James Wagner

We really really really love Maine!

As U.S. House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt stepped away from the crowd Sunday in Kennedy Park, the crowd followed.
It was not the crowd that showed up to support Democrat Mike Michaud in his run for the House, it was the crowd unhappy with members of Congress, especially Gephardt.
“Gephardt, Gephardt has no spine! He just follows Bush’s line,” the crowd loudly repeated, holding signs and banging drums, standing a few feet away from the high-ranking Democrat. The age of protesters ranged from college students to middle-aged parents to white-haired seniors.
The protesters were angry that Gephardt and other congressional leaders signed off on a resolution giving Bush the authority to use military action against Iraq. That resolution is expected to be taken up in Congress this week.

Just maybe, this could be the start of something great.

“war as only a tool of statecraft” [my characterization of the accelerating Republican talk of war] Now that sounds like a fine old European tradition, although one modern Europe was happy to abandon a couple of generations ago. For our own mad engineers in the twenty-first century White House it is a brand-new tool, and they are using it against their benighted subjects at home. War as a ruse.
We are being/have been used.
Not to take back anything from my previous posting calling for a last attempt to keep Bush from being invested with legitimacy as American Lord of War, but I believe that the real damage has already been done.
Primary evidence: We are all now talking only of “guns,” not of “butter.”
Those of you who have been following my remarks lately have seen me arguing that it’s not necessarily actual war that the White House wants, but the solid Republican Congress that talk of war will almost certainly ensure. The invention of this war has virtually overnight changed the subject of the 2002 campaign from issues like the economy, the stock market, executive scandals, health care, the environment, schools, racism, or anything else which really threatens the country, to the phony issue of the imagined imminent threat from a small tin dictator on the other side of the world.
Bush’s handlers have already succeeded in hijacking the election. The next Congress will be Cheney’s rubber stamp (well, yes, something like this one, only even more so). The war? Iraq? Oh, that. Well, it may not be necessary other than as a bugbear.
Paraphrasing part of the argument of David Morris on AlterNet, this week Congress is likely to give the White House the blank check it wants, which means that at any time in the future, should we ever again have to be distracted from debating real issues, the war drums will be heard once again.
I suppose I can even imagine this scheme working without the war powers being released to George at this time, but it would definitely be much smoother with the check in his their pockets.
So write to Congress nevertheless. It just might help us all.

Do something.
Together with tomorrow and just possibly the day after, these may be the most fateful days in modern American history. Some day they will ask, “Where were you?”
Be ready to tell them, if you survive the days ahead.
Congress is about to sign-on to the unelected Bush Administration’s free pass for, effectively, by unique precedent, the concept of unilateral pre-emptive war against whatever element, sovereign nation or otherwise, the American regime of the day deems to be an appropriate target for elimination.
Whether of not we think we can make a difference to the outcome, there is still time to register dissent, for our own integrity, and for the ultimate record of mankind.
Please, please, please contact your own congresspeople and anyone else in Congress who might be able to use your encouragement to pursue the right course in these hours. There is talk of a Senate filibuster, led by the estimable Senator Byrd, to prevent the vote now expected to result in the Senate’s capitulation to this regime’s folly. He and others of good will need your encouragement.
You can go to Common Cause for direction to the people you wish to contact.
The world thanks you, even if it doesn’t yet know it should.
If you have any doubts about the power and the will of the enemies of this Republic, look at the media at this moment. Barry and I spent four hours in the East Meadow of Central Park today in the midst of a diverse, very noisy, extraordinarily enthusiastic group of (perhaps twenty thousand?) other people of conscience, in an anti-war rally organized by “Not In Our Name.” Up to this moment at least, there appears to be a complete blackout on any information about the event in the commercial media.
We saw absolutely no sign of the presence of any of the American commercial news media. Maybe their Republican patrons forgot to tell them about it.
The lead story on NY1, New York’s own all-news television station’s website, at this moment (Sunday, 11:30 PM), over six hours after the end of the protest, is the description of a “mock ticker-tape parade [and torch-bearers which the City is preparing to send] through Manhattan streets this week to show the U.S. Olympic Committee what the 2012 Summer Games would look like in New York.” Yuck. I see no mention of this, or of any of the other rallys held in 24 cities throughout the nation today, anywhere on the site, or on the sites belonging to any of the major U.S. news organizations.
As far as the print and electronic press are concerned (and therefore the people of the U.S. as well), it just didn’t happen.
But it did, and someday people may know–if we live to tell about it.

A great orator, and perhaps the last of his kind.
I don’t often see eye-to-eye with the senior Senator from West Virginia, but Democrat Robert C. Byrd did amazing work in the halls of Congress this week.
[the following quotes are excerpted from the complete text printed in the NYTimes]
The Senator begins with a characteristic reference to the Roman historian Livy, who was familiar with republics and dictatorships both.

Titus Livius, one of the greatest of Roman historians, said all things will be clear and distinct to the man who does not hurry. Haste is blind and improvident. Blind and improvident, Mr. President [the remarks are addressed to the president pro tem of the Senate], blind and improvident.

Byrd feels the White House pressure and knows the reason for it.

The newly bellicose mood that permeates this White House is unfortunate, all the more so because it is clearly motivated by campaign politics. Republicans are already running attack ads against Democrats on Iraq. Democrats favor fast approval of a resolution so they can change the subject to domestic economic problems.
Before risking the lives, I say to you the people out there who are watching through those electronic lenses, before risking the lives of your sons and daughters, American fighting men and women, all members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, must overcome the siren song of political polls and focus strictly on the merits, not the politics, of this most grave, this most serious undertaking, this most grave, this most serious issue that is before us.
Mr. President, the resolution S.J. Resolution 46, which will be before this Senate, is not only a product of haste, it is also a product of presidential hubris. This resolution is breathtaking, breathtaking in its scope. It redefines the nature of defense. It reinterprets the Constitution to suit the will of the executive branch. This Constitution, which I hold in my hand, is amended without going through the constitutional process of amending this Constitution.
S.J. Resolution 46 would give the president blanket authority to launch a unilateral, pre-emptive attack on a sovereign nation that is perceived to be a threat to the United States. A unilateral, pre-emptive attack on a sovereign nation that is perceived to be a threat to the United States. This is an unprecedented and unfounded interpretation of the president’s authority under the Constitution of the United States, not to mention the fact that it stands the Charter of the United Nations on its head.

He warns of the horrible prototype which the rush to war will establish, both within the U.S. and without. (But why should this Junta care?)

Think for a moment of a precedent that this resolution will set not just for this president — hear me now, you on the other side of the aisle — not just for this president, but for future presidents. From the day forward American presidents will be able to invoke Senate Joint Resolution 46 as justification for launching pre-emptive military strikes against any sovereign nations that they perceive to be a threat.
You’d better pay attention. You’re not always going to have a president of your party in the White House. How will you feel about it then? How will it be then?
Other nations will be able to hold up the United States, hold up the U.S.A. as the model to justify their military adventures. Do you not think, Mr. President, that India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, Russia and Georgia are closely watching the outcome of this debate? Do you not think that future adversaries will look to this moment to rationalize the use of military force to achieve who knows what ends?

War is being invoked as a first resort, and we are not even allowed to ask why.

Mr. President, the Senate is rushing to vote on whether to declare war on Iraq without pausing to ask why. We don’t have time to ask why. We don’t have time to get the answers to that question why. Why is war being dealt with not as a last resort but as a first resort? Why is Congress being pressured to act now? As of today, I believe 33 days before a general election when a third of the United States Senate and the entire House of Representatives are in the final highly politicized weeks of election campaign

Once again, for Byrd and many others, there is the rhetorical question. Why just now?

It is now October of this year of our Lord 2002. Four years have gone by in which neither this administration nor the previous one felt compelled to invade Iraq to protect against the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction until today, until now, until 33 days before Election Day. Now we’re being asked, now we’re being told that we must act immediately. We must put this issue behind us. We must put this question behind us. We must act immediately we are told before adjournment and before the elections. Why the rush? Why the rush?

–not that the media is going to report her statement, even if she is a celebrity (shouldn’t that be enough of a temptation?), when it refuses to cover the statements of (legitimate?) politicians who speak out against the Administration’s latest divertissement.
In a press conference at the San Sebastian film festival in Spain, where she received a lifetime achievement award, Lange did not mince words.

“Bush stole the elections and since then we have all been suffering the consequences. The Iraq plan is absolutely mad, but what I do not understand is that nobody tries to stop it – neither inside nor outside the United States,” the actress added.
“The atmosphere in my country is poisonous, intolerable for those of us who are not right-wing, so thank you for inviting me to this festival and allowing me to get out for a few days,” Lange said on receiving the Donostia Prize, presented by Spanish actor Jose Coronado.

Thanks, Jessica, for trying to stir up the waters a bit.

There really is an excellent reason for supporting war with Iraq, or at least for talking about such a war. If one is of the Republican persuasion and one wishes to maintain and even increase the Republican domination of the American polity, talk of war and the imminent danger to America presented by the imagined threat presented by a demonic foe will do the trick. Absolutely.
Any other justification is superfluous. In fact, any other justification may be impossible, even for many Republicans, since, aside from its immediate advantage for the politicos, this war is almost certain to be disastrous for all but oil and armament moguls.
The economic and political health of the country is in very real danger, but we are all being distracted by the Republicans’ manufacture and sale of this absurd sideshow adventure.
Almost two years ago, in the months after the 2000 elections, I bored or frightened my friends with my prediction that we would never have another Presidential election, and we would very likely be relieved of the messiness of another congressional election as well. I believed that the Republicans would never give up what had been so ill-gotten in the winter of 2000-2001.
I was certain that some pretext would be invented to distort the electoral process, or even entirely suspend the Constitutional niceties providing for the election of a Congress and a President, in order to protect us from enemies at home or aboad.
Absent any compelling case for Republican involvement in the events of September 11, we still have a case for a Republican conspiracy, one which is subverting the political process at this very moment, and it’s working very well indeed. Most of the Democrats have bought into the monstrous idiocy of this regime’s war arguments and practices, with disagreement only in the details, at best.
If they get away with it this fall, a Republican executive, a Republican Congress and a Republican judiciary will virtually guarantee their success with a frightened and gung-ho citizenry in 2004. Dictatorship accomplished.
As far as the current situation is concerned, I do not have an opinion about whether their war-thing is merely a political device, that is, a gambit for sabotaging what whould otherwise be almost certain victory for Democrats in November and a long-overdue accounting for the Republican executive, or whether the Administration is really serious about this thing.
I would like to think that it is the first scenario (which represents I suppose the greater cynicism) that we are dealing with here, especially since what is at stake is our own lives, our property (but not our sacred honor, which is already lost and perhaps irretrievable).
At this point I’m expected to ask anyone reading this to communicate with her and his senators and representatives, on the outside chance that they have not already performed the ritual, but I honestly believe that the demons are now beyond recall. It’s now summer, 1914, and the mobilization cannot be retracted.
But write anyway.
You’ll feel better in the morning, I think, especially if you realize that the next opportunity for nobility may not involve letters or emails.
To locate your member of Congress, use this.