Graphic: United Federation of Teachers.

Like most informed people, I’ve watched in disgust as over a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted laws to prevent Democrats from voting.

They don’t come right out and say that’s what they’re doing, of course. To hear them talk, it’s about preventing “vote fraud.” That follows a script from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing group that works for America’s super-rich against the 99.9 percent.

Those same people were curiously incurious about vote fraud in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The 2000 election was stolen by rigged electronic voting machines, voter suppression, and “spoiled” ballots in Florida — where the election machinery was controlled by George W. Bush’s brother Jeb. The Bushes’ dirty tricks made the vote count so close that a recount was needed. Then, Bush’s friends on the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a halt to the recount and they awarded the presidency to Bush. Rather than cast doubt on the legitimacy of the U.S. government, Democratic candidate Al Gore conceded without a fight. Later, a consortium of six major newspapers (including The New York Times) and the University of Chicago did a comprehensive recount and analyzed the data under various assumptions. In every scenario, Gore won.

The 2004 presidential election was stolen by the Bush-Cheney machine in much the same way, but this time in Ohio rather than Florida. A University of Pennsylvania statistician found that based on the data, it was virtually impossible for Bush to have won the 2004 election. But the ever-subservient news media ignored the evidence of massive vote fraud when it benefitted the Bush-Cheney regime.

At the retail level, however — that of individuals or small groups of people conspiring to vote fraudulently — very few cases have been documented. Republican cries of “vote fraud” are simply a pretext to prevent voting by groups likely to vote Democratic: minorities, young people, the poor, and the elderly.

In the eyes of Republicans and their super-rich corporate paymasters, such people have no business voting in the first place. They’re not “the right kind of people.” If they were good enough to vote, they’d be rich. And corrupt. And white.

The Republican agenda is simple: Government should be of, by, and for the rich and the politically connected. Voting by the common people is a nuisance that should be minimized as much as possible.

Democrats want more people to vote for the same reason that Republicans want fewer people to vote: The majority favors ideas, programs, and policies that Democrats say they support, even if their actions often contradict their promises.

Progressives believe that for democracy to be legitimate, voting should be extended as widely as possible. No group should be deprived of the vote, either directly or through subterfuge.

But It’s Not That Simple

But the issue isn’t quite as simple as either side pretends. Democracy as an institution was not handed down to us on tablets from Mount Sinai. It has taken many forms in many different times and places.

In the South prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, literacy tests were used to prevent black citizens from voting. That’s an unsavory purpose. The law was also used to harass and humiliate black citizens. That’s despicable.

On the other hand, consider the official justification for the law: In order to be properly informed about the issues, voters had to be able to read. If they couldn’t read, then they couldn’t be properly informed. If they weren’t informed, then they couldn’t vote intelligently. Society has a legitimate interest in limiting the vote to people who can vote intelligently. You can say that the argument was abused, and it was, but it’s not a crazy argument. It makes sense.

In the early days of the American republic, voting was limited to white male property owners. Women couldn’t vote. Even if they were free and not slaves, blacks couldn’t vote. That limitation of voting rights led to a particular kind of government and political system. It was worse in some respects than our system, and better in other respects.

Even in the birthplace of democracy, ancient Athens, only white male Athenians could vote. Women couldn’t vote, and were considered about equal in status to horses. Foreigners couldn’t vote, and were considered fit for enslavement. That limitation of voting rights led to a government and society that was pretty good for white male Athenians. Its results were pretty good for all of Western civilization that came afterward, giving us foundations in science, philosophy, art, and politics. The cost was what we’d call injustice. Athenian males disagreed.

The Real Issues in Voting Rights

The real issues in voting rights are:

• What values do we consider most important?
• What kind of society and government do we want?
• And who counts as part of “we”?

From a political-science standpoint, democracy only works in small political units up to populations of about 500,000. When a political unit is bigger than that, democracy breaks down because (1) it’s impossible for the majority to know what’s going on, and (2) each individual’s vote is so diluted that it has almost no chance of making a difference. Ancient Athens had a population of about 250,000 — of whom only about 30,000 could vote.

With larger populations, democracy degenerates into oligarchy, just as it has in the United States. Democracy is no longer about rule by the majority, because that’s practically impossible. Instead, it becomes a device by which the ruling oligarchy deceives the majority into consenting to whatever the oligarchy does for its own benefit. It’s a way to give the majority of people the illusion that they have some control without actually giving them control. In essence, voting is transformed from an exercise in governance into an act of consent to be ruled and exploited by the oligarchy.

That said, there is some wider benefit in having people feel that they are part of the society. That applies even if the political system is corrupt. Voting rights are a way to recognize people as full citizens, giving them status and respect. People who feel that they are part of the society are more inclined to cooperate with others, help the needy, and contribute in other ways that the ruling oligarchy neglects because it’s too busy stuffing its bank accounts and starting wars.

For those reasons, I think that voting rights should be extended as widely as possible, even though the people voting are unlikely to have any power. It’s not a political but a social exercise: People who can vote are part of our society. We, as their peers, show them respect and acceptance.

Copyright 2012 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Technorati Tags: voting, elections, Republicans, vote fraud, democracy, Jim Crow

Back in 2005, my friend Miles Gloriosus interviewed George W. Bush at the White House. He found that Bush was quite different from his public image.

Actually, I should say that Miles claimed to have interviewed George W. Bush.

Miles is a good man. He’s a war veteran decorated for his heroism in the Battle of Macho Grande. But he’s also a drunkard, a libertine, and an incorrigible liar. So I cannot attest to the accuracy of his report, but it does sound plausible.

Mr. Bush released his own book about his presidency last week, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit Bush’s revelations to Miles. What follows is his interview from 2005. I’ve added some links to explain people, places, and events that might be unfamiliar to readers who don’t know Miles.

–N.S. Palmer

My Interview with George W. Bush

By MILES GLORIOSUS

Copyright 2005 by Miles Gloriosus.

Morning. I was getting my laundry out of the dryer and preparing to see my girlfriend. Well, she’s not actually my girlfriend. She’s a model on the provocative-but-tasteful “Republican Vixens” Web site. There’s something fascinating about a blonde born-again Christian who mouths neoconservative war slogans while dressed in black leather. I firmly believe that if she knew me, she’d want to be my girlfriend.

The phone rang. I picked it up.

“Gloriosus?” the caller said.

“Yeah? You and what army?”

“The president wants to see you.”

“Roosevelt?”

“No.”

“Larry Summers?”

“No.”

“Martin Sheen?”

“No. Bush. George W. Bush. That one.”

It was starting to sound authentic. Secret Service agents are notorious for having no sense of humor.

I ended up that evening at the entrance to Blair House, a diplomatic residence across the street from the White House. A couple of thick-necked types with black suits and earpieces hustled me inside, then through a tunnel that led under Pennsylvania Avenue to a lower floor of the White House. We climbed some stairs and went into an office in the residence. Bush was sitting at a desk reading some papers. He waved the agents to wait in the hallway outside.

“You know why you’re here?” he said.

“I suppose that you’re either going to talk to me or have me killed. Or both,” I said.

Bush laughed. “You’ve got a pair on you, boy, I’ll say that for you. But it’s nothing so lurid as you might imagine. To tell the truth, you’re no threat. Do you own a TV network? Can you out-shout O’Reilly? Can you untangle Hannity‘s non sequiturs? Could you even get a letter to the editor published if we didn’t want it to happen? Not a chance. Killing you would be more trouble than it’s worth.”

“On the other hand,” he said, “you do seem to have figured out a lot of things. I don’t often get a chance to talk to smart people who don’t work for me and aren’t trying to kiss my keister. I just thought we could chat. It’s more fun to do that when you’re talking to someone who can understand.”

I pulled a micro-cassette recorder from the pocket of my sport jacket. It’s standard equipment for an old ex-newspaper reporter like me. I said, “Do you mind if I tape this, just to make sure that I quote you accurately?”

“No taping,” Bush said. “I’ll take that recorder, please.”

I handed him the recorder. Not much point in arguing about it when there were half a dozen heavily-armed Secret Service agents just outside the door.

Bush opened a desk drawer and tossed the recorder inside. He pulled a $50 bill out of his wallet and gave it to me. “That should cover a new recorder. Don’t worry. I’ll expense it.”

“Now, here are the ground rules for our chat,” he said. “You can take notes. That’s all. And when we’re finished, on your way out, don’t try stealing any of those White House coffee cups or ballpoint pens. The FBI warned me about how many Ramada Inn bath towels you have in your apartment. What you get is a one-on-one with the president. What you don’t get is anything that would prove you were really here.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

Bush got up. There was a Mister Coffee machine on a table in the corner. “Do you want a cup? It’s fresh. Then we can get started.”

“Sure,” I said. “Black …”

“… with three sugars,” he said. “I take mine the same way. Aren’t those FBI boys amazing? By the way, I can get you an introduction to that girl of yours on the Web site. Nice young lady. She’s in the neuroscience Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins. Jewish, too. That stuff about her being born-again was just to keep Ashcroft from raiding the Web site. He always had a bug up his shorts about that kind of thing.”

He gave me the coffee, sat down in an easy chair, and took a sip from his own cup. “All right, we’re comfy. Ask your questions.”

I took a deep breath. “Everyone thinks that you lied about Iraq having WMDs and being connected to 9/11. Did you?”

“You bet your sweet bippy I did,” he said. “But that’s not the question to ask. The important question is, why did I lie? That’s what makes me either a traitor or a true patriot.”

“All right, why did you lie?”

“Because whether you like it or not, the world economy still runs on oil. The country that controls the largest oil reserves will have guaranteed prosperity at home and irresistible clout abroad. Which country do you want it to be? Russia? China? Japan? For me, there’s only one acceptable answer: the United States, and only the United States, is going to control that oil.”

Bush dropped another lump of sugar into his coffee cup. “What’s the alternative? Picture gas at $20 a gallon,” he said. “Picture unemployment that would make the Great Depression seem like the roaring 1990s. Picture Don Rumsfeld prancing around in one of J. Edgar Hoover‘s old pink dresses.”

I broke into a cold sweat. I had a bicycle, and I was financially secure. But the image of Don Rumsfeld in a dress … I finally understood the kind of horror that the P.O.W.s at Guantanamo had to endure.

I said, “As for the 9/11 attacks, some people think that they were staged. They believe that your administration either let them happen or actively helped them happen. Did you?”

Bush waved his hand dismissively. “No matter what I say, people are going to believe what they want to believe about 9/11. A lot of them think it was damn suspicious that I kept sitting there with the schoolkids reading My Pet Goat after learning that the attacks were underway. Others think I was a coward for flying all over the country in Air Force One instead of going right back to the White House after the attacks. As for me, I don’t worry about that. I focus on moving forward, not on looking back.”

I said, “I notice that you didn’t answer my question.”

Bush grinned. “No I didn’t, did I?” He chuckled. “My, aren’t you the observant one? It’s too bad that The New York Times and The Washington Post don’t have anyone quite that perceptive. They might have caught on to my little Iraq scam in time to prevent the war. If they’d had any cojones, which of course they don’t, they might even have asked me a tough question or two.”

Bush got up and started rummaging through the piles of books on his desk. “You know what Ralph Waldo Emerson said? ‘Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.’ Emerson wrote that in his book The Conduct of Life. I have it here someplace, if I can just find it … It’s a really nice edition. One of those leather-bound jobs from Easton Press, I think.”

Bush stood up from his desk. “I can’t find it,” he said. “But getting back to your question about Iraq. Sure, I lied my head off to start that war. It was discreditable as hell, as Emerson said. But if my analysis of the geopolitical situation was correct, then my discreditable little war will save the American economy from ruin and preserve our country’s status as a world leader. I care more about that than I do about abstract morality. And though it sounds terrible, I care more about the welfare of Americans than I do about the welfare of Iraqis.”

“My job as president isn’t to be a ‘fair arbiter’ between the needs of Americans and those of everyone else in the world,” he said. “My job is to protect the interests of Americans and America. God bless the rest of the world, but if they get in the way of what I think is best for America, then I’m sorry, but screw ‘em. Bombs away.”

I said, “Excuse me, but you seem to have a very limited notion of who’s American. You aren’t doing what’s best for working people who see their sons and daughters killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose jobs get shipped overseas, whose wages go down and whose taxes go up while giant corporations and multi-billionaires pay almost nothing in taxes on incomes higher than they’ve ever had before.”

Bush sat back down and took another sip of coffee. He thought for a minute. “America is an abstraction,” he said. “It means something different to everyone. It means people you know, places you grew up, holidays and customs you cherish. It means your family, books you like, and TV shows you watch. At a slightly greater remove, it means people similar to you, whom you think you understand.”

“For you, America is those working people you talked about so eloquently. It’s the soldiers who fought beside you in the battle of Macho Grande. It’s cab drivers and unemployed computer programmers. For me, on the other hand, America is rich people. Very rich people. People who either inherited their money or made it through graft, monopolies, and crooked deals. I don’t apologize for it. I was born into that estate. So when I talk about standing up for America, I’m being perfectly honest. I stand up for the America I know. I’m not indifferent to the ‘little people’ you love so much, but they’re not on my ‘A list’ any more than I’m on theirs.”

I said, “You also talk ad nauseam about how Americans are free. And yet we’ve now got your so-called Patriot Act, pre-emptive arrests, and no-fly lists that stigmatize people as terrorists when they’ve done nothing ‘wrong’ except criticize your administration. We’ve got a government that taxes and regulates almost every aspect of life, from toilets to cars to our personal speech and conduct. How does that make you a defender of freedom?”

Bush nodded. “Yes, all that endless prattle about freedom bores me sometimes, too. But define what you mean by freedom. Is it everyone doing whatever he wants? Then you have no society. The freedom to fly on Air Force One? I’ve got it. The freedom to get thrown out of your house and live in a shelter? You’ve got it.”

“I support the freedom for myself and other members of my social class to extract wealth from millions of working schnooks like you and to commit egregious crimes with impunity. But notice that in all my public statements about freedom, I never define what I mean by it. And nobody ever asks me. Just like standing up for America, when I say that I’m defending freedom, I’m being perfectly honest. I defend what freedom means to me.”

“Let me tell you something else about freedom,” Bush said. “Most people really don’t want it. They want to be told that they’re free, because it flatters them and makes them feel like Davy Crockett. But when it comes to actually being free — and having all the responsibilities that freedom entails — they’d much rather have Uncle Sugar looking out for them and telling them what to do.”

He stretched in his chair. “What the American people want isn’t freedom,” he said. “What the American people want is cheap gasoline. Dirty movies and cable. Sports. Bread and circuses. They want a shot — even if it’s a very small shot — at the big score. Yes, the chances of an honest person getting rich are lower than ever before. But if he or she does hit it big, the payoff is bigger than ever before. That’s what I provide to every American: not a fair shake, but a shot at the big payoff.”

“Mr. President, may I ask you something … a little sensitive?”

“Ask away,” he said. “I might not answer.”

” I don’t agree with you about anything,” I said. “But you seem … well, smarter than I expected.”

“Ain’t it a bitch?” he said. “Do you think I enjoy letting everyone believe that I’m a drooling moron who’s just a sock puppet for Dick Cheney and Karl Rove? I don’t. I’m a human being. Sometimes it hurts my feelings to hear what people say about me. But it’s like Sun Tzu said in The Art of War: ‘Though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective.’”

“What that means is, trick your adversaries into underestimating your strengths and overestimating your weaknesses,” he said. “It worked for me in Texas, and it works for me now.”

There was a knock at the door. A Secret Service agent stuck his head into the room. “Mr. President, they’re waiting for you in the theatre.”

“What’s the movie tonight, Frank?” Bush said.

“It’s ‘Sleepless in Seattle‘ again, Mr. President. The First Lady insisted.”

Bush snorted and looked at me. “Chick flick,” he said. “I’d invite you to stay, but I know that you have to file your story. Frank, would you conduct Mr. Gloriosus out?”

“Yes, sir,” the agent said.

Bush stood up and stuck out his hand. I hesitated for a moment, then I took it.

“It was good to meet you,” he said. “And if you ever get to be too much of a pain in the ass, we’ll always have Gitmo.” He laughed.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” I said. “Goodbye.”

With Frank and another thickneck at my side, I walked back through the tunnel to Blair House.

When we reached the entrance, Frank handed me a piece of paper. “The President told me to give this to you,” he said.

I looked at the paper. It said “Ilsa, she-wolf of the Young Republicans, 301-555-1111. Don’t call after 11pm.”

I hopped onto a Metro train and headed home. I still thought that Bush was a disaster for America, but at least now I understood him.

And I really liked the White House coffee cup I had in my jacket pocket. I hoped that Ilsa would like it, too.

Sarah Palin reads crib notes written on the palm of her hand. Source: The New York Times.

What do President Obama, mosques, Cuba, and Sarah Palin’s hand have in common?

No, it has nothing to do with how many Republicans it takes to screw in a light bulb.

I might be over-thinking a few things here, so take this as speculation.

President Obama didn’t need to take a public stand about the building of a mosque near “ground zero,” where some of the 9/11 false-flag attacks took place. But he did.

A lot of Fox-addled Republicans already think that Obama is a secret Muslim, so that move was guaranteed to confirm their suspicions and drive them (more) nuts. Many “moderate” voters, seeing them on television, will recognize how crazy they are. Did Obama plan it that way?

Obama didn’t need to ease travel restrictions to Cuba. But he apparently plans to do it.

Most of the same Fox-addled Republicans who think that Obama is a secret Muslim also believe that he’s a Godless Communist™, so that move was guaranteed to confirm their suspicions and drive them (more) nuts. Many “moderate” voters, seeing them on television, will recognize how crazy they are. Did Obama plan it that way?

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin didn’t need to write crib notes on the palm of her hand, where TV cameras would be guaranteed to show them to the world.

Most of the people who admire Sarah Palin seem to have low self-esteem and very little education. They believe (often incorrectly) that they’re stupid. Sarah Palin’s crib notes were guaranteed (a) to be noticed and (b) to tell her followers, “See? I’m stupid, just like you! I’m one of you!”

Ms. Palin is certainly ignorant and interested only in self-promotion, but I don’t believe that she’s actually stupid. In general, people who aren’t her fans already think she’s stupid, so her crib notes won’t change their opinion. However, people who are her fans seem to think that they, themselves, are stupid. Palin’s crib notes confirm that she represents them. Did Palin’s puppetmasters plan it that way?

As I said, maybe I’m over-thinking this. But it seems possible that President Obama and Palin’s puppetmasters are playing a very tricky game with these moves.

As an aside, let’s have a show of hands: Does anyone believe that Palin writes her own Twitter tweets? Or that she wrote any of the books, articles, or speeches attributed to her? No, of course not.

Today’s New York Times has a forum about the Cheney gang’s attempt to demonize lawyers who represented accused terrorists during the Bush-Cheney era.

Before reading the exchange, I noticed that Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz was one of the participants. I wondered what position he would take.

In the past, he’s represented unpopular clients such as Claus von Bulow and has argued vigorously for their right to counsel — a right which is long established in European and American law. He’s also smart enough to recognize the stark contradiction between those facts and the Cheney gang’s propaganda campaign.

At the same time, Dershowitz is in the neoconservative orbit and could be expected to support anything for a war either against Islam or against those whom he perceives as Israel’s adversaries. In the United States, “accused terrorist” has been seen as roughly synonymous with “accused Muslim,” so it’s not much of a stretch.

In the end, Dershowitz did not disappoint. He acknowledged that accused terrorists, including sympathizers and “fellow travelers” (look it up), had a right to legal counsel. But he then drew a moral equivalence between providing legal counsel to suspects and providing legal cover to the Bush-Cheney regime for torturing prisoners. Providing the latter is the same kind of war crime for which Nazi judges were tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to long prison terms.

Give Dershowitz credit: He’s an advocate. No matter how immoral or irrational his position, he’ll argue it well.

Surprise, surprise: Today’s New York Times reports that the U.S. Justice Department has given only a slap on the wrist to John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Bush-Cheney regime lawyers whose “torture memos” provided specious legal cover for violation of U.S. and international law.

Yoo and Bybee’s work not only tried to justify torture of prisoners. It also committed torture: against logic, human decency and — most relevant — against both statutory law and legal precedent.

Yoo is now a (much-protested) law professor at the University of California / Berkeley. Bybee is a federal judge, appointed to the post by the Bush-Cheney regime.

Ethics lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) concluded that Yoo and Bybee had

… ignored legal precedents and provided slipshod legal advice to the White House in possible violation of international and federal laws on torture.

The OPR recommended that Yoo and Bybee be cited for “professional misconduct,” which could have led to the revocation of their licenses to practice law.

However, David Margolis, associate deputy attorney general, overruled the OPR’s recommendations, which were already far too mild. As a result, the official Justice Department report (PDF) cited the two war criminals only for “poor judgment.”

Thus, the Obama administration once again let the psychopathic monsters of the Bush-Cheney regime (starting with Bush and Cheney themselves) escape justice.

In 1947, German jurists who had provided similar legal apologetics for the Nazi regime were tried at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, were convicted, and served long prison terms. As a result of the Justice Department’s whitewash, Yoo and Bybee won’t even suffer the loss of their law licenses.

Republicans try to frighten the uninformed by painting Obama as a wild-eyed leftist (as well as a Kenyan Socialist Muslim), but there’s no indication he’s anything but a slightly less vicious, considerably more intelligent version of his predecessor.

From his continued support for Bush-Cheney policies that benefit Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, to his continuation of the Bush-Cheney regime’s Afghanistan occupation, to his complete lack of leadership on issues such as jobs and health care reform that would benefit working Americans, Obama is starting to look very much like “Bush-lite.”

And that is not “change we can believe in.”

Waaaay back in the 1960s — yes, during that tiresome decade of Woodstock and flower power and Vietnam — something remarkable happened in Czechoslovakia.

From the end of World War II in 1945 until 1989, Czechoslovakia was dominated by the Soviet Union, which was the 20th-century’s nom de voyage for the Russian Empire. Its official ideology was communism. Its official governing method was oppression.

In 1968, a reformer named Alexander Dubček became leader of the Czech Communist Party, which was the country’s ruling party. He wanted to keep the egalitarian goals of communism (such as equality and social welfare) but get rid of its oppressive aspects. His government allowed free speech, including open dissent from government policies. He reined in the secret police.

Dubček called his movement “communism with a human face.”

Naturally, the Russians couldn’t allow it. They invaded Czechoslovakia and put an end to that experiment.

How little things have changed. In 2009 under President Obama, the United States is now being treated to “Bush-ism with a human face.”

One must admit that it is a slight improvement. Instead of having to endure the smirking, murderous, simian countenance of Dubya Bush, we now hear very similar policies from the serious, calm, intelligent visage of President Obama. It cuts the nausea factor by quite a bit. It’s been months since I threw my shoes at the TV set.

But it’s still Bush-ism: Bail out the Wall Street sharks who wrecked the economy, but not the unemployed whose jobs and lives the Wall Streeters destroyed. Sell out health care reform to the in$urance companies, the drug companies, and their hired lackeys in Congress. Crank up the war against Afghanistan. Slow down the exit from Iraq. Beat the drums about largely imaginary terrorist threats. Provide legal defense for the Bush regime’s chief torture apologist, John Yoo. Leave in place the instruments of oppression established by the Bush regime, such as the Transportation Security Agency, no-fly lists, warrantless wiretapping, and the Department of Homeland Security: instruments that never stopped a real terrorist threat, but hyped plenty of fake ones and beat down the American people into cowed submission lest they be put on a “watch list.”

An article in today’s New York Times recalls the worst paranoia and propaganda of the Bush years, when hapless loudmouths and street thugs were framed as dangerous terrorists. The Times article, “Domestic Insecurity,” uses the same weasel-words that we saw over and over in propaganda from the Bush-Cheney regime: the supposed terrorists were “accused of being drawn into terrorist scheming,” “accused of helping plan the killing spree in Mumbai,” “accused of going to Pakistan for explosives training,” and they “allegedly participated in a rocket attack against U.S. troops in Afghanistan.”

Anyone can be accused of anything, and since the Bush-Cheney regime’s signature event of 9/11, they have been. Jose Padilla was accused of plotting to explode a “dirty bomb,” and was then tortured in an unsuccessful attempt to get any evidence at all that would implicate him in such a plot. The “Miami Seven,” who couldn’t have assembled a bomb even if they’d bought it “ready to assemble” at Wal-Mart, were led by an FBI agent provocateur to take an “oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda” before being framed for a virtually non-existent plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. There are many more such cases.

Are any of our current “accused people” actually guilty of anything? The Bush years taught us to doubt it. The Obama administration hasn’t given us good reasons not to doubt it.

I still believe that President Obama is trying to do the right things. The problem is that he’s not trying very hard. Instead, he’s “going with the flow.” Since 2001 (and even before that, to a lesser degree), the flow has been in the wrong direction.

Update, September 2011: I no longer believe that Obama is trying to do the right thing. As an educated and rational man, his culpability is greater than that of his ignorant and deranged adversaries. At least they can legitimately claim that they don’t know any better.

Copyright 2009 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Have you ever seen a car commercial on television?

Think about that commercial. The most important criteria for choosing a new car include:

• Reliability
• Safety
• Gas mileage
• Comfort and roominess
• Features such as satellite radio and GPS
• Price
• Warranty

Did the commercial emphasize those criteria as the car’s selling points?

Of course not. Instead, it showed endless video clips of the car zooming along the highway, looking attractive and powerful, suggesting that the person who drives it must also be attractive and powerful. If the driver was male, the car most likely zoomed past a bevy of admiring women on the sidewalk. The message, quite obviously, is Drive this car and you’ll get women. All that’s missing is the grunting of the cavemen.

Have you ever bought a car?

Think about that experience. Unless both it and you are quite unusual, the salesperson was trying to push your emotional buttons. Salespeople will talk about facts and figures if they must, but it’s not their tool of choice. Their main approach is to manipulate you emotionally. The car salesman’s motto is: “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.”

Let’s consider an example from a different field. This is from an October 3, 2000 debate about Medicare between Vice President Al Gore and presidential candidate George W. Bush (quoted in the book The Political Brain by Drew Westen):

A book by Drew Westen that examines the role of emotion in politics.

GORE: Under [Mr. Bush's] plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you now have under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18 and 47 percent, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he’s modeled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries. Let me give you one quick example. There’s a man here tonight named George McKinney from Milwaukee. He’s 70 years old, has high blood pressure, his wife has heart trouble. They have an income of $25,000 per year. They can’t pay for their prescription drugs. They’re some of the ones that go to Canada regularly in order to get their prescription drugs. Under my plan, half of their costs would be paid right away. Under Governor Bush’s plan, they would get not one penny for four or five years and then they would be forced to go into an HMO or to an insurance company and ask them for coverage, but there would be no limit on their premiums or deductibles or any of the terms and conditions.

BUSH: I cannot let this go by, the old-style Washington politics, if we’re going to scare you into the voting booth. Under my plan the man gets immediate help with prescription drugs. It’s called Immediate Helping Hand. Instead of squabbling and finger pointing, he gets immediate help. Let me say something …

JIM LEHRER (MODERATOR): You’re …

GORE: They get $25,000 a year income. That makes them ineligible.

BUSH: Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers. I’m beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, but he invented the calculator. It’s fuzzy math.

Gore’s argument is mainly about facts and figures. Only after he’s presented the facts and figures does he give an example, probably as an attempt to connect emotionally with the audience because his advisors told him that he should.

Bush’s argument — well, he doesn’t really make one. He accuses Mr. Gore of engaging in “old-style Washington politics” and seems to claim that because his own plan is called “Immediate Helping Hand,” it provides immediate help to the man in Gore’s example.* He tells a joke about Gore inventing the electronic calculator and alludes to the Republican campaign’s outright lie that Gore said he invented the Internet.

Bush’s approach is to draw people’s attention away from policy issues and engage in emotional attacks on Gore’s character. Gore is all about the steak, but like many a car salesman, Bush only wants to talk about the sizzle.

My point isn’t that Mr. Bush is uniquely deceptive. He’s not. Mr. Bush provided many examples of such fact-avoidance and emotional manipulation, but one could also find them on the Democratic side. However, one of the most vivid examples comes from my own experience of watching the first 1980 debate between President Jimmy Carter and presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.

1980: Ronald Reagan vs. Jimmy Carter

I supported Mr. Reagan in his 1980 presidential campaign. To this day, I believe that he was a good man and a good president, apart from his tragic choice of George H.W. Bush as his vice president.**

After the first Reagan-Carter debate, however, I was despondent. I thought that Carter had pretty much destroyed Reagan in the debate. Carter was armed to the teeth with facts, figures, and logic. I knew many good arguments Reagan could have made for his positions, but he didn’t make them. All he offered was grandfatherly charm and quips such as “There you go again.” I thought Carter had won so decisively that there was virtually no chance Reagan could win the election.

Surprise. Most people who watched the debate thought the opposite: That Reagan had pretty much destroyed Carter. They didn’t want to hear about facts, figures, and logic. They liked Reagan, as did I. To them, that was what mattered. He was someone with whom they would have felt comfortable “having a beer.”

People Are Both Rational and Emotional

It’s hardly a hot news flash that both reason and emotion influence our beliefs. The irony in U.S. politics is that:

• Democrats often believe that people are just animals, but they tend to argue as if they believe that people are rational, intelligent beings who can be swayed by logic and evidence — such as all those “numbers” for which Mr. Bush derided Vice President Gore in their debate.
• Republicans claim to believe that people are children of God with the ability to reason. However, they tend to argue as if they believe that people are just stupid apes who can be manipulated into adopting false beliefs and supporting causes against their own interests.

And guess what? On both issues, the Republicans are right. People are indeed children of God with the ability to reason, but effective propaganda easily manipulates most of them, most of the time, into believing almost anything and supporting almost anything.

I say this with no feeling of superiority. During the 1990s, I was completely deceived by the Republican propaganda campaign against the Clinton administration. In place of affordable medical care for all Americans, we got embroiled in endless debates over issues that were at best unimportant and at worst completely manufactured. Did Mrs. Clinton profit from sweetheart stock trades years before her husband was elected president? Did the Clintons want to put their own friends in charge of the White House Travel Office? Did an embarrassed President Clinton try to cover up his affair with Monica Lewinsky? Did someone in the Clinton campaign, sometime, accept an illegal campaign contribution? Did White House lawyer Vincent Foster really commit suicide?

The most important good things that the Clintons wanted to do were blocked by the savage Republican attacks and the Clintons’ need to defend against them. What we got instead was the “giant sucking sound” of NAFTA, thank you very much. Multi-national corporations love it; Mexican and American working people, not so much.

When the time came to elect a new president in 2000, we were all so disgusted by the “Clinton scandals” that we allowed a regime into power far worse than the Clintons had ever dreamed of being. We traded political patronage and sexual dalliance — sins, to be sure, but relatively harmless ones — for war and illegal wiretapping and torture and stolen elections and the drowning of New Orleans.

The Propaganda War Against President Obama

The Republican establishment is now using a variation of the propaganda campaign it ran against the Clintons. The white-hot emotional pitches are there again. Based on no evidence at all, they scream that Obama was “really born in Kenya” and isn’t legally eligible to be president, that he’s really a Muslim instead of a Christian, and so forth.

Establishment Republicans don’t want to talk about any real issues except for abortion and “gay marriage” because those are the only real issues they’ve got. Almost all the other proposals they have are variations on their standard mantra: stick it to working people and consumers, slant the laws and tax code even more outrageously in favor of the rich, and let giant corporations do whatever they want.

They know that if Americans start thinking for themselves instead of blindly following emotional propaganda, they’ll demand affordable national healthcare, greater protection for workers and consumers, sensible business regulation, and an end to the tax code’s “free ride” for corporations and the super-rich. Those are all things that the Obama administration might deliver if it’s not blocked by the Republican attack machine.

So I have only one request: Think for yourself about the real issues that matter, and give your political support accordingly.

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*Mr. Bush seems to be fond of naming things in ways that suggest their opposite. For example, the Bush-Cheney administration’s “Clear Skies” law of 2003 increased the legal amount of air pollution, thereby promoting the opposite of “clear skies.”

**The choice would have been even more tragic if John Hinckley, the son of one of George H.W. Bush’s political financiers, had succeeded in his attempt to assassinate President Reagan, thereby enabling Bush to assume the presidency to which he felt entitled.

Is President Obama a socialist?

Probably not. But dare I ask: Would it be such a bad thing if he were?

“Socialist” is the latest epithet to be flung at President Obama by the Republican establishment that controlled Washington for the last eight years. Falsely calling themselves “conservatives,” these apostles of fiscal prudence gave America record budget deficits and economic depression. In their role as guardians of the Constitution, they gave America torture and illegal wiretapping, abrogated the first, fourth, and fifth amendments, and eliminated the centuries-old right of habeas corpus. In their role as patriots, they lied America into aggressive wars and invented the unitary-executive doctrine, a thinly-veiled update of “the divine right of kings” that purported to grant the Bush-Cheney regime arbitrary power beyond the wildest fantasies of of Britain’s King George III, against whom the American colonists revolted in 1776.

But what is a socialist, anyway? The president’s critics take care to avoid defining the concept. They’re counting on the fact that most people don’t know what a socialist is, except that they’ve been told it’s something bad. And if President Obama is a socialist, then that’s something bad. Right?

Several points are worth noting. First, calling people and policies “socialist” has been a standard scare tactic of the corporate state and its media shills for most of the last century. They called Social Security “socialist.” They called Medicare “socialist.” They went even further in attacking Martin Luther King and called him a “communist.” It’s a measure of their desperation that they’ve pulled out the same old smears yet again.

Second, in America, only one national politician identifies himself as a socialist. That’s Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont — who is, by the way, one of the best friends that working people have in the American government.

Third, President Obama does not claim to be a socialist. Indeed, even the Republican weekly tabloid Human Events reported that officials of various American socialist parties have denounced President Obama as a middle-of-the-roader.

What Socialism Means

Fourth, socialism means different things to different people. George Orwell, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, said that “the underlying ideal of socialism is justice and liberty.” Albert Einstein, the most famous scientist of the 20th century, said that it was a way to “overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development.” To the Mexican Zapatistas who fought against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that impoverished both Mexicans and Americans, socialism is “education, housing, health, food, land, good pay for our work, democracy, and liberty. Some people may call this socialism. But it doesn’t matter what name you give it.” Some socialists have supported significant government control of the economy; others have called for abolishing government altogether.

What ties all socialists together is a belief in the fundamental equality and dignity of all human beings. They think that at the very least, government should not promote vast inequalities of wealth and condition by handing out special privileges, tax breaks, and legal preferences to the rich and the politically connected. At best, government should provide a legal framework that limits economic, social, and legal inequality, while recognizing that some inequalities are inevitable and even desirable in any society. To the extent possible, government should guarantee basic human rights and a minimum level of economic security to all citizens.

Fifth, a lot depends on the execution. In the movies, there are only a few basic stories that appear over and over. The difference between a classic film and a clunker is often not the story itself, but how well it is told.

Likewise, in political economy, there are only a few basic approaches. One approach is a “free market” system based on private ownership and control of economic resources. The main problem of the last eight years under the Bush-Cheney regime was not that free markets can’t work in principle, but that they were run in such a corrupt and incompetent fashion under a flawed legal framework. An alternative approach is socialism. The Soviet Union and China showed us how not to do it; Britain’s experience has been imperfect but mostly positive; and other places, it’s been extremely successful in providing a decent, secure, fulfilling life for the majority of people.

Capitalism and Socialism

It’s just as unrealistic to condemn socialism because of Soviet oppression as it is to condemn free enterprise because of the Bush-Cheney regime’s corrupt “crony capitalism.” Socialism can work, and so can free-market capitalism, though each aims for a different type of society.

Socialism aims for a society in which everyone is guaranteed a basic standard of living and human dignity. It lacks both the highs and the lows of free-market capitalism. Free-market capitalism aims for a society in which anyone can become very rich — though it also allows anyone to be struck down by poverty and desperation. In theory, a person can get richer in a free-market capitalist society than under socialism. But the vast majority of people won’t, and many people will be far worse off than they would be under a socialist system.

Let’s be frank. Socialism is indeed “un-American,” if that means it’s different from what the American founders envisioned. But so is the corporate state under which Americans now live: if anything, rule by giant multi-national corporations is even more “un-American” than socialism. Therefore, what’s at issue is not a choice between one system that’s consistent with American political traditions, and another system that isn’t. It’s a choice between two systems that both depart from how America’s founders understood their country.

The Real Question

The real question is not “what’s traditionally American,” but “What is the best system for the majority of Americans?” And the answer to that is certainly closer to socialism than to the corporate capitalism under which they currently live.

So far, however, President Obama appears determined not to rock the boat. He’s a definite improvement on the psychopathic savagery of his predecessor, but he seems reluctant to take the radical steps necessary to make the American economy serve the American people in general instead of a small, stupendously wealthy minority.

The U.S. Republican Party is at it again. This time, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and his minions are trying their best to block or sabotage government programs that would stimulate the American economy and reduce unemployment. Some conservative and libertarian economists, such as former Bush advisor Gregory Mankiw at Harvard, are doing likewise — advancing one specious argument after another to forestall anything that would help working Americans.

However, though many of the arguments advanced against the Obama plan and fiscal policy are disingenuous, they are sometimes sincere. The reason is that conservative and libertarian economists tend to focus obsessively on the long run at the expense of the short run.

Of course, Keynes gave the best reply to that kind of thinking: “In the long run, we are all dead.” During the 1930s Great Depression, FDR’s advisor Harry Hopkins said pretty much the same thing: “People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.”

There is reason to believe that given a proper legal and institutional framework, the economy will perform best in the long run if taxes and other government interventions are kept to a minimum. However, (a) we do not have a proper legal and institutional framework, and (b) people’s lives depend not on the long run but on a series of short runs.

The trick is to keep the economy going today while taking care that it doesn’t crash tomorrow or the next day. And that’s a trick that both the U.S. Republican Party and its house economists have proven unable to perform. Their signal achievement so far has been to run the U.S. and world economic systems into a ditch. Their current efforts could do little beyond ensuring that the ditch becomes our long-term residence.