What happened to white America?

In his New York Times column of July 4th, with the attention-grabbing title “Disunited States of America”, John Tierney contemplated Americans acting like “the Red people in the South and the Blue people in the North had a border between them”. Ouch! Not exactly our very own version of a Shia-Sunni divide, but one that is becoming more and more jarring with each passing election.

In 1984 Ronald Reagan won reelection by a landslide capturing 49 of 50 states. Yet I can’t remember any divisive debates about red states and blue states from that era. In fact, the only red state that President Reagan was focused on back then was the one he derisively referred to as “the evil empire” – which he was passionate about defeating. And, the only ridicule that I recall following that lopsided election was a cartoon depicting the lonely “blue” state of Minnesota – as a part of Canada! The rest of the 49 states were not considered “red” – they just happened to represent the “United” States of America.

It was only after the split election of 2000 that the red state-blue state dichotomy began to get deeply ingrained into the American psyche. Candidate Bush, who had promised throughout that campaign to be a uniter and not a divider, ascended to the presidency despite losing the popular vote. President Bush then chose to further alienate the red and blue states throughout his first term. In fact, he successfully used this divisive “politics of color” to win reelection in 2004. In spite of a narrow victory, he claimed to have gained “political capital”.

He quickly managed to spend that capital and some. One would have hoped that the outcome of the 2006 mid-term elections would inject a dose of reality into the remaining two years of his presidency. However, recent indications from the White House seem to suggest that “stay the course”, on all manner of Bush policy, is here to stay – in spite of the American people having expressed their displeasure at the status quo.

The Clinton impeachment over lying about a personal indiscretion now seems Kafkaesque in its absurdity when compared to the steady string of whoppers that the Bush Administration has fed us over the past six years regarding vital matters of state. Nonetheless, impeaching this president, especially in a time of war, would be a cop out – it is imperative that President Bush get us out of the mess that his own “untruths” have created. We the people have elected a Democratic Congress so that we can finally hold the Bush Administration accountable for its actions.

Through his rash conduct of foreign policy, President Bush has seriously degraded the reputation and standing of the United States in the eyes of the world. It is imperative that we set our differences aside in our attempts to repair our international image. In the spirit of which I ask this seemingly provocative question “What happened to white America?” However, I do not ask this question in a pejorative manner implying race, but in the patriotic spirit of red, white and blue! Instead of our constant focus on red vs. blue in every aspect of policy making, I suggest that we all look at a compromising, neutral “white” – which could become the bright white light of enlightenment that guides US to glory!

The Accidental Pundit

It was the best birthday present that I had received in a long time. In the wee hours of the morning of November 8, 2006, about 3.15 am to be precise, I decided to call it a night. The Democrats had recaptured the House and they were just 2 seats shy from getting control of the Senate – it was time to get some shut-eye.

I awoke again at 5.30 am, only to learn that Burns and Macaca were hanging in there – damn, why couldn’t they just throw in the towel? Nevertheless, it turned out to be the birthday that kept on giving. President Bush called a press conference at 1 pm to announce that he had fired Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. The president also announced that Bill Gates was taking over from Rummy!

I thought that was kind of weird – why would the President want the retired marketing genius from Microsoft running the Defense Department? Honestly, it was kind of late in the day to expect Iraq 3.0 to work. After all, Bill might do Windows and philanthropy well, but honestly what did he know about a war gone bad? Besides, Bill would just throw a whole lot of money and people into the mix – the President had already tried the former and consistently rejected the latter.

Suddenly the phone rang and I woke up. I had dozed off just as the President’s press conference got rolling. I had actually heard Bob Gates being mentioned and then drifted off into a blissful sleep… it was during that brief interlude that I got to wondering how on earth could the Microsoft marketing machine salvage Iraq, when those “nattering nabobs of neocons” had failed to do so?

My son was calling to say that he had been up until four that morning in his college dorm waiting for Burns to go down in flames. After we discussed the exciting turn of events, I let him into my little secret.

I sang it to him in my best Britney Spears imitation, “Oops, I did it again!”

“What on earth are you talking about, Dad?” my son asked in an exasperated voice.

“You are not going to believe this, Jay,” I said, “but I had entered Al Kamen’s ‘In the Loop’ contest about a month ago.”

“Oh, that Post guy who does all that sarcastic stuff on the Federal Page of ‘The Washington Post’?” Jay asked rather impatiently.

“That’s right, son. I had called the mid-term election in his contest as follows – 51 to 49 in favor of the Democrats in the Senate and 239 to 196 in favor of the Democrats in the House.” I said quite proudly.

“Wow! That’s great.” Jay replied.

“Yeah, but Macaca could throw a monkey-wrench into my Senate plan. I know Burns doesn’t have much fire left in him. Also, MSNBC is projecting the final House tally at 234-201 for the Dems. That ain’t bad. I think I am going to nail this puppy.” I told Jay quite animatedly.

Then I went on to remind him about my last great call on the eve of the millennium (December 31, 1999) – almost a year before that infamous 2000 election – when I had prophesized about the first split election in over a century! I still smart from the fact that I got no recognition for that prescient piece of punditry. Maybe if someone from Gore’s staff had read my piece (“Musings for the New Millennium”) in a timely fashion, they would have been better prepared to deal with those “hanging chads”.

Nonetheless, the inconvenient truth is I blew my subsequent predictions in 2002, when I wrote that the Democrats would capture the Senate 53-47, and in 2004 when I went out on a limb for Senator Kerry and “stuck” with a 53% to 47% victory in his favor! What had I been smokin’?

The moral of this story is that punditry has as much to do with your political skills, as it has to do with premonition and luck. Just ask triple-crown winner, Karl Rove, and all the conservative talk radio gasbags that he invited on to the lawns of the White House in the week prior to this election. They all blew so much hot air from under those tents that day, one could have floated across the mall and landed right on the steps of the Capitol to witness a new Republican Congress being sworn in.

In any event, as I write this, Macaca has decided to settle for the “real world of Virginia” and ride into the sunset (at least, for now). So I could hit the mother lode again this time, but I no longer pine for my fifteen minutes. I am trying to be happy just being an accidental pundit, who happens to get it right once in a while. But maybe just this one time, say, later “this week”, I would love to “meet the press” and then “face the nation” squarely – and, tell them about my plans for “Saving President Bush” (the title of my upcoming blog, which has a metaphorical reference to the movie, “Saving Private Ryan”).

With sincere apologies to Harold Ford, and minus the wink, I conclude my commercial with this appeal, “George, Tim, Bob… call me!”

A Consistent Foreign Policy Based on Core American Values – How Convenient?

John Tierney, talking about Republican and Democratic stereotypes in the voters’ minds, wrote in his October 10th column in The New York Times, “At one time these stereotypes made sense, but not anymore.” But why would they? Back in 2000 would anyone have predicted that the party that would get – reckless about government spending, suffused by sexual scandals, tainted by powerful lobbyists, mired in another unpopular war, etc. – so removed from its traditional image, would be the party of Eisenhower and Reagan? Therefore it is not the voter who is confused, as Mr. Tierney implies in his column, but the GOP. Having been in control of both branches of our government for most of the past six years, the GOP seems to have lost its way.

This stereotype would have us believe that foreign policy has always been the strong suit in the GOP armor, especially after President Reagan’s efforts in ending the Cold War. However, in the aftermath of the Bush Doctrine, we have seen a litany of foreign policy setbacks. Afghanistan is witnessing a resurgence of the Taliban, Iraq seems to be mired in a civil war, Iran in brazen defiance of the UN is on the verge of going nuclear, and North Korea has already tested its first WMD. Even outside the "axis of evil", freedom and democracy seem to be stumbling?

It looks like Thailand did not get the State Department’s memo on President Bush’s preference for democracy over stability? With violence challenging the fledgling democracies produced by the Bush Doctrine, we cannot afford to have otherwise stable U.S. allies fall off the democracy wagon as well. In fact, Thailand could be sending the wrong message to Pakistan, whose General Musharraf might be now tempted to postpone general elections next year under the garb of ensuring stability for his country?

President Reagan is credited with having ended the Cold War but, in his October 25th column in The New York Times, Thomas Friedman resurrects what he calls “The Really Cold War”. Mr. Friedman’s “‘First Law of Petropolitics,’ which posits that the price of oil and the pace of freedom operate in an inverse relationship in petrolist states” is undoubtedly emboldening Russia to backslide on freedom and democracy. President Bush, who had “looked the man in the eye” back in 2001 and got “a sense of his soul”, has clearly misread Mr. Putin. In fact, Russia started a slow march away from freedom and democracy, soon after the ex-chief of the KGB took over as President on the eve of the new Millennium. The upsurge in the price of oil over the past couple of years has only hastened this march.

Mr. Friedman in another recent column also suggested that the rise in radical Islamic power has been directly proportional to the rise in the price of oil. Iran did not appear as much of a threat a couple of years ago when crude oil was under $40 a barrel. In the $60-$70 range, even the Shia in Iraq are having “pipe dreams” about ruling their own country without the “infidel Americans” – which is probably another reason why the sectarian violence there has spiraled towards civil war. It won’t be long before the Sunni oil cartel led by Saudi Arabia (another stable ally?) starts acting up, now that they don’t have to worry about Saddam Hussein any more? This is fallout from a wrong turn in the “war on terror” that the American taxpayer will be paying for a long time – at least, until we are no longer “addicted to oil”.

It is therefore quite distressing to watch President Bush fawn over petro-authoritarianists such as Russia’s Putin, Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev, and Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah, while he simultaneously condemns leaders that he has never met such as North Korea’ Kim Jong Il, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. In the long run this inverted diplomacy could also prove to be a “lose-lose” approach in our overall foreign policy efforts.

Now does anyone in the Bush Administration really have a clue about the Middle East? Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had characterized the recent Israel-Lebanon conflict as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East” when civilians were being brutally killed on both sides. When a truce finally went into effect after a month of senseless fighting, Hezbollah (a U.S.-designated terrorist organization) appears to have emerged politically and morally stronger – and, the “new Middle East” seems to have been still born.

Then we had the transfer of fourteen suspected terrorists from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay. Not one of these fourteen prisoners is a national of Afghanistan, Iraq, or Iran. Nine of these fourteen terrorists were captured in Pakistan, a country that also contributed three of these high-value prisoners. It really makes one wonder on what basis President Bush constituted his “axis of evil” after the events of 9/11, which were largely planned in and executed by nationals of two of our allies – Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It is almost like President Bush’s version of the Sun Tzu strategy, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

In any event, the transfer of these prisoners from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay was a forced result of the Supreme Court’s ruling in late June. Vice President Cheney did not help the United States’ already tarnished image on human rights, when he had this exchange (as reported in The Washington Post) with Scott Hennen, a conservative talk show host, in an interview on October 24th:

“Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?” Hennen asked.
“Well, it's a no-brainer for me,” Cheney said, “but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president for torture. We don’t torture. That’s not what we're involved in.”

Earlier in the summer, in another jarring reference, President Bush classified the people behind the London airlines plot as “Islamofascists”. By thus conflating religion with politics, which is what a made-up term such as "Islamofascists" does, the Bush Administration is effectively putting victory in the “war on terror” out of the western world’s reach. On Labor Day, the New York Times published my letter in which I had cautioned:

“…with the passage of time, this war is getting increasingly divided along religious lines. History has proved that religious fundamentalists are the last ones to accept that they are the children of a lesser god.”

President Bush must surely understand that Muslims make up one-sixth of the world’s population and trying to win a “war on terror” by associating their religion with fascism is simply foolhardy.

So Republicans, who often compare President Bush to President Reagan, would do well by reading George Will’s October 5th column in The Washington Post “What Goeth Before the Fall”. In it Mr. Will defines “unresolved tensions between, two flavors of conservatism -- Western and Southern”. In applying Mr. Will’s reasoning, I consider President Reagan as a western “libertarian” conservative, whereas President Bush is a southern “religious” one. The long Cold War was eventually won by a western conservative president at the helm. I believe that we will be hard-pressed to win a long “war on terror”, given its increasingly religious overtones, with a southern conservative president in charge.

Remember those two slogans – relating to his Iraq policy – that had been used effectively by President Bush during and after his successful 2004 reelection campaign up until very recently. The first catchphrase was “cut and run”, which is what he accused the Democrats would do, from Iraq. The other option was naturally to “stay the course”, which he proudly claimed the Republicans would continue to do under his leadership. But that was then and this is now – ten days prior to the 2006 mid-term election, which increasingly looks like it is going to be a 1994-style blowout – and, a very likely end to the long Republican stranglehold on Congress.

The president who claimed to never rule by polls seems to have finally been rattled by them. So President Bush did what he had accused Senator Kerry of doing all through the 2004 campaign – he flip-flopped on Iraq! The president finally “cut and run” on “stay the course” in Iraq, when he told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News on the October 22nd edition of “This Week”,

“Well, listen, we’ve never been stay the course, George.”

With that admission, President Bush appears to have overcome an unusually lengthy “state of denial” over his disastrous foreign policy undertaking in Iraq. However, I believe that it will take him equally long to acknowledge reality. I suspect that the Bush Administration and the GOP will go through the other four classical stages of coping with loss – anger (which will manifest itself in their reaction to the results of the upcoming midterm elections), bargaining (with a Democratic Congress in 2007 to contain their humiliation), depression (as 2008 nears, they might pretend not to care anymore), and finally, acceptance (arising more from a need to protect their legacy). Hopefully, some conscientious leader in the Bush Administration or the GOP will quickly seek to redeem the nation’s prestige before any attempts at salvaging their own pride?

Meanwhile the road to the other “state of denial”, a.k.a. Darfur, littered with corpses, will have to unfortunately wait its turn – wait, to even make it onto our foreign policy agenda in the near future, since our human rights agenda has been severely compromised by this wrong turn in the “war on terror”. However, we could start to make at least some headway in addressing the root cause of terrorism, if we at least tried what I had suggested in my October 6th letter to The Wall Street Journal:

“The U.S. could make serious progress with this reasoning if it showed some consistency in the application of its core values to its foreign policy. This would necessarily imply that we make no exceptions of convenience even in the short-term: Musharraf, Mubarak, Nazarbayev, Abdallah, et al. We insult the intelligence of the common Muslim populace with these exceptions of convenience -- this is the core issue, it seems to me.”

To my mind, it’s these three C’s of distinction in our foreign policy – core values, consistency, and no exceptions of convenience – that will restore the United States as a beacon of freedom and democracy throughout the world.

As Baghdad sizzles, Condi fiddles and Bush piddles over “Long War” riddle

The Bush Administration has been trying to have it both ways since 9/11 in the security vs. liberty argument. At home their covert actions have been suggesting to us for some time that in order to ensure our security, we need to sacrifice some of our liberties. But then abroad, they have been pushing liberty at a tremendous expense of security – where far more innocent, non-American lives are being lost on a daily basis. This high incidence of “collateral damage” is not only morally repugnant, but also a cause for increasing disenchantment with America around the world.

To therefore help keep an increasingly skeptical American public engaged, the Bush Administration has begun drawing parallels between the longevity of the Cold War and what some in the Administration have been referring to lately as the “Long War” (a.k.a. the “War on Terror”). In any event, they cannot continue to unilaterally violate a sacrosanct principle common to these two ideological struggles: the preservation of liberty as enshrined in the Constitution. Ironically, the preservation of liberty – which their oxymoronic “Long War” policy now seeks to curtail in order to secure – was the rai•son d'être for the Cold War.

The genesis of the “Long War” was an attempt by the Bush Administration to establish a dubious link between Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda and 9/11. This blatantly false equivalence was used as a rationalization to divert the true “war on terror” from Afghanistan to Iraq. To make matters worse, after no WMD were found in Iraq, the Bush Administration changed its phony primary objective to an even harder, secondary objective of “establishing democracy” in Iraq. In recent Senate testimony, the top two Pentagon officials politely suggested that it is hard for a democracy to function in the midst of a civil war. This stark testimony leaves President Bush with a Hobson’s choice – to continue to promote “democracy” or try to contain a civil war.

Is it any wonder then that almost 60% of the American public now believes that the Iraq war was a mistake? In the light of which, it is quite surprising that Senator Lieberman, a strong supporter of President Bush’s “Long War” policy, lost his primary bid for reelection in a deep blue state by only a narrow four point margin. One could conclude that Senator Lieberman took his constituents for granted and paid a price for it. However, based on his post-primary remarks, “For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot and will not let that result stand” it appears that Bush-style hubris has infected Senator Lieberman as well.

The morning after his humiliating loss in the primary, Senator Lieberman proclaimed, “I am even more devoted to my state and my country,” as his justification for making an independent run in November. Senator Lieberman may think that he is putting his country first, but he is definitely putting himself second, and his party last among his priorities. He does not seem to care how his selfish power grab might affect the chances of his Democratic Party in winning back the Congress – ironically, from those very Republicans he now hopes will help elect him as an independent senator.

As far as the “Long War” is concerned, it’s quite apparent that both parties are playing politics with what “The Daily Show” host, Jon Stewart, so presciently called “Mess-O-Potamia” shortly after it began. Many people now see President Bush’s “Long War” strategy as trying to “stay the course”, even if it’s a failing one, for the next two-and-one-half years – then to “get outta Dodge” and leave it to the next administration to clean up the mess. Personally, I had an epiphany while watching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on a recent Sunday morning talk show. It seemed to me like she was fiddling while Baghdad was going up in flames. One can only hope that the larger American public will resist political fear mongering, as was witnessed in the aftermath of the foiled London plot last week, and hold the Bush Administration’s feet to this messianic fire of its own volition. As Baghdad sizzles, we can no longer afford to have Condi fiddle and Bush piddle with the “Long War” riddle – they either solve it or “Lamont” (i.e. lament) the consequences of a November tsunami!