Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Out now?

This week, as you likely know, President Biden announced the planned withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan, with the last ones leaving sometime before September 11, 2021. Mind you, that is not the anniversary of our invasion of Afghanistan, but rather the 20th anniversary of the attacks that we used as a justification to invade Afghanistan (not to mention the 48th anniversary of the overthrow of Salvador Allende, President of Chile, and the installment of the dictator Augusto Pinochet – another triumph of American foreign policy). As that date is a significant one in the annals of imperialism, I suppose it’s fitting that we should choose it to mark the end our occupation of Afghanistan, assuming we actually go through with it this time. Let us not forget that Trump agreed to pull out by May of this year, and that the Biden team backed away from that. So … we’ll see.

I (and I’m sure, you as well) have heard many, many voices over the past few days warning of the dark consequences that may result from this decision, as qualified and attenuated as it may turn out to be. (For instance, will contractors be removed? Will overflights and drone sorties continue?) There is a cadre of politicians – mostly those who coalesced around John McCain back in the day – who suggest that our best way forward would be to stay in that country permanently. They point to Germany, Japan, and Korea as examples of what positive effects such an endless presence may have. It’s no accident that the chief proponents of this “strategy” tend to be either veterans or people with strong military connections, because they claim some standing on the issue. It’s just that these are all really bad examples. While there’s been a standoff of sorts in Korea for 70 years, we haven’t been engaged in combat in Germany or Japan or, really, Korea the whole time our military has been ensconced in those countries. Afghanistan, on the other hand, has been an active war zone for forty years and more.

Just to be clear – I’m not saying we should wash our hands of Afghanistan altogether. God, no. We owe the Afghans big-time. We owe them for stoking the Mujahideen rebellion in the seventies, years before the Soviet invasion, a policy that led to a grinding war of attrition through the 80s and into the 90s. We owe them for having funded and facilitated that long war, helping the Saudis bankroll the rise of the precursors of the Taliban and Al Qaida, which is a curse that the Afghans suffered from far more than we have . We owe them for attacking their country in 2001, throwing them into another two decades of war, making common cause with their most rapacious warlords, and costing them another 150,000 lives. We owe them for dropping a lot of bank on some of the most corrupt elements in the country, further entrenching oligarchic power and further distorting their society with corruption and neocolonialism.

Suffice to say, it’s time we left Afghanistan for good. And then maybe make an extra effort to help them overcome the problems that we played a key role in causing.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

For the squad.

I want to preface this post with a simple confession: I’m old. And yes, I am a baby boomer, albeit a late-stage one, so feel free to issue the usual “Okay, boomer” eye-rolls, I totally get it – my generation has had plenty of opportunity to get things right, and we totally blew it. So let me simply say that, as with most of my content, I am speaking for myself, not my fuck-up generation, a goodly portion of which showed promise early on but whose best potential was not ultimately realized. (In truth, only about a third of boomers were on what might be termed as the political left during their youthful prime, so what potential there may have been was not broadly shared.)

That said, as someone who has been watching Congress since his teens, I can vouch for the fact that we have seen progress over the past forty years in increasing representation of the left in the House of Representatives. Yes, we have a long way to go before we can hope to move legislation in a more unapologetically radical direction, but for the first time in my longish life, we have a solid caucus of progressive Democrats who actually support a leftist agenda in both legislation and oversight. What’s more, there are opportunities to expand this caucus in the coming years if progressives and leftists in this country organize and engage in coalition-building between movements, regions, and organizations.

Let me be clear. I do not expect Congressmembers to agree with me on every issue. I am pretty far to the left politically, and if I withhold support from candidates until I find one that aligns with me on every issue, I will end up supporting no one. Forty years ago, the closest I could come to a House member that held views similar to mine was Ron Dellums. Shirley Chisholm was good, as well as a handful of others, but there were typically very serious trade-offs, and the overwhelming majority of Congresspeople back then were older white men. In the 90s and 2000s, Barbara Lee (who started as an aide to Dellums and succeeded him in his seat, I believe) was the only serious progressive in the House, and my expectations were pretty low regarding the Democratic caucus at that time. For instance, I was glad when Nancy Pelosi took over leadership of Congressional Democrats after the drubbing they took in the 2002 election, only because she was slightly more progressive than her predecessor in leadership, Dick Gephardt. (Again …. very limited expectations.)

Compare that with today. Now we have the recently-expanded “squad” – AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Presley, Rashida Talib, Jamaal Bowman, and Cory Bush, all of whom are way, way to the left of where Congressional progressives were in the 1990s and 2000s. We’ve got solid progressives like Ro Khanna (whose foreign policy views are as nuanced as I’ve ever heard from a sitting Congressmember), Pramila Jayapal, Mondaire Jones, Katy Porter (best interrogator in the House), Dan Kildee, and elders like Barbara Lee, Raul Grijalva, Mark Pocan, etc. There are others as well, like Jamie Raskin, who have strong progressive tendencies on key issues and could lend support on legislation.

Now, admittedly, there is a broad range of views represented by the folks I named above. But overall, the caucus is further to the left than it has ever been throughout my lifetime. And while there’s much left to do, much further to go, this is like a base camp on the side of this mountain we’re climbing. It’s something we can build on from this point forward, if we work together.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Fire one.

Last Friday, I thought there had been two mass shootings in a single week. Michael Moore’s podcast Rumble set me straight on this. Based on law enforcement’s definition of a mass shooting – four or more victims – there were seven that week. As I said in my last post, this is nuts. We’ve become a nation of people waiting to be shot. For the more than 80 percent of us who do not own firearms of any sort, that’s a pretty nerve-wracking place to be. It’s not like there’s a safe place. Shootings happen in schools, movie theaters, grocery stores, outdoor concerts, restaurants, you name it. Anyplace a gunman can enter, so too can the gun, and like that Chekhovian cliche, if there’s a gun in the first act, you know that someone will be shot by the end of the play. So the operative question is, how do we get the gun out of the first act? If we’re depending on Congress to answer that question, it’s going to be a long play.

I will admit, I thought for certain that Sandy Hook would have been sufficient to put gun control over the edge. A hideous massacre of young school children – that had to be enough to shock the conscience of a nation. Perhaps …. only not this nation. Of course, Obama was president, the House was in Republican hands, and the Senate – while still run by a significant Democratic majority – was tied up in knots by its fealty to the modern version of the filibuster. Even the small-bore gun law they proposed could not make it through, and ultimately it was dropped. Now we live in a post-Heller gun-owners paradise, in which a particularly expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment – one that implies a personal right to gun ownership – rules the day. I have to think that even if we were to get meaningful gun measures through Congress and signed by the president, the reactionary U.S. Supreme Court might well knock them down.

There are some who defend this notion of the Second Amendment. People like Joe Scarborough are fond of saying that the amendment “says what it says” – a kind of shorthand textualist approach. The trouble is, they don’t seem to know what the amendment says. (Scarborough in fact affected to read it from memory on his show last week, and added in a few terms not found in the original.) For one thing, they all seem to ignore the dependent clause at the beginning of the text; the part about the well-regulated militia. If you’re a strict textualist, shouldn’t that, too, be considered sacrosanct? But setting that aside for a moment, the fact is that this is clearly not an unlimited right – we do, in fact, limit our interpretation of the Second Amendment, like we do with every other text. The word “gun” appears nowhere in the document. It uses the term “arms”, which we interpret narrowly as meaning “guns”. I think most people agree that there is no constitutional right to own chemical or nuclear weapons, even though those are “arms”. I suppose a bazooka could be considered a kind of “gun”, and yet we disallow ownership of those under the Second Amendment. (At least, as of now.)

I guess what I’m getting at is that we are all potential victims of semantics. If we could limit our interpretation of “arms” to our Founding Fathers’ use of the term, Americans might have a limited right to own flintlocks and other muzzle-loaders. I think I could live with that kind of originalism. How about you?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.