2004 Redux?

He is a U.S. Senator with a record of accomplishment, and when he runs for the Democratic presidential nomination, his party rallies around him to defeat an intensely disliked Republican President who got in without winning the popular vote and bungled his reaction to a national crisis.  Unfortunately, but the Democratic presidential nominee's awkwardness and paper trail of controversial Senate votes hamper him, as do rumors about his past.  Although early polls show him in a strong position against the incumbent President, many fear that he will still lose in November.

No, he isn't Joe Biden; I'm talking about John Kerry in 2004.  But the resemblance between the two is striking.  Biden, like Kerry, seeks to defeat an incumbent Republican President who has all of the advantages of incumbency and an ability to influence the voters that no challenger can match.  And the fear of another outcome like 2004 - Kerry lost - is justified.  George Walker Bush made the argument that you don't change leaders in the middle of a war, and Donald Trump is trying to position himself as a steady leader in the middle of a pandemic . . . while ignoring scientific and medical guidelines.  Polls show that, though Biden has an overall edge over Trump, Trump is solidly beating - yes, beating - Biden on the economy despite its free-fall in the past nine weeks.  Trump knows this, which is why he's pushing the insane, inane idea that the economy will regain a good deal of its mojo by autumn if we reopen immediately - science be damned! This would suggest that enough people in swing states can be taken in to give Trump the necessary swing states to give him the necessary 270 votes  in the Electoral College.

Biden backers have every reason to be worried - especially when people who should be in his column (*cough cough*, Bernie bros, *cough cough*) aren't ready to support him yet and maybe won't be ready at all . . . and he also has to deal with campaigning with only one resource to him - virtual outreach - that is also his greatest weakness.  But there are differences between 2004 and 2020.  The economy was going relatively smoothly in 2004, and Kerry was a less a known quantity than Biden, hence the "Swift Boat" charges against him stuck to him more firmly than sex-assault allegations against Biden have.  Trump can talk up the economy all he wants, but whether states reopen sooner or whether they reopen later, the growth he projects will likely not happen and the economy is likely to  get worse between now and November and erode his standing.  His campaign merrily pledges to destroy Biden, but Biden sees what's coming and is slowly but diligently preparing for that inevitability.  (If he could only get his Internet connections to work flawlessly.)   Biden beats Trump in polling on who would handle the pandemic better; this pandemic could be going on for years, at least until 2023.  And if more states open up, it could give Biden the opportunity to have public events that allow him to engage in retail politics - with previously screened and tested groups of voters, of course - which is is biggest strength.

I am not saying Biden will win in November.  After all, despite the reality of a worsening economy, Trump's effort at exploiting his better polling numbers on the issue over Biden might just work.  I am only saying that the circumstances facing Biden are different from the circumstances failing Kerry in 2004, and they allow more room for Biden to gain an edge on Election Day.  One thing is for certain - even if Trump wins, he will not win a majority of the popular vote.  The election of 2004 is one of only two instances in which the Republican presidential candidate won a popular majority since Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election landslide; the other instance was the election of 1988.

Both of the winners, for the record, were named George Bush.  And unlike Trump, both Bushes took national-security crises seriously.  (The younger Bush started the initiative to have the United States plan for dealing with . . . a pandemic.)

Ten Years After

One of the more unpleasant truths about America after the events of September 11, 2001 is that we haven't changed for the better.  If anything, we've become more superficial and bellicose in the past ten years.  On September 12, 2001, I thought we Americans would be more intelligent and sensitive in our approach to the rest of the world and each other, and that we would be more united and more purposeful in how we lived or our lives.  Nothing could have prepared me for how wrong I was. 

I thought we'd rediscover a sense of community in out towns and cities and reach out to one another, but we became more cut off from each other.  9/11 actually drove more people into their own little worlds; we retreated into our houses and bought home theaters to take the place of concerts and movie theaters.  I expected people to make the connection between terrorism and foreign oil, and how money to purchase Middle Eastern oil found its way to supporting terrorist activities - not all of it, but enough to give us pause.  But instead of becoming more energy-efficient and less dependent on foreign oil, we bought more SUVs and almost let Amtrak go bankrupt.  We certainly can't persuade Republican governors to build rail transit projects in their states, and President Obama pays so much lip service to "green jobs" that it's become a national joke. 

I thought our culture would become more meaningful and less tawdry.  How could reality shows prosper after the reality of 9/11 on our TV screens? But our culture got much sillier and a whole lot meaner.  One Hollywood producer said that action movies would always remain popular due to demand for them in a global, multilingual audience - because everyone understands the international language of "BOOM!"

I suddenly developed a greater appreciation for mime when I heard that.

Even worse, Americans failed to learn the reality of how the world works.  We constructed, on a planet full of tragedy and loss, a civilization designed to confute and deny such realities.  The peoples of Europe, who endured one war after another and found its values comprised and tested so much for so long, certainly understand this reality, and their cultural assumptions - that life is full of tragedy that must be dealt with - contradict the blind optimism of Americans.  With the worst terrorist attack ever brought to our shores, I found it hard to understand why America was not able to start over with a better understanding of civilization in the same way Western European countries understand it.

Perhaps the worst outcome after 9/11 was how President George Walker Bush took the opportunity offered by the attacks to pursue a unilateral militaristic foreign policy.  Journalist Jonathan Alter touched on this point in remarks at a 9/11 memorial ceremony in his adopted hometown of Montclair, New Jersey, where he lamented how Bush failed to appeal to our sense of patriotism and ask us to sacrifice.  Alter noted the failure of Americans to lessen our dependence of Middle Eastern oil, to be sure, but he went further than that in pointing out how we ended up going to war in Iraq.  "We went to war under false pretenses against a country that had no connection to the attacks against us," Alter said. "We allowed fear to be exploited for political purposes and too often put our put our deepest values in deep storage. We failed to tap the idealism unleashed across the country to launch an era of national service."

Indeed, on September 22, 2001, Bush told us to go shopping.  He exhorted us to fly (not take the train) to Disney World (in the state where his brother was governor), essentially asking us to live in a September 10 world and continue propping up our consumerist society.  And how were we to deal with "the folks" (as Bush referred to al-Qaeda on the day of the attack) who committed these acts of terrorism? Bush more or less told us to let the experts handle it. We were given freedom to go about our business, even as the government cracked down on our civil liberties.

So when Bush carefully insinuated that Saddam Hussein was a threat without explicitly saying Saddam was or might have been involved with 9/11 (he let people think Saddam was), he got the country to back him into going to war in Iraq in March 2003 and tick off a planet that had been on our side eighteen months earlier.  Those of us who opposed invading Iraq were met with the following question from those who thought Iraq was involved with al-Qaeda and 9/11: "Have you forgotten what happened to our country?"

"No," I wanted to reply at the time. "Have you?" :-(

On September 13, 2011, we're too divided to solve any problems, be it the economy or the ongoing wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  We can't even provide relief money to victims of Hurricane Irene because Senate Republicans complain how costly it is.  The division in this country was created from exploitation of our unity on September 13, 2001, and that is George Walker Bush's worst legacy.

Out of the Closet

It shocked a lot of people to learn that Ken Mehlman, the campaign for George Walker Bush's 2004 presidential bid and the subsequent chairman of the Republican National Committee, is gay. After all, it was Mehlman who was instrumental in rallying Republican voters around supporting laws to ban gay marriage as a method of getting them to the polls to give Bush a second presidential term.

Mehlman says he's really, really sorry for the divisiveness and bitterness he's caused among gays and that he wants to make amends, but no one is accepting his apology. It was because of a gay marriage ban on the ballot in Ohio that Bush won a second presidential term against Democratic presidential nomination over John Kerry. Without Ohio, there would have been no second Bush term, no guys on the Supreme Court named Alito or Roberts (and no Citizens United ruling), and no Brownie overseeing Katrina relief. But even more significant is that Mehlman betrayed his own conscience and his fellow gays in polarizing the nation, scapegoating gays as an enemy of a moral and just people, and making gays feel like second-class citizens.

This, by the way, is nothing new; gay Republicans have happily worked against their own interests to advance their profiles in the GOP. Some people might remember Terry Dolan, a closeted homosexual conservative activist who opposed gay rights and formed the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the group that helped the Republicans win control of the Senate in 1980 by getting veteran liberals like George McGovern, Gaylord Nelson, and Birch Bayh voted out of office in favor of dullards such as, respectively, James Abdnor, Robert Kasten, and Dan Quayle. Dolan's greatest legacy is the method Republicans now use to get people to contribute money. "[You try to] make them angry and stir up hostilities. The shriller you are, the easier it is to raise funds. That's the nature of the beast."

Dolan died of AIDS in 1986.

Ken Mehlman may have perpetrated Dolan's modus operandi, but his own legacy was using the gay marriage issue to get middle-class Americans to vote against their own economic interests. I may have said this before, but it's worth repeating. The choice was defined in 2004 as thus: Either you let gays register wedding presents at Bloomingdale's or compete against your own teenage children for a job at Wal-Mart. Guess which was chosen.

I'm sure Mehlman is seriously sorry for the hostility to minority rights he stirred up as a loyal Republican foot soldier. It's too bad he can't undo the damage now. That's why I have trouble accepting his apology.

Iraq: It Started With a Bang

President Obama addressed a convention of disabled veterans in Atlanta today declaring that all American combat troops in Iraq - which, I believe is still trying to form a new government after the elections in March - and even though today is the twentieth invasion of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Mr. Obama did not mention the event.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was actually a watershed moment for the world, as it was the point where the Cold War began to end and a new era of geopolitics began to emerge. With greater instability in the Middle East and Iraq's sudden control of over 20 percent of the world's oil as a result of his occupation of Kuwait, Western focus shifted from the Soviet Union - a year and change away from dissolving - and eastern Europe to the rise of Arab and Islamic influence. President George Bush sent troops to Saudi Arabia to check the Iraqi army from going any further and then push Saddam's troops out of Kuwait when it became apparent that Saddam wouldn't give it up without a fight. This angered Osama bin Laden, who resented the presence of American troops in his homeland, which led him to form al-Qaeda from the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan, from which the Soviets had withdrawn and which the Americans forgot about. (Bin Laden wanted to use his commandos to defend Saudi territory, but King Fahd would have none of it.) Bin Laden himself took up residence in Afghanistan much later after living in Sudan, where he approved and oversaw the plotting of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks that took place in September 2001, which the second President Bush used as an excuse to invade . . . Iraq.

Before August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein was a thuggish dictator who persecuted his own people and had grand but unrealized ambitions of controlling more of the Middle East. His invasion of Kuwait upset the balance of power in the Persian Gulf region. In the eighties, the United States had supported his regime as a counterweight against the Islamic fundamentalists who ran Iran, and American support allowed Saddam to wage an eight-year war against Iran. When he forcibly annexed Kuwait, the elder Bush must have wondered who would provide a counterweight to Saddam.

I must admit this: The Persian Gulf War was the right war to prosecute, although I didn't think so at the time. Although I feared it would lead to World War III and last interminably, what happened was that the Iraqi army was decimated in six weeks, Kuwait regained its sovereignty, and a peace was quickly established in which Saddam was contained by the American and British air forces. War was never actually declared against Iraq - an official declaration of war, if I'm not mistaken was made in advance by Saddam's rubber-stamp Parliament recognizing a state of war if Kuwait was invaded by the Americans and their allies - but the resolution Congress gave to the senior to wage war was used judiciously. Bush could have allowed American troops to go deep into Iraq, march on Baghdad, and overthrow Saddam - but he merely wanted to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty, not remake Iraqi civilization. Besides, Bush, Secretary of State James Baker, and General Norman Schwarzkopf knew what would happen if they tried to invade and occupy Iraq. Exactly what happened when Bush's son did the same thing. The younger Bush's war didn't start a global conflict, but, boy, has it been interminable.

Was it about oil? Of course it was about oil, but bear in mind that in 1990, the U.S. only got twelve percent of its oil from the Gulf region, while Germany and Japan got much more of their oil from there. Japan actually paid for much of the military operation then called Desert Storm. Had Saddam been allowed to annex Kuwait, it would have amounted to appeasement and given carte blanche to starve the West of oil. The Saudis, who have more oil than they need, are happy to sell it to anyone, but Saddam would likely have used greater control of the world's oil as a weapon. It figures that American policymakers only realized that after it was too late, after having propped him up for eleven years.

If Albert Gore - who supported the Persian Gulf War but has never supported the current war in Iraq - had become President in 2001 instead of George Walker Bush, there likely wouldn't have been another war in Iraq, but we'd probably still be in Afghanistan and we would still be struggling against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. And while our dealings with Iraq would have been different, they wouldn't necessarily have turned out better. It's only fair to say they would have been different.

The effects of the invasion of Kuwait twenty years ago today, despite shift in American policies based on who's in the White House, are likely to last for a long time.

Rudolph The Long-Nosed Republican

My jaw almost dropped when Rudolph Giuliani appeared on ABC-TV and insisted to George Stephanopoulos that we had had no terrorist attacks under George Walker Bush, completely forgetting that the September 11, 2001 attacks happened on Bush's watch. Many people found this ironic, given that Giuliani was mayor of New York when the 9/11 attacks happened and has used the event to buttress his own national security credentials. Stephanopoulos apologized for not calling Rudy on the mistake, but Giuliani continues to insist that President Obama has done nothing to make us safer.

Giuliani has since said that he meant we'd had no terrorist attacks in the United States since September 11, 2001 under Bush. Okay, I'll give him that, because I'm a charitable sort of guy, but even that remark isn't entirely true. How about the 2001 anthrax attacks? Okay, so Giuliani meant there had been no Islamic terror attacks under Bush after 9/11, and pointed that out as much. "[A]s far as we know," he said of the anthrax attacks, "that was not done in the name of Islamic terrorism."

Even if you grant that, you have to consider the SUV attack at the University of North Carolina, where a Muslim inspired by Muhammad Atta intentionally hit nine people with his sport utility vehicle to punish America, as well as the 2002 Washington, D.C.-area sniper attacks orchestrated by one John Allen Muhammad, a member of the Nation of Islam, as an act of jihad. If Giuliani were to insist that he was only referring to foreign Islamic terrorism, I couldn't grant any benefit of the doubt there. Too many qualifiers. But that still wouldn't be true, as an Egyptian militant shot up a El Al (the Israeli national airline) ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport in 2002. All of this happened under Bush.

Giuliani isn't the only Republican to try to imply that 9/11 was not Bush's fault. Bill Clinton was blamed for 9/11 by right-wingers almost since September 12, 2001, on the grounds that he left Bush a flawed national intelligence network . . . and also because he had failed to capture Osama bin Laden. So had Bush. And Bush didn't seem too serious about bin Laden even after the August 2001 memo indicating bin Laden's desire to strike inside the United States. This is all part of an orchestrated attempt to paint the Democrats as soft on terrorism, even as Obama demonstrates his own seriousness in dealing with the issue. What's appalling about Giuliani is that he built his post-mayoral career and political prospects on the idea that he's a security expert who knows how to combat enemy commandos bent on acts of war against American citizens. He's not. He did a great job keeping New York City together on September 11, 2001 and in the weeks after, but he didn't do anything that might have enhanced the security of New York City. If anything, he did something that weakened it by keeping the city central command center in the original 7 World Trade Center building after David Dinkins, his predecessor, advised him to move it to Brooklyn when Giuliani took over the mayor's office in 1994. The advice was ignored.

Even Larry King, not exactly a hardball interviewer, caught Giuliani rewriting history. Giuliani complained about Obama waiting three days to address the would-be "underwear bomber" on that Christmas Day flight into Detroit while Bush waited twice as long to address Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," on that flight into Boston. Giuliani insisted the Reid incident happened before 9/11. It happened three months after 9/11.

George Stephanopoulos was deeply ashamed of his lapse of journalistic professionalism, and he made that clear. Giuliani, by contrast, has no shame.

Unsavory Characters

Two somewhat unsavory figures died recently . . .

Allen Klein was a music mogul who made his reputation as the "Robin Hood of Pop" for getting sweetheart royalty deals for his pop star clients (and, coincidentally, himself). Starting out as the manager of singers like Bobby Darin and Sam Cooke, Klein advised and later managed the Rolling Stones (his record company still has the rights to their pre-1971 catalog) and later acted on behalf of three of the Beatles. Paul McCartney didn't trust him and had his affairs taken care of by his father-in-law, which turned out to be a good idea. Klein was a skank, making lot of money off the chaos at Apple, and he may have contributed to the Beatles's breakup. Ironically, Yoko Ono - wrongfully credited to instigating the split - was instrumental in getting Apple separated from Klein, thanks to her skillful negotiating tactics. Klein compared her negotiating skills - as a compliment - to those of Henry Kissinger.

His handling of the Stones's finances so angered Mick Jagger that he had to chase Klein down a hotel corridor to pick a bone with him over it.

Klein later did time in prison for tax fraud.

Also, Robert McNamara died today at 93. As Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, McNamara oversaw the escalation of the Vietnam War and was blinded by anti-Communist paranoia into keeping the war going, even though he knew the U.S. couldn't win. He later expressed regret for his policy but never actually apologized for it.

Personally, I think McNamara would have been better off staying at Ford, where President Kennedy found him.

Two extremely unsavory people celebrate birthdays today. Former President George Walker Bush and former box office attraction Sylvester Stallone both turn 63 today. Meanwhile, Nancy Reagan, 88 - who it turns out, wasn't unsavory at all - celebrates her 86th birthday today.

Torturing the Torturers

President Obama has suggested that while he doesn't want to prosecute the CIA agents who tortured al-Qaeda prisoners to get information on terrorist plots, he would be open to prosecutions of those who wrote or endorsed the torture policies. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, likely aware of the fact that he could be prosecuted, spoke out against the recent release of the torture memos, insisting that these practices were necessary to prevent another attack in the aftermath of 9/11. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich found the time to bash Obama for shaking hands with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Fine. How about that cordial meeting former and future Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had with Saddam Hussein in 1983 on behalf of the Reagan administration regarding U.S. support for Iraq in its war with Iran, which ended in a handshake?

The prosecution of just the higher-ups for advocating the torture of enemy combatants makes sense, though. It was just reported that torture was endorsed by the Bush administration as early as the spring of 2002 to get information on a Saddam Hussein-al Qaeda connection that never existed.

Contradictions

President Obama should be credited for releasing the CIA memos involving torture in the Bush administration. It sheds light on some of the most cruel and inhumane practices ever committed in the name of the United States under the guise of protecting the homeland.

However, Attorney General Eric Holder is all wrong when he says he declines to prosecute the CIA agents who were involved in the torture of suspected al-Qaeda combatants. I've heard all of the reasoning and rationale for this decision - the nation had just been savagely attacked on September 11, 2001, we didn't know what al-Qaeda was capable of, information involving future terrorist plots had to be extracted post-haste, the CIA agents were acting in good faith based on legal reasoning, and so on. None of them measure up. By treating these prisoners with the same cavalier attitude al-Qaeda showed toward the victims of 9/11, we descended to their level. We violated several of our own laws and likely violated international law, and we made ourselves hypocrites in the eyes of the world. These agents need to be prosecuted, and their superiors - those who approved the use of torture - should be given justice. Even an attack as horrible as 9/11 doesn't justify or excuse this policy.

Twenty years from now, Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA members for torture and simply move on and not do it again may be seen in the same light as Gerald Ford's pardoning of Richard Nixon for Watergate, but I doubt it.

More News

President Obama reversed nearly eight years of stem cell policy by allowing federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. George Walker Bush had banned this because of the moral questions involved. This from the guy who later started an unjust war Iraq. . . .

Meanwhile, the Dow Jones hit a fresh twelve-year low, and may soon hit a fresh thirteen-year low . . . .