Is the GOP Driving Us Crazy?

If McCain, Graham, Boehner, Cruz, Rand Paul et al shut up, would our mental health be better? Without such nasty sounds in our heads 24/7, would there be less violence in America?

A proposed GOP filibuster on defunding Obamacare raises such questions in the light of a provocative essay about the angrier voices schizophrenics hear in America as opposed to India and elsewhere in the world.

A Stanford anthropologist suggests that “the greater violence in the voices of Americans with schizophrenia may have something to do with those of us without schizophrenia. I suspect that the root of the differences may be related to the greater sense of assault that people who hear voices feel in a social world where minds are so private and (for the most part) spirits do not speak.

“We Americans live in a society in which, when people feel threatened, they think about guns. The same cultural patterns that make it difficult to get gun violence under control may also be responsible for making these terrible auditory commands that much harsher.”

Such speculation may be academic, but wouldn’t we all benefit from a lowering of the endless screaming of TV talking heads, tweeters and bloggers that assaults us?

A century ago, President Teddy Roosevelt, a warrior by nature, recommended that America “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Three years after his White House tenure, T.R. left the Republicans and ran for the Presidency again, forming the Bull Moose Party “to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics."

When the GOP comes to its senses again in this century, it may result in breaking that alliance, speaking more softly and removing those angry voices that constantly keep assaulting our heads today.

At the very least, it could stop driving us crazy.

The Pope Makes Republicans Look Medieval

Primal prejudices are intractable, but American liberals of my era are put to the test with a new Pope professing a large-hearted vision of the Catholic faith even as the Tea Party hunkers down in Washington to defend to the death its deep belief that the poor and the sick are unlovable and evil.

Religion and politics collide in a spiritual train wreck. Those of rational bent are hard-pressed to sort out where America is going.

In his first authorized interview, Francis I says, “The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives, adding that the Church “is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people...We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.”

Here, in the so-called New World, a GOP group YouTubes an ad showing a young woman in hospital gown, feet in stirrups for a gynecological exam, when an Uncle Sam caricature pops up and the messages, “Don’t let government play doctor” and “Opt out of Obamacare” flash on the screen.

At the same time, House Republicans slash billions from food stamp programs, a move described as “the most heartless bill I have seen” by a long-time Democratic Congressman but justified by Speaker John Boehner, captive of his mindless Kamikaze caucus, as “getting Americans back to work a priority again for our nation’s welfare programs.”

Just as burning at the stake was a way of clearing the minds of heretics in the good old medieval days.

In his interview, the Pope recalls, “A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person.”

Someone should tell that to Tea Party here and, in next year’s election, take away their matches.

Obama, McCain and Their New Pen Pals

In the age of sound bites, the President and his 2008 opponent are reviving an ancient art, lobbing letters at foreign adversaries rather than missiles, an improvement no doubt but neither quite has the hang of it.

John McCain, in his usual retro style, sends Putin an old-fashioned “Dear Sir, You Cur” missive, telling his constituents, “I am pro-Russian, more pro-Russian than the regime that misrules you today. They punish dissent and imprison opponents. They rig your elections. They control your media.”

Speaking of which, McCain sends his screed to the wrong Pravda (don’t ask, it’s complicated) but Putin surely gets the message. Will they exchange seconds to arrange for an old-fashioned shootout on some neutral ground, say an OK Corral in Turkey?

Obama, on the other hand, finds a new pen pal by passing notes in the international schoolyard with Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, who sees in the exchange “subtle and tiny steps for a very important future.”

A welcome change in tone from that of his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was prone to offhand remarks such as that about Israel: “The regime that occupies Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time.”

Still and all, President Obama, who has accumulated painful experience in trying to find common ground with adversaries at home and abroad, is chastened enough to say only that Rouhani “is somebody who is looking to open dialogue with the West and with the United States, in a way that we haven’t seen in the past. And so we should test it.”

By all means, he and McCain should keep expressing themselves on paper rather than with tons of hardware, but be sure to use enough postage and double-check the addressee’s residence.

In doing so, they may want to keep in mind the strategy of statesman-author Winston Churchill: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

No News on "Newsroom"

Waiting this long to watch your recorded season finale doesn’t even earn you a “spoiler alert.” The question hanging in the air for those who enjoy Aaron Sorkin’s HBO media circus is whether or not the show will be back for a third season.

As the season ender ties up so many plot knots, it’s natural to wonder if the fast-talking characters have finally run out of steam. And it doesn’t help to learn that ratings were down for the sendoff installment.

The official position is that everybody wants a Season 3 but (harrumph) scheduling issues need to be worked out. Don’t hold your breath.

The main problem may be that events keep overtaking the show, i.e., how do you build a whole season around the question of one use of poison gas, when such toxic weapons have been preoccupying the real world for weeks—-and with much more complexity?

Internally, if “Newsroom” does come back, it will require a major retooling of the MacKenzie-Will relationship. Those who remember when the sexual tension went out of the Diane-Sam duet on “Cheers,” the chemistry went away and never came back.

But fans can hope. After two seasons of juggling two men, Maggie Jordan is the only main character left unmated and with ugly short red hair to boot.

If Sorkin and HBO work out their “scheduling” problems, we may get to see it grow back and revert to its normal color and length. That would be nice for her and the rest of us.

One thing is sure: There won’t be any shortage of new political and media issues to bounce off, as those who witnessed last night’s Daily Show takedown of CNN’s coverage of the DC shootings will attest. 

"Let 'Em Eat Cake," Says the Tea Party

If watchers saw “The Hunger Games” as fantasy, Washington politicians are working hard to turn it into a reality show.

Tom Colicchio, head judge of TV’s “Top Chef,” notes that “if Congress manages to cut $20 to $40 billion” from food stamps, “there’s no way charity can make that up. All the fund-raisers in the world are not going to get back to that number. Are we O.K. with people starving in the streets?”

He is a board member of Food Policy Action, a group to “support healthy diets, reduce hunger at home and abroad, improve food access and affordability,” among other goals, that now rates members of Congress on how they vote on such issues.

Not surprisingly, members of the Tea Party fill the ranks of those who agree with Marie Antoinette before the French Revolution that, if people have no bread, “Let 'em eat cake.” If voters are paying attention, they may want to sharpen guillotines for the November 2014 balloting.

Nobody’s perfect, but Ohio Rep. Steve Stivers managed to score zero on averting starvation, while Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt and Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo were in single digits.

Not only are Americans going hungry in the richest country history has ever known but cheap nutrition among the poorest is contributing to bad health for the future, with rising numbers of elementary school children suffering from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, even gallstones.

So we have the spectacle of feckless politicians devouring the welfare of future generations in every way possible. Only the Obamas are lobbying for their health.

Can we really stomach that?

Gun-Loving Congress Flinches

When the shooting started in Washington today, there was no hesitation in the Capitol two miles away: Both houses shut down with no debate about Second Amendment rights. In the face of possibly imminent danger to themselves, gung-ho NRA-loving lawmakers did the equivalent of hiding under their desks.

Now we face the usual ritual that follows random gun massacres: counting the dead and wounded, listening to the pointless bleating of “security” analysts, searching for “motives” to explain madness that is by definition unfathomable, wallowing in grief for victims and families and, after a few days, retreating into that cosmic shrug that always follows.

If today’s shooter had somehow breached not a Navy facility but the Capitol itself, randomly butchering everyone in sight, would it have made any difference?  

The President, in the White House only four miles from the shootings, cancels a speech and shakes his head over “men and women who were going to work, doing their job protecting all of us” who “know the dangers of serving abroad, but today they faced the unimaginable violence that they wouldn’t have expected here at home.”

As we move through the desolation we now know so well, won’t those with political power in Washington pause long enough to consider what all of us, they themselves included, at every moment face from a madman’s finger on the trigger of a semi-automatic weapon?

Is this the world they want to bequeath their children and grandchildren?  They should come out from under their desks and tell us.

Two to Watch for 2016: Cruz and Warren

While Barack Obama breaks all records for exclusive interviews, news about his successor is starting to stir in the background.

A new CNN poll is fascinating for what it reveals—-and doesn’t. No surprise that Hillary Clinton is favored by a whopping 65 percent of Democrats with Joe Biden way back at 10. Expectedly too, Republicans are in a gaggle with Chris Christie (17), Paul Ryan (16), Rand Paul (13), Jeb Bush (10) and Marco Rubio (9).

At this point, name recognition counts heavily, but just below those current leaders is a provocative pair: Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz, each at 7 percent.

Two senators who have occupied their seats for only months are poised to move up as more Americans find out who they are and what they stand for—-the most clear-cut (some would say extreme) positions on the role of government, an issue that has been dominating—-and paralyzing-- Washington politics.

Even as prospects for Democrats retaking the House next year remain slim, the ascension of Cruz and Warren may sharpen serious debate about what voters two years later, their heads cleared of Obama’s race as a distraction, want from government.

With professorial backgrounds, both could elevate the discussion above the Michele Bachman-Rick Perry duh level and offer some real bite to the overarching arguments.

Fascinating too is the prospect of the pair bringing true demographic diversity to their parties’ national tickets (after all, the 2012 race still featured three and a half white men).

Conceivably, the Democratic ticket could consist of two women with the GOP fielding a pair of Latinos. Mix or match as they may, the parties may be forced to stop searching for compromise candidates and field choices that voters can understand, think about and among whom they can express their clear preference.

In 2016, the middle of the road may be the most dangerous place for an ambitious national politician to be.

Why Can't Obama Do Better?

Less than a year ago, Americans elected a President who was clearly the better choice—-an experienced, gifted, humane man who had steered the country through a tumultuous four years.

Why is Barack Obama in such distress now? Domestically and around the world, he is in less control than ever, the agenda being driven by events and ruthless antagonists. On major issues, even his own party is not squarely behind him.

Is the nation in some existential funk that no leader could overcome, or have we somehow been swamped into a loss of priorities that has to be set straight?

The question sounds suspiciously like an election theme, but it can’t wait for 2014 or 2016 to be addressed.

For one thing, in 2013 Barack Obama seems to be wavering between the passivity that finally produced a Pyhrric victory on health care reform in 2010 and a new-found aggressive insistence on punishing Syria.

Lest we forget, the “victorious” version of Obamacare was a compromised mess that resulted from the President’s failure to tell Congress exactly what he wanted from the start the year before and fight for it, rather than settle for what he could get (and giving the Tea Party a vehicle for taking over the House).

Now on Syria we see a different Obama, drawing a red line on Assad’s use of poison gas but then deferring (sort of) to Congress on a military response and being deflected from his course by that renowned peacekeeper Vladimir Putin.

No matter which way he turns now, the President is in trouble, on the defensive, explaining himself, being seen as weak and indecisive.

As he girds himself for another bitter pointless fight with Congress on the debt ceiling and budget, is it too much to ask Barack Obama to take a step back and remember who he was in November 2008, a living example of how America can change and evolve?

Why are we spending so much of our political capital on every new insoluble crisis that can be produced by inexhaustible Middle East quagmire makers?

In his last futile speech, the President acknowledged the nation’s exhaustion with all that. For the sake of his legacy and our future, he should be stepping back to look at the whole picture and start spending his remaining time in the White House to pull us as far out of that muck as humanly possible.

Cross-Generational Love

When I was in my twenties, I had a brief crush on a sixtyish Southern woman I met at a writers’ conference. We talked for hours and I can still remember that honeyed voice saying, “Sir, you purely pleasure me.”

Later, I would now and then feel emotional connection with even older women and, as time went on, with some who were much younger. None of these was sexual, and I began to believe in cross-generational love, an affinity that spans decades of difference in the accident of birth.

All this comes to mind because Debbie Moore, my niece by marriage, is celebrating her sixtieth birthday in Vermont. Over decades I have known her, she is empathy squared: a nurse and much more by profession, a nurturer by nature.

One of a dozen children, she came to her calling early and ever since has elevated it to an unpretentious art, caring personified. Just being with her is a warming experience.

To all the Ploofs and Moores gathered tonight and especially my nephew Tom who has shared more than half her life, all happiness and a memory:

Decades ago Debbie was in Manhattan for a professional meeting and, after dinner, we were walking together talking animatedly and ran across my son’s high-school basketball coach who, on seeing a mismatched couple holding hands, quickly averted his eyes.

I was tickled both by his misapprehension and the realization that nothing could possibly have explained to him the existence of platonic cross-generational love.

But it does exist. To my joy. Happy birthday, Deb.

President McCain to Answer Putin

You get old, you forget things. It’s been only five years but John McCain is having a senior moment by arranging to answer Vladimir Putin, President to President.

Stirred up by the Russian leader’s New York Times OpEd piece, the 2008 loser has prevailed upon Pravda to publish his answer to the Kremlin commentary.

Whatever medication they have him on in that old-age home, the US Senate, they should consider doubling up. McCain’s memory lapses seem to be getting more frequent and virulent as time goes on.

Egypt, Libya, Syria, whatever, the former pilot of the Straight Talk Express Bus gets more garrulous at 77—-and more combative.

"Mr. McCain,” says the editor of Pravda, “has been an active anti-Russian politician for many years already. We have been critical of his stance on Russia and international politics in our materials, but we would be only pleased to publish a story penned by such a prominent politician as John McCain."

As John Kerry and the Russian Foreign Minister labor long hours to cook Assad’s goose in some mutually satisfactory manner, McCain will be stirring folks in Moscow with the real skinny on what red-blooded American patriots think about Putin and his gang.

Even so, his response will be late. New York Democratic Congressman Steve Israel has already penned a rebuttal article for Kommersant, a Russian magazine under the title, “An Open Letter to the People of Russia.”

Who would have thought that a new threat of World War III would be fueled by American lawmakers writing free-lance articles for Moscow publications?

Dear Vladimir

Wonderful to hear from you after so long. We were beginning to fear Barack had offended you in some way at those interminable meetings, but it’s reassuring to know you still care.

We too remember when “we were allies...and defeated the Nazis together.” Those were the good old days, meeting up in Czechoslovakia and swapping Mickey Mouse watches for vodka.

It’s reassuring to hear you’re willing to forgive our little misunderstandings since then (that really was a dustup in Cuba!) and that you still have our best interests at heart. Too many old friends drift apart after such spats as a Berlin airlift and cold war.

We haven’t gotten together much at our old hangout, the United Nations, since Khrushchev had one too many and start pounding his shoe on the bar, but your nostalgia for “consensus” there is touching, and it’s good of you to straighten us out on how it’s not Assad in Syria using poison gas but “opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists” and that “militants are preparing another attack-—this time against Israel.”

Who knew? Only a true friend would show such concern for helping us avoid making mistakes. We’ll certainly take another look at what those bumblers in the White House and CIA have been telling us before we blunder into another one of our “commonplace...interventions in internal conflicts in foreign countries.”

It’s also good to hear you have been in touch with “major political and religious leaders, including the Pope” who agree with you about our misguided missile strike plan in Syria.

The next time you talk to the Pope, give him our best. And write again soon. Don’t be such a stranger.

Losses of 9/11/01

Until 12 years ago today, we lived in another country. They did things differently there. For one, they did not keep bringing death to people halfway around the world who posed no imminent threat to us.

For another, they didn’t casually keep sending our own young men and women to be killed and maimed in such places. One Korea, one Vietnam and one Kuwait in half a century were enough to discourage such behavior.

What America lost on September 11, 2001 was more than 3000 innocent women, men and children. It lost social trust--the sense of not having to be constantly on guard against the malice of unknown people who want to hurt or kill us for no personal reason whatsoever.

Before then, we took much for granted: We could walk safely in front of cars that would stop for red lights, eat food that had passed through the hands of countless unseen people, turn over our children every day to strangers who would keep them safe and nurture them.

We still do all that and more, but we can’t board a plane, sit in a stadium, attend a midnight movie, go to church or walk a crowded street with the same security we felt before 9/11/01. We live in a nation where, as Bill Clinton put it, it’s easier to get a gun than vote.

Our public life has become meaner, coarser and, in politics, we are not the people we were before--fiercely opinionated, intensely competitive but optimistic and generous underneath it all.

This anniversary of the fall of the Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon will pass with ritual moments of silence for what we lost that day.

Yet the biggest loss is the memory of who we were before then.

The President's Pinprick Speech

Defensive, disappointing and demagogic are words that come to mind after Barack Obama’s appeal to a reluctant nation on Syria.

Defensive, because the President lists all the reasons against his position and ineffectually tries to destroy them.

Disappointing, because he seems unable to grasp how deep the opposition goes and that rejection of his arguments is not based on failure to understand them.

Demagogic, because his appeal to watch videos of Assad’s gas victims puts them in a special category that is hard to accept. Dead women and children will be just as dead if they are killed in an American missile strike.

To create a special category for such weapons, the President cites “the horror of the Holocaust,” omitting that Nazis herded millions of Jews into concentration camps before gassing them. And in asserting America’s “sense of common humanity” on such matters, he is speaking for the only nation on earth that ever dropped atomic bombs on civilian populations—-twice-—without warning, killing men, women and children by hundreds of thousands in Japan and dooming countless more to slow death by cancer for decades.

“Our ideals and principles, as well as our national security, are at stake in Syria,” he says, but few Americans believe that, and his media blitz of the past few days has not changed their views.

In the final minutes of his speech, he gives short shrift to the Russian effort at the UN, treating it with the skepticism it merits but not changing his stance in any material way.

To answer critics who believe that missile strikes at Assad would be ineffectual, the President claims with pride that “the United States military doesn’t do pinpricks.”

Just so. It inevitably brings death to innocents with no assurance of changing Assad’s behavior in any material way or not drawing us as deeply into Syria as we have been in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why must we have an Obama just as determined to strike Syria as George W. Bush was to invade Iraq? In two presidential elections, Americans have shown they want no more of that.

Listening to Obama last night brought back echoes of Bush’s “axil of evil” speech. No oratorical gifts can overcome that.

Obama's "Bad Cop" Coup

For a dozen years, Americans have lived in fear of what crazy Middle East terrorists might do. In recent weeks, Barack Obama has turned the tables with seemingly irrational determination to wreak havoc on Syria.

The mild-mannered former law professor/community organizer has morphed into an Osama, bent on bombing the wicked against the wishes of world opinion.

Has the President, consciously or not, been playing the good cop-bad cop game, as the wild-eyed avenger who has to be restrained by more reasonable proponents of law and order? 

Whether or not, he is on the brink of a success no one could have imagined.

The Russian reversal at the UN has handed Obama an unforeseen opportunity to pull back from the posture of intractable avenger to the “Yes We Can” optimist of yore, converting his request of Congress from an imminent attack to provisional approval if Assad backslides on handing over his chemical weapons.

John Kerry may have muffed his good cop role by prematurely blurting that Syria faces an “unbelievably small, limited kind of effort,” but the table is set for the President to revert to reason.

Will the temporary bad cop take yes for an answer?

Can Obama Handle a Russian Flop on Syria?

History may see this as the moment when Obama and Putin went eyeball to eyeball and the other guy blinked.

Maybe so but, as the President unleashes weapons of mass persuasion with wall-to-wall TV interviews and key Democrats back him, he should recognize what any good basketball player knows is a strategic flop, suddenly stepping away from an aggressive adversary to have him called for a foul.   

World opinion is the ref here, and abrupt Russian agreement to have Syria surrender its chemical weapons to UN control already has Obama scrambling to modify his prepared pitch to call the move “a potentially positive development” and emphasize that he favors a diplomatic solution.

Such tactics date back to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the former Soviets have not forgotten what JFK taught them, to take any opening to get the other guy off balance.

The Russian UN Ambassador is on PBS, unblinkingly backing his nation’s proposal to have Syrians give up weapons he called non-existent yesterday and reminding Americans of Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule on Iraq (“You break it, you own it”) on where a Syrian strike could lead.

What is waiting for President Obama as he faces the nation Tuesday night is a remarkable opportunity to extricate himself from the no-win trap he created by declaring a diplomatic victory now and putting his missile sword back in the scabbard, reserving it as a later option if the Syrians use chemical weapons again.

The ground is prepared. Harry Reid has already delayed a Senate vote on the military action, and the President has an unbelievable opportunity to relieve the nation and the world by taking the opening the Russians have handed him for whatever devious reasons of their own.

It would be a winning three-point shot at the buzzer.

Pissing Contests with Skunks

Embattled as he is in Washington and around the world, Barack Obama may find himself pondering the earthy wisdom of a favorite predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower.

“I don’t want to get into a pissing contest with that skunk,” Ike told his Secretary of State about Sen. Joe McCarthy’s putrid emanations on American foreign policy. Years later, on his dark porch overlooking blood-soaked Gettysburg, the former President was still nursing the pain of that conflict, muttering “I didn’t want to get into the gutter with that guy.”

Now, Obama finds himself in multiple urinating matches with Assad, Putin, even his own allies in Congress over the prospect of lethal conflict with Syria. Sadly, he won’t find answers in Eisenhower’s experience, but it may suggest other choices.

Back then, in the absence of presidential leadership, it took TV icon Edward R. Murrow and aging Boston lawyer Joseph Welch (“Have you, sir, no sense of decency at long last?”) to start turning Americans away from McCarthyism toward sanity.

Ike’s hunkering down didn’t work. What, in the light of Obama’s choice to put himself into such contests, can he do now?

Even as he asks for support in his Weekly Address, the President sounds defensive: “I know that the American people are weary after a decade of war, even as the war in Iraq has ended, and the war in Afghanistan is winding down. That’s why we’re not putting our troops in the middle of somebody else’s war.

“We can’t ignore chemical weapons attacks like this one--even if they happen halfway around the world.”

Next week, as he tries to rally the nation behind that belief, Barack Obama should agree to delay any strike against Syria if Congress does not sanction it and use every possible diplomatic pressure against Assad in the meantime.

That would be a stance more befitting a Nobel Peace Prize winner than a pissant politician worrying about his own reputation and credibility.

The Bushies Are Back

Advertising genius Jerry Della Femina once wrote a gag slogan for a Japanese electronics client, “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.”

Now in grim deliberations over Syria, the folks who gave us Iraq are back. Whatever venom the poison gas issue has sprayed over American politics, it has revivified some of George W. Bush’s cocky crusaders from that era.

Don Rumsfeld, who was finally booted in 2006 for botching that war, now blusters: "Why would you go in and fire a shot across the bow? All it does is make a splash, and...what you've probably achieved is the embarrassment of the United States for being feckless and ineffective."

Almost three months ago, Dick Cheney was calling Obama “a day late and a dollar short” for not doing more to overthrow Assad. Will whatever the President does now satisfy the former VP who can’t recall any of his own mistakes?

Elliott Abrams, who graduated from promoting Reagan’s Iran-Contra disaster to become W’s Neo-Con “keeper of the flame” on Middle East democracy, scurries out to proclaim that Obama’s “erratic conduct leaves U.S. foreign policy in a shambles.”

Self-righteous hindsight is inevitable but making it work requires monumental ego as well as perversion of all memory.

The process always recalls a fabled Hollywood producer of the last century, Sam Goldwyn. A screenwriter he had hired to do a script based on a popular novel came back after months of trying and told him it couldn't be done. Goldwyn hired another writer and made the movie, a disaster.

Years later, discussing a new project, someone suggested the first writer. "Oh, no," Goldwyn said vehemently. "He was involved in one of my worst failures."

Cheney, Rumsfeld and Abrams, meet Sam Goldwyn and Jerry Della Femina.

A Seminar on Mass Murder

The Syria hearing brings the Senate into sharper focus. After six years of aimless dysfunction and deadlock about the lives of Americans, members of both parties are alert and attentive while debating death, past and future, in a nation of 20-some million people half a world away.

Suddenly gone from discussion are previously overriding issues of government power and spending in favor of such geopolitical questions as US credibility and moral authority in the world. Suddenly front and center again are arguments about when and how to employ the military might that George W. Bush’s Neo-Cons used to justify invading Iraq and other policing of the Middle East.

The most cogent doubts come, not from Rand Paul arguing that everything will go wrong after a Syrian strike or Marco Rubio insisting the President has muffed the timetable, but from new Democratic Senators like Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Tom Udall of New Mexico pressing John Kerry on exactly how a few days of delivering death by air will advance the cause of freeing a nation from a murderous despot on the ground.

It doesn’t demean Kerry’s long and honorable public service to see his strong advocacy of striking Syria now overlaid by ghost figures of the 27-year-old Vietnam veteran who came back in 1971 to denounce the politicians who sent him there as “war criminals” and the mature candidate whose war bravery was swift-boated by Karl Rove in 2004 to reelect a President who had evaded combat service.

In days to come, Congress will find a way to avoid doing what might hurt the nation most of all, undercutting and humiliating a President who has committed himself to attacking Assad, but grinding out that painful and dangerous decision will leaden the hearts of Americans who can remember a time of national choices that did not range from very bad to worse.

We are in a lose-lose situation, and holding seminars on the relative obscenity of mass murders won’t change that.

Hit-and-Run World War II?

Gassing populations inevitably invites comparisons with Hitler and Jews in the 1930s. Headlines abound: John Kerry tells Democrats they face a “Munich moment” over Syria, referring to the 1938 British appeasement that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain promised would bring “peace in our time.”

In Britain, the Daily Mail features photographs of Kerry’s 2009 “cozy dinner” in Damascus with “Syria’s ‘Hitler’” before Assad’s regime was beset by revolution.

Can Americans today give Holocaust metaphors a rest in debating whether or not the US should attack Syria? As vile as Assad’s reported use of poison gas against rebels may be, it’s degrading to elevate that with the systematic murder of six million Jews in death camps.

Even if comparison is irresistible, how does a hit-and-run air strike compare with years and casualties it took to overthrow the Nazis? As someone who took part in that effort, I am offended not only for fellow Jews who were the victims but other American veterans who bled and died to stop it.

The Congressional debate deserves better than overheated rhetoric. As a New York Times editorial suggests, “Obama and his top aides will have to explain in greater detail why they are so confident that the kind of military strikes that administration officials have described would deter President Bashar al-Assad of Syria from gassing his people again (American officials say more than 1,400 were killed on Aug. 21) rather than provoke him to unleash even greater atrocities.

“They will also have to explain how they can keep the United States from becoming mired in the Syrian civil war--something Mr. Obama, for sound reasons, has long resisted--and how military action will advance the cause of a political settlement: the only rational solution to the war.”

For the moment, voters can be grateful that John McCain did not win in 2008. If he were in the White House now, our armed forces would be attacking Syria with “very serious” and not “cosmetic” strikes.

How many World War IIs would McCain and his followers have started in the Middle East over the past five years?

  

Too Small a Step Back from War

The President finally admits he wants to attack Syria but will ask Congressional permission to do it.

“I’m prepared to give that order,” he says. “But having made my decision as commander in chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interest, I’m also mindful that I’m president of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.”

In acknowledging uncertainty among Americans and allies, Barack Obama is taking a small step back from unilateral executive action that has become the norm over decades.

In doing so, he is vindicating a recent book by my college classmate Marvin Kalb, “The Road to War: Presidential Commitments Honored and Betrayed,” tracing a trend of American wars without formal declarations by Congress since Pearl Harbor.

This summer, Kalb presciently suggested we “think about what’s now happening in Syria. The president has said he will now give arms to the good guys in Syria. What is to stop the president tomorrow from saying, ‘You know, we’ve tried this business of giving them arms. It didn’t work. So let’s put troops in or let’s begin to bomb.’ In other words, let’s go in big time. Just think of it: Who is going to say, ‘Hey wait, a minute. Not a terribly good idea, Mr. President?’”

Something is askew when taking the nation into war with no bipartisan approval, no clear goals and no exit strategy is considered permissible, let alone normal.

“I know well we are weary of war,” President Obama said yesterday. “We’ve ended one war in Iraq. We’re ending another in Afghanistan. And the American people have the good sense to know we cannot resolve the underlying conflict in Syria with our military.”

Then why, in the name of all that Americans across the political spectrum hold dear, do it or ask Congress to share the responsibility?

Whether the man in the White House is Barack Obama or George W. Bush, the answer should be no.

Farewell to Football

What price entertainment? Violent movies carry a disclaimer that “No animals were hurt in the making,” but now pro football admits to human brain damage and agrees to pay $765 million as an oops to 4500 wrecked plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the NFL.

Sports, we are told, helps society sublimate innate savagery, but few lives are destroyed by baseball, basketball, tennis, golf or even hockey. For one admirer of the skill and grace of quarterbacks and wide receivers, the brutality of the game has reached the tipping point.

This is it.

As the world becomes more violent, one recalls Barack Obama’s statement that, if he had a son, he would “think long and hard” about letting him play football.

"They can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies," he said of NFL players. "You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That's something that I'd like to see the NCAA think about."

But no amount of money can ease a conscience over watching a game in which hurting people is one of the aims.

There is enough of that going on in the real world to shame one over being part of a crowd cheering it on.

Count me out while planning the next Super Bowl party.

Shifting Lethal Lines in the Sand

The United States tacitly approved and pinpointed targets for deadly chemical attacks by Saddam Hussein against Iranian troops in Iraq, according to Foreign Policy Magazine.

A military attaché in Baghdad in 1988 recalls, "The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn't have to. We already knew.”

The White House, according to declassified CIA files, “applied a cold calculus three decades ago to Hussein's widespread use of chemical weapons against his enemies and his own people. The Reagan administration decided that it was better to let the attacks continue if they might turn the tide of the war. And even if they were discovered, the CIA wagered that international outrage and condemnation would be muted.”

Are Americans so much more sensitive now, or did 9/11 change everything, including all those vaunted Middle East lines in the sand?

As Obama prepares a punitive strike for behavior Reagan tacitly approved, how much more deeply mired are we in the sectarian quagmire that is destined to grow worse, no matter what we do?

Whether for political or (forgive the word) moral reasons, a Republican Congress threatens the President with “the money card” of sequestration if he moves against Syria. “Buy-in from Congress and the American people is critical if he’s going to act,” warns St. Boehner.

“The Syrian civil conflict is both a proxy war and a combustion point for spreading waves of violence,” observes David Brooks. “This didn’t start out as a religious war. But both Sunni and Shiite power players are seizing on religious symbols and sowing sectarian passions that are rippling across the region. The Saudi and Iranian powers hover in the background fueling each side.”

How and where do we draw lines in the sand against that?

Obama is Bringing Us Together

Irony of ironies, a President who yearns for consensus is finally achieving something like it in growing opposition and doubts across the political spectrum about attacking Syria.

Even as questions arise about the weapons themselves (pace this week’s episode of HBO’s “Newsroom”), the chorus of naysayers and staysayers keeps growing louder.

When voices from John Boehner and Donald Rumsfeld to Senate Democrats and Denis Kucinich are mumbling worries over a Syrian quagmire, there are strong echoes of the run-up to the Iraq invasion a decade ago. The phrase “slam dunk” is back to haunt Americans who remember.

Taking the President at his word that he has not finally decided to launch another such adventure into uncertainty, he must seriously consider such across-the-board worries.

How will we be advancing a humanitarian cause by unleashing more death and destruction? 

Why Martin Luther King Kept Marching

Three Presidents commemorate the “I Have a Dream” speech, but Americans should remember Dr. King did not stop marching on Washington after that day 50 years and his later efforts were not only for racial justice but against war.

As President Obama prepares to strike Syria, he should revisit what King concluded about Vietnam in his last years:

“I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, extreme materialism and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road which can lead to national disaster...

“Those of us who love peace must organize as effectively as the war hawks. As they spread the propaganda of war, we must spread the propaganda of peace. We must combine the fervor of the civil rights movement with the peace movement. We must demonstrate, teach and preach, until the very foundations of our nation are shaken. We must work unceasingly to lift this nation that we love to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humaneness.”

By 1967, Dr. King was persuaded that ending the war in Vietnam was part of his mission; a disproportionate number of the young men fighting and dying there were African-American. He began to take part in anti-war protests.

I witnessed an attempt to dissuade him. In a phone call to Dr. King, Norman Cousins argued that he would be associating himself with unsavory radical groups in a planned march. Cousins was the eloquent Saturday Review editor who always kept open his backdoor access to the White House while denouncing the war, a Cause Celebrity whose celebrity often took priority over the cause. I could not hear Dr. King’s response, but it was clearly a polite suggestion that Cousins get lost.

Martin Luther King led that march, as he did so many others. In photographs, he can be seen side by side with Dr. Benjamin Spock, who had been driven from the leadership of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy for associating with “disreputable” antiwar groups. Dr. King and Dr. Spock, as unalike as people can be in many ways, had one thing in common: They were not concerned about their reputations. The Cause always came first.

President Obama is ready to strike Syria, but he should recall that, beyond what was said at the Lincoln Memorial today, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life for both racial justice and non-violence. It should not be so easy to separate those two ideals as another attack in the Middle East would.

Going to Wars Nobody Wants

Barack Obama is being inexorably drawn, clearly against his better judgment, into a strike on Syria that could morph into yet another quagmire, just as he is facing once again an unwanted, destructive debt-ceiling battle in Washington.

Atrocities abound, human and political devastation is sure to ensue, as the President of the United States is rendered powerless to exercise the reason those who elected him expected to see in the White House.

His top second-term advisers—-John Kerry, Chuck Hagel and Jacob Lew—-are reduced to following scripts being imposed on them by irrationality outside the White House.

“A political agreement is still the best solution to this deadly conflict,” a New York Times editorial says of Syria, “and every effort must be made to find one. President Obama has resisted demands that he intervene militarily and in force. Though Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons surely requires a response of some kind, the arguments against deep American involvement remain as compelling as ever.”

On the debt ceiling, the Treasury Secretary is whistling in the dark that Republicans in Congress don’t want “a repeat of 2011. I don’t yet see that they have a plan to avoid it, which is one of the reasons it’s so important for them to come back in just a couple of weeks and get to work on getting this done and trying to make the debt issue different from other debates that we have.”

In these fantasies of negotiating with the likes of Assad and Boehner, Obama will likely be playing tennis with nobody on the other side of the net. What would any of us do in his place?

One small step would be to let him and our representatives in Congress know that not everyone in the country is in step with a mindless media that keeps reporting on both issues like ball games rather than life-and-death matters.

Voices like that of Connecticut’s Sen. Chris Murphy urging restraint on a response to Syria should be amplified by Americans everywhere to slow down this latest march to madness. The alternative is to keep fighting, and losing, wars nobody wants.

 

Snowden Snowball

Glenn Greenwald may go down in history as the most successful agent of stolen property ever.

Now the New York Times and the nonprofit investigative reporting group ProPublica have bought partial access to the purloined papers of Edward Snowden, the fugitive patriot now residing in Moscow.

In a move clearly intended to broaden Snowden’s legal protection, his puppet master Greenwald is enlisting as many legitimate journalistic shields as possible into their joint enterprise. But what are the Times and ProPublica doing?

It would be comforting to believe those respected organizations are not just buying into Snowden but using their access to shed further objective light on his activities. But what are the odds?

At a time of turmoil for newspapers such as the Times, the vaunted line between “church and state,” editorial and business, has been breaking down. The Snowden venture may be just another breach in which institutional self-interest triumphs.

But for those who have loved the Gray Lady for so long, there is comfort in recalling the days of the Pentagon Papers, when the Times did not buy its way into classified government material but went through an arduous journalistic and legal process to publish it.

Unlike Snowden’s crime, Daniel Ellsberg’s revelations did not endanger any Americans in ongoing activities, and Ellsberg himself did not flee the country but surrendered to authorities to face the consequences of his actions.

Back then, the now-reviled mainstream media took their responsibilities seriously. What are they doing now?

Man of the Century

Grainy black-and-white images are all over TV this weekend, but a flesh-and-blood Martin Luther King Jr. might still be here, heavy with years denied him by an assassin’s bullet at age 39.

As they celebrate his finest moment fifty year ago, can Americans reckon the moral loss of his not walking the earth since then and working for a just and nonviolent world?

That he died so savagely and is now being resurrected on television are among the ironies of a brief life that dominated the past century.

“If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day,” a young minister told followers during the 1955 bus strike in Montgomery, Alabama, “don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate him. We must use the weapon of love.”

In the years to follow, with the emerging ubiquity of TV, he went beyond words and used the full power of body rhetoric, planning marches for the nightly news to elicit images of brutality against his people--guns, clubs, police dogs and high—pressure fire hoses--to win support for rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

"In the process of gaining our rightful place," Dr. King said at the Lincoln Memorial fifty years ago, "we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds….we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."

If he were here at the age of 84, what would he be thinking and saying about a re-elected African-American president trapped in raging debates about gun rights and the financial costs of ministering to the poor? Would he still be as inspired as he was that night before his death in 1968?

“Like anybody,” Dr. King told followers in Memphis, “I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”

Of the many gifts he bestowed on America, the most undervalued may be hope, an unyielding optimism transcending the kind of bitterness and hate that divides people and would eventually take his own life.

 “The reports are that they are out to get me,” he told his parents before Memphis. “I have to go on with my work, I’m too deeply involved now to get out, it’s all too important. Sometimes I want to stop. Just go away somewhere and have some quiet days, finally, a quiet life with Coretta and the children. But it’s too late for that now. I have my path before me. I know what I have to do.”

That kind of selfless dedication is an invitation to see Dr. King as a saintly martyr, but he was also a mortal man with human failings that led J. Edgar Hoover to bug his hotel rooms and have anonymous letters sent urging him to commit suicide.

In Hoover's files were angry scrawls on press clippings. On Dr. King receiving the St. Francis peace medal from the Catholic Church, he wrote "this is disgusting." About the Nobel Prize: "King could well qualify for the 'top alley cat' prize!"

During his last years, despite gratitude to LBJ for pushing through a landmark Civil Rights law, Dr. King had turned against the Vietnam War and was actively opposing it, much to the President’s displeasure. His focus remained on faith, not politics.

If he were still alive at 84, Martin Luther King surely would be transcending all of today’s hatred and discord to remind Americans of the nonviolent ethos that first brought him national attention, urging them to meet “physical force with soul force.”

Bad to Worse to What in Bloody No-Wins?

Every new headline from Egypt and Syria affirms chaos in the Middle East and American helplessness to do anything about it.

Impotence is a bad basis for foreign policy, but self-delusion would be worse, as we presumably learned in Iraq but seem to have forgotten. John McCain rants about a “loss of credibility” in not responding faster to the latest crises, but the President is more realistic.

"We have to think through strategically what's going to be in our long term national interests,” he says, warning against becoming "mired in very difficult situations...being drawn into very expensive, difficult, costly interventions that actually breed more resentment in the region."

Withholding aid to Egypt won’t work, as Saudi Arabia and others fill the gap. Syria is an even worse quagmire of reckless factions to topple a reckless regime.

What makes all this even worse is that, as bad as these strategic and diplomatic situations are, the moral choices are even worse. It is not in our national nature to stand by helplessly when multitudes are being killed and displaced.

Yet what else can we responsibly do?

As New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat recently put it, “history makes fools of us all. We make deals with dictators, and reap the whirlwind of terrorism. We promote democracy, and watch Islamists gain power from Iraq to Palestine. We leap into humanitarian interventions, and get bloodied in Somalia. We stay out, and watch genocide engulf Rwanda. We intervene in Afghanistan and then depart, and watch the Taliban take over. We intervene in Afghanistan and stay, and end up trapped there, with no end in sight.

“Sooner or later, the theories always fail. The world is too complicated for them, and too tragic.”

In that light, the President’s watchful waiting can be seen as sane rather than weak. His caution is not cowardice but rationality. Suspending arms to Egypt may be only a gesture, but what more can be done?

In the longer run, we will have to revive that cliché about not being the world’s policeman. If we don’t, we’re doomed to keep repeating the same costly mistakes in insane situations.