Op-Ed

The leaders of today's Congress have made clear through numerous lobby visits that unless we can produce polls that show congressional elections in November 2008 hang on the question of impeachment, nobody's going to be impeached. Bush and Cheney can continue to ignore subpoenas, spy illegally, kidnap, torture, murder, and rewrite laws. They can launch another illegal war. They can rig the elections. They could barbeque babies on the White House lawn. It doesn't matter. They will not be impeached.

Never mind the whole question of whether future presidents and vice presidents will be expected to obey any laws. It's all about elections. The Democrats played this same game when Reagan was investigated in the Iran Contra scandal. The Democrats exercised restraint. In the end, they restrained themselves right into a defeat and created the Bush dynasty.

With the Senate embracing the reckless Kyl-Lieberman amendment, we've moved one step closer to attacking Iran. But there's still time for Congress to assert itself against yet another needless war with massive destructive potential. By defining Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, a core branch of the Iranian military, as a  foreign terrorist organization, Kyl-Lieberman put the U.S. Senate on record as vindicating the Bush-Cheney line that Iranian proxies are part of a global conspiracy, linking Al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents, Hamas, Hezbollah, and any other enemy the administration wants to list. The bill now makes it far easier for Bush to manufacture some Tonkin Gulf-style excuse, then use it to justify an attack. No wonder Senator Jim Webb called it Cheney's fondest pipe dream.

Contempt for the empirical that can’t be readily jiggered or spun is evident at the top of the executive branch in Washington. The country is mired in a discourse that echoes the Scopes trial dramatized in “Inherit the Wind.” Mere rationality would mean lining up on the side of “science” against the modern yahoos and political panderers waving the flag of social conservatism. (At the same time that scientific Darwinism is under renewed assault, a de facto alliance between religious fundamentalists and profit-devout corporatists has moved the country further into social Darwinism that aims to disassemble the welfare state.) Entrenched opposition to stem-cell research is part of a grim pattern that includes complacency about severe pollution and global warming -- disastrous trends already dragging one species after another to the brink of extinction and beyond.

While they may not be in Congress, there are members of our government willing to risk their careers and more to blow the whistle on the criminal takeover of our former democracy.  One of them is Sam Provance.

I've just posted an amazing video of Sam Provance telling his story, along with videos of others telling theirs, including: Dan Ellsberg, Ann Wright, Larry Johnson, Coleen Rowley, Bob Parry, Akbar Ahmed, Peter Kuznick, Edward Mortimer, Max Friedman, and Ray McGovern: http://afterdowningstreet.org/whistleblowervideos

Sam Provance exposed the torture in Abu Ghraib and as thanks had his career ruined, was threatened with prison, has had his wife leave him, and is now barely scraping by. He said last Thursday evening that on a personal level his choice to speak out was not worth it. "But," he said, "this is not about me." And everyone in the auditorium where he was speaking knew exactly what he meant, because we had just heard all the other speakers listed above lay out the gravity of the situation this nation and the world are now in.

There are now two types of Democratic presidential candidates, the ones who promise to end the occupation of Iraq, and the ones who say they may very well keep it going for another four years.

MSNBC hosted another Democratic presidential debate Wednesday evening. Due to a technical error, the cable network failed to identify itself as a subsidiary of General Electric, a major weapons maker. Due to another technical shortcoming, viewing the debate streaming live on the MSNBC website was slow and choppy, and no recorded file was made available after the fact, just little segments selected by GE.

The New York Daily News, with its long tradition of lurid and stupid headlines, outdid itself in its special welcome for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week, warning him: “If you even think of setting foot near Ground Zero, you can GO TO HELL!”

The accompanying editorial was one of the ripest specimens of yellow journalism I’ve seen in a while: “No. No. No. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can not be allowed to defile Ground Zero, must be stopped from exploiting this hallowed landmark, this tragic product of a fanaticism cousin to the demons in Ahmadinejad’s soul.”

Cousin? Is this what you call moral relativism?

I wonder how many frustrated racist-patriots out there, silenced by a disastrous war effort and hemmed in by the cruel strictures of political correctness, felt this bit of media jingoism resonate with a soul-satisfying, secret ka-ching-g-g?

Jeremy Scahill, author of a terrific book on the Blackwater mercenary army, spoke in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Tuesday to a packed hall.  He took questions at the end, and one man asked something to the effect of "Why does the government want to privatize the military?  We taxpayers have been paying for the Army."  I wished Scahill had pointed out that it's the tax payers who are now paying the private corporations, but the answer Scahill gave was critical. 

"There's a cynical answer and an honest answer," he said, "and I think they're the same answer."  He said that the Pentagon is useless to politicians because it doesn't make campaign "contributions".  But when you take a big chunk of that enormous military budget and give it to private companies, you free it up to come back (some portion of it) to politicians every campaign season.

Scahill has the ability to tell the story of one little corner of corruption and through it provide an understanding of the overall military industrial media congressional complex.  The corner of corruption he focuses on is Blackwater.

A Roseland, Indiana, city council member orders police to remove a fellow city council member.  The police escort him out, shove him down on his face and pound his head. Onlookers either cheer, do nothing, joke, behave as if all were normal, or yell at others to let the police do their jobs.  Not a single person protests.  Only the one victim is hauled off in the police car.  No one jumps in and shouts "Before this becomes Nazi Germany, arrest me too!"

A University of Florida student asks inconvenient questions of a U.S. senator.  Police tackle him and shoot him with a taser.  Onlookers, including the senator, either cheer, do nothing, joke, behave as if all were normal, or yell at others to let the police do their jobs.  Not a single person seriously protests.  Only the one victim is hauled off to jail.  Fascist-friendly media outlets love the story because the senator is a Democrat, but they don't tell the story right.  Progressive media outlets don't tell the story, even though they would tell it right, because the senator is a Democrat.

The abyss between “crime against humanity” and “we’ll have to look into this” may be all but unfathomable — deep as a mass grave — but sometimes we have to trust the process.

I fear that democratic progress is a mouse’s progress: justice — sanity — in tiny nibbles. This past Sept. 11, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed a law that seems to promise this sort of progress — to evaluate the scope of an acute, ongoing, manmade calamity — and I find myself trying to curb my sense of impatience that it doesn’t do more.

The law authorizes the state to educate returning vets and National Guardsmen on their rights, as well as available testing and treatment, if they think they’ve been exposed to hazardous substances overseas, in particular, depleted uranium. It also sets up a task force through the Illinois Veterans Association to study the health effects of such exposure.

As police officers were torturing a University of Florida student with a taser in the back of a lecture hall as punishment for asking inconvenient questions of Senator John Kerry, the Senator chose not to order them to stop. Rather he calmly mumbled his non-answers to the questions and even joked about the young man's inability to come up on stage. Later, Kerry posted a statement on his website in which he chose not to answer the student's questions in a serious way, but rather expressed with full muddledness that he was for arresting the student before he was against it and even expressed concern that the police might have somehow been hurt.

Kerry's exquisite sense of timing was also on display in late 2004 when he speedily conceded an election that had been widely expected to witness Republican election fraud, many reports of which had already come in. I've been wanting to ask Kerry the same thing this student asked (why the hell he conceded so fast) ever since that day. On November 8, 2004, I published on Counter Punch a lengthy lament over Kerry's betrayal of all those prepared to fight for an honest recount, which included these points: