Op-Ed

Take empathy out of the concept of justice and what you have left are rules: simple, mechanical, lifeless.

“Are we really going to insist,” Texas Sen. John Cornyn asked the other day, after President Obama talked about closing down the Guantanamo detention facility, “that the jihadist with a suitcase nuke captured in Times Square be read his Miranda rights . . .?”

In other words, who needs all this complication — the luxury of rights and other froo-frah — when we’ve got so much evil bearing down on us? Oh, Republicans! They operate on a spectrum that runs all the way from mockery to fear as they pursue their single-minded assault on the new president and the agenda he was elected to implement.

If you’re tired of the great American experiment, or never quite believed in it, or have too much to gain by circumventing it, then you’re on the team. The party platform is pretty clear: Let us hollow out every core American value, worship the shell (think Founding Fathers, think Our Precious Freedoms) and quietly keep wealth and power where they belong, in the hands of the entitled.

It takes at least tacit faith in massive violence to believe that after three decades of horrendous violence in Afghanistan, upping the violence there will improve the situation.

Despite the pronouncements from high Washington places that the problems of Afghanistan can’t be solved by military means, 90 percent of the spending for Afghanistan in the Obama administration’s current supplemental bill is military.

Often it seems that lofty words about war hopes are boilerplate efforts to make us feel better about an endless warfare state. Oratory and punditry laud the Pentagon’s fallen as noble victims of war, while enveloping its other victims in a haze of ambiguity or virtual nonexistence.

When last Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post printed the routine headline “Iraq War Deaths,” the newspaper meant American deaths -- to Washington’s ultra-savvy, the deaths that really count. The only numbers and names under the headline were American.

Ask for whom the bell tolls. That’s the implicit message -- from top journalists and politicians alike.

In sacred remembrance of all those we have killed, and are continuing to kill . . .

The flag waves, the heart stirs, the music rends the air. Memorial Day 2009. I stood at a bubbling fountain in downtown Chicago and listened to speakers from Vietnam Veterans Against the War — speakers with hard-earned and grown-up attitudes about war — apologize for the wars still going on today and plead for awareness that they must stop, that we must learn how little they solve and how long they linger, and that only in committing ourselves to the end of all wars can we honor the dead. Then, toward the end of the small, solemn gathering, the passing of Zak Wachtendonk was mourned.

“Zak’s name will never be on the memorial, but he died in Vietnam just as surely as my nephew did,” said Barry Romo, who earlier had talked about the death of his relative.

Romo’s comment opens up the select world of this day’s honorees in a way that has left me disturbed in wave after wave of overwhelming remorse.

An association representing top advertisers on broadcast and cable television has proposed the creation of a new Cheney Channel dedicated exclusively to the Cheney family, the primary motivation apparently being to get Dick and Liz off all the other channels where their presence seems to be hurting the sales of advertised products.

OK, not really, but it wouldn't surprise me. One of the products that Liz Cheney seems to be hurting is in fact Dick. Ray McGovern just pointed out to me that with Lynne and Liz having probably replaced David Addington as Dick Cheney's editors, some big gaffes have slipped through. For example, in Thursday's speech Cheney listed U.S. support for Israel as one of the "true sources of resentment" for terrorists. True enough, but did Dick mean to say that?

The Republican National Committee recently dropped its resolution to brand the moderate pro-corporate Democratic Party “Socialists.” As the late, great Democratic Socialist leader Michael Harrington liked to tell it when he testified before a dying Senator Hubert Humphrey on the Humphrey-Hawkins Work Bill, that would theoretically guarantee every American a right to a job, Humphrey bluntly asked him “Is my bill socialism?” Harrington replied, “Senator, your bill’s not half that good.”

Here’s why the Democratic Party is also not half that good. Obama’s “Me too” bailout policy to the largest and most irresponsible banks and investment houses has nothing to do with socializing capital. Democratic Socialists believe in democratizing and socializing money matters. They favor credit unions and co-ops with democratically elected boards over large welfare checks to transnational corporations. In fact, there’s little difference between Obama’s approach to the big bankers and George W. Bush’s.

The reason we must keep the torture issue alive is not to exact a small measure of comeuppance from the Bush administration zealots who bent the law till it screamed, but to alter the course of history.

Thus the filing of disciplinary complaints a few days ago against 12 Bush administration lawyers, who crafted the quasi-legal justifications that made waterboarding a household word, has significance well beyond the case for their disbarment. This action, taken by a coalition of citizen organizations — from the ACLU and Vets for Peace to the Libertarian Party of West Virginia, 200 groups in total, claiming a membership of more than a million people — represents, as I see it, American citizens’ furthest reach of patriotic sanity.

The Bush sins are unoriginal. We’ve always done torture. We’ve always been at war with a dehumanized (and usually dark-skinned) other, whom we have simultaneously attempted to kill and, in our armed righteousness, “save.”

Is it important to counter the CIA's lies about what it told a handful of congress members when? Of course it is. It's important to expose every bit of the secrecy imposed by all agencies and departments of what we still rather goofily call the "executive" branch. This is a branch of government that has openly flouted subpoenas for years, and assisted others in doing so. The chairman of the senate judiciary committee is now afraid to subpoena Jay Bybee, or - probably - to blow his nose, without the approval of what we still call "the executive," the individual who's supposed to faithfully execute the laws of congress. (Prove me wrong, Senator Leahy, make my day!)

To understand what’s up with President Obama as he escalates the war in Afghanistan, there may be no better place to look than a book published 25 years ago. “The March of Folly,” by historian Barbara Tuchman, is a chilling assessment of how very smart people in power can do very stupid things -- how a war effort, ordered from on high, goes from tic to repetition compulsion to obsession -- and how we, with undue deference and lethal restraint, pay our respects to the dominant moral torpor to such an extent that mass slaughter becomes normalized in our names.

What happens among policymakers is a “process of self-hypnosis,” Tuchman writes. After recounting examples from the Trojan War to the British moves against rebellious American colonists, she devotes the closing chapters of “The March of Folly” to the long arc of the U.S. war in Vietnam. The parallels with the current escalation of the war in Afghanistan are more than uncanny; they speak of deeply rooted patterns.

Imagine if Spain indicts Gonzales, Bybee, Haynes, Yoo, Addington, and Feith, but the United States fails to extradite them and in fact appears guilty of having harbored and possibly even employed them at good salaries. Then suppose -- use your imagination! -- that Spain invades and occupies the United States. Now, imagine that seven years later we still aren't happy with being occupied by Spain, and the people of Spain oppose their own government's crimes and follies. Wouldn't it be decent and appreciated if some crusading Spanish legislators were to propose a piece of legislation requiring that within the next seven months their nation produce a plan to eventually someday withdraw all of its troops from our country?

George W. Bush has been compared to Curious George the monkey for many years, but the comparison didn't quite fit until now. Every Curious George story must include these plot elements:

1. The man with the yellow hat shows George something irresistible, asks him to leave it alone, and then wanders off.

2. George resists everything except temptation and causes all kinds of trouble.

3. Someone makes the bizarre claim that George has done more good than harm, gives him a prize.