The Smoking Argus

(OFFICIAL STATEMENT) – WASHINGTON D.C. – Things seem to be unraveling quickly for the new administration. The latest unemployment numbers are worse than the last reports. For all the billions of dollars spent and committed to fixing our economic problems, the situation is only getting worse. This was to be expected by those who understand the root causes of the problems. Throwing money around and creating more government programs is both simplistic and damaging to the economy. Of course, the administration claims that we would have been much worse off without these efforts. You can’t improve this situation by adding to our mountain of public debt for the benefit of big banks and other special interests. The American people know this. When will Washington learn?

In addition, the president’s plans for healthcare reform – or health insurance reform – are becoming more and more unpopular as details are examined. But because of all the alarmist rhetoric, politicians in Washington feel obligated to pass something, even if it doesn’t help. Rarely are liberty and prosperity at greater risk than when politicians feel they must “do something”. It is frightening to watch Washington toy with our healthcare purely for political reasons.

However, the saddest shortcoming of this administration is its utter failure to pursue a more peaceful foreign policy. Just last week up to 90 people, apparently mostly civilians, were killed in Afghanistan in an airstrike, and the violence is only getting worse. The administration is mulling over how many more troops they will send as part of their “Afghan Surge” with advisors getting it exactly backwards. They qualify sending fewer troops as “high-risk” and sending more troops as “low-risk”. This is not the perception at all if you were to ask the families of those being sent over. The best answer would be to stop risking any of our troops for the sake of what is, for all intents and purposes, a violent occupation, helping no one.

But all of these problems and their wrong-headed solutions come from one greater problem – which is not understanding the reasons that we are here. The economy is in bad shape because of too much government intervention producing a myriad of unintended consequences and perverse incentives. Healthcare is broken because the doctor-patient relationship has been broken down by hyper regulation and too much government interference. Afghanistan is a mess because they ignored the mission approved by Congress – to seek out those who attacked us on 9/11. They have instead gotten sidetracked with nebulous interventionist tasks such as promoting democracy and nation building. Eight years later, there is no real progress. The Soviets bankrupted themselves fighting in the mountains and caves of Afghanistan and we’re about to do the same. If we would just look to history it would be self-evident that there is nothing left to win in Afghanistan, and everything to lose.

Most of all, we need to understand that we don’t understand Afghan culture and politics, and for that reason alone, intervening in their affairs is unlikely to produce positive results. The best thing we could possibly do now is to bring our troops home, from Afghanistan, from Iraq, from Japan, from Germany, from all occupied countries, and concentrate on mending badly damaged relationships around the world. Free and honest trade has always been the best way to do that, without fail. Not understanding the benefits of peace, freedom, and nonintervention will always bring about catastrophe.

—END OFFICIAL STATEMENT—

Related Material(s)
	Rep. Ron Paul, Texas Straight Talk, “Government Solutions Lack Understanding” Transcript (13.6kb PDF)

Source(s): U.S. House of Representatives, Texas 14th Congressional District, Representative Ron Paul web page • The Smoking Argus YouTube Channel “Rep. Ron Paul Texas Straight Talk: Government Solutions Lack Understanding”

Allison Bricker

As someone who did not vote for President Obama, (my vote went to Thomas Jefferson as a write-in) never did my imagination fathom that he would move so quickly in continuing the unConstitutional “Bushian” expansion of the Executive Branch. Case in point, President Obama gave a speech this past Thursday filled with enough doublespeak as it relates to the rule of law and torture to make Mr. O’Brien proud.

Thus proving yet again, holding a degree in Constitutional Law does not necessarily equate to a love or respect for the Constitution. Unfortunately, it seems at least in this case, only to serve as a road map to its circumvention. However, the fact that Ms. Maddow of “The Rachel Maddow Show” rakes him over the coals for such intellectual dishonesty provides further substantiation that the false left/right paradigm’s facade continues to crumble as more and more Americans are awakening. It is becoming plain that regardless of party label/mascot,  a politician’s sole motivation is the retention and expansion of power unto themselves via the bloated state apparatus.

Long Live the Republic, as the answer to 1984 is still 1776.

Joseph Marohl

Twelve years ago, Ralph Peters wrote, “Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures [called elsewhere “noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or the rejectionist segment of our own population”—emphasis mine].

Peters, now retired from the U.S. Army as Lieutenant Colonel, writes novels (under his own name and the pen name Owen Parry), essays, and newspaper columns.

In the same article, Peters cites celebrities like Bill Gates, Madonna, and Steven Spielberg and television programs like Dynasty, Dallas, and Baywatch for inciting international unrest by purveying “America’s irresponsible fantasies of itself … a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world” from which the normal Third-World citizen is barred.

But Col. Peters is not altogether hostile to this devilish enchantment. For most of the article, he praises American mass media—particularly action movies—as effective in quashing ideologies (inside and outside the U.S.A.) that resist exploitation by American-style corporate capitalism.

“The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture,” he says, “is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people’s culture. It stresses comfort and convenience—ease—and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx’s dream, and his nightmare.”

I might add that we are also Aldous Huxley’s nightmare in Brave New World—a culture titillated by “feelies” while rejecting actual sex and turning human reproduction into technology … for profit. A populace enslaved and intellectually enfeebled by its gadgets and incapacity for the independent thought and effective cooperation needed to resist its masters.

He continues, making a point that Noam Chomsky (on the other end of the sociopolitical spectrum) agrees with: that current labor practices exhaust workers, leaving them fatigued and incapable of research into and critical thinking about current events—thus the average worker is drawn to the seductive fantasies of mass entertainment, an American specialty.

He says, “Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made [a] mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can’t wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather ‘Baywatch.’ America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine.” [Emphasis mine.]

Unsurprisingly, Col. Peters is taken less with Madonna’s “irresponsibly” open and assertive sexuality or the independent, neorealist stories of struggling masses or hapless individuals than with Hollywood summer blockbusters: “The films most despised by the intellectual elite—those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex—are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere.”

Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Chuck Norris are, for Col. Peters, America’s answer to Tokyo Rose, Axis Sally, and Hanoi Hannah. Violence becomes the working man’s alternative to thinking about the information so readily at his fingertips—and his only tool in dealing with the reality of rising unemployment and poverty: “As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by information, or dispossessed by the effects of information-based technologies, there will be more violence.”

As highly individualistic, vigilante-style heroes begin to dominate the world’s imagination, Peters (rightly) predicts, nationalism will fail and terrorism will rise:

“We will see countries and continents divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic trends. Developing countries will not be able to depend on physical production industries, because there will always be another country willing to work cheaper. The have-nots will hate and strive to attack the haves.

“… Beyond traditional crime, terrorism will be the most common form of violence, but transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars will continue to plague the world, albeit with the ‘lesser’ conflicts statistically dominant. In defense of its interests, its citizens, its allies, or its clients, the United States will be required to intervene in some of these contests. We will win militarily whenever we have the guts for it.

“… The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault.” [Emphases mine.]

No wonder, then, that the attacks on September 11, 2001, so closely resembled—in their gaudy visual spectacle—a Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay film. No wonder, then, that the shock-and-awe bombings of Baghdad looked like a video game. No wonder, then, that President Bush found it expedient to dress up like a Top Gun cadet to boast about the U.S. victories in the Middle East.

But what do we do when the mass entertainments and independent (non-embedded) investigative reporters begin to sway in another direction—away from grandiloquent, corporate-inspired logos on the evening news (so effectively lampooned on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), and away from multimillion-dollar spectacles of computer-generated stunt work and testosterone-fueled explosions?

What happens when new, inexpensive computer and recording technologies make it possible for Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat [the stereotypes Peters so arrogantly calls on to denigrate working classes and “noncompetitive” have-nots] to make their own documentaries and narrative films—telling their own stories, not just the propagandistic fantasies of corporate-owned, corporate-controlled, and corporate-idolizing mass media?

What happens when blogging and YouTube allow unsponsored, not-for-profit expressions and analyses of current events? What happens if and when the public wants to see more humane, empathetic, and cooperative images of American life?

Writing in the Spring 2009 Journal of International Security Affairs, Col. Peters complains that, once undefeatable, we Americans no longer have the guts for military victories to ensure the success of our economic interests and “cultural assaults.”

For this, he apportions blame everywhere from “academic theorists” to the end of the military draft to atheism to fewer bloody noses in school playgrounds, jaundicing America’s backbone. Further, we have “cheapened” our respect for war itself—“our enemies view the home front as our weak flank.”

But the worst thing of all, he says, is the “killers without guns”: “There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media.”

So however bloodthirsty American media make us citizens of the world and however much their airbrushed images of wealth and glamour make us dissatisfied with our ordinary lives, pushing us to terror and despair, there are chinks in the empire’s best secret weapon!

What’s a good neocon militarist to do?

Col. Peters strongly implies a solution: “Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win.”

But, first, let’s kill the independent media … literally: “Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.” [Emphasis mine.]

Given his uncanny (no, “creepy”) foresight twelve years ago, Col. Peters’ new report raises chilling prospects for American democracy in 2013 … if not sooner. A “democratic” nation that declares war on its “partisan media”! —By which, no doubt, Peters does not mean Fox News, CNN, or PBS, on which he regularly appears as an expert on military and cultural affairs.

And, as Jeremy Scahill reminds us, 189 journalists have been killed while on duty covering the Iraq war alone—at least 16 of which killed by U.S. forces.

But it looks like Peters, at least, is already thinking the “unthinkable.”

Joseph Marohl

I’m not the sort of person who expects a whole lot out of democratic processes.

For instance, I’m not a guy who votes for somebody for President and then expects him (or, perhaps someday, her) to fulfill his fondest dreams of what the country should be or expects every item on some idealistic checklist* to be crossed off within four or eight years.

I have idealistic aspirations, yet, I think, realistic expectations.

But it strikes me as basically wrong that the nation (its government and its people) should entertain the defense of torture.

Torture is the most conspicuous violation of our traditional and moral concepts of liberty and human rights. All by itself, torture has been widely regarded as sufficient cause for declaring nations and individuals to be enemies of the people of the United States.

Until recently, torture marked the dividing line between civilization and barbarity—between enlightened modernity and the dark ages.

Until recently, nobody—not individual citizens, not ranking members of government—needed a working definition of “torture,” no more so than they needed a working definition of “pain” or “inhumanity.” Even in the definitions that were needed—as for “cruel and unusual punishment”—torture was understood to be the line that should not be crossed.

Besides that, torture is widely recognized to be ineffective. Our soldiers have been trained to resist torture—so no doubt other combatants are similarly trained. Those who have suffered torture in the past have often admitted to giving false and deliberately misleading information, just to stop the torture.

Nowadays, psychologists tell us that the inclination to torture even non-human animals is symptomatic of sociopathic and psychotic tendencies.

What is it, then, about our nation today that causes its Democratic and Republican governmental office-holders to sanction torture or to contort the English language to redefine torture as something other than torture? Are we now a nation of sociopaths?

To speak of fear as a justification is to forget that most of us don’t accept fear as justification for any other premeditated crime. It is also to ignore that, based on the evidence, most of the controversial acts of torture occurred in 2003, in preparation for the invasion of Iraq, not in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The American government evidently used torture to justify the war in Iraq, not to safeguard frightened citizens at home.

Now President Obama wants to suppress evidence of this torture and to exonerate high-level officials who formally approved and pushed for torture. Why would the democratically elected representative of a free and humane democracy do this? Have we all seen just too many episodes of 24, too many sequels to Saw, too many dogfights?

In fact, the President’s very effort to suppress the evidence strongly suggests that it is persuasive and incriminating.

This and this alone is the one action that Obama pursues that I cannot imagine a justification for.

Sure, maybe nobody—not even he—can put the humpty-dumpty economy back together. Maybe adequate health care for all is pie-in-the-sky fantasy (I don’t think so, but I can certainly understand why many others do). Maybe, despite his campaign promises to the gay and lesbian communities, the timing is not yet right for equality in marriage and the military (but if not now, then when?) Maybe top-secret documents to which only the President has access affirm that we should open a third-front war in Iran.

These are issues of great importance to me, yet I can at least imagine justifications that, though unconvincing to me, might satisfy somebody else, particularly someone with marginally different values and interests.

But not to stand up to terror? What could justify that? Our fear? (Can we show our faces and claim that we torture human beings out of fear?) Its effectiveness? (The overwhelming evidence refutes its effectiveness.) Politics? (Can any of us proudly stand behind the use of torture just because it’s bipartisan?)

What good is a democracy if that democracy decides to go ahead and do what the overwhelming majority recognize intuitively to be wrong?

—

* I fully understand that the American people have widely variant values and interests and would compose widely different versions of such a checklist. In my case, the checklist would entail (for starters)

1. baseline health care, housing, and education for every legal denizen of the U.S.A.;

2. compulsory education in civics, economics, and ethics, respectfully reflecting myriad points of view and encouraging independent critical thinking regarding currently accepted practices in government, wealth distribution, and morality;

3. equal rights and access to privileges for every citizen, regardless of race, ideology, social status, or life style;

4. open and egalitarian justice system—where plaintiffs and defendants are received and heard on a level playing field, regardless of race, ideology, social status, or life style, where surveillance and torture are not used to pursue political ends or to expedite governance;

5. equitable and fair distribution of the responsibilities of maintaining order and governance of rights and liberties—in areas of revenue/taxation, military service, access to public office, and voting;

6. the proprietary interests of the American people in all technologies, therapies, and inventions funded or largely funded by taxpayers’ money—without relinquishing these patents or the profits from them to private interests without fair and adequate compensation;

7. compulsory justification of any governmental or large corporate use of force or abridgement of human rights and liberties, with clear stipulations that such use and abridgement always have definite benchmarks or time limits;

8. absolute freedom of expression, so that every denizen of the country can express any impression or notion he or she can articulate and any opinion he or she can back up with reason and data—entailing all due responsibilities for such freedom;

9. ensured adequate care (of all types) for children, the infirm elderly, and anyone who, without care, would be hopelessly incapacitated, e.g., by poverty, mental or physical illness or impairment, violence, natural disaster, membership of maligned minorities, etc.

10. active protection and conservation of natural resources and engineered infrastructure of demonstrable importance to the American people;

11. strict preservation of liberty and recognized human rights (as enumerated in the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Human Rights) and active expansion of that liberty and those rights, as needed and recognized as the culture changes;

12. absolute intellectual freedom of the press, science, religion, educational institutions, and the arts—entailing all due responsibilities for such freedom;

13. elimination of all laws and regulations whose contributions to the common good of the people cannot be demonstrated and proved; and

14. diligent yet reasonable protection of national borders and maintenance of a military for national defense, under civil (but never private) control.

Joseph Marohl

I’m getting a new look at The Wizard of Oz. Right now, a fair-sized section of “hope you can believe in” has been pulled back to reveal the old quack Professor Marvel, who was hidden there all along—torture, surveillance, high finance, and (despite a recent epistolary assurance to the contrary) the same old same old in health care reform. (I don’t make predictions, but my guess is a good chunk of “reform” change will wind up in the pockets of insurance companies and big pharma—mind you, just a guess.)

I wouldn’t go so far as to deny that Obama has brought some Technicolor rays to our black-and-white world.

Sure, as far as same-sex marriage is concerned, we see some encouraging changes—on the state level (not federal)—from which, shamefully, in my opinion, the new wizard is holding himself just as aloof as the old wizard, under whose watch these state legislative and judicial reforms emerged. And, to be fair, the religious right no longer feel quite as empowered as they did a year ago in resisting these changes, despite a monstrous, shocking victory in California six months ago.

(It is good news indeed that my gay sisters and brothers who want to get married are increasingly enabled to do so—though, I should add, I personally have no desire to get married, and legal and economic inequities towards single people—gay or straight—remain unopposed.)

And while not having quite gotten around to dumping “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—and even continuing to enforce it (ask Lt. Dan Choi!)—Obama still promises further inroads on gay rights … “some time.”

And, sure, the Guantanamo prison-slash-interrogation center is scheduled for closure in just eight months. Fantastic news for those of us with a feeling for human rights fresher than the year 1215! But, at present, closure of the infamous (and barely legal) detention center has no funding.

On the other hand, we have seen a proposed 15% cap on credit card interests defeated this week 60-33 in the Senate—denying indebted consumers the type of safety nets Washington is shitting itself to give to failing banks and other lending institutions. Twenty-one (21!) of the nay votes were Democrats; five more Democrats did not vote at all.

Not to suggest that, for one minute, I placed much confidence in the Democratic Party to stand up for the people against big capital … much less to Republican bullies and loudmouths.

Now, just like Bush, Obama is trying to block disclosure of photographs of Americans’ torture of detainees, on the understandable grounds that they may “inflame anti-American sentiment” (but only just as understandable now as when the Bush White House made the same argument). Meanwhile, the nation engaged this week in the “single deadliest US airstrike” on Afghanistan since 2001—one of a series of attacks designed ostensibly to weaken al-Qaeda while politically proving Obama’s commander-in-chief cojones. So 100 civilian lives have no anti-American propaganda potential?

Also out from behind the curtain is Obama’s indifference to US and international conventions in choosing not to go after the high-level members of the previous administration who blighted America’s global reputation and moral integrity by promoting and condoning inhuman and ineffective techniques of torture (including Cheney and Bush—as well as culpable Democrats).

The media, meanwhile, have responded to these revelations with little heart, brains, or courage … with the continues-to-amaze exception of stand-up comics!

Obama—God help me, I still like him (and do not in fact believe in God)—needs to put some ruby slippers on his rhetoric. And fast!

I admire the man’s style, manners, and his political savvy. But only what he says appeases the left; what he does appeases the right. In trying to show he’s no “socialist,” he panders to war-mongering, corporate capitalist interests. He panders with a great deal of dignity and wit, I have to admit, but it’s time for him to make direct and deliberate domestic and international policy changes of substance.

I can’t help but worry that Obama is squandering the window of opportunity he has had since February. The good news is that, for now, the far right and religious right are in shambles—but they are regrouping … fast … and with a vengeance.

My worst fear (hopefully groundless) is that their present whining over socialism, terrorist threats, higher taxes (after a tax cut, no less), teleprompters, and Dijon mustard will turn the tide entirely back to the dark ages many of us were hoping to escape.

The wicked witch could still use a good bucket of water—and the flying monkeys need a good talking to. Americans are ready for change, equality, liberation, hope, whatever you want to call it. But it (none of it) will come by following the same road we’ve been on for decades now already.

Jeff Lewis

The political bombshell last week was the surprise announcement of Pennsylvania Senator of 29 years, Arlen Specter, that effective immediately he was now a Democrat.  This switching of political party affiliation is one of the more unique aspects of American politics: all you have to do is claim affiliation, or in this instance declaim affiliation.  In some cultures divorces are achieved, similarly, by simply stating, “I divorce thee”, and the union is over.

In the afternoon of Specter’s announcement came the enthusiastic welcome of President Obama and other Senate Democrats.  Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Ed Rendell, also chimed in with his promise of political fealty to the veteran Senator, whom he had campaigned against since his early political days.  It was pointed out, however, that when Specter served as Prosecuting Attorney in the 60′s, Rendell served under him as a deputy in that office.  At day’s end, the triumvirate of Obama, Specter, and Rendell talked about working in the coming months for Arlen’s election in the Democratic primary and later in the fall against Specter’s Republican opponent.

Specter’s desertion from Republican ranks set off a firestorm of talking heads about the continuing implosion of the Republican Party and the significant changes in the political landscape that led Specter to the sobering conclusion that he couldn’t possibly defeat a well funded primary campaign from former Republican Congressman Tooney, who had the backing of rightwing political support that had already dispatched other Republican moderates in primaries in other states.  Specter’s decision was underscored by a switch in party registrations in Pennsylvania in the 2008 primary that calculated over 200,000 Republicans switched to the Democrats.  Because Specter cherishes being a current member of the U.S. Senate more than being an ex-Senator, he made the switch.

Later that evening, I saw the interview Chris Matthews had with current Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak from the Philadelphia suburb of Delaware County, presently in his second term. I said to myself,” This guy hasn’t bought in to the Specter deal, yet.”  There is always an unmistakable glint in the eye of a potential, but unannounced candidate, and it was manifest in Sestak during the interview. Congressman Sestak has everything it would take to upset Specter’s well greased introduction to Pennsylvania Democratic politics.  To begin with, he has been raising money for the past few months for this Senatorial seat anticipating that he would run against Specter in the fall.  It is estimated that he has raised over $3 million so far. He is an articulate, clean cut fellow with a stellar public service background.  For 31 years he served in the U.S. Navy, attaining the rank of a three star Admiral, who commanded the George Washington carrier battle group until his recent retirement from naval service. He also has a Masters Degree in Public Administration and a PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard.

He told Matthews that he has not made up his mind on whether he would challenge the Specter cabal and go against the President and Governor of his state.  As Matthews was throwing all of these potential obstacles out in the interview, Sestak fielded them all with the aplomb of a guy that was ready to take up the challenge.  In spite of Specter’s top line Democratic cavalry support, I sense Sestak knows that rank and file Pennsylvania Democrats have no loyalty to Specter, after all, in spite of Specter’s 29 years of Senatorial experience, he is still a “Johnny Come Lately”.  Sestak is fresh, a military star, articulate and one of their own.  If he decides to run, he will provide Specter with his first real thrill of what it’s like to be a Democratic newcomer.  To overcome such a formidable challenge, Specter will have to work overtime to ingratiate himself to Democratic primary voters, which he could achieve if he proves his value to the President’s agenda, as Obama is counting on.

If politicians are anything, they are creatures of opportunity.  It will be interesting to see if Sestak’s door receives the proverbial “Knock,” loud enough for him to hear it.

Joseph Marohl

I appreciate the improvement in tone of the Obama administration over its immediate predecessor, for example, Obama’s statement in Turkey that America, though enriched by its Christian population, is “not a Christian nation”; even the President’s espousal of his personal faith has, so far, avoided the arrogant display of ignorance and bullying bluster of Bush.

Obama has lifted bans on stem-cell research and the abortion bans linked under Bush to international aid. On Friday, Obama condemned homophobia in particular no less than intolerance in general in a speech at Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum—an inclusiveness that is poignant in light of the surge in gay bashing in the past decade and the growth of hate groups in America since his election.

All these examples speak of a bright new spirit in the leadership and values of our nation.

But President Obama has everything to gain or lose over the issue of whether to investigate those in power who promoted or condoned the use of torture of terror suspects.  So far, he appears to be failing a crucial test of integrity.

Fox TV has repeatedly criticized the President’s release of formerly classified memos showing the government’s deliberate attempt to whitewash torture techniques and to approve specific techniques, namely waterboarding, that have been used as torture since at least the Spanish Inquisition and condemned by American military courts trying foreign war criminals for the past 65 years. Fox TV pundits say that the President’s act is politics, a threat to security, an aid to the nation’s enemies.

The White House has defended its action on the basis that the information had already appeared in the media—in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere. Besides, precautions were taken to blacken out names, supposedly to protect the innocent or the legally covert. And, unlike the Valerie Plame “outing” in 2003, the White House appears to have little to gain politically from the release of this information.

The burning question is—What does the President intend to do with this information?

In his original statement to the press, Obama exempted CIA operatives who participated in torture but did so with an understanding that they were acting within certain legal bounds. In World War II and other cases, soldiers were prosecuted only for exceeding the bounds of laws existing at the time—“following orders” was a legitimate defense that many Nazis who did not just follow orders tried illegitimately to use to save their necks at Nuremberg.

Obama can reasonably justify not prosecuting low-level personnel—unlike the 2004 attempt to quiet the Abu Ghraib scandal, where investigations and prosecutions did not rise higher than low-ranking GIs.

Then last Sunday, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel announced that the Bush policymakers, namely John Yoo and Jay Bybee, whose support of torture is documented in the released memos, would likewise be exempt from further investigation and prosecution. But then later White House aides intimated that the President did “not rule out legal sanctions for the Bush lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the techniques.”

Troublingly, in public addresses, Obama has echoed Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s dribble that we should not waste time, money, and energy to “look back” to offenses in the past. (As one commenter to Noonan’s original statement put it: “Great news for hit-and-run drivers.”)

Obama told an enthusiastic crowd of CIA employees, “Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn.” But the government’s detailing of specific torture techniques and fostering an air of institutional and public acceptance of what it euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” can hardly be called a simple mistake.

On Tuesday, an internal memo by Dennis Blair, Obama’s national intelligence director, was publicized, stating, “High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.” Blair seems to support at least the underpinning assumption that the Yoo-Bybee interrogation policy was effective.  Obama, in turn, has left the matter in the hands of Attorney General Eric Holder, who is less shy of the word “torture” and has called for the release of even more memos detailing the U.S. government’s support and defense of torture.

To my mind, torture is a bigger issue than the economy. The cost of investigating and prosecuting those of both political parties who were actively or tacitly behind the senseless, brutal, and unjustified beatings of detainees fraudulently in the name of the American way of life and at the expense of justice-loving American citizens is worth more than ten General Motors and fifty Bank of Americas.

And if we taxpayers could fork out $6.2 million to investigate a blowjob in the Oval Office, we owe at least as much to our sense of ourselves as a just, moral, tolerant, and humane people.

Government funds are at least as justly spent in supporting the rule of law as in supporting military actions abroad and sustaining economic growth.

One of the reasons we elect a President every four years is to permit the opportunity to investigate and legally address the flaws—both simple mistakes and flagrant illegalities—of the previous administration. If he or she does not do so, why bother with term limits or even elections?

Our nation’s much-praised propensity for “smooth transitions” distinctly implies that we transition to something new and different from its precedent—not continuation of the same, and not erasure of recent memories of injustice and lawlessness.

If Obama does not address the wrongs of the previous administration, he betrays the fundamental reason for his (or any new President’s) election: change.

If he does not push the investigation and prosecution of injustices committed in the name of America, he does nothing to build the nation’s reputation for democracy and rule of law.

If he does not look into charges of wrongdoing in the Bush administration, even if he  and (less likely) his political party could remain blameless of those wrongs, he furthers the erosion of American values and liberties and, in this case, leaves torture as a tool for future leaders with a bent towards tyranny and a cruel streak.

Joseph Marohl

On Sean Hannity’s Wednesday radio program, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called for an “orderly revolution” to offset the “economic Marxism” of the Obama administration, in particular citing Thomas Jefferson’s much quoted call for a periodic revolution to keep one generation of Americans from being enslaved to the laws and constitutions of previous generations.

For a while now, for a couple of decades anyway, conservatives in the Republican Party have co-opted the terms “rebel” and “revolution”—words that still resonate positively with a good number of Americans. So pundits can remember Ronald Reagan as a “rebel,” and nobody raises an eyebrow.

One more sign of the debasement of the American English language, Bachmann’s call and similar calls promote turning back to the same business models and social roles we have followed into hell thus far and ignore that Obama’s “recovery” plans so far have done little that would please Marx (the real one, not the one that lives in the right wing’s imagination) except, perhaps, throw a few bones to programs that benefit the poor and needy. Those bones, apparently, are tantamount to all out “Marxism” to those whose notion of helping the poor and needy is to help the rich and grasping—so it’s no wonder that they might imagine “revolution” in terms of preserving the status quo.

Of course, these wannabe revolutionaries have had little to say about the previous administration’s eight years of assaults on human rights and the U.S. economy. And, for a while now, I have given up my dream of George W. Bush and his arrogant gang’s ever being brought to trial for any of a number of crimes against the nation, its Constitution, its laws, its reputation in the world, its security, its defense, and its wealth, certainly not from the Republicans and not from the Democrats, Bush’s willing accomplices from the beginning. That dream was mere fantasy.

Year by year, I am convinced of George Orwell’s acuity in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he claims that dying metaphors (among which “orderly revolution” must surely be listed), verbal padding, and hype effectively empty language of its content, leaving us with catch words and catch phrases incapable of holding any meaning whatsoever. So what becomes important about a word like “revolution” is not so much what it means as how attractive it sounds—and, used thus, it may be appropriated not only by those who promote change and progress but also by those who promote the obstruction of change and progress.

In summarizing these “swindles and perversions,” Orwell decries writing and speech that “consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.” Copy-and-paste language results in copy-and-paste intellects. Familiar word combinations please the ear and may even excite emotions, but they fail to draw fine distinctions or clarify exactly what the speaker means to say. As a teacher of writing, I am often impressed with how effortlessly some people can fill five typewritten pages with clichés and jingoism without ever saying anything in particular.

Such use of language hides rather than reveals. It abstracts rather than depicts.

Again, Orwell: “In our time [Orwell was writing in 1946], political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”

Of course, Orwell, a supporter of labor and non-totalitarian socialist change (while strongly opposing fascism and Soviet communism), is better known for his novel Nineteen Eighty-four, in which governmental “newspeak” proposes that “War Is Peace,” “Freedom Is Slavery,” and “Ignorance Is Strength.”

I’m repeatedly reminded that we now live in a world which newspeak has swept clean of definition and meaning. Just yesterday I watched a movie rated “R” for “pervasive language.” In previous posts, I’ve mentioned my consternation at debaters of abstinence-only education, both pro and con, declaring their concerns that children today may be learning that “sex is OK.” What the hell does that mean? When I ask students to explain the precise qualities they most admire in their friends, most of them respond with identical phrasing: “My friends are there for me.” Well, OK then, that explains a lot, thanks.

When I express concern that they are not expressing themselves clearly, students often reply, “But you know what I mean.” Not exactly—and, besides, clear communication is more than the rhythmic accumulation of platitudes and tropes—and the burden of clarification and definition belongs primarily to writers and speakers, not readers and listeners.

I propose that “orderly revolutionaries” like Bachmann and Hannity and even Obama and Clinton are, while indeed interested in change to varying degrees, principally involved in preserving “order,” equivalent in their minds to making minimal and perhaps merely nominal changes to the status quo. Now, I am not opposed to order—not at all—but neither am I convinced that it is synonymous with stagnation and obscurantism.

Those in power still want us to swallow the “trickle-down” theory of economy, under a new name. They are appalled and frankly scared of reports of widespread malcontent and anger—for them, it’s “class warfare” only when the underdogs fight back.

Savvy politicians are trying to co-opt some of the rage percolating in our culture with calls to revolution, all to pursue their own political ends—which are (guess what?) to sustain and perpetuate the powers that be.

So, to paraphrase Bachmann and others, let’s have a revolution that manages to change nothing, except perhaps the removal of the modicum of anemic “hope” poor and otherwise disempowered voters had in electing Barack Obama as President in the first place—a “hope” that the Obama administration has already watered down and sugared up to suit the sensitive palates of AIG, Chrysler, GM, Bank of America, and hedge-fund billionaires.

Joseph Marohl

In high school and college, I felt loyalty to my schools’ teams only when I personally knew one or more of the players. I’m amazed when, at about this time of year, I see friends and acquaintances around these parts, decades out of school, get apoplectic about NC State, Duke, or UNC basketball. With some people, I’d be risking bodily harm even to voice this concern to their faces.

It’s basically all in fun, I know that, a way to vent, to aerobicize one’s loyalties and group identifications. To some extent, I wish I could join in on the fun. Really, I do. But another part of me remains not just disinterested but distrustful—as if, as Noam Chomsky suggested, such sideline enthusiasm for team sports is just indoctrination in the herd mentality, group-think brainwashing, and conditioning to respond favorably to jingoism.

I might go a little further—and say such concerns can be distractions from the business of a democratic republic. As the Roman satirist Juvenal so famously put it—with heaps of irony: “Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed commands, consul-ships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things—Bread and Games!” (Satire 10, trans. G.G. Ramsay, 1918)

Or, to modernize, Doritos® and NCAA®!

Arguments about ideas, especially ideas that strike me as important and about which I’m curious—such as religion, culture, the state of the world, or politics—are very worthwhile. I thrive on reasonably heated (but mostly reasonable) discussions.

Another thing (but related): I’m not a good partisan. I’m really just not much of a joiner at all—sometimes just clicking a “send” icon to rally with Moveon.org is more than I’m prepared to commit to. I’m sorry if this offends—and I assure you I’m anything but wishy-washy—and I abhor unthinking relativism and the “paralysis of analysis.”

Still, I do not have a mindset compelled to bend every new found fact to a pre-existing ideology. I try not to be a knee-jerk liberal or a knee-jerk anything. I do not feel bound to bottom lines, constitutions, creeds, manifestos, or scriptures. I haven’t decided yet whether this deficiency makes me more or less a person of integrity.

In breaking his ties to an anarchist organization, William Morris, the Victorian artist and socialist, wrote, “Men absorbed in a movement are apt to surround themselves with a kind of artificial atmosphere which distorts the proportions of things outside, and prevents them from seeing what is really going on.”

I stopped being a “true believer” of any sort by age 29. Though I am registered to vote as a member of the Democratic Party and happily voted for Obama last November, my mind is more dialectic than partisan, so I’m more a small-letter politico—democrat, republican, anarchist, radical, socialist, libertarian—which is to say “not actually a politico at all.”

I like to challenge (rather than to confirm) my ideals, principally by taking frequent long, hard looks at reality and seeking challenging input from knowledgeable people with varying values, interests, and affiliations.

It’s good to resist whatever conditioning one’s had to take sides automatically, without checking each position by the facts, without mulling the facts over. No doubt it makes life more difficult and sometimes more lonely not knowing what colors to wear, to have to wait to see who plays the better game before deciding whom to cheer. And sometimes I take shortcuts, but always with a sense of bad faith and guilt. (And, by the way, letting distrust corrode into cynicism is the worst kind of shortcut.)

Distrust of certainty, cant, and jingoism is healthy. Can you really respect anyone whose whole philosophy, whose whole politics, whose whole values, fit on an 11×3-inch bumper sticker?

Allison Bricker

It is both amazing and troubling to me that in the relatively short span of seventy-eight years, a important piece of American history can be almost wholly wiped from the minds of the populous. Perhaps it is no coincidence that as America took its first giant lurch towards becoming a socialist democracy with the then largest government intrusion to date in 1931, that the intrinsic ideals of inherent liberty and federalism, ergo Columbia would be legislatively and culturally  removed from the public consciousness.

Columbia began solely as the poetic name ascribed to the United States of America following the Latin neologic tradition of combining a surname, i.e. Columbus and -ia commonly meaning “land of “. In time, Columbia began to be used by the Founding Generation as an allegorical embodiment of the principles of the American Revolution after a native African female slave, named Phillis Wheatley, wrote a poetic tribute to George Washington, on October 26th, 1775.¹

By the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia, Columbia had become the national personification of the newly birthed American Republic.

For George Washington’s inauguration in 1789, Phillip Phile composed and Joseph Hopkins wrote a piece originally entitled “The President’s March”. This song which was later called “Hail Columbia” was our de facto national anthem until 1931 when it was replaced by an act of Congress, with the “Star Spangled Banner”. A modified version of the song is still in use and is played to announce the arrival of the Vice-President.

For One Hundred and Forty-two years, her allegorical representation appeared everywhere, from money to pamphlets, to monuments to national expositions, to political cartoons; Columbia and what she represented was an ingrained part of the American psyche. The Founding Generation was so dedicated to securing the principles of the Revolution and federalism, that they named the land surrounding the national capitol, the Territory of Columbia in her honor and as a reflection of these ideals. Moreover, the chief architect and Founding Fathers involved with the planning and design of the new capitol also believed that the citizens who lived and worked within the Territory should be so dedicated to upholding these ideals and service to the Republic, that they prohibited residents from voting for their own self interest, and thus purposefully withheld a voice in Congress.

Columbia has gone by many names, from the Statue of the Republic, during the 1898  Columbian Exposition in Chicago, to the Statue of Freedom, which sits atop the Capitol building and faces directly towards the Washington Monument.

Yet once the nation fell into the Great Depression thanks to the money manipulators from the FEDERAL RESERVE and the incompetent government meddling into the economy started by President Hoover and expanded by President Roosevelt, Columbia and her pull yourself up by your bootstraps, live free and independent mantra was pushed aside. Superseding her place, is the scraggly unscrupulous looking figure named “Uncle Sam”; who reminds us to pay our taxes to the King and urges our men and women to enlist in order to be sent off to die in pursuit of Neo-America’s Imperial foreign policy.

It is my wish that one day, the sunshine of Liberty and the ideals embodied within Columbia, may wash back over the shores of our beloved Republic.

Source(s): ¹The New England Historical and Genealogical Register By Henry Fritz-Gilbert Waters, New England Historic Genealogical Society, page 310