Policy & Politics

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McCain's Un-American Activities

          Presidential candidates often paint themselves in shades of gray so they can attract the lowest common denominator eligible to vote. Often, this means obfuscating their positions on controversial subjects.
          Barack Obama, by being a freshman senator who has cam- paigned for president for most of his time in the U.S. Senate, has laid down little national record on which he can be judged.
          John McCain has done and said a lot, and much of it already is being closely examined. Obama has the luxury of pointing fingers at the opposition for taking positions he never had to take. John McCain does not. That situation is somewhat unbalanced, but those are the kinds of conflicts candidates have to face.
          One of these issues already has come home to haunt McCain. He paints a different picture, but the Supreme Court, the majority mem- bers of which were appointed by his own Republican Party, has rejected one of his major positions.
          McCain’s campaign site strangely uses only generalities about his efforts to combat terrorism. This immodesty is uncharacteristic of a presidential candidate, and an examination of the issue and the Su- preme Court’s take on it suggests why that is.
          Three years after the loony U.S. invasion of Iraq, McCain helped author the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which established proce- dures for denying “terrorist” detainees access to federal courts, i.e, the habeas corpus guarantee of the U.S. Constitution, the only right in- cluded in the body of the document (the rest were added as the Bill of Rights amendments). McCain and his Senate colleagues demonstrated no interest in another American standard, that a person is presumed innocent until found guilty in a court of law.
          The usual argument in this case was the United States cannot afford to turn loose a terrorist and give him a chance to act again, so it had to take drastic actions. Under our legal system, judges quite often have been able to either deny bail or set bail so high it cannot be met by those charged with abominable crimes, so that is no argument.
          Despite the fact the deciding vote among 5-4 justices who struck down that law was cast by a justice appointed by Republicans, McCain denounced the decision as one of the worst in history.
          As McCain justifies the law, those being detained in Quantanamo are “enemy combatants,” even before they have been adjudicated by the U.S. court system to be so.
          One of the worst sins of the Bush administration has been the way it has chosen to combat terrorism, by abrogating the privacy rights of ordinary citizens and denying the guarantees of our U.S. Constitution, the finest example of democracy in the world, to citizens and aliens alike.
          If McCain wishes to paint himself as a presidential candidate who would not be a carbon copy of the one still in office, his failure to express a mea culpa for his role in Boumediene v Bush smeared that tint.
          And there is lots more fallout to come in correcting the Bush mess. How McCain responds to those corrections will be telling enough about how he would serve as president.

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          I have been concerned about Kennedy's health for many years. He has been overweight to the point of obesity for more than a decade and barely able to take a breath.
          Quite often, Kennedy was one of several senators participating in a news conference about one thing or another. Invari- ably, he would take his turn at the lectern and then practically waddle over to the nearest seat. That usually meant he took a seat be- side reporters sitting in the front row and several times that put him be- side me. He would fall into the seat with a powerful sigh. He may not have remembered my name, but he recognized me as a regular of many decades, so he'd give me a friendly poke on the leg and as much of a smile he could muster between wheezes. My instinct was to nod and leave him alone as he caught his breath, but I often wondered if he would survive the day.
          Reporters do form personal opinions about the people they cover. Readers never know what are the opinions of good reporters, because those opinions are never reflected in the news story. But we do judge people according to many criteria.
          In the early 70s, most of us correctly judged Kennedy as a light- weight. He gave little effort to being informed on the issues and relied heavily on his staff. His staff usually was the best in Congress because the Kennedy name attracted some of the best legislative and issue prac- titioners. Even then, Kennedy was a liberal, as is the rest of the Kenne- dy clan, yes even the wife of California's celebrity governor.
          But, except for giving speeches, Kennedy was not good at his job. As reporters seeking information, we seek out the person who knows the answers and we hope that is the person in charge, the person holding the office. In Kennedy's case in those years, it was not he, it as a staffer.
          Sitting down for a one-on-one interview with Kennedy or trying to get some substantive comments from him in a hallway or on the run used to be almost fruitless, except to get a quote from the man himself to put in the story. Sitting in his office, he would be surrounded by staff- ers whom he depended on to answer the questions put to him. Rarely would any of us even try to hold an in-depth discussion directly with him on the issues. He did not have a grasp of details. He was shallow.
          He was elected majority whip of the Senate in 1969 (the same year as the Chappaquiddick incident that will dog him to his grave), and he predictably was a failure at the job. The whip job requires a great deal of effort, making sure members of your party not only know how the ma- jority leader wants them to vote, but knowing if the majority has the votes, including any from the minority, to pass an amendment of legisla- tion. He clearly was not up to the job and was kicked  out of it two years later.
          But over the years, we saw him mature and grow into the job. As he moved from subcommittee to committee chairmanships, he became more serious about the job as senator. He appeared to change after the fateful interview with Roger Mudd of CBS when he finally succumbed and entered the race for the Democratic nomination for president in 1979.
          Mudd, one of the few television network reporters who actually worked at the journalistic part of his job, was a jovial sort and not the type to ask a "gotcha question." When he asked Kennedy in a one-on- one special interview why he wanted to be president, it was a softball question to get the interview started and set the stage for substantive questions to follow. Most of us begin an interview that way to soften up the interviewee. The toughest questions are saved until the end of the interview, in case the interviewee turns hostile and refuses to cooperate further.
          Other than running for president just because he was a Kennedy and could do so seriously, Ted Kennedy had no clue why he wanted to be president and stumbled through his answer, looking a lot like the cur- rent president.
          Whereas these days looking like a fool in an interview does not rule you out as a president, in those days it still did. His candidacy was over as quickly as it began. The same year, Kennedy became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee simply because the job went, and still does, to the person who has been on the committee the longest.
          It is not clear whether the shock of coming off shallow in the pres- idential campaign or the huge responsibility in becoming chairman of what was then an almost-critical committee of Congress did the job, but Kennedy began to become a knowledgeable member of the Senate, well-versed in the issues before him and someone a reporter could ques- tion without having to rely on the senator's staffers for informative an- swers.
          Sadly, that maturity began nearly two decades after he was first elected, but his longevity in the office has allowed him to emerge not only as one of the most liberal members of Congress, but one who can safely dare to claim the title "liberal." Lately, it seems the more his fel- low liberals hide behind other labels and waffle on the issues, the more strident he becomes in speaking out for the cause.
          As the mantle of "statesman" is rarely worn in Congress these days, after Kennedy so will those strong enough to admit to being "liberal be rare.

          George W. Bush did a big disfavor to the pope during his re- cent visit to the White House. Bush lifted a thought from a speech the pope gave before he became pope, a speech that had been unknown to just about all but Catholic Church insiders.
          In exposing that speech to the world, Bush showed the pope to be just about as disconnected from the reality of the world as Bush has been. Bush also exposed further and gave a name to one of the huge chinks in his own armor.
          Now, nobody is going to contend Bush came up with a phrase that probably is still beyond his grasp, but he chose to read it aloud and associate himself with it.
          While merely the Cardinal Ratzinger, the pope had said, "We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."
          The part of the Bush speech associating himself with that sen- tence was: "In a world where some no longer believe that we can distinguish between simple right and wrong, we need your mes- sage to reject this 'dictatorship of relativism,' and embrace a cul- ture of justice and truth."
          Pundits are still gagging over Bush's audacity to speak the final clause. But the error the two central characters made was to denounce relativism.
          Simply put, relativism is the belief that what constitute morals and ethics change over time relative to the situations at hand and the time in which man finds himself in evolution. The pope and his church believe, as has been taught since Christianity became a formal religion, i.e., Catholicism, that what is considered right or wrong, moral or im- moral, ethical or unethical, is absolute and never changes, a theory that plays well into a religion based on strict top-down authority. That is the theory, of course, that is at the root of the movement away from the church.
          The pope is the head of that church, so one can understand how he would attempt to retain the absolute authority vested in him by cen- turies of church doctrine, even to the point of terming him "infallible."
          To be generous to Bush, we know he did not and does not really understand what he said or what it meant beyond its usefulness as a catch phrase and an attempt to associate himself with a man much more popular and intellectual than he.
          Relativism stands at the very foundation of the United States of America. The nation was created to throw off the shackles of those would attempt to rule over us with a claim of absolute authority.

          The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution illustrate that sort of tyranny in their own shortcomings. Neither document sought to cast off what were assumed to be absolute truths at the time, but the genius of the documents is the flexibility they provide for being interpreted in the light of the times. They may not know it, but that flexibility is what is behind the right- wing's "constructionist interpretations" of the Constitution and diatribes against "activist" judges and justices.
          One absolute truth at the time of the American revolution, one that held on until the past half century, held that caucasians were natur- ally superior to black people and other "savages." "All men are created equal" not only was never intended to include them, it was not intended to apply to women. And look who the Democratic party's would-be nomi- nees are today.
          The list of changes that interpretations of the Constitution by "ac- tivists justices" have wrought are endless. Much of what we now consid- er moral and ethical is much different than what was considered moral and ethical more than 200 years ago. Is there anyone who would take us back to what was considered moral and ethical at the dawn of Christ- ianity?
          A "strict constructionist" interpretation of the Constitution also would have us believe the president is not commander-in-chief of the U.S. Air Force, because the Constitution lists only the Army, Navy and state militias, i.e., the National Guards in times of national service. And that part of the Constitution has never been amended.

          The pope's reference picked up by Bush's speechwriter was to the "dictatorship of relativism." That is an oxymoron, akin to "compassionate con- servative." It is the claim there is only one truth and that it never changes that is the stuff of dictatorships, not democracies.

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The Unanswered Question

Five Years Later, the Iraq Question Remains: Why?

          After Bush leaves office, we should not expect a revealing auto- biography from him. His speech on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and reassertion of his deci- sion-making infallibility indicate we may never know why he and the Bush F-Team engaged in that lunatic mission. Not even thousands of American lives and a trillion wasted dollars later.
          The U.S. military probably will never rethink its mind-numbing, blinders-on tradition of loyalty to its commander-in-chief (he's their's, not ours) instead of to the American people, the real subjects owed their al- legiance. And it probably will never realize it no longer has the capabil- ity of fighting a war if it has to put boots on the ground. The world has changed and everybody else in the world appears to know that except the U.S. military. We can only fight successfully as we did in Serbia nearly 10 years ago, from thousands of feet in the air. The military should have learned that lesson more than 30 years ago in Vietnam. But then, promotions still flow more freely during a war.

          But the biggest puzzle that probably will re- main unsolved, unless psychiatry gains the ability to analyze from a distance, is why Dick Cheney, the Bush F-Team's architect and tacit leader, is the hateful, nasty character that he is. The answer to that question may provide us with the answer to why we were so hell-bent to invade Iraq.
          In our line of work, we have met several presidents and vice presi- dents, dozens of Cabinet officers, hundreds of senators and thousands of House members, including Cheney when he was there, and are hard put to think of a nastier person in public office. A reporter could under- stand his hatred of the press, as many members of Congress share that feeling. But rarely do any of them take it to the personal level, with a sneer, a snide remark or hateful statement or even an occasional gross insult. Congressman Cheney would simply walk past a reporter and ig- nore him or her with his trademark head-down stride if he thought he had nothing to gain by responding to a question.
          Today's Cheney is far worse. He does not limit his open disdain to reporters any more, if he ever did. Now, according to him, his disdain apparently extends to anyone who disagrees with him.
          Witness this interview with a TV reporter in Oman on the fifth an- niversary of the Bush F-Team escapade. Read it, third page, or view it.
Reporter, lamely: "Two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fight- ing, and they're looking at the value gain versus the cost in Amer- ican lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives."
Cheney, after an uncomfortably long pause: "So?"
Reporter: "So......you don't care what the American people think?"
Cheney: "No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctu- ations in the public-opinion polls."
          And Cheney goes on to equate the determination to stay the course in Iraq with Lincoln's determination during the Civil War, an amazingly ludicrous comparison.

          Well, this Gallup poll graph looks like a fairly steady rise to us, the rise beginning the moment the invasion was launched and "mission accomplished" claimed. But as Cheney says, we, as well as you, don't count.
          Cheney's haughty attitude sums things up quite well, we think.
But why did we plunge into this quagmire in the first place? That is the question of the century so far.
          None of the theories voiced so far rise in importance enough to justify the Bush F-Team's actions. Not oil, not one-upping one's Daddy, not payback for trying to have Daddy assassinated and not a simple- minded democracy crusade that will have just the opposite of the intend- ed effect. The better question is: what was Cheney's motive? 
          Why? Why? Why?

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 Obama and the "Race"
Third of Electoral College Majority Might Say No

          Few pundits we know of are talk- ing much about it yet, and we'd prefer not to either, but even when he is leading in the polls, Barack Obama faces a daunting task.
          The United States has come a long way in giving women and blacks something approaching equality with the ruling white males, but anyone with a realistic bone in his or her body has to acknowledge sexism and racism are still present in our society.
          Women may be able to surmount the prejudice against a woman in the White House by their sheer numbers--a slight majority of the U.S. population, a large majority of the voters.
          But can blacks and a man of their race win a national election today?
          Remember that map of the United States with states colored blue if they voted Democratic and red if they voted Republican? In 1964, the southern states would have been painted a solid blue (except Arizona, home state of the GOP candidate). Now the same states are quadren- nially painted a solid red. What happened? Racism.

          That's right. More than 40 years after the Civil Rights Act that single-handedly changed the South from a swatch of blue to one of red, racism still abounds in the country. Racists and people with biases in that direction tend to vote Republi- can. And southern states vote Republican these days. All of the southern states voted for George W. Bush in the ex- tremely tight 2000 election and have done so since the Democratic party and President Lyndon John- son, an ironic Democratic son of the South, engineered the rights act.
          Yes, Obama won six primaries in southern states--Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and North and South Carolina. But those were Democrats voting, giving Obama 110 delegates, or a greater number than the current spread between him and Clinton.
          Twelve states considered southern or that usually vote with southern states next door, plus Utah, have 171 electoral college votes. That number is just two-thirds of the 270 total needed to elected a presi- dent. In a close race in the fall, automatically losing a third of the major- ity of electoral votes could be disastrous for the Democrats.
          Yes, many Republican women strangely retain a hatred for Clin- ton, but since there are far more women voters than men voters in the United States, that hatred is not likely to be able to swing a sexist bias to an entire state.

          (Utah is important in the calculation because while several south- ern states split away from red to vote for Jimmy Carter of Georgia and/or for Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Utah has been consistently red. The state is overwhelmingly Mormon, a religion that discriminated officially against blacks until 1978. Many members subscribe to the founders' strange idea that brother-killer Cain was black, even though, according to the same Bible that discusses the slaying, only two other people existed on Earth when Cain was born--Adam and Eve.

Choosing Presidents In Iowa
Oprah, Jesus and Joe

          It is about time the two leading political parties consider the silli- ness of allowing a couple of states such as Iowa and New Hampshire to have so much influence over the selection of presidential candidates. On the good side, Iowa, New Hampshire and the early-primary schedulers may have tilled fertile fields for independent candidates in 2008.
          If either state is representative of the rest of the nation, we are a far different country than what we have been led to believe by common knowledge, backed by statistics. And it may be the early influence of these two states that is largely responsible for some of the bad choices for president American voters have been making.

          The Iowa partisan caucuses ac- curately reflected the goofy practice of letting voters in that state determine who will or not be a candidate. The best-qualified candidate, Joe Biden, and a close runner-up, Chris Dodd, withdrew after the caucuses that chose Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee as ther candidates of choice. (Bill Richardson, Democratic winner of our citeria rating sys- tem, withdrew after the New Hampshire primary a week later.)
          The Iowa caucuses had the effect of denying primary voters the chance to vote for Biden or Dodd, while such incredibly weak candi- dates as Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Duncan Hunter, Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich remain in the primaries.
          Now consider this: Biden and Dodd will not have suffered at the hands of primary voters and will have six months to raise money and set themselves up as the best choice if something should happen to their party's nominee during that time. Other candidates also could take ad- vantage of that period to launch an independent challenge against the Democratic and Republican primary nominees having to spend all that time trying to keep prospective voters interested, raising record amounts of contributions and trying to beat down each other with a much longer incubation period for smear campaigns.
          It is dangerous and absolutely insane to choose a president based on the endorsement of a celebrity who knows little or noth- ing about politics, the public issues, even the problems or needs of the common weal. Or the endorsement of any celebrity.
          After Oprah Winfrey endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama, his poll numbers in Iowa went from 20 points behind HIllary Clinton to at least six points ahead of her, and his circus tour of the state with Winfrey drew record crowds.

          Winfrey's Web site highlights its con- tents with "The perfect haircut for your face," "Kirstie's bikini body" and "Oprah's debt diet." Her biography says she became a local TV news anchor (the British call anchors "news reader," which is what they are) at the age of 19, did the same for a while in another city and moved from there to hosting talk shows, which she has done since. She's no more qualified to endorse a presidential candidate than a pig in that sty that sits on the highest point in Iowa. She is nothing more than a talk show host.
          This issue is nothing about a black woman endorsing a black man or about anything else but how silly it is to allow a bunch of syco- phants in one abnormal state to influence a presidential nomination.

          And it's not just sycophancy, although that should be enough to bury this setup for good. It's also about the fact Iowans are nowhere near reflective of the rest of the country in religious views, or at least we hope not, yet a nobody like Mike Huckabee is finding his star rising in a state heavy with evangelicals, those people who insist on converting everyone to Christianity.

          Huckabee is a Southern Baptist minister who said the only explanation for his star rising in the state "is not a human one." In Iowa, he is battling for the lead Mormon Mitt Romney who thinks you can't have freedom without religion or vice versa. How can you trust either man not to consider his religious beliefs when making presidential decisions?
          Finally, you have John McCain, a Republican, getting a boost in Iowa because Joe Lieberman, a Democrat without a party, endorsed Mc- Cain because no other candidate asked Lieberman for an endorsement. McCain got enough of a boost from Iowa, he was a fairly easy winner the following week in New Hampshire. How nutty is that?

          And these states are allowed to have such a lopsided influence on the course of the presidential nominations of the two major par- ties? C'mon people, get a life. Or at least get some sophistication.
          Sycophants, evangelicals and worship- ers of losers are about to have a major say on our choices for president next November and yet the two parties allow it to happen every four years. And the Democratic Party does so while boycotting a more repre- sentative state such as Michigan.
          Next after Iowa? The first real primary, in New Hampshire, a state that may be just as out of sync as Iowa.

          What next? Tom Cruise shows up in New Hampshire to plug a member of a dead sci-fi novelist's cult for president? Where does this insanity end?

Medal of Shame

Better Jeckyll than Hyde 

          Just as the term “hero” is denigrated every time it is used to des- cribe someone who did not risk his or her life to rescue another, now the Presidential Medal of Freedom has been denigrated.

          The presidential medal may be just showbiz stuff, but it really is a slap in the face to those who deserve special recognition to award it to a some- one such as former Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill.

          While dismissing his own sex-related pec- cadillos as “youthful indiscretion,” Hyde played a central role in the effort to use another man’s sex-related peccadillos to carry out a political ven-detta in an attempt to bring down a president. The episode will go down as one of the sleaziest acts in U.S. political history.

          Hyde, as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee at the time, claimed to be following established laid down by his committee when it considered impeaching President Nixon. In truth, he ignored the care- fully thought-out Nixon impeachment inquiry and led the GOP rush to a foregone conclusion.

          The good name of "presidential impeachment" can be restored today by impeaching the current president on grounds of misdeeds far, far more serious and consequential than President Clinton's sexual pec- cadillo and lie to cover it up.

          Addendum: Hyde was unable to attend the award ceremony presentation and died a few weeks la- ter. Even in politics, the practice is not to speak ill of the dead, but his shameful role in that impeachment is a historical fact.