The Most Successful American President: George W. Bush, Part 1

Column No. 218

About two years ago, on The Political Junkies.net I published a series of columns under this title. I thought it useful to revisit the argument, and will be doing it over my next several columns here on TPJmagazine.

Under the combined efforts of the GOP and their media Scream Machine and Pres. Obama’s determination to “look forward, not back,” the record of the Bush Presidency is receding quickly from public view. Most observers who still look at it (and future historians will return to it aplenty, we can rest assured) characterize as the worst, or at least one of the worst, Presidencies in American history. But “worst” is a value judgment. In this particular case, given my values, I agree with that assessment. But I am not talking here about an application of my values. I am talking about an application of the values of Bush himself and his principal supporters: the extractive industry, military-industrial complex, and prison/industrial complex segments of the US power elite, the thought/behavior-control legions of the Christian Right, and the Republican Scream Machine in the mass media. In applying their values and measuring against them what of his original true goals (not the advertised ones, almost of them being lies) he accomplished, George W. Bush becomes the Most Successful American President. 

OK, OK, but “How can you, Steve Jonas, give him that appellation,” you might ask?  “Awhile back didn’t you say that he was the ‘Worst American President?’ ” And I would say, “indeed I did, but one thing has nothing to do with the other.  In fact, I began my TPJ column of Sept. 14, 2006 with the following text (edited slightly here):”

“George Bush is the worst President the United States has ever had.  Notice that I did not use the word ‘arguably.’  He is simply is.  For one reason.  He is the first President ever to have as his primary goal the destruction of the Constitutional, Democratic, system under which he took power (notice that I did not say ‘elected’), and under which our country has been successfully governed in the 215-plus years since its founding.  This is for him the absolutely primary goal.  For the nation as a whole his achievement of it would obviously be an unmitigated disaster.

“There have been, to be sure, other bad Presidents.  Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan essentially stood by as the nation slid towards civil war.  Andrew Johnson established the basis for what became the South’s long-term victory in that Civil War in every element other than preserving the legal institution of slavery (see my column, “How the South Won the Civil War, Sunday, November 06, 2005.

“Some of those bad Presidencies shared major characteristics with that of the Second Bush.  Ulysses S. Grant (who was drunk in office), Warren G. Harding, and Ronald Reagan presided over Administrations rife with corruption.  James Polk and Lyndon Johnson essentially lied our country into foreign wars aimed at, in the first case, gaining large swatches of the territory of another county, and in the second preventing the establishment, through the Democratic process, of a system of government in another country that ours did not approve of.  Herbert Hoover was incompetent when it came to dealing with major economic and natural disasters, and had a strong predilection for favoring the rich.  Nixon was paranoid; Clinton was personally irresponsible, and so on and so forth.  But none of them set out to destroy US Constitutional Democracy and replace it with a Dictatorship (otherwise known as the ‘Unitary Executive’).” 

And so, you might say, “If, Steve, you can say that, how can you label him ‘Most Successful?’ ” And I would respond, “because it all depends upon how you define ‘success.’   If you define it as achieving goals and objectives that are in the best interests of the majority of the American people and indeed of the people of the world at large, and as meeting to the best of his ability the terms of the oath of office he has taken twice --- ‘I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States’ --- then clearly George Bush has not only not been the most successful American President.  He has clearly been the least successful American President.   

However, let us say that you define “success” as achieving what you, yourself, have defined as “successful,” and then set goals and objectives for you to achieve in line with that definition.  Well, this is exactly what George W. Bush has done. He has ignored the Constitution.  His political and policy agendas, both domestic and foreign ran totally against the best interests of the majority of the people who elected him.  Indeed they ran against the interests of virtually everyone in the country, rich, poor and in between, as we are seeing now. However, look at his agenda, and his definition of success, at what he has accomplished since taking office. Why I think that it is a “slam dunk” that indeed he is the most successful President this country has ever had. 

The estimable Zbigniew Brzezinski and Dennis Ross, former senior US diplomats and national security advisors/consultants, have each written books about the disasters of BushCheney foreign policy.  (Mr. Ross now has a top position in the Obama/Clinton State Dept.) They are, respectively, Second Chance: The Crisis of American Superpower and Statecraft and How to Restore America’s Standing in the World.  They present detail after detail of each foreign policy disaster Bush has created.  Each author then offers a series of recommendations about how the US as a nation can recover, following the end of the Bush Presidency, and they think that it can. 

By anyone’s definition, then the Bush Administration’s foreign policy was a total failure, no?  No.  Not by anyone’s definition.  It is a total failure (or worse) according to the definition of the term used by those of us who believe in: Constitutional Democracy, the Rule of Law, the provisions of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions (which by the provision of Article VI are part of the law or our land), in the role of government as set forth by the Preamble to the Constitution, in the Social Compact established by the New Deal, in the Separation and Balance of Powers and the Checks-and-Balances provisions that are essential elements provided by the Constitution for the effective democratic operation of the Federal government.  For us, whether Republican or Democrat (and yes, there are still Republicans who believe in these principles although their number is dwindling), truly conservative (not Conservative) or liberal or progressive, the Bush Presidency is, to repeat, a failure. 

But for the Georgites, yes for Bush and Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Norquist and Gonzales and Wolfowitz and the whole Neocon Establishment, the Bush Presidency was a resounding success at up until the time of the economy’s collapse.  Even with the economy’s collapse, for some like Grover Norquist the Bush Presidency can still be considered a success. This because the collapse is making it so hard for President Obama and the Democrats in the Congress who are true Democrats to go about fixing the oh-so-many things about our country that need to be fixed and only the Federal government can fix. 

Thus, when we measure the outcomes of the politics, policies, and programs of the Bush Administration in terms of what its original goals and agenda were, a grand success it was.  When we look at what they really set out to accomplish, boy, they are winners.  Not that Bush ever told the American people what his true agenda was, how he was defining success.  In fact, Bush did his very best to conceal his true agenda from the American people, and the Congress too.  Not that a Democratic candidate for anything facing him (much less the Shrum-driven Kerry of 2004) ever had the temerity to flush out and write large what the true goals of the Georgites were and are.  (And for purely political reasons, I am convinced, President Obama chose not to in his campaign, and now in the White House too.) It is not that the true agenda was not there to see, and still is.  It is just that most commentators and analysts who have any significant access to the public airwaves and print media really didn’t and don’t want to talk about it. Politicians with the will and wherewithal to do so are few and very far between. 

In my next column I will begin to look at the record.

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This column is largely based on one I published on The Political Junkies.net on June 27, 2007

A Torturous Debate: Controlling the Agenda

Column No. 217

Hopefully, torture, and how to deal with its purveyors in the Bush/Cheney Regime at both the policy and delivery levels, will be back on the political/policy agenda, once A.G. Holder and his team get set in their new positions.

One of the principal lessons that Karl Rove (gone for now, but don’t forget him) learned from his master teacher Lee Atwater was that he who controls the agenda wins the debate and, in grander terms, the election. Rove was positively brilliant with this tactic, from 2000 until 2006. True Bush policies and programs were never on the agenda, whether in that first election or any of the subsequent ones. Rove was able to do this on both the grand and the lesser scales. And so we came to the debate over torture and Judge Mukasey (Bush’s last undistinguished Attorney General, you may recall) at his confirmation hearing, and the agenda for that debate. I have no way of knowing whether Rove was still active on a day-to-day basis at that time in the Bush White House. My suspicion is that he was, for the tactics they used had Rove's fingerprints all over them.  

They are being repeated in the current debate over President Obama’s decision to ban torture by US personnel, regardless of location. The debate and where it is going is still, in part at least, in the control of those who will control the agenda. Torture and intelligence “experts” like MSNBC’s “Morning Joe’s” Joe Scarborough tell us that despite what anyone says torture is good for gaining “actionable” intelligence. In fact, he tells us, Khalid Sheik Mohammed gave up such nuggets after being waterboarded. So therefore, “to protect the American people” it should still be permitted. To Morning Joe it matters not that so many intelligence experts have dismissed what he has to say both about torture in general and the supposedly “actionable intelligence” (not) obtained from the Sheikh by waterboarding in particular. Joe says it and he controls at least one portion of morning cable’s agenda. Opposing views, supported by facts, are not allowed, although Mika Brzezinski, with her sad face on, does dispute him about whether it really does any good or not.

The Scarborough/Rove control-of-the-agenda approach still aims to confine the whole discussion to just what is the definition one particular torture technique known as “waterboarding."  Is it or isn't it torture is the total matter for debate.  It happens that it has been used by torturers, most of whom were only too happy to have potential victims know what they might face, since the time of that "Instrument of God's Will" known as the Spanish Inquisition. (Although the Inquisition was originally designed to "inquire" as to whether a particular resident of Spain after the official Expulsion of the Jews by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 was a Jew or not, it came to be more broadly used against a wide variety of persons perceived by its Catholic masters as "enemies of the church.") The technique has been used by a variety of repressive and oppressive regimes, not the least of which was the German Nazis, as a frank method of torture of chosen victims. There is no record of either the Inquisition or the Nazis ever claiming waterboarding or any of their other techniques of choice were not torture. As I said, they wanted to make sure everyone knew exactly what went on in their chambers of horror.

But not so the Georgites and their current successors in the debate. For they have a little problem, which unfortunately doesn’t make it into debates in which the agenda is sharply controlled a la Scarborough.  It has to do with International Law, the U.S. Constitution, the Rule of Law, and the Georgites’ constant lying about what they were and were not doing, which still persists. Because of this little problem, they have needed and still need to control the agenda of the debate. And boy have they done this well. The agenda, as noted, was been all about whether or not waterboarding is torture, extended now to whether such things as stripping, enforced prolonged squatting, noise exposure, cold exposure, public humiliation, and etc. are torture. It is about whether what the Bush Regime did to certain of its captives/victims amounted to torture. It is about, even if it did, whether or not using it constituted a “necessity,” and still might. It is not so much about whether they tried to cover that up, whether they violated the Constitution and the law, both domestic and international. And so, now that the Obama Administration has disavowed torture, generally using the Geneva Convention definition of the techniques, its defenders are still trying to keep the discussion on definitions (arguing with those of the Geneva Conventions) and on whether torture ought to be used anyway.

They are also still using a second agenda item, whether or not torture (which of course it wasn’t any way) if not generally justified, might just be justified in the "ticking bomb" scenario. (That that scenario has never been shown to occur doesn’t seem to concern those who would use it in such a circumstance.  However, the fact that if it were to, anyone caught with the proper knowledge wouldn't give it up anyway because a) they would want the bomb to go off and b) they would know they were going to die in any case. These considerations are treated by all of the non-experts discussing the matter as irrelevant. After all, they know all they need to know about the use of torture and the ticking bomb from the plots of the TV series "24," (at least up to the current series, which has a somewhat different take on the matter). Thus the debate, as controlled by the Georgites and their present media successors/defenders, first comes down to: "it is torture; no it isn't; yes, it is; no it isn't; yes it is," and so on and so forth. Then it goes on to "it is justified in certain circumstances, well what circumstances, yes it is, no it isn't," and so on and so forth. These are the matters that were essentially at the center of New York Sen. Chuck Schumer's defense of his vote for Judge Mukasey (The New York Times, Nov, 6, 2007). And yes, Schumer, the darling of the Wall St. Whizzes, did define Mukasey as “OK” way back when.

But this is not what the agenda for this debate should be. The United States is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions, by treaty. Under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, they have become part of the Supreme Law of the Land. Waterboarding was specifically defined as torture at the Nuremberg Trials and previously by the US military as far back as 1902 when it was putting down the post-“liberation” revolt in the Philippines. Without doing a poll, we know it is regarded as torture by virtually all, if not every one, of the signatories of the Geneva Conventions. We know the Georgites knew this. They also knew that the fact presented difficulties for them, as they obviously contemplated incorporating torture into their protocols for treating captives in the so-called "War on Terrorism." How do we know that? Because, as White House Counsel, none other than Alberto Gonzales described the Conventions as "quaint," i.e., discardable.

There is just one little problem here. Nations that abide by the rule of law cannot and indeed don't discard treaty obligations just before they think one provision or another of them is "quaint." They either abrogate the treaty (which in this case would put U.S. citizen captives of foreign regimes at great risk, to say nothing of even further diminishing the international stature of the United States) or they re-negotiate it.  Obviously the Georgites didn’t want to do either one. And neither are their current defenders proposing to. However, a) they apparently didn't want to take the P. R. hit around the world, and b) much more to the point for them, they wanted to keep exactly what they were planning to do secret.

The primary agenda item for the current debate should not be whether or not the Georgites and certain of their supporters think waterboarding (and etc.) is not torture, or even if it is, that it might be justified in certain circumstances (even if these circumstances have never been known to occur except on the aforementioned "24"). The primary agenda item should be: The Obama Administration has reversed the BushCheney Regime’s policy of willfully violating international law and in this case specifically an element of the Constitution, in this case defined as the supreme law of the land. This was an impeachable offense and may become a prosecutable one.

Now, finally, Sen. Arlen Spector, he of “full disclosure” in the case of Attorney General-designate Eric Holder, knows all this. (One wonders where he was on full disclosure for, say, Bush’s Supreme Court nominees.) Spector knows that the torture thing carries with it potential legal problems for the Georgites. Obama may show no inclination to go after them now, but the case may build up to such a point over time that he will just “have no choice” but to call in a special prosecutor. Spector is terrified of a number of things other than simply dealing with the torture issue in a Constitutional manner the new Justice Dept. will do. Not the least of them is to convert the Civil Rights Division back to its original function of protecting and extending civil and voting rights for discriminated-against sectors of the population. The movement for converting it to a mechanism for suppressing the African-American vote in particular, under the claim of “fighting voter fraud,” started with Ashcroft and intensified under Gonzales and Mukasey. That trend will be totally reversed. 

At the same time, Spector knows that he would not be able to prevent Mr. Holder’s nomination. Some observers think that he did what he did because of some statute of limitations issue on some kind of possible prosecution of former Atty. General Gonzales and aides around the original torture order and how it was processed. Some think it has to do with trying to prevent any prosecutions of Bush Regime officials, up to and including the man himself, on the use-of-torture issue itself. In my view it is not quite that devious (or even criminal, as in obstruction of justice, literally). What he was really trying to do (and all he really could do in this instance) is just the same old political thing: establish himself as a “true Republican” because if he is planning to run again in 2010 he would likely face a primary challenge from the Right. 

And so, there we have all those attempts at agenda control, in this case on the torture issue. Atwater, Rove, Bush, Cheney, etc. It has been used just brilliantly by them, and people like Scarborough are still trying hard to keep the discussion off the real questions of the Rule of Law and what Constitutional government means and doesn’t. While until recently Democrats just never seemed able to learn the lesson of agenda control, with the new President and his team, that state of affairs may well be history. Oh my. What a nice turnaround that would be.

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This column is based in part on a Commentary of mine that originally appeared on BuzzFlash on Nov. 8, 2007, http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/081

Abortion Rights, Gay Equality, Guns, the Constitution and Senator Gillibrand

Column No. 216

On January 31, 2009 a New York Times editorial (“Listening to Ms. Gillibrand) tore up the newly appointed Senator from New York. “She has 100% support from the NRA,” they roared. And as for her position on illegal immigration, well, oh my!

Well, my usual knee-jerk reaction to such a writing would be “well, we’ll get her in 2010.” But even before I saw that editorial I had received two other communications. One, from the Planned Parenthood Federation cheered New York Governor Patterson’s appointment (clumsily handled though it was). The PPFA had already given her a 100% as a Congressperson. And then I heard from the Lesbian and Gay (political) Alliance: she is in favor gay marriage! You read that right. Not just “domestic partnership” (otherwise known as second class citizenship status) for gay couples. But full marriage rights? The Times, stretching the definition of what a “liberal Democrat” is, claimed that “gay marriage is a non-starter even among liberal Democrats like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer,” but tossed off Sen. Gillibrand’s endorsement of it by saying words to the effect of she’s only for it because Gov. Patterson is. 

Well in my view that means that at least two of New York State’s top officials recognize what Constitutional principle we are talking about here. And that’s what I am going to be talking about in this column. For me, the Senator’s position on abortion rights and gay equal rights outweigh (yes, you read that one right) her position on gun “rights” (at least her position prior to becoming a Senator --- it seems to be changing with some rapidity) and even her position on illegal immigration, for in my view there is not major politician in the United States who has got it right. Let’s look at the Constitutional approach to the first three issues, where in my view Senator Gillibrand has got it exactly right.

First, on abortion rights. I don’t know on what the Senator bases her pro-abortion rights position, but I do think that in order to win this battle over the long run, we have to move to the broader Constitutional approach. Since the Senator presumably takes the Constitutional position on gay marriage (with which I will deal below) I presume that if she is not already there she will be ready to move to the Constitutional position on abortion rights as well. Since Roe v. Wade the supporters of abortion rights have based their support for them on the “woman’s right to choose” position. I fully agree with that. Roe v. Wade is in fact based in part on the privacy rights that are implicit in the First Amendment. The gradual development over the years of the Supreme Curt’s determination that there is a Constitutional right to privacy, and that the determination of the outcome of pregnancy up to the time of fetal viability falls under that privacy right, could also have been based on the Ninth Amendment. It says: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be con­strued to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” 

However, since the late 1970s I have been convinced that a pro-abortion rights position based entirely on the right to privacy as it is stated in Roe v. Wade, could be subject to continual attack and would be one that put the abortion rights movement continually on the defensive, politically. My earlier policy recommendation (which has resonance in certain pro-abortion rights quarters) was based on the public health approach to the issue of abortion itself. That approach focuses on how to reduce its incidence through the application of various public health measures, an approach that is shunned by the so-called “anti-abortion” movement. Since the advent of a Christian Rightist President, I moved on to a different Constitutional position, one which I think could carry great weight in the political arena and one which Sen. Gillibrand might find herself attracted to.

Criminalization of abortion is written into the Republican Party Platform. It calls for a Constitutional Amendment that would do just that for the nation as a whole, and/or the overturning of Roe v. Wade so that states could do it on an individual basis. Not widely recognized is that the criminalization of abortion would not only affect women having abortions and any persons providing them (medical or otherwise in the case of re-criminalization). It would affect all of us, men, women, married, un-married, of child-bearing age or not. For the criminalization of abortion goes well beyond abortion to the criminalization my religious belief that life does not begin at the moment of conception but at the time of viability. For me, abortion prior to the time of viability is not murder. Because during that time the fetus cannot survive outside of the woman’s body, abortion is a choice of what to do with an aspect of female biology that is totally within the woman’s right to choose. It lies in the same category as the choice of what kind of cancer therapy to undergo or even whether she should have an inflamed appendix removed. 

We are not talking about the right to privacy here. We are talking about freedom of belief as to when life begins. Any criminalization of any belief as to when life begins, other than at the time of viability when all agree that there is “life,” is the imposition of a particular religious belief that life begins at the time of conception on those whose religious belief is otherwise. And that is a clear violation of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or pro­hibiting the free exercise thereof;” The criminalization of abortion would not only prohibit women from having abortions prior to the time of viability. It would also prohibit me, a man, from advocating abortion rights, that is from freely exercising my religious belief as to when life begins. (And by the way, yes, as a Secular Humanistic Jew, I too have religious beliefs. The latter are not limited to Goddists. But that is a discussion for another time.) This position, which I would put in the political arena in addition to the “woman’s right to choose based on the right to privacy” argument, places the political battle on a whole different plane. 

At the same time, under the Constitution I cannot stop any person from not having an abortion if doing so runs contrary to their religious beliefs. Nor can I require any person to work in an institution that provides abortions if doing so would violate their religious beliefs. However, if one chooses to work in such an institution, they do not have the right to attempt to deny patients their abortion rights by say, refusing to work in such situations or, within the walls of such institutions, attempting to dissuade women from having abortions. 

Now as to the gay marriage debate. Regular readers of my column in this space and on BuzzFlash as well know that my position in favor is based entirely on the Constitutional argument flowing out the language of the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1: “nor [shall any state] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” To my mind this is a much stronger argument for use in the political arena than the traditional ones of “fairness” and “justice.” I happen to believe in the latter two, but they are representing a belief. The 14th presents in the Constitution, in clear language, what the legal principle in our country is, just as in clear language does the First pertain to my belief as to when life begins. 

Marriage is a civil as well as a religious institution in our country. Each of the 50 states has an extensive series of civil laws pertaining to both it and its legal dissolution. To deny anyone access to the obligations and protections that those laws provide clearly violates the Fourteenth. The Fourteenth clearly requires no religious institution to perform marriages between persons of the same sex. That would clearly violate the provisions of the First.   At the same time, the Fourteenth clearly prevents the importation of any religious test on the application of the civil marriage laws in each state. New York’s Governor is a very smart man and a good lawyer. Senator Gillibrand is a very smart woman and a good lawyer. I would not be surprised if their position on gay marriage rests ultimately on this Constitutional principle.

Now as to “gun rights,” which I will treat very briefly here. The Second Amendment does not provide any clear guidance to this question. Its ambiguity has lead to much controversy over its meaning. The Second says: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” To me and many others, the Second clearly applies to militias which, even in the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights, were known as locally organized units of armed men. However, if one is going to interpret the clause “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” as applying to individuals as well as to militias, then one must apply the words “well regulated” to individuals as well as to militias. And then the road to, say, licensing and registration, is a straight one. 

Now that is not what the NRA and the gun dealers want. The NRA, the membership of which amounts to about 6% of the total number of private gun-owners in the United States, is heavily supported by the small-arms industry. They want to sell as many guns as they can. The fact that there are 35,000-plus gun deaths in the United States each year, the vast majority of them from hand guns, is not of their concern, it would seem. Sen. Gillibrand, to my knowledge, has drawn her high rating from the NRA because of her position on hunting weapons, not hand guns. It seems to me that now, representing the whole of the State of New York, as she modifies her position on a variety of issues, should she place her positions on abortion rights and gay rights firmly on the foundation of the Constitution, she could do that with the gun rights issue as well.

Remarks at the Obama Inauguration

Column No. 215

The most important speech at the inauguration of President Barack Obama were of course those spoken by him in his Inaugural Address. On January 19, 2009 I wrote a Commentary for BuzzFlash entitled “My Wish List for the Inaugural Address.”

It was published on inauguration day. At the beginning of that Commentary I said: “A couple of weeks ago, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out a questionnaire to its contributors (of which, I must admit, I am one). It asked for one's top pick for the must-deal-with problems. The list consisted of the usual suspects, beginning with what can be called ‘The Five “E's” ‘(with liberties taken): Economic stimulus, Education, Environment, Ealth Care, and Eraq (well some people do pronounce it that way), as well as Tax Reform (?!) and, somewhere on the list, "national defense/security." My answer, had I answered, would have been "None of the above." One will likely hear some version or another of the list above in Pres. Obama's address. But I am really hoping, oh boy am I hoping, that some significant percentage of the time in what will be a relatively short speech (20 minutes or so, so we have been told) will be devoted to the Big "C:" the Constitution, and the restoration of Constitutional Democracy (C.D.) in the United States.

Well, my wish was rewarded. Below I will highlight those portions of Pres. Obama’s Inaugural that constituted my reward. But before doing that I would like to turn to the words of another speaker about whom I had also written commentary before the event, commentary that appeared both on the pages of BuzzFlash and right here on TPJmagazine. Like many other commentators on the Left, I took Warren apart. I also criticized the choice that the Team Obama had made. For it fell into the trap set by the Right that in contemporary American politics homophobia is politically OK, just as long as the putative subject is “gay marriage.” 

Then along came Rev. Warren, to give the invocation. Much to my surprise, in it I found much to admire and nothing to complain about. Indeed many observers on the left did complain about the frequent references to “God” and to “Jesus.” But the man is a Christian minister and he believes in both God and Christ, as divine, sentient, powerful beings, existing in the supernatural. I am a Secular Humanist and I don’t believe in what he believes in. But I respect him and his beliefs and I also believe in the First Amendment. Thus he is free to express them, in our country. What I do not agree with is when Christians, or the representatives of any other religion, attempt to force their particular beliefs upon me, in an attempt to control and limit my beliefs, through the force of law. But that is another matter. 

So surprising to me were the words in his invocation which completely contradicted the homophobic positions he has taken on many other occasions, from the pulpit and elsewhere. I am just wondering if, because of the furor that followed his selection the Rev. did some rethinking, perhaps even communicating in the manner in which he does with his concept of “God.” In so doing did he learn, perhaps, that his God truly loves all of his or her creations, including homosexuals? To paraphrase Lincoln, in fact God must love the gays and lesbians because he made so many of them. And so, let’s listen to the Rev. Warren:

“Now today we rejoice not only in America's peaceful transfer of power for the 44th time. We celebrate a hinge-point of history with the inauguration of our first African-American president of the United States. We are so grateful to live in this land, a land of unequaled possibility, where the son of an African immigrant can rise to the highest level of our leadership. . . . Give to our new president, Barack Obama, the wisdom to lead us with humility, the courage to lead us with integrity, the compassion to lead us with generosity. . . . [r]emember that we are Americans, united not by race or religion or blood, but to our commitment to freedom and justice for all.

“When we focus on ourselves, when we fight each other, when we forget you, forgive us. When we presume that our greatness and our prosperity is ours alone, forgive us. When we fail to treat our fellow human beings and all the Earth with the respect that they deserve, forgive us.

“And as we face these difficult days ahead, may we have a new birth of clarity in our aims, responsibility in our actions, humility in our approaches, and civility in our attitudes, even when we differ. Help us to share, to serve and to seek the common good of all. May all people of good will today join together to work for a more just, a more healthy [sic], and a more prosperous nation and a peaceful planet.”

I say that these are memorable words, with which all supporters of President Obama (and even some, but unfortunately not all, of his opponents) can agree. I say with all due respect to the Rev. Warren: “Is it possible that, having gone through the fire of the criticism aimed at you for your evil words said to our gay and lesbian compatriots, you have again been born again and moved to a higher level of understanding or your fellow man?” We shall see what the future holds for the Rev. Warren.

Turning now to the words President Obama. In my “wish list” BuzzFlash Commentary I said: “I am really hoping, oh boy am I hoping, that some significant percentage of the time in what will be a relatively short speech (20 minutes or so, so we have been told) will be devoted to the Big "C:" the Constitution, and the restoration of Constitutional Democracy in the United States.” Well, the word “Constitution” did not appear in the Address. But it was very much of a presence. 

Paraphrasing the great work by Aaron Copeland, “A Lincoln Portrait,” that opened the Inaugural Concert on January 18, President Obama said, this is what he said: “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.”

In this light, listen to the most ignored section of the Constitution, the Preamble: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more per­fect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the com­mon defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Consti­tution for the United States of America.” No prescription for big or small government here, but for one that works, for the benefit of all the people, in the context of the democratic government, operating under the Rule of Law, that the body of the Constitution prescribes..

President Obama said, this is what he said: “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. . . . [O]ur security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint. We are the keepers of this legacy.” There we can find in these words echoes of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

Echoing the First Amendment once more, President Obama said: “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers.” To my knowledge, no President has ever referred, as he did with these last words, to my sector of the population. It now, it has been estimated, stands at 30,000,000 strong. Echoing the Fifteenth Amendment, the original Civil Rights Act that took 100 years to be put into force, President Obama said: “This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed — why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent Mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”

And finally President Obama said, referring to the darkest days of the American Revolution, spent by General Washington and his Winter Soldiers at Valley Forge, “So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: ‘Let it be told to the future world ... that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet (it).’ "

The President probably does not know, for few Americans do, that the great Prussian officer Baron Friedrich von Stueben, who trained the Continental Army into fighting shape throughout that bitter winter, at the age of 47 a to be life-long bachelor, brought with him only his French secretary, a handsome young man of 19.

And that, my friends, brings us back to the words of those in this country who would deny people their civil rights, simply because they have a different sexual identity than do the majority. And so, by implication, President Obama finished his address by alluding to perhaps the most important clause of the Fourteenth Amendment: “[No] State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

“Class Struggle”

Column No. 214

The classic Marxist concept of class struggle elucidates the millennia-long battle between the owners and controllers of the means of production, whether that be agricultural, trading, manufacturing, or finance, and everyone else.

Under the capitalism of Marx’ time, the bulk of “everyone else” consisted of the manufacturing working class and related occupations, such as the miners and the railroad workers. In our era things have gotten rather more complex. 

First of all, in the developed capitalist countries fewer and fewer people are engaged directly in manufacturing, more and more in “white collar” positions directly and indirectly supporting the manufacturing sector, and in small business. Second of all, while there is a definable owning/controlling class, it is much less publicly apparent than it used to be and many non-owner/controllers have the appearance of “ownership’ and an interest in it through the securities markets. Third of all, in the United States to the greatest extent, but in most of the other developed countries to some extent as well, the owners/controllers have created a very effective propaganda machine designed to suppress traditional working class consciousness. For example, when President-elect Obama refers to the “middle class” what he is really talking about is what used to be called the “working class,” but the capitalist media have made sure that that term is passé. 

Fourth of all, in the United States since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and its successor state totally mis-named “right-to-work” laws and in the United Kingdom more recently since Margaret Thatcher (but less in most of the other capitalist countries) the trade union movement under which so many workers developed class consciousness has been very actively and very successfully repressed. Finally, in the United States the owner/controllers and their media have run a very successful propaganda campaign to get the term “class warfare” to be used to refer to the (relatively weak) efforts by the Democratic Party to mitigate some of the worst effects of the owning/controlling class’ ownership and control, like the ever-rising and very rapidly-rising separation in both income and wealth between the top of the o/c heap and everyone else. The result of all this is that in the United States, and to a lesser extent in the other developed countries, there is very little of the old-fashioned class consciousness on the part of the workers, whether blue or white collar. This does not mean that there is not class struggle going on. It does mean that most of the non-owners/controllers of the means of production are not aware that they are in one.

The human species is the only one that cannot survive without converting elements that it finds in its environment into other things. It began with simple food conversion, and producing clothing and shelter. It has obviously gotten a lot more complex over time. Thus it is that control over the means of production, from growing food in amounts to feed more than oneself and one’s family to converting iron ore and coke into steel and the products that can be made from it, is central to controlling human life. Central also is the ownership and control of the natural resources that literally fuel our modern economies. Karl Marx provided us with the understanding of the basic class divisions, in relation to the means of production.

It was V.I. Lenin who provided the understanding of the true relationship between the owning/controlling class and the government in any modern nation. Under capitalism the owners/controllers attempt, usually with great success, to create the illusion that the State is somehow an independent body, up for grabs. In fact, and one can observe this happening over and over again, the State serves the interests of the owning/controlling class, which in fact own it too. (In the U.S., with for the most part private financing of elections, they literally buy it.) Thus the greatest achievement of the last great reformer US President, Franklin Roosevelt, was to save US capitalism operating with a Constitutional government (Marxists call the form “bourgeois democracy”) from becoming either a fascist state or becoming, horror of horrors, possibly subject to at least an attempt at socialist revolution. 

Barack Obama is in exactly the same position as FDR was, although given the depredations on our nation of the particular sector of the US owning/controlling class represented by what I call the “Georgites” over the past eight years, his task is rather harder than that of FDR. But he no more represents the interests of the true non-owning/controlling class (whatever label one might give them) than did FDR. But he is representative of one actor in the current class struggle in the United States. It’s just that that active, conscious-as-between-its-antagonists, class struggle is not of the traditional kind. It is occurring within the owning/controlling class, not between it and everyone else. 

There are certainly overlaps in both interests and memberships, but what one can now discern with a fair degree of confidence is that the US owning/controlling class has split into two fairly well-defined groups. They happen to have seriously competing interests in both the economy and government policy, in both the domestic realm and the foreign one. 

In one corner are the extractive industry (petroleum, natural gas, coal, and minerals), the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, and certain elements of the “health care” industry (particularly in the pharmaceutical and insurance ends of it). In the other corner is what is left of the US manufacturing sector, the service and communication industries, the public utilities, the growing “green energy” sector, the entertainment industry, the news media complex, and major elements of the financial sector (although some of them are on the other side). It is clear that Pres.-elect Obama represents this latter class-sector. For decades they had done very well under “bourgeois democracy.” The Georgites have launched a major assault on it in many sectors over the past eight years, serving the interests of their controllers, with, however, the results that readers of these pages know all too well. The other grouping, shall we for the sake of moving the argument along call them the “Constitutionalist owner/controllers,” wanted it back. And to spearhead that drive, they have put Sen. Obama in the Presidency.

Obama and his people are very smart and appear to be very well organized. They have a quite monumental task in front of them, however, for capitalism has never faced a world-wide crisis of the sort it is now facing. But the Georgites, for all their apparent failures, are not going away. In fact, while most observers rank George Bush as the worst President the US has ever had, in terms of his record of achievement of his true goals, mostly never openly stated, he is in my view the most successful President the US has ever had. I have written on that topic on these pages and plan to return to it in a couple of months. He has definitely advanced the interests of the class sector he represents. In fact, it is no coincidence that Bush made so many extractive-industry friendly rulings since the election. He is their boy.

Obama and the class sector he represents represent a major threat to them. With green energy increasing oil and coal consumption will gradually decline, and along with a decline in both their influence and their profits. With a decline in the shoot-first, maybe negotiate afterwards foreign policy, the production of military hardware, especially the high-tech, high profit type, declines, along with their profits. And kind of national health insurance system that can control costs to even some extent ins going to reduce the profits of both the pharmaceutical and the “health” insurance industries. And so on and so forth. 

The Georgites may be somewhat conflicted because of the immediate impact of the Recession/Depression on their profits. But in the long run, they want to get back into power. Even though the Team Obama has a monster challenge and may well not succeed, they just might. And the Georgites cannot take that chance. The Georgites own and control the Republican Party. While there will be some sharp battles within it over tactics, their class interest remains the same. So, trying oh-so-cleverly to hide their true intent behind various kinds of rhetoric, they will do everything they can to make sure that Team Obama does not succeed.

Of course, the failure of Obama to rescue traditional American capitalism would mean a rapid rush to squalor for many Americans. And that might mean the outbreak of anything from union organizing, to civil disobedience, to outright violence of the type that caused the Bush Regime to recently ready Army units for domestic duty and Treasury Sec. Paulson to openly refer to the possibility that it might be necessary to use them. Fascism, anyone? Well, Cheney, who directly represented the extractive industries in government, has done his best to lay the governmental groundwork for it. Oh yes, there is a class struggle going on. While capitalism is not at stake in the U.S., just what the form of government that the owners/controllers will use to maintain their power very much is. That’s the class struggle that is going on in front of our very eyes.

“President-elect Barack Obama, the Rev. Rick Warren, and the Mythical 'Middle Ground' ”

Column No. 213

Right-wing commentators such as the sometimes hard-to-categorize Pat Buchanan, the comedian Bill Kristol, the still-trying-to-shake-her "Reagan Hagiographer" label Peggy Noonan, and so-called "even-handed" cable news personalities such as "Morning Joe and Mika" of MSNBC were all het-up about why the "left" (these folks wouldn't know a real LEFT if they saw one) is so het up about Pres.-elect Obama's choice of Rick Warren to deliver the Inauguration Invocation. "It's a free country," they say. "There's a wide range of views on gay marriage" (which happens to be Rick Warren's least odious on-the-gay-question position) they say. "Obama is showing himself to be tolerant," they say. Obama is looking for "common ground," they say.

"You'se guys" (which is what they would say to us lefties if they spoke Noo Yawk) are just a bunch of whiners. Or worse, you are just as bad as the Christian Fundamentalists, except I cannot remember when any of the above listed "authorities" ever criticized the latter group for anything. For example, when Gov. Huckabee, the funny man, was riding high for a bit during the Republican primaries last winter, he was on the cable news shows a lot. And thus I saw him a lot. I don’t remember one question ever being asked him about the fact that he is not just a run-of-the-mill Right-Wing Christian Fundamentalist (which fact itself never came up in questions), but that he had major Dominionist backing. (Dominionists believe that Constitutional government in the United States should be replaced by the “Dominion of God,” based upon their particular so-called “literal” reading of a particular translation [usually the King James Version] of the Bible, in other words institution of a theocracy). No questions there. But that's another story.

These folks then proceed, not surprisingly, to talk about Warren only in the context of his opposition to gay marriage. They trot out all of the traditional arguments in defense of the position (whether it is theirs or not is often left unclear) that "traditional marriage" is "between a man and a woman" and thus should not be/cannot be changed. There are two problems here, folks. First, if that were the only way that Warren demonstrated his antipathy towards gays and equal civil rights for them, one could have a rational argument with him and the people he represents, using one or more of the usual arguments in favor of the gay-marriage-is-just-fine position.

One could point out that the "nature of marriage" has changed oodles over the centuries. For example: under slavery in this country, slaves couldn't marry each other; in the 19th century, women were their husbands' property; in many states until various times in the 20th century, women had no property rights; until relatively recently in a number of states, so-called "mixed race" marriages were illegal (that one being particularly puzzling: since very few African-Americans are of "pure" African blood and therefore at least one partner of a proposed "mixed" marriage was already "mixed" courtesy of a slave-master or a successor, exactly where and how was the line drawn); in the present time, although polygamy is technically illegal, it is openly practiced in various rural areas of certain Western states, with penalties being exacted only very occasionally, usually only when there is a very big difference between the age of the "husband" and one or more of his "wives."

Then one could roll out the big gun (unfortunately very rarely used by gay marriage proponents who for some reason[s] seem to be afraid to go there). In my view, the most important argument in favor of legalizing gay marriage (and I have written extensively on this one elsewhere, is the Constitutional one. Marriage in this country is a bimodal institution, civil and religious. Each one of the 50 states has an extensive body of civil law governing marriage. To prevent persons of the same sex from taking advantage of the legal protections of the institution (as well as assuming its legal obligations) violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, to wit: “nor shall any State . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

However, there is a second, and much more important problem with Warren. It is that, as is well known, opposition to the institution of gay marriage is for him only a cover. This guy is a true homophobe. In one context or another, for him homosexuality is akin to incest (a matter of opinion and definition); homosexuals are pedophiles (and surely, let's not let facts get in the way: the last time I looked, 95% of cases of pedophilia that come to light are committed by straight men, most often on their own children); gay marriage is akin to polygamy (with that stretch, was this guy a first-baseman, even Warren happily allied himself with the Mormon-funded pro-Prop 8 campaign while the vast majority of practicing polygamists in the U.S. are Mormons [heaven help the Muslim who tries it]); homosexuality by nature is in the nature of child abuse; and he may well hold to the James Dobson view that homosexuality is a choice. This latter one is as if (forgetting about all of the evidence supporting the in-built explanation) anyone would actually want to choose to be a homosexual in this most homophobic of societies in the non-Muslim world, a society in which one of the two major political parties runs in major part on the prejudice, just as the pre-Civil Rights Southern Democrats ran on racism and the post-Civil Rights Republicans did too (until they discovered homophobia and were able to turn down the former, some).

So. Despite all of this, the supporters of Pres.-elect Obama's position, from within his Campaign-soon-to-be-White-House staff, and from within the Commentatariat, say that what he is doing is showing that he is "open to other points of view." That "he wants to bring us as a people together, not divide us." That "we need to find the middle ground." Well, I see two problems with that one. First, what is happening here is that homophobia is getting a pass; it is being treated as just another "point of view," another "perspective." After all, “there are indeed many voices in the United States. They should all be heard.” Oh really? There are many anti-Semitic preachers in our Nation. They too have "another point of view." Showing his "openness" to "other ideas," why should Obama not invite one of them to give a prayer at the Inauguration? There are many racist preachers in our Nation. (Although we don't hear much about either group, The Southern Poverty Law Center could tell you a bunch about both.) How about inviting one of them?

"Well that's different," many folks would say. And aye, folks, there's the rub. Homophobia has now replaced anti-Semitism and anti-black racism as the "OK" prejudice in this country. And in the name of "openness to other ideas," it is being promoted by all sorts of folks, such as the aforementioned "authorities." What we as a nation have to realize and realize very quickly is that there is no DLC-type "middle ground" on questions such as the “on-first-appearance-not-in-any-way-homophobic” gay marriage one. “Civil unions” don’t solve the problem. They still violate the 14^th Amendment. Denying the Marriage Right to gay couples still makes gays and lesbians into second-class citizens, deprived of a basic CIVIL right. Denying that the anti-gay marriage movement is homophobia-in-full is to deny reality.

We are moving quickly in the direction of having an officially approved prejudice, one approved in search of that mythical "middle ground," by oh-so-ironically the first African-American U.S. President. HOWEVER. You either are a homophobe or you ain't. Just like in Harlan County, Kentucky, in the famous Depression-era United Mine Workers song: "They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there. You either are a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair." There is no "middle ground."  In Nazi Germany, before they came for the Jews, they came for the Gays. In "The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022" published by its pseudononymous author Jonathan Westminster in 1996, first the "Christian Republicans" came for the gays. It was only when they were all killed or expelled form the country that they returned to the blacks. As for the Jews, the antifascists among them were classified as "Renegade Jews.” The fascist government went after them too, as Jews. Beware America, beware. It is a very slippery slope that we are now collectively sliding down.

When the First Civil War began, Abraham Lincoln thought that it was about the Constitution (no provision for secession there, and no provision for necessary expansion of slavery into the Territories). By the time he wrote his Second Inaugural he had learned that the Civil War had been about slavery all the time: “One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.” Obama may think that there is some “middle ground” on gay marriage, or on abortion rights, or separation of church and state, or on the Rule of Law and Constitutional government. Just as there was no middles ground on slavery, there is none on the matters just above either.  “You either are a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair.”  If he learns the latter lesson, his election will mark a true political turning point in the history of our country. If he does not, his election will just have given us a four-year pause on the steady, slow march to fascism which began with the election of Ronald Reagan.

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This column is based in part on one of mine by the same name published on BuzzFlash on Dec. 30, 2008.