The House Democrat Revolt That Wasn't

The 70 Democrats who voted today against authorizing Obama's splendid little Libyan war that is not war at first gave me a faint smidgen of hope that the progressive wing of the party is branching off on its own.  They defied Nancy Pelosi for a change.  They didn't listen when Hillary Clinton fed them her guilt-trip spiel that if they weren't for bombing Libya, then it logically follows that they must love K-Daffy.  The "if you're not for us, you're against us" tripe used to sell the Iraq invasion didn't work this time.


 And one New York congressman actually stood up on the House floor and called his president a monarch in the making as far as his bombing adventure is concerned.  Gerry Nadler, whose district includes the 9/11 site, has been anti-war since Vietnam, when he worked on Gene McCarthy's 1968 campaign. (another one of those dreaded "spoilers").  He is also disgusted with Obama's bait and switch Afghanistan withdrawal plan, and wants the troops brought home -- now. He pointed out, rightly, that each executive administration has given more and more power to successive presidents.  Obama seems to believe that he is Commander in Chief of the entire country, when the Constitution merely makes him commander in chief of the armed forces. He actually does still work for "the people" -- if only in theory.


And then, inexplicably, the House voted to pay for the war it just said was illegal. Never mind.


Of course, the ruling class Democrats in the Senate want to bomb Libya for a whole year more, if necessary, so the House voting on the fact that they hated Obama going behind their backs was purely symbolic anyway.  You have to love the message it's sending Obama, though, as he campaigned at this week's factory.  How ironic that his latest factory makes robotics.  How refreshing that at least 70 House Democrats are not pure robots, but bona fide androids with just a touch of humanity still left in their carcasses.


This has nothing and everything to do with Republicans.  Of course the Republicans voted against authorizing Obama to bomb Libya for all the wrong reasons.  If it had been one of their own in the Oval Office, they would have been urging him to invade a dozen more countries and given him a blank check.  Of course it was the Republicans who cheer-led the Iraq War and bankrupted the country.


But they are the known lunatics and the Democrats are supposedly the sane ones -- although by compromising with the GOP on the budget, they're just enabling and colluding with the insanity.  The two parties we have now are the John Birch Society and the Reagan Republicans.  Either Democrats have to start acting like Democrats again after a 50-year hiatus, or the whole party should just implode and allow a new liberal/labor/progressive party to emerge from the ruins.  Right now there is only one Democrat in the Senate, and his name is Bernie Sanders.  And he calls himself a socialist.


Michele Bachmann and her ilk could never have risen to national prominence were it not for the big Democratic sellout.  The vacuum created by the inaction of the so-called liberal class on jobs, the continued bankrupting wars, the deregulation of Wall Street, the infusion of corporate money into national elections, the corporatization of the mass media and the killing of the Fairness Doctrine have left a citizenry so devoid of hope that it creates the perfect atmosphere for the rise of a theocratic demagogue like Bachmann.


Obama, from his waffling on Afghanistan, his capitulation in the name of bipartisanhip to Republicans, his dithering on immigration reform and DREAM Act amnesty, his failure to appoint Elizabeth Warren and protect consumers, his release of oil reserves for pure political expediency, his groveling to Wall Street --is about one thing: his own re-election. We have to stop looking to him, or the plutocratic millionaire-bloated Senate,  for any leadership. We should instead concentrate on voting for representation on the local and state and Congressional levels -- and continuing to organize as progressive groups and to speak out as individuals.


Holding Republican nutjobs up to the ridicule and blame they so richly deserve is fine, but it isn't enough. Not by a long shot.


**Update 6/25:  Some writers are pointing out that the vote against defunding the war was actually a vote against a sneaky provision in it, thus absolving the Congresspeople who voted against authorizing the war and then seemingly doing an about-face.  Glenn Greenwald writes in his Salon column today:  

That was the reason so many anti-war members of Congress -- including dozens of progressives -- rejected the "de-funding" bill despite opposition to the war in Libya: because it was a disguised authorization for a war they oppose, not because they cowardly failed to check executive power abuses.  As Rogin reports, "there were more than enough lawmakers to pass" a true de-funding bill, but GOP leaders -- who have been protecting Obama on Libya from the start -- did not bring that to the floor.

That's the whole trouble with so much of the legislation being voted on these days: the bills are riddles wrapped in secrecy surrounded by enigmas.  Half the Congresspeople probably didn't even realize what they were voting for. Some voted against both measures, some voted for, and some split the difference. Where was House Speaker Boehner in all this?  Probably canoodling with Obama. He was not present to vote on the Libya bills yesterday.

Happy Talk Keep Talkin Happy Talk

How's this for a White House public/private partnership strategy: blame the media for painting a too-gloomy picture of the economy, and keep insisting America is the greatest country on earth, the best of all possible worlds, and the glass is not only half full but almost overflowing.

Reuters Editor- at- Large Chrystia Freeland, who was invited to "moderate" a panel discussion of the White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness in New York this past weekend, quoted a mega-banker as saying just that. According to her article,  Robert Wolf, chairman of UBS Americas, and one of  Obama’s earliest Wall Street supporters said: “Since I sat here a year ago, we have two million jobs that have been created. Exports have gone up by 10 percent and technology is booming, agriculture is booming. But when you look at the TV you hear what we are not doing well. I believe we have built a foundation and are on the right path.”

Yeah, that TV sure is biased, all right.  I have to give Freeland credit for not being a media stenographer on the meeting that the Public Private Obama Administration so obviously co-opted her into attending as a discussion "moderator" rather than a reporter.  Just beneath the surface of her balanced piece is the wee-est bit of healthy snarky skepticism.  A close reading reveals just what lengths the White House is willing to go in its propaganda campaign of getting the masses to put on their rose-colored glasses and just how they attempt to manipulate public opinion by cultivating the press. I loved this bit about Obama BFF and Chief Cheerleader and Presidential Back-Watcher Valerie Jarrett:

That’s why her determined good cheer at the forum matters. “We have good reason to be optimistic,” she said. “We have great entrepreneurs and the capacity to reinvent ourselves. This is still the best country on earth.”

The other panelists, all members of the Jobs and Competitiveness Council, faithfully chimed in in the same key. Brian L. Roberts, chairman and chief executive of Comcast, the cable giant that recently acquired a majority stake in NBC, said a positive outlook was essential to “make America a great place to live and work. We all want that to be the outcome, so it’s critical to have a sense of optimism."

Jarrett now runs something called The White House Office of Public Engagement and even blogs about it. Her entry today touts the oxymoronic "Corporate Voices for Working Families", a consortium of megabanks (including Goldman Sachs), giant pharmaceuticals and multinationals that strives to make life better for the workers.  Who needs a union or on-site day care or paid maternity leave when the beneficent corporations are now making it okay for new moms to bring breast pumps to work!  And thanks to the miracle of Public/Private, breast pumps are now tax deductible. 

And Jarrett is certainly enthusiastic if not very original: "As we work to Win the Future by out-innovating, out-educating, and out-building the rest of the world, we must use every tool at our disposal, and workplace flexibility is one of those tools!"  (take an extra 10 minutes, Honey, and pump away and we won't even dock your pay!)

In the best of all possible results of this ham-handed White House propaganda campaign of feel-goodism, the American people will at long last arrive at their Candide moment in the face of this hideously happy Panglossian assault.

"...and private misfortunes make the public good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the more everything is well."
- Voltaire, Candide, Chapter 4

What Harry Told Barry



It's Academic and Far, Far Away



State Department head attorney Harold Koh has been universally lauded as a champion of human rights. He is widely reported to be on President Obama's short list of future Supreme Court nominees, precisely because of his stellar record as a trans-global, humanistic legal scholar and public servant in both Republican (Reagan) and Democratic administrations. The son of first-generation immigrants from South Korea, he would be the first Asian-American Supreme Court Justice and its only international law expert.  The former  dean of Yale Law School, he served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor under President Clinton and is currently Legal Adviser to the State Department.  Thus, he has had both Clintons as bosses. 

So it came as a  surprise last week when Mr. Koh, an erstwhile staunch defender of the War Powers Act,  performed a prima facie flip-flop on his interpretation of it. This came after the President had already been advised by two other lawyers in the Departments of Defense and Justice that he needed congressional approval to keep bombing Libya.  But war is not war, according to Koh's conveniently convoluted thinking, when we destroy just a few buildings and people with remote control gizmos.

 He told the president exactly what he wanted to hear, much in the same way George Bush's lawyers told him what he wanted to hear about torture.  It's easy.  All you have to do is mangle the English language. Torture becomes an enhanced interrogation technique.  War becomes a limited kinetic military exercise when you perform surgical strikes with drones and minimal collateral damage.  If these weapons do happen to kill some innocent women and children along the way, it's because of system failure, not human aggression.  Or so the reasoning goes.  It's kind of like a video game, because from a distance, you don't have to deal with even looking at any blood or mangled bodies.  You are at so many degrees of separation.  You can physically be thousands of miles away. Plus, if no American is in imminent danger of bodily harm, the grudgingly acknowledged and always regrettable deaths of civilians simply don't count.  War is war only if someone on our side gets hurt. It has to be a mutual thing.

Since Koh had always been such a defender of the War Powers Act, why has he now seemingly gone out of his way to subvert it through semantics? 


"One possibility is that Koh has a client, the Secretary of State, who is committed to the Libya intervention, and he is serving his client faithfully" writes former  DOJ and DOD lawyer Jack Goldsmith of Harvard University. "Another possibility is that Koh’s commitments to humanitarian intervention and the 'responsibility to protect' outweigh his commitment to his academic vision of presidential war powers.  I certainly do not believe that Koh’s academic views should control his advice and judgment during his government service.  Nor do I think that his academic writings addressed the precise issue under the WPR that he is now advocating in the government.  But for a quarter century before heading up State-L, Koh was the leading and most vocal academic critic of presidential unilateralism in war, and a tireless advocate for institutional cooperation between the political branches in war decisions.  I am thus genuinely surprised, as many people are, by his current stance."


Goldsmith added that "it cannot be pleasant for the men and women involved in this 'kinetic military action' to know that the Defense Department General Counsel and the head of OLC think the intervention in Libya as currently executed is unlawful."


In his capacity as State Department legal advisor, Koh was also instrumental in  writing new international rules governing the behavior of private security contractors in the wake of the Blackwater (now XE) scandal involving the shooting of civilians in Iraq. Of course, the new code of behavior does not include sanctions for previous bad behavior.  It's another one of those aspirational things, apparently, with the purpose of placating the international human rights community.

And then there is that bane of the Administration and of the American Security State, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, subject of an ongoing DOJ investigation for possible violation of the Espionage Act.  Last December, Lawyers Rights Watch Canada, a advocacy group which has an advisory role at the U.N., accused the ubiquitous Mr. Koh of violating ethical standards and putting British barrister Jennifer Robinson in jeopardy by interfering with her representation of her client. Koh had posted a letter online conflating her legal work for Assange with criminality on her own part. (Shades of the Bush Administration's criticism of lawyers defending Gitmo detainees?)  Koh's actions, according to the Canadians, violated both international law and the ethical standards of the American Bar Association.  Details can be found here. LRWC filed a complaint about Koh with Attorney General Eric Holder and Sec. Clinton.  But since Koh not only still has his Foggy Bottom job, but is also now a go-to legal eagle for the White House, we can safely assume the letter was stuffed in a circular file somewhere, eh? 

Koh is a new breed of apparatchik, a tool of the neoliberals who wage war that is not war with a wink and a nod and a path to riches in an oil-rich state that is conveniently not too dedicated to human rights.



It's Collateral Damage and Far, Far Away



Update: Here's a list made by Rep. Dennis Kucinich of 10 reasons to oppose the war in Libya.