By The River

I didn't think President Bush was nuts enough to provoke a war with Iran, but a Washington Post story today that revealed he has authorized U.S. troops to kill or detain Iranian agents in Iraq left me with a queasy feeling.

I can't help but think back to the notorious Gleiwitz incident in August 1939, in which Nazi Germany manufactured a reason to invade Poland. German agents seized a radio station on the German-Polish border, killed a few people they had put in Polish uniforms, and then broadcast appeals for Poles to kill Germans in the former German territories given to Poland by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. The loss of these territories, among them Posen, where my mother's grandfather, August Boettcher, emigrated from in the late 19th century, was a burning issue among rightist Germans. Not long afterward, World War II began.

Yes, yes, I know, Bush is no Hitler, but it is instructive to look back at how leaders and governments intent on going to war can create a reason to do so. Hitler rarely if ever felt a need to manufacture a reason to invade other countries after Poland--he just did it. But for Poland, he was still trying to put a false veneer of legality under international law on what was, in fact, naked aggression against a neighboring country. Bush has no credibility left when it comes to trusting him not to start a war for spurious reasons. Not after Iraq and the nowhere-to-be-found weapons of mass destruction.

Only a madman would start a major war to save his party and Presidency. But it just might work. Congress would be reluctant, at least right away, to impeach a President when troops are in active combat, as opposed to simply being shooting gallery ducks as they are in Iraq in too many instances. Iraq has gone past the point where many Americans care whether we win or lose; they just want to get out. Invading Iran could change that equation. Of course, Congress may have reinstitute the draft to have enough troops to sustain another, probably larger and bloodier war.

MoveOn.org and other groups will be leading an anti-Iraq War march tomorrow (Saturday) in Washington. It will be interesting to see how many people turn out, whether the numbers match the legions that protested the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. Go if you can. Wish them the best if you can't.

Posted by David at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The racial terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan and certain other Southerners in the 1950s and 1960s was the closest America has come to the terror mounted against the Jews by Nazi Germany. Many more Jews died, of course, but in terms of subjugation and terrorizing of an entire people, the Klan campaign to keep blacks racially subservient was still a major crime against humanity.

I always cheer when one of these increasingly old Klansmen is found, arrested, and hauled into court. That will happen in Mississippi today when James Seale is accused of participating in the murders of two black teenagers in 1964, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore. The link goes to the story in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, a newspaper which threw out its racist past and now crusades for justice in these old cases. Seale is the 28th person arrested in a Civil Rights era crime since 1989, when the Mississippi Attorney General first began to seriously go after cold cases. Twenty-two of them have been conducted.

Why did these Klansmen escape justice for so long? The entire system back then was fixed, at least in certain places. The Klan, local police, FBI, and local juries all did their part to frustrate the arrest and punishment of men who often boasted openly of their crimes. With the FBI, which was then run by J. Edgar Hoover, there were good agents, but too often they were stymied by agency rules and procedures and customs put in place by superiors who were less than sympathetic to the idea of black civil rights.

There is a move afoot to create a civil rights cold-case unit in the U.S. Justice Department to seek out and arrest suspects in these old crimes, much as a similar dedicated unit once sought out former Nazis living in hiding in the U.S. There can be no forgiveness for these old crimes before a criminal trial is conducted. Only that way can the stain of this horror be expunged.

Posted by David at 06:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The President has finished his State of the Union message and Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, has just finished the Democratic response. What's clear to me is that Bush and his most diehard supporters have not yet accepted the judgment of the American people last November. The American people would have voted Bush out if they could, but since they couldn't, they handed Congress to Democrats like Sen. Webb, who, as Webb put it so well, will "show him [Bush] the way" if he doesn't reverse course on the disastrous Iraq War.

Webb is a former Republican who was Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan Administration. He defeated the odious Virginia Republican Senator George Allen in the election by a margin of 1 percent, a victory that gave Democrats control of the Senate. He ran into a bit of nonsense controversy after his election when he attended a reception for new Senators at the White House. He tried to avoid having his picture taken with Bush, whom he had criticized often in the campaign. Bush sought him out, and despite having been warned by aides to tread carefully because Webb's Marine son had narrowly escaped death in Iraq recently, said, "How's your boy?" Webb replied that he wanted his son and all U.S. troops out of Iraq. Bush then pointedly said, "That's not what I asked. How's your boy?" Webb, angered, said later he felt like punching Bush for the provocation.

Conservative commentators and bloggers heaped scorn on Webb for his supposed effrontery to the King, but he didn't apologize. Nor should he have. In his speech last night, Webb said Bush led the U.S. into the Iraq War under false pretenses. Sounds about right.

I found the Democratic body language fascinating during the President's speech last night. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in the Speaker's chair directly behind and to the right of Bush, while Vice President Cheney was in his usual position to the right. You could quite easily gauge what parts of Bush's program the Democrats will and won't accept by what Pelosi applauded during the speech. She sat on her hands during most of Bush's comments on health care, especially when he said that most Americans should only be served by private health insurance companies, meaning not a government single-payer program. There were many portions of the speech where Republicans were standing and cheering and the Democrats sat stonily motionless.

Does this all mean the Democrats have their groove back? I sure hope so. This is no time for "bipartisan" compromise on issues where the American people have clearly spoken. Perhaps they can't overturn a veto because of the narrow Senate margin of control, but at least they will have tried, and they will have forced Bush to compile a record of vetoing popular legislation (most likely embryonic stem cell research and maybe minimum wage) that the next Republican Presidential candidate will have to live with. As Sen. Webb said, the Democrats must show Bush the way if he refuses to listen to reason.

Posted by David at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It has been just over a year since U.S. District Judge John Jones III in Harrisburg, Pa., demolished so-called "intelligent design" in his ruling in a lawsuit brought by parents against the Dover Area School Board. The school board, if you recall, tried to put intelligent design--the idea that a complex world "must have had" an intelligent designer, i.e., God, on an equal footing with Darwinian evolution. Jones ruled that it was not science, and that the religious right-dominated school board had pretty much perpetrated a fraud at taxpayer expense (and oh, the expense). For those of us who want real science taught in schools and real religion taught in churches, it was a moment of triumph.

Four books on this seminal case--the most historically important event in central Pennsylvania since the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979--are either out or will soon hit the stores. Matthew Chapman, a great-great-grandson of Darwin who attended part of the trial, has written "40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania." Gordy Slack, a writer with Salon.com, has written "The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, PA". The third, already out, is "Monkey Girl" by Edward Humes, a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Last in line--it was only just signed by a publisher, so it's a minimum 8 months to a year away--is former York Daily Record reporter Lauri Lebo's "The Devil in Dover: Dogma vs. Darwin in Small-Town America." She covered the intelligent design trial for her newspaper, but brings a unique perspective to her book. Lebo comes from an evangelical family, and has an insider's view on the beliefs and emotions that led to the intelligent design showdown. I may not read all these books, but I'll definitely read her's for that special local insight.

Posted by David at 09:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was moved to write this piece by a story that appeared in today's Washington Post. It concerns one of the Episcopal churches in Virginia that has voted to break away from the national Episcopal Church because it ordained a bishop who happens to be gay and will bless gay unions if not actually conduct gay marriages. This church and the others in the breakaway group have instead proclaimed their allegiance to a rebel Anglican denomination in North America organized by the gay-baiting Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria.

More on Archbishop Akinola in a minute. The church in the Post article is called St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, almost the same name as St. Stephen's Episcopal Cathedral here in Harrisburg, Pa. I was raised a Lutheran but have been a member there since I got married back in 1988. The Lutheran Church has gone through a number of schisms in its long history in the U.S., and now has close to 40 different "synods." These originally had more to do with the German or Swedish origins of the churchgoers, but now are sharply different theologically. The Missouri and Wisconsin synods are extremely conservative, while the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is quite moderate, much closer to Episcopalians than to the conservative synods. I felt as comfortable in the Episcopal Church as I did in the ELCA.

That these Virginia churches would ally themselves with Archbishop Akinola is truly astonishing, showing these congregations to either be extremists or deluded or both. Akinola is opposed to gay clergy and the ordination of women, which has brought him hails and huzzahs from Episcopal conservatives in the U.S. But his beliefs go much further off the deep end than that. He vocally supports a proposed law in Nigeria that would criminalize gay relationships and make it a crime to even associate with a gay person, to the extent that AIDS support groups would find themselves criminals as well. It is anti-Christian in the extreme. Akinola is the antithesis of Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who supports gay rights and opposes the schism.

I can't say there aren't members of St. Stephen's Episcopal Cathedral in Harrisburg who support Archbishop Akinola, but I doubt there are many. I remember a few years ago the stunned silence that resulted when a member, during the post-service announcements, called on fellow male parishioners to join him at a meeting of the Promise Keepers, a national group of evangelical Christian males who promoted male dominance in the family structure. I never heard the Promise Keepers mentioned again at St. Stephen's, but I always think of them whenever President Bush makes one of his "I'm the decider" statements.

Conservative religious movements have been an integral part of the rightwing Republican movement of the last 12 years. Nearly all these groups have demonized gays, who as I've said before, are the new Jews of today's world. They fill an apparent need among rightwing extremists for a group of outsiders to persecute. Since it's no longer socially acceptable, post-Holocaust, for them to demonize and persecute Jews, gays fill the bill nicely. And as I've also said before, if you want to feel really weird and creeped out, take a statement by a Christian group denouncing gays and substitute "Jew" for "gay." You'll have something that could have been printed in Der Stürmer during the Nazi era.

Ultimately, it may be in the best interest of the Episcopal Church in America to allow the schism to occur. The dissidents shouldn't be allowed to take the church buildings (most state laws don't allow this anyway), but let them go. I somewhat optimistically believe the rightwing era in America effectively ended with the 2006 Congressional elections. Yes, let them go if they insist on leaving and want to declare their allegiance to a gay-baiting Nigerian. They are not a youth movement, and will eventually die out. The Lutherans survived theological schisms, and so will the Episcopalians.

Posted by David at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the great mysteries of the disastrous Iraq War is why there has been no mass protest movement, no great marches on Washington, D.C., demanding that the U.S. pull out. Between 1969 and 1971, there were several large demonstrations against the Vietnam War in Washington and numerous more large and small elsewhere in the country. if you lived in Michigan then, as I did, and couldn't get to D.C., you could always get to Ann Arbor.

That hasn't happened so far in the Iraq War, although MoveOn.org is trying to get a protest march organized in Washington for Jan. 27. Despite the incredibly low percentage of Americans who still support the Iraq War, big protests are largely absent. One reason, almost certainly, is that there is no draft, no threat of death in combat hanging over the heads of young men in college or out. Young men in college had draft deferments through the end of the 1970-71 academic year (and could keep them four years if they started in college that year), but you always knew the risk was only postponed. Students could and were drafted when they finished college or left early. That line in "Animal House" where Dean Wormer informs John Belushi and the others that he's notiufying their draft boards that they're available for immediate Army service was no joke.

So there were a lot of young men--and women, too--with great motivation to protest the war. it's a lot easier to round up 250,000 people for a march on the White House when there's self-preservation involved and not just personal belief. Not impossible, just more difficult. The American liberal left was at the peak of its powers in the late 1960s. Today, finding a politician to call himself a liberal may keep you busy for awhile.

Another reason for the lack of protest may be the relatively low death toll among U.S. forces in Iraq compared to Vietnam--3,000 vs. 58,000. In Vietnam, there could be 3,000 killed in 12 weeks in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive and the highest U.S. casualties. Many more wounded troops are being saved in Iraq compared to Vietnam, although their degree of recovery varies.

So whatever the reasons, there aren't many average Americans in the street protesting the Iraq War, and no future leaders like John Kerry arising from the masses.. And that's a shame, because the protests in Vietnam had a real impact on the Congress, the American public, and probably even President Nixon. When the Mall is filled with people who are deeply and profoundly opposed to your war, it has to be important.

Posted by David at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the best innovations in the American Presidency in the late 20th century was the Presidential Library, a place to store the President's papers and make them available to scholars. Four-term Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to have one (Herbert Hoover's actually came later). It was built next to his home in Hyde Park, N.Y., and opened after his death. Until Roosevelt formalized the idea, preservation of Presidential papers was hit-and-miss. Calvin Coolidge notoriously burned most of his, depriving the public (who after all paid to create those documents) of an important historical record of the 1920s.

I've done research at the Roosevelt, Carter, Reagan, Hoover, and Kennedy libraries, and received copies of documents through the mail from the Eisenhower, Truman, and Johnson libraries. The archivists are professonal, friendly, and dedicated to helping researchers no matter their political persuasion. They may or may not harbor an admiration for the President whose library they work in, but if so, they keep it to themselves. It's their job to be neutral, and that's the way it should be. They don't seek to prevent access to documents that might be embarassing to the former President.

President George W. Bush has never been a friend to open access to the records of former Presidents. In November 2001, when the public was still fixated on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he issued an Executive Order barring access to certain documents in the Reagan Library. It is believed these were documents relating to people in his own Administration, but no one is certain. This was an unprecedented restriction of the public's right to know.

Now controversy has erupted over plans to build the Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University, Laura Bush's alma mater. The faculty isn't happy, in large part because the library complex will include a unit dedicated to burnishing the tarnished "legacy" of George W. Bush. Almost unbelievably, it plans to pay conservatives to write hack history glorifying the former President, much as the Bush Administration paid conservative commentators to promote its policies until it got caught.

It isn't unprecedented for Presidents to create institutes to promote their policies after they leave office. Herbert Hoover established the Hoover Institute at Stanford University in California, although his Presidential Papers are at his official library in his hometown of West Branch, Iowa. President Carter has his Carter Center adjacent to his Presidential Library in Atlanta, from which he conducts his admirable efforts toward world peace. Carter writes his own books. Hoover is long dead, and his institute is more of a conservative think tank plus a library with eclectic collections that include the papers of several of the late 20th century members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I suspect anyone at either place would be insulted by the idea that they were there to write hack history about Hoover or Carter.

Bush and I suspect all but his most zealous supporters know legitimate historians are unlikely to treat the 43rd President kindly. I suspect historians will be dissecting his failures for the next half-century, trying to determine how America went so wrong. That he would attempt to buy favorable treatment is not surprising, given all that has happened. Where once hack history would have been laughed at or ignored, with the rise of Fox News and the other rightwing media outlets it is likely to get promoted as real: sort of the Intelligent Design approach to Presidential history.

The danger is that Bush will seek to engineer some sort of permanent restrictions on access to his Presidential Papers, or keep the shredders running 24 hours a day between the November election in 2008 and the inauguration of his successor in January 2009. That would be illegal, probably. But when has that ever stopped him?

Congress in 1974 took former President Richard M. Nixon's official papers, including the notorious tapes, away from him because of fears he would destroy them. They sit today in National Archives II in College Park, Md., far from his Presidential Library in suburban Los Angeles. The current Congress needs to do something to ensure that Bush does not destroy any of the records of his Administration, or put them beyond the scrutiny of non-hack historians. America doesn't need another Calvin Coolidge.

Posted by David at 09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Many politicians, journalists, and members of the general public reflexively refer to "our young men and women" serving in Iraq. Many of them are, but unlike the Vietnam War, when nearly all the foot soldiers were draftees in their late teens or early 20s, a fair number in Iraq are in their 30s and 40s, or even older. They tend to be members of Reserve units and especially of the National Guard. They are often married with children. And now a lot of them are going to be heading back to Iraq as part of President Bush's plan to add 20,000 troops on the ground. A plan which an ABC-Washington Post poll shows a strong majority of Americans oppose, by the way.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Pentagon has quietly reversed a policy that exempted Army National Guard units which did a tour in Iraq from overseas deployment again for five years. Why? They don't have anywhere else to turn for "fresh" troops, short of reinstituting the draft, which would cause riots in the street in the unlikely event Congress approved it, or hiring foreign mercenaries.

Yes, I know that National Guard members know they can be sent off to war instead of providing relief during natural disasters. But I doubt that many of the men who signed up prior to the Iraq War ever envisioned the nightmare that Bush would present to them. Other than World War II, use of the Guard in overseas adventures has been limited to the post-Vietnam, volunteer Army period that began in 1973. They were used in the Persian Gulf War, but the shooting part of that conflict lasted barely a few weeks. That probably seemed tolerable risk to many. Being forced to do a second tour in the hell of Baghdad after being promised a five-year respite will seem the worst sort of betrayal.

It will be interesting to observe the reaction of elected officials like Gov. Rendell of Pennsylvania when Guard units in our state are sent back to Iraq. Will he mouth the usual patriotic platitudes, or try to put some roadblocks in the way? Those in the 20,000 will be the worst sort of cannon fodder, dumped into Iraq for no other reason, really, than to string the war along until Bush is out of office. Even I don't think Bush is nuts enough to invade Iran. He just doesn't have the troops to pull it off unless he empties Korea, Japan, and Europe of most of the U.S. forces stationed there. That would be the height of insanity.

Posted by David at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the great myths of the late 20th century and our current century has been that raising the minimum wage will automatically throw poor people out of work and result in fewer job opportunities overall. This is an article of faith with Chambers of Commerce, small business groups, many economists, and of course, the Bush Administration.

The trouble is the myth just doesn't hold up when there is a real life place to test its impact. A story in the New York Times today compares towns along the state line between Washington and Idaho. Washington has one of the highest minimum wages in the country, $7.93, and Idaho the lowest, the current Federal minimum wage of $5.15. Turns out that low-wage, i.e., fast-food businesses on the Washington side are booming, defying dire predictions in the usual quarters that businesses would "flee to Idaho" and its rock-bottom minimum.

Businesses in Washington say they've raised prices modestly to pay the higher wages, but the public hasn't complained. Teenagers in Idaho are voting with their feet and taking jobs across the border in Washington to get the higher wages. Washington businesses report lower turnover because of the higher wages. Idaho businesses complain they get bottom-of-the-barrel job applicants, and are being forced to raised their wages to compete.

It's always great to see conservative Republican conventional wisdom turned on its head. Now lets hope the U.S. Senate takes up the minimum wage increase bll passed by the House and speedily approves it. The big question that remains is whether President Bush will veto a higher minimum wage. You know, stick his thumb in the public eye to protect his wealthy supporters. Will he do that? Hmmmmm.

Posted by David at 06:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There were no surprises in President Bush's speech tonight announcing his doomed plan to commit 20,000 more troops to the failed Iraq War. He stared intently and obviously into the Teleprompter, rarely, if ever, connecting with his presumed audience as he read the speech prepared for him. The wording of it was pedestrian, predictable and uninspiring. One wonders which White House intern got the duty of assembling this one. The President seemed to shrink visibly as he spoke.

Bush seems more and more like Lyndon Johnson trying to salvage the Vietnam War. Unlike Johnson, though, he has no major domestic accomplishments that will lead future historians to say that, well, at least he passed the Voting Rights Act. Or created Food Stamps. Or did any of a hundred other things that made life better for the average American.

Posted by David at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Wednesday night, President Bush will address the nation and tell us how he plans to escalate the war in Iraq. As you watch this tragedy unfold, you will be seeing one of the greatest flaws in our political system dramatized before your eyes.

We have no good way to remove a President who has failed miserably and lost the support of a significant portion of the American people. In Great Britain, in Germany, in Israel, and other parliamentary systems, a leader in Bush's position would not be a leader anymore. His government would have fallen, and a new leader more in tune with the will of the people, at least in theory, would have taken his place. In America, where the President is halfway between a king and a premier, we can only attempt to impeach. The bar is set high against that possibility, and it has never actually been done. President Richard Nixon would have been removed from office in 1974, but he resigned instead. Removing Bush from office would give us Cheney as the new President. The mind reels.

So Bush blunders on, still able to use the war powers of the Presidency to commit troops to battle. And what troops will these be? Not fresh reserves drawn from the people. They will mostly be tired men on their third, fourth, or fifth tour of battle, some forced to stay in Iraq for months after they thought they would be home with their families. He will throw them back into a civil war between Sunni and Shiite militias, and some will die, and in the end the result will be the same as if he had ordered them all home for the recent Christmas. That is the sad truth. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, to use the Vietnam phrase.

Thankfully, the newly empowered Democrats say they will oppose the escalation, as well they ought to given how it was the Iraq disaster that gave them their majority. They need backbone and the courage to do the right thing, which is to end U.S. involvement in Iraq within six months. The result--I can't say it enough--will be the same as if it was six years.

Posted by David at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The eyes of the literary world are on the Fairfax County Public Library system in northern Virginia, and those eyes are set in a cold, hard stare. A recent Washington Post article highlighted the library system's practice of removing books that haven't been checked out in two years and either dumping them or putting them up for sale. It doesn't matter whether the book in question is a classic by Hemingway or a potboiler by Ludlum, although the latter is far less likely to hit the scrap heap. This has provoked howls of outrage.

Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of technology. Integrated library system software from SyrsiDynix in Huntsville, Alabama (ever notice how much of the bad in corporate America these days comes from the South? Just an observation) is used to check out books, probably via barcodes, so it is no great shakes to program the software to spit out a literary death list of books gone unread in two years. The outrage stems from the many classics consigned to the scrap heap, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" or Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Both authors won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I suspect more libraries than we authors care to imagine engage in this practice. My parents in Holland, Michigan, periodically check out my book, Unseen Danger, from Herrick District Library to keep it from meeting a similar fate (although they tell me last time they went to do this somebody had it out). I would find it quite depressing to have my book tossed to make way for some trash popular novel of the moment.

The issue, expressed brilliantly by writer John J. Miller in the Wall Street Journal of Jan. 3, is whether it is right for public libraries to cater primarily to middlebrow public tastes. Is it right for a library branch to buy five copies of some trash novel to meet public demand, possibly bumping books of more lasting quality. He argues that popular books are incredibly cheap and available these days. For libraries to buy them anyway, he says, subsidizes tightwad middle class patrons who could easily afford to buy the books. He argues that libraries must be cultural repositories where people can go to find knowledge and enlightenment. Librarians, he says, need to use their training to select and retain books the public ought to read, not just the ones they want to read.

Newspapers over the last 10 years have gone through a similar wrenching shift aimed at appeasing the supposed interests of the masses, who are generally defined as middlebrow white suburbanites. We in the business are told we must be "reader driven," not use our training and knowledge to decide what news is best for the public to read. In the new regime, the public orders the hamburger and we deliver it, and don't ask if they want fries, too. The result, predictably, has been dumbed-down newspapers with less and less real news, especially government news. Someday someone will figure out that the newspaper industry's destructive turn against government news was driven as much by conservative politics as any supposed public desire for more chicken dinner reporting and "news you can use." Journalists can't uncover the next Watergate or Jack Abramoff scandal if they can't get the stories in the paper.

For those of you who care about books and libraries, there is something you can do. The next time you're at the library, check out a classic. Even if you don't read it, check it out and then return it in a few days. Spare it from the bonfire so your descendants can still read it.

Posted by David at 02:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Former Democratic Party chief Terry McAuliffe will release a political memoir Jan. 23 that dishes on the last 10 years or so of Democratic politics. Titled, "What a Party! My Life Among Democrats: Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators, and Other Wild Animals," it was mentioned in today's Drudge Report for the swings it takes against 2004 Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry.

McAuliffe, who is close to the Clintons, was in a position to see much and hear even more. He attacks Kerry for "political malpractice" in the way he ran his campaign. I would tend to agree with that: War hero Kerry made a huge mistake by not coming out swinging against the so-called Swift Boat Veterans who smeared him repeatedly in the summer of 2004. McAuliffe wanted to attack George W. Bush's own military record more harshly, but was held back by Kerry for fear of offending "swing" voters. Bush won by the slimmest of margins, which makes the might-have-beens even more infuriating.

I do think the party largely, but not completely learned its lesson in the 2004 debacle. So-called "centrism," which is defined as being as much like the Republicans as you can get away with (and without vomiting), took a major hit. Hugging the mushy middle took a major hit. Howard Dean, the current Democratic Party chairman, deserves a lot of credit for the 2006 election results. Here's what he said today:

"In 2006 Americans sent a crystal clear message. As the war in Iraq continued and ordinary people struggled to make ends meet, scores of Republicans at every level of government were removed from office by the voters, every single Democrat running for reelection as a Senator, Governor, or Representative was reelected -- every single one. It didn't happen by accident. It happened by building a strong opposition party with a clear message of change."

I couldn't have said it better.

Posted by David at 07:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Iraq story gets worse and worse. The New York Times reports tonight that the Bush Administration is allowing only a tiny handful of Iraqi refugees into the United States. Those excluded include some of the Iraqis who worked for the U.S. Army or the occupation government and who have been targeted for death by one of the factions in the civil war now raging in the country.

This comes a few days after we learned that the late President Gerald Ford counted among his greatest regrets that he couldn't keep the evacuation of South Vietnamese loyalists going for even a week longer so more of them could escape to the U.S. He kept the helicopters flying between Saigon and aircraft carriers offshore until the last possible moment, when the North Vietnamese were closing in on the American embassy. And to go back deeper in our history, although following a victory rather than a defeat, President Truman opened the gates of America to large groups of European refugees after World War II.

Let's be honest about why this is happening. The rightwing Republican pogrom against illegal immigrants, which has only a hazy line of distinction in their minds from legal immigration, is to blame here. The White House has no desire to be "for" immigration by non-whites of any persuasion, save those who are wealthy. For the Bush Administration to blame the U.N. for the delays is the height of chutzpah, given that Bush and his people typically put as much distance between themselves and the U.N. as possible.

Just hope and pray that America never experiences blowback over what Bush has done in Iraq.

Posted by David at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)