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Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Direct from the Democratic National Convention, where I’m blogging alongside Hunter S. Thompson

The ether kicked in about a half hour ago.  Then the lights around here got really bright and hot, and I could swear that I saw Dennis Kucinich turn into a giant gecko.  Weird thing was, though, Kucinich turned out to be hanging with the Ohio delegation way across the hall-- the thing I saw really was a giant gecko.  And then I remembered that I’m not even at the Democratic National Convention in the first place-- I just fell asleep in front of the TV.

Clinton’s speech was a terrific bit of rhetorical reframing (that’s a good thing), and I was astonished at the light touch of the self-referential moments.  Republicans were kinda mean to him, indeed.  And he didn’t go to Vietnam either.  Republicans preserving his tax cut (though he’s worked that angle before).  We don’t need a divided country-- they do.  Kerry has an insatiable curiosity about the world and a willingness to listen to people who disagree with him.  Very nice, very nicely done.  Can’t wait for Barack Obama.

So far, Jesse and Ezra seem to be the most energetic reporters on the scene-- I don’t know how that dynamic duo does it.  But count on Tom Burka to get the story behind the story. . . .

Posted by Michael on 07/27 at 04:25 AM
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Monday, July 26, 2004

Amnesty International on Darfur

Today I’m only posting this (reformatted) letter from William F. Schulz, Amnesty International’s Executive Director-- along with my apologies for not having said anything on the subject earlier.  Please stop by Amnesty’s site and give if you can.

The text of the letter follows:

As you read this, more than two million innocent Sudanese men, women and children face dislocation, disease and starvation. They are victims of unspeakable state-sponsored crimes against humanity and abuse. 

Right now, more than 1.2 million people have been uprooted in the Darfur region of Sudan with over 150,000 refugees living - barely - along the border between Sudan and Chad, their homes, possessions and livelihoods destroyed by government-backed militias.

Amnesty International was the first human rights group to call the world’s attention to the horrific crisis. I call upon all people of compassion to help by making an emergency donation to support our efforts.

You can speed your gift to the front lines by using our secure Web page.

AMNESTY’S EMERGENCY CAMPAIGN

From the beginning, Amnesty has mobilized its credibility, worldwide diplomatic contacts and unique moral force to focus attention on Darfur.  Amnesty has been on the ground in the region four times in the past year and a half - most recently in Chad in May.

Here is what Amnesty has done and will be doing to alleviate the massive suffering and restore law and order:

-- Securing UN Intervention: Amnesty has helped spur UN action. A Security Council resolution is in the drafting stage calling on the Sudanese government to rein in the militias. But we need to go farther. The UN must deploy monitors in sufficient numbers to oversee the protection of refugees. Right now, the Sudanese government is acting with impunity and blatant disregard for the law.

-- Pressuring Secretary of State Powell: The US government considers Sudan a state sponsor of terrorism and has sanctions in place. Amnesty has asked Secretary Powell to demand an immediate cessation of government-sponsored violence, and to continue pressing for UN action.

-- Activating the African Union: Through our long-standing relationships with African leaders and diplomats, Amnesty has been able to help organize their concern about the apparently deliberate slaughter and dislocation of the black African population of Darfur.

-- Involving the Government of Chad: More than 150,000 refugees from the violence are living in desperate conditions. Disease is rampant. Food and water are in acute shortage. Our greatest near-term concern must be for the masses of refugees in camps inside Chad or huddled desperately along the border.

THE SITUATION IS GETTING WORSE

Even worse, in the midst of their desperate struggle to survive, the refugees continue to be attacked. This is particularly true for the women who must foray from the mass of refugees to fetch water or food. Men lie in wait. Rape and other forms of violence have become commonplace leaving these women with horrific physical, emotional and psychological scars.

The disaster in Sudan is growing worse daily now that the rainy season has begun, making roads impassable and increasing the risk of civilian deaths by starvation and water-borne illnesses like malaria. Still, the Sudanese government continues to impede and restrict access to the Darfur region by humanitarian aid groups. This includes repeated requests by Amnesty for visas to allow our monitors to document first-hand a tragedy that is ballooning into a terrible humanitarian catastrophe.

Will you please help? I urge you to make an emergency donation right now.

With your immediate help and continued participation, Amnesty will be better able to sustain what may be a long struggle in Sudan.

Sincerely yours,
William F. Schulz
Executive Director

P.S. Donating online cuts our overhead and helps speed your generous donation to the front lines of the battle for global human rights.

Posted by Michael on 07/26 at 03:23 AM
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Saturday, July 24, 2004

Now, where would he have gotten that idea?

Atrios has a fine, angry post on Richard Cohen’s mea culpa in yesterday’s Washington Post.  Curiously, his very next post is on how the film Shattered Glass turns out to be “a complete apologia for TNR.”

OK, so let’s connect these seemingly unrelated points.  How could a nice, sensible Washington liberal like Cohen get the idea that we had to take out Saddam because of the anthrax attacks?

Cohen says:

Anthrax played a role in my decision to support the Bush administration’s desire to take out Saddam Hussein. I linked him to anthrax, which I linked to Sept. 11. I was not going to stand by and simply wait for another attack—more attacks. I was going to go to the source, Hussein, and get him before he could get us. As time went on, I became more and more questioning, but I had a hard time backing down from my initial whoop and holler for war.

Who might have frightened him so badly that he was willing to support a war-- not on the grounds that its brutal, fascist dictator should be removed for horrific violations of human rights, but on the grounds that its brutal, fascist dictator had hit us with anthrax, or maybe had the capacity to, or maybe just had the desire to?

Why, The New Republic, that’s who. 

Now, let’s give Atrios credit (not that he needs it from this humble blog!) for noting that Richard Cohen was editorializing for war in Iraq as early as November 30, 2001.  But let’s also remember that the doughty editors of TNR had led the charge to Baghdad a month earlier, in their ludicrous October 29 editorial calling us to “weaponize our courage” and take out that anthrax-producing Saddam.  (Weaponize!  get it?  like anthrax!  Saddam has weaponized his anthrax, and so shall we weaponize our courage!)

This isn’t hindsight on my part, folks-- I thought that editorial was ludicrous the day I read it, and I said so in this essay, which I wrote in January 2002.  (Here’s the relevant clip from that essay if you don’t want to read the whole 4000-word thing:  “In his bunker in Baghdad, a shaken Saddam Hussein looks up from his copy of TNR: ‘Nothing would please me more than to fight American armed forces in the daughter of the mother of all battles-- but I cannot face the fearsome senior editors of this weekly magazine.’")

So if there’s any apologizing to be done on the part of people who ginned up that there anthrax hysteria, I’d start with Stephen Glass’s former employers, myself.

Kudos to Cohen for making exactly half this point in his column:

My point is that we were panicked. Yet that panic never gets mentioned. Last month the New Republic published a “special issue” in which a bevy of very good writers wondered whether they had been wrong to support the war in Iraq. Most of them admitted to having erred about this or that detail or in failing to appreciate how badly George Bush would administer the war and the occupation. But none confessed to being seized by the zeitgeist. I read the magazine cover to cover and unless I somehow missed it, the word anthrax never appeared. Imagine! Not once! Not a single one of these writers admitted to panicking over anthrax.

To finish the point Cohen didn’t quite make, go back and look for the word “anthrax” in TNR from, say, September to December 2001.  Don’t worry-- you’ll find it!  But you can’t look online-- for some reason, the magazine’s archives don’t go back that far.  Ask a friendly public librarian for help.

Posted by Michael on 07/24 at 04:12 AM
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Friday, July 23, 2004

Reasons to like Kerry

for those of you still feeling a certain, shall we say, lack of enthusiasm on the eve of the convention.  From Thomas Oliphant in the current issue of American Prospect.  I think Oliphant’s a bit too hopeful on what a President Kerry would do with regard to Israel and Palestine, myself, but check out those lovely wonky details on Kerry’s healthcare and energy plans.

(Notice that in the spirit of Democratic unity, I haven’t taken even one cheeky, freewheeling potshot at Barbara Ehrenreich’s support for Dennis the K.  But talk about enthusiasm exceeding its object. . . .)

Via Nathan Newman, whom I usually introduce to people as “this smart National Lawyers Guild guy a foot or two to my left, who, when he disagrees with me, turns out to be right two-thirds of the time.” Let’s not forget that Nathan predicted we’d be hearing the 2005 State of the Union address from John Kerry-- and he predicted it back in the summer of 2003 or maybe even earlier, back when it looked to most people as if George Bush would be appointed President for Life.

UPDATE:  Sorry about that Oliphant link!  That’s what I get for not checking all the hyperlynx before posting (which I always do, I swear, officer, it was just this once).  It’s fixed now.

Posted by Michael on 07/23 at 05:59 AM
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The September Project

From Seattle, a great idea-- brought to you by David Silver (and co-director Sarah Washburn):  free, public discussions about democracy, all to be held in the nation’s public libraries on September 11 (which, this year, falls on a Saturday).  Libraries across the country are planning performances, exhibits and forums on the state of the nation, and voter registration will accompany all events.

The Seattle Times ran an article on the September Project early last week:

In the midst of the war on terrorism, and in the heat of a presidential campaign, The September Project has a simple goal: Start a national conversation about democracy, citizenship and patriotism. Libraries by the dozen are signing on, from a juvenile hall in California to a private school in Alabama, a countywide library system in Minnesota to a university in Texas.

“People are so eager to talk to someone, anyone, to figure out what’s going on,” said Marsha Iverson of the King County Library System. “And there’s more need than ever for developing understanding and finding solutions, no matter what your political persuasion.”

As the guardians of one of the last public places in America, librarians say they feel a duty to jump-start that discussion.

And as bloggers, stewards of one of the most curious virtual-public places in America, we have a duty to lend a hand to the libraries.  So spread the word, talk to a local librarian, put up a notice on your blog or on your street (unless, of course, your street is privately owned and its owner does not permit the posting of notices of discussions about democracy).  And check out The September Project website to learn more.

Thanks to David Silver for letting me know about this-- and, of course, for coming up with the idea in the first place.

Posted by Michael on 07/23 at 02:17 AM
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Thursday, July 22, 2004

Obligatory followup

Yeah, well, even though I didn’t think Ralph was a particularly good candidate, and (as I’ve said before) didn’t think he would be a remotely plausible President (he’s never held an office, and, as his former associates have repeatedly pointed out, he does not play well with others), I too had my moments of being “excited” by him.  Late in the 2000 race, in (where else?) Madison, Wisconsin, Ralph was interviewed by Chris Matthews, who was a Raider back in the day before he became one of the barking dogs of cable news.  In that interview, conducted on the University of Wisconsin campus, Ralph said a couple of True Things I’d never heard a presidential candidate say in October: that our drug laws are insane, and that (relatedly) it is a travesty that we have two million of our fellow citizens locked up for small-time offenses which the rich not only can get away with in their callow youth, but can get away with in their callow youth and then fib about when they grow up to run for President.  At one point, Matthews asked Ralph about the so-called New Economy, and whether the Internet boom didn’t prove that a less regulated form of capitalism is more productive than those stuffy European forms, where states provide all those costly services and where unions still exist.  Ralph squashed that little neolib thought like a bug, pointing out that the success of the Internet was in fact a perfect example of a piece of infrastructure built by the state.  Thousands of U Wisconsin students and faculty, of course, ate it up.  And watching all this on TV, I had my moments, yes I did, of thinking, “you go, old man, you keep saying those True Things.  Stick it to ‘em.”

Then I snapped to, and said to myself, you know, if this old man had said these True Things in a Democratic primary, then not only would he have pushed the field to the left, as Howard Dean (and unexpectedly, given his record, John Edwards) did this year, but we progressives would have been spared the embarrassment of clustering around that nice liberal-centrist Bill Bradley in 1999 as if he were the second coming of RFK.

But we all know why Ralph wouldn’t run in the primary: the whole premise is that the system itself is broken, so there’s no point even attempting to play within it.  Well, as every savvy progressive and her brother has already pointed out, it’s a shame the New Right didn’t take that holy attitude toward the GOP, isn’t it.  Instead, they worked within it and took it overñ like good radicals, working from the roots up.  (Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? contains a fine account of how the Kansas GOP of Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum became the Kansas GOP of Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts and creationism in just over a decade.)

Very well, so why won’t progressive Naderites do the same thing?  Is it because they’re infantile, self-absorbed, clueless, orñ as one progressive Democrat has suggestedñ college-town yuppies who are insulated from the economic consequences of their actions?

I don’t think so.  I think Ralph’s appeal to his supporters works very much the way the underground music scene worksñ even for supporters who’ve never heard, or heard of, Mission of Burma or the White Stripes or the Fiery Furnaces (whose CD Nick gave me the other night, and is playing as I type, even though it’s not good “background” music).  One key: look back, over the years, at the fury with which Ralph has attacked associates who’ve “sold out” by going to work for federal agencies.  True Naderites love that shit: it’s one of the ways their man marks his territory.  And after all, working in the federal government does involve all manner of corruption and compromise.  It involves money and power and being implicated in some really nasty horse-trading and foul policy-making.  It’s not at all like working for a citizens’ group.  And I’m old enough to remember when the Clash were accused of “selling out” by playing a long stand at Bond’s in Times Square in 1981.  That’s right, they sold out by playing a big club.  As if that made them indistinguishable from REO Speedwagon.  But it was important for certain diehard Clash fans to mark their fandom in that way, by insisting that the Clash were the only band that mattered-- and that they would never do things that other bands did, like, um, play at Bond’s.  (For the record, the Clash picked as their opening acts a bunch of different local, underexposed bands.  And when it turned out that the show was oversold, they agreed to play extra gigs in order to honor all tickets, and wound up playing something like nine or ten shows.  Now, of course, that gig is legendary.  But nonetheless, at the time, I knew people who’d insisted they’d sold out.)

So when establishment Democrats came along in 2000 and told Naderites to get over themselves, to grow up, to tamp down their petty little passions and get acclimated to the real world of corruption and compromise, it didn’t work.  Actually, it had precisely the opposite effect: it confirmed Naderites’ sense that they were in fact messing with the system and sticking it to the man (and I don’t mean to belittle the idea of man-sticking: how many times has this blog wanted to stick it to Lieberman, after all?  And it’s not like I’ve forgotten who propelled the guy into national prominence, either.) Imagine some parental figure breaking into your room in 1988 and taking away all your H¸sker D¸ records and then saying, “very well, if you must listen to your music, hereñ I have some nice Huey Lewis and the News albums for you.  Now put on that sports jacket and grow upñ we’re going to the Dukakis rally, and you have to look presentable.” Woo woo, the Dukakis rally.  Can you feel the excitement?

The establishment-Democrat response is guaranteed to backfire, then, and anyone with any experience in any “alternative” community can tell you why.  What then of what I called the “savvy progressive” response, where people insist on the importance of the Cabinet positions and judicial appointments and regulatory agencies?  Why doesn’t that work either?

Because some Nader fans just aren’t working on that level.  They don’t care much for the prospect of reducing mercury emissions by ten percent (after the mercury ban gets blocked by the House GOP) or issuing new guidelines for the conditions under which repetitive-stress injury will be covered by Worker’s Comp and the ADA.  It’s not about the wonky detailsñ it’s about the fact that neither Gore nor Kerry inspires a bit of enthusiasm or excitement, and the reason they don’t inspire any enthusiasm or excitement is that they’ve spent a lifetime working for Incremental Change, Inc. while accepting campaign contributions from the Moderate Mercury Emissions industry.  Also, they never say anything about the insanity of our drug laws or the structural role of the state in propping up “free” enterprise, because, don’t you know, utterances like these are associated with the (decadent) intellectual leftñ they don’t poll well with swing voters, and might in fact lose 2.4 percent of the independent vote in suburban St. Louis.  Better for a New Democrat to propose school uniforms and a Defense of Marriage Act.

My point is that both establishment Democrats and progressives (myself included) have woefully underestimated the importance of visceral, affective, emotional factors in all this.  When people are profoundly disaffected from the party of Clinton/Gore, and think of it (not without reason) as the party of Dick Morris and David Gergen, you can’t snap them to attention by (a) insisting that Huey Lewis is the only music that responsible grownups listen to or (b) trying to scare them by arguing that George Bush will scorch their earth.

Am I saying that people to the left of the Democrats are irrational?  Not at all.  But I am saying that many of us want more than a New New Democrat white paper to go onñ we actually want to care about the candidate, we want to believe he’s worth our effort, we want to trust that he won’t take our support and use it to cut a deal with Bill Frist sometime next spring, knowing that we have Nowhere Else To Go.

This really isn’t a trivial matterñ and I say this as someone who’s underestimated the role of emotion in politics his entire life.  These days, I look back at some of the prominent Nader intellectuals’ enthusiasm in late 2000 and I’m mystifiedñ they truly believed that they had a mass protest movement on their hands, that they were seeing the groundswell of a decisive break with the plodding corporate Democrats they despised.  Seriously, go back and look at some of that stuff todayñ and I think you’ll wonder, as I did, all this hoohah for a guy who pulled 2.7 percent of the vote-- about one-third of Ross Perotís 8.4 percent in 1996? (Remember, Perot pulled 8.4 percent long after every sensible person had realized that the Weekly World News had it right all alongñ Perot was actually a member of the same species of creature that crash-landed near Roswell in 1947.  Who was still voting for him in 1996?  People like Dennis Miller, that’s who.  Miller was a piece of work long before 9/11, folksñ a passionate Perot man from way back in ‘92, and a fierce defender of good old Admiral James Stockdale.) But for some progressives, especially those of us in universities, it seemed exhilarating at the time: look!  millions of people agree with us! and our guy is on TV, stickin’ it to Chris Matthews! For those of us who are more used to having hundreds, or maybe dozens, of people agree with us, the idea of pulling three million votes for Nader was intoxicating.  Problem was, there were 102 million other voters involved, and that should’ve dampened anyone’s enthusiasm for The Movement.  But it didn’t, which suggests to me that in many respects, the enthusiasm for Nader 2000 significantly exceeded its object.

Democrats need to understand this. Even today, in his Perotian decline, Nader continues to pull three to five percent in polls.  I know it’s a small number, and it may not affect the outcome this time, but think about that: Bush has turned out to be worse than any Nader voter could have imagined; Nader is not running with the Greens; he’s working with far-right lunatics and lying about it; nearly every prominent progressive intellectual has publicly jumped shipñ and his support is still at the level it was four years ago.  As I said yesterday, I think The Nader Factor is doing exactly the right thing, by trying to channel some of that progressive-left passion into useful venues.  I don’t agree that Nader voters have to be “courted”: it’s not like we prolabor progressives have done them some terrible harm and now have to make it up to them.  But if the Democrats can’t figure out how to handle Nader progressives’ legitimate desires to care about the guy at the top of the ticketñ the legitimate desire to desireñ then we’re going to see something very much like a replay of the debacle of 2000.  And even if Kerry wins, can we afford to have three million permanently disaffected progressives, too alienated from the Democrats to care about taking back the party?

Next installment:  don’t ask me what it would take for me to leave the Democrats.  I left ‘em in 1995, to join the New Party, and now I’m back, because the Supreme Court shot down “fusion” ballots on the grounds that the two-party system, like the Terminator, cannot dismantle itself.

Posted by Michael on 07/22 at 04:14 AM
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