The Age of Civility

After President Obama's weekly address calling for Democrats and Republicans working together to fix the nation's problems, Republicans signalled their reply. The first vote in the new House will be to repeal the healthcare reform bill. Teabaggers are positively jubilant after voicing discuss with the GOP during the Lame Duck. In the new economic rules of the House, the GOP doesn't have to explain how such a repeal would increase the national debt by several trillion or any of the negative effects on the American people. What is real classy is that the vote will occur before the State of the Union Address.

Today,Austin Goolsbee appeared on television to warn about playing chicken with raising the national debt ceiling. Previously Gentleman John Boehner said that Republicans would have to act as adults on this issue, citing the fact that the government of the United States has bills to pay and obligations to meet. Even Club of Growth Senator Pat Toomey claimed that this would be playing with fire. However, teabagger cheerleader Michelle Bachman wants to lead the vote against raising the debt ceiling. And Lindsey Graham, apparently positioning himself to avoid being teabagged in 2012, thinks Congress can not raise the debt ceiling until there is a substantive plan to cut the national debt.

Clearly,Goolsbee is annoyed at hearing the new rumblings from the Right. As he rightfully said,"this would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity." As Goolsbee points out, the United States is not even close to the position of actually defaulting on its debt. However,the foreign markets hearing this type of talk among the American political class will react and negatively. It would make it harder for the U.S. to borrow further and may in fact disrupt the markets. I would say that such talk will propel the international community to seek another reserve currency rather than the dollar.

A failure to raise the debt ceiling--an automatic bipartisan vote until the days of Republican obstructionism--will finally ensure the United States is no longer a major country. How does one expect serious countries to deal with people who are apparently crazy and do not understand international economics?

President Obama's budget--usually dead on arrival as every other president's--will be late because the Republicans in the Senate held up his nominee for OMB director.

The other war will be fought over the spending bill that was approved in the Lame Duck session. This is due to expire in March and it's renewal will be another bloody fight with the House trying to extract massive spending cuts from the Obama Administration.

To give you some idea about how nuts this coming year will be, consider that the American voters in poll after poll, before and after the 2010 mid-terms put the deficit low down on their concerns,about the same as terrorism. This should give you some idea of how out of the mainstream the new Congress is.

While Gentleman John Boehner has stated the House Republicans will not make the same mistake they did during Clinton by shutting down the Government,there is no quarantee that Boehner will be able to maintain control over the teabaggers. The teabaggers are currently suffering from triumphalism and actually believe their ideological position was endorsed by the American people. Remember they do not believe those who voted against them should be represented. It's a strange concept to them.

Of all people, Dick Morris and Newt Gingrich are lobbying to shut down the Government. A fantastic idea when you consider the country is fighting at least two wars and just recovering from a Depression. In a strange way, the United States could endure the Gingrich tantrum of the Clinton years because we were in an age of prosperity and peace.

Meanwhile 60% of the American people oppose the war in Afghanistan. As Dick Cheney said about a similar poll on Iraq,"So what?" And I agree. There is virtually nothing the American people can do to stop any of America's war-making propensities. What was astonishing to me was that, without the exception of the debate over DADT, the defense appropriations bill passed both the Senate and the House without any debate and no vocal criticism of our wars abroad. This is really incredible considering past debates since the Vietnam War days. There is virtually no desire by Congress to put a break on our wars and on our military spending.

David Ignatius writing in today's Washington Post talks about the need of the American military to transform the way it does war. He quotes Chinese defense expert Dingli Shen about how the new 21st century weapons will neutralize traditional weapons systems and strategies. Shen thinks it's terrific that the United States is spending billions on weapons systems that are obsolete and using its navy to keep the shipping lanes open for the rest of the world. Ignatius writes about the Pentagon brass still stuck in retaining "legacy power" that comes from conventional fleets and having hundreds of bases around the world. It's quite clear from reading Ignatius that not only is the Pentagon an old white elephant but it also is still fighting several wars back. And there is not a chance that the $1.2 trillion budget for the military/intelligence/terrorist complex will cut anytime soon.

Meanwhile all we hear is the sound of crickets from our robust Christian Right about real Christians being persecuted abroad. Over the holidays, Chaldean Christians in Iraq fled the country and were hunted down by death squads. On New Year's Eve, suicide bombers attacked and killed several dozen at a Coptic Church in Egypt. The devastating attack led to the Coptic Christian community furiously fighting police, whom they accused of instigating the whole event. Since both the Iraqi Christian community and the Coptic Christians are branches of some of the oldest Christian traditions, you would think they deserved some solidarity from the Christian Right. At least Pope Benedict spoke out on both incidents.

The new year has started off with the usually right-wing e-mails. One calling on all the Obama Administration officials to resign because the constitutional conservatives are now in town because of the will of the people. The other actually reinvented Barack Obama's alleged ties to the New Left. At least, this e-mail didn't mention Saul Alinsky or Bill Ayers. I guess they are getting to be old hat by now.

State governments are busy dismantling the public education system. Now with the teabaggers in the House,there is a move--symbolic of course--to eliminate the Department of Education. I will pass on outlining the negative effects this would have on millions of students and the state of higher learning. Given the challenges to the United States in adapting to the challenges of the 21st century,you would think that a country such as ours would need a national push to strengthen our educational system. Even the poorest African countries I have worked in prize education above everything else. But no, 40% of all Americans are creationists; more than 50% of Republicans are creationists and an equal percentage climate change deniers. How do you expect education to build a constituency in this environment?

In the next two years,the United States has to escape the bullet. As of now, the House Republicans are playing symbolic politics and have no interest in governing responsibly. There is no downside for them in reading the Constitution and voting against everything that actually may benefit a human being. And there really may not be a downside for them in 2012 pursuing the art of destruction. Maybe the United States really has given up hope on self-government.

This week there have been rumors that Jon Huntsman, the former Governor of Utah and now the ambassador to China, may run for the Republican presidential nomination against Barack Obama. You will recall his father was honored at the Glenn Beck Washington rally for his charity. The Huntsman clan are billionaires plus. When Barack Obama picked Huntsman it was a brilliant political move to keep a potential challenger away from the United States. Huntsman is pro-environment, gay friendly, very high-tech oriented and yet moderately conservative. I thought he was the best bet for the Republicans in the future. But alas, he will return to a party that has morphed into a pseudo-populist, proto-fascist movement that is completely beholding to corporate America. While Huntsman can operate in this milieu, he would not be welcomed by the radical right that dominates the party. It's like a normal Republican running--it's not going to happen.

John Roberts, the CEO of Supreme Court,Limited, has publically come out blasting the Senate for holding back all of Barack Obama's judicial nominees. Republican holds on Obama judges exceed that on any prior administration. I do expect some movement on this front during 2011 because the federal bench is drowning in their caseloads.

I know Julian Assange of Wikileaks is an annoying little twit and a sexist bore from Australia but what business does the United States have trying him for anything. Personally, I expect the American government is more concerned with his information about our banks than anything he released about our government. Consider that Bob Gates basically yawned off the Iraqi and Afghanistan Wikileaks. While the State Department cables made for good reading,they have received hardly any public response in the United States.

Now we enter the legal twilight zone. The DOJ has been holding a grand jury proceeding against Assange down the street here in Alexandria. Assange himself said he doesn't fear extradition to Sweden to answer the sex charges but he worries about extradition to the United States. Apparently, the DOJ is thinking about using the 1917 Espionage Act to get Assange. Sometimes it would be nice to see our government be a little more self-conscious and reflective when they bring these smoldering old statutes out for another go-around.

The 1917 Espionage Act was created to crush dissent against American entry into WWI. The Wilson Administration felt that he had to stop the public outcry against the war. This act had the strange effect of stigmatizing German-Americans and those who spoke German. My grandparents stopped speaking German because of the reaction this law provoked. Their families were originally from Alsace-Lorraine and they spoke German together as their language of romance, as opposed to their French. I have yet to figure that out.

But the most famous victim of the 1917 Law was none other than socialist party leader Eugene V. Debs, who ran for President from prison and received over 1 million votes. he later received a presidential pardon. Then fast forward to the Cold War and the Law was used to convict the Rosenbergs of "conspiring to spy for the Soviet Union." The couple wwas executed by the electric chair.

Now Julian Assange is an Australian citizen and his alleged crime was committed in cyberspace. He has no loyalties to the United States and the Australian Attorney-general announced he had broken no laws down under. Now what is stranger still is that leaking classified documents by civilians is not a crime in the United States. There was a bill passed during the Clinton Administration, which would have rectified this, but he vetoed it. And, you would have thought with Patriot Act I and II, this would have been taken care of. But no,the U.S. has to rely on a law that stands in disrepute.

We have heard the chorus of outcrys against Assange, many accusing him of treason. Even here, the Constitution provides a very limited definition of treason for the reason that the Founding Fathers anticipated that populace might consider simple dissent as treason and they wanted to quell that notion. And how can Assange , an Australian commit treason.

Of course, Assange embarrassed the United States and we expect the Government to get at him one way or the other. But could we do it in a straight up way and not invent new legal excuses.

This brings me to PFC Bradley Manning who is being held in the brig at Quantico on the suspicion he was the primary leaker to Wikileaks of at least the Iraq and Afghanistan materials. Beacuse he has not been tried, his lawyers,according to military law, can not weigh in and protest the conditions of his confinement. From visitors and Manning himself,he is restricted to his cell without access to any publications, is woken every five minutes by guards and allowed once a day to exercise in another cell for about an hour. His visitors claim he is udnergoing sleep deprivation. Should we care? Yes, because he hasn't been charged with anything and the conditions of his confinement in isolation should at least be humane. The other problem here is the single accuser is an old hacker friend of his, who has a history of mental illness, which may or may not affect the accuracy of his claims that Manning was indeed the infamous Wikileaks leaker.

As anyone who reads this blog notes I am a big supporter of President Obama. But I thought he made an atrocious mistake in signing an Executive Order that allowed detainees at Gitmo to remain confined there without charge because they were either too dangerous to let out or that the United States government's case against them were too tainted by allegations of torture that we couldn't get a conviction. In effect, the Executive Order allows the President to detain terrorist suspects indefinitely without any legal remedies.This is an enormous mistake. From a simple perspective, it just kicks the can down the road and it allows this type of behavior to be considered the norm in the future. It's also against America's judicial traditions--both civilian and military. And, of course, against international law. But we're an Empire and we make our own legal reality.