Category Archives: The American Experience

“The last thing in the world I think Democrats and Republicans are going to do at the end of the day is create a government run health care system where you’ve got a bureaucrat standing in between the patient and the doctor.”

Of course, while Senator Graham is one of the worst examples, the biggest meaningful obstacle to getting a reasonable public health care insurance option in this country are certain conservative Congressional Democrats. Please write your Congressional representatives, especially if you live in an area represented by one of these fence-sitting Democrats, and let them know that Senator Graham’s view of the public option is the view of a blind, old fool, and that the best way to remove “bureaucrats” from the relationship between you and your doctor is to institute some form of public health insurance program.

Do it before you get sick or go bankrupt. And don’t fool yourself that your flim-flam private insurance is going to keep this from happening to you. Have you actually read your health insurance policy? Do you even know what it covers, honestly? The fact is that the same “entrepreneurs” who brought you sub-prime mortgages, credit card contracts and Bernie Madoff sell you your health insurance. Think there’s much difference? Think again.

Health care was never truly a “market,” in any sensible meaning of that word, to begin with. The time is now to stand up and demand a health care system that works for all of us.

(Video hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

I’ve long been of the opinion that once the U.S. State Department and other American foreign affairs powers-that-be got over the long trauma of the Iranian revolution and the “loss” of Iran, that the S’hia Muslims and historical Persians of Iran were generally better suited intellectually and emotionally to be friends of America than the Gulf Arabs of Saudi Arabia. If the very dangerous and potentially incendiary and potentially harmfully destabilizing “popular” uprising today in Iran can, against very long odds, succeed, we may very quickly find the entire arithmetic of mid-East diplomacy changed. The first place that could benefit from that new arithmetic would be Afghanistan, of course.

We must, first and foremost, of course, not be tempted to militarily intervene, regardless of how things turn out. But with a great deal of luck, a new Iranian state could emerge that would be at least as friendly to American interests, while posing some of the same ideological challenges, as today’s China or Vietnam. That would be what, I think the pundits would call, a major inflection point.

We have come to the GOP’s end of days, where “class warfare” means marginally lifting the income cap on payroll taxes (or holding the president of AIG’s salary to the same range as that of the President of the United States), and racism means hating on whitey (“no german soldier ever called me honky!”).

Senator Jeff Sessions, R-AL, victim of reverse racism

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), a man who once famously said the only thing that troubled him about the KKK was that some of their members smoked pot, calls Judge Sonya Sotomayor’s comments about her experience as a Latina “troubling,” implying there is some suspect “racialist” tinge to her thinking. Sessions’ remarks about the KKK, a history of referring to the NAACP as “communist” and “un-American,” and similar on-the-record remarks he later claimed were  “jokes,” kept Sessions from winning Senate approval for appointment to the Federal bench in 1986. This, he will tell you, as so-called “racist” Sotomayor sails towards the Supreme Court, is the troubling double-standard that faces down-trodden white Republicans everywhere.

Rush Limbaugh, whose salary is reported to be in excess of $39 million a year, leads the GOP class warfare charge, decrying the progressive income tax as “socialism,” and demonstrating the fiscal sense one would expect from a not-quite-recovered opioid addict, ridicules any suggestion of the need for raising marginal income or capital gains tax rates in the face of historic deficits as “class warfare.” So much for “ask what you can do for your country,” then.

Gordon Gekko, victim of class warfare

Card check and union organizing are class warfare. Limiting the average CEO wage at “public” companies to 400 or 500 times the wage of the average worker is class warfare. (How can Citi possibly recruit more “talented” managers at a salary of a “mere $500,000”?) Universal health care and free day care are class warfare. Teachers’ unions are a Platonic ideal of class warfare. And these sentiments are echoed everywhere from the Halls of Congress to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims that all Americans are invited to President Obama’s economic “table,” but that the entrepreneur and the “rich” are “the main course.” And Senator Lindsey Graham is typical of Congressional Republicans, calling any proposal for marginally increasing capital gains taxes a type of “class warfare,” whose time has passed:

Class warfare is a time-tested political endeavor whose time has passed. We are in this together. There are about 270,000 people in my State who depend on capital gains income and dividend income. Senator Kyl has gone through, in very detailed fashion, who benefits from capital gains and dividend tax reductions, and there are a lot of seniors.

The world is topsy-turvy, and it’s not surprising that the GOP, backward-facing as ever, should take up the mantle of the rich, white guy as victim. The White Man’s Burden lives, and the GOP will retreat to permanent irrelevancy before they give up their raison d’etre, standing, as they imagine themselves, between the citidal and the hungry horde.

With its JFK, NASA and Neil Armstrong audio clips, this “teaser” for the new Star Trek neatly melds our childhood’s wanna’-be-an-astronaut nostalgia with the latest manifestation of Star Trek Utopianism. A neat trick. Is the “final frontier” reopening? Or is it already too littered with junk, physical, historical and emotional junk? Still: “Spock’s” voice at the end of this trailer brings tears to my eyes, just like Obama’s.

The battle between our basest and better instincts play themselves out against a background of technological opportunity, in the persons of the young Kirk and Spock. Star Trek, in each iteration, has become steadily more humanized. Has technology? So many great American tropes, spoken and unspoken, present themselves  here. Obama himself, steadily plays both sides of the Kirk/Spock divide; the unflappable guy with all the answers who defiantly takes mustard on his Hell Burger. We’re in a hell of a pickle, Mr. Zulu; but our best days are surely still ahead.

The likely phenomenal box office success of this movie may eventually look like a cultural turning point. (“Inflection point,” I suppose, is the current jargon.) Baby boomers mind-melding with Generation Y in a neoliberal paradise powered by clean nuclear windmills made in America.

Well, maybe for two hours this Saturday night.

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

(Official White House photo by Pete Souza © Creative Commons, via Flickr White House Channel.)

Dick Cheney is running off at the mouth because he’s running scared. And with good reason. The Orwellian double-speak that obfuscated the authoritarian torture state created by the Bush-Cheney administration in the aftermath of 9/11 is collapsing. Dick Cheney is facing serious jail time. He’s especially facing serious jail time if the allegation, bouncing around the Internet now, that “Global War  on Terrorism” suspects were tortured with the sole and specific intent of supporting the thesis of a link between Sadaam Hussein and Al Qaeda in the run-up to the Iraq War, proves true..

Torture is torture. Even John Boehner, that font of ignorance and obstructionism, frontman for the reactionary movement that now calls itself the Republican Party, called it so in a recent unguarded moment. Torture apologists like Boehner are arguing that instead of prosecution, we should have a political debate, that this all boils down to a political disagreement. But civilized societies don’t debate the merits of torture any more than they debate the merits of genocide. There simply is no legitimate debate to be had on this issue. It is moot.

Torture is used by authoritarian and tyranical regimes solely to impose arbitrary punishment, or to elicit false confessions. Our American “enhanced interrogation techniques” were directly copied from techniques used by the Chinese and Soviet Communists, during the heart of the Cold War, and from other charming precedents like the torture of Jews and Muslims under Ferdinand and Isabel during the Spanish Inquisition. Even the Orwellian name, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” in another reactionary malapropism worthy of  the creators of political “tea-bagging,” was taken directly from the German, “Verschärfte Vernehmung,” as used specifically and most memorably by the Nazis.

The perpetrators of this crime belong in jail, and it’s supporters should be ashamed. It’s as simple as that. And the perpetrator at the head of it all, the Fuhrer, if you will, of the American torture regime, is Dick Cheney.

[As an aside, PLEASE read all of Andrew Sullivan’s brave, concerted blog reporting on torture, at his “Daily Dish” site.]