-----O----- A fundamental premise of democracy is that elections matter. That belief is being tested today as it seldom has before. In 2006, the Republicans were swept from power in Congress because the American electorate had had it with the war and with Congress's unquestioning acquiescence to President Bush's blind and obdurate faith in the eventual success of the American mission. In responding to the election by sending more troops to Iraq and keeping these troops there until the limits of our manpower compel their return next year, Bush merely doubled down on his unwinnable bet on his unwinnable war. Congressional Democrats have honorably tried and failed to scale back the war; the Senate's requirement of a 60-vote supermajority to alter policy requires supermajority support from the public for an altered Senate. And looking at the tea leaves for 2008, a heavily Democratic Senate and a Democratic president may well be swept into power.                                                             Harold Myerson, 'The Silenced Majority'                                                                                    The Washington Post                                                                                              Oct. 10, 2007 -----O----- He (Bush) used the August vacation — when lawmakers were largely laying low at home — to reassert his determination to stay the course. The White House also let it be known that it plans to ask Congress for more money — perhaps another $50 billion — beyond $600 billion already requested to maintain the counteroffensive in Iraq into spring 2008. Some people think the administration will get it. The White House tried to discredit the ominous G.A.O. assessment by saying the standards set by Congressional investigators were too high. It may be unrealistic to expect that Iraq’s weak and dysfunctional government could meet all the targets by September, but a serious, conscientious effort across the board was needed, and would be apparent to all. Mr. Bush has invoked Vietnam to argue against leaving Iraq. That argument is specious, but there is a chilling similarity between the two American foreign policy disasters. In Vietnam, as in Iraq, American presidents and military leaders went to great lengths to pretend that victory was at hand when nothing could be farther from the truth. NY Times Editorial, 8-31-07 -----O----- And insurance is crucial to receiving adequate health care. President Bush may think that lacking insurance is no problem — “I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room” — but the reality is that the nine million children in America who don’t have health insurance often have unmet medical or dental needs, don’t have a regular place for medical care, and frequently have to delay care because of cost. Now, the public understands the importance of health nsurance, even if Mr. Bush doesn’t. According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an amazing 94 percent of the public regards the fact that many children in America lack health insurance as either a “serious” or a “very serious” problem. So how can conservatives defend the indefensible, and oppose giving children the health care they need? By trying the old welfare queen in her Cadillac strateg (albeit without the racial innuendo that made it so effective when Reagan used it). That is, to divert public sympathy from people who really need help, they’re trying to change the subject to the supposedly undeserving recipients of government aid. Hence the emphasis on the evils of “middle-class welfare.” Paul Krugman NY Times 27 Aug 07 -----O----- Re “The Silence of Politicians” (editorial, April 19): While I commend your editorial urging politicians to confront what you call “the runaway gun problem,” I see the only workable solution to putting a stop to more and more Columbine and Virginia Tech-type disasters is not for politicians to admit there is a problem but to repeal and rewrite the Second Amendment to the Constitution. While it’s true that even the whisper of gun control causes politicians to run for cover, I believe that a groundswell can be built by those of us — and we are in the majority — who are appalled by what the rest of the civilized world sees as our Wild West heritage. Yes, it’s time, at long last, to stop arguing over what the founding fathers meant by “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Instead, it’s time to write a sane national gun law that is right and proper for our nation in the 21st century. Allen M. Cobrin Massapequa, N.Y., April 19, 2007 from the Washington Post 20 Apr 07 -----O----- To say that Mr. Schwarz is disturbed by some of the things that have occurred during the presidency of George W. Bush is an understatement. In a book to be published next month by The New Press, Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, Mr. Schwarz and a colleague at the Brennan Center, Aziz Z. Huq, write: For the first time in American history, the executive branch claims authority under the Constitution to set aside laws permanently — including prohibitions on torture and warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. A frightening idea decisively rejected at America’s birth — that a president, like a king, can do no wrong — has reemerged to justify torture and indefinite presidential detention. —Bob Herbert (re FAO Schwarz, a legal scholar) Washington Post, 19 Feb 07 -----O----- What's the lesson to be learned? Modesty. Before initiating a war of choice — and Vietnam and Iraq both qualify — define the goal with honesty and precision, then analyze what means will be needed to achieve it. Be certain you really understand the society you propose to transform. And never gamble that the political solution to such an adventure will somehow materialize after the military operation has begun. Without a plausible political plan and strong local support at the outset, military operations alone are unlikely to produce success. Bush's latest initiatives — like all his earlier ones — will not produce the desired political result, because Americans cannot accomplish political objectives in Iraq. Americans are outsiders, occupiers, foreigners in every sense of the word. Only Iraqis have a chance of finding a political resolution for their divisions. So now we await the fate of this latest gamble like a high roller in Las Vegas watching a roulette ball in a spinning wheel. We have about as much control over the situation as the gambler has of that ball. The outcome is out of our hands, and it would be foolish to bet that we will like the way the conflict ends. —Robert G. Kaiser Washington Post, 14 Jan 07 Robert G. Kaiser, an associate editor of The Post, covered the Vietnam War in 1969 and 1970. -----O----- In the early years of this new century, we thus find ourselves facing two opposite and yet curiously similar fantasies. The first fantasy, most familiar to Americans but on offer in every advanced country, is the smug, irenic insistence by commentators, politicians, and experts that today’s policy consensus—lacking any clear alternative—is the condition of every well-managed modern democracy and will last indefinitely; that those who oppose it are either misinformed or else malevolent and in either case doomed to irrelevance. The second fantasy is the belief that Marxism has an intellectual and political future: not merely in spite of communism’s collapse but because of it. Hitherto found only at the international ‘periphery’ and in the margins of academia, this renewed faith in Marxism—at least as an analytical tool if not a political prognostication—is now once again, largely for want of competition, the common currency of international protest movements. The similarity of course, consists in a common failure to learn from the past—and a symbiotic interdependence, since it is the myopia of the first that lends spurious credibility to the arguments of the second. Those who cheer the triumph of the market and the retreat of the state, who would have us celebrate the unregulated scope for economic initiative in today’s ‘flat’ world, have forgotten what happened the last time we passed this way. The are in for a rude shock (though, if the past is a reliable guide, probably at somebody else’s expense). As for those who dream of rerunning the Marxist tape, digitally remastered and free of irritating Communist scratches, they would be well-advised to ask sooner rather than later just what it is about all-embracing ‘systems’ of thought that leads inexorably to all-embracing ‘systems’ of rule….But history records that there is nothing so powerful as a fantasy whose time has come. —Tony Judt New York Review of Books Good-Bye to All that? 21Sept06 I go on about this matter because in Woodward's book, as with everything else I've read about the 43rd president, it's apparent that Bush had no reason to run for the office other than to satisfy some psychological compulsion — and had no accomplishment to his name that did not stem from primogeniture. Especially in foreign policy, he was an ignoramus who smugly thought that his instincts trumped experience and knowledge. What's even more appalling is that over and over in Woodward's book, Bush sticks to his losing hand, refusing to challenge his own assumptions — or, it seems, his steadfast belief that his is a divine mission. The conventional script in Washington for ending the Iraq war is for Bush to approach key Democrats and seek bipartisan cover for a methodical American withdrawal. Maybe that will happen or maybe it will be Republicans such as James Baker, Bush senior's secretary of state, who will do the approaching. But given the nature of the problem, maybe it would be best if the father shed his reluctance and offered his son some sharp advice. After all, it is now clear that the finest service one president can provide another — not to mention his country — is to reassert a parental role. The kid's in way over his head. —Richard Cohen The Washington Post Oct. 3, 2006 -----O----- But sober, moderate opinion was largely silent as the right wing slashed and distorted Clinton's record on terrorism. It largely stood by as the Bush administration tried to intimidate its own critics into silence. As a result, the day-to-day political conversation was tilted toward a distorted view of the past. All the sins of omission and commission were piled onto Clinton while Bush was cast as the nation's angelic avenger. And as conservatives understand, our view of the past greatly influences what we do in the present. A genuinely sober and moderate view would recognize that it's time the scales of history were righted. Propagandistic accounts need to be challenged, systematically and consistently. The debate needed a very hard shove. Clinton delivered it. —E.J. Dionne The Washington Post -----O----- Building up the theoretical threat of bin Laden's "radical empire" is a nifty way to shift attention away from the questions on the minds of most voters. What will this administration do to fix its flawed and terribly executed policy in Iraq? And if bin Laden is the threat after all, what exactly are we doing in Iraq? And why have we allowed the situation in Afghanistan to deteriorate? The president has no good answers, so he wants to lift the whole debate to a misty, ideological plane where he can bunch bin Laden with Hitler and Lenin as totalitarian threats. A president who kept quiet about bin Laden when doing so served his political purposes now revives him rhetorically just before the anniversary of Sept. 11, at a moment when his party is in grave jeopardy in another election. Whenever the president gets into trouble, he tries to remind us of who he was in the months immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. Most of us respected that George W. Bush. But maybe that Bush was just a figment of the imagination of all Americans who actually thought the events of five years ago transcended partisan politics. Too bad that was an illusion. —E.J. Dionne The Washington Post Sept. 8, 2006 -----O----- A few days ago, as I do every day in Iraq, I listened to the commander's battle update. The briefer calmly and professionally described the day's events. Somewhere in Iraq, on some forgotten, dusty road, an insurgent fighting an occupying army detonated an improvised explosive device (IED) under a Humvee, killing an American soldier. The briefer fielded a question from the general and moved to the next item in the update. The day before that, in America, a 15-year-old's incredibly rich parents planned the biggest sweet 16 party ever. They will spend more than $200,000 on an opulent event marking a single year in an otherwise unremarkable life. The soon-to-be-16 girl doesn't know where Iraq is and doesn't care. That same day an American soldier died in Iraq. —F. John Duresky from the 5 July Washington Post -----O----- ...If only Iraqis would go to the polls and show the world a stirring portrait of democracy in action, the nascent insurgency would wither away -- except that when Iraqis voted, the insurgency grew. If only the Iraqis could write a constitution, that would marginalize the insurgents -- except the insurgency grew some more. If only Saddam Hussein were made to sit in the dock like a common defendant, the insurgents would lose faith -- except his histrionics seemed, if anything, to hearten his die-hard followers. If only the Iraqis would go to the polls and vote again -- except the violence has now worsened into sectarian killing that threatens to blow the place apart. And of course there was the biggest "if only . . ." of all, the one about how invading Iraq and turning it into a pro-Western democracy would touch off a wildfire of pro-Western democracy throughout the Middle East. Well, we did manage to get Hamas elected in the Palestinian territories and strengthen religious parties almost everywhere else. History will take a while to render a final judgment on this one, but early returns are anything but promising. —Eugene Robinson, Washington Post 'Once Upon A Time in Baghdad' -----O----- Incompetence is not one of the seven deadly sins, and it's hardly the worst attribute that can be ascribed to George W. Bush. But it is this president's defining attribute. Historians, looking back at the hash that his administration has made of his war in Iraq, his response to Hurricane Katrina and his Medicare drug plan, will have to grapple with how one president could so cosmically botch so many big things — particularly when most of them were the president's own initiatives. —Harold Meyerson, The Washington Post 25Jan06 -----O----- ...this White House has cried wolf so many times on the urgency of national security threats that it has lost all credibility. But we have learned the hard way that Mr. Bush's team cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of the law, much less respect them. —Editorial, New York Times ----O----- If this war is as important as the hawks insist it is, the burden should be shared by all of us. The youngsters sacrificed on the altar of Iraq should be drawn from the widest possible swath of the general population. If most Americans are unwilling to send their children to fight in Iraq, it must mean that most Americans do not feel that winning the war is absolutely essential. —Bob Herbert writing in the New York Times ----O----- We are a country that can no longer pay our bills, no longer wage an effective military action, and no longer protect our citizens from disaster. And it doesn't matter what fiscal responsibility individuals show, what bravery individual soldiers show, or what generosity individual Americans show. As a nation-as a geopolitical entity-we have been stripped of all of our superpowers and many of our powers, and it has been done quickly and efficiently, in the name of blind patriotism, by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and their neocon advisors. The very powers that these people thought they were going to enjoy exercising have slipped out of their grasp. It's laughable now to remember the name of the campaign against Baghdad, "Shock and Awe". No one in Iraq feels any "shock and awe" toward the US presence there any longer. "Fear and Loathing" is more like it. —Jane Smiley writing in the Huffington Post ----O----- What is both amazing and appalling about Bush is that he seems not to care. The way things look now, he will go down in history as an amiable dunce — Clark Clifford's scathing and misapplied characterization of Ronald Reagan — who took his country to war for reasons that did not exist. This is a blunder without peer in American history and possibly an assault on democracy: The people, through their representatives, are supposed to make an informed decision about war. It is incredible to me that Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sex, but nobody — that's nobody — in the entire Bush administration has been fired, not to mention impeached, for this shedding of American blood. Cheney, a man of ugly intolerance for dissent, should have been the first to go. His has been a miserable, dishonest performance — which he continues to this day. The restraint of responsible war critics has been remarkable. Despite a recent headline on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page — "What If People Start Believing That 'Bush Lied'?" — the "L" word has been prudently withheld by elected Democrats. But you would think that Bush himself would wonder about how he's gotten to this place where he looks like such a fool: wrong on the biggest issue of his presidency. He went out there and told the American people things that were not true. Does that mean he lied? Maybe not. Maybe he was just repeating the lies of others. —Richard Cohen writing in Washington Post 22 Nov 05 ----O----- Mr. Bush flew south on Friday and proved (as if more proof were needed) that he didn't get it. Instead of urgently focusing on the people who were stranded, hungry, sick and dying, he engaged in small talk, reminiscing at one point about the days when he used to party in New Orleans, and mentioning that Trent Lott had lost one of his houses but that it would be replaced with "a fantastic house - and I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration. —Bob Herbert writing in the New York Times -----O----- We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame. —The Times-Picayune "I'm not star-struck. I need answers," said Mildred Brown, who has been there [Bethany World Prayer Center in Baton Rouge] since Tuesday with her husband, mother-in-law and cousin. "I'm not interested in hand-shaking. I'm not interested in photo ops. This is going to take a lot of money." —Mildred Brown -----O----- When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke's character, then we stop talking about the administration's pre-9/11 inattentiveness to terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an insubordinate plant of the "liberal media," we forget the Pentagon's abysmal failure to give our troops adequate armor (a failure that persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we focus on Joseph Wilson's wife, we lose the big picture of how the administration twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam's nonexistent W.M.D.'s —Frank Rich in the New York Times -----O----- For all the talk of supporting the troops, they are a low priority for most Americans. If the nation really cared, the president would not be frolicking at his ranch for the entire month of August. He'd be back in Washington burning the midnight oil, trying to figure out how to get the troops out of the terrible fix he put them in. —Bob Herbert, New York Times -----O----- The pro-war pundits who continue to defend the occupation of Iraq are freaked out by the fact that a grieving mother is calling into question their claim that the only way to "support the troops" is by keeping them in the frontlines of George W. Bush's failed experiment. Bush backers are horrified that Sheehan's sincere and patriotic anti-war voice has captured the nation's attention. What the pro-war crowd does not understand is that Cindy Sheehan is not inspiring opposition to the occupation. She is merely putting a face on the mainstream sentiments of a country that has stopped believing the president's promises with regard to Iraq. According to the latest Newsweek poll, 61 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush's handing of the war, while just 26 percent support the president's argument that large numbers of U.S. military personnel should remain in Iraq for as long as it takes to achieve the administration's goals there. The supporters of this war have run out of convincing lies and effective emotional appeals. Now, they are reduced to attacking the grieving mothers of dead soldiers. Samuel Johnson suggested that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. But, with their attacks on Cindy Sheehan, the apologists for George Bush's infamy have found a new and darker refuge. —John Nichols, The Nation -----O----- WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper's e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove's own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994 Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught. —Frank Rich, New York Times -----O----- The Zionist project has always been to construct and then defend a world a Western/ “white” fortress in the Arab/ “dark” world. At the heart of the refusal to allow Palestinians the right of return is the fear of Jewish Israelis that they will eventually be outnumbered by Arabs in Israel. This prospect arouses such strong feelings that Israelis seem not to care that their actions are condemned throughout the world; the Jewish propensity to find atonement has been replaced by pious arrogance and self-righteousness. Their position is not unlike that of the Crusaders when they realized that the Kingdom of Jerusalem they had built in the Holy Land was merely an island in a hostile Islamic world. Or that of the white settlers in Africa, whose enclaves have disappeared more recently, their pretense of being another local tribe shattered. –Ilan Pappe of Haifa University in The New York Review of Books -----O----- Here is the contradiction in the tiny, dark heart of American conservatism: its values are solidly “pro-life,” but its economic policies lean toward death. While upholding the right of each stem cell to blossom into a human, conservatives have curtailed the lives of all multi-cellular citizens—by weakening environmental regulations, for example, and cutting social programs. —Barbara Ehrenreich in The Albuquerque Journal -----O----- American empire cannot forego oil—its control is a geopolitical priority—but strategic and corporate oil interests cannot, in themselves, credibly account for an imperial mission of the sort we have witnessed over the last two years. Rather, what the Iraq adventure represents is less a war for oil than a radical, punitive restructuring of the conditions necessary for expanded profitability—it paves the way, in short, for new rounds of American-led dispossession and capital accumulation. This was a neo-liberal putsch, made in the name of globalization and free market democracy. It was intended as the prototype of a new form of military neo-liberalism. Oil was especially visible at this moment of extra-economic imposition because, as it turned out, oil revenues were key to the planning and financing of the military exercise itself, and to the restructuring of the Iraqi “emerging market.” –From an unsigned article in The London Review of Books -----O----- What would an Iranian nuclear weapon, or the achievement of the capacity to produce one in short order, actually mean? The Iranian regime is on the defensive at home, where it has lost the trust and even the interest, of a large proportion of the people, and in its region, where it fears Israel, and has no friends other than Syria. A long view in Tehran might suggest that events in Iraq may work out in Iran’s favor, and then there are new economic relationships with China and India that could have useful political consequences in the future. But the overwhelming reality for the Tehran regime is the enmity of American and Israel under their present governments, and this is an America that, thanks to Iraq, is now on Iran’s doorstep. That, in these circumstances, an insecure Iranian government might seek to develop a nuclear weapons option, a “bomb in the basement,” would not be surprising. But that once it possessed such a capacity it would use it aggressively is hard to credit. Against Israel, whose response would be devastating? Against the US, except in the event of an American invasion, and then only on the invading forces? The conclusion must be that an Iranian nuclear weapon might constrain Israel and the US a little in their dealings with Iran, but would not threaten them or anybody else.—Martin Woollacott in The Guardian -----O----- The vast amount of suffering and death endured by civilians as a result of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has, for the most part, been carefully kept out of the consciousness of the average American. I can’t think of anything the Bush administration would like to talk about less. You can’t put a positive spin on dead children. As for the press, it has better things to cover than the suffering of civilians in war. The aversion to this topic is at the opposite extreme from the ecstatic journalistic embrace of the death of one pope and the election of another, and the media’s manic obsession with the comings and goings of Martha, Jacko, etc. There’s been hardly any media interest in the unrelieved agony of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq. It’s an ugly subject, and the idea has taken hold that Americans need to be protected from stories or images of the war that might be disturbing. As a nation we can wage war, but we don’t want the public to be too upset about it. —Bob Herbert, in The New York Times -----O----- Most intelligence is worthless, with the scant truthful stuff rapidly deep-sixed. Whatever makes its way onto the desks of presidents or congressional overseers is 100 per cent “political.” Anyone who wants to know what is happening in the world would be better advised to ask a taxi driver. —Alexander Cockburn, in The Nation -----O----- Why does an ideological position become sacrosanct just because it gets labeled as a “value?” There are serious arguments and sincere passions on both sides of the gay-marriage debate. For some reason, the views of those who feel that marriage requires a man and a woman are considered to be a “value, while the views of those who believe that gay relationships deserve the same legal standing as straight ones barely qualifies as an opinion. Those labels don’t confer any logical advantage. But they confer two big advantages in the propaganda war. First, a value just seems inherently more compelling than a mere opinion. That’s a big head start. Second, the holder of a value is more sensitive to slights than the holder of an opinion. An opinion can’t just slug away at a value. It must be solicitous and understanding. A value may tackle an opinion , meanwhile, with no such constraint. —Michael Kinsley, in The Los Angeles Times -----O----- Have all the people in the world but American become invisible to Americans? Torture is not wrong because someone else thinks it is wrong or because others, in retaliation for torture by Americans, may torture Americans. It is the torture that is wrong. Torture is wrong because it inflicts unspeakable pain upon the body of a fellow human being who is entirely at our mercy. The tortured person is bound and helpless. The torturer stands over him with his instruments. There is no question of “unilateral disarmament” because the victim bears no arms, lacking even the use of the two arms he was born with. The inequality is total. To abuse or kill a person in such a circumstance is as radical a denial of common humanity as possible. It is repugnant to learn that a country’s armed forces are engaging in torture. It is worse to learn that the torture in widespread. It is worse still to learn that the torture was rationalized and sanctioned in long memorandums written by people at the highest level of the government. —Oliver Schell in The Nation -----O----- Blowing yourself up for political reasons is a complex symbolic act, one that mixes despair and defiance. It proclaims that even death is preferable to your wretched way of life. The act of self-dispossession writes dramatically large the self-dispossession that is your routine existence. Laying violent hands on yourself is a more graphic image of what your enemy does to you anyway. At the same time, the bomber forces a contrast between the extreme form of self-determination involved in taking his own life and the lack of self determination in his everyday existence. If he could live in the way he dies, he would not need to die. At least his death can be his death, and thus a taste of freedom. The only form of sovereignty left to you is the power to dispose of your own death. Suicide, as Dostoevsky recognized, means the death of God, since you usurp his divine monopoly over life and death. What more breathtaking form of omnipotence than to do away with yourself for all eternity. —Terry Eagleton in The Guardian -----O----- There is still—and I say this with a heart full of sorrow—no Iraqi people but an unimaginable mass of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever. —The late King Feisal of Iraq, spoken in 1933 -----O----- States don’t really mind their citizens dying (provided they don’t do it all at once): They just don’t like anyone else to kill them. —Malcolm Bull in a review in The London Review of Books -----O----- The U.S. is an excellent place to be rich. Back in 1980, the average American chief executive earned forty times the average manufacturing employee. For the top tier of American CEOs, the ratio is now 475:1 and would be vastly greater if assets, not income, were taken into account. By way of comparison, the ratio in Britain is 24:1, in France 15:1, in Sweden 13:1. A privileged minority has access to the best medical treatment in the world. But 45 million Americans have no health insurance at all (of the world’s developed countries only the US and South Africa offer no universal medical coverage.) According to the World Health Organization the United States is number one in health spending per capita—and thirty-seventh in the quality of its service. As a consequence, Americans live shorter lives than Europeans…the US ranks twenty-sixth among industrial nations in infant mortality, with a rate double that of Sweden, higher than Slovenia’s, and only just ahead of Lithuania’s—and this despite spending 15 percent of US gross domestic product on “health care” (much of it siphoned off in the administrative costs of for-profit private networks). —Tony Judt, in The New York Review of Books -----O----- Bush has earned a reputation as the “bubble president” because he is told only what he wants to hear from his staff, exhibits little curiosity about conflicting points of view and is so insulated that only ardent supporters are allowed at his public appearances. A poll suggests that the problem goes deeper still. The bubble president is the preferred choice of bubble people, Americans who are themselves insulated against inconvenient facts and hear only what they want to hear. It is hard to see that as anything but willful self-delusion. Deep in their hearts, many Bush supporters have to know that the pre-war case for invading Iraq has collapsed, leaving us with a looming disaster. But they don’t dare to admit that fact, not to themselves, not to others, and certainly not to a pollster on the telephone. —Jay Bookman in The Atlanta Constitution -----O----- Anything that might be embarrassing to a president is now treated as a national security issue—weakening him, it is said, will hamper his dealings with foreign powers. Unless we treat him as infallible, foes will see him as powerless. Since democracy is impossible without accountability, and accountability is impossible if secrecy hides the acts to be held accountable, making a just war may become impossible for lack of a competent democratic authority to declare it. A president who can make a war of choice, not of necessity, at his pleasure, on the basis of privileged information, treating his critics as enemies of the state, is no longer a surreal fantasy. —Gary Wills in The New York Review of Books -----O----- For more than a decade, radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has taken millions of Americans on a daily excursion that panders to their prejudices, never challenging them to reconsider their ideas, always encouraging them to blame all their problems on identifiable others. The voice leading them on these excursions radiates an aura of certainty, despite the vast ignorance underneath, and shows no scruples about distorting facts to reach a desired conclusion. These daily forays into comforting falsehoods have forged in the minds of millions of Americans a path down which fine-sounding messages unmoored from reality could more readily travel. —Andrew Schmookler in The Baltimore Sun -----O----- [P]eople don’t want to go to war…But, after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship… Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country. —Nazi leader Hermann Goering -----O----- In Cancun last year, the U.S. insisted on keeping subsidies for its cotton producers, thus violating its own advice to Third World countries to abandon state subsidies and open up the market. With torture it’s much the same story. The exemplary economic strategy of today’s capitalism is outsourcing—contracting out the “dirty” process of material production (but also publicity, design, accountancy) to other companies. In this way, it’s easy to circumvent environmental and health legislation; the production takes place in Indonesia, say, where regulations are much less stringent than in the West, and the Western country which owns the logo can claim that it is not responsible for violations by the subcontractor. Torture is nowadays “outsourced” to Third World allies of the U.S. which can practice it without worrying about legal liability or public protest. —Colin Kidd in a review in The London Review of Books -----O----- We talk about the importance of “public opinion” but, for the most part, the public is to ill-informed to have an intelligent opinion about important and complex issues. Most of us are too dumb to understand any of them. It’s John Kerry’s hair we like or George Bush’s ingenuous manner of speaking. We prefer one of their wives over the wife of the other. These are the things that get our vote. —Andy Rooney in Liberal Opinion Week -----O----- In the lead-up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence, and irresponsibility; at worst, lying, incompetence, and corruption. False rationales presented as a justification; a flawed strategy, lack of planning; the unnecessary alienation of our allies; the underestimation of the task; the unnecessary distraction from real threats; the unbearable strain dumped on our overstretched military; all  of these caused me to speak out….I was called a traitor and turncoat by Pentagon officials…. —Retired Lt. General Anthony Zinni -----O----- One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one’s own soul is the failure to recognize the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised, especially if the helpless come to be treated as animals, and degraded. —Al Gore, in a recent public speech -----O----- “We didn’t feel like we were doing things we weren’t supposed to, because we were told to do them,” Lynndie England says. The fact that such orders can be traced back through the highest chain of command will not stop her from becoming a scapegoat…It is hard to keep moralism on a leash. In the case of Iraq, the stakes are even higher because the violations are not those of one or two individuals whom it is easy to hate, but of a group—a group, moreover,  that is meant to embody our national pride. At moments it has felt as if exposing this reality, rather than the reality itself, were the worst offense. Lynndie England and her partners in crime will be despised less for the appalling things they have done than for shattering the complacency of western values, for letting the world see. The lone criminal can be distanced, but not the policies of a government that, democratically elected, represents each and every one of us. We cannot palm our atrocities off on a dictator. —Jacqueline Rose in The London Review of Books -----O----- If a culture has not got beyond the point where the satisfaction of some participants requires the oppression of others, maybe the majority (and this is the case with all contemporary cultures), then, understandably, the oppressed will develop a deep hostility towards a culture that their labor makes possible but in whose commodities they have too small a share. It goes without saying that a culture that fails to satisfy so many of its participants, driving them to rebellion, has no chance of lasting for any length of time, nor does it deserve to. —Sigmund Freud, in The Future of Illusion [1927] -----O----- We cherish the progress in civilization since biblical times and long before. But there is a needed and, indeed, accepted qualification. The U.S. and Britain are in the bitter aftermath of a war in Iraq. We are accepting programmed death for the young and random slaughter for men and women of all ages. So it was in the first and second world wars, and is still so in Iraq. Civilized life, as it is called, is a great white tower, but at the top there is permanently a large black cloud. Human progress dominated by unimaginable cruelty and death. Civilization has made vast strides over the centuries in science, healthcare, the arts, and most, if not all, economic well-being. But it has also given a privileged position to the development of weapons and the threat and reality of war. Mass slaughter has become