Neocons "heart" war - in Libya, Iran, wherever

Neocons, always interested in encouraging war and more war, are jumping on the opportunity they see presented by the revolution now turned to civil war in the major oil state of Libya to do what they do best and apparently like the most, warmongering for United States military intervention. David Dayen has some recent news on the Obama Administration's current position on military intervention: US Mulls Limited Intervention in Libya FDL News 03/07/2011.

As we should all learn from the neocons' support of the Bosnia and Kosovo interventions in the 1990s and their drumbeat of demands to resume war against Iraq essentially from the moment the shooting stopped in the Gulf War of 1991, these folks play the long game. Kosovo was a sideshow to them. Iraq was the main event. For the 2010's, Libya is their current "Kosovo", a sideshow on the road to the main event of war against Iran.

The National Interest, published by the Nixon Center and a journal friendly to the Realist school of foreign policy thought, carries Jacob Heilbrunn's on The GOP's Neocon Addiction to War 03/07/2011.

Why has the GOP become addicted to war? The default response of the party to almost any international conflict has been to argue that America should intervene, or, to use a less polite term, intrude into what amounts, more often than not, to a domestic dispute. Add the political capital that congressional leaders and presidential aspirants believe can be derived from pummeling a Democratic president for passivity, appeasement, and you have a recipe for embroiling America in messy foreign conflicts.

This is a brand of militarism which is very much a feature of today's Republican Party and all too much a feature of the Democratic Party, as well.


Heilbrunn clearly thinks a Libya war would be a bad idea. But then he breezily assets, "Maybe a no-fly zone could be established with NATO. But this is not the time for America to come swaggering in by itself." The NATO intervention in Afghanistan is a genuinely multilateral one, although Dick Cheney and George Bush declined to make it a NATO operation from the initial intervention in 2001 because unilateral swagger and shooting and bombing and torture were what they wanted to do. Did I mention that this intervention started in 2001, now close to ten years ago, with no end in sight?

Neoconservative cheerleader Bobo Brooks has been eagerly pushing for war on Libya on the PBS Newshour and Meet the Press. The bold Maverick McCain, who generally follows the neocon foreign policy direction, was on This Week pumping for war on Sunday, too. Jim Lobe at Neo-Con Hawks Take Flight over Libya LobeLog Foreign Policy 02/25/2011 reports how the current cutting-edge neocon organization, Foriegn Policy Initiative (FPI), presented a statement encouraging preparations for military intervention in Libya, whose signatories included quite a few names familiar for having been so disastrously wrong about invading Iraq: Elliott Abrams, Eric Edelman, John Hannah, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Sen. Joe Lieberman, the bold Maverick McCain, Dan Senor (who is married to former CNN celebrity reporter Campbell Brown), Marc Thiessen, Peter Wehner, and Paul Wolfowitz.

I plan to post more from another piece from The National Interest by the leading Realist foreign policy theorist, John Mearsheimer, Imperial by Design 12/16/2010 (Jan/Feb 2011 issue). He describes from a Realist perspective what the post-Cold War grand strategy options for the United States were. The one which Old Man Bush's Administration (in which Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense) adopted, and which the Clinton Administration continued, Mearsheimer calls "global dominance, or what might alternatively be called global hegemony, which was not just doomed to fail, but likely to backfire in dangerous ways if it relied too heavily on military force to achieve its ambitious agenda."

I'm a grudging fan of the Realist approach, although it's not the main way I look at international issues. But Mearsheimer's account of the problems in US foreign policy the last two decades is very perceptive. And he explains that within the global dominance strategy, there are two major variants that have predominated:

There is ... an important disagreement among global dominators about how best to achieve their strategy’s goals. On one side are the neoconservatives, who believe that the United States can rely heavily on armed force to dominate and transform the globe, and that it can usually act unilaterally because American power is so great. Indeed, they tend to be openly contemptuous of Washington’s traditional allies as well as international institutions, which they view as forums where the Lilliputians tie down Gulliver. Neoconservatives see spreading democracy as a relatively easy task. For them, the key to success is removing the reigning tyrant; once that is done, there is little need to engage in protracted nation building.

On the other side are the liberal imperialists, who are certainly willing to use the American military to do social engineering. But they are less confident than the neoconservatives about what can be achieved with force alone. Therefore, liberal imperialists believe that running the world requires the United States to work closely with allies and international institutions. Although they think that democracy has widespread appeal, liberal imperialists are usually less sanguine than the neoconservatives about the ease of exporting it to other states. As we set off to remake the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these principles of global dominance set the agenda. [my emphasis]

I don't agree with the global dominance strategy, so that means I have to be cranky about many of the foreign policy choices of both parties. But there's obviously a big difference between a reality-based perspective that has some recognition of the limits of American power and a healthy caution about going into a foreign country and start bombing and shooting people, and the neocons' testosterone dreams of easy, short and invariably successful imperial expeditions.

In practice, a no-fly zone is an act of international war that the United States should not blunder into. It's plausible that in the midst of days-old civil war, a no-fly zone could provide a significant boost to the rebels. But once we've taken sides in a civil war, we would inevitably have to worry about who actually comes out on top in that conflict and how or if we will support them militarily. And, of course, once we were involved militarily, the temptation to assure the best possible deals for American oil multinationals would be great. (Not that I would suggest that oil has anything to do with US foreign policy!) As Bill Clinton found out with the Somalia intervention that Old Man Bush started in the final months of his Presidency, mission creep is a very real problem in such matters.

It's also worth remembering that the US and Britain maintained no-fly zones over large parts of Iraq from 1991-2003. They involved a considerable amount of firing of rockets at ground targets, which rose to the level of a short but very serious air war in late 1998, creepily dubbed Operation Desert Fox by the PR wizards in the Pentagon. The no-fly zone represented a continuing military commitment which gave plausibility to the neocons' war agitation against Iraq and which effectively deferred any feasible improvement of diplomatic relations with Iraq. A no-fly zone is a big deal, not "just" a no-fly zone.

Michael Tomasky gives us a useful contrast between the way British historian Timothy Garton Ash approaches the question of military intervention in Libya and how Marty Peretz, formerly the hawkish editor and still publisher of The New Republic, approach the question: Garton Ash and Peretz on Libya: case studies Guardian 03/07/2011.

Tags: libya, militarism

Down to the wire on the California budget

Thursday March 10 is the deadline for the California state legislature to vote to put a tax extension on the June ballot, which Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed as part of his package to close the projected state's approximately $25 billion deficit for fiscal year 2011-12 starting July 1. He proposes $10 billion in cuts, $10 billion in tax extensions and $5 billion in one-time fund shifts to cover one-time expenses.

As Kevin Yamamura explains in this article, Brown's Countdown, Day 51: As deadline looms, hurdles remain Sacramento Bee 03/01/2011, March 10 isn't a hard-and-fast drop-dead date for this action. That's a goalpost based on the time it takes for the Governor to call a special election and then go through the process of actually holding the election.

The Bee has been doing a daily article in a countdown which Brown established for himself of getting a budget plan in place within the first 60 days of his term. March 10 will be day 60. The Democrats are ready for a floor vote on Wednesday, March 9, that is expected to pass Brown's plan, even the highly controversial closing down of local redevelopment agencies.

In the day 55 article, How the state budget has changed 03/05/2011, the Bee's Jack Chang explains the actual state of alleged runaway government spending (if you believe the Republicans' endless chant to that effect):

The general fund portion of the state budget proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown spends $5.05 per $100 of personal income earned statewide. That's the lowest amount since the 1972-73 budget year, when Ronald Reagan was governor and state spending per $100 of personal income was $5.01.

This is a dramatic and heartening contrast to the national scene, where the Democrats are falling all over them to compromise with Republicans no matter how intransigent the Republicans are. And the Democratic leadership, especially the White House right now, refuses to draw sharp contrasts with the Republicans' obstructionist wrecker tactics.

Tags: california politics, democratic party, jerry brown

Jerry Brown putting California Republicans on the spot over state budget deficit

The Republicans in the California state legislature, not surprisingly, are stalling on coming to terms with Gov. Jerry Brown and the Democrats over the state budget. Brown has asked for a legislative action that would be needed this month to put a referendum on the June ballot for a statewide vote on extending some current taxes to cover $10 billion of the projected 2011-12 budget deficit, and have $10 billion covered by permanent cuts.

But Jerry, unlike too many other Democratic politicians, is willing to call out the Republican obstructionists and tell them to put up or shut up. Dan Morain reported some good examples in Brown: It's time to take a risk Sacramento Bee 02/27/2011:

In this coarsening partisan scene, California's septuagenarian governor took the extraordinary step of entering the legislators' lair the other day, and engaging in a civil conversation about this state's never-ending budget crisis.

"When you folks say, 'No, no vote, no plan, no,' that is not America," Jerry Brown told legislators. "It is not acceptable, and it is not loyalty to California." ...

If the tax plan fails, Brown warned, he will answer with an all-cuts budget that will erase the deficit. Every state service would face reductions. Not that we should suspend skepticism, but Brown certainly seems serious.

"I don't want to be here for four years, and play games," Brown told the joint Assembly-Senate budget conference committee. "We've got to meet the moment of truth now. I would ask that all of you help me in that process."

Jerry is sticking with his Josiah Roycian theme of loyalty to the community. And he's not flinching from head-to-head confrontation with the Republicans over the deficit issue.

Former presidential candidate Brown understands ambition. Sure, legislators take risks by taking stands. But maybe they should grow some spine, as Brown urged:

"America is facing a real challenge, the trillions of deficits, over-extension all over the world. Where is the leadership? All they do is fight over who is going to be the next congressmen, the next president, the next senator.

"I have played the games you all play. I'm telling you time is running out for California and this country if politicians just keep squabbling all the time. You've got to get out of your comfort zone." ...

Brown needs Republican support to place the tax package measure on the ballot and directed most of his comments at the legislative hearing to Republicans.

When Sen. Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar, complained that Democratic legislators weren't cutting enough, Brown urged: "If you can find some better (cuts), then come on down. I'll be glad to talk about it."

When Assemblywoman Diane Harkey of Orange County asked for "some pension reform, some regulatory relief," Brown urged horse-trading, a quaint concept.

"This is your chance to make (Democrats) do something they don't to do. You have to step up and do something you don't want to do," Brown said.

"We can't go there," Harkey said, keeping true to her anti-tax pledge. [my emphasis]

This kind of confrontation with the Republican wrecker Party is what the Democratic needs to be doing over and over.

Tags: california politics, jerry brown

Beltway blather about public debt

David "Bobo" Brooks and Sleepy Mark Shields hold forth here about the alleged horrors of public debt, with the unstated implications that people other than billionaires and star TV pundits will have to suffer in order to right this scary, scary debt problem. The liberal Sleepy Mark reflects of the great foresight of, uh, Ross Perot on debt:



Bobo thinks we should go to war in Libya. He doesn't mention any concerns about boosting the debt in connection with yet another neocon war wetdream. Sleepy Mark manages to state fairly coherently why that would be a seriously-to-disastrously bad idea. Bobo and his neocon friends never tire of advocating wars for other people for other people to kill and die in. Bobo is here spinning a boys-with-toys fantasy and making a quick-and-easy strike in Libya, which in neocon fantasy-world would then magically create democracy.

But this bipartisan consensus among the punditocracy and even, sad to say, in Congress and the White House that it's a dandy idea to slash domestic public outlays in the early stages of a fragile and slow-moving recovery is just remarkable for its disconnect with the practical needs of the moment.

Tags: david brooks, mark shields

Gabriel Ladeen on cheering for the home team and not worrying about a citizen's responsibilities on war

I don't know if we're starting to see the AOL-ization of the Huffington Post, or if this article is an example. Regardless, it's a straightforward statement of the idea that it is the duty of American citizens to cheer for any war in progress as though it were a high school football game: Gabriel Ledeen, Who Supports the U.S. Soldier? 03/04/2011. It's not Ledeen's first stab at this pitch. He has been doing it for years, as in the conservative National Review Online in 2006 and 2003. If the Absolute Astronomy and Wikipedia entries on neocon and Iran-Contra figure Michael Ledeen are correct, Gabriel is his son.

High school civics class is a better reference point. A soldier signs up to be a soldier, which includes carrying out any legal mission to which they are assigned. They operate under regulations limiting their freedom of dissent while operating in their official roles. Soldiers who are citizens of the US - most American soldiers but not all of them are - are also voters who make decisions about leadership and policy in their role as voters. Soldiers also have freedom of speech and opinion in their private lives.

A factory worker doesn't have to like the model of car he's building, his job as a factory worker is to build it. He can be enthusiastic and conscientious about his work without having a high opinion of the end product. If employees of a corporation had to be personally convinced of the wisdom of the policies they are required to implement as part of their jobs, no corporation could function.


Ledeen's article is one of those that either strikes an accord and you agree with it - or you actually think about what it says, in which case it probably doesn't make a lot of sense. Especially if we start off recognizing that pretty much anyone over the age of 15 or so can recognize that soldiers in the heat of battle typically don't concentrate on debating the finer points of international diplomacy at that moment. Here's his pitch:

Once our volunteer soldier deploys, his sole purpose is to achieve the objectives he is ordered to secure by our elected leaders. In fact, every soldier swears an oath that defines their duty, to "obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me." The soldier, more than anyone else, wants these orders to be well-considered, valid, popular objectives that are worthy of his sacrifices.

Once he receives these orders, he wants to accomplish these objectives as quickly and as decisively as possible. Every delay exposes him to further danger and risks the mission. Once he is so engaged, "supporting" him necessarily means sharing this desire for victory, defined as successfully fulfilling the mission. [my emphasis]

Here in the real world, neither Democrats nor Republicans operate on such a premise. Nor can they, unless they just turn over their responsibilities as office-holders and citizens to some general who gets to define a military mission any way he wants to. That is not how the American form of government is set up, however. And the overall mission of every US soldier is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

When the "Black Hawk Down" incident happened in Somalia in 1993, Republicans demanded that President Clinton pull all American troops out of Somalia immediately. Democrats and Republicans have criticized in various ways the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The effects and advisability of the drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen have been widely discussed, if inadequately reported by our national media.

Were Republicans wrong to criticize the Somalia mission in 1993? Should they have just cheered for "victory"? Even if they couldn't define what constituted "victory"? General Petraeus when bragging about the alleged brilliant success of The Surge in Iraq stated that the military situation had been on the verge of disaster in 2006. Were the Democrats who pointed that out - in the face of Republican lies about the brilliant successes in Iraq in 2006 and Republican accusation that they were being unpatriotic in questioning the unending successes of our glorious generals - also undermining "victory"? How in a democracy is it okay for our Savior-General Petraeus to say that something needs to be done differently and not be impeding "victory" but it's not okay for members of Congress who have the Constitutional power and responsibility for declaring war not to do so?

Ledeen continues:

Undermining public support for the effort, delegitimizing the mission, and declaring victory unattainable make it tougher for the soldier to decisively achieve his objectives by emboldening the enemy, damaging morale, and undermining political leadership. Therefore, from this perspective, there is a logical and inherent contradiction in claiming to "support" the soldier while taking actions that undercut his efforts.

Well, dude, what if victory is unattainable? Or, to use the calculation that every nation that's ever gone to war has had to make, is "victory" attainable at an acceptable cost? And if it's not, is it responsible in the least for conscientious citizens and voters to just shut the hell up and cheer for disaster?

I've given Ledeen's cheer-for-the-generals-no-matter-what pitch more attention than the actual arguments he makes are worth. All you have to do to see how frivolous his argument actually is, is to look for where in his article he gives even a vague definition of what "victory" actually is in what he calls "the protracted, unstructured war [sic] in which we are engaged, where public and political support are critical elements of success."

In fact, what war is he even talking about? Afghanistan? Iraq? The secret missions in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and who knows where else?

Like I said, if it fits you agenda of the moment, Ledeen's article may resonate to you. Otherwise, it's just more Republican "culture war" hot air.

Tags: gabriel ladeen, militarism, neoconservatives

Why don't the Democrats demand impeachment hearings on Justice Clarence Thomas?

Rightwing Republican Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have both been involved in partisan activities of a kind that, to put it mildly, is highly questionable for a Justice of the highest court in the US. Both Thomas and Scalia voted for the majority decisions in Bush v. Gore (2000) and Citizen's United (2010), two of the worst decisions in being destructive to democratic government that the Supreme Court has ever made.

The Democrats no longer have a majority in the House, which would have to make an impeachment vote. But the Dems can certainly use a push for impeachment hearings against Thomas and/or Scalia to raise a stick about the crass partisanship of those Republican Justices.

As Robert Reich notes at his blog in Clarence Thomas and the Politicization of the Supreme Court 03/03/2011, some House Democrats showed the moxie to make a public issue out of Thomas' conduct:

Back in 1991 when Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, Citizens United spent $100,000 to support his nomination. The in-kind contribution presumably should have been disclosed by Thomas.

At the very least you’d think that, given his connections with Citizen’s United and with the Koch brothers, Thomas would have recused himself from the Citizens United decision in order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. He would have recused himself, that is, if he were as concerned about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as he says he.

Thomas has also failed to disclose financial information about his wife’s employment. Virginia Thomas is the founder of Liberty Central, a Tea Party organization now receiving unlimited corporate contributions due to Citizen’s United. Among the things she’s lobbying for are the repeal of what she terms the “unconstitutional” healthcare legislation.

Because of his wife's direct involvement, seventy-four House Democrats have sent a letter to Justice Thomas asking him to recuse himself from any case questioning the constitutionality of the legislation. "Your spouse is advertising herself as a lobbyist who has 'experience and connections' and appeals to clients who want a particular decision," the legislators wrote. "They want to overturn health-care reform."

The Democrats needed to raise the roof in 2000-1 about Bush v. Gore. When the Court issued it's plutocrat Citizen's United decision, President Obama declared in his weekly address on 01/23/09, the White House transcript of which is grandly titled, President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People:

But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. [my emphasis]

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections. [my emphasis]

He called for a "bipartisan" solution, which has become for the Obama Administration has come to mean little more than preemptive surrender to the hardline Republican Party. The Republicans see no partisan incentive to set Citizen's United aside, any more than they saw one in opposing Bush v. Gore. And in fact, Obama and the Democratically-controlled Congress in 2010 did nothing effective to mitigate the disastrous effects for democracy of the Citizen's United decision. Even the mild requirement for reporting donors that the Democrats proposed didn't get enacted.

We should expect more on an issue which the Democratic President said "strikes at our democracy itself"! "I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest," the President said. Accurate words. No follow-up even close to matching the seriousness of the words.

Some relevant stories:

Jed Lewison, Clarence Thomas defends wife, but not himself Daily Kos 03/01/2011

Ben Adler, The bigger Clarence Thomas scandal Salon 02/20/2011

Kim Geiger, Clarence Thomas failed to report wife's income, watchdog say Los Angeles Times 01/22/2011

Lee Fang, Group Requests DOJ To Investigate Scalia and Thomas Involvement With Koch Corporate Fundraisers Think Progress 01/20/2011

Warren Richey, Campaign finance ruling: Should Supreme Court justices have recused themselves? Christian Science Monitor 01/20/2011

John Dean, A Closer Look At The Case From Which Justice Scalia Has Refused To Recuse Himself: The Momentous Stakes, and the Larger Political Context Findlaw 03/26/2004

David G. Savage and Richard A. Serrano, Scalia Was Cheney Hunt Trip Guest; Ethics Concern Grows Los Angeles Times 02/05/2004

Tags: antonin scalia, citizens united decision, clarence thomas, supreme court

Ray McGovern on Robert Gates' newfound agnosticism about the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

Ray McGovern has weighed in on the speech by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on February 25 that I discussed in a previous post in How to Read Gates's Shift on the Wars Consortium News 03/02/2011. This was the speech in which the SecDef warned against getting involved in more wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan in the future.

McGovern, who was once Gates' supervisor at the CIA, looks at the statement in the context of Gates' career ambitions. The SecDef's skepticism about the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars certainly seems on the face of it to be a recent revelation:

In his first months at the Pentagon, Gates certainly didn't seem like a hesitant skeptic about the war policies. He played a key role in helping President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney escalate the war in Iraq and thus make their escape into the sunset without having lost a war on their watch.

That was 90 percent of what the celebrated "surge" of troops into Iraq was about, staving off an obvious defeat, even if it cost the lives of an additional 1,000 or so U.S. soldiers and many more Iraqis. ...

Then, after he was kept on by Obama, Gates supported a similar "surge" in Afghanistan, pushing for a 40,000-troop increase in late 2009. Obama groused that Gates and the generals wouldn’t provide a meaningful set of alternative options to the escalation, but Obama finally relented and sent 30,000 more troops.

McGovern concedes that one cannot rule out such a dawning of revelation. But he thinks it's more likely that Gates is playing the career game as follows:

Yet, I would venture to suggest that – more likely – the timing of Gates’s conversion can be pinned on two other factors, a typically windsock reaction to recent polling on Afghanistan and an attempt to burnish his future wise-man reputation:

--U.S. public opinion has swung dramatically against the war in Afghanistan, with some polls showing that as many as 86 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of Republicans want a speedier U.S. pullout from the war.

--Gates has announced he will retire in the coming months. By abandoning his post on the bridge of the sinking pro-war ship now, Gates will let the next secretary of defense take the blame when the U.S. does not "prevail" in Afghanistan. Gates can point to his echoing of MacArthur's warning [against ground wars in Asia].

Gates' career is a reminder of how previous official misconduct can haunt policy for decades to come:

More serious still was Gates's denial of any awareness of Oliver North's illegal activities in support of the Contra attacks in Nicaragua, despite the fact that senior CIA officials testified that they had informed Gates that they suspected North had diverted funds from the Iranian arms sales for the benefit of the Contras.

Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel for the Iran-Contra investigation (1986-93), later wrote in frustration that, despite Gates’s highly touted memory, he "denied recollection of facts thirty-three times."

Gates's dubious explanations about the Iran-Contra scandal forced the withdrawal of his first nomination to be CIA director when he was supposed to replace Casey who died in May 1987. Gates's career appeared to be at a dead end, but in 1989, President George H.W. Bush gave him a spot as deputy national security adviser.

The lack of real legal accountability for high-level officials breaking the law is a very bad tradition - and it really has become a tradition in American politics and government. Although the Republicans will surely make an exception if they think they can pin some real or imagined crime on Barack Obama, just as they did in Clinton's impeachment. There are many reasons that Obama's Look Forward Not Backward policy on Cheney-Bush Administration crimes is a bad one.

Keeping Gates on as SecDef from the previous Administration was one more aspect of the larger Democratic willingness to not hold the previous Administration responsible in even the political sense for misconduct and failures.

Tags: ray mcgovern, robert gates

Philosophy and the Huck (aka, Mike Huckabee)

It's kind of painful to think of using the term "philosophy" in connection with Christian fundamentalism. George W. Bush unintentionally illustrated why in his famous response to a dorky question in a Republican Presidential debate on who his favorite philosopher is, "the Lord Jesus Christ." I'm not sure, but that may have made Shrub Bush the first person in history to consider Jesus a philosopher.

John Maynard Keynes once observed that businessmen often p[ride themselves on having derived all their ideas about economics from practical experience, when in reality they are the intellectual slaves of some long-dead economist. American Christian fundamentalists are not a very philosophically inclined bunch - not that any other significant group in the US is, either. But their religious thinking is actually influenced by a school of thought called Scottish Common Sense philosophy, of whom the most famous were George Campbell (1719-1796) and Thomas Reid (1710-1796). You can read a bit more about the general concept in this article by Alexander Broadie of the University of Glasgow.

Like Keynes' practical businessmen, today's Christianists are often running off some philosophy that looks much more like a brand of Social Darwinism than anything coming out of the Gospels. Even though they claim to what they call Darwinism, better know to most people as the science of biology.

Mike Huckabee's recent statement about Obama having been raised in Kenya sounds like a garbled version the claims of Dinesh D'Souza's frivolous book about Obama's alleged anti-colonial obsessions: Sarah Posner, Huckabee on Obama vs. "Average Americans" Religion Dispatches 03/02/2011. As Sarah Posner explains:

The reference to the Brits is by now a storyline that has reached fever pitch among conservatives: as part of the standard personalizing of the Oval Office by new presidents, Obama returned a bust of Winston Churchill -- which was on loan to former President Bush by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- and replaced it with a bust of his own choosing, of that notorious un-American figure... wait for it... Abraham Lincoln. [my emphasis]

The American President replaces the bust of a foreigner (Churchill) with one of the American all-but-universally regarded as the greatest President (Lincoln): and conservatives see this as sinister? The Huck's excuse for a clarifying statement included this: "The Governor would however like to know more about where President Obama's liberal policies come from and what else the President plans to do to this country -- as do most Americans."

Between free-market zealots, neoconservatives who believe in the Leo Straussian doctrine of governing by deception, and Christian fundis, more and more of what Republicans say sounds like one thing in American English and another in RepublicanSpeak. Blue Texan (Mike Huckabee a Victim of Epistemic Closure Firedoglake 03/02/2011) thinks the Huck has fallen victim to a philosophical disease. But it's one that is epidemic among his fellow Republicans: "this Obama/Mau Mau talk is perfectly mainstream in right-wing circles, and fruitloops everywhere else. Ditto death panels, the socialist conspiracy behind climate change, and the looming threat of Sharia law being imposed in the US."

Sarah Posner translates the Churchill business into American English for us:

But there's a lot more embedded in Huckabee's comment about Obama's "view of the Brits" and the supposed snub of returning the Churchill bust. First, in suggesting that Obama is anti-imperialist, Huckabee intimates that the president, in what conservatives frame as a civilizational war between the west and the rest, doesn't embrace the superiority of western civilization (which can also be read as Obama doesn't embrace "American exceptionalism.")

Second, and probably even more important, for an evangelical and Christian Zionist like Huckabee, Churchill is a figure of enormous symbolic power. In this scenario, Obama is an appeaser like Chamberlain -- whether it's on Iran's nuclear ambitions, or in failing to address the "Holocaust" of abortion -- Churchill is an Esther-like figure who finally intervened for the Jews (much as Christian Zionists see themselves as protecting Israel from Iran) in a Holocaust (much as ardent anti-choice crusaders see themselves protecting fetuses from what they attempt to portray as genocide). [my emphasis]

She goes on to frame this as "winking and nodding to his base." It looks to me more like an increasingly cult-like alternative political language among the Christian Republican White People's Party.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, mike huckabee, sarah posner

Bob McElvaine on the union movement

Tags: robert mcelvaine, union movement

Mark Hertsgaard: climate change deniers are cranks, not skeptics

Tags: global climate change, global warming, mark hertsgaard

Small government conservatism and the war on women's rights

Linda Campbell of the Austin Star-Telegram adresses one of the anti-choice bills debated in the Texas state legislature in Would Jesus mandate sonograms but cut pre-K? 02/23/2011:

Sen. Leticia Van de Putte of San Antonio got carried away during debate on the sonogram bill, saying (according to Texas Tribune live blogging), "It is our responsibility to protect that child once that child's born, too. When we start debating a budget, let's make sure we don't cut 100,000 vaccines. Let's make sure we've got health insurance. We seem to worship what we cannot see, but as soon as that baby's born, oh no, we don't want to be intrusive. Texas is going to shrink government until it fits in a woman's uterus." [my emphasis]

Thompson also says, "It's worth remembering that Jesus was prescribing a path to salvation, not a menu of public policy options."

Meanwhile, the chief ideologist of the Republican Party, junkie bigot Rush Limbaugh, calls the National Organization of Women (NOW) "whores to liberalism." The Republican drive to Talibanize women's status in America continues. It ain't pretty.

Tags: christian right, republican party, women's rights

Jerry Brown on current politics

Jerry Brown gave an interview to the Sacramento Bee last Friday that they published Sunday, Q&A: Cagey Brown lets the budget process play out by David Siders 02/27/2011.

Jerry did seem to be taking a more cautious attitude than usual in this interview. I'm not sure if he was being cagey or just cautious with this particular reporter, who seems to have a fondness for celebrity-time coverage. But if you ask Jerry Brown silly horserace/gotcha questions like the following, you're likely to get answers like the following:

Do you think you've made any strategic missteps since taking office?

None that anyone has identified.

I like the way Jerry turned the following question around; the question was basically just tossing a Republican slogan at him:

Are Republicans right that regulations in California are too burdensome on business?

They're right and wrong. In some respects, they may be right. The regulations on the banking and mortgage industry were obviously inadequate, to the extent that billions of dollars, trillions of dollars, have been lost and destroyed because of the lack of regulation. And people lost their lives in San Bruno because somebody wasn't watching the pipes. [A reference to a disastrous pipeline explosion in September 2010.] So it all depends which particular problem, which particular regulation.

It's a rhetorical call, and it's one that I think always needs attending to. But just as a generality, it's not very helpful.

California is going to generate $2 trillion worth of gross domestic product. That's more than, you know, 110 nations. There's a lot of wealth here, and very smart people are getting a share of that, and they're not leaving it, they're coming to it. So there's a lot of rhetoric in that, but there are burdensome regulations that I'm looking at.

Why can't Barack Obama frame issues like Jerry does? A big part of the answer is that Obama has bought into the neoliberal/deregulation/Washington Consensus worldview in a way that Jerry never has.

Because of Siders' inside-baseball approach to the interview, he didn't really get anything of substance out of the Governor on the budget issues. A mid-March deadline is approaching for putting tax extensions on the balance. Jerry's approach to closing the approximately $25 billion project deficit for the fiscal year 2011-12 beginning July 1 has been to propose about $5 billion in one-time financing of expenses that are not continuing expenses, and handle the remaining $20 billion with $10 billion in cuts and $10 billion from an extension of existing taxes that are set to expire.

One of his promises during last year's gubernatorial campaign was that he would approve no tax increases without a vote of the people. So he is asked the legislature to put the tax extension on the ballot for June. If the tax extension isn't approved, he's saying the $20 billion will all have to come in cuts. It's a high-stakes game. But Jerry is confronting the Republican scam that they've been running since 1978 of saying you can cut your own taxes and not lose any services that are important to you. David Siders tried a gotcha question on the issue:

Why in the campaign didn't you tell the public that you were considering tax extensions?
I said exactly what I would do: no taxes without a vote of the people.

Do you think it would have been harder to win if you'd said you were considering tax extensions?

I have no idea. But politics and the way the game is played, statements are very easily manipulated and become more than they are in the form of commercials, and so very small, slim statements can be repackaged and become something very different.

So one has to be careful what one says. And that's why most candidates are under strict discipline and are not allowed to speak. I'm one of the few candidates that can speak my mind, but that doesn't mean that I don't have to be careful.

And he was careful. His pledge about no tax increases without a vote of the people was a message his campaign ads repeatedly showed him making. And to anyone but a reporter looking for horserace factoids, it's clear that Jerry is sticking with that pledge. He's approaching the tax extensions (which the Republicans of course call a "tax increase") in a straightforward way, working with California's semi-plebiscitory form of state government to address the severe budget problem that his Republican predecessor Arnold Schwarzenegger left him.

On Monday, more of the interview was published by Siders on the Sacbee Capitol Alert blog, Jerry Brown: Politics isn't Sunday school 02/28/2011. Maybe Siders thought he had a horserace score with this one:

Do you think you'll run for a second term?

I have no idea.

If this year's focus is the budget, if it works out ...

Well, it's not just the budget. I have, you know, corrections, realignment,
energy, education, these are important, these take, occupy time.

All this year?

Yeah, of course.

You were young and rising in politics, so why is the governorship ...

Now I'm old and rising.

But are you rising, or is this it?

I don't know. What does that mean?

Is the governorship the highest office you'll ever hold?

Probably, but maybe I'll take another lower, I may take another office.

Like what?

I don't know.

You won't run for president, though?

Maybe I'll run for mayor.

Of Sacramento?

No. I liked being mayor. I liked being mayor. Mayor is a very good job.

Do you like it better than governor?

I'm enjoying being governor right now because it's very interesting. But I certainly liked, I liked helping get things built in Oakland.

For all Siders' horserace approach, the printed excerpt makes it look like Siders didn't realize that Jerry pointedly evaded (is that a valid phrase, "pointedly evaded"?) saying that he would not run for President.

I seriously doubt that he will. But still, when a prominent figure with national appeal like Jerry Brown gives an answer like that, he's sending some kind of signal to the White House. It comes on the heels of a third snub from the California Governor of an invitation to the White House. (Jerry Brown to skip governor confab in Washington Sacramento Bee 02/24/2011, also a David Siders piece)

I'm guessing that the message Jerry is sending to Washington is that the Obama Administration is badly letting down the states by not even trying to provide federal funds to cover all or part of the severe deficits the states face. It's bad for the states, bad for the state and national economies, and bad politics for the Democratic Party. I don't see Jerry running for President against Obama in the primaries in 2012, much less on a third party ticket. But I can much more easily imagine him giving support to some other credible liberal primary challenger to Obama, if someone like Russ Feingold steps up to do it.

Tags: 2012 election,, california politics, jerry brown