Laundry-List Politics, Begone!

In this Sunday's Washington Post, professor of psychology Drew Westen writes, in Dems, You Gotta Have Heart:

The philosopher David Hume had it right: Reason is the slave to the passions, not the other way around. Recognizing the primacy of passion in everything we do has profound implications for politics. Reason is the middle manager in decision making, not the CEO. Policies are nothing but the frontmen for values. You listen to the middleman's "pitch," but you go straight to the top when it's time to choose. You go, in other words, to your emotions — particularly your moral emotions — when you pull a lever in the voting booth.

Yet for the last 40 years virtually every Democratic candidate for president — Bill Clinton is the notable exception here — has solicited popular support based on laundry lists of issues and positions. Their basic assumption: people who take voting seriously "choose candidates by examining their positions on the issues and coolly calculating their relative costs and benefits." This is the "dispassionate vision" of the voter's mind, and Westen says it's dead wrong.

Meanwhile, a raft of successful Republican campaigns have been based on the competing, "passionate vision" of the electoral mentality: "voters are moved by the feelings that candidates and parties elicit in them and are guided by their shared values and goals."

That passionate vision is exactly what drew oldstyleliberal to John F. Kennedy in 1960, the winner of the first presidential race your blogger was old enough to follow. JFK, a Democrat, defeated Richard Nixon primarily because voters tapped into his clear vision, values, and goals, while the future that Nixon would lead us into remained inscrutable (mainly because the perspiring Republican standard bearer appeared ill-at-ease, even mendacious, when caught in the harsh glare of the lights at the historic Kennedy-Nixon TV debate).

So oldstyleliberal, who favors Democrats, passionately hopes the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and the others vying for the Oval Office in 2008 will pay close heed to Westen's insight.

Five Lies from Bush on Iraq War

The lead story in today's Baltimore Sun is Bush urges lawmakers to be patient on Iraq war. It deserves close attention, because it demonstrates the essential dishonesty and cynicism — if not the total delusionality — of this president.

The truth is what the Senate's top Democrat, Majority Leader Harry Reid is quoted as saying by the Sun: "... the troop escalation has been under way for six months and [in Reid's own words] 'is not working'."

• Lie number one by the president (as quoted directly from the Sun article):

The new troops "just showed up and they're now beginning operations in full, and in Washington you got people saying stop," said Bush, whose remarks about the war drew silence from an otherwise enthusiastic Cleveland audience.

As the article itself says, the troop escalation or "surge" has been at full strength since the last installment of new U.S. fighters arrived "weeks ago." The president's prefixing "weeks ago" with "only" is intentionally deceptive and misleading.

• Lie number two:

[Bush] said Congress should give the commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, "a chance to fully implement his operations" and wait for his progress report in September.

General Petraeus has been taking advantage of the chance to "fully implement operations" for several months. As oldstyleliberal pointed out recently in Congress Needs To Impose an Endgame in Iraq, Petraeus and the military he commands are down to what is essentially a rear-guard mission. According to the Washington Post recently (see that earlier blog post):

For its part, the [U.S.] military has calculated that a veto-proof congressional majority is unlikely to demand a full, immediate withdrawal. But however long the troops remain, and in whatever number, [a] military intelligence official said [under condition of anonymity], they see a clear mission ahead. "We're going to get it as stable as we can, with the troops we have, and in the time available. And then, we'll back out as carefully as we can," the official said.

Preparing to "back out as carefully as we can" after "getting it as stable as we can ... in the time available" is a definition, not of victory, but of minimizing our losses. The president is lying to us to suggest that we can still, at this late date, achieve more than that.


• Lie number three by Bush:

In advance of an interim White House report on Iraq, to be released this week, Bush acknowledged that "the Iraqis have got to do more work."

As the Post coverage shows, there is now zero chance, barring a miracle from God, that "doing more work" will produce a breakthrough:

According to several senior officials who agreed to discuss the situation in Iraq only on the condition of anonymity, the political goals that seemed achievable earlier this year remain hostage to the security situation. If the extreme violence were to decline, Iraq's political paralysis might eventually subside. "If they are arguing, accusing, gridlocking," one official said, "none of that would mean the country is falling apart if it was against the backdrop of a stabilizing security situation."

From a military perspective, however, the political stalemate is hampering security. "The security progress we're making is real," said a senior military intelligence official in Baghdad. "But it's only in part of the country, and there's not enough political progress to get us over the line in September."

In other words, the situation is gridlocked. A political stalemate in Iraq feeds the ongoing extreme violence and lack of security. Yet Iraq's political progress "remains hostage to the security situation." It's a classic catch-22. Again, the president is lying to us by suggesting it isn't.

• Lie number four from Bush:

Bush spoke in broad terms about a new strategy, saying he'd be "glad to discuss different options," based on what military commanders tell him. The White House and the Congress "can work together on a way forward" after Petraeus reports in September, he said.

Bush has never, ever been "glad to discuss different options" concerning Iraq. Never, ever.

• Lie number five:

The president warned of the threat posed by al-Qaida in Iraq, describing it repeatedly as part of the organization behind the Sept. 11 attacks, a linkage that anti-terrorism experts say is inaccurate and misleading. ...

"The same people that attacked us on Sept. 11 is the crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children" in Iraq, Bush said.

As the article itself shows, "al-Qaida in Iraq" — which is the name of the organization — did not even exist at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks. In fact, it exists as a direct result of the Bush war in Iraq:

The terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida in Iraq "are not the same," said Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University terrorism specialist, who called Bush's statement "inaccurate, if not misleading."

Today's al-Qaida in Iraq fighters "are patently not the same people who attacked us on 9/11," Hoffman wrote [to the Sun] in an e-mail response. U.S. military authorities in Iraq believe al-Qaida in Iraq is made up of 90 percent Iraqis and 10 percent foreign fighters, he said.

Insurgents in Iraq and the al-Qaida cell responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks "are only in the very loosest sense part of the same organization," Hoffman said.

Al-Qaida in Iraq is a Sunni group organized by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who declared allegiance to al-Qaida in 2004. Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in June 2006.

If it weren't for our invasion of Iraq, it's doubtful al-Qaida in Iraq would have gotten off the ground.

Will the Real Conservatives Please Stand Up?

The real trouble behind the failed war in Iraq, oldstyleliberal believes, is the neo-cons.

The term, which is short for "neo-conservatives," applies to those whose politics derive from something that happened in the 1960s and '70s. In the later '60s, many on the American Left turned into radical revolutionaries, and near-chaos broke out in the wake of the Vietnam war.

Many former leftists, some of whom were once communists of one stripe or another, then felt "mugged by reality" and shifted their sentiments to an obdurate form of anti-communism. These former liberals called themselves "neo-conservatives."

Later, when the Cold War ended, neo-cons congratulated themselves on a worldview which held that America's first duty is to use any means possible to eliminate unfriendly, anti-democratic regimes around the world.

The Bush Administration has always been neo-con friendly, what with Dick Cheney being the Vice President and Donald Rumsfeld being the original Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld's underlings included the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leading neo-con thinkers.

In the post-Cold War world, the neo-cons saw a need to project American power, military and otherwise, into other arenas. It the post-9/11 world, Wolfowitz and those like him saw an opportunity to do what Wolfowitz had longed to do since the 1980s, when he broke from the official line of the Reagan Administration by denouncing Saddam Hussein at a time when Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Reagan's official envoy, was offering the dictator support in his conflict with Iran. Namely, Wolfowitz and his fellow neo-cons wanted to use U.S. military might to topple Saddam Hussein.


Neo-cons are not real conservatives. They are true believers who have become a power elite, while real conservatives believe power elites need to to be held in check by keeping government small.

Neo-cons are quite comfortable with other power elites — particularly money elites. In fact, many neo-cons are in the money elite. This is why a neo-con administration like Bush's is unfailingly pro-big oil, pro-big business, and pro-multinational corporation.

Let us not forget that Dick Cheney, when he wasn't in government, worked for Halliburton Energy Services, a multinational corporation with operations in over 120 countries. Halliburton's middle name is now "energy," but used to be just plain "oil." President George H. W. Bush, the current president's father, once worked for a corporation that is now part of Halliburton, Dresser Industries ... as did George H. W. Bush's father, the former Connecticut senator Prescott Bush, who when he was not in government was a Wall Street executive banker.

So when opponents of the current president and his war in Iraq wonder whether Bush went wrong out of a firm ideological commitment to neo-conservatism or out of personal loyalty to this country's entrenched power-money elites, the class into which he was born and raised, the correct answer is ... both!


We are rapidly approaching a make-or-break moment concerning the immediate future of the war in Iraq, as oldstyleliberal tried to convey in Congress Needs To Impose an Endgame in Iraq. The recent "surge" in troop strength has failed to turn the tide. Come next spring, the pressure of ongoing troop rotations will force us to reduce our military footprint in Iraq. Military sources, speaking to the news media on condition of anonymity, are saying things like that until then, "We're going to get it as stable as we can, with the troops we have, and in the time available. And then, we'll back out as carefully as we can."

It's fair to say that that's now the best-case scenario. There's no longer talk of victory of any sort, by any definition, in Iraq.

Fir that reason, real conservatives in Congress have to step up to the plate and break with the neo-con power-money elites. They need to take their rightful place in a veto-proof majority that will require a shift in policy in Iraq on the part of President Bush — specifically, a commitment to an endgame or exit strategy that will marshal our remaining military and diplomatic options in the interest of leaving the country we invaded in as stable a situation as we can manage.

Congress Needs To Impose an Endgame in Iraq

Today's Washington Post has two articles, White House Shaving Yardstick for Iraq Gains and Bombings Kill at Least 170 in Iraq, that together tell oldstyleliberal that Congress needs to stop shilly-shallying and impose an endgame in Iraq on an unwilling President Bush.

The first article says, in effect, that no one in the know thinks the troop "surge" Bush called for in January is meeting the benchmarks set for it by him and added to by Congress as a condition for paying for it. Though the final report on its success or failure will not be due until September, an interim report due next week will admit only minor progress has been made.

Meanwhile, the optimistic claim that sectarian killings in Iraq were in fact down in June, after a particularly bloody May, is offset by the second article, documenting at least 170 Iraqi deaths in one 18-hour period. The article says 8 U.S. troops died in the same period of less than a day.

In another article, Special Report: Congress's War Over the War, the Post describes the difficulties four U.S. House members and senators, from both sides of the aisle, are having deciding on an appropriate course of action in Iraq. One of them, Rep. Johnny Isakson, a conservative Republican from Georgia loyal to the president, says the most persuasive argument he hears from the war's opponents is, "There needs to be an endgame."

"I agree fully," oldstyleliberal would like to tell Congressman Isakson. "There needs to be an endgame, and the president doesn't have one. That's why Congress has to take the bit in its teeth and impose one."


It seems like all the experts are saying the same thing: the window within which the U.S. will hold much sway at all in Iraq is shutting rapidly, no matter what Washington does. By early next spring, the pressure of ongoing troop rotations will force us to reduce our military footprint in Iraq, willy-nilly.

Many pundits have been calling for some form of "soft partition" in Iraq, with semi-autonomous Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd sectors. The Post coverage seems to indicate that kind of thing may be evolving in de facto fashion, anyway.

The Post's informants don't think Iran or any other regional power will absolutely control any of these sectors. Still, they will exert influence that is presently unwelcome in Washington.

This is true in part because Iraq's government and political system are now deadlocked, paralyzed. It might be different if U.S. and Iraqi forces were able to dampen the sectarian violence, country-wide ... but they're not strong enough to do so. What would make them get strong enough? Well, if the Iraqi government got more resolute, then just maybe ... but, alas, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is weak and corrupt. The Iraqi army and security forces, with their sectarian allegiances, are accordingly as much a part of the problem as they are a part of the solution.

In other words, each component of the two-prong solution the president hopes for is blocked by ... the other component. An increase in governmental staunchness is blocked by how ineffectual the Iraqi armed forces currently are, but any improvement there is forestalled by the weakness of the government. It's crazy to expect such a government to command the loyal devotion of its army, no?


Meanwhile, the time window is closing. The hourglass is running out of sand.

Here's the current bottom line, according to the Post coverage:

For its part, the [U.S.] military has calculated that a veto-proof congressional majority is unlikely to demand a full, immediate withdrawal. But however long the troops remain, and in whatever number, [a] military intelligence official said [under condition of anonymity], they see a clear mission ahead. "We're going to get it as stable as we can, with the troops we have, and in the time available. And then, we'll back out as carefully as we can," the official said.

The problem there, as oldstyleliberal sees it, is that the "we" spoken of by the military intelligence official includes only the military. It doesn't include the State Department or the diplomats. It doesn't include Washington, really.

That's a recipe for disaster. If the war in Iraq to date has proven anything, it's that nothing good happens unless U.S. military and civilian decision-makers are on the same page, acting in concert, with a common strategy and set of goals. That happened, albeit to a grudging, limited extent, earlier this year when Congress joined with President Bush to sanction the "surge" — and there was, as a result, less sectarian violence in June.

Now Congress has to step up to the plate again. It has to impose, by a veto-proof majority, an endgame that will salvage as much as possible in Iraq before we have to "back out," as the military intelligence official put it. By "as much as possible" is meant just this: some vestige of stability and order in Iraq, some ability for the Iraqi people, with the assistance of their admittedly less-than-disinterested neighbors in the region, to avert a bloodbath when we leave. No more, or less, than that.

Code Red for Liberty?

Today's The Baltimore Sun contains an article, Challenge to NSA spy program is rejected, which makes oldstyleliberal even more paranoid about the way things are going in America today.

A panel of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, by a 2-1 margin, overruled District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, among others. The plaintiffs alleged the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens is unconstitutional. Judge Taylor found for the plaintiffs, after which the Justice Department appealed the case to the 6th Circuit on grounds that the complainants lacked legal standing:

Justice Department attorney Gregory Garre argued that the plaintiffs, including the [ACLU], had alleged only "speculative" harm done to them, which would be insufficient to grant them standing to sue. The only way the plaintiffs could find out whether they had been the targets of wiretapping, he said, was if they obtained information about the surveillance program — in violation of the "state secrets" privilege.

Talk about a catch-22! If the 6th Circuit ruling stands, the Terrorist Surveillance Program, as NSA's post-9/11 warrantless eavesdropping initiative is called, is deemed legal until someone with standing successfully challenges it in court. To demonstrate standing, however, the challengers first have to show they've been wiretapped ... which can never happen, since that information is protected by the government's "state secrets" privilege.

So the neo-cons in charge win another one. Note that Judges Alice M. Batchelder and Julia Smith Gibbons of the 6th Circuit — the two judges that sided with the government in the NSA case — are both Republican appointees. Anyone see a pattern here?

Impeach Bush, Cheney!

It took President Bush's commutation of "Scooter" Libby's sentence for lying to a grand jury to break this camel's back! oldstyleliberal now thinks the president deserves to be impeached.

So does Vice President Dick Cheney, what with all this bunkum about the Vice Presidency being a fourth branch of government, accountable to no one.
While we're at it, if it is possible to impeach Supreme Court justices, today's "conservative majority" has to go. oldstyleliberal doesn't know which of their decisions this term is the most egregious: the gutting of school desegregation programs under Brown v. Board of Education (see here and here); the gutting of long-settled law prohibiting makers of consumer goods from price-fixing with retailers (see here, with critical article here); the setting of an all-too-short deadline after which employees charging employers with sex discrimination cannot sue (see here); or what. Add to that upholding the partial-birth abortion ban (with which oldstyleliberal happens to agree) and you have a clear picture of a Roberts court that has veered sharply to the right.

Seriously, folks ... what is happening now is truly scary. All the stuff happening abroad: secret prisons, endless detentions without trial. And all the stuff happening at home: warrantless wiretaps, various other kinds of government snooping, the suspension of habeas corpus rights. oldstyleliberal could go on and on, but the list is already familiar to everyone not in a coma since 2001.

oldstyleliberal has made an honest effort during the Bush presidency to be moderate in his criticism, and to seek ways in which we non-conservatives could look on the bright side. No more! All it once it becomes clear to oldstyleliberal that the neo-cons are playing for keeps. The guess here is that the hard right realizes that, come January 2009, they will be swept out of power in the White House, as the Democrats further solidify the hold over Congress they gained in the 2006 elections.

oldstyleliberal will even go so far as to say that these radicals who are running things in the Executive Branch are bent on bringing down the whole edifice of "liberal" policies of the recent (and not so recent) past, while there's still time for them to work their evil intentions. One of the prime beneficiaries, obviously, will be corporate America.

In other words, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has been right about the Bush Administration all along ... and oldstyleliberal hereby takes back everything bad he has ever said about him.