The Last Chance Democracy Cafe

Though I’m only 53-years-old, in just the space of my memory America has traveled from Jim Crow to Barack Obama: from the back of the bus, to the most powerful office in the world. And I still can’t quite believe it.  

In some ways, we’ve come such an unbelievably long way in race relations in this country: in other ways, we’ve hardly moved an inch. Come Tuesday, America will have an African American president. To someone of my generation, those words would once have seemed almost as unlikely as an announcement that Martians had just landed on the top of White House. But here we are.

Yet, in virtually every other aspect of life, black Americans remain miles behind their white counterparts. They are far more likely to be without jobs and decent health care, to languish in prison and even, on average, to die much, much younger.

There is so much left to be done, and yet . . .

I can’t help but think that somewhere Mary Church Terrell is smiling. It was on October 10, 1906 that Terrell gave one of the most extraordinary speeches in American history to the United Women’s Club in Washington, D.C. The superb American Rhetoric website ranks it as the 44th greatest American speech of the 20th century.

Her topic was “What It Means to be Colored in Capital of the U.S.” The whole thing is well worth reading, but here’s a small part:

For fifteen years I have resided in Washington, and while it was far from being a paradise for colored people when I first touched these shores it has been doing its level best ever since to make conditions for us intolerable. As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, a stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head. Unless I happened to know colored people who live here or ran across a chance acquaintance who could recommend a colored boarding-house to me, I should be obliged to spend the entire night wandering about. Indians, Chinamen, Filipinos, Japanese and representatives of any other dark race can find hotel accommodations, if they can pay for them. The colored man alone is thrust out of the hotels of the national capital like a leper.

As a colored woman I may walk from the Capitol to the White House, ravenously hungry and abundantly supplied with money with which to purchase a meal, without finding a single restaurant in which I would be permitted to take a morsel of food, if it was patronized by white people, unless I were willing to sit behind a screen. As a colored woman I cannot visit the tomb of the Father of this country, which owes its very existence to the love of freedom in the human heart and which stands for equal opportunity to all, without being forced to sit in the Jim Crow section of an electric car which starts form the very heart of the city– midway between the Capital and the White House. If I refuse thus to be humiliated, I am cast into jail and forced to pay a fine for violating the Virginia laws….

As a colored woman I may enter more than one white church in Washington without receiving that welcome which as a human being I have the right to expect in the sanctuary of God. . .

Unless I am willing to engage in a few menial occupations, in which the pay for my services would be very poor, there is no way for me to earn an honest living, if I am not a trained nurse or a dressmaker or can secure a position as teacher in the public schools, which is exceedingly difficult to do. It matters not what my intellectual attainments may be or how great is the need of the services of a competent person, if I try to enter many of the numerous vocations in which my white sisters are allowed to engage, the door is shut in my face.

Not so very long ago, that is what it meant to be a black person in Washington, D.C.

And next Tuesday, in that very same city, an African American will become President of the United States.

All of our national failings notwithstanding, my God, that makes me proud of this nation.

Think Progress has a great list up of the worst Bush enablers, titled: The 43 Who Helped Make Bush The Worst Ever.

It’s definitely worth a look, if for no other reason than to remind us, whatever our disappointment with some of Obama’s early decisions and appointments, just how much reason we’ll have to feel wonderful next Tuesday.

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.

Although, I have to say I’d love to live in that problem free, everything’s going fine, country he described. Too bad it doesn’t exist.

This isn’t about politics, but what incredible skill and clear thinking to steer a disabled plane into a river. Assuming the initial reports are correct, that pilot saved the life of everyone on board.

Dear Al:

Speaking as a trial lawyer, let me give you a little free advice (probably worth every penny you’re paying for it):

STOP THINKING LIKE A LAWYER!

Al, I have no doubt that you have a topflight legal team. And as to all legal issues in the post-election litigation in Minnesota, you should follow their advice.

But — and this is one big-assed doozy of a but — when it comes to the politics of the situation, please take any advice a lawyer gives you with a whole wheelbarrow full of grains of salt. They’re the legal experts: but you and your political advisers are the political experts.

I mention this because, well, to be frank, I think you’ve been seriously fu*king up the politics of this thing lately. You need to remember that at the end of the day, this is a political, not a legal, issue. Whatever the courts end up doing in Minnesota, ultimately the Senate gets to decide who to seat, if anyone. And don’t underestimate the willingness of the Republicans to filibuster in order to try to force a special election, as once happened in a razor-close Senate race in New Hampshire back in 1974.

By the same token, if the courts end up surprising everyone by somehow unfairly swinging this thing back to Norm Coleman, it may turn out to be you who will want to take the fight on to the Senate.

Either way, you don’t just need to win the lawsuit: you need to win it in a way that will allow you to head to Washington with the wind of popular opinion at your back. And, happily, the early signs out of Minnesota are very encouraging on this, what with poll results showing most people opposed to Coleman’s decision to go forward with litigation. And the longer Norm pushes this, the less popular he is likely to become.

And may I say for everyone that it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

But remember — public opinion is fickle and can change in the flash of a light bulb. So while, of course, you need to fight like hell for your seat, you also need to do it in a politically smart way. And to be honest with you, Al, your recent attempts to shortcut the process by asking the Governor and now the Supreme Court to declare you the winner, at least on a provisional basis, haven’t been all that smart politically.

For one thing, you never stood a flea’s chance in a wrestling match with an elephant of winning. I mean seriously, Al, what was the likelihood the Republican Governor would grant you that relief? And as for the Minnesota Supreme Court, it isn’t like the justices have been falling all over themselves trying to intercede in this process. Remember that odd ruling where they held that wrongfully rejected absentee votes could be counted, BUT ONLY if both candidates agreed? Friend, that’s not the action of a court that’s chomping at the bit to shortcut the process. And now comes word you probably won’t even get a hearing before the Supreme Court until February.

I understand the thinking behind this: if you can get in, even on a provisional basis, it will be damn hard to get you out. But as nice as that would be, where was there the slightest indication that going to the governor or the Surpreme Court would actually work?

What’s the gain here to make up for the PR damage this may cause you? Because my sense is, rightly or wrongly, a lot of people will regard this as overreaching on your part: and that’s the last thing you need right now. (The fact that more people than not favor putting you in provisionally doesn’t mean they’ll favor this approach.) 

I know, I know — many of my fellow lefties will scream that I must be just another one of those gutless liberal wimps who are afraid of a street fight. And I agree with them on one thing: our side does need to fight harder in disputes like this (as your legal team has done brilliantly for the most part). Election 2000 taught us that. But fighting hard doesn’t mean fighting stupid.

My advice? Take a deep breath. Remember that being a United States Senator is a pretty swell thing even if it comes a few months later than it should. Then continue to fight like hell — just do it smartly.

I have to say, when I first read this atrocious Tom Friedman piece in The New York Times, I was struck by the exact same thought expressed by Glenn Greenwald here: Friedman appears to be expressly condoning (celebrating even) the use of what (based upon Friedman’s assumptions as to Israel’s motivations) can only be called terrorism by Israel.

Here’s a small part of what Friedman has to say, as quoted by Greenwald, in discussing the motivation behind Israel’s unsuccessful 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Friedman’s hope that similar motivations are at play today in Gaza:

Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.

Israel’s military was not focused on the morning after the war in Lebanon — when Hezbollah declared victory and the Israeli press declared defeat. It was focused on the morning after the morning after, when all the real business happens in the Middle East. That’s when Lebanese civilians, in anguish, said to Hezbollah: “What were you thinking? Look what destruction you have visited on your own community! For what? For whom?”

You get the drift? Contrary to conventional wisdom, according to Friedman, Israel actually won its war with Hezbollah, because in the process of fighting it they harmed Lebanese civilians badly enough to make their point.

And he’s hoping for more of the same in Gaza:

In Gaza, I still can’t tell if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to “educate” Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population. If it is out to destroy Hamas, casualties will be horrific and the aftermath could be Somalia-like chaos. If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims.

So there you have it. A columnist for none other than The New York Times, unapologetically making the case for deliberately harming civilians in the pursuit of political ends: in other words, engaging in terrorism.

It says something about just how pathetic our national dialogue has become on the issue of Israel and the Palestinians that something like this is not only tolerated — in the Gray Lady no less — but also widely celebrated as gifted punditry.

If Bob Woodward’s report is to be believed, a senior Bush Pentagon official, Susan J. Crawford, has finally spoken the words out loud: the United States has engaged in torture. This from The New York Times:

The senior Pentagon official in the Bush administration’s system for prosecuting detainees said in a published interview that she had concluded that interrogators had tortured a Guantánamo detainee who has sometimes been described as “the 20th hijacker” in the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The public record of the Guantánamo interrogation of the detainee, Mohammed al-Qahtani, has long included what officials labeled abusive techniques, including exposure to extreme temperatures and isolation, but the Pentagon has resisted acknowledging that his treatment rose to the level of torture.

But the official, Susan J. Crawford, told Bob Woodward of The Washington Post that she had concluded that his treatment amounted to torture when she reviewed military charges against him last year. In May she decided that the case could not be referred for trial but provided no explanation at the time.

In confirming torture has occurred, Crawford’s statement comes on top of recent admissions by both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush of their own complicity in the crime. And, yes, torture is a crime, not a policy dispute. We recently sentenced a guy from another country to 97 years in jail for doing just that.

So it is that the criminality of his predecessor has been dumped squarely onto Barack Obama’s unwilling lap.

It’s hard to blame Obama for wanting to avoid this issue. The man has a few other things on his plate at the moment, after all, what with trying to stave off another Great Depression, end two wars and deal generally with the wreckage left behind by the worst president in American history. And, of course, there’s also that whole post-partisan thing.

Let’s face it: it’s hard to be post-partisan when you’re prosecuting the other party’s leaders.

Clearly, given his druthers, Obama wouldn’t touch this with a ten googolplex foot pole. He has little to gain politically by doing so, and potentially much to lose.

But unfortunately, that’s one of the disadvantages to being president — one of the negatives that offset somewhat the joy of getting to pick really cool rugs: sometimes history forces you into places you’d rather not go.

As we so often preach to the rest of the world, the United States of America is a democracy. And in a democracy, each of us — whether we like it or not — is a stakeholder in the process of governance. This means, of course, that as stakeholders, we all bear some responsibility for the actions of those who lead us. If we choose to look the other way when the United States government tortures people, we as its citizens become torturers ourselves. It goes with the territory.  

It may sound hokey, but we have, in truth, reached a time of national judgment — one of those moments when we declare to the world whether words like freedom, human rights and the rule of law represent ideals we actually live by, or merely lovely political poetry, nice to recite, but easily discarded when inconvenient.

The crimes committed in our name have now been stripped bare. Any plausible deniability we as a people might once have pretended to exist, has been blown to bits by the recent statements of people like Crawford, Cheney and Bush. We either tolerate torture as a nation or we don’t. It’s that simple.

There’s no middle ground, no artful compromise. Yes or no.

It’s time to decide.

Barack Obama is staring failure in the Middle East in the eye and, frighteningly, all signs point to him liking what he sees. 

I wanted so badly to give the man the benefit of the doubt on this. When he appointed Hillary Clinton, a tireless Israeli apologist, as Secretary of State, I looked for a silver lining. Clinton, I suggested, would be the perfect “only Nixon could go to China” emissary to carry a new “tough love” message to Israel.

And I was right: she would be. Unfortunately, not every Nixon actually ends up going to China. And given the other appointments Obama has been making, it’s getting very difficult to believe that either Clinton or Obama intends to go anywhere near the place.

Roger Cohen, someone I rarely find reason to quote, is right on target on this one. After noting how important it is that Obama’s Middle Eastern team include at least one member with a reputation for being somewhat sympathetic to Palestinian aspirations, he writes:

In fact, the people likely to play significant roles on the Middle East in the Obama Administration read rather differently.

They include Dennis Ross (the veteran Clinton administration Mideast peace envoy who may now extend his brief to Iran); James Steinberg (as deputy secretary of state); Dan Kurtzer (the former U.S. ambassador to Israel); Dan Shapiro (a longtime aide to Obama); and Martin Indyk (another former ambassador to Israel who is close to the incoming secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.)

Now, I have nothing against smart, driven, liberal, Jewish (or half-Jewish) males; I’ve looked in the mirror. I know or have talked to all these guys, except Shapiro. They’re knowledgeable, broad-minded and determined. Still, on the diversity front they fall short.
On the change-you-can-believe-in front, they also leave something to be desired.

In an adulatory piece in Newsweek, Michael Hirsh wrote: “Ross’s previous experience as the indefatigable point man during the failed Oslo process, as well as the main negotiator with Syria, make him uniquely suited for a major renewal of U.S. policy on nearly every front.”

Really? I wonder about the capacity for “major renewal” of someone who has failed for so long.

This simply isn’t the crew someone desirous of meaningful change in America’s Middle Eastern policy would choose to bring on board.

Now, almost certainly, there will be some change around the edges: I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if Obama is more open to the idea of increased contact with Hamas. So what? Unless talk somehow translates into action, it just becomes so much more desert wind. If there’s one thing the Arab-Israeli issue hasn’t lacked for over the years, it’s been useless talk.

In fact, while I desperately hope I’m wrong, my guess is that this represents the most likely outcome for Obama’s Middle Eastern policy: a lot of empty talk followed by more of the same.

And if that’s true, things won’t just fail to get better: they’ll get worse. If actual change isn’t forthcoming, the hopefulness that many in the region felt, at least initially, over Obama’s election, will quickly turn into even deeper hatred for the United States, the natural byproduct of disappointment.

And if change is coming, right now it’s hard to see from where.

Joe the Plumber may just have the right amount of intelligence to make it as a right wing pundit. Smart enough to breath, but not to think coherently.

There’s no “moving forward” until we deal with the crimes of the Bush era.