May 7

It looks as though it’s over for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic candidate for the US presidency in 2008 will be Barack Obama.

To keep her flagging candidacy alive Mrs Clinton’s task yesterday  was to show that the white working class vote that gave her victory in Pennsylvania would sweep her to another convincing triumph in Indiana.

It didn’t happen. She needed a robust victory by ten points or so, but in the end Mrs Clinton eked out the slimmest of margins, 51-49,and by ate evening even  this tiny lead still did not look entirely secure.  Meanwhile in North Carolina Obama rolled to a thumping victory by 14 points.

Even by mid afternoon on Tuesday the Clinton camp gave the impression of being triumphantly  on the verge of derailing Obama’s drive with a big win in Indiana. Obama had a rough couple of weeks trying to leap clear of the ferocious rhetoric of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Hillary Clinton whacked the war drum tirelessly and continued to threaten to obliterate Iran.  It was the first time one could sense a certain desperation in Obama. There was something close to panic in his diatribes against Wright.

But Mrs Clinton’s strategy didn’t work, and there are no other big states left for her to contest. Primary season is all but over, with Oregon the only significant contest left, one which Obama could well win. 

There is now absolutely no way that Hillary Clinton can argue that she can beat Obama in either the popular vote this primary season, or in the count of committed delegates. Already across this last week  Hillary’s last line of defense – the uncommitted Super Delegates –  showed a trickle of defections to Obama and the next few weeks will most likely see this turn into a steady stream.

Mrs Clinton’s financial crisis is now acute. It may happen in the next few days or at a slightly later date, but Mrs Clinton will surely concede. Defeat was certainly written all over the face of her spouse, who looked ghastly, just as on the other half of the television set Obama was already speaking in lofty and magnanimous terms about Democratic unity.

May 22

There’s certainly no effective liberal, let alone left presence in mainstream American politics any more. The political primary season, now in its final throes, has resoundingly buttressed this fact.

Take the scene in Portland, Oregon last Monday, on the eve of a vote in that north-western state which sent Barack Obama one step further in formally clinching the Democratic nomination. How did Hillary Clinton try to remind Oregonians of her claims to be the authentic rep of white working-class America, without whose votes no Democrat can ever win the White House?

She held a press conference in the upscale Portland suburb of Beaverton, in a subdivision where $500,000 homes have gone unsold for the past year. She spoke movingly of the pain being experienced by the developer. A few miles north, homeless Oregonians were besieging the offices of Portland’s mayor, Tom Potter.

Almost exactly forty years ago John F. Kennedy’s younger brother Bobby was making a similar last-throw bid  in California to win the state and seize the Democratic nomination by a populist campaign. Bobby reached out to California’s poor. There’s no way Bobby would have hunkered down with a property developer. He’d have been heading the homeless to the mayor’s office to demand the homeless be given rent-free accommodation in the unsold mansions.

Bobby Kennedy’s younger brother Ted, diagnosed this week with a malignant brain tumor, tried to sell the same populism as Bobby in his run for the nomination against Carter in 1978. Ten years later Jesse Jackson, the first black American to take a serious tilt at the Democratic nomination, led many a poor people’s march to City Halls across America.

Not any more. Hilary’s populism has been skin-deep in the literal sense of the term. It’s not been about rich developers, or predatory sub-prime loans. It’s only about the color of Obama’s skin.

The old truism about primary season used to be that Democratic candidates had to run left to capture crucial support from the sort of politically active progressives who vote in Democratic primaries and caucuses. Then, with the nomination secured, the nominee would spend the rest of the year running right, to win over middle America.

But Obama has achieved the amazing feat of being the almost-certain nominee without barely a phrase on the record with whih John McCain can belabor him for “loony-leftism” or even “outdated liberalism” in the months to come.

Bloated Pentagon budgets? This favored target in past primary seasons has flourished unscathed this year, even though the arms-spending to which Bush’s former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, committed the US government promise certain budgetary catastrophe in across the next fifteen years. Obama’s subservience  to the US military has been evinced numerous times, most recently when he confided last week to David Brooks, one of the New York Times’s profuse stable of neo-con columnists, that “The [U.S.] generals are light-years ahead of the civilians. They are trying to get the job done rather than look tough.”

What about Wall Street, whose leading bankers have devastated middle-income America with the sub-prime scams? Obama has been tactful, meanwhile hauling in hefty campaign contributions from these same bankers. Health care? No relief for America’s 45 million uninsured from Obama, who has a program unreservedly deferential to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. What about labor and the right to form a union – something virtually impossible to do in America today, where it’s (barely) legal to go on strike but almost entirely illegal to win one.  Seldom has a Democrat won the nomination with less IOUs to organized labor than Obama.

The only politically unorthodox item on Obama’s record is that he has a black skin. As he runs against an elderly, unstable  Republican candidate whose own mottled epidermis raises constant uneasy questions sbout possible battles with cancer Obama should thank Bush 1 for making a black man chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and putting Clarence Thomas on the US Supreme Court, and Bush 2 for making  Condoleezza Rice secretary of state. He should thank the Republican Party for nominating a candidate weaker by far than any he might have dreamed of only six months ago.

May 25

The wish is mother to the deed. If anything does happen to  Obama in California Mrs Clinton should surely be indicted as a co-conspirator.

How to else construe her grotesque remarks in Sioux Falls, South Dakota,  in the editorial offices of the Argus Leader newspaper. Here she told the editors,  "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it," she said, dismissing calls to drop out.

June 5

On Tuesday June 3 Barack Obama claimed the greatest prize the Democratic Party can offer, namely his nomination as its candidate for the presidency. The very next day the salesman of “change” raced from Minnesota back to Washington and publicly abased himself at the feet of an organization whose prime mission is to ensure that change unpalatable to the state of Israel will never be pressed by the United States government. The terms of Obama’s surrender exploded like rhetorical cluster bombs across the Middle East. To Israel and its Arab neighbors it surely signaled that whoever moves into the White House next January, there will be no swerve from Bush’s role as guarantor of Israeli intransigeance.
   
The conferences of the American Israel Public Committee have become showcases for the political clout of this lobbying group. The clout is real.

On January 11 of this year, hot on the heels of an editorial praising Obama as a Friend of Israel in the rabidly Zionist New York Sun, Lester Crown circulated a testimonial through the Jewish community, expressing his eagerness "to share with you my confidence that Senator Barack Obama’s stellar record on Israel gives me great comfort that, as President, he will be the friend to Israel that we all want to see in the White House-stalwart in his defense of Israel’s security, and committed to helping Israel achieve peace with its neighbors. Few public figures inspire as much hope and optimism as Barack Obama. Please pass on this message to all who are interested."

Worried about rumors fanned by the Clinton campaign that he was still a secret Muslim, Obama insisted that before the April 22 primary in Pennsylvania, a state with a politically significant Jewish vote, his campaign start a Hebrew-language blog in Israel.

So Obama came to this year’s AIPAC conference determined  to dispel all remaining doubts that he’s a Friend of Israel. “We will also use all elements of American power to pressure Iran,” he assured AIPAC.” I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything in my power. Everything and I mean everything.”  He swore he wouldn’t talk to the elected representatives Palestinians, Hamas. To thunderous applause he declared, "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided,"

As Uri Avnery, the veteran Israeli writer and peace activist expostulated here furiously in the wake of this last sentence, “Along comes Obama and retrieves from the junkyard the outworn slogan ‘Undivided Jerusalem, the Capital of Israel for all Eternity’. Since Camp David, all Israeli governments have understood that this mantra constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to any peace process. It has disappeared – quietly, almost secretly – from the arsenal of official slogans.  No Palestinian, no Arab, no Muslim will make peace with Israel if the Haram-al-Sharif compound (also called the Temple Mount), one of the three holiest places of Islam and the most outstanding symbol of Palestinian nationalism, is not transferred to Palestinian sovereignty. That is one of the core issues of the conflict. On that very issue, the Camp David conference of 2000 broke up.”

Obama’s foreign policy advisors were tearing their hair out and the next day his campaign issued a clarification. "Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties" as part of "an agreement that they both can live with." All the same, they insisted, Jerusalem in Obama’s eyes must be the capital of Israel.

June 13

The delirium in the press at Tim Russert’s  passing has been strange. As a broadcaster he was not much better than average, which is saying very little. He could be a sharp questioner, but not when it really counted and when courage was required. He was tough with George Bush in a February interview in 2004. He taxed with him with faking the reasons to attack Iraq. But in the years before the 2003 attack, I used to hear him being merciless with those questioning whether Saddam Hussein had the nukes and bio-weapons alleged by the Bush administration and its conspirators in the press, prominent among them Russert himself.

If Russert had rocked the boat in any serious way he’d have had more enemies.  The right wingers didn’t care for Walter Cronkite, but they had no problem with Russert. Rush Limbaugh nuzzled him respectfully on the air and so did Don Imus. Russert was always there with his watering can to fertilise myths useful to the system.

Russert  spent many years working for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who played the greasiest cards in the political deck, whoring  for the Israel lobby, race-baiting for Nixon. Few were more zealous than Russert in shredding anyone with the temerity to criticize Israel. Obama, now shuffling  Moynihan’s greasy deck  with his  Father’s Day sermon about black responsibility, himself got a dose of Russert’s own race-baiting earlier this year, with a ridiculous volley of questions about Farrakhan and Wright in the Feb 26 debate   Any white telly pundit can make hay with Farrakhan, but when it came to high gasoline prices Russert was meek as a shoeshine boy on his show, lining up the oil execs and tugging his forelock.

The  tv carried live shots of Russert’s coffin. He was lying in state and the mourners could pass by and merely touch the edge of his coffin for a cure, or hope for cure. There’s  been nothing more grotesque since Reagan’s funeral; this, after seven years of craven, culpable journalism across the mainstream board. No one at this point is remembering the reporters at Knight Ridder, who were among the few in the mainstream pre-war to hammer away at the WMD argument. Russert’s colleague-survivors need him as a saint.

June 28

In his always entertaining and instructive column on this site  The Musical Patriot David Yearsley this weekend describes the appalling sunburn inflicted on him by Thomas Mann, for reasons I shall not divulge, except to say Yearsley took Mann with him on holiday.

How many arms has Thomas Mann turned into spaghetti, lugging his vast novels around Europe in the vain hope that on some beach or restful glade the traveller will finally settle accounts with the Joseph Trilogy. When I left Oxford I took my girlfriend Jenny Barnes plus Joseph and his weighty Brothers on a tour of Mallorca. The vehicle was a Lambretta, and Thomas Mann x 3 rode postillion, right behind Jenny, who was right behind me.  I wasn’t used to the Lambretta or to the weight of three hardback vols of T. Mann. I would over-rev, the Lambretta would rise on its rear wheel and fall over backwards on top of Jenny and me and Thomas. One time this happened was right outside the gates of Robert Graves’s house in Deya. I ripped my pants and sat on the Mann vols as Jenny the pants up. Mann tagged along the whole of the trip, but I never got anywhere with him. A very over-rated novelist in my opinion.

July 1

For millions of Americans the political highpoint of 2008 is now behind them. The precise day is forever inscribed in their hearts as one of glorious ratification of one of America’s core freedoms: June 26, when the US Supreme Court for the first time affirmed by a narrow majority of 5-4 the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

The Court’s decision was written by the court’s peppery ultra-conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia who became positively lyrical in his paean to the handgun: “There are many reasons that a  citizen may prefer a handgun for home defense: It is easier  to store in a location that is readily accessible in an emergency; it cannot easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker; it is easier to use for those without the upper-body strength to lift and aim a long gun; it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police.  Whatever the reason, handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.”

Europeans, incredulous at America’s 50 million households holding about 250 million guns usually miss two important points. “Home defense” is a phrase with profound reverberations, as Scalia emphasized strongly in such paragraphs as the one cited above. And the gun lobby has been successful in anchoring their cause in the notion of a basic “freedom”, in an era when Americans correctly feel that freedoms – against unreasonable searches and seizures, or to a speedy trial, – are being relentlessly eroded by Government.

Looking for silver linings the day after the decision, gun controllers pointed to Scalia’s acknowledgment that cities and states can still pass laws denying weapons to the unsuitable, ban them altogether near schools, prohibit bazookas on front lawns and so forth. But in response the exultant gun owners point to the all-important footnote 27 in Scalia’s decision, declaring flatly that laws impinging on the Second Amendment can receive no lower level of review than any other "specific enumerated right" such as free speech, the guarantee against double jeopardy or the right to counsel. June 26 truly did open a new page in American judicial history, as politicians quickly recognized. In contrast to the New York Times’ editors, Barack Obama  prudently endorsed the Court’s decision.

I remain astounded by the tiny number of weapons allegedly seized by the Feds in their recent execution of 29 search warrants in Humboldt county, northern Caifornia, commencing on June 24.

Only thirty firearms seized in SoHum! Mr McGregor probably had better home defense against Peter Rabbit. If that’s all that a passel of alleged cultivators  can muster in Southern Humboldt, heaven help us when the Chinese declare World War Three. They could land at Shelter Cove, and scythe their way through the woods to Garberville with only token resistance from pacifists bunkered down in their plastic greenhouses flourishing watering cans. The red flag would be flapping over Willits by sundown, and San Francisco right down 101 waiting to drop into the hands of the Commie-Capitalists like a ripe plum.

July 19

Bleary Americans – well aware that neither candidate will do anything to improve their material condition –  have nothing much else to brood upon beyond the fact that Obama is half black, has “Hussain” as a middle name, spent formative years in his childhood  in places like Indonesia surrounded by Muslims and is married to an attractive black woman who said earlier this year that she’d been ashamed of America till her husband ran for the presidency.

The New Yorker is creating a stir by running its cover of Obama in ethnic dress bumping fists with Michele sporting an Afro and a gun, with Osama bin Laden’s portrait on the wall behind him and an American flag burning in the grate. Obama says it doesn’t bother him, though it’s a slur on Muslims. Liberals whine that it fans the flames of prejudice. The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, claims to be stunned and upset that satire has been confused with reality. This is the magazine that has never apologized for running a very influential though entirely fake story by Jeffrey Goldberg before the Iraq war claiming seriously that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were bumping firsts, while the American flag burned in the grate. Either Remnick is being disingenuous or he’s really stupid. Anyone familiar with editing material for the internet knows that satire is always taken as literal truth.

August 14

Just shy of the seventh anniversary of the Sep 11, 2001, attacks on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon, a mystery linked to those attacks has burst once again into active life, prompting a hail of speculation about just how far Bush and Cheney were prepared to go in inflaming public fears.

The mystery concerns the envelopes of white powder containing anthrax spores that were mailed out to prominent Americans, starting on September 18. In the post-Sep 11 mailings five died. The crudely written notes accompanying the anthrax spores said “Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is Great.”

Within hours the Bush administration was leaking stories to the effect that analysis of the anthrax in the envelopes disclosed the presence of bentonite and this chemical footprint – so the anonymous sources insisted to their favored outlet, Brian Ross of ABC News  — was characteristic of products from the bio-terror Labs of Saddam Hussein. (Bentonite is widely used in the US in applications ranging from oil drilling to clarifying wine.)
  
ABC’s stories about bentonite-laced anthrax spores were hugely effective in helping prep public sentiment for passage of the Patriot Act, giving the White House dictatorial and thus unconstitutional powers. Longer range, the stories helped justify the attack on Iraq.
  
Those – I count myself among them – who most emphatically do not believe that George Bush and Dick Cheney masterminded the 9/11/2001 attacks on the Trade Towers and Pentagon – have much less difficulty in agreeing with those who suggest the US government played a sinister role in setting up ABC News with its inaccurate reports, acting – as one critic, Glen Greenwald has written, as “fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood.”

Will ABC’s Ross fess up to who fed him the stories? I doubt it. He’s been a useful conduit for  government leaks on matters such as the utility of water-boarding as a vital weapon in the war on terror. He’ll keep his mouth shut, even as public cynicism government and the press, soars. 

August 20

Vacations are dangerous. Ask Barack Obama. He went off to Hawaii for rest and fun and while he was being tossed around in the surf, John McCain – who should by rights be snoozing in a hammock in one of his eight homes – was right there in the trenches fighting the Third World War. Guess who’s jumping in the polls. Obama is still stuck at 45 and McCain is pushing past him, right on the eve of the Democratic convention. Obama’s having nearly as bad a summer as John Kerry did four years ago.

Vacations have cost Georgia dearly too. A friend of mine has business in Georgia. Correction. He may have business in Georgia, but on the phone he didn’t sound too confident. “Georgia’s a disaster,” he said gloomily. “But why did Shaakashvili do a dumb thing like attacking the capital of South Ossetia,” I asked. “Couldn’t he figure that this was exactly what the Russians wanted him to do?”

My friend said the problem was that all the sensible people around Saakashvili had gone off on holiday. It seems that the Georgian president is a man of impulse. He blows his top easily, just like his friend John McCain. The Americans had given his army nice shiny new toys and his generals were eager to use them. One bright morning in early August he started screaming orders to invade, and there was no one around to tell him to cool it. Only the nuts were in the office and they cheered him on.

Saakkashvili also made the mistake of thinking the United States was right behind him.  That’s almost as big a mistake as going on vacation. Ask the ghost of Saddam Hussein. He swore up and down that he only invaded Kuwait at the start of the 1990s after a U.S. envoy in Baghdad gave him the okay. The envoy was called April Glaspie. Many hold the view that it was not entirely unreasonable of Saddam to draw that inference. The record seems to show it.

August 23

“Change” and “hope” are not words one associates with Senator Joe Biden, a man so ripely symbolic of everything that is unchanging hand hopeless about our political system that a computer simulation of the corporate-political paradigm senator in Congress would turn out “Biden” in a nano-second.

The first duty of any senator from Delaware is to do the bidding of the banks and large corporations which use the tiny state as a drop box and legal sanctuary. Biden has never failed his masters in this primary task. Find any bill that sticks it to the ordinary folk on behalf of the Money Power and you’ll likely detect Biden’s hand at work. The bankruptcy act of 2005 was just one sample. In concert with his fellow corporate serf, Senator Tom Carper, Biden blocked all efforts to hinder bankrupt corporations from fleeing from their real locations to the legal sanctuary of Delaware. Since Obama is himself a corporate serf and from day one in the US senate has been attentive to the same masters that employ Biden, the ticket is well balanced, the seesaw with Obama at one end and Biden at the other dead-level on the fulcrum of corporate capital.

Another shining moment in Biden’s progress in the current presidential  term was his conduct in the hearings on Judge Alito’s nomination to the US Supreme Court. From the opening moments of the Judiciary Committee’s sessions in January, 2006,  it became clear that Alito faced no serious opposition. On that first ludicrous morning Senator Pat Leahy sank his head into his hands, shaking it  in unbelieving despair as Biden blathered out a self-serving and inane monologue lasting a full twenty minutes before he even asked Alito one question. In his allotted half hour Biden managed to pose only five questions, all of them ineptly phrased. He did pose two questions about Alito’s membership of a racist society at Princeton, but had already undercut them in his monologue by calling Alito "a man of integrity", not once but twice, and further trivialized the interrogation by reaching under the dais to pull out a Princeton cap and put it on.

In all, Biden rambled for 4,000 words, leaving Alito time only to put together less than 1,000. A Delaware newspaper made deadly fun of him for his awful performance, eliciting the revealing confession from Biden that "I made a mistake. I should have gone straight to my question. I was trying to put him at ease."

Biden is a notorious flapjaw. His vanity deludes him into believing that every word that drops from his mouth is minted in the golden currency of Pericles. Vanity is the most conspicuous characteristic of US Senators en bloc , nourished by deferential  acolytes and often expressed in loutish sexual  advances to staffers, interns and the like.
His “experience” in foreign affairs consists in absolute fidelity to the conventions of cold war liberalism, the efficient elder brother of raffish  “neo-conservatism”. Here again the ticket is well balanced, since Senator Obama has, within a very brief time-frame,  exhibited great fidelity to the same creed.

August 30

Obama’s prime diagnosis of America’s condition is that it’s bitterly divided. This seems wrong to me. America is more united than in any time in my memory. By a vast percentage it despises George Bush, and thinks America has been hijacked by neo-cons and billionaires. The last time America was this united was in the mid-70s, as Nixon fled west to San Clemente. And in the wake of a lost war and accounts of tycoons hauling bags of cash into the Republican National Committee there was a big appetite for real change, swiftly quelled by calls for “bipartisanship”.  Suddenly we had the McNeil-Lehrer Show telling us, night after night, there were two sides to every question.

The Boadicea of the Backwoods

You want drowsy Sarah Palin getting that 3am phone call from the Situation Room, in charming décolleté, her hair down, snuggled under the soft mounds of grizzly pelt? Or you want Joe Biden, still talking even in his sleep? Who would not wish to take off Sarah’s spectacles and liberate those rich, heaped-up tresses? It’s that librarian look so reminiscent of  Laura Bush in happier days, back among the stacks in the Midland Public Library  which I made visited in 2001, mostly to view the crossroads where 17-year Laura broadsided her boyfriend in that so-tragic “accident”. (The  police report says that Laura ran a stop sign in her Chevy and struck the Corvair of 17-year old Michael Douglas. He was thrown from the car and broke his neck. Some accounts have claimed Michael and Laura had been dating. Laura was with a 17-year old girl friend at the time. It was a clear night, with unobstructed views,  shortly after 8 p.m. on Nov. 6, 1963. )

Pundits murmur that McCain has blown the “inexperience” argument against Obama by picking a young Alaskan governor, not so long ago the mayor of Wasila. I don’t think Americans have much patience with that kind of talk. Who needs experience in foreign affairs in the White House, since the major decisions are taken in Jerusalem and relayed through AIPAC? No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robust common sense of an unstained outsider is the best medicine for an ailing polity. Caligula doubtless got big cheers from the plebs when he installed his horse as proconsul.

September 9

There are certitudes about our political situation that were not addressed in Denver or St. Paul.

Indeed, it would take the pen of Swift to depict a scene more ludicrous than the recent Republican convention, featuring thunderous denunciations of big government a few hours before Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson rushed to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the largest nationalization in history, privatizing the profits and nationalizing the losses, sticking the taxpayers with a $300 billion tab.

The directors of these two giant operations had been engaged in the pleasant activity of cooking the books by borrowing at low-interest government rates, selling the repackaged mortgages at a higher-interest markup and then lying about their actual exposures.

Now the Treasury is refloating these two huge casinos and sending them down the river again, so that Wall Street can stay happy and China and the other overseas lenders can be assured that the money they’re lending the United States to finance activities like strafing Afghan children from the air is at least partly secured.

September 13

I don’t think anyone, however charitable, could watch the interviews and conclude that the Alaskan governor is highly qualified to take up the reins of executive power. She’s no Dick Cheney, seasoned in state craft. But I thought at least Palin’s not a waffler. Wrong.  Here she was trimming on issues like choice and man’s supposed contribution to global warming. Next thing you know, she’ll be back-dating Creation to the Miocene and tipping her hat to Al Gore, a creature who in Palin’s previous incarnation, less than three weeks ago (only 3,999 years and 344 days after the Beginning, on her old calendar)  she’d have  been happy to hunt from the air in whatever state-owned helicopters weren’t otherwise engaged in shuttling Piper and the kids to school or home for the weekend.

September  20

Hope walks arm in arm with fear, and so naturally enough Candidate Barack Obama is now reminding us, a la Roosevelt, that we have nothing to fear but fear itself and we must all pull together in a spirit of bipartisanship.  Wrong. We have many identifiable things to be frightened of, starting with a bailout program designed to bail out the thieves running our financial system, and stick middle America with the pricetag – heftier than you can imagine. Why pull together with the licensed thug who just stole your money with the pledge that he would be doing it again to your kids?

October 1

In whatever years remain to him – and the health prognoses for McCain are cloudy at best – McCain should look back at the debate over the $700 billion bailout for Wall Street as the Rubicon he was too scared to cross.  He spurned a huge chance to turn the tables on his all-too-decorous opponent. Instead he flopped around, and finished by making an ass of himself, claiming a vital role in successful passage of the bill, minutes before  House Republicans, with 95 Democrats, voted it down.

McCain should have furiously denounced the bailout. There was no ideological impediment, since the Arizona senator has no firm convictions beyond the precepts of his bankrollers – which can be quickly summed up as: less taxes for the rich. Everything else, the thundering about earmarks, the calls for an abolition of “cost plus” in defense contracting (actually, a truly radical proposition if McCain believed a word of it), is hot air.

A McCain “No” to bailout would have put Obama in a difficult position, exposing the timidity of his own posture, and leaving him with the options of continuing as  Wall Street’s errand boy, his  role to date, or if he tried to outflank McCain from the left, as a wild-eyed radical.

But McCain’s nerve failed him, and he declared himself to be Wall Street’s errand boy too, same as Obama.  In the opening exchanges of the debate even the sedate Jim Lehrer became impatient as McCain and Obama fled the all important matter of the economic crisis and the proposed bailout and retreated into campaign boilerplate about earmarks and tax cuts.  Sacrifices? It should not have been hard for Obama to say, right up front in stentorian tones, “You ask, Senator McCain, what I propose to cut in this hour of crisis. John, I propose to cut the war in Iraq. Here’s what it has cost to date…”

The first function of any presidential debate is to demonstrate to the Big Money that both candidates are “safe”, first  on the matter of keeping the rich secure from worry. The second function is to assure all relevant lobbies that they are ready and willing to blow up the world if American “security” requires it.

In the requisite demonstrations Obama and McCain sang in unison. They are as one with Wall St. They are ready to blow up the planet. Three times Obama said he completely agreed with the elderly crank opposite him. The interactions became progressively more hackneyed and absurd. Obama pledged to “take out” Osama bin Laden. McCain vowed to prevent another Holocaust of the Jews. Obama respectfully agreed with McCain that Putin is a potential problem and that plucky Georgia needs America’s succor. It was nauseating. Most of the world and its problems didn’t feature at all. Latin America? Free trade?

Between the two of them, the candidates affirmed, often in identical terms, almost every lunatic policy position that has doomed George Bush’s presidency and made America an object of derision and loathing among the nations.

Obama is incapable of going for the jugular or even sounding as though he can take a firm stand on anything. This guy’s no leader. He comes across as a trimmer and a wimp.   McCain looks decisive by comparison.  He’s a throat slitter by temperament. He nicked Obama a couple of times, but the Wall Street tycoons went unscarred. At a ripe tactical moment McCain declined the role he affects to love. When the chips are down, he’s no maverick.

Click here to continue.

October 5

“When the waters poured into Atlantis,
the rich men still screamed for their slaves.”

Bertolt Brecht, “Questions from a Worker Who Reads”

The brief mutiny is over. The Democrats, who control Congress, have pushed through the outrageous Paulson swindle, giving an initial $700 billion or so to Wall Street. The Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, lobbied hard for the bankers’ bailout, according to reps and senators receiving his phone calls. Obama voted for the package of course, and so did the vice presidential Democratic nominee, Joe Biden.

I never heard anyone speculate that Obama might, against all the odds, rally to the “No to Bailout” cause. His Yes was pure. He told reporters in Clearwater, Florida last Wednesday that "issues like bankruptcy reform, which are very important to Democrats, is probably something that we shouldn’t try to do in this piece of legislation." In addition, he said that his own proposed economic stimulus program "is not necessarily something that we should have in this package."In the crunch, almost invariably, he does the wrong thing and in my opinion he always will. Just count out the moments of surrender: reauthorize the Patriot Act? Aye, from Obama. The “class action fairness act”, sought by Big Business for years. Aye from Obama. Capping credit card interest rates? No-o-o from Obama. FISA? Aye from Obama. With Robert Rubin at his side, his bailout vote was as sure as that of the harlot of the credit card companies, the six-term senator from Delaware, Joe Biden.

Normally, in these elections, one tries to peer forward into the future, to alert people to impending villainies, still dim in contour. Rare is it to have corrupt servility to the Money Power so brazenly displayed by the Democratic ticket merely a month before the ballot. We have just witnessed a class struggle where, for once, we had a huge popular coalition stretching all the way across the political spectrum. The coalition was there; the anger was there; the timing was perfect. “ The great appear great to us,” James Connolly wrote, “only because we are on our knees. Let us rise.” This time it was Paulson who was on his knees. Could not Obama, at this moment of extraordinary power, have extorted extraordinary concessions from these frantic bankers? He could, but he fled the task. Could not Bernie Sanders have filibustered the bill? Of course not. That would have taken the Vermont blowhard “independent” far beyond his ritual bluster.

Obama’s designated role in these fraught times is to de-fuse, not inspire; to urge the angered crowd to remain calm, and disperse quietly, not to march upon the citadel, pitchforks upraised.

But somehow Obama is not the focus of the liberals’ fury. From many of the pieces pouring into my inbox, I can scarcely deduce that he was even at the scene of the crime. Sparing Obama, the left and the progressives reserve their venom for the Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.

I read more than one piece from these gallant leftists hailing Biden for his fine performance. Biden! This is a man with six full terms of infamy in the US senate. Find a Palestinian kid maimed from a cluster bomb, and you’ll likely read “Greetings from Joe Biden” scrawled on the casing. Find someone crippled from 25 per cent interest charges on credit card debt, and you’ll espy “Best wishes, Joe Biden” scrawled across the front of the bill. He’s a poster boy for all that is foul about the Democratic Party.

October 28

In these last days I’ve been scraping around, trying to muster a single positive reason to encourage a vote for Obama. Please note my accent on the positive, since the candidate himself has couched his appeal in this idiom. Obama invokes change. Yet never has the dead hand of the past had a “reform” candidate so firmly by the windpipe.

Is it possible to confront America’s problems without talking about the arms budget, now entirely out of control? The Pentagon is spending more than at any point since the end of World War II. In “real dollars” – admittedly an optimistic concept these days — the $635 billion appropriated in fiscal 2007 is 5 percent above the previous all-time high, reached in 1952. Depending on how you count them, the Empire has somewhere between 700 and 1,000 overseas bases.

Obama wants to enlarge the armed services by 90,000. He pledges to escalate the US war in Afghanistan; to attack Pakistan’s sovereign territory if it obstructs any unilateral US mission to kill Osama bin Laden; and to wage a war against terror in a hundred countries,

Obama’s liberal defenders comfort themselves with the thought that “he had to say that to get elected.” He didn’t. After eight years of Bush, Americans are receptive to reassessing America’s imperial role. Obama has shunned this opportunity. If elected he will be prisoner of his promise that on his watch Afghanistan will not be lost, nor the white man’s burden shirked.

After eight years of unrelenting assault on constitutional liberties by Bush and Cheney, public and judicial enthusiasm for tyranny has waned. Obama has preferred to stand with Bush and Cheney. In February, seeking a liberal profile in the primaries, Obama stood against warrantless wiretapping. His support for liberty did not survive its second trimester; he aborted it with a vote for warrantless wiretapping. The man who voted to reaffirm the awful Patriot Act declared that “the ability to monitor and track individuals who want to attack the United States is a vital counterterrorism tool.”

As a political organizer of his own advancement, Obama is a wonder. But I have yet to identify a single uplifting intention to which he has remained constant if it has presented the slightest risk to his advancement. Summoning all the optimism at my disposal, I suppose we could say he has not yet had occasion to offend two important constituencies and adjust his relatively decent stances on immigration and labor-law reform. Public funding of his campaign? A commitment made becomes a commitment betrayed, just as on warrantless eavesdropping. His campaign treasury is now a vast hogswallow that, if it had been amassed by a Republican, would be the topic of thunderous liberal complaint.

In substantive terms Obama’s run has been the negation of almost every decent progressive principle, a negation achieved with scarcely a bleat of protest from the progressives seeking to hold him to account. The Michael Moores stay silent. Abroad, Obama stands for imperial renaissance. He has groveled before the Israel lobby and pandered to the sourest reflexes of the cold war era. At home he has crooked the knee to bankers and Wall Street, to the oil companies, the coal companies, the nuclear lobby, the big agricultural combines. He is even more popular with Pentagon contractors than McCain, and has been the most popular of the candidates with K Street lobbyists. He has been fearless in offending progressives, constant in appeasing the powerful.

So no, this is not an exciting or liberating moment in America’s politics such as was possible after the Bush years. If you want a memento of what could be exciting, I suggest you go to the website of the Nader-Gonzalez campaign and read its platform, particularly on popular participation and initiative. Or read the portions of Libertarian Bob Barr’s platform on foreign policy and constitutional rights. The standard these days for what the left finds tolerable is awfully low. The more the left holds its tongue, the lower the standard will go.

October 30

For Republicans and the right wing generally, the first alarm bells rang two years ago, in November, 2006, when the Democrats recaptured Congress. To use the imagery of a familiar disaster, that was when an iceberg sliced through the front portion of the Titanic’s hull. Even so, there was no great alarm on the upper deck and in the first class compartments. The smart money at that time decreed that after the hiccup of 2006, Rudy Giuliani, the great hero of 9/11, would carry the Republican ticket home this year.

The unpleasant phrase “coming financial crisis” did not disturb the 2006 elections at all , even though the really smart money was already figuring that the prophets of doom had a point and the whole show was due to go off the rails. By early spring of this year political analysts were startled to observe that this same smart money was also heading in an unexpected direction – towards a young, back, inexperienced black Democrat. Wall Street bet on Obama early. The K Street lobbyists in Washington did the same. Big aerospace corporations like General Dynamics threw money his way.

Along with the small contributions Obama was hauling in through the internet, a tidal wave of big contributions poured in and continues to do so. Obama promptly renegued on his agreement with John McCain that they each limit themselves to $80 million in public money. He broke all records with a $150 million haul announced in mid October. Nothing more starkly advertises the Republican disaster in 2008 than the party’s funding crisis. In the battleground state of Florida Obama has been running five advertisements to McCain’s one. On Wednesday night the Democrat scheduled a half-hour infomercial costing $4 million and running on three of the major tv networks.

McCain scarcely has a dollar left in his locker. In senate and congressional races across the country desperate GOP candidates beseech the Republican National Committee for money to buy some air time. Some of them even endorse Obama, as the ultimate way of distancing themselves from what they see as a doomed presidential ticket.

After all the talk about the “Bradley effect” and the half-hidden racist vote, analysts and pollsters are beginning to figure that maybe it’s pretty simple: put an unpopular war and the worst economic news in 75 years in the same pot, and you get the most elemental of all emotions inside a polling booth: the lust for retribution, starting with Bush and Cheney and heading on down a long list. The financial crash has been devastating not just for McCain’s chances, but for the Republican Party

Nervous liberals are perennially terrified that the Brownshirts will soon be marching down Main Street. Now they worry that economic depression will spark to life a right-wing populist counter-attack, headed by Sarah Palin who is already cutting herself loose from McCain and setting herself up as the Jeanne d’Arc of Republican Renaissance in the next four years.

On her current form, she’s not up to it. She’s just not smart enough to get beyond canned one-liners to the rubes. And how much of a constituency will she really have, beyond the born-agains? In the late 1960s Nixon’s speech writers had the easier task of delighting a solidly confident blue collar constituency, many of them with good union jobs, with their sallies against pointyhead professors , liberal judges and unwashed hippy scum. That constituency is long gone, along with the jobs.

When the Republicans have pulled themselves together they’ll muster up some new demagogue of the right, to run a right-wing populist campaign of the sort Palin has been too dumb to mount.

November 4

“I don’t know what more we could have done to win this election,” John McCain said in his concession speech in the Biltmore hotel in Phoenix. Actually there was a lot he could have done. He ran an awful campaign. Obama is now enveloped in an aura of inevitability, but let us raise a toast to that vital ingredient, luck. Never was there a luckier man in the timing of economic collapse, the ultimate October surprise.

It could have been different. At the end of August, the gods seemed to be smiling on McCain. Hurricane Ike kept Bush and Cheney out of the Convention in St Paul. Palin’s surprise nomination nullified Obama’s bounce and seemed to invigorate McCain. Then the economic crisis intensified. At this fraught moment, with Obama keeping a cautious profile, McCain could have seized the initiative. Even after the stumble about the fundamentals of the economy being sound, the senator could have recouped by saying that he was returning to Washington to lead the opposition to the bailout. McCain could have gone into the first debate attacking Obama for his support of the bailout. He could have sent Palin round the country denouncing Wall Street greed and predatory bankers, as she did in her debate with Biden. Unlike McCain, Obama and Biden, Palin had no Wall Street cash showing in her campaign war chest, filled only with virtuous mooseburgers.

Unfortunately for McCain, Palin’s brain wasn’t filled with much useful material either. She helped McCain keep the Christian fundamentalist vote. She helped lose him the vital suburban vote.

With Phil Gramm whispering in his ear and McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis’ lobby shop still on Fanny Mae’s payroll, McCain chickened out. He played a feeble role in Washington and voted meekly for the bailout, and, thereby, threw away the chance to put Obama on the defensive.

This election advertised not only McCain’s stupidity but also the absence of an effective third force in American politics, at a moment when the credibility of both parties and of both major candidates is open to sweeping challenge. Voters were disgusted with the entire system and the direction the country has taken. Disapproval of Bush and of the Democrats running Congress has been at the same high level. Obama and McCain share many positions, starting with the bailout and continuing with endorsement of a belligerent foreign policy from Georgia to Iran, total fealty to Israel and a ramp-up of the doomed Afghan campaign.

Ralph Nader is a man for whom the economic crisis has come as total vindication of everything he has been proclaiming for decades about the corruption of Wall Street, the ties between Wall Street and Congress, the economic sellouts of Clinton time, from free trade deals to the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Yet, Nader had no party and hence suffered from hugely diminished political purchase on everything, from volunteers to finance to media presence, at a moment when his message could have resonated hugely with the furious and fearful electorate. The political groups and coalitions that rallied to Nader in 2000 were all shadows of their former selves. Eight years of Bush have pushed the environmental and labor lobbies back into the Democratic Party, where their voices are inaudible and political influence scarcely visible to the naked eye. Obama pounds the drum for nuclear power and hugely toxic coal-to-gas conversion plants and campaigns through the industrial wastelands of the Midwest, while remaining more or less mute on “free” trade.

December 2

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai three Indian officials have already stepped down. Out goes the top federal official, the minister for home affairs, Shivraj Patil. He says he should have done better and popular indignation ratifies his judgment. Since Mumbai is in the state of Maharashtera, the chief Minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, has offered his resignation and his number two, R.R.Patil, has quit. Desmukh says he “accepts moral responsibility”. Remember that Maharashtra, at a hundred million, has a third the population of the United States, so we’re talking about very powerful officials.

Given the ratios of destruction it’s as though Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Governor Pataki, Bush’s National Security Advisor (Condoleezza Rice) and heads of the CIA, NSA, and FBI all quit or at least tendered their resignations on September 12, 2001, which of course none of them did. Like the tribe of Ephraim in the Book of Judges, (12:5-6) which couldn’t pronounce the word “shibboleth”, the tongue and palate of an American politician or bureaucrat simply cannot handle the phrase “moral responsibility”, at least as a condition applying to themselves. Remember that the tribe of Gilead made everyone trying to cross the Jordan after the battle say the word “shibboleth”, and those who couldn’t were put to the sword. The best the Ephraimites could do was “s-s-siboleth”. A good lesson here. Line up the high-ups, and make them say it. “I accept mowal wes-,wes-wes,” and down comes the axe.

It’s hard to stop people rowing ashore and hard to fathom that a well armed man clambering onto the jetty is not part of some spectacular put on by the Indian tourist bureau. . I’ve stood looking down at the spot by the Gateway to India where the gunmen probably stepped ashore. Actually, on that date, March 26, 2005, I’d been warned to expect a personal assault. It was Holi, a day when rowdy fellows pelt you with dye and balloons filled with stones in honor of spring. I wandered out at dawn and soon met people whose faces and clothes were blotched with red and green stains. Probably,last week, right up until the bullets started spraying, tourists and locals thought it was all some masque put on by the Indian tourist bureau.

The brain initially retranslates the unexpected as some minor aberration of normalcy. Look at what happened in February, 2003 in Key West, on the actual day Ashcroft and Riggs announced we’re One Nation Under Orange Alert. Four uniformed fugitives from Cuba’s navy patrol made landfall on the Homeland, passing undetected by southern Florida’s vast flotillas of Coastguard and Navy vessels.

The four tied up their 32-foot fiber-glass cigarette boat (sporting the Cuban flag and containing two AK-47s, 8 loaded magazines and a GPS finder tuned to the coordinates of the US Coastguard station) on the southern shore of Key West, at the Hyatt Resort dock.

Then, clad in their Cuban army fatigues (one had a Chinese made handgun strapped to his hip) they wondered about, marveling at the serene emptiness of the evening streets, (so unlike bustling Havana, their leader said later) looking for a police station where they could turn themselves in. Had they been Terrorists there were plenty of rewarding targets within a strolling distance, including a major surveillance center for the Caribbean and Latin America, run by US Southern Command, also a US Navy base, plus of course Key West’s extensive literary colony. The Cubans could have wiped out half the authors on the New York Times’s bestseller list with a single salvo. You can bet the head of the Coastguard, not to mention the head of Southern Command, wouldn’t have been able to say “mo..mo.. mowal…”

December 3

A month after he won the White House Barack Obama is drawing a chorus of approval from conservatives who spent most of this year denouncing him as a man of the extreme left. “Reassuring”, says Bush’s master-strategist, Karl Rove, of Obama’s cabinet selections. In Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, mouthpiece of the neocons, Michael Goldfarb, reviewed Obama’s appointments and declared happily that he sees “nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush in his second term."

But on the liberal-left end of the spectrum, where Obama kindled extraordinary levels of enthusiasm throughout his campaign, the mood is sour. “How… to explain that not a single top member of Obama’s foreign policy/national security team opposed the war?” Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, asked last Monday. She went on, “For Obama, who’s said he wants to be challenged by his advisors, wouldn’t it have made sense to include at least one person on the foreign policy/national security team who would challenge him with some new and fresh thinking about security in the 21st century?”

More mouldy cabbages are being hurled at Obama’s picks at the Pentagon, starting with the familiar visage of Robert Gates, already in occupation of the top job, having been put there by George Bush Jr, to replace Donald Rumsfeld. Winslow Wheeler, for many years a senor Republican staffer in Congress, has a solid reputation as one of the best-informed of all the observers of that vast sink hole of fraud and waste, the US Defense Department.

During Gates’ tenure, Wheeler complains, “things have only gotten worse. What about Obama’s Nayional Security Advisor, former US Marine General Jim Jones? “He is a man of great stature, physically and figuratively, in Washington,” Wheeler says tartly. “He is a Washington ‘heavy’ but if you look at his record, nothing much ever happened. Things went south in Afghanistan pretty rapidly when he was supreme commander of all Nato forces in Afghanistan. When he was Commandant of the Marine Corps, a lot of the marines’ overpriced underperforming hardware programs were endorsed and continued happily along. He seems to have been mostly a placeholder when he had these very senior and important positions.”

One striking feature of these complaints is that if the complainers had their suspicions about Obama during the campaign, they kept their mouths firmly shut. Across eight presidential campaigns, since Jimmy Carter’s successful run in 1976, I’ve never seen such collective determination by the liberal left to think only positive thoughts about a Democratic candidate. Indeed, some of the present fury may stem from a certain embarrassment at their own political naivety. In fairness to Obama, beyond the vaguely radical afflatus of his campaign rhetoric about “change”, Obama never concealed his true political stance, which is of the center-right. In every sense of the phrase, he can say to his left critics, “I told you so.” And indeed he did.

December 17

Call any Jewish friend across the few days and the degrees of separation from someone financially devastated by Bernie Madoff are often only one or two. One rich Jewish friend in New York volunteers that because of some intricate family dispute his own money hadn’t been parked at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. On the other hand his uncle had woken up the morning after Madoff’s arrest to discover that the $40 million he’d entrusted to Bernie was gone forever, along with the multi-million pension fund of his workforce, which he’d also entrusted to Madoff.

It’s not just ruined heiresses in the Palm Beach Country Club now faced with the prospect of dividing the contents of the Whiskas can into two equal portions for mistress and cat, it’s academics on Ivy League campuses, doctors in Santa Monica, rich people from Boston to San Francisco to the West Side of Los Angeles finding their retirement nest eggs or charitable trusts wiped out overnight.

In terms of financial and psychological impact, Bernard Maddow’s $50 billion heist certainly ranks as a major ethnic cleansing here in America, a hugely traumatic event for American Jewry. Of course Madoff had clients of every creed and nation, but he made a specialty of trolling for Jewish money. I asked a Jewish woman I know here in California if any in her circle had taken a hit. She looked at me tremulously, shaking her head, on the edge of tears. Though no one was in immediate earshot, she whispered, “They kept telling me to put my money with Madoff. At that time the entry level was $250,000. I dodged the bullet. Some of my friends didn’t. They’ve lost everything. This is Kristallnacht Two.” Her fear and horror would scarcely have been diminished if she’d heard what a perfectly nice young person had remarked to me earlier, apropos the Madoff affair: “Now the rich people will know what it’s like.” On the larger canvas, what exactly separates Madoff’s operation from those of the banks rewarded for their shady follies by a $700 billion bailout? Just like Madoff, the banks finally had to admit that all their public financial statements were false, that the supposed assets were worthless. The operating assumption of the Ponzi scheme is that the tide will always rise, that old investors can be repaid by the infusions ponied up by the fresh recruits. For the past twenty years the entire American economy has become—to quote Bernie’s succinct résumé of his business to his sons —“a giant Ponzi scheme,”.

Uncle Sam is the biggest Ponzi operator of all, with the added magical power denied Madoff (unless forgery was among his talents) of being able to print money at will. CounterPunch tip of the week. Wheelbarrow stocks. Buy ‘em while the price is right. Soon Americans will be needing wheelbarrows to put the money in to go shopping. A vast new wheelbarrow industry could be part of Obama’s recovery plan. Collapsible wheelbarrows for the soccer moms to get in the back of the Volvo. Electric-powered wheelbarrows. Hybrid wheelbarrows from GM. Gold-plated wheelbarrows from the Defense sector.

ALEXANDER COCKBURN can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Hope is the fuel. Hope the feds will bail you out of your foreclosure, hope you’ll get a job, hope you don’t get sick and go bankrupt, hope your money manager didn’t give your trust fund to Mr Madoff. Bury 2008 and write its epitaph, "I question why I never questioned it. I believed it; it was an incredible, hope-filled story."

This was the forlorn wail of the literary agent who bought the latest fake memoir to have embarrassed the publishing industry – the story of Herman Rosenblat who claims in Angel at the Fence that he met Roma Radzicky, his wife of 50 years when he was a kid in a Nazi German concentration camp. He says a little Polish girl fed him apples through the barbed wire and that they met on a blind date in New York in the Fifties and fell in love.

Funny thing is, Herman WAS in a concentration camp  and he did meet Roma on a blind date in New York. She had been a child in Germany, and had come to the States via Israel. They have been married for 50 years. So theirs is a truly a hope-filled story. But not hope-filled enough in today’s market. Not hope-filled enough for Berkley Books and Oprah. Some time in the 1990s  Herman, a retired tv repairman living in Miami, began to improve on reality, to the the fury of his and also Roma’s family who knew perfectly well what he was up to. He decided he met Roma through the wire of Schlieben, a subcamp of Buchenwald.  Berkley bought his book and Oprah had him on her show, twice. Investigators finally demolished Herman’s fantasy, saying the layout of the camp would have made it impossible for Roma to throw the apple that far. Herman, 79, has fallen back on the hope defense: "I wanted to bring happiness to people. I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world."

Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish studies at Michigan State University, who investigated and exposed Herman and Roma’s fables, told Wyatt Mason of Harpers on the last day of 2008:

“Herman erased his own compelling story. His three older brothers took an oath never to part from him. They fed him in the camp and they lied about his age to protect him. Herman wrote his brothers out and substituted a fantasy tale about meeting a young girl at the fence. Roma, the compliant wife, erased her own compelling story. She was part of a family group from Krosniewice that survived–and few survived from that town–by dint of special cunning, forged documents, and luck. She also reconstructed her family as a family of four when there were five. The third sister, too young, too dark, to pass in hiding as a Polish Catholic, was, sadly, left behind.”

So Herman and Roma decided, in evening of their lives, to repackage their survival as  a love story of the death camps, “the single greatest love story… we’ve ever told on the air" Oprah Winfrey.)

As the late Raul Hilberg, great historian of the Nazi extermination of the European Jews wrote in his often acrid memoir, The Politics of Memory, published in 1996. “If counterfactual stories are frequent enough, kitsch is truly rampant… The philistines in my field are truly everywhere. I am surrounded by the commonplace, platitudes, and clichés….The first German publisher of a small volume, containing my introduction and documents about the railroads [viz. their role in the destruction of the Jews] inserted a poem for which, he said, he had paid good money, describing human beings in freight cars including children whose eyes glowed like coal… . The manipulation of history is a kind of spoilage and kitsch is debasement.”

Israel, Gaza and the U.S.

President-elect Obama is getting whacked by the left for declining comment on Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, but his prudent silence is just as discomfiting to the Israeli government and its allies here, in the United States. They wanted a ringing endorsement of their onslaught. There were also hints in their demeanor on television that Obama’s senior aides like David Axelrod were not overly delighted with Israel’s state propagandists for headlining Obama’s remarks on a visit to Israel in the summer that "If somebody shot rockets at my house where my two daughters were sleeping at night, I’d do everything in my power to stop them.”

On the campaign trail and, indeed, since he reached the U.S. Senate in 2005,  no politician was more sedulous that Barack Obama in ensuring that the Israel lobby here had no cause for disquiet. On arrival in Washington, he instantly selected Joe Lieberman, known informally as the senator from Israel, as his mentor. At the annual conference this last summer of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Obama drew criticism from across a broad political spectrum for his groveling.

“Israel should get whatever it wants and an undivided Jerusalem should be its capital,” Obama assured the American Jewish delegates, many of them influential Democrats from across the U.S. The next day, one of his foreign policy advisors hastily issued a clarification to the effect that Obama believes "Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties" as part of "an agreement that they both can live with." The aide refused to rule out such possibilities as Jerusalem also serving as the capital of a Palestinian state or Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods.

So, is there any evidence that when he sits down in the Oval Office, Obama will try to set a new course? 

It’s certainly true that the minute the new Obama administration made any move, however tentative, deemed “anti-Israel” by the massed legions of the Israel lobby – stretching from vice president Biden’s office, through Obama’s own Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to about 98 per cent of the U.S. Congress, the major newspapers and TV networks, the think tanks in Washington, the big Democratic Party funders – political mayhem would break loose. The White House would see its prime political enterprise, the  economic recovery program, immediately held hostage.

It’s also true that both Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have in the past evinced sympathy for Palestinian aspirations: the former was photographed with his wife Michelle in what was obviously an amiable meeting with the late Edward Said, America’s best known Palestinian, and Hillary Clinton publicly embraced Yasir Arafat. It seems safe to say that, unlike Bush Jr., neither Obama nor Mrs. Clinton have any rootedly ideological or religious commitment to the Zionist cause. Political self-preservation and advancement form  the  leaven in their loyalty to Israel and will remain predominant.

But if the power of the Isrel lobby , here in the U.S.A., is as obstructive   as ever to the formation of any equitable U.S. policy to address Palestinian aspirations the international situation does offer opportunity. Although ruthless and horrifying Israel’s onslaughts on Gaza are evidently an expression of weakness, in a quest for military credibility forced by the imminence of elections in Israel, just as Shimon Peres, in similarly dire straits, launched Operation “Grapes of Wrath” against Lebanon before an election (which his party lost) in 1996. Bombardment, as always, unites the population on the receiving end and rallies it around its political leaders, assuming they don’t run away.

In the end, Israel will stop the bombing and what will it achieve  beyond another exhibition of futile strategy, like the attack on Lebanon in 2006? The last time Israel had an effective military campaign that could be called a victory was 27 years ago, in the 1982 attack on Lebanon. Hamas has been greatly strengthened by the current attack and the status of President Abbas reaffirmed as a spineless collaborator with Israel,;Mubarak likewise; Syria and Turkey alienated from Western designs; Hezbollah and Iran vindicated by the world condemnation of Israel’s barbarous conduct. For months Israel besieged Gaza, starving its civilian inhabitants of essential supplies with no effective international reproach. It’s hard to take dramatic photographs of an empty medicine bottle, but  easy to film a bombed out girl’s dorm or a Palestinian mother weeping over the bodies of her five dead daughters, featured on the front page of the Washington Post this week.

Israel’s current  crop of leaders are second-raters, and conditions ripe for a forceful push from the U.S., assuming that the new administration has the requisite modicum of courage and ingenuity – a very, very long bet, as bitter experience for nearly forty years instructs us.

In the dying moments of his administration, Bill Clinton nearly brokered a deal between Barak government and Arafat. Hilary Clinton certainly knows that the story of Arafat walking away from “the best possible deal” is a myth fostered by Israel and that it was Barak, facing elections who collapsed the deal at the Taba summit. Everybody knows what the contours of a settlement should be. Olmert, on his way out, put it flatly in his famous October interview in Yediot Aharonot:  "We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the essence of which is that we shall actually withdraw from almost all the territories, if not from all the territories … Anyone who wants to keep all the territory of [Jerusalem] will have to put 270,000 Arabs behind fences within sovereign Israel. That won’t work."

In that same interview Olmert said of his previous 30 years as a politician, apropos the Palestinian question, “I was not ready to look into all the depths of reality." Will  Obama and Clinton confront reality? America’s changing and weakening circumstances prompt them to do so. If Obama wants to be judged as anything more than a partisan of the Israel  lobby, he will have to make the attempt. That said, no one who has followed US policy in the Middle East with any attention since the Six Day War in 1967  should discard profound pessimism as the anchor for all assessments.

For those who want to get a taste of Hamas’ outlook, where better to turn than to the interview in our latest newsletter with Hamas’s leader, the Damascus-based Khaled Meshal. Last May CounterPuncher Alya Rea and   yours truly were among a party of Americans sitting down with Meshal and some aides in a house in the suburbs of Damascus. Meshal himself is an alert and humorous man who looks to be in his early 50s, born in a village not far from Ramallah. He was trained as a physicist, has visited the U.S. a number of times and speaks good English.

In  this same bumper edition subscribers get  the definitive rundown from the grerat Indian journalist P.Sainath on a prolonged spasm of terrorism which has probably claimed in total well over 200,000 lives. I refer to the neoliberal onslaught on Indian farmers which drove  some 17,000 farmers to suicide last year alone, many of them not too far from Mumbai. In this instance the sponsors of terror are not to be found in Pakistan but in economics departments in Chicago, Harvard and Yale and the headquarters of the World Bank. 

Talking of academe you’ll also find in the newsletter gratifying testimony to the vile conduct of Harvard Law School during the McCarthy witch-hunts as the School tried to force famed attorney Jonathan Lubell and his twin brother David to Name Names. Finally, in the newsletter There’s an excellent probe by Steve Higgs into the possible environmental causes of autism and a homage by yours truly to the late great English environmental writer Roger Deakin. Subscribe Now!

So let’s turn now to politics as kitsch, and the campaign year just concluded, with hope’s (and Oprah’s) candidate triumphant.

January 1

It’s time to take stock of the landscape.  The American political system, as conditioned by corporate cash, legal obstructions to independent candidacies, the corporate press,  is designed to eliminate any substantive threat to business as usual. In the case of the Democrats, the winnowing process is working well.  Mike Gravel, by far the most vivacious and radical of the party’s candidates on substantive matter of the war and empire, was swiftly  marginalized. I’ve seen very few Gravel buttons.

Dennis Kucinich seemss to have a lock on those Democrats prepared to say true to a hopeless outsider. I don’t understand this loyalty to the Ohio congressman. The point of hopeless outsiders is to give us hope. It’s a dialectical thing. They convince us that their cause is not hopeless, is worth fighting Kucinich gives me no hope. He has barely shouldered his way into single digits.  His signs and buttons and tickers already look as though they’re collectibles on e-bay.

The three major Democratic contenders for the nomination are all unalluring. John Edwards is offering us a populist package, with homilies on fair trade, gaps between rich and poor, corporate greed and so forth. Decent people including many labor organizers are working for him. I don’t believe a word he says. His substantive record on war and empire is bad. He has poor judgement. Why spend $400 to have a hairdo that makes you look like a slick lawyer with a fancy haircut?

Barack Obama?  I can’t remember a single substantive statement he’s made. In terms of political philosophy and pragmatic intention his platform is like the Anglican clergyman’s answer, when asked for his conception of God: an oblong blur. When pressed, Obama’s positions on war and empire are usually very bad.

January 3

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is now fighting for its life after a shattering defeat last night in Iowa at the hands of the black senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. Also on life support is the candidacy of the Mormon Mitt Romney, trounced in Iowa’s Republican caucuses by Mike Huckabee, the folksy and decidedly Christian former governor of Arkansas.

Confounding all expert predictions, the turnout on the Democratic side doubled from 2004 and Obama can fairly claim he was the reason. His vague calls for change held huge allure for Democrats and independents in every age group, except among women over 65 who stayed true to Mrs Clinton.

Obama won in the cities and in rural counties. Among young people Hillary won 11 per cent of college voters. Obama won 60 per cent. Young people simply didn’t care for Hillary. In their cohort, Hillary’s ‘likeability’ scored a desolate 17 per cent.

The parlor wisdom in the press has been that the war in Iraq is no longer an issue. It turned out that the three main issues on voters’ minds were, in descending order, the war, the economy and health care. Obama led in all three.

For the party establishments – Democratic and Republican – it was a bad night, as their favoured candidates went down to severe defeat.

The Clintons’ calculation had been that Obama would never be able to match their fund-raising. Wrong. Obama raised huge sums from small-sum contributors, who can continue their support. A lot of Hillary’s big financial backers have already reached their legal limits.

Mrs Clinton had the big feminist organizations in her corner and a good chunk of organized labor. They didn’t deliver, any more than the Democratic machine supervised by campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe and super-pollster Mark Penn. They thought they could sink Obama withDecember’s slurs about drug use, Islamic heritage and color. The slurs backfired.

On the Republican side Mike Huckabee sank the hopes of Mitt Romney and the Republican establishment in part because of his version of economic populism, far more persuasive than that of the Democrat John Edwards, whose run now seems doomed.

Ron Paul scored 10 per cent, a respectable performance for an anti-war candidate running in a pro-war party. The Iowa results have brightened the landscape by overturning the official apple cart.

January 8

The women of New Hampshire saved her. Hillary Clinton, confounding premature expectations of her political demise, won the Democratic primary by a narrow two per cent, 39-37. The prime reasons for her victory over Barack Obama were a) women and b) the lower profile in New Hampshire of the war in Iraq.

In New Hampshire, Hillary got 47 per cent of the women’s vote, 34 per cent going for Obama. The Clintons learned, how to calibrate an assault on Obama. That was Bill Clinton’s role. His carefully prepared outburst the day before the primary, assailing Obama for lies and malicious slanders on his own character, was an eerie reprise of his furious outbursts during the Lewinsky affair.

As in Jacobean tragedies, the time is coming for the stage hands to haul the dead and dying off the stage. Gone: Fred Thompson (one per cent of the vote in New Hampshire, after an incredible amount of press); Mike Gravel, 396 votes; Dennis Kucinich, 3,800 votes, the same number of UFOs Shirley MacLaine sees on a clear night; Bill Richardson, 12,845 votes, or five per cent.

Giuliani? It doesn’t look good for him. This is the north-east, his quarter of the Homeland.

January 11

On January 10 Moody’s, in concert with the other main bond-rating firm, Standard and Poor’s, gave the United States its top AAA credit rating. The terrorist blackmail threat came in the form of a demand by Moody’s that the US government “reform” Social Security and Medicare. “In the very long term, the rating could come under pressure if reform of Medicare and Social Security is not carried out as these two programs are the largest threats to the long-term financial health of the United States and to the government’s Aaa rating.”

Today, the world’s credit system is strained to bursting point by such financial scams as CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) which are bundles of debt instruments, ranging from junk bonds through subprime mortgages. Moody’s and the other rating agencies have played a crucial role in putting the CDOs together in the first place.

If Moody’s is going to present itself as a major political player presuming to dictate national policy down the barrel of a financial gun, its executives and analysts should be hauled into the star chamber. Let’s have a rendition of these Moody’s executives before a special investigative committee of Congress with full subpoena power. Ask them to explain their own role in causing the financial upheavals afflicting the planet right now, due to the collapse of the housing bubble and its impact on the home mortgage market.

January 21

He’s a smart fellow and so Barack Obama surely knew what was in store for him if he ever looked like taking the Democratic nomination away from Hillary Clinton.

Obama’s charmed life came to an end with his Iowa caucus victory. In New Hampshire, Hillary’s campaign manager Billy Shaheen warmed up voters by reminding them Obama was unelectable because of his past "drug use" as a pot-smoker and a cokehead. Hillary snarled that whereas the black Martin Luther King was a merchant of dreams it took a white president, Lyndon Johnson, to get the Civil Rights bill through Congress. Andrew Cuomo, a prominent New York Democrat, said he was tired of Obama’s "shuck and jive".

Bob Johnson, America’s first black billionaire and a big Hillary supporter, stood next to Hillary on a campaign platform in South Carolina and said the Clintons had been fighting for black justice while young Obama was still "doing something in the neighbourhood" ie doing drugs behind the schoolyard fence.

Racial decorum is paper-thin in America, and already the gloves are halfway off. Obama’s home preacher and spiritual counselor, Jeremiah Wright, told a huge and applauding congregation in his church in Chicago that "some argue that blacks should vote for Clinton because her husband was good to us. That’s not true! He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky."

Now Clinton and Obama are locked in a desperate struggle for the South Carolina vote on January 26.  It won’t be long before the Clinton campaign circulates some of Rev Wright’s sermons linking Zionism with racism. Already they’re trying to link Wright’s church to the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Jackson can predict accurately to Obama what will happen next and those speeches praising Senator Lieberman won’t help.

January 31

McCain’s victory in Florida on Tuesday is a measure of the terrible shape the Republican Party now finds itself in. They have a front-runner that no faction in the party really likes. He’s old, short, bald, with a history of serious skin cancer and a record of psychological instability. He is favor of a war deeply disliked by about 70 per cent of all Americans and has publicly proclaimed that the U.S. may well be in Iraq for a hundred years. With the country is poised on the lip of recession he calls for budget cuts. In Michigan he told distraught auto workers, – many of them “Reagan Democrats”, that their jobs were never coming back. In Florida he said he didn’t know much about economics but that Social Security would have to be fixed – i.e. privatized. Over half the people voting in Florida’s Republican primary were over 60 and the Arizona senator’s blithe endorsement of privatization would have scarcely been encouraging as they read the slumping bottom lines on their private 401K retirement accounts.

February 1

Politics offer many sagas of lowness acting in the service of decent achievement. Richard Nixon was a low character but presided over the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and passage in 1973 of the Endangered Species Act, the single most significant piece of legislation in American environmental history. Bill and Hillary professed noble intentions endlessly. Page upon page in Sally Bedell Smith’s book, For the Love of Politics,  even amidst scandal and impeachment, has them raptly discussing constructive “public policy.” If mere information was the key to political success, the Clintons would have rivaled FDR and Eleanor.

Bill Clinton had “typically had a half-dozen books going at any one time.” His briefing primers “ran more than one hundred pages.” He “liked to devour the Department of Agriculture’s acreage-planted reports.” But the gabfests went round and round in circles because very early in Little Rock, Arkansas, Bill and Hillary had also learned conclusively that a hundred worthy position papers, each a thousand pages long, weigh less in the balance of forces than a single phone call from the CEO of Georgia Pacific or Tyson Chicken or Wal-Mart.

The book echoes with the stunned gasps of astounded friends, long-term political supporters and lovers, as the Clintons’ knives sank between their shoulder blades. The most vivid of Bedell Smith’s pages portray a man operating well beyond the norms of rational or civilized behavior. His Georgetown professor had told him great men could do without sleep, and so he tried to get by on four hours a night. His eyes would glaze in important meetings. Jolted awake, he would abuse his subordinates in endless, profanity-laden tirades.

“Some aides,” Bedell Smith writes, “thought his eruptions were pathological … Years later, Bill explained that he was able to live ‘parallel lives,’ which he described as ‘an external life that takes its natural course and an internal life where the secrets are hidden.’ He traced his identity as a ‘secret keeper’ to his troubled upbringing, when he hid the chaos of his household behind a sunny persona. He had difficulty, he said, ‘letting anyone into the deepest recesses of my internal life. It was dark down there. He admitted that over the years his own anger ‘had grown deeper and stronger.’”

As president, he kept everyone waiting, including a group of elderly concentration camp survivors huddled for two and a half hours in a tent during a rainstorm until they finally left. Terrified of open conflict and desperate for approval, he drove his staff mad by vacillation in reaching any decision, followed by abrupt switches in direction.

February 10

At the end of last week, Ann Coulter, the Saxon Klaxon, announced that if McCain gets the nomination she would not only "vote for" Hillary, she would "campaign for her if it’s McCain” because  Clinton "is more conservative than he is".

On Super Tuesday the dirigible of drivel himself, Rush  Limbaugh, told his vast radio audience: “If I believe the country will suffer with either Hillary, Obama or McCain, I would just as soon the Democrats take the hit rather than a Republican causing the debacle. And I would prefer not to have conservative Republicans in the Congress paralyzed by having to support, out of party loyalty, a Republican president who is not conservative.”

February 14

Hillary Clinton’s biggest mistake was not divorcing Bill in 2001 and then pressing forward into the presidential campaign as Senator Hillary Rodham, He’s a millstone and the campaign thus far has exploded the claim that Bill Clinton is still magic as a vote winner. Many Democratic party regulars have very hard feelings about him. Clinton was not good for the Democratic Party when he was in the White House. As Barack Obama pointed out in a speech in Virginia Beach, “Keep in mind, we had Bill Clinton as president when, in ’94, we lost the House, we lost the Senate, we lost governorships, we lost state houses.”

On top of that Bill Clinton infuriated blacks in South Carolina by mildly race-baiting Obama. Clinton’s little slaps, designed to ghettoize Obama, produced huge black majorities for the purveyor of Change and angered many white liberals too.

Hillary as divorcee would have had real panache, a woman high-stepping into freedom on the ashes of her past, like Eva Peron. As things stand she can’t even offer Obama a deal whereby she’ll accept the vice presidency. Who would want Bill scampering in and out of the Old Executive Office Building, ogling the interns.

But if Hillary’s in bad trouble, the Hillary-haters are in even worse shape. The conservative movement is finished. Rush Limbaugh, is flaming out, like the zeppelin Hindenberg. For years now the liberals have loved to tremble at Limbaugh’s malignant powers. But it turns out Rush couldn’t get a dog-catcher elected. For months he’s urged the dittoheads to rally to a true conservative. He’s worn himself hoarse denouncing McCain as a traitor to the cause. With each daily dose of raillery from Limbaugh McCain’s cause flourished.

The prophets are discredited because their cause has failed. The conservative movement has splintered, victim of lethal saber slashes from the neocons, who plunged the country into an unpopular and hopeless war; from George Bush, who rewarded the conservatives with the No Child Left Behind Act and the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, both of which could have been put forward by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

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March 1

Political race-baiting works in America, because racism is part of the cultural and historical furniture. In 1960, when Barack Obama’s Kenyan father married Stanley Anne Dunham, a white woman who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, 22 states still had laws forbidding interracial marriages. In 1967, an appropriate year since it was the "summer of love", the US Supreme Court voided all "race hygiene" laws, still on the books in 16 states.

In 1988 Al Gore, running in the New York Democratic primary against Michael Dukakis, attacked the Massachusetts governor for supporting lax parole laws that a year earlier had permitted a convicted black murderer called Willie Horton to leave prison on a weekend pass. Horton used the opportunity to rape a woman.

Dukakis prevailed nonetheless and won the nomination. Then in the fall the Republican dirty tricksters began circulating photos of Horton, an identikit of every white’s nightmare about what a black rapist kicking down the front door would look like. The leaflets insinuated that Dukakis and Horton had been pretty much on a first name basis. The race card was effective and was a significant factor in Dukakis’ defeat by George Bush Sr. In 2000 George Bush Jr defeated John McCain in the South Carolina primary with the insinuation that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. (McCain and his second wife, Cindy, had adopted a child from a home in India run by Mother Teresa.)

Here we are in 2008 and the race card has made its inevitable appearance. True to the Willie Horton model, on February 25 someone in the Clinton campaign sent the Drudge website a photo of Obama in Kenya a couple of years ago, wearing a turban and what looks like a bedsheet pretending to be a nurse’s white uniform, though apparently it is Somali ceremonial rig. Obama’s team cried Foul. Maggie Williams, now running Clinton’s campaign, said Obama shouldn’t be a wuss.
Your middle name is Hussein and you run in a US election in 2008? Of course you catch flak. But these are only the early salvos, as the RNC slime squad runs profile groups to help them figure out what it can get away with. Already right-wing columns are pillorying Obama’s mother, an anthropology professor in Hawai’i at the time of her death in the mid-1990s, as a fellow-traveling, crypto commie slut and lover of non-Caucasians.

Obama’s wife Michelle, the candidate’s wife, is being portrayed as several hundred miles to the left of Malcom X, in large part because she said recently that owing to the huge response to her husband’s campaign for hope and change, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country." Cindy McCain has taken to saying that she for one has always been proud of her country. In the last debate Clinton called for Obama to repudiate Louis Farrakhan –a ritual Jesse Jackson knows well. Obama finessed the challenge gracefully, but the Republicans are taking up the theme. Late last week the Clinton campaign was leaking stories about support for Obama from the former Weather Undergound couple, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, both of whom became respectable fixtures in mainstream liberal Chicago years ago. That hasn’t stopped the Republican hit squads from painting Obama as a secret Muslim, channeling bomb plots from Osama–whose photo an NBC studio grip recently put up behind Obama in a news clip.

All the same, the race card is a tricky one to play. A fall face-off between McCain and Obama will target the crucial independent voters, many of whom will be put off by race-baiting. Attitudes have changed, even since the Horton era. A 2007 Gallup survey found more than three out of four Americans approving of marriages between whites and blacks. In 1994 less than half felt that way.

March 3

When I first came to America in 1972 I was astonished to find that the conservative cold warrior William Buckley had a television channel paid for out of public funds and reserved for his exclusive use. This was PBS, which alternated Buckley’s show with "Wall St Week". In an effort at balance PBS offered the left’s point of view in Sesame Street. Buckley’s syndicated column was also featured in Dolly Schiff’s New York Post. I found him mostly unwatchable and unreadable, being 97 per cent predictable and disgusting in all his views, with a style intolerably loaded with affectation — fake English urbanity and pompous usage. He was the sort of writer who could never use the word "punishment" without sticking "condign" in front of it, the better to flaunt his stylistic credentials.

His staple was straight cold-war paeans to the unfettered glories of capital. It was all aimed at college-age conservatives. I doubt the rubes could endure him. Who would, when the alterative was Jimmy Swaggart in full spate?

It’s astonishing to read the funeral paeans from liberals, flush with homages to Beckley’s "urbane civility". Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, issues a warm eulogy in Newsweek. John Nichols echoes these kindly sentiments in The Nation itself. The supposedly left Portside site promptly reprints Nichols. What are these people thinking? All this is evidence of the decay of liberalism. Do they have any memory? Buckley wore urbanity like cheap make-up, badly applied. At the slightest challenge it disappeared and we were left with the hiss and venom of a  reptile. Coulter and the other yahoos descend in part from him. Here’s Buckley confronting the AIDS crisis with an advisory of Nazi lineage: "Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals."
Here are some lines from Buckley’s editorial on "Why The South Must Win" in the National Review in 1957:

"The central question that emerges is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. … So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function."

So, farewell Mr Buckley. How wrong you were. How vile the tyrants and the wars you cheered for.

Footnote: Looking for some trace of a famous Cleaver-Buckley exchange, I did find this passage, in an interview with Cleaver by Henry Louis Gates Jr., , which ironically ran on PBS’s Front Line about a decade ago:

GATES: Was the civil rights movement a success?

CLEAVER: I think it was a success in terms of the goals that it espoused. That was to break down the color barrier in public accommodations, access to the institutions and things like that. But the big failure of the civil rights movement was that it did not have an economic plank because while we got access to schools and to Hot Dog Stands and all that, the burning issue right now is economic freedom and economic justice and economic democracy. The NAACP didn’t touch that. They had no plan for that. When Martin Luther King was turning towards the economic arena in Nashville supporting the strike of the garbage man, he was murdered. I applaud my country for the changes that we have undertaken in these areas of civil rights. But where the big problem still remains is with the economic system. If you would call a meeting today to talk about segregation, wouldn’t nobody come but Louis Farrakhan and David Dukes. But if you call a meeting to talk about the money, it would be standing room only. It wouldn’t all be black because the money is funny for everybody, right. That’s where the rubber hits the road; that’s what we’ve got to deal with.

March 5

The press is blaring tidings of a great Clinton comeback in Ohio and Texas last night, both states in which she had twenty point leads in late February. But in terms of delegates Obama is ahead by what appears to be an insurmountable margin. The only way Hillary Clinton can win the nomination is to savage Obama with calumnies, bloodying him to a point where the Clintons can turn make the case to the super delegates in the convention that in a race against McCain Obama has already been fatally wounded. It’s a course to which the Clinton campaign is now totally committed.

Obama has plenty to be rueful about. He managed the astounding feat of being on the defensive in Ohio about trade, at the hands of a Clinton. The history of the late 1980s and 1990s was the Clintons at the head of the Democratic Leadership Council, arguing that the free trade agreements were essential to America’s future. Ohio, devastated by job flight was treated to the spectacle of the Obama campaign failing on this very issue, because Obama shrank from making the full case against what Clinton did to working people in the 1990s. He could have slaughtered the Clinton record on Hillary’s disastrous effort at health care reform, on the trade agreements, on the welfare bill, on the well- documented fact that the people who did well in the Clinton era were the rich. He was too innately cautious to play the populist card and he paid the price.

March 13

Was there a medium-size right-wing conspiracy to nail Gov. Elot Spitzer, above and beyond  Gov Spitzer’s own diligent efforts in the same cause? It certainly looks like it. It’s clear that the feds started with Spitzer whose wire transfers led them to the Emperors Club, a prostitution business efficiently administered by a young 23-year old Blair Academy grad, Cecil Suwal on behalf of her 62-year old boyfriend, Mark Brener, from the high rise in Cliffside Park, NJ, with fine views of Manhattan.

The official story is that it was Spitzer’s efforts to break down a $10,000 transfer to an account fronting for Emperors Club that alerted clerks at his Manhattan branch of Capital One’s North Fork bank. A similar transaction at another bank where Spitzer had an account also supposedly twitched a red flag.  Banks have to report transactions of $10,000 and up to the Treasury Department. People not wanting to have their bank snitch to the Feds about their transactions routinely keep the sums below the red-light figure, and feds have told the banks to adjust their mandatory snooping to report $8000-plus sums, or sums that add up to $10,000.

Like innumerable other affronts to privacy, this reporting requirement began as a tool in the “war on drugs”, and now is part of the furniture of our lives. All the same, it strains credulity to believe that North Fork’s “suspicious activity report” on a well known and presumably valued client immediately aroused the interest of the IRS employee scrutinizing the hundreds of thousands of SARs churning through his computer in the IRS watchpost in Long Island. The official version has the IRS man noting Spitzer’s name, then passing the information up the food chain to the Justice Department, and the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan.

Instead of the banks being curious on their own, what if the Feds told the banks to report all of Spitzer’s wire transfers to them? It seems likely, and if so, we have here in outline a sting operation which raises another pressing question: who exactly was it who put Spitzer in touch with Emperors Club in the first place?

Spitzer’s role as the sole target in this recruitment of investigative and prosecutorial manpower since July, 2007, is evidenced  by the malicious insertion in the prosecutor’s indictment of a quote from the phone taps about his sexual preferences (reminiscent of Kenneth Starr’s detailed disclosures about the minutiae of physical transactions between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky); also by the fact that once Spitzer’s voice  had been captured on the tap, the FBI shut down the phone surveillance.

It’s hard to root for Spizer with much enthusiasm, beyond mandatory support for anyone facing political ruin and possible criminal charges for having sex with a consenting adult. It was extraordinary to hear the Mann Act, ancient weapon of racist bigotry against blacks, being brandished as a possible sanction against Spitzer for having paid for a prostitute to travel from New York to Washington DC. Spitzer, obviously a stewpot of psychic contradictions, was brimful of prosecutorial zeal himself, against prostitutes, also against convicted sexual offenders. It was Gov. Spitzer who pushed civil commitment into law in March 2007, legalizing possible lifetime incarceration for sex offenders, no matter what their original prison sentences may have been.

But Spitzer also frightened Wall Street, which was a good thing. There were plenty of very powerful financial institutions that craved his downfall and whose employees cheered wildly when that downfall appeared imminent. A little perspective is useful here. We are now well advanced in a campaign year where the prime candidates, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton and John McCain have successfully avoided all substantive comment, let alone prposals for tough legal sanctions against Wall St firms for their subprime frauds.

A lawsuit filed by the NAACP on March 7, makes for instructive reading in this regard. The suit seeks to fast track the NAACP’s  federal class action lawsuit against Washington Mutual, Citi, GMAC and 15 other mortgage firms who systematically steered African American borrowers into predatory loans. The suit cites a 2008 study by United for a Fair Economy estimating losses of between $164 billion and $213 billion for subprime loans taken by people of color during the past eight years. This is thought to be "the greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern US history."

Major Wall Street operators created the housing bubble, fixed the system of bogus AAA ratings, kept the debt off their balance sheets  and prevented pricing transparency. As with  the .com NASDAQ bubble of  nearly a decade, there are perpetrators who should be facing criminal sanctions.  Wall Street has nothing to fear for its subprime frauds from the SEC.  But New York State does have the Martin Act, the most powerful criminal enforcement weapon in the country and one used to great effect by attorney general Spitzer. In January there were news stories about Attorney General Andrew Cuomo using Martin to go after the subprime corporate miscreants. Such an onslaught, with the backing of Gov Spitzer, was undoubtedly making Wall St nervous. Now Spitzer has gone. Wall Street has nothing to fear from Clinton, or from Obama who candidacy floats on vast contributions from Wall Street.

American presidential elections are mostly about keeping important issues off the agenda, whether it be US complicity in Israel’s atrocious crimes in Gaza, or the funds voted by Clinton and  Obama for the Iraq war now arriving at its fifth anniversary, or impeachment of a president destroying constitutional protections. Instead we get a sex scandal, freighted as always with hypocrisies far in excess of Spitzer’s own double standards, about which I trust we will one day get a book from Mrs Silda Wall Spitzer. 

March 26

Suddenly everyone is having a “conversation”. The word has come of age. I see it bowing and scraping on the opinion pages and tv talk shows three or four times a day. Its formulaic sidekick is the equally irksome “if you will”, beloved of Wolf Blitzer, John King and the other tv anchors and correspondents. “If you will” is something between a sheep-like cough and a verbal tailwag, a signifier of decorum, itself a prime ingredient of the “national conversation”.

Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia about race  stuck pretty carefully to the unwritten rules of a national conversation, in marked contrast to the sermons of the Rev. Josiah Wright whose stimulating rhetoric has caused such extraordinary  affront –- if you will — to the conversing classes.

With Wright, Obama began by excluding him from the national conversation:

“…the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”

A “perceived injustice” isn’t really an injustice at all. It’s a figment –- if you will – of the paranoid black imagination. Israel is stalwart and the perceived horror – if you will –  of its siege of Gaza is not even to be mentioned, as against the perversities of Islam.  Then comes anathema, as pronounced by any conversationalist, divisiveness: … “Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems…”
Our tragedy is that we have three neoliberals left in the presidential race, at a time when neoliberalism has collapsed and life-giving divisiveness top of the Wanted list. I suppose, out of the three of them, I prefer Obama. McCain is an idiot and HRC wants Volcker, Rubin and Greenspan to lead a “high-level emergency working group” to recommend ways to restructure at-risk mortgages to help avert more foreclosures.

April 1

I flew home from London to San Francisco from Heathrow’s new Terminal 5, inhabited solely by British Airways. I flew on March 27, the day it opened. As the world now knows, this was a day of epic British humiliation. For weeks the British newspapers and television channels had been vaunting the marvels of T5: miles of baggage conveyors rushing luggage swiftly from check-in point through entrails of steel to airplane hold; the gospel of efficiency bodied forth in this new temple of modernism.

The trouble is that the British just aren’t very good at this kind of thing. In the case of T5 the planners had forgotten to create parking spaces for the baggage handlers. When the handlers finally got to the doors of T5 their security passes didn’t work. The few that managed to get through didn’t know where their work stations were. The baggage handling software had already failed. My two bags which I had complacently supposed were being whirled at tremendous speed to the Boeing 747 at Gate 38 in Terminal B had in fact joined a vast logjam in the center of the baggage maze. Everything came to a standstill.

But upstairs chaos was not yet apparent. BA’s greeters, soon to be the objects of vilification and physical threat, smiled sweetly. Since T5′s policy is not to have strident loudspeakers, there were no quacks of warning or alarm from the loudspeakers. It was 11.35am. I went off to Terminal B on a little railway, the sort that was cutting edge at SeaTac in the 1970s when optimists were writing about impending conversion of the war economy to the "social industrial complex". There was almost no one in Terminal B. At Gate 38 I was the only person. No other travelers, no BA staff, just the quiet bulk of a 747 at the boarding port. Gradually the passengers mustered. In a movie this is where we would meet our characters: the noisy fellow who would panic and elbow the old lady; the lovers holding hands as they plummeted through the depressurized door; the unassuming Californi-based journalist, co-editor of a radical website and newsletter who in the end takes control of the 747 and brings it safely down.

By 4 pm we were boarded, wedged into seats so tightly crammed that when I dropped my book, there was no way to maneuver mybody to get a hand under the seat. There was the familiar wait for the tractor to haul the plane out to the runway; the familiar inaudible drone from the Captain. By six pm were in the air. We flew over southern Greenland. I was disappointed to see no signs of farming, amid newly benign conditions. We flew over Hudson’s Bay. There seemed to be plenty of ice. We flew over Tahoe. We were four hours late. No bags for most of us of course.

April 4

LARRY KING: The USS Jimmy Carter is being constructed. It will be the newest submarine in the fleet.

CARTER: And the fastest and quietest ship in the world.

KING: Now that has got to be…

CARTER: I’m very flattered.

KING: I know Mr. former president, there’s a lot of things to be proud of, but that’s got to be kooky.

CARTER: Kooky?

KING: I mean, kind of like kooky. You’re going to go and slam the champagne against it. It’s your sub.

CARTER: My wife will christen the submarine.

KING: Permission to board the Carter, right? They’re going to say that.

CARTER: Absolutely. You’ll be welcome, by the way.

Sums it all up, doesn’t it? Here we have an absolute disconnect between the rational human who has criticized Israel for its apartheid policies and the lunatic reveling in having his name painted on a lethal machine that could kill hundreds of thousands of people with a single detonation.

In the old days I would have ended with a pious paragraph or two about the pressing need to end the arms race. Not any more.  We’ll never stuff that genie back in the bottle. Every country should have a couple of nuclear missiles and, if they really want one, a nuclear sub.  You can get the sub from the Germans and put the missiles out for bid.

April 18

These past few months have been agreeably bad for Bill Clinton, disclosing him as a a corrupt lobbyist for top-tier scum, including Uribe’s blood-sodden gang of butchers in Colombia. His capacity for serial lying continues at full stretch.  Furthermore, he cannot stop opening his mouth, each time dropping his wife another couple of feet through the trapdoor of public disesteem.

Example; single-handedly, a week or so ago, he managed to reignite Hillary’s  Bosnian disaster, where she converted a pleasant outing into an anecdote of courage under fire unexampled since Audie Murphy took on a German battalion single-handed. Bill said that Hillary came up with this fictional packet because it was late in a long day and she was kind of tired and not thinking straight. So, what happens four hours later when that 3am phone call comes?

The bouncy charmer of January is now disclosed as a predatory lobbyist demanding outlandish sums for services rendered to an unalluring collection of patrons. The rewards are large. To take one example, committed to the Clinton Foundation is $131 million from Canadian mining czar Frank Giustra. Clinton flew to Kazakhstan with him to hunker down with Kazakh tyrant  Nursultan Nazarbayev, who leased Giustra valuable uranium mining rights.

One of Bill’s assets twenty years ago is that he looked so boyish – so unlike a fleshy southern pol , marinated in dirty money. It’s not the way he seems now. He looks like a sleazeball. His low character has caught up with him yet again.

April 23

A friend of mine who’s a librarian was recently reviewing job applicants. Asked his qualifications in library skills, one man  put “machine-gunner”. He was a vet who’d served in Fallujah. The library is in a state school which, last fall, had 650 such vets enrolled. The young man got the job, but soon became irked by what he saw as the trivial preoccupations of his colleagues and applied a job at a nearby police department. All over the country police departments are advertising for Iraqi vets. Three quarters of the way through the hiring process, the PD signalled to him that things looked good. Then, in rapid succession, three Iraq vets in the area were involved in very violent episodes: two murders and one suicide. The P.D.immediately called the young man in for a second psychological evaluation, then nixed him for the job. He’s 24. He can’t find anything satisfying to do and is thinking of reenlisting. He’s against the war.

Those violent episodes was just part of bringing the war home. It’ll be active on the home front for years to come. Just under one in 3 – 31 per cent – of those who’ve been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from brain injury or major depression and stress disorder or a mix of all these conditions. 

Here’s how the figures add up. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have thus far produced 300,000 psychological casualties, 320,000 brain injury casualties, plus 35,000 (probably understated) officially reported "normal" casualties. This adds up to a total of 655,000 U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, an average of 130,000 Americans killed or wounded every year since the invasion. If the idea of 130,000 casualties for every extra year in  and Afghanistan gets out and infects the voting public, imagine the effect on the currently torpid national debate over leaving in 5 years versus 15 years!

May 3

Every few years New York City cops hear the growl of clear and present danger and subdue the threat with powerful volleys of lead. With Sean Bell, an African-American, in November 2006 the fusillade rose to 50 shots, deemed necessary by the men in blue to lay low Bell outside a nightclub in November 2006.

In Queens last week a judge ruled that the cops who turned young Bell into a sieve on his wedding day had been filled with most understandable apprehension though Bell  turned out to be unarmed. As usual  the cops walk and sometime later the victim’s family may get a settlement from the city. The important thing is that justice is seen not to have been done. Power needs the periodic buttress of irrational, uniformed violence.

The crowds protesting in Queens after Judge Anthony Cooperman let Bells’ killer go free a week ago were orderly, as instructed by an African American. "We’re a nation of laws, so we respect the verdict that came down," Barack Obama , said when asked about the case by reporters in Indiana. "Resorting to violence to express displeasure over a verdict is something that is completely unacceptable and is counterproductive."  

Spoken like a president of the Harvard Law Review, at least in this era! In fact Obama’s white rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, put more juice into her press release: "This tragedy has deeply saddened New Yorkers – and all Americans. My thoughts are with Nicole and her children and the rest of Sean’s family during this difficult time. The court has given its verdict, and now we await the conclusion of a Department of Justice civil rights investigation.”

Obama is now well advanced along the path of reassurance, where  each candidate nearing the White House make clear their fidelity to the standard of irrational violence. As with McCain and Mrs Clinton this year he has affirmed his willingness to wipe out America’s enemies with nuclear bombs and missiles, though he draw some rebukes for saying he was not in favor of nuking the Hindu Kush, thus casting a disquieting flicker of reason across the path of reassurance.

If Obama loses, he will probably ascribe it privately  a mistake he made many years ago, stepping into the Rev Jeremiah Wright’s tumultuous  church in Chicago intead of praying sedately in some dour white Presbyterian chapel in the western suburbs. Obama thought he’d dealt with the Wright problem by a tasteful speech about race in Philadephia in late March in which he said the fiery pastor was anchored in the divisiveness of the past.

Wright came bounding back last weekend, with an unflinching interview with Bill Moyers on tv and a rip-roaring sermon in the National Press Club in Washington. He’s clearly the most powerful public orator in America since Martin Luther King, and as radical as MLK in his toughest moments. People have puzzled about Wright’s timing, which from Obama’s point of view, could not have been worse. I’d bet that there was no plan. In the press club Wrght felt the wind at his back and gave the folks his basic sermon. It’s the way he is and 95 per cent of it makes total sense and is a breath of fresh air, as Wright ushers the Real America onto the stage, as opposed to the political candidates’ flattering fictions.
  
Has Wright really cost Obama the presidency? I doubt it. There are Americans who will never vote for Obama, because he looks like a black man, whether or not his hue is darkened by Wright’s shadow. There are Americans reminded by Wright that whatever Obama may say,  there are still a lot of angry black people. But particularly this week these Americans have seen that Obama isn’t angry and doesn’t want to demand reparations for slavery  and justice for Sean Bell. He and Wright are in opposite corners of the ring. That could help Obama , having a black radical  as well as whites to run against.

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