O Fickle Democrats!

This just in: George W. Bush has endorsed Susan Collins, a Republican Senator from Maine, for re-election.  Collins has been a frequent target for Democratic ire, because despite the occasional lapse she has been a reliable supporter of Donald Trump's agenda.  This is, The Hill reports, Bush's "first endorsement of the 2020 cycle."  I presume this means there are more to come, and for the first time I'm genuinely curious to see what will happen next.

I'm also looking forward to reactions from the Democrats who've rehabilitated Dubya these past few years.  Already on Twitter there's been some consternation.  The word "disappointment" recurs.  So do versions of "I was just praising Ol' W. this morning. Well.... so much for that." Why were they praising a war criminal who killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, made refugees of millions more, crashed the world economy, and fiddled while New Orleans drowned?  You might well ask.  Of course, it's because he gave Michelle Obama a cough drop, she declared him her "partner in crime" who shares her values, and Ellen DeGeneres is his good friend and you don't have to agree with someone on every little thing to be their friend.  (They may have more in common than some of us thought.)  But never mind all that, they'll throw him under the bus now.  Cancel culture is real.

Another person remarked that Bush is "only reminding us what a disaster his presidency was."  Funny how many Democrats have forgotten.  But as I suggested recently, Democrats seem to have cheesecloth memories, and if you don't keep reminding them, they forget things.  I therefore have to hope that Bush will come up with more disappointing endorsements to keep their memories refreshed.

The Amnesia Is the Point

I didn't intend to write more about Democrats' determination to whitewash and rehabilitate George W. Bush, but the controversy raged on, and while it seems to have peaked for the moment, it hasn't flattened yet.

Besides, something became clearer to me as I read more of the discourse.  There's probably no way to stop people from playing this game.  Many people are obsessed with ranking and comparison, and the culture and the media feed it by ranking the Top Ten Best or Worst Whatevers: movies, books, music, athletes, artists, stocks, potato chips, soy sauce, and so on, including presidents.  Really thinking about presidents is very difficult, even for specialists, and I think that ranking them is a waste of time.  At best it provides clickbait, a hook for magazine essays.  But it also means that people will focus on the traits they can rank.  With athletes, say, it's easier: you can rank them by their statistics.  With presidents it's not so clear what to compare, and people get bogged down looking for comparable details.  It's related to competition, which obsesses American culture.  But you can't line up the past ten presidents and see who among them can kill the most dusky foreigners, invade the most countries, trample the most civil liberties.  The competition takes place in the mind of the beholder.  Again, I think it's a waste of time, but it appeals to a certain kind of simpleton.

The thing is, if you really insist on playing this game, you need accurate data.  You can't rank the greatest batters of all time if you just make up their numbers.  But what characterizes pretty much all of the people comparing Bush to Trump is that they consistently misrepresent Bush and his record.  One of the easiest and most common rebuttals has been to point out that Bush killed a lot more people than Trump -- around a million people in Iraq alone.  Most of his defenders tend to focus only on the number of US troops who died in Dubya's wars, because Americans are not very interested in America's civilian victims.  The only score they care about is the number of Our Fallen Heroes and Wounded Warriors.  However, they're not as invested in dismissing the number of Iraqi dead as Republicans would be, so they tend to accept correction on that point.

So they move to other defenses -- and though they deny that they want to defend him, they soon talk about his supposed (but imaginary) positive qualities.  Often they claim that he has empathy, or that he has a conscience.  Now, Bush was notorious for his lack of empathy and conscience.  If you want a fuller picture, Molly Ivins wrote a couple of books with Lou Dubose about Bush's political career, but I think his moral emptiness can be summed up by a couple of his comic moments.  First, there was an interview where he was asked about a double murderer, Karla Faye Tucker, who'd become a born-again Christian in prison, leading to calls for clemency.

In brief, Bush was apparently asked if he had met any of those pressing Karla Faye Tucker's case for clemency. Bush said he hadn't, but claimed to have seen an incident on the Larry King show wherein King had asked Karla Faye Tucker what she would say if she could speak directly with George W.

What was her answer? the Talk reporter asked Bush. And George W. apparently puckered his lips and, in a mocking, simpering tone said: "Please don't kill me."

As it happens, Tucker had not said this.  Dubya was as enthusiastic a fantasist as Trump, and like Trump, never more so than when he fantasized about killing people.  George Will, whose 1999 essay on Bush I just linked, sniffed:

Mr. Bush should take care not to exacerbate the suspicion that he has a seriousness deficit. When he was asked by Mr. Carlson to name something he isn't good at, he should not have said, "Sitting down and reading a 500-page book on public policy or philosophy or something."

Mr. Bush told James Barnes of the National Journal, "I'm a decisive person" who doesn't "read treatises," and he told Mr. Carlson, "I'm not interested in process. I want the results. If the process doesn't yield the right results, change the process." All very brusque and hearty.

There's another presage of Donald Trump, who doesn't like to read, and prefers the process of making deals.

Another well-known example: In 2004, after Bush's invasion of Iraq had failed to turn up the fabled Weapons of Mass Destruction that had been one of its main rationales,

During the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner this week, Bush presented a slide show of quirky photographs from inside the White House. In one, the president is looking under furniture in the Oval Office.

"Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere," Bush joked. "Nope, no weapons over there ... maybe under here?" (Bush pokes fun at himself at dinner)

Democrats have seized on the matter, calling it astonishingly insensitive when Americans [plus a million Iraqis, but who cares?] have died for their country in Iraq while the search for WMD has turned up nothing. 

I've also seen it said that Bush "unified the country" after 9/11.  This is arguable, but what is not arguable is that he worked to unify the country by going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In his fine book The Bush Dyslexicon, Mark Crispin Miller sought to show that Bush is not very good at inspirational rhetoric, but he can be eloquent when he talks about punitive violence.  And Americans, like many nations, love punitive violence, at least at first.  Trump may not be as eloquent when he celebrates punitive violence, but his base aren't picky.

Related to this is the claim that Trump has alienated our allies overseas, but Bush worked together with them.  Again, the convenient amnesia is remarkable.  It was a Democratic commonplace in 2009 that Bush had alienated our allies -- there was considerable difficulty in getting them to line up for his War on Terror -- and that Barack Obama won them back over.  At last, they crowed, we have a president who doesn't embarrass America before the world!  (As Trump is doing now.)  There's some truth there, because although Obama was happy to ignore multilateral action when it suited him, European leaders found him much more congenial than Bush, whom like Trump they considered a boor.  This rapprochement was more complex than well-trained liberal memories like to remember; Naomi Klein wrote about it well in late 2009.

After nine months in office, Obama has a clear track record as a global player. Again and again, US negotiators have chosen not to strengthen international laws and protocols but rather to weaken them, often leading other rich countries in a race to the bottom.

Let’s start where the stakes are highest: climate change. During the Bush years, European politicians distinguished themselves from the United States by expressing their unshakable commitment to the Kyoto Protocol. So while the United States increased its carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels, the European Union countries reduced theirs by 2 percent. Not stellar, but clearly a case where the EU’s breakup with the United States carried tangible benefits for the planet.

Flash forward to the high-stakes climate negotiations that just wrapped up in Bangkok. The talks were supposed to lead to a deal in Copenhagen this December that significantly strengthens the Kyoto Protocol. Instead, the United States, the EU and the rest of the developed countries formed a unified bloc calling for Kyoto to be scrapped and replaced.

Obama was hailed by liberals as a vast improvement on the brutish Bush, in just those areas where they'd denounced Bush while he was in office.  This may be partly because Obama continued many of Bush's terrible policies, and Democrats promptly forgot that they were Bush's or that they were terrible.  That willed forgetting may have extended to embracing Bush himself.

I suspect that many liberals, as dependent on TV for news as conservatives and reactionaries, never paid much attention to Bush's policies.  They were more concerned with his spotty oratorical ability, his many gaffes and bloopers, his inability to pronounce the word "nuclear," than about a million Iraqi dead and another million Iraqi refugees.  They couldn't help noticing the Iraq War or Abu Ghraib, but most likely they blamed the media for making them notice them.  They hated Bush because he's a Republican, the same way they hate Trump.  If they'd read a range of print media, they might be better informed.  Or maybe not, I don't know.

Now, to repeat, it would be different if Democrats looked at Bush with eyes wide open and concluded that he wasn't as bad as they thought.  That they choose to falsify his record, that they seem to have forgotten comparatively recent events from their own adult lifetimes, is strange to me.  It may be their very American Manichaeism, a desire to see the world in terms of heroes and villains, light and darkness, that drives them to invent a George W. Bush wholly unlike the real man.  If Trump is bad - and he's not just bad but Evil incarnate - then anyone who criticizes him, indeed almost anyone who isn't Trump, must be good.  These Bush apologists insist that they're not defending him, not saying that he was a good president, but that's exactly what they're doing: they can only rank him higher than Trump by lying about him, inventing virtues that he notoriously lacks.  No wonder they're equally willing to whitewash Joe Biden in much the same way.

Abiden with Me, Fast Falls the Eventide

This really needs to stop.

I haven't watched this new Dubya video, and see no reason to.  If he made it from a jail cell in the Hague, I might be more interested.  The rehabilitation of George W. Bush by Democrats is one of the most repugnant phenomena of the Trump years.  I can't think of a good reason why anyone should pay attention to what appears to be a routine exercise in platitudes, which of course he didn't write himself anyway.  Note too that it's identified as a message from "President George W. Bush," because like any ex-President he gets to use the title.  Trump will get to do it too, just in case you think it's reasonable.

But Katie Hill, a former Congresswoman from California, takes the syndrome to such depths that it beggars belief.  That's kind of okay, because she makes it even clearer how irrational, what a distraction this thought experiment is.

Just what am I supposed to imagine?  How would Bush still be President?  If I'm to fantasize that a fairy godmother or wise space aliens remove Donald Trump and put Dubya in his place, I would rather fantasize that they put, say, Bernie Sanders in the Oval Office instead.  The fairy godmother could turn Congressional Republicans into mice, and replace them with 435 clones of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Ro Khanna.  This would be very far from an ideal situation, but it would be a lot better than what we have now, and also better than giving George W. Bush an opportunity to destroy the economy again and kill another million or so people with illegal wars.  You don't think he's learned from his "mistakes," do you?  He's never faced any accountability at all.

Or maybe I'm supposed to imagine that I'm still living in 2001-2009 America, and Katie Hill tells me that as bad as Bush is, he's better than future President Donald Trump?  No, this makes no sense at all.  If I were back in that period, I would still feel terrible, and the prospect of another vile president would not make me feel any better.  Nor, I believe, would most liberals, who as I remember fell into despair when Bush stole the 2000 election.  Hill apologizes, with typical politician's smarm, if her remarks "seemed dismissive of the horrors of the Bush years," which they do.  She seems not to remember them, and can only think of the invasion of Iraq in terms of its cost to Americans; the millions of Afghan and Iraqi dead, wounded, tortured, and made refugees are not on her radar.

If Bush were somehow in his fifth term as President today, would he have handled the COVID-19 crisis any better?  His record on civil liberties, disaster management (hello? Hurricane Katrina!), and running the economy indicates that he'd be at least as bad as Trump.  Like Trump, he was warned of impending disaster, and ignored it.  If she's going to get all weepy over a propaganda video, I'm damn glad she's not in Congress now: she'd vote for another invasion in a heartbeat.

I also don't get what having been "an LGBT teenage girl" has to do with anything. (For what it's worth, she's not LGBT -- she's either L or B.)  Maybe she's forgotten about Bush's horrible record on LGBT issues.  When he was President he wanted a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, remember?  It's possible to believe, if one is driven by wishful thinking (and Hill evidently is) that this was as politically calculated and expedient as Barack Obama's opposition to same-sex marriage, but that's the point.  If he were President now, he'd have to appease the same Christian-fascist constituency he pandered to before.

What it's all about, as usual with nice liberal Democrats, is her feelings.  She assumes that "we all" are weeping with her.  The next time she feels tempted to go on Twitter and tell the world how "we all" should feel about George W. Bush, she should resist the temptation.  Crying doesn't make the world a better place.  Yes, Trump is terrible, a monster, but that doesn't justify the liberal amnesia for Bush.  No wonder they're supporting Joe Biden now.

He Talks Nice, Still Does His Job

Just a brief return to George W. Bush and the speech that thrilled so many liberals.  I know that its fifteen minutes of glory have passed, what with so much new breaking news, but its time will come again, and one would do well to be prepared.

Readers may recall that one defense of Bush -- offered, let me stress, by liberal Democrats, not Republicans -- was that maybe he was a disappointment, flawed, less than perfect before, but he's clearly changed.  Was blind, but now he sees.  Hallelujah, he's seen the light!  Can't you hateful radicals believe that people change, and should be given a second chance?  And so on.  Here's why I don't find this persuasive.

Early in Barack Obama's first term as president, John Caruso wrote a post criticizing a speech Obama gave in Cairo, setting out his stance on the Middle East.  He followed it up with another in which he claimed to have changed his mind, quoting passages from the speech which showed Obama to be not just a visionary on foreign policy but a rather daring one, even ready to put real pressure on Israel.  He quoted several passages to illustrate:

We have great respect for the commitment that all Muslims make to faith, family, and education. And Americans of many backgrounds seek to learn more about the rich tradition of Islam. [...] I have asked young Americans to study the language and customs of the broader Middle East. And for the first time in our nation's history, we have added a Koran to the White House Library...

Our country's citizens come from diverse backgrounds and cultures, which has enabled us to realize the vision embodied in our first national motto: "E Pluribus Unum," meaning "Out of many, one." ...


Israeli settlement activity in occupied territories must stop. And the occupation must end through withdrawal to secure and recognize boundaries consistent with United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338. [...] Israel should also show a respect, a respect for and concern about the dignity of the Palestinian people who are and will be their neighbors. ...

To overcome dangers in our world, we must also take the offensive by encouraging economic progress, and fighting disease, and spreading hope in hopeless lands. Isolationism would not only tie our hands in fighting enemies, it would keep us from helping our friends in desperate need. We show compassion abroad because Americans believe in the God-given dignity and worth of a villager with HIV/AIDS, or an infant with malaria, or a refugee fleeing genocide, or a young girl sold into slavery.

Having made his case, Caruso then admitted that these bold, idealistic sentiments were not Obama's at all: they were George W. Bush's, expressed in speeches he gave before American Muslim leaders at the White House on October 17, 2005; proclaiming Irish-American Heritage Month in 2002; in the Rose Garden on April 4, 2002; in his State of the Union message to Congress on January 31, 2006.  that first one, by the way, was for an Iftar dinner marking the end of Ramadan; Bush gave one every year of his presidency, continuing a practice begun by the Clinton administration "for which we have to thank a teenage Chelsea Clinton," who'd been studying Islamic culture.  Obama followed suit.  This multicultural sensitivity didn't stop either Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama from killing lots of Muslims, most of them civilians.

The point is that Bush hasn't changed; hasn't reformed; hasn't repented of his previous sins.  He's still as ready to emit gaseous platitudes as he was while committing his many crimes as President.  What has changed is that he no longer has the power to commit those crimes.  If he did, he'd no doubt still be bombing, torturing, invading, just as he did from 2001 to 2009.

Our Atrocities Are Not Atrocious Because Our Motives Are Good

The danger of Trump is, everybody looks good by comparison, everybody can stand up and look like a hero, I mean, I live in Canada, right? So I know.  So I think the logic needs to be, we're not gonna give you a pass because you're better than Trump. We're gonna demand so much more of you, because of Trump...

-- Naomi Klein on Chapo Trap House podcast 142, September 17, 2017

There's been some attention to a recent Economist/YouGov poll which found that 51% of Democrats have a favorable view of former president George W. Bush, compared to 42% who do not.  A new Fox News poll "puts Bush at 48/46 among Dem voters, 50/43 among Clinton voters."  Predictably, politically correct haters in the pay of Vladimir Putin, like Glenn Greenwald and myself, were displeased.

The Blogger Formerly Known as IOZ argued, sensibly enough, that "This reveals exactly nothing useful about people's political leanings or attitudes except that they are mercurial", because "People have recently heard some okay things about GWB, who they've barely heard about in 8+ years. So, okay, they 'approve.'"  I'd agree more if so many Democrats (including pretty much all the ones I know on Facebook) haven't been defending and justifying this change in attitude.

The usual response, unsurprisingly, is that Bush wasn't as bad as Trump. "No doubt due to a @realDonaldTrump comparison." "It's simple a lizard looks pretty cute and harmless next to Tyrannosaurus Rex." "This is only because we're now dealing with pure crazy in the WH. Even Bush looks ok next to Trump. Sad."  Or: Bush lied to us more elegantly.  This one is particularly funny because Dubya infuriated Democrats back in the day by his often incoherent speaking ("Is our children learning?", "nukular"), his Commander-Codpiece posturing, his clumsy and offensive humor ("Some call you the elite; I call you my base"; "No WMDs over here"; "'Please - don't kill me'")

One of Greenwald's critics wrote, "So I guess we have to hate him for the rest of our lives. No one gets a break at the Intercept right?" (It isn't "have to," it's "get to.") This was a common lament of liberals I know after Bush's recent speech sort-of-denouncing Trump: C'mon, can't you accept that people change? If liberals want to slobber over Bush's probably ghostwritten discovery of high Amurrican ideals, that's their lookout and their right under the Constitution.  As it says right there, The Intercept shall make no law restricting liberals' right to slobber on war criminals.  No one has to hate him if they don't want to.  What's significant is that they are indignant if someone else does hate him.  Let's have some freedom of hatred around here, okay?

And, as I've said often before, "hate" is irrelevant.  Making it personal is a handy distraction from attending to policies and actions.  I believe I've mentioned the young college student I once knew who refused to discuss Bush's policies and actions because she had once attended a dinner in the Governor's mansion when Bush was governor of Texas, and she liked him. That was very nice and all, but what does it have to do with -- just picking an example off the top of my head -- lying in order to start a few wars that cost hundreds of thousands of lives?  As Greenwald wrote years ago, "'trust' is appropriate for one's friends, loved ones, family members and the like -- but not for politicians."  Most of us have no personal connection to politicians at the national level anyway; we shouldn't evaluate them by our reaction to their simulacra on TV and computer screens, but by what they do. What Bush did as President, much of which stands condemned by his speech, should be judged harshly -- all the more so because he has not faced any accountability for it.

When Greenwald wrote with bitter sarcasm, "Stop being so judgmental and purist. They were well-intentioned war crimes. And W jokes with Obama and Ellen", someone took a different tack.  "Question," wrote a user called muddletoes. "Hypothetically speaking, do you see no moral distinction pertaining to the motives which lead to a war crime? Is a G. W. Bush as culpable as a Bashar al-Assad?"

Greenwald didn't reply as far as I saw.  I and some others took the question on.  "I absolutely believe that many sides in many wars are completely indifferent to whether or not they are 'right'. I think that it's a mistake to assume that an equivalent moral calculus exists on both sides," muddletoes wrote. "That's actually the crux of my question to GG. Granted the premise that the US under GWB committed war crimes, and were mistaken to believe that their actions were moral, does it make no difference that a requirement of their reasoning was that their actions be moral?"  The remarkable aspect of per questions is the assumption that the Bush regime believed that their actions were moral, and that, say, Assad does not.  (There's also an assumption that everyone in the Bush regime had the same beliefs on that score.)  When I declared that Bush's actions were amoral, muddletoes brushed that objection aside: "There are contexts in which you could argue that, but on the other hand it doesn't seem like a very useful summation when comparing their actions to, for instance, any of the genocides of the 20th century."  The trouble is that Assad's crimes don't really compare to other genocides of the 20th century either; certainly muddletoes offered no calculus for deciding.

I don't know how muddletoes knows Assad's motives, which in the final analysis are probably as unknowable as Bush's.  This al-Jazeera article probably tells as much as anyone can:

We know from his semi-regular longform interviews that he sees himself as carrying the flame of Syrian unity against a conspiracy of foreign actors looking to destroy Syria.

We know that he denies the existence or use of barrel bombs as he does reports of his government blocking aid to Syrian civilians around the country.

We know that his consistent line is that he is fighting against terrorists and his future will be decided by the Syrian people and nobody else.

In other words, Assad denies that he does bad things, and appeals to noble values like fighting terrorism, appealing to the judgment of the Syrian people; essentially the same rhetoric used by Bush (or Obama) to justify their wars.

I have a question of my own about this, which I've asked in various forms before: If the Bush gang had such noble motives, why did they choose to lie about the reasons for invading Iraq?  They knew perfectly well they were lying, as shown by their evasions, and those of their apologists, when the lies were exposed.  The use of lies to generate popular support for unjust wars is commonly invoked as one of the characteristics of the genocides of the 20th century, which would put Dubya in their camp rather than distinguish him from them.  One must also ask whether high ideals can ever justify aggression, attacks on civilian populations, torture, disappearances / rendition, abrogation of civil liberties at home and abroad, etc.  It's precisely such actions which discredit any pretensions to moral purity.  muddletoes complained that person was being accused unfairly of making an "endorsement of Bush."  I don't think it's unfair at all; I think that trying to ameliorate Bush's crimes by a purely fanciful claim that he acted out of a concern for justice is, if not an endorsement, certainly an apologia for him.

I wrote that I consider such questions a distraction, one beloved of apologists for American crimes.  "Is a G. W. Bush as culpable as a Bashar al-Assad?" is like ranking football teams, making a list in order of your favorite Beatles songs, or asking whether the Predator or the Terminator is more badass.  These are popular American pastimes, but they're irrelevant to the serious problems we face; certainly they're not an acceptable response to them.  Even if Bush deluded himself about the criminality of his actions, that doesn't make him less culpable; or if it does, it might at most shorten his appropriate prison sentence from, say, one hundred consecutive life sentences to ninety.  In the absence of reliable information about the innermost thoughts and motives of either man, it's impossible to compare them, and unimportant.  Assad is not an American ex-President, and Bush is.  As an American, Bush is my business in a way that Assad can't be.

It's also hard for me to see how Trump could make Bush look any better, if one isn't dedicated to a willed amnesia that erases Bush's actual offenses, which aren't limited to the invasion of Iraq or the "war on terror."  Many Democrats clearly are.  His economic policies, for example, were disastrous both for American citizens and for people around the world.  If he now attacks Trump without acknowledging his own culpability, he's just throwing up a smokescreen; if Democrats let him get away with it, they discredit themselves.  Certainly their judgment, their conviction of superior knowledge and rationality compared to the stupid Rethuglicans, is open to serious question.  That's not news, of course; it's just continuity.

To The Best of My Mismemorization, Uh ...

This morning I noticed that the Onion had an item in their faux Person-in-the-Street feature, based on a report that former President George W. Bush had offered to officiate at a lesbian wedding in 2013, but had to back out because of a scheduling conflict.

Ironically, the Onion is pretty reliable in its references to actual news (as opposed to the satire it spins from it), so I looked around and decided to look at what the Daily Caller (one of RWA1's preferred sources) had to say about the report.  It turned out to be only the barest aside in a Boston Globe piece about Dubya's brother Jeb, and for what it's worth, a Bush spokesman told the Washington Post that "While President Bush is indeed friends with Bonnie and Helen, he doesn’t recall making such an offer."  Which is a rather mild denial; it might well be true (that Bush doesn't recall it).  It's a sign of how much has changed, that rather than declare his eternal opposition to the destruction of holy matrimony by Teh Gay, Bush chooses not to remember anything about it.  I even believe that if he did offer and then withdrew, it really was because of a scheduling conflict, even if it was really a hangover.

I indulged in some snark on Facebook about the story, declaring that obviously Dubya isn't really a conservative after all! I think he was just misled by his advisors when he said he opposed same-sex marriage, just like Barack was.  (Or maybe not -- Obama denied the report.)  For that matter, Dick Cheney also pretended to oppose same-sex marriage while he was VPOTUS (via).  So they were just playing eleven-dimensional chess with the Christian right!  Bush did appoint numerous openly gay Republicans to important posts, after all.  I bet if Bush could have had just one more term, he'd have shown his true colors as the progressive social reformer he really is ... As so often happens, reality tends to leave satire behind it, gasping in the dust.

Incidentally, the Most Liberal Pope Evar continues to proclaim his inclusive message of love and inclusion.

Outrage Is Our Most Important Product

So the US Senate finally released its long-promised report on torture during the first years of Bush's War on Terror, defying warnings by alarmists that it would set off a wave of anti-American violence.  As Daniel Larison pointed out:

There was no such concern among hawks about the foreign policy implications of torturing people when it was being done, and they expressed no similar worries that other U.S. actions would provoke violent responses. If one raises the possibility that aggressive U.S. actions in other parts of the world could have dangerous consequences for Americans later on, that is normally denounced as 'blaming' America. Strangely enough, that doesn’t seem to apply when there is a chance of exposing our government’s egregious abuses to public scrutiny and having some small measure of accountability for those abuses.

I've been bemused by the reactions among liberals.  Jon Stewart was reportedly so shocked! shocked to learn that there was torture going on it made him want to vomit.  No one who was an adult during the 2000s, even in America, can credibly claim not to have known about the US practice of torture at the time: even before the Abu Ghraib revelations, there were plenty of reports of rendition and torture in the media.  There was even a fair amount of debate throughout the decade in mainstream as well as marginal media.  Nominal liberals like Jonathan Alter and Alan Dershowitz advocated the use of torture before the end of 2001, and urged then-new President Obama to continue the proud tradition.  Stewart is old enough to remember all this, so I presume he's going for theatrical effect.

I've also been reminding liberals who've indulged in outrage over Fox News's attacks on the report that it wasn't only Fox that warned of the dire consequences that would follow if the world were told that what they'd known had happened all along, had happened.  Fox was part of a chorus with CNN, the New York Times, and USA Today.  Some liberals were thrilled when John McCain dusted off his anti-torture credentials.  I teased a few of them by accusing them of endorsing him for the Presidency in 2016, since they'd used a similar line when a few writers pointed out that even Ron Paul was right about a thing or two.  I also had to remind them that the US was supporting, fostering, and practicing torture on a bipartisan basis long before George W. Bush took office.  They also like to forget Obama's role in shielding the torturers from accountability for most of his presidency.  (Remember "Reflection, not retribution"?  That's down the memory hole, along with "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!")  But posturing is so much easier, and more fun, than informing oneself.

Today Larison linked to a story in the Washington Post which reported that the "bitter Mideast" has reacted to the Senate report with a "shrug."  But you know, life is totally cheap in the Mideast, so they don't really care about torture -- they just hate America, because Islam.

... Shadi Hamid, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy [explained].  “This seems like run-of-the-mill stuff in the sense that this is what people expect of the U.S. They would be surprised if it wasn’t the case, and that’s a product of years of deep anti-American sentiment,” he said.

See, the "deep anti-American sentiment" couldn't possibly be the result of US violence, whether direct or by proxy, in the region.  They just hate us for our freedoms, I guess.  Or for our Freedom Fries.

Arab governments might have been expected to seize on the report, but their reaction too was muted. That’s in part because many U.S. allies in the region were directly complicit in the rendition and interrogation programs. Also, nearly all Arab governments have long employed similar brutality against their own political prisoners.

“Clearly everyone’s disgusted by it, and I’m sure the extremists will leap on it as evidence of American perfidy,” said Theodore Karasik, a regional expert who serves as senior adviser to Dubai-based Risk Insurance Management.

Well, the report is "evidence of American perfidy"; but then, so is the consistent US support for repressive regimes in the Mideast and elsewhere, another troublesome fact that has the effect of winning recruits to Islamist insurgent groups. Again, as Daniel Larison says, the hawks and their defenders never think that invasion, mass murder, torture, and indefinite imprisonment without trial might produce bad consequences for the US.  It's not as if the world's people need Senate reports to know what the US and its allies are doing to them -- their noses are ground in it every day.  Only Americans can maintain blissful ignorance about what is being done in our names, and throw tantrums when our sleep is disturbed.

The (Tea?) Kettle Calling the POTUS Black

This probably isn't a new thing, but I've been noticing it more often lately: fans of President Obama referring to him online as POTUS when defending him against his critics. For example, this comment today on Facebook on Obama's current troubles with the American Catholic hierarchy:

POTUS is safe on this one.

It's easier to type the five letters than the full title, I suppose, though "Obama" also has just five letters. Maybe referring to him by his surname feels disrespectful, but calling him "Barack" is too familiar, and POTUS is like "Commander-in-Chief," suitably pompous and grandiose. What really bothers me about the practice is the tendency to make Obama, or any other person, disappear into the office he holds, so that criticism of Obama becomes an insult to the Presidency itself. (A good example of this was the National Citizens Committee for Fairness to the Presidency, founded in the depths of the Watergate Scandal by Rabbi Baruch Korff, who'd taken it into his head to defend Richard Nixon. I recall seeing Korff saying during a TV interview that he didn't believe The President had committed an impeachable offense: he hadn't committed adultery, for example. I always thought that it was Nixon and his defenders who were being unfair to the Presidency if anyone was.)

As usual, this concern is purely partisan. People who called George W. Bush "the Chimp" or worse are suddenly very punctilious about the dignity of the Office of the President. And vice versa, of course: people who think Dubya's likeness belongs on Mount Rushmore refuse to recognize the Kenyan Usurper as the country's Executive. In that sense, both sides agree about the sanctity of the presidency, and that this or that incumbent profanes the sacred seat of Washington. As Glenn Greenwald has written, this doesn't even rise to the level of ideology: it's an authoritarian cult.

After I wrote about that snapshot of the Obamas* on Sunday, I got e-mail from a reader who agreed with me about the cult of personality that surrounds the presidency and infects American politics. Not only has that cult always been with us -- it followed George Washington into office -- but I think it's intrinsic to politics, much more than a concern with issues ever is. The Leader, the Big Man and his entourage, his largesse, the justice he dispenses, have always been part of American politics. People talk about separating the man from the office, but the man was there first. Not, as some pundits would have it, that we want a President we would want to have dinner with (though we would surely want to, with much bowing and scraping and consciousness of how honored we were to have him under our roof, and of course we'd have our photo taken with him to display on the wall forever); we want a President we can look up to and adore, partly a regular guy because this is America and we're all the same here, but a guy who's more regular than others, and for whose good name we'll challenge any smart alecks to put up their dukes. This isn't limited to politics: the same mentality pervaded the popular defense of Joe Paterno, for example.

With all this symbolism attached to the President, it's not surprising that his opponents demonize him: it's as natural as idolizing him. Criticizing him rationally would be irrelevant, even anti-relevant. Instead he must be depicted with horns and tail or ridiculed, merged with Alfred E. Neuman (and it's convenient that both Bush and Obama can be assimilated to Neuman's image so easily), burned in effigy, and vilified with projection so transparent that it almost has to be deliberate. The President, like the Monarch, is the Nation, and criticizing him is spitting on America according to his devotees; to his opponents, the Dirty President spits on America by his unfitness to occupy the office. (Remember all the Democrats who were so vocally glad in January 2009 to finally have a president they weren't embarrassed by?) These feelings can be rationalized by the fact that our Presidents are more or less elected, and so do represent us in a way that an unelected monarch doesn't; but the baggage attached to our presidents, the cult of personality, looks like something a good deal more ... primitive. Certainly nothing rational.

*In connection with that photo, I saw several references to Michelle Obama as FLOTUS, which clarified the way people are using POTUS. "First Lady of the United States" is not a title, not a political office, though it is part of the baggage of monarchy that we proudly republican Americans have always tried to pin onto the President and those around him. As Gore Vidal wrote, "Martha Washington contented herself with the unofficial (thus seldom omitted) title 'Lady' Washington." But the President's wife is a private citizen (COTUS?), albeit a private citizen stuck in one of the most blinding and uncomfortable public spotlights on the planet. As Jacqueline Kennedy complained, the "operators at the White House ... just love saying 'First Lady.'"

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Something odd today. Glenn Greenwald has a good post on the increasing climate of fear in the United States, despite or because of statements like President Obama's "They wanted to terrorize us, but, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear." Greenwald musters plenty of evidence to the contrary, and the whole article is worth reading.

But one bit of evidence, in the comment section, has me wondering. In response to a reader who argued, "This president, i believe, has had more threats against him then any other", Greenwald replied that "the claim about Obama receiving some huge increase in death threats is myth", citing this article from Politico.

Bit of a bombshell at this morning's Homeland Security Committee hearing:

U.S. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan dismissed published reports that the level of death threats against President Obama are four times greater than typical threat levels against recent presidents — claiming the current volume of threats is comparable to that under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

"It's not [a] 400 percent [increase]," Sullivan said during a heated exchange with Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who suggested the service needed additional agents to protect the first African-American president.

"I'm not sure where that number comes from," he said, aHdding that the number of threats against Obama "are the same level as it has been [against] the last two presidents."

Sullivan said he would get more specific in a closed-door session with members of the Homeland Security Committee.

Having written about that subject myself, I decided to see "where that number comes from." I got it from a post at the FAIR blog by Jim Naureckas, which linked to this Talking Points Memo story citing this October 2009 story in the Boston Globe, and a New York Times column by Frank Rich:

This week the journalist Ronald Kessler’s new behind-the-scenes account of presidential security, “In the President’s Secret Service,” rose to No. 3 on The Times nonfiction best-seller list. No wonder there’s a lot of interest in the subject. We have no reason to believe that these hugely dedicated agents will fail us this time, even as threats against Obama, according to Kessler, are up 400 percent from those against his White House predecessor.

The Globe story begins by mentioning the "unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service," according to an "internal report issued in August by the Congressional Research Service." It doesn't mention an increase of 400 percent, nor does it mention Kessler's book. So that's where the number comes from. Whether it's correct I don't know. I don't know how seriously to take a denial by the U.S. Secret Service Director, but considering that he's not talking up the danger or asking for more money for the agency, it seems more likely that he's telling the truth. Still, this was probably worth checking out.

Whatever It Is I'm Against It posted a bunch of pictures of George W. Bush at the 9/11 Memorial festivities, trying very hard to look solemn and serious.
He looks a lot happier when he's surrounded by football players at the game afterward. Maybe they let him do some chest bumps, or even slap an ass here and there. But my favorite picture of the lot is the one where he has a teleprompter in front of him.

Much as I despise Obama, no, I don't miss Bush at all.

That's Guilty -- Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

I was listening to Democracy Now! this morning, and guess who their guest was? Why, Michael Moore, pimping his new movie Capitalism: a Love Story. His discomfort was audible if not palpable. On the one hand, he recognizes that Obama has not lived up to Moore's many hopes. On the other hand, he still hopes that Obama is playing eleven-dimensional chess with his opponents; he just doesn't realize that he and the American people in general are Obama's opponents. So, when he was listing the many crimes involved in the Bush junta's handling of the economic crisis, he couldn't quite bring himself to include Obama among the conspirators, the enablers and collaborators, the accessories before and after the fact.

IOZ writes this morning:

Since taking office, he has ratified the policies of domestic surveillance that supposedly marked his predecessors as uniquely intrusive, has continued their policies of detention, has expanded a war, has reaffirmed rendition, i.e. kidnapping, is building a bigger, better concentration camp at Bagram, etc. etc. Practically speaking, he is at least Cheney's equal, with two exceptions. One: he is the president. Two: he is immensely popular.

Many liberals and progressives and suchlike will tell you, and not without some reason, that they oppose these policies now as they did before, that they condemn them in this administration as they did in the last. But it takes no special powers of discernment to see that their hearts aren't in it, that the frequency and fervor of their criticism is greatly diminished, that the prospect of some or other bullshit, half-assed, health-insurance subsidy causes them to pull their punches, and that their temperamental preference for Obama is a fine substitute in their minds for substantive improvement. When they begin suggesting that he be impeached, as they yowled about Cheney, I will take them more seriously in their complaints that I and others like me target them unfairly. They remain "supporters" of this president. Well, why does he need, and why does he deserve anybody's support?

I'd been thinking along the same lines earlier this week, thinking about Obama's international terrorism, but IOZ, who's bolder than I, threw down the gauntlet first. So yeah, impeach him, I'm game.

When the time comes (and you know the Republicans have been working on it all along), the impeachment will probably be for irrelevancies, like Clinton's. There's the rub. Maybe it will emerge that Obama smoked in the White House, violating all kinds of non-smoking ordinances that the Republicans always opposed as a violation of personal liberty. It always pissed me off, during and after the Clinton administration, to have to correct the lies of the Right (including the Democratic Right) about the malfeasance of the Pudgy Satan. (Just as my Korean friends complained of having to defend former President Noh Mu-hyeon when he was impeached.) I suppose I'll end up in the same position with Obama.