I’ve been hearing the bleatings of ex-Bush administration officials and other assorted “conservatives” (i.e. statist reactionaries) on the airwaves lamely attempting to reframe the history of the past eight years, now that it is safely past (and fading from the collective memory). You got your Ari Fleischers, your Frank Gaffneys… a whole rogue’s gallery of familiar mugs, bandaging up what is without question the most sorry record in recent presidential history. This would be amazing if we lived in a sane world – as it is, it’s just kind of laughable. Obama (which is to say, we) should be grateful that Bush rid the world of Saddam Hussein. W.t.f. – grateful for what? Saddam wasn’t even a credible threat to Iraqi Kurdistan, let alone the United States. Is the world a better place without him? Not really. Not that Saddam made it any better, but simply because of the fact that it hasn’t gotten any better since his passing. So even by the standards of the classic post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy, this claim doesn’t work. Too many liberals fall into the trap of voicing pavlovian agreement that we are better off without that tin pot Iraqi dictator. I say, demonstrate how, exactly.

Don’t say we’re safer, because we’re not. We’ve destroyed Iraq as a functioning nation, killed about a million of its people, and driven millions more into exile. Aside from the untold (by the mainstream media) misery that has meant for Iraqis, that is a formula for disaster for the rest of us. Now we can expect payback from an entire generation of Iraqis and, more generally, people in the Muslim world who sympathize with their plight. We’ve killed their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, cousins, etc. … and we will certainly hear from them again. So… are Iraqis better off? Decidedly not, after the experience of the last six years – far more deadly and destructive than Saddam’s worst pogroms (many of which were carried out with our support, it bears remembering).

What about the “Bush kept us safe after 9/11” argument? Well… setting aside the fact that the time to keep us safe would have been before the most devastating terror attack on U.S. soil ever, not after, this defense is pretty thin, too. More Americans have died since 9/11 than on that dreadful day, thanks to Bush’s elective wars, so I guess it depends on just who Ari Fleischer means when he says “us”. This claim is mostly based on the specious assumption that the Bush team stopped terrorist attacks, but if they had uncovered any actual operational terror attempts, they certainly would have broadcast their success over and over again, judging by the extent to which they bloviated over those kids from Buffalo who went to Afghanistan, or Jose Padilla who thought about maybe building a bomb, or those guys who fantasized about blowing up the Sears tower. It’s a little hard to swallow that the Bush boys would have kept the lid on actual open-and-shut terror cases they’d foiled when they made so much hay over these lame examples. And, of course, there are many objective measures that place the threat of terror attacks at a much higher level than before the invasion of Iraq.

And the bit about fifty-odd straight months of growth followed by an unprecedented financial meltdown? Well… Madoff could make that claim. Maybe Bush should get 150 years in prison, eh?

luv u,

jp

This week there was a summit on health care reform. Last week was about the president’s big, expensive budget. Through it all, and the concurrent crises unfolding in banking, unemployment, and investments, I keep hearing the specter of socialism raised by nervous acolytes of the imaginary purist free enterprise system we supposedly have now. Nationalize the banks? We can’t go there – that would be socialism! Single payer health coverage? Forget it, comrade – no socialized medicine here in the good old U.S. of A. Even though the Obama administration is nowhere near either of these propositions (alas), it seems as though the prospect of government doing anything remotely useful to the population it’s supposed to serve always brings on this overblown rhetoric about sacrificing our principles, destroying our way of life, etc. Though I hate to use his name (because MSNBC and others have been doing so incessantly for the last week), Rush Limbaugh (that great hulking hippo of hate) represents the rightward bookend of this tendency, calling for the president to fail in his quest to bring about the new International right here in America.

Yeah, well, all I can say is, keep your 4X golf shirt on, fat boy – your golden microphone is safe, trust me. Obama is like Roosevelt in the sense that he is setting himself up to be the man who saved capitalism from itself. FDR did the same. In an era when labor was mobilized and workers had little left to lose, this nation was ripe for the kind of social revolution right wingers still obsess about – the kind that was happening all around the world. It might have been a left-socialist transformation or a fascist one (in times of extreme economic hardship, either can take hold). Roosevelt basically shoveled out the coal dust from the furnace of free enterprise and stoked it with public funds. He helped workers get a stake in the economy through job programs and labor-friendly legislation. He helped give poor and working class older people the promise of some measure of dignity in retirement for the first time ever. Those millions of workers that might have brought about a revolution were able to take an important seat at the table of national economic power. Small wonder they re-elected FDR to office three times.

Economic conservatives and money-bag corporate types, listen: This is what Obama is attempting to do right now, fool! He’s going to save your freaking bacon. Leave us face it – you drove the bus into a ditch, pure and simple, just as surely as your boy Bush crashed and burned on Iraq. This is not the time to complain about how much the tow truck is going to cost. Just sit there, play with your freaking PDAs, and maybe people will forget that you’re the fuckers who got us into this mess in the first place. Personally, I think it’s a mistake to let people off the hook this easily. Our banks may be falling to pieces, but there seems to be an awful lot of rich bankers around still. We should consider relieving them of some of the wealth they garnered over the last 20-30 years, when most of us were losing ground. We should make it a little more uncomfortable for the extremely wealthy, and a little harder to carry their ill-gotten gains someplace more congenial.

But, hell – not to worry. Obama’s going to save your sorry asses, just like FDR did. That’s fine. Just do us all a favor along the way, okay? A little less yap, if you please.

luv u,

jp

See any good speeches this week? In point of fact, I did watch Obama’s all the way through, though I didn’t bother with Jindal’s response, and now I’m kind of sorry, frankly. The excerpts I’ve seen were pretty hilarious. I’m not sure where they were going with that entrance… it just looked strange. In any case, the content was probably the most ridiculous part – an apparently apocryphal story about intervening during Hurricane Katrina to get those rescue boats through all that bureaucratic red tape so they could start saving people. Then there’s the laundry list of wasteful projects in the stimulus plan, like monitoring volcanoes (goodness, what a bad idea… especially from the standpoint of the governor of Louisiana!) and mag-lev trains from “Disneyland” to Las Vegas. Interesting side note – the day after his speech, Governor Jindal reportedly went to Disneyworld. (Apparently it’s all about how you get there.) Pretty goofy shit… but then what do the Republicans have to talk about except taxes, the deficit (something they’ve apparently just determined is a bad thing), and wacky Democrat projects? With Jindal, Palin, Gingrich, and Joe “The Plumber” their headliners, they’re going to need more substance.

There are times when I think Americans, in spite of their news media, will be able to get their minds around the fact that this economic crisis is serious and needs addressing in ways that go beyond merely cutting taxes and interest rates. I’m not certain they grasp the seriousness of some of the other problems we face, not wholly unrelated to economics. The Iraq war is certainly front and center in this category. Through the tireless efforts of politicians, commentators, and news reporters (the kind who pass along lightly altered press releases to their copy editors), we have been given to understand that things are a whole lot better in Iraq now, and that aside from an explosion here and there, it’s really a very normal place. This is pretty sad. It’s like the smoldering remains of a house we burned down – the fire may be out, but the house is still destroyed. Hundreds of thousands have been killed there, millions displaced. This is a severely traumatized society that may never recover, and we can’t simply act as though our work is done there and our “mistakes” can merely be forgotten.

There was a particularly good article on Iraqi refugees in last week’s Nation Magazine. The author talked to families in Jordan and Syria about their experiences, and the stories are pretty universally bad. An example: an Iraqi man who was a member of the Baath party as part of the terms of his employment (it was a requirement for certain kinds of non-security related jobs); at some point he was kidnapped by unknown assailants, held and tortured for many weeks, such that he was partially paralyzed. During that time, gunmen invade his house and killed his 16-year-old son. His 8-year-old daughter’s school was attacked by assailants, who kidnapped her and other girls, assaulted them heinously and left them for dead (she survived, somehow). Then someone burned their house to the ground. Now they live in a one-room apartment in Syria where they have no means, no possessions, no hope, and no wish to ever return. Multiply that story by about a million and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the kind of disaster this war represents.

We need to leave Iraq, probably faster and more completely than Obama wants to. But we also have to address the septic problem of all of these battered people exiled in penury. And we have to start yesterday.

luv u,

jp