Peace And Struggle

I gave a lot of thought to trying to say something profound for Independence Day. Something about how much I love this country even as many would accuse me of being anti-American because I'm a Red civil libertarian who values dissent. For some reason, probably linked strongly to stupidity, passive acceptance of war, greed, cynical manipulation and crass maneuvering by our elected officials has become synonymous with patriotism. And I have to admit, there's a patina around claiming to be a patriot that is unflattering. It implies a "my country right or wrong" attitude. It's because I love this country that I'm so compelled to help guide it with my most noble attributes. Namely, my strong conviction that compassion and ability to reason are the greatest things we naked apes have going for us.

I got this letter from a man I respect perhaps more than any person I've ever met, David McReynolds. He sent it out to a group of socialists and won't mind my posting it to my little corner of the Internet. The article to which he is referring is posted beneath his letter.

Letter from David McReynolds...
For those who may have missed this statement from last night's MSNBC broadcast, it is important. Not important simply because of what Olbermann said, but that it was said on MSNBC.

I'm sending this out to several lists because I think the "left" can scare itself to death.(One of the popular pieces that has been around and around the internet is the one on the 14 defining characteristics of fascism - the assumption being that is where we are). We have been inundated by 9.11 conspiracy material - a whole movement of its own which wastes our time and diverts us from the real and open conspiracy which is the Administration.

Bush and Cheney didn't cause 9.11 - but they certainly used it, as the GOP candidates are trying to ride that horse of fear in a desperate gamble to avoid defeat in 2008. In the same way that historians are agreed Hitler didn't set the Reichstag fire, but leaped on it as his way of destroying the German Left. (Historians may not fully agree but most evidence suggests the fire was set by a mentally unstable Dutch anarchist).

First, if we were in a fascist period I wouldn't be able to send this and you wouldn't be able to get it - we'd all be safely locked up. The internet would have been closed down. The Democrats - timid and divided as they are - would have done even less than they have done. Which God knows is little enough - they can and must stop funding the war, sending back the same bill again and again no matter how often Bush vetoes it.

And most of all, the media would not be carrying Olbermann. It is a Commentary on our democracy - which is indeed in peril, and in large part because of the role of the corporate control - that we can tell how things are going to seeing what the media is willing to tell us.

The Washington Post, which has supported the Iraq War, ran a devastating five part series on Cheney. Material enough to merit his impeachment. Bush's act of saving Libby from prison is not the act of power but of a President who is down to 26% in the polls and has nothing left to lose, and who may well be buying Libby's silence (what might he have said if he was finally left to sit in jail?). The New York Times, which let Judith Miller help sell the Iraq War by her now-infamous articles on the alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction, has also hit hard at Bush with information on the rendition program, and on the torture centers the US maintains abroad.

Yes, the events in Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Graib and elsewhere are deeply shocking. The arbitrary arrest of hundreds of Muslims after 9.11 was a violation of the Bill of Rights. But Moveon.org hasn't been stopped. The various peace coalitions - United for Peace and Justice, ANSWER, World Can't Wait - all function. Not always wisely, never in unity, but they are alive and well.

Rarely have we seen a President fall so desperately far in so short a time. When Bush won his election in 2000 it was only because a slim majority of the Supreme Court gave it to him. He had lost both the popular vote and, had the Florida vote been fairly counted, the electoral vote as well.

He won 2004 by a narrow margin but said he had earned real capital and that he would spend it.

What has he done? He lost totally on his efforts to alter Social Security. He lost totally on his efforts at Immigration Reform. The situation in Iraq is a desperate mess, in which the only thing on which everyone can agree is that "there are no good options". Aside from the rabid Ann Coulter, who runs her hands through her hair so restlessly one can't help but think she has bugs in her scalp, there are few real defenders left.

The right wing, which owns Fox News (and much else) has not been able to buy or build any real competition to the Daily Show. Not even the Supreme Court can be counted on when it comes to issues such as torture. (The Supreme Court has always followed the election returns).

As you read Olbermann's devastating (and quite sound) indictment of Bush and Cheney, keep in mind that unless Olbermann is fired tomorrow, unless Jon Stewart is taken off the air, our job is to focus on Congress. Both in letter campaigns, in phone calls, and in sit-ins at Congressional offices. And by civil disobedience at other points which make sense. By vigils, protests, and demonstrations.

We are not losing - we are winning. There is a danger that Bush might still try a nuclear strike on Iran, and he has been egged on by the half-mad neo-con, right wing Zionism's very own Ann Coulter, Norman Podhoretz. But I think we are in a situation where the military might refuse orders which would clearly lack a legal mandate. A President with the support of only 1/4 of the public not only has no right to launch yet another war, but very possibly will not be able to do so.

Among the letters we should write would be to anyone serving in the military, urging them to consider their obligations to obey only orders which are legitimate.

The media has moved as it has because there is major opposition within the higher echelons of the Establishment to Bush and the damage he has done to American interests, the extreme isolation he has created for our foreign policy. We have seen something that has not happened before in the past century - a revolt by Generals, who have spoken out against Bush.

Remember, after 9.11 the leading French newspaper ran a headline saying "We Are All Americans Now" and all of Europe stood by us. How distant is that time. The world is on our side, not that of Bush. It wouldn't hurt to drop a note to MSNBC to let them know we support Olberman. It wouldn't hurt to write your member of Congress and say that finally there may be no alternative but to seek to remove both the President and Vice President from office. (Something I have until now considered so unlikely that I've not endorsed it). The quasi-pardon of Libby puts Bush on a moral part with Clinton's pardons as he left office. (And those pardons are part of the stain on Bill Clinton's record which liberals should not forget).

Peace, and struggle,
David McReynolds


Olbermann: Bush, Cheney should resign
‘I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.’
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
Updated: 8:13 p.m. ET July 3, 2007

“I didn’t vote for him,” an American once said, “But he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”

That—on this eve of the 4th of July—is the essence of this democracy, in 17 words. And that is what President Bush threw away yesterday in commuting the sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

The man who said those 17 words—improbably enough—was the actor John Wayne. And Wayne, an ultra-conservative, said them, when he learned of the hair’s-breadth election of John F. Kennedy instead of his personal favorite, Richard Nixon in 1960.

“I didn’t vote for him but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”

The sentiment was doubtlessly expressed earlier, but there is something especially appropriate about hearing it, now, in Wayne’s voice: The crisp matter-of-fact acknowledgement that we have survived, even though for nearly two centuries now, our Commander-in-Chief has also served, simultaneously, as the head of one political party and often the scourge of all others.

We as citizens must, at some point, ignore a president’s partisanship. Not that we may prosper as a nation, not that we may achieve, not that we may lead the world—but merely that we may function.

But just as essential to the seventeen words of John Wayne, is an implicit trust—a sacred trust: That the president for whom so many did not vote, can in turn suspend his political self long enough, and for matters imperative enough, to conduct himself solely for the benefit of the entire Republic.

Our generation’s willingness to state “we didn’t vote for him, but he’s our president, and we hope he does a good job,” was tested in the crucible of history, and earlier than most.

And in circumstances more tragic and threatening. And we did that with which history tasked us.

We enveloped our President in 2001.And those who did not believe he should have been elected—indeed those who did not believe he had been elected—willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of non-partisanship.

And George W. Bush took our assent, and re-configured it, and honed it, and shaped it to a razor-sharp point and stabbed this nation in the back with it.

Were there any remaining lingering doubt otherwise, or any remaining lingering hope, it ended yesterday when Mr. Bush commuted the prison sentence of one of his own staffers.

Did so even before the appeals process was complete; did so without as much as a courtesy consultation with the Department of Justice; did so despite what James Madison—at the Constitutional Convention—said about impeaching any president who pardoned or sheltered those who had committed crimes “advised by” that president; did so without the slightest concern that even the most detached of citizens must look at the chain of events and wonder: To what degree was Mr. Libby told: break the law however you wish—the President will keep you out of prison?

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental com-pact between yourself and the majority of this nation’s citizens—the ones who did not cast votes for you. In that moment, Mr. Bush, you ceased to be the President of the United States. In that moment, Mr. Bush, you became merely the President of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican Party. And this is too important a time, Sir, to have a commander-in-chief who puts party over nation.

This has been, of course, the gathering legacy of this Administration. Few of its decisions have escaped the stain of politics. The extraordinary Karl Rove has spoken of “a permanent Republican majority,” as if such a thing—or a permanent Democratic majority—is not antithetical to that upon which rests: our country, our history, our revolution, our freedoms.

Yet our Democracy has survived shrewder men than Karl Rove. And it has survived the frequent stain of politics upon the fabric of government. But this administration, with ever-increasing insistence and almost theocratic zealotry, has turned that stain into a massive oil spill.

The protection of the environment is turned over to those of one political party, who will financially benefit from the rape of the environment. The protections of the Constitution are turned over to those of one political party, who believe those protections unnecessary and extravagant and quaint.

The enforcement of the laws is turned over to those of one political party, who will swear beforehand that they will not enforce those laws. The choice between war and peace is turned over to those of one political party, who stand to gain vast wealth by ensuring that there is never peace, but only war.

And now, when just one cooked book gets corrected by an honest auditor, when just one trampling of the inherent and inviolable fairness of government is rejected by an impartial judge, when just one wild-eyed partisan is stopped by the figure of blind justice, this President decides that he, and not the law, must prevail.

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war.

I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people, a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient.

I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors.

I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely-motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent.

I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought.

I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents.

I accuse you of handing part of this Republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience, and letting him run roughshod over it.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that Vice President, carte blanche to Mr. Libby, to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to Grand Juries and Special Counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation, with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison, and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.

When President Nixon ordered the firing of the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” on October 20th, 1973, Cox initially responded tersely, and ominously.

“Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men, is now for Congress, and ultimately, the American people.”

President Nixon did not understand how he had crystallized the issue of Watergate for the American people.

It had been about the obscure meaning behind an attempt to break in to a rival party’s headquarters; and the labyrinthine effort to cover-up that break-in and the related crimes.

And in one night, Nixon transformed it.

Watergate—instantaneously—became a simpler issue: a President overruling the inexorable march of the law of insisting—in a way that resonated viscerally with millions who had not previously understood - that he was the law.

Not the Constitution. Not the Congress. Not the Courts. Just him.

Just - Mr. Bush - as you did, yesterday.

The twists and turns of Plame-Gate, of your precise and intricate lies that sent us into this bottomless pit of Iraq; your lies upon the lies to discredit Joe Wilson; your lies upon the lies upon the lies to throw the sand at the “referee” of Prosecutor Fitzgerald’s analogy. These are complex and often painful to follow, and too much, perhaps, for the average citizen.

But when other citizens render a verdict against your man, Mr. Bush—and then you spit in the faces of those jurors and that judge and the judges who were yet to hear the appeal—the average citizen understands that, Sir.

It’s the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the pre-arranged lottery all rolled into one—and it stinks. And they know it.

Nixon’s mistake, the last and most fatal of them, the firing of Archibald Cox, was enough to cost him the presidency. And in the end, even Richard Nixon could say he could not put this nation through an impeachment.

It was far too late for it to matter then, but as the decades unfold, that single final gesture of non-partisanship, of acknowledged responsibility not to self, not to party, not to “base,” but to country, echoes loudly into history. Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign

Would that you could say that, Mr. Bush. And that you could say it for Mr. Cheney. You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday. Which one of you chose the route, no longer matters. Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is irrelevant.

But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics, is the only fact that remains relevant.

It is nearly July 4th, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a King who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them—or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them—we would force our independence, and regain our sacred freedoms.

We of this time—and our leaders in Congress, of both parties—must now live up to those standards which echo through our history: Pressure, negotiate, impeach—get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our Democracy, away from its helm.

For you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed, on August 9th, 1974.

Resign.

And give us someone—anyone—about whom all of us might yet be able to quote John Wayne, and say, “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19588942/