Jon Taplin, in his recent article "Don't Know Much About History," argues that right-wing critics such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and their ilk are ignorant of the meaning and history of socialism, and are "passing on ignorance to their audience." If only ignorance really were the problem with those guys, indeed with the entire right wing noise factory, because if it were just ignorance, then maybe a history lesson would bring them back to the table talking sense.

Not only do they not care one whit about history, they could care less about making sense, they could care less about reason and logic, they have no intention of meeting on the battlefield of ideas and working something out. They are actually proud of their ignorance, they see ignorance as a touch of commonality, it's how they communicate with the base, and how the base identifies its constituents. Ignorance is a badge of honor. Outlandish, patently false, alarmist in the extreme and utterly resistant to counter-argument, ignorance is the lingua franca of the right.

In ignorance, no one need be responsible for his arguments, anyone can say anything. As we can see in the statements of right wingers from the lowest to the highest stations of power, making sense, referring to fact and sticking to the truth is actively eschewed. Rather, the further a statement is divorced from reality, the more irresponsible the claim, say for example Sarah Palin's "death panels" comment last weekend, the more loudly it is trumpeted in the media and then taken up by partisans, bounced back to the media, on and on in a spiraling inferno of hot gases. Republicans have made a sport of making outlandish claims and seeing how far they can get them to play across the land.

The danger here, however, is not ignorance per se. The danger, and it's ten times more deadly than ignorance, is the utter abandonment by the right of their responsibility to participate in the dialogue of politics in good faith, examining the facts to the best of their ability and coming to consensus to make laws that serve the best interests of the country and their constituents. They seem to care little about the plight of their constituents and the could care less about the welfare of the country as a whole. 

Democracy was built on the idea that reasonable educated people could make good policy and laws by arguing their views in good faith. Hiding behind ignorance, the right - beginning with Limbaugh and Beck, through Palin and Gingrich and Boener and McConnell, and all the way down to the gun-totin' ignoramuses who threaten death to socialists and their freedom-stifling government - shows bad faith at every ridiculous inflammatory claim. 

The right hides behind a veil of willful ignorance, but their true objective is to scuttle the entire democratic process. In doing so they make government look bad and by keeping the process in chaos they confuse and obscure the will of the people. In the vacuum of a popular consensus big money interests are given opportunities to entice lawmakers to do their bidding. If the health care reform debate is any measure, the right's campaign to disrupt our democracy and confuse the will of the people is succeeding in grand fashion.

IFILL: Let's talk conventional wisdom for a moment. The conventional wisdom, Gov. Palin with you, is that your Achilles heel is that you lack experience. Your conventional wisdom against you is that your Achilles heel is that you lack discipline, Sen. Biden. What id it really for you, Gov. Palin? What is it really for you, Sen. Biden? Start with you, governor.

PALIN: My experience as an executive will be put to good use as a mayor and business owner and oil and gas regulator and then as governor of a huge state, a huge energy producing state that is accounting for much progress towards getting our nation energy independence and that's extremely important.

But it wasn't just that experience tapped into, it was my connection to the heartland of America. Being a mom, one very concerned about a son in the war, about a special needs child, about kids heading off to college, how are we going to pay those tuition bills? About times and Todd and our marriage in our past where we didn't have health insurance and we know what other Americans are going through as they sit around the kitchen table and try to figure out how are they going to pay out-of-pocket for health care? We've been there also so that connection was important.

But even more important is that world view that I share with John McCain. That world view that says that America is a nation of exceptionalism. And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said, that we are a beacon of hope and that we are unapologetic here. We are not perfect as a nation. But together, we represent a perfect ideal. And that is democracy and tolerance and freedom and equal rights. Those things that we stand for that can be put to good use as a force for good in this world.

John McCain and I share that. You combine all that with being a team with the only track record of making a really, a difference in where we've been and reforming, that's a good team, it's a good ticket.

Not long ago, former senator and McCain economic adviser Phil Gramm famously told us that America has become “a nation of whiners.” This week the whiners came out in force. On Monday House Republicans began whining loudly about how mean Nancy Pelosi was, in a speech before the failed bailout vote, for citing the Republican Party’s culpability in bringing about the financial meltdown that was rocking Wall Street and the world. Graham himself, as chair of the Senate Banking Committee, had played a major part in the collapse through his reckless deregulation policies over the years. Now here were his colleagues whining plaintively about how harsh it was to hear the truth. Being scolded by Nancy Pelosi was unacceptable, it just wasn’t bipartisan. They picked up their toys and went home, leaving the bailout deal undone.

So let’s see. Republicans have for decades now been saying nasty, often exaggerated or altogether untrue, things about Democrats, turning the very word “liberal” into some kind of hideous epithet. Republicans have been using demeaning, offensive, disrespectful and downright anti-democratic tactics to pass laws (or evade them), but when the Democrats get a little fresh by actually pointing out how Republican  foolishness has gotten us into this mess, they start pouting and forget the seriousness of their work. Perhaps they never really took the work all that seriously in the first place.

Phil Gramm, we have seen your whiners and they are y’all.

While the media stir up a dust cloud chasing the tail of the next president’s Iraq strategy story it strikes me that for any candidate to commit to a strategy would be premature if not foolhardy for several reasons. In the first place January 2009 is a long way away, and any strategic plan would have to be loosely arranged to accomodate the changing situation in Iraq for implementation somewhere around March at the very earliest (giving six weeks for the new president to digest unvarnished information and roll out a plan). 

But far more importantly, are not both Senators McCain and Obama working with the same historically thin and stilted information the Bush administration has controlled and released at its whim since before the invasion? Whether it's cherry-picked NIE's, unaccounted-for billions invested in secret bases around the country (how smart will it look to leave those behind now that we've spent all that money on them?), or simply the Bush administration's ongoing efforts to classify and control all information to maximize political gain, why would anyone trust the available Bush-filtered information as a basis for sound policy? Trying to construct good strategy from bad information is foolish. 

Finally, as the Bush administration began to tip its hand last year showing its Stay-in-Iraq-Forever plan, clearly this is a political strategy where Bush's successor will be "stuck carrying Bush's turd", as a TPM commenter so succinctly put it. Given Bush's propensity for controlling information, it would be naive to think that Bush isn't trying to make things look as rosy as possible through the end of his term, hoping to make all blame for failure to achieve VICTORY fall on his successor. A wise policymaker would leave lots of room for adjustment (“recalibration”) for any strategy that hoped to deal with Bush’s stinking legacy in Iraq.

All this talk about strategy pisses me off. Devising an effective strategy in Iraq begins the day Bush leaves office. Wouldn't Obama be better off emphasizing his general principle that the American occupation in Iraq is the problem not the solution? There could be no clearer distinction between him and McCain than that. And rather than be suckered into devising a strategic plan based on Bush's lies and subject himself to the slings and arrows of a thousand armchair patriots, Obama could draw attention to Bush's malfeasance (and McCain's ostensible continuation of such) and pledge that his administration would use of intelligence and information to make good policy, not good politics.

Ted Bucklin

Conservative vandals are on the march again, this time hoping to do to “liberal” academia what they’ve been so successful in doing to the “liberal” mainstream media – destroy the entire institution by planting seeds of conservative antipathy within. The president of Colorado University has announced a new nine million dollar endowment for a Visiting Chair of Conservative Thought and Policy (upward of $200K/yr.) to “add diversity of thought and scholarship,” according to a CU spokesman.

CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT! Hahahahah, that's a good one. If thought is an activity based on logic, using commonly agreed upon methods such as those taught in universities, stressing fact over wishful thinking and intellectual rigor over name-calling, then I'm afraid there's nothing to teach about conservative thought, it never happens.

Conservatives see it as a problem with the institutions of education and journalism that so many teachers and journalists are "liberal."  Indeed, of 825 professors at CU, only 23 are registered Republicans. Teachers and journalists tend to be liberal because the values and practices of teaching and journalism accord well with the values of liberalism. To wit: love of ideas, commitment to principles of academic rigor and objective truth, compassion for fellow human beings of all stripes, and willingness to sacrifice for the common good (that's what teachers do in this country). These are all principles that are toxic to the conservative world view.

And conservatives are so insecure about this unfair imbalance that they would rather destroy the institutions (as they already have the news media, and now seek to do to academe) than look into the mirror and see their own anti-intellectual, anti-humanist, self-aggrandizing qualities, the very qualities that make them so rare in academia and journalism.

Perhaps saddest of all, conservatives are suspicious of academia. To begin with, for mysterious reasons, well-educated people tend to be liberal. In addition, conservatives believe that (liberal) educators are secretly trying to indoctrinate students against the conservative creed, just as they believe that liberal journalists write the news to suit their political ends. But ultimately conservatives don't believe in professional education (or journalism) because they themselves are not willing to submit to its tenets. It’s not liberal ideology but the simple practice of rigorous thought and commitment to truth that keeps conservatives out of the loop. And now they're trying to buy their way in with a well-funded department of conservative thought.

The paucity of conservatives at CU and other liberal arts programs is not due to a liberal bias among teachers against conservatives, but because of conservatives themselves. Conservatives just don’t like academia and its rules. They want their views to be taken seriously, but they really aren’t too interested in thought. Maybe instead of trying to infiltrate existing schools, they should branch out and start an entirely conservative approach to education. They could call it indoctrination. And mixed with a little religious dogma, it’d be unstoppable. 

Republican Presidential candidate John McCain announced yesterday that the US is no longer "staring into the abyss of defeat” in Iraq. When McCain was later asked what kind of topography would best describe the situation in Iraq, he said it looks much more like a “chasm of quagmire” and he challenged anyone to deny that that wasn’t proof that the surge is working. “I’ll tell you one thing,” McCain said testily, “I’d much prefer to be looking into a chasm of quagmire than staring into an abyss of defeat.”

This week Allen Raymond, author of the just-released "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative," about his misadventures in the New Hampshire phone-jamming and other political scams, is all over the country and all over the airwaves these days talking about his book. While he served three months in prison for his crimes in New Hampshire, it is hard to say whether he suffers any remorse for his actions. In fact, in his discussion on TPM Café he actively dismisses any moral culpability, saying in essence morality is for chumps, not part of the discourse in hard-knuckled political campaigning.

To his credit, Raymond accepts responsibility for breaking the law, but in his curt dismissal of morality he lays bare the sickening delusion that informs the entire framework of conservative ideology from the trenches of electoral combat to the loftiest heights of policymaking. In the conservative universe all politics is war, and in war moral consideration is a handicap, principles are for losers. There is but one consideration: winning. As Raymond says, he was “hired to engineer victory…. morality was not a luxury to be afforded candidates or their staff.”

Allen Raymond and conservatives in general take comfort in not having to judge their individual actions in a moral/ethical light, for they have another imperative to judge themselves by: victory. This is just another “ends-justify-the-means” formulation, nothing new in the affairs of man, but conservatives have reconfigured the moral calculus to where morality is now a function more of identity than of actions and behavior. As members of the moral army, defending “Christian Family Values,” promoting the Ten Commandments or any other standard of God-sanctioned virtue, individual soldiers need not consider the morality of their actions, for they clearly, in spite of an occasional venality, are fighting for the good. Besides, in war stuff happens.

Blanket absolution for warriors, too, is nothing new in the affairs of man, but it is a bit surprising how adamant and successful this strategy of undeclared war has been for Republicans in helping them garner political power, if not policy success. Practically every Republican initiative is couched in the language of war, or is itself a literal war. And the battlefield is littered with Republican warriors who have been caught up in serious ethical compromise and who yet have emerged from the fires of scandal, Terminator-like, ready to take the fight to the enemy, from Dick Cheney to Alberto Gonzales to Larry Craig, and seemingly hundreds more. Every one of them is proudly unabashed by, if not utterly ignorant of, their personal moral failings.

Allen Raymond says “morality is the domain of organized religion, … but not government,” forgetting individual moral responsibility altogether. He demonstrates the moral development of a child. In a civilized society of adults, questions of the morality of one’s behavior are always in play at every level. And as an officer of an institution, whether church or government, one is responsible for upholding the letter of the laws they represent in exemplary fashion. This is a moral imperative, one that Republicans, in their unbridled disdain for government, have ignored at the peril of our democracy.

Conservative ideology in fact reverses the moral imperative of honorable conduct in high office, substituting it with a creed of selfishness. As Alan Raymond so aptly puts it “the bright line of the law [is to] be taunted but not crossed. Anybody who has a problem with that or doesn’t get it doesn’t understand America. America is about self interest, within the rule of law.” Conservatives have jettisoned the concept of personal responsibility, and in particular personal morality, for the sake of winning a war of self-interest they have silently declared against anyone who does not agree with them.

Rather than defend and uphold the parameters of any law or moral convention, conservative warriors look for advantage “taunting” the outer limits of what’s permissible. Rather than a paragon of the laws they represent, conservatives act like criminals looking for enforcement loopholes, they push the boundaries with all the zeal and sophistication of a two-year old who won’t accept the word “NO.” From corporate boardrooms to the halls of government, from Ken Lay to the subprime mortgage mess, from the Gonzales Justice Department to the “War” President, it’s all about taunting the law rather than respecting it. It’s all about winning. This is not a war of ideas; ideas require respectful discourse between adversaries. This is simply a war, waged by people who are convinced they are right and who respond to disagreement as an act of war.

We often hear from across the political spectrum people decrying “the bitter partisan divide in Washington.” But no one, neither pundit nor politician, seems to have a clue as to why this is happening. The answer is War. While conservatives would never have the courage to openly declare war, they prefer casting themselves as victims of others’ aggressions, it is their war that is the source of so much bitterness. Our democracy was built on the idea that respectful discourse and compromise among adversaries is the way to create a nation of laws. The conservative blitzkrieg on our government would spit on the notion of respect for their adversaries and actively frustrates the spirit of compromise through filibuster, signing statements, and outright disregard for the rule of law. These are bitter pills to swallow for anyone who still cares about democracy in America.

Today’s National Intelligence Estimate depicts the Iraqi government of Nouri al Maliki as in deep trouble, unlikely to overcome crippling sectarian differences and unlikely to meet US mandated benchmarks for political reform and progress. This, even as many top-level US officials including Democrat Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and many Bush administration officials, report the “surge” is yielding positive results in many places around Baghdad and elsewhere and deserves to be extended.

Let us consider these two assessments, the first political, and the second military, separately before we presume to make a policy determination regarding what to do in Iraq.

We begin with the military assessment, since it is commonly stated that the purpose of the surge is to create calm for Iraq so that it can proceed with political resolutions to its ongoing problems. First of all, a report of some moderate progress is perhaps heartening for many Americans, particularly for President Bush, whose entire legacy rests on something positive coming out of his misadventure in Iraq. Also, for those eager to show that they support the troops, it’s nice to have something to say that acknowledges the positive outcomes for all the hard work and sacrifice our soldiers have made. Certainly, no matter how true it might be, saying that the “surge” or any other aspect of our military exercises in Iraq is failing will be loudly protested in the US as anti-troop, or treasonous if you’re Karl Rove. So while “modest progress” may be a soothing palliative for Americans sick of this war, it does little or nothing to meet the needs or boost the hopes of Iraqis living amid the chaos in their country.

Let’s be realistic. What use are “signs of moderate progress” against the truly disastrous situation throughout Iraq and beyond. The American invasion has so terribly stirred up the hornet’s nest of centuries of sectarian animosities while destroying Iraqi society, modest progress just ain’t going to do it. Gone are such bulwarks of social welfare as a functioning economy, military and police forces to maintain civic order, institutions of justice, health care, education, food, water, sewage, electricity. All are barely functioning, or worse, contributing to the tensions or being targeted by militants and blown to bits. What is needed is not moderate progress but a blinding stupendous miracle, something on the order of religious détente between Sunnis and Shias. Short of a miraculous turnaround, all our efforts, all our interventions and modest gains are merely postponing the gathering storm.

Of all the powerful assets the US has in its arsenal, none is more powerful than the asset Iraqi militants have in infinite supply: time. While our troops rush about the country putting out fires, calming tensions in disparate neighborhoods, our adversaries can bide their time waiting for opportunities to stir up tensions across the whole country with a single act of violence. One well-placed bomb can undo a month’s worth of modest progress. Ultimately, no matter what patchwork peace we can cobble together for Iraq, once we’ve left the country, one year or ten years from now, after the celebrations over ridding the country of the invaders, Iraqi adversaries who have been at each others’ throats for a thousand years or more will still have to work out their differences. Ten years is not a long time to wait.

In sum, no matter what grand military victory we might pull off in Iraq, it is unlikely to have any effect on the simmering, infinitely complex web of tensions that suffuse Iraq save to perhaps squelch them temporarily. And even if there were areas of calm, swaths of moderate progress such as we may be seeing in Fallujah these days, the police chief there reported last week how terribly fragile and vulnerable that calm is. This is a problem no application of US military force can repair, at least not in Iraq.

That’s the report of five US soldiers in the New York Times last Sunday, concluding after 15 months of operations in several military branches across several regions of Iraq that there’s nothing of ultimate value that can be gained by continuing the “surge” or any other US military operations there. Somehow, I find the conclusions of those who are actually carrying out the “surge” more convincing than those of a president who categorically denies the existence of bad news, those of a Senator who spent two days looking at the very best scenarios the US military could orchestrate, or even those of the Times reporters O’Hanlon and Pollack who spent eight days recently as guests of DOD in Iraq before writing a cautiously optimistic op-ed about giving the surge a chance.

Which brings us to the political situation. What better measure of US military success in Iraq than progress on the political front in the Iraqi government? After all, even Commander in Iraq David Petraeus insists that there is only a political solution to Iraq’s troubles, to which military operations play but a supporting role. Today’s NIE showers the al Maliki government with doom and gloom, as have President Bush, Senator Levin, and others over just the past couple of days, calling into question al Maliki’s fitness to continue presiding. These pronouncements, while accurately portraying the political troubles faced by al Maliki’s government, promote fallacies fitted to the American political framework, and serve American political aims while ignoring Iraqi reality. To wit, as in America where we resolve political discontents by replacing the commander in chief every few years, Iraq’s problems are entirely a function of poor leadership and could be resolved simply by replacing al Maliki with a less divisive, more effective leader.

Once again, the unspoken assumption here is that in a miraculous stroke of good fortune, some super-president will ascend to that high office and quell the unrest and bring stability to Iraq. Nothing less than a surprise appearance by the Prophet Mohammed would suffice (and even the prophet himself would have a hard time patching up Iraq’s wounds). Unfortunately for everyone, we’re stuck with a list of less than divine candidates. And beyond that, even with a perfect president at the helm, the Iraqi government itself is nearly powerless to soothe the outrage and hopelessness that clutters the Iraqi political landscape.

Is it more than a little baffling that the first replacement candidate floated out by American conservatives is none other than Ayad Allawi, who has already once been President of Iraq but failed to bring the disparate parties together in the first go-round? What kind of miracle are we to expect from this retread?

Even more disturbing about this recent tack against al Maliki is that it is an obvious effort by President Bush to find a new way to postpone judgment and prevent serious alternatives to his “stay-the-course” strategy. Replacing al Maliki would require of us yet another suspension of disbelief while we allow the new guy a chance to make the difference, locking in another “stay-the-course” extension as we come ever closer to the end of President Bush’s term.

The idea that a new president will make a decided difference in Iraqi politics is bunk. Anyone worthy of consideration has made numerous alignments and affiliations to gain and consolidate power that are sure to alienate just enough Iraqi interest groups to essentially paralyze his government, just as al Maliki and the Iraqi parliament are now.

The problem is not the president of Iraq, the problem is Iraq itself. Whatever we might wish we could do, there simply is very little the US can do, military or otherwise, to help pull Iraq out of the chaos our invasion has unleashed. It is an intractable situation, where even our most noble efforts (such as they are) are easily undone by our adversaries.

For now we are stuck with a President Bush whose main objective in the war in Iraq is to craft his policies to impress American voters (without much luck, apparently), bully his Democratic opponents into inaction (very successfully), and to insure that historians will see the American mis-adventure in Iraq as a bipartisan disaster (we’ll see). The one group President Bush’s policies have never sought to impress, the Iraqi people, is the one group that will someday determine the political future of Iraq.

To make political progress in Iraq, what’s needed is not hope among the political classes in America but hope among the people in Iraq. It’d be nice to see an American strategy that actually seeks to bring hope to Iraq, not another delaying tactic, not another meaningless change in government, and not more bombs, more bullets, more fighting, more senseless death. That would itself be a miracle.

- Ted Bucklin

Have you ever stopped to consider the sheer majesty of the words “Commander in Chief?” The word “commander” practically leaps out of the page, demanding fealty and awe, perhaps a crisp salute. “In Chief,” while bordering on the redundant, in this case implies an almost impossibly high office. With its military overtones and unimpeachable executive dominance, the phrase demands acquiescence of those who stand before it.

And these days many Americans have the opportunity to be reminded of the power of this phrase, particularly by the president himself, who is fond of using it to add throw-weight to his magisterial pronouncements. In fact, as President Bush’s credibility diminishes, he is ever more insistent that by virtue of his being “Commander in Chief” we must take him seriously.

Unfortunately, it appears that many Americans would bow before his majestic title rather than judge the seriousness of the man who claims it. Whether it be the force of his logic, which commands the attention of almost no one, his veracity, which frequently strays beyond the boundaries of plausibility, or the outcomes of his many crumbling policy initiatives, of which the Iraq disaster is but the most egregious example among many, it is clear that the president’s only remaining majesty is in his title. Which is why he keeps deploying it like a bunker buster bomb, blasting away at mountains of doubt about his performance as commander in chief.

Perhaps his most egregious misuse of the title is when he invokes it to remind us that as supreme commander of our military forces, he is also the supreme military strategist whose access to all channels of intelligence and expert counsel makes him alone qualified to choose the course for our legions in Iraq and elsewhere. Time and again he has dismissed questions, dissenting views, the recommendations of experts including his own generals, by hiding behind the screen of his official powers, without once addressing the depressing consistency with which his strategies have led to worsening conditions and outright failure. President Bush seems to believe that his status as Commander in Chief makes him infallible, beyond reproach, and his performance irrelevant.

America, and in particular the news media, needs to reach through the imposing artifice of the president’s title and remind President Bush of his humble office as citizen of the United States, answerable to the principles of democracy and to the questions of the people he represents.

-Ted Bucklin

February 12, 2007

Dear Congressperson,

I’m writing because I am concerned about the state of affairs in our country. The situation in Iraq captures the headlines, and it is indeed a horrendous situation that needs our attention, but it is not simply the crisis in Iraq but rather the crisis in the United States that we must address. Call me Chicken Little, but I think our democracy is in extreme peril. There is no time to lose in checking the erosion that has already significantly damaged the principles and institutions of our once proud nation.

President Bush and his administration have demonstrated time and again their utter disdain for democratic principles in making policy, they show repeatedly their contempt for the rule of law, and they reject out of hand the reasoned counsel of anyone, be it intelligence agencies, scientists, policy experts, bipartisan panels hired to make recommendations, and perhaps most significantly, the will of the American voters.

There is, of course, a certain amount of flexibility in our political system that forgives even transgressions such as those listed above. However, I believe when the sum of all Executive Branch misdemeanors over the past six years is added up, the challenge to our Constitutional system is unmistakable and grave. To fail to challenge this assault leaves our Constitution vulnerable to irreparable damage. The problem for leaders such as yourself is that it is difficult to judge when to stand up to such transgressions. After all, President Bush will be out of office in a matter of days (six hundred and some to go).

At this point, the problem is not President Bush himself, it is the erosion of our “sacred” democratic principles, the destruction of our whole system of governance that he has unleashed and we, by our inaction and tepid measures to counteract, sanction. What makes me feel that we as a country (and as a member of a community of nations) are in great peril is the recklessness with which President Bush pursues his policies even as evidence and wise counsel (most succinctly expressed in an op-ed in the Feb. 11 issue of the Washington Post by retired Lt. General William Odom) piles up that contradict and demonstrate the folly of his policies. A sober assessment of the Bush administration’s policies, especially but not limited to a close look at what they say and do about the situation in Iraq, can only be characterized as madness. And Iraq is but an illustration of how they approach all policy questions, from the economy to the environment to international affairs.

The president’s Iraq policies are truly insane. While the NIE, to which Bush has had unfettered access since long before the first time the words “surge” fell from his lips, expresses unequivocal disdain for the notion that our troops can effect a positive outcome in Baghdad much less Iraq as a whole, Bush pushes on with a policy that experts along with the American people have clearly said they don’t think will work and they don’t support it. Even more disturbing is how Bush seems bent on provoking Iran into war, an eventuality that none but the most deluded among us can think of as a good thing. Rather, much in the way the Iraq adventure appeared foolish from the outset, a military confrontation with Iran would be not just foolish but terribly destructive to our interests and contrary to our values. A sober assessment of Bush policies over the entire duration of his presidency shows the same pattern in every aspect of his governance. It is a pattern that is toxic to American democracy.

We can no longer look at Bush’s policies as a benign quirk of an odd man who happens to be our president. We can no longer see the broad front of assaults upon our cherished democratic values, against social equity and equanimity, against the rule of law, domestic and international, against the primacy of reason in governance, against the will of the majority as expressed in the vote and in Congress, as disparate transgressions. They must be seen for the complete set of rewritten values and principles that the Bush administration is imposing upon our nation, regardless of what we Americans would wish or vote. As such, I believe it is no longer tenable to approach this assault upon the most sacrosanct tenets of our nation employing the normal “collegial” approach to lawmaking and Congressional oversight. Congress must recognize the fundamental anti-democratic value system that informs practically every significant move made by the Bush Administration and act to counter it forcefully and without remorse.

Julius Caesar stood upon the banks of the Rubicon River and pondered his future. Not crossing the river was repugnant to Caesar because in staying, he would leave the fate of Rome in the hands of incompetents. I think the US Congress (and the American public) stands at the banks of its own Rubicon. Would that the choices were clearer. Would that America’s dedication to the principles of democracy was more informed and more steadfast. Nevertheless, I feel there is a compelling need for dramatic action, if only to force the question into the limelight: Do we choose democracy, do we defend the principles upon which our nation was founded, or do we allow those principles to be watered down, abnegated, ignored at the whim and convenience of our supposed protectors? I, for one, am far more concerned about the anti-democratic forces in our government than I am about any threats from the Middle East.

The Executive Branch of the United States Government is currently demolishing our democratic system, unchecked by its bicameral counterweight in Congress, unless you consider non-binding resolutions and pledges to investigate malfeasance as some kind of meaningful response. I realize that politics is a slow game of chess-like moves and countermoves, drawn out by the chatter among the media heavyweights, as the public is invited to be confused about how to evaluate all this. I think it’s time to move beyond politics into heroics, some kind of high-stakes, make-it-or-break-it commitment to repulse this anti-democratic surge in our country. It’s not as if we need more evidence that high crimes and misdemeanors are being committed at the highest levels of government. From torture and utter disregard for the rule of law, to statements from the Attorney General dismissing habeas corpus and other foundational legal precepts, from corporate and CPA malfeasance to the strategic and international diplomatic nightmare that is now and has been since our first bombs fell in Iraq, from recent brazen politically-motivated replacements at top federal attorney positions to vote tampering to intelligence manipulation to lies and misrepresentations and malfeasance and bad-faith acts at every level, Congress increasingly looks like Nero fiddling over a conflagration.

Perhaps most disturbing of all to me is how President Bush appears literally deluded in his “new” strategy for Iraq. Is there anything more frightening than a violent madman with an unlimited arsenal?

Congress must find a way to reset the nation’s course toward a sensible and sane horizon, and I believe a business-as-usual approach is at this point tantamount to capitulation to the Executive’s plan for America. Indeed the current administration is taking full advantage of the ponderous pace of normal political discourse with an anti-democracy blitzkrieg that has outflanked all normal political safeguards, including, or perhaps especially, Congressional powers. As the President mounts his final, obviously doomed offensive in Iraq, preparing to waste lives and treasure for foolhardy reasons, while recklessly taunting Iran to join us on the battlefield, I can think of no more corrupt or morally bankrupt scenario in the history of our great nation, and the strategic outcomes that are likely to result from this truly insane scheme will drag at our heels for generations to come.

As my representative in Congress I urge you to take extraordinary action to counter this ongoing desecration of my democracy. The Bush Administration has changed the rules of play in government. For Congress to try to repel the Bush onslaught with “by the book” strategies would be as futile as throwing foreign soldiers into a roiling civil war. It is time for an innovative and fierce defense of our precious democratic principles before they are corrupted beyond repair.