good’ old gal. Obama should assign Bill and Hillary to the White House motor pool, and let them be responsible for keeping the presidential limo spiffy shiny and clean.

4). I’m sure the Clinton’s just great at leading tours of the White House, though the secret Oval Office broom closet and the Lincoln bedroom should be off-limits to visiting girl scouts troops, unless Hillary accompanies her hubby.

3). Appoint Bill Clinton to the Court, the White House indoor basketball court that is. Hey, Bill Clinton supported affirmative action, so it’s only fair to have a token white guy who can’t jump on Obama’s team.

2). Bill Clinton playing “Hail to the Chief” on hi sax. How cool would that be? Obama should pick the big guy to lead the White House Band.

1). If Obama is foolish enough to pick Hillary as his VP he should insist on getting two for one by getting Bill as his food taster.

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Bush, Obama, and Appeasement

Man, in his unwillingness to understand other men, becomes like the beasts of the jungle. And their ways become his ways. This sentiment comes from the brilliant film, “The Naked Prey,” directed by Cornel Wilde. But it is probably the best encapsulation of all that has gone wrong with America’s foreign policy under the tragic tenure of George W. Bush. Dialogue equals appeasement, or so the architects of the Iraq debacle hold. But these would be vanquishers of Evil have spawned Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and four million Iraq refugees.

George Bush and John McCain have blasted Barack Obama over his willingness to talk to Iran without preconditions. Bush, in particular, has had the temerity to imply that taking to Iran would be Munich all over again, but this time in the Middle East (Munich was the moment the Europeans appeased Hitler). Of course, Bush’s historical analogies involving Nazi Germany might carry a little more authority if he and his bunker buddy, Dick Cheney, hadn’t decided to unilaterally scrap the Geneva Conventions and launch a preemptive war under false pretenses. After all, wasn’t it Herr Hitler who insisted he was “liberating” Eastern Europe after claiming Poland had attacked the Third Reich? Bush would do well to avoid drawing analogies involving the megalomaniacal but hopelessly incompetent Furher.

Bush’s spiel that dialogue equals appeasement is wrong on multiple counts. First, reactionary conservatives during the Cold War argued in favor of preemptive war against the Soviet Union on the grounds that any form of diplomacy with the “Evil Empire” was appeasement. Needless to say, most sane observers now agree that containment, diplomacy, and dialogue were the right approaches to take, while the rollback doctrine that led to calamities like the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs would have been suicidal.

There is a second and even more insidious way in which Bush’s dialogue is appeasement argument is a dangerous delusion. He is applying it not just to al-Qaeda -- the terrorists who attacked America on 9/11 -- but also to Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and anyone else the Bush administration designates in its ever expansive catch-all category: the Enemy. It is worth noting that Iran was the one country in the Middle East that held public rallies demonstrating their solidarity with the United States following the 9/11 attacks, and that the Iranian government cooperated with the U.S. military’s campaign to oust the Taliban. The invasion of Iraq, however, coupled with the Bush administration reckless plans to refashion the Middle East in America’s image, have helped turn an erstwhile ally into an implacable adversary. You are either with us or against us works better when you don’t piss everybody off so much that everyone is rooting against you.

The tragedy, of course, is that moral obtuseness – assuming one always in the right, not listening to other perspectives, and the unwillingness to compromise with adversaries – leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy that has a tendency to bring out the worst in everybody. The irony, needless to say, is that with George W. Bush the War against Evil has only one exit strategy: escalation.

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Top Ten Ways Hillary Can Pander Her Way to the Presidency

10). Promise to give each and every American $1,500 gift card to use at the mall of their choice. Hey, if every American could afford to purchase a second or third giant screen TV it sure would help stimulate the economy. And who better than Hillary to get tough with the Arab oil sheiks in order to get them to lend us the money to finance this scheme.

9). Hey, if Hillary would promise to obliterate Crawford, Texas it sure would make up for her vote to give the warmonger George W. Bush the authority to invade Iraq.

8). Offer raffle tickets to ordinary citizens where the prize is an overnight sleepover in the Lincoln bedroom. The prize should include quality time with Bill and other VIPs. Winners, of course, must be over 21.

7). Subsidize massive federal boondoggle to turn marijuana into cannabis-based ethanol. Hey, weed is already America’s #2 cash crop. Let’s see if we can get higher mileage with hybrid cars that run on fumes. This should solve global warming too. And it’s doubtful it will lead to more traffic accidents, assuming drivers don’t inhale.

6). Forget the gasoline tax holiday. Like a lot of Americans I consume a lot more alcohol than I do petrol. How about a tax holiday on Hillary’s favorite beverage, the boilermaker? I’ll drink to that.

5). Hey, if Bill can pardon billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, then why couldn’t Hillary pardon me for the $28,432 I owe in unpaid parking and traffic fees? A traffic infraction amnesty for all Americans is just what Hillary needs to propose to pick up some Red states.

4). Draft dodging chicken hawk Republicans have succeeded in Swift boating liberal war heroes for too long. Hillary should retroactively reinstate the draft for top government officials who used multiple deferments and the National Guard to avoid one senseless war when they were young only to start another when they were old. Let’s see how Dick Cheney and George Bush look in Kevlar helmets and body armor as they dodge IEDs, mortar rounds, and sniper fire in “Free Iraq.”

3). I’d vote for Hillary if the Clinton campaign would make “She’s so Cold” by the Rolling Stones her theme song. Hey, but if Obama should happen to get the nomination after all I’d love to hear “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” following Barack’s acceptance speech.

2). Hillary should pledge to appoint Al Gore as Chief Justice of the World Court responsible for investigating and prosecuting Crimes Against Humanity (including any and all high government officials who may have authorized torture, preemptive war, and election fraud). Let’s face it, I want to see the rightful winner of the 2000 election order Bush confined to a straightjacket while the disgraced ex-president undergoes a thorough psychiatric evaluation.

1). Hillary should promise to pick her vice-presidential running mate from a pool of contestants that face off on a popular reality-based TV show like “Survivor.” Contestants will have to compete in a series of silly tasks designed to reveal their capacity for ruthlessness, duplicity, and backstabbing. The contestant that would make the Clinton’s want to hire a food taster the most wins the second spot on the ticket.

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Reverend Wright vs. the Right

A debate between Jeremiah Wright and Sean Hannity would probably be about as subtle and intellectually rewarding as a scene from of Hamlet played by Vince McMahon and Donald Trump. Rightwing bloviaters are in perpetual need of bogeymen to rail against, and what better foil to make stupid white men seem smart than an African-American Archie Bunker. If Reverend Wright weren’t the product of the far left the far right would have had to invent him.

Projection is a psychological mechanism whereby unacknowledged emotions of one’s own – fear, aggression, and bigotry – are attributed to another, thus alleviating oneself of the responsibility for toxic feelings. One can imagine, for instance, the temporary psychological relief a KKK member gets from watching loops of Reverend Wright venting his spleen; the white supremacist feels justified by locating the source of his anger in the uppity black minister spouting “God Damn America.”

Reverend Wright and his most vociferous critics are in many ways mirror images of one another. This can be seen, for example, in the mindset of figures from the religious right, such as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, who insisted that the 9/11 attacks were God’s retribution upon America for promoting abortion, gay marriage, and secularism. This is arguably an even cruder and more irrational explananda than Wright’s “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” commentary on 9/11.

Ironically, Wright and his detractors share the same dubious premise: namely, that we live in a just universe where human events are governed by a benevolent deity who nevertheless dispenses rewards and punishments for our moral good. The notion that the perpetrators and victims of terrorism are part of a divine scheme to dispense justice is so patently anti-scientific, juvenile, and irrational that it is beyond embarrassing.

Reverend Wright’s view, however, at least has the virtue of being more theological sophisticated and tenable than that of his counterparts on the right. For instance, Wright makes the perfectly valid point when he draws the connection between America’s foreign policy and a terrorist backlash. Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noregia, and Osama bin Laden were all recipients of U.S. military aid. In a very real sense, as Benazir Bhutto noted decades ago, al-Qaeda was the Frankenstein monster the Reagan/Bush administration helped create.

Wright is an astonishing mixture of erudition and ignorance. He weaves uncomfortable truths and conspiracies into a narrative that can be odious and illuminating at the same time. I don’t doubt that he and his church have done good work ministering to the poor and championing the cause of the disenfranchised and disaffected. Wright’s legacy will be even more mixed, however, if he succeeds in derailing a candidate who transcends the divisiveness that religious demagogues feed on. Here Wright shares another trait with the far right cable crowd: if he spent as much time solving problems as he did whipping up anger and resentment he’d be out of business.

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Bush vs. Justice

Justice is to society what health is to the body. That is, justice is a kind of harmonious interplay between the various components of the social order that engenders optimum functioning. Philosophers, of course, have long inquired about the nature of justice. For a character named Thrasymachus justice is synonymous with the interests and advantage of the stronger, and attitude summed up by the notion that “might makes right.” When the tiny island of Melos resisted the unilateralism of the Greek Empire a forerunner of George W. Bush simply informed the inhabitants that you are either with us or against us. After all, as the official put it, fairness and justice only pertains to equals. And in disputes between non-equals, the sophistic official went on, “the strong do what they can and weak suffer what they must.”

This is a cynical and corrosive understanding of justice, needless to say, since it reflects the notion that justice is little or nothing more than one side imposing its will on the other, through force of arms, rhetorical sleight-of-hand, or whatever means happen to be at one’s disposal. On this account there are no objective standards, save one: winning is proof that one is right, as evidenced by the fact that the victors will get to write history.

In examining this notion, which extols power as the end all and be all, it is worth quoting the words of John F. Kennedy. He wrote on the pitfalls of power not tempered by a poetic dimension:

“When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses”

Eight years of Bush’s unilateralism, zero-sum politics, and legal sophistry have convinced most Americans that the country could use a moral disinfectant to purge the taint associated with an administration that completely squandered the public trust. This was a president, after all, who insisted the United States did not engage in torture, illegal eavesdropping, or manipulate intelligence even though the administration’s own internal memos explicitly contradict his public assurances.

It is now abundantly clear that administration lawyers – particularly David Addington and John Yoo – contrived Alice in Wonderland type rationalizations to legitimize interrogation methods that were outside the U.S. military code of justice, international law, and the Geneva Conventions. Moreover, these logic-chopping legal sophists attempted to promulgate a perverse doctrine whereby the President supposedly had the inherent authority to ignore, interpret, or fashion the law in any way he chose to in his role as Commander-in-Chief. This so-called theory of the Unitary Chief Executive might just as well be called the Humpty Dumpty Doctrine, after the cracked character who tells Alice after she’s fallen through the looking glass that a word means just what he says it means – neither more nor less. After all, thanks to Bush’s signing statements a law means just what he says it means – neither more nor less.

A law that depends on the whim of a single individual, however, is a contradiction in terms. That is, just as the philosopher Wittgenstein showed that the idea of a private language is incoherent, so the idea of a single individual serving as the fount of what is permissible and not is the very antithesis of the law. Bush’s pursuit of executive omnipotence has in fact led to a form of schizoid irrationality – i.e., torture is not illegal if the president orders it or defines it in ways that makes even the most inhumane and degrading interrogation methods acceptable.

Wittgenstein, incidentally, is famous for saying that “ethics could be shown, but not spoken.” By the same token, it might be said that justice cannot be defined, but still we might find examples that exemplify it. I believe Mozart’s great opera, The Marriage of Figaro, contains a sublime illustration of justice. Here the story concerns a decadent aristocrat presiding over a disordered household. To distract himself from the decaying and dysfunctional state of affairs he governs, the Count in question pursues a series of amorous affairs with the household help. His wife, distraught by her husband’s unfaithful intentions, makes plans to exact her revenge: she will impersonate one of the servant girls that is the object of her husband’s lust. In other words, the Count thinks he is seducing a maid, but he is really pursuing the wife he has spurned.

When the ruse is revealed the Count realizes how much he loves his wife and he begs her forgiveness. The tables have been turned and the wife can now extract her pound of flesh, but in one of opera’s most sublime arias she orgives him. We in the audience immediately recognize the poetic justice in the way the conflict has been resolved. As the opera concludes order has been restored, love triumphs, and justice reigns. Life, alas, does not often imitate art, but perhaps it should. In any event, I believe Mozart’s opera provides an archetypal example of justice.

In contrast, the Bush administration’s conception of justice is nothing but a prosaic counterfeit. Everywhere one turns – Bush vs. Gore, Guantanamo, the trumped up case for invading Iraq – one finds only rhetorical sleights-of hand, ad hoc and post hoc rationalizations, and endless excuses and evasions. Deep dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq, the decline of America’s moral authority, and the tanking of the economy are symptomatic of a country that is seriously out of order. There is a lesson here: the arrogance that equated brute force with justice is being undone by a far great power: poetic justice.

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George W. Bush: The Most Unpopular President Ever?

George W. Bush is about as popular with the American people as an undertaker visiting a nursing home would be. Seventy-one percent of the public disapproves of Bush’s job performance, the highest negative rating ever. Not even Richard Nixon was so reviled.

By some estimates a million Iraqis have been killed since the war began, two-and-a-half million Iraqis have fled the country or been displaced, and virtually every expert agrees the invasion has enhanced the influence of America’s chief nemesis in the region, Iran.

The dollar is near an all-time low, gas prices are soaring, and the country is teetering on the brink of what some are predicting will be the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Bush, however, is so clueless that he didn’t even seem to know – or care – when someone told him that gas would likely top $4 a gallon by this summer.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has described Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina as “disgraceful.” When you factor in the mortgage meltdown; the failure to find WMD in Iraq; the collapse of Bush’s efforts to privatize Social Security; the explosion of the deficit, the discrediting of the administration’s democratization agenda for Iraq; the setbacks in Afghanistan; the failure to catch bin Laden; and the precipitous decline in America’s power and prestige during Bush’s tenure . . . well it’s a no-brainer that George W. Bush has been a monumental failure. You might say that Dubya is kind of like Nero, but without the musical talent.

George Bush has decimated virtually everything he’s come in contact with: FEMA, the U.S. military, Iraq, the economy, and the Republican Party. But you can bet your retirement account and/or your economic future that Forty-Three earnestly believes he’s been doing a “heck of a job.”

Bush likes to claim that he’ll be vindicated by history. Many decades from now, Bush claims, historians will recognize he made the right choices, particularly in regards to his decision to invade Iraq. This is a facile, self-serving, and irresponsible way of looking at things. As chief weapons inspector Hans Blix noted, had Bush delayed his decision by as little as two weeks the world would have know with certainty that Saddam did not posses the dreaded WMD that were the casus belli of the invasion.

Certainly, from a military standpoint, it would be important to know that U.S. troops would not be facing chemical and biological weapons. Needless to say, this would have simplified the invasion, or perhaps made it unnecessary. But the Bush administration has invariably been hostile to evidence that contradicts its ideological convictions, as its foot-dragging approach to global warming demonstrates.

Bush could (and should) have fired the incompetent Donald Rumsfeld earlier. He should have set up a unified chain of command so that Paul Bremer wasn’t disbanding the Iraqi Army on his own. And he never should have allowed political loyalty to trump competence when it came to sending personnel to reconstruct Iraq. Put simply, it’s not just that the choices that Bush has made that have been disastrous, but rather that his entire ideological, managerial, and political style has engendered catastrophe at every step. George Bush, in short, has about as much chance as going down as a successful president as Britney Spears has of winning an Oscar.

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