Night Thoughts from the Last Manatee

The totalitarian right discovered the constitution when Barack Obama was elected. That's not a bad thing. However, I have been barraged by e-mails about one constitutional violation after another by our President. And we have seen what a curious constitution is being invoked. A new Arizona law will ban children of illegal immigrants born in this country from being citizens. This happens to violate Amendment 14. The Hard Right claims they are constitutionalists and want to revoke Article 17 of the constitution, which quaintly allows citizens to elect their Senators. The teabaggers embrace the very exotic tenther movement, which elevates states' rights to a paramount place in our Constitution. Glenn Beck daily proclaims that the Left--whoever that is--has hoodwinked all of us into believing that the Founders really did believe in the separation of Church and State. The Republican nominee for the Senate in Nevada claims we should no longer negotiate treaties, although that is explicit in the preamble of our Constitution. And then we have the rather bizarre group of Supreme Court Justices who believe in something called originalism, which enabled them to rule that both domestic and foreign companies have rights as individuals and can donate unlimited funds to political campaigns.



I have a basic viewpoint on all this. I believe these people seriously have given up on the idea of America. I think their efforts to deconstruct the Constitution indicate they have grown cynical about the whole idea of self-government itself. That is why I said that this theme, which appears daily in right-wing talk radio, is ominous. Newt Gingrich in his latest book attacking President Obama writes that we are at an existential moment, the equivalent of the time of our civil war when we questioned who we are as Americans. I believe this is rubbish but I do believe conservatives sincerely have been thrown for a loop and don't know why they participate in our democracy. It is clear that today's Republicans refuse to participate or even compromise unless they have total power.



The natural response to the right's recent embrace of the Constitution is to ask where they were when the Fourth Amendment disappeared for three years during George W.Bush and Dick Cheney and his minions advocated a unitary theory of the executive, which conservative constitutional scholar Bruce Fein argued was a form of despotism. And then we could discuss the issues of torture and American traditions.



Since this revisionism about our history and our constitution is gaining momentum and entering the mainstream of political debate, it's best to be prepared and armed. For this I recommend Seth Lipsky's The Citizen's Constitution: An Annotated Guide (Basic Books, 2009). This book provides the historical background to the various articles and amendments of the Constitution and contemporary discussions about recent cases and arguments. For the upcoming Supreme Court case on health care reform, we'll need to become specialists in the commerce clause.



A blogger at the Daily Kos posted an entry "Gingrich, Obama and American Exceptionalism". It is well-worth a read. The blogger in my mind rightfully criticizes Gingrich's definition of American Exceptionalism as exclusively a property of the Hard Right, while Newt neglects to furnish the more apt definition that we are a people who all originated somewhere else and are united in a commitment to democracy, pluralism and tolerance with a commitment to the common good. In this short essay he outlines Barack Obama's notions of American Exceptionalism based on these concepts. The one problem I have is that he tries to secure his definition as the exclusive property of progressives, not just all of us. He made the mistake that Newt did.



John Keane is back. This British, former Labor thinker popularized the notion of the civil society as it formed the basis of the democratic revolutions in Central Europe. I credit him with influencing American policymakers to incorporate the civil society in all our programs to promote democracy overseas. Intimately involved in both Poland and Czechoslovakia, Keane later wrote the definitive biography of Vaclav Havel. By that time, he had soared on Havel because he practiced normal democratic politics instead of an overarching brand of the civil society. He has a lengthy tome The Life and Death of Democracy, which makes an urgent defense and plea for democracy as it looks a bit tattered these days.



Reinhold Niebuhr is back in terms of a realism in foreign policy. But, not so much to the chagrin of William Pfaff of the International Herald Tribune. Pfaff laments the triumphalism of American foreign policy in general and warns that our global interventionism will ultimately fail. Despite Obama's embrace of multilateralism, Pfaff believes President Obama has embraced some of the worst tendencies of the past and his policies will fail. His latest book on this subject is The Irony of Manifest Destiny: the Tragedy of America's Foreign Policy (Walker, 2010). He traces the idea of Manifest Destiny and America's interpretation of its exceptionalism through our history and seems to elide with Gary Wills' National Security State, a critique of American policy after Truman.



I can't think of worst news than Afghanistan having over $1 trillion in mineral deposits such as Lithium. Think of Karzai as the Ibn Saud of Lithium, the master of cellphones. I have heard the pundits here already discuss the wonderful opportunity this provides the country. But, having lived through this with many new oil states and the mineral riches of the Congo, I can say, yes I know you can create laws that willl create transparency in awarding the mining contracts and ,yes. you can create a transparent way the nation could use the revenues for development. But it will never happen. The Mines and Minerals Ministry in Afghanistan is considered even more corrupt than the rest of the country and a few families will monopolize the industry. Whole populations will be displaced; and local warfare will be the rule like in mineral-rich Congo. And, unfortunately, the fact of minerals will enable those who want us to stay indefinitely in Washington to have greater infuence in the debate. And, the bottom line is that the Chinese will get the minerals anyway like they have the copper in Afghanistan and the oil in Iraq.




Daniel Byman and Christine Fair in the July/August The Atlantic have an excellent article on the ineptitude of Islamic terrorisms and the Taliban entitled "The Case for Calling Them Nitwits". Reviewing recent failed bomb plots, the authors also deal with the whole issue that these guys are not so religious. The laptops seized by U.S. authorities from the would-be jihadists are filled with porn. For a while, Pentagon analysts believed they encrypted messages in the porn but after extensive exams decided that these guys were just porn addicts. Apparently, we have tertabytes of this stuff from the laptops. Our Predator drones have captured exciting images of two Taliban engaged in intimate relations with a donkey and a fighter gratifying himself with a cow. The authors believe we must root out Al Qaeda's havens in Pakistan and then fighting terrorism becomes easy once we realize the rest of them are inept. Apparently, Al Qaeda is so cunning either. The CIA did an elaborate internet sting on Al Qaeda using Facebook and the organization actually posted their operational manuals and plans and personnel. It's a good thing Bin Laden just released another message to the United States. I was getting woried for a moment. His team isn't looking good.