Arthur Silber on aging and the HOPE that Rev. Wright brings

Choosing Sides (I): "Why America May Go to Hell," and Feeling Young Again

{Amen, as always Arthur. AMEN.}

I am profoundly in Jeremiah Wright's debt. He has reinvigorated my spirit, strengthened certain dwindling resources of mine, and made me feel young again.

It is often noted that many people become more conservative as they age. The opposite is true in my case. Over the last three or four years in particular, I have become more and more radical. I once described my political beliefs as libertarian in nature -- although, I hasten to add and I think the record will show, my libertarianism was of the genuine and serious variety, as opposed to the utterly phony libertarianism that will be found in today's culture, and especially among many bloggers. I opposed the very dangerous authoritarianism of the Bush administration from the time I began blogging in September 2002, and I opposed the invasion of Iraq before it began. I always recognized that the corporatist-authoritarian state at home and an aggressively and violently interventionist foreign policy are inextricably linked, that they are but the two faces of the same coin. But as my political-cultural critique has hopefully deepened, my political views altered. I now describe myself as a leftist-anarchist: the leftist part of the description designates the cultural-economic-historical-political perspective I try to employ, while the anarchist label indicates that I view the State as the primary problem. As I have said (and I will have more to say about this at some point), I view anarchism as useful in theory only at this point, although the theory is of immense importance. Until and unless a critical number of individuals alter the primary motives that move most people (the desire for power and control, and the demand for obedience, being chief among them), any state of affairs approximating anarchism will lead only to more chaos and death. If humanity manages to evolve through several more stages, which assumes we don't kill ourselves in huge numbers in the meantime (a fragile hope, indeed), then peaceful anarchism might have a chance.

I will be 60 tomorrow. Most of my readers are probably considerably younger than I am. I'm sorry to tell you that some of the standard cliches about aging are true. I have absolutely no idea how the hell I arrived at the age of 60. It seems only yesterday that I was a teenager who skipped school, and finally dropped out of high school altogether (twice!), so that I could go to the Metropolitan Opera five or six times a week. Subsequently, I acceded to the demands of convention, took the high school equivalency exam, got a B.A. from NYU and still later, in my thirties, got a law degree. In the course of my life, I studied intensively to become a concert pianist, and then an opera singer. I was an actor for the better part of a decade. I've worked in the film industry, and as a civil litigator. About ten years ago, through a complicated and terribly painful series of events, I said to hell with all of it. Today, my life is much as it was when I was a teenager who loved opera more than anything in the world: I've dropped out of "the system" almost completely. I have as little to do with the State as possible. I ask for nothing from the State, and I can only hope the State will demand nothing from me. Of course, the State can choose to demand everything from me whenever it wishes, and I will be close to helpless before its onslaught. Yes, freedom is a wonderful thing. I wish we had it. (If the State were to demand everything from me, there is almost nothing they would get since I have almost nothing, except for my life. Although I well understand that my life is of less than no interest to the State, it remains of some certain value to me, even now.)

Physically, I feel very, very old. Given current medical technology, it's very likely I would not have to feel so old at 60, except that my poverty means I can't avail myself of any of that technology. So my rotten health means that I feel more like 130. Yet it feels churlish to me to complain too much about the wreck that passes for my body. It also seems like only yesterday that I moved from New York to Los Angeles. But I moved here exactly 30 years ago, in 1978. I've lived half my life in Los Angeles. I didn't come out as a gay man until after I moved to L.A. (Some of that geographical and psychological journey is described here, in an essay from 2003, written when I was about to turn 55.) In the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s, I made many friends and acquaintances in the gay community. Most of my friends from that time are dead now. They began dying around 1984, and they didn't stop dying regularly and in large numbers for a decade. I felt like a very old man while I was still in my thirties, as did all my friends. We expect to see our friends start to die when we arrive at, well, 60 or so. We don't expect it several decades earlier. This is my second time at this rodeo. Once would have been enough.

I do my best to ignore my health altogether. On some days, I can't, because I feel too lousy. But it's pointless to dwell on it, so I try to set it aside. And here's the interesting, and wonderful, thing: psychologically, I feel much younger than I did 30 years ago. I think I know more, and I think I understand much more. Even though I can control next to nothing in my physical existence, I feel very much in control psychologically and intellectually. That's a great gift, one for which I am deeply grateful.

But many of the subjects that I discuss here are exceedingly grim. Sometimes, it gets to be far more than I can bear, so I need to leave it alone for a while. But then, something completely unexpected turns up. A Jeremiah Wright appears on the scene. He causes me to feel more radicalized than ever, and I feel young again. Reverend Wright has performed an invaluable service, for those able to recognize and appreciate it. He has spoken a number of truths of critical importance -- see here and here for some background on that. And he has also caused a number of people to reveal themselves as significant frauds. I refer, of course, to many liberals and progressives, especially white liberals and progressives. When the moment of testing arrived, many liberals and progressives denounced Wright in terms that are indistinguishable from those employed by writers at National Review, or people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. You would think it might trouble these self-proclaimed liberals and progressives that they find themselves in such company, but it doesn't. This is useful information. Thanks, Reverend.

(I must note that this phenomenon is hardly restricted to white liberals and progressives, and I'm not referring only to awful conservative-"libertarian" blacks of the Larry Elder variety. Bob Herbert is often wonderful on subjects such as our inhumane prison system and torture, but take a look at Bob Herbert on Wright. "[T]he histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago." "The idea that [Wright's] nonsense may shape the outcome of this election is both tragic and absurd." Herbert has been an op-ed columnist at The New York Times since 1993. The Times is one of the leading voices of the existing power structure. That power structure is, from a cultural and historical perspective, an affluent, immensely privileged, white power structure. It not only propagandizes for the U.S. government and cheerleads the U.S.'s wars of aggression; it also seeks to enforce the permissible terms of debate, terms that are suffocatingly and immorally constricted. With regard to this controversy, Herbert has chosen sides -- and he has not chosen the side of truth and justice.)

I have briefly mentioned the ways in which the views and actions of Martin Luther King have been sanitized, defanged, neutralized and made "acceptable" to mainstream American opinion. In that connection, you should read this interview with Jonathan Walton. This excerpt will give you a start:

Let's talk about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Martin Luther King. Some of Wright's critics have contrasted his approach to that of King, who they portray as using reconciliation rather than confrontation. Is that an accurate portrayal of King? Is that an accurate portrayal of Wright?

No to both. It's a mythic portrayal of King, a nostalgic portrayal of King -- because King was accused and vilified for being controversial, actually more controversial than Jeremiah Wright.

Didn't King become more radical in the course of his career, in the period leading up to his assassination?

It was largely because of the fact that he moved from civil rights to human rights. One of King's famous quotes after desegregation laws had been passed was that he began to find out that it mattered little if African-Americans -- he said Negroes, of course -- have the right to eat at the counter if they don't have a dollar to spend at the lunch counter.

In response to my question before, you said that portraying King as having a message of reconciliation and Wright having a message of confrontation or subversion was not accurate. You've explained how King's approach wasn't purely about reconciliation.

It was about reconciliation. But just because it was about reconciliation doesn't mean that he wasn't confrontational. King believed in nonviolent, direct confrontation. And thus when we come marching through the town, we are trying to expose inequality and expose violence. And if you practice nonviolent confrontation, you morally shame your opponent toward moral suasion. And when you shame them toward moral suasion, it's not to defeat your opponent, but to reunite with your opponent. You're trying to make them ashamed of themselves, so they will turn from their wicked ways. These are all Gospel principles.

Essentially you're saying Wright uses that same approach.

Wright ain't necessarily King. Wright sees himself in that tradition. King was very much in the tradition of the African-American jeremiad. And that is where he would call out the sins of the nation so the nation would live up to its ideals and its promises. That's how King saw himself. But that's not how people looked at King. On April 4, 1967, King stood in front of the Riverside Church and said that if America does not change its ways, America, if you continue to be so prideful, God will tear down this nation, and rise up another nation that doesn't even know my name.

It was his "God damn America" moment, except there wasn't YouTube.

It was his God damn America moment. And the Sunday after King was assassinated, do you know what King was scheduled to preach that Sunday morning? His sermon title was "Why America May Go to Hell."

It is only one of the many calumnies heaped on Wright's head that the mythical, non-existent King is used to condemn him. There is no question that, if King were to reappear among us and speak as he did in the last few years of his life, he would be vilified and loathed in terms at least as harsh as those now directed at Wright. This is to not even mention what some of these same liberals and progressives might say about certain of the views of radicals such as Thomas Jefferson. As I often note these days, we are drowning in lies. Yet it is still no small wonder that this entire conversation about Wright, King, et al. proceeds in the almost complete absence of a discussion of what Wright has actually said, just as no one seems to remember what King actually said.

Among the more dishonest and ignorant reactions to Wright's comments are the reactions to his statements concerning AIDS. Consider this further excerpt from the Salon interview:

What about his statement about -- and he repeated it again on Monday -- about the U.S. government putting the AIDS virus in the African-American community?

Some may regard that as a trope for known, unjust practices, unjust medical practices against people of color.

Such as in Tuskegee?

Such as the Tuskegee experiments. Or America's complicity in Agent Orange. Or the American government's longtime denial of Gulf War syndrome. So that kind of becomes a rhetorical trope which is a heuristic shorthand for all of that -- for a failed healthcare system in America and failure to do anything about it. And while people may viscerally disagree with Rev. Wright's claim there, and while it may be clearly undocumented and unfounded, you're also talking about a man who had an HIV/AIDS outreach ministry to African-Americans, as well as gays and lesbians, in the 1980s, when the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, wouldn't even say the word in public.

Please note that Reverend Wright "had an HIV/AIDS outreach ministry to African-Americans, as well as gays and lesbians, in the 1980s." While my own experience means this carries special significance for me, this is a staggeringly great and unusual achievement, one deserving of the deepest admiration from every decent human being.

I've discussed some of the historical background that helps to explain Wright's AIDS commentary. Let's discuss it a bit more, and try to break through the wall of comfortable denial erected by almost all Americans, including many liberals and progressives. From Margaret Kimberley:

The name Josef Mengele is so infamous that it needs no introduction. Mengele was the German doctor who performed medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. An American doctor, James Marion Sims was equally monstrous, but his name is less well known.

Sims was a doctor who routinely performed unnecessary and sadistic surgeries on slaves in Alabama. He opened the skulls of babies and performed gynecological surgeries on women. They were forced to endure unimaginable treatments, all without the ether that had by then become available as an anesthetic. Of course, being enslaved people, they had no choice in any decisions that Sims made about their bodies or their lives.

Sims allegedly sought to treat vaginal fistulas caused by complications of child birth. One woman underwent this treatment, without anesthesia, 30 times. He obviously didn't cure her of anything.

Because Sims' victims were black Americans their stories remained largely untold. They were not the first or the last black Americans to be subjected to what can only be called torture in the name of scientific investigation. Sims is called "the father of gynecology" and eventually became president of the American Medical Association. He has been immortalized in a monument that still stands in New York's Central Park.

...

A newly published book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, is a comprehensive chronicle of surgeries performed without anesthesia, the notorious Tuskegee experiments that prevented 400 men from being treated for syphilis over a 40 year period, and forced sterilizations.

Harriet Washington, the author of Medical Apartheid, has performed an invaluable service. White Americans love to point fingers at Germans who won't apologize for Hitler, or Japanese who claim that the rape of Nanking didn't take place. There is little interest in acknowledging, much less apologizing for atrocities that took place on American soil.

History tells us that torture and murder are considered acceptable if the perpetrators are white and the victims aren't. The population of American Indians was decimated from an estimated 15 million before European occupation to 200,000 in 1890. Simply put, they were murdered. They were shot and scalped and infected with disease. Millions of Africans taken into slavery in Africa perished before reaching the western hemisphere where they faced the prospect of being the property of Dr. Sims and his ilk.

The litany of atrocities documented in Medical Apartheid shocks the soul and the senses. Yet it must be pointed out that those atrocities are all logical results of the white supremacy that was manifested in chattel slavery, and the terror that followed it. There isn't a better candidate for torture than a person who isn't really considered a person.

It is indeed valuable that some of the most racist crimes committed in this country have finally been exposed. But it will be of little use if this history is dismissed as vestiges of another time instead of revealing an ideology that has never disappeared from the American consciousness. The use of black Americans as guinea pigs didn't end with the slavery era and wasn't confined to the South.

From a Washington Post review of Medical Apartheid featured at Amazon:

A fresh account of the Tuskegee study, including new information about the internal politics of the panel charged by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare with investigating it in 1972, lies at the center of Harriet A. Washington's courageous and poignant book. The balance of Medical Apartheid reveals, with arresting detail, that this scandal was neither the first chapter nor the last in the exploitation of black subjects in U.S. medical research. Tuskegee was, in the author's words, "the longest and most infamous -- but hardly the worst -- experimental abuse of African Americans. It has been eclipsed in both numbers and egregiousness by other abusive medical studies."

Although medical experimentation with human subjects has historically involved vulnerable groups, including children, the poor and the institutionalized, Washington enumerates how black Americans have disproportionately borne the burden of the most invasive, inhumane and perilous medical investigations, from the era of slavery to the present day. (This burden has become global in the last few decades.) In 1855, John "Fed" Brown, an escaped slave, recalled that the doctor to whom he was indentured produced painful blisters on his body in order to observe "how deep my black skin went." This study had no therapeutic value. Rather, fascination with the outward appearance of African Americans, whose differences from whites were thought to be more than skin deep, was a significant impulse driving such medical trials.

...

The infringement of black Americans' rights to their own bodies in the name of medical science continued throughout the 20th century. In 1945, Ebb Cade, an African American trucker being treated for injuries received in an accident in Tennessee, was surreptitiously placed without his consent into a radiation experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Black Floridians were deliberately exposed to swarms of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and other diseases in experiments conducted by the Army and the CIA in the early 1950s. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, black inmates at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison were used as research subjects by a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist testing pharmaceuticals and personal hygiene products; some of these subjects report pain and disfiguration even now. During the 1960s and '70s, black boys were subjected to sometimes paralyzing neurosurgery by a University of Mississippi researcher who believed brain pathology to be the root of the children's supposed hyperactive behavior. In the 1990s, African American youths in New York were injected with Fenfluramine -- half of the deadly, discontinued weight loss drug Fen-Phen -- by Columbia researchers investigating a hypothesis about the genetic origins of violence.

...

Given the history presented in Medical Apartheid, it is no surprise that some African Americans continue to regard the medical system with apprehension, despite more stringent safeguards enacted by the federal government in the 1970s. Washington attributes this outlook, which she calls iatrophobia, to the seeds of distrust sown in black communities by the Tuskegee scandal and a history of lesser-known mistreatment.

Washington, a visiting fellow at Chicago's DePaul University, intends that Medical Apartheid serve a socially therapeutic -- if not cathartic -- function. Laying bare these atrocities, her logic goes, will foster healing and frank but necessary conversation. Clearing the air may encourage a better informed African American public to participate in clinical trials.

Despite the author's best intentions, the scale and persistence of the "dark history" she delineates may well preclude such a development. Precisely because Washington's account of racially stratified medical exploitation is so gripping, it may be difficult for the public to muster enthusiasm to enter clinical trials, no matter their cultural background. And with the experimental research burden shifting from Americans of African descent to Africa itself (which Washington calls a "continent of subjects"), Asia, and Latin America, where some cavalier researchers are seeking more plentiful and pliant subjects, readers may be more convinced than ever of the durability of the medical color line.

Get Harriet Washington's book, and read it. Try to understand this history and its significance, and then consider again this part of Chris Floyd's commentary:

First, what Obama called "such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS." After citing some books on the subject, Wright said:

I read different things. As I said to my members, if you haven't read things, then you can't -- based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything. In fact, in fact, in fact, one of the -- one of the responses to what Saddam Hussein had in terms of biological warfare was a non- question, because all we had to do was check the sales records. We sold him those biological weapons that he was using against his own people.

So any time a government can put together biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.

I personally don't believe that the U.S. government concocted the AIDs virus; but the notion that a government which conducted murderous medical experiments on black men for decades, and sold chemical weaponry to a brutal dictator (and, by providing military intelligence, helped him use them against the Iranians), and also launched a war of aggression in Iraq that has killed at least million innocent people might also be capable of creating and unleashing a deadly disease is certainly not implausible.

Yet all conservatives, and many more liberals and progressives than one might have thought or hoped, refuse to acknowledge this history. They do not want to understand the context in which Jeremiah Wright made his remarks. They are not interested in the full truth, or anything close to it. It's too upsetting. It might make people angry.

Well, fuck, yeah. If you're not profoundly upset and angry when you contemplate history and facts of this kind, you might as well be dead. You're certainly dead intellectually, and by your own choice.

But I'm not dead, not by a long shot. I may feel like hell physically, but I feel more alive psychologically and intellectually than I have in a long time. I am filled with delirious joy by certain aspects of our world, and I am deeply, terribly angry and enraged at others.

And I feel young again. Thank you, Reverend Wright. You're the best birthday present I could have asked for.

posted by Arthur Silber

The connections - violence and torturegate!!

"The link between intimate violence in the home and the international violence of terrorism and war is as tightly bound together as the fingers of a clenched fist."

Riane Eisler

Violence, it seems, has become a worldwide epidemic. We are bombarded by stories of inhumanity and violence daily by the media. We are aghast at stories of children shooting children in the US, women being stoned for showing an arm in the Middle East and even genocide the world over. Is this who human beings are? Are we doomed to a future of violence and given our technological capabilities, a brutal and cataclysmic end?

The answer is no. Anger and violence may be written into our genetic code, but so are compassion, empathy and caring. We have a choice, both personally and globally.

The challenge we face in creating the peaceful and compassionate world we want is to understand and rid ourselves of the mechanisms and systems that hold violence in place.

Riane Eisler, nearly a victim of Nazi genocide as a child, has spent a life time studying the question of man's inhumanity to man, and woman. Her multidisciplinary approach has led her to an understanding of the social systems that create and maintain cultures of violence. Looking at a larger picture made it possible to see patterns or connections that were not visible before. Underlying the many differences in societies, both cross-culturally and through human history, are two basic social configurations, the dominator model and the partnership model.

In societies adhering closely to the dominator model, we find top-down authoritarianism (strong-man rule), the subordination of one half of humanity to the other, and a high degree of institutionalized or built-in violence, whether in the form of wife and child beating or in the form of warfare. Moving toward the partnership side of the spectrum we see a more democratic organization, economically as well as politically. Both halves of humanity are equally valued, and stereotypically feminine values such as caring and nonviolence (which are considered "unmanly" in the dominator model) are highly regarded, whether they are embodied in women or men. We also see a less violent way of living. (We see this most highly developed today in the Scandinavian world, but there are trends in this direction worldwide.)

While changing society might seem beyond the reach of one concerned individual, remember that society is a human invention partly inherited from our dominator past and partly built on the sum of individual relationships. Not only can you change your own relationships in a partnership direction, your voice for change can be as loud as you choose it to be.

The main determination for whether a society adheres primarily to a dominator or partnership model is intimate relationships. It is in the family that we first learn either respect and caring for others or that violence and fear can get us what we want. It is between parents and children that either domination or partnership are passed to the next generation. It is for this reason that CPS has become one of the first sponsors of (SAIV) Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence. We invite you to be come a member and add your voice to this important stepping stone. For more information follow this link.

SAIV

Dr. Eisler has written extensively on the subject of violence in our society and our relationships. All of her books are concerned with positive changes to our selves and our society to create the peaceful and sustainable world we want. For more information on our selection of books, visit our Library. Below is a selection of the many articles Dr. Eisler has written dealing with violence.

A Partnership Response to Terrorism

• Dark underbelly of the world's most 'peaceful' countries
  The Christian Science Monitor July 26, 2007 edition
• Pragmatopia: Revisioning Human Possibilities
  TIKKUN VOL. 19, NO. 6 - Nov/Dec 2004
• Spare the Rod
  YES! A Journal of Positive Futures Winter 2005
• Women's Issues Key to Peace
  International Women's Day is a good time to reflect
  A new article by Riane Eisler
• Nurture, Nature and Caring: We are not Prisoners of our Genes
• Article- Building Foundations for Cultures of Peace:
• The School for Violence: A conversation with Riane Eisler
  Interview by Helen Knode, LA Weekly,
  Vol. 23, Number 45, September 28-October 4, 2001
• Postwar Recommendations for Afghanistan Based on Equal Rights From WIN NEWS / Fran P. Hosken, editor,

Other articles pertaining to violence

• New Article! Human Rights and Violence: Integrating the Private and Public Spheres
• A Challenge for Human Rights
• Spiritual Courage
• Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth and the Politics of the Body

The Democrats are implicated in every single crime IMPEACH

why-there-is-no-impeachment-democrats.html">Why there is no impeachment: The Democrats are implicated in every single crime with which they would charge the current administration

November 28, 2007

For those NEW TO THIS BLOG: This is argument is linked to "coming war with Iran".

Yes: I TOLD YOU SO

Every now and then, when I am in a particularly self-punishing mood and feel I deserve some suffering for my sins, real or imagined, I read comment threads on various blogs, where commenters are debating the merits and failings of a minor league blogger who goes by the name Arthur Silber. As I say, I only engage in this ill-advised practice on rare occasions; besides, my writing isn't discussed that much by anyone, so it's not as if the opportunity arises with any regularity.

One comment that I've seen more than a few times typically goes like this: "Silber has been amazingly prescient. Everything he's predicted has come true. Everything. I don't know how he does it." That's all very nice, and I also think it happens to be true. But when I first saw this sort of remark a year or so ago, I would usually get very angry. I wanted to shout, or at least add a comment of my own, all in capital letters: "SO WHY WON'T YOU LISTEN TO ME NOW?" The primary subject about which I would have such thoughts is the one that ought to concern everyone, the only subject that matters now in terms of what it could mean for the future of the world, and of the United States: the probability of an attack on Iran.

Did you hear that? An attack on Iran.

Do you understand what I'm saying? A LIKELY ATTACK ON IRAN.

Never mind. The point is that even commenters who offer this kind of praise for my musings will not listen to me now, despite what they themselves admit is a track record of 100% accuracy, or as close to 100% accuracy as anyone is likely to come. For such commenters always go on to add: "Oh, but I don't read him regularly. I can't. He's just too damned depressing."

Please note that they do not contend that I'm wrong or inaccurate in what I see coming down the road. They acknowledge that I've been right before, and that I'm probably right now. But they would prefer not to think about it. It's just too depressing, doncha know. Of course, this is an entirely valid and useful approach to politics, and to life in general. When the deadly boulder topples over the edge of the cliff and is headed toward a landing directly on top of where you're standing below, it's always most advisable to close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears, and say over and over and over again:

"It's not happening!

There's no boulder!

It will be fine!

NOTHING'S WRONG!!

IT'S NOT HAPPENING!!!!"

Those of us who survive what may be coming will do our best to scoop up your pitifully splattered remains, and give you a decent burial. Never let it be said that we are disrespectful, or vindictive in even the smallest degree. We shall honor your memory, just as it deserves to be honored.

Many people consider it bad form to say, "I told you so." But I have, in detail, on many different subjects, most importantly in connection with trying to prevent terrible future events. Have I mentioned the likelihood of AN ATTACK ON IRAN? Forget it. Oh, you already have. Good for you! Anyway, only a few people listen to me -- I'm such a downer -- so what the hell.

For many months, I have been saying that this Democratic Congress would never, ever impeach anyone in the Bush administration. I said it in "Blinded by the Story":

But for the reasons set forth above (and a full case would fill many volumes), the Democrats are not going to impeach any of these criminals, barring events entirely unforeseeable at present. And they will not for one overwhelmingly significant and determinative reason: always with regard to the underlying principles, and frequently with regard to the specifics, the Democrats are implicated in every single crime with which they would charge the members of the administration. The Republicans' crimes are their crimes.

I said it in "From the Department of Not Going to Happen":

Of course, if the Democrats had any convictions that were genuinely opposed to the corporatist, authoritarian, warfare state, they would begin impeachment proceedings against both Bush and Cheney immediately upon Congress's return in September (and they would have begun them months ago) -- because impeachment is deserved 1,000 times over in both cases, and because such proceedings might make an attack on Iran less likely. That would also assume that the Washington Democrats had some strategic smarts.

Democrats with deeply held convictions that impelled them to principled action that was not guaranteed to be successful, and clever about the implementation of a plan -- one that didn't directly concern an election -- that demanded their careful attention for more than a week or two? Excuse me for a moment.



Sorry. I had to collapse to the floor in helpless laughter for a few minutes, and then slowly pull myself back up so I could get to the keyboard.

I said it again recently, in "Get Out the Razor":

So impeachment WON'T hurt the Democrats politically. Not even in terms of 2008. Why, it might HELP them -- and help them to an overwhelming victory. Not incidentally, it would also signal to the world that there are at least some people in our national life who give a damn about the Constitution, about the law (including international law), about moral law, about the value of human life, about civilization, about decency. It might save us from being unceremoniously heaved into the filthiest of trash heaps, where we deservedly belong.

More and more Democrats themselves admit that impeachment is the unquestionably appropriate remedy, and fully DESERVED. It won't hurt them politically. So why won't they do it?

One more time -- first, what I said that is excerpted above:

[Impeachment] is the one method the Democrats will categorically, absolutely not utilize -- because the Democrats are a crucial, inextricable part of the identical authoritarian-corporatist system that has led us to these horrors. They have all worked toward this end over many decades, Democrats and Republicans alike, and now the horrors manifest themselves explicitly, without apology, even with the sickening boastfulness of the mass murderer who is proud of what he has done, and who vehemently believes he is right.

Or as I put it in an earlier essay:

...

Try to grasp this finally, before it is too late: the Democrats may differ from the Republicans on matters of detail, or emphasis, or style. But with regard to the fundamental political principles involved, everything that has happened over the last six years -- just as is the case with everything that has happened over the last one hundred years -- is what the Democrats want, too.

This should not be a difficult point to understand. The historical record is compelling in its clarity, and overpowering in its length and volume. A corporatist, authoritarian state is what the ruling elites want, and it is precisely what serves their interests, Republican and Democrat alike. They know it; they count on your inability or refusal to see it.

That's why they won't do it. That's why impeachment is "off the table." Try, please try for crap's sake, to understand this. I am weary of explaining it.

But I will keep explaining it, until at least 15 of you get it. At the current rate, I expect that to take until 2018.

Even now, I'm an optimist. Go figure.

And I've said it in a number of other posts.

In the latest installment of my "Final Descent" series, I mentioned an illuminating conversation between Jonathan Turley and Randi Rhodes, on Rhodes' radio show. The topic on that occasion was the increasingly widespread use of a specific form of police intimidation typical of a more and more tyrannical state. When the police approach or question you, even if you have done absolutely nothing criminal and nothing wrong at all, if you do anything that the police may later construe as "resisting arrest," they will arrest you for resisting arrest -- even if there had been nothing to arrest you for in the first instance. Oh, my, you are thinking. Why that means the police could arrest anyone -- and everyone! Exactly.

The state and the numerous representatives who execute its authority
understand that;

it's time more of you did.

Rhodes invited Turley to be her guest again today. Their discussion began with the government's systematic abuse of the state secrets privilege: how the government uses the privilege to shield itself from the exposure of any and all of its many criminal acts. Invoke the state secrets privilege, and the case is stopped dead in its tracks. Eventually, when the privilege is invoked a sufficient number of times and on enough points critical to a specific case, the lawsuit goes away entirely.

They then turned to impeachment, and why it is not going to happen -- and exactly how the Democrats are doing everything in their power to make certain it doesn't happen. Rhodes said she wanted Turley to explain his views, because Turley's insights had helped to make clear what Rhodes herself had not been able to understand. Rhodes said she hadn't understood at all why the Democrats wouldn't pursue hearings and investigations more aggressively, why they keep talking about retroactive immunity for the telecom companies (see "It's Called the Ruling Class Because It Rules," for a discussion of that and related subjects), and in general why the Democrats act like a pathetic, horribly abused dog that is regularly beaten almost to death. (If you'd been reading my blog, Randi, you would have understood it months ago! No, on this point I am not remotely humble.) For all the good they've done on any subject of importance, the Democrats might as well have taken the last year off. That could only have been an improvement. They have turned themselves into almost non-existent blobs of putrefying flesh, without the excuse of being non-existent or dead.

So if you didn't believe it when I said it, listen up. Here is what Turley had to say. The Democrats will never pursue hearings or investigations of the Bush administration beyond a certain point the Democrats consider "safe," they will not object to the administration derailing any case of moment by invoking the state secrets privilege, they keep telecom immunity alive, and the Democrats act in countless other ways to bury and cover up the crimes of the Bush gang, because there is one eventuality they fear more than any other: if there were ever to be a finding -- by a court, in Congressional committee, or anywhere else -- that the Bush administration, including the president himself, in fact ordered criminal acts, then they would have to begin impeachment hearings. It is inconceivable that even this repellent Congress could ignore, for example, a court determination that Bush had ordered torture -- which, as Turley pointed out, would constitute a war crime as defined by U.S. courts. The same would be true of any finding that the administration, perhaps including the president himself, had committed a crime by ordering illegal domestic surveillance.

Turley additionally noted that this is why the Democrats went out of their way to "save" the administration on the Mukasey nomination. The Democrats, or at least key Democratic leaders, didn't want Mukasey to say that water boarding constitutes torture. That would mean that administration officials had committed a war crime -- again, as defined by U.S. courts. They would have to begin impeachment hearings, once the meaning of the admission sank in. So the Democrats made certain that the question could be avoided, and that Mukasey was confirmed by a comfortable margin (see, "There Is No 'Lesser' Evil Now").

The broader point that Turley went on to make is the one I've made repeatedly, in the essays linked above and in others as well. "These are not principled people in this city," Turley correctly noted. He said he was sorry to have to say it, but it's the inescapable truth. Turley said that, with regard to the most critical dynamics in play, party designations don't matter much at all: "They don't believe in principle. They believe in power."

Turley thus made precisely the same point that I made in an article I wrote just before the 2006 elections:

Ah, but the Democrats will investigate the Bush administration's endless crimes. The investigations will restore honesty, decency and "true" American values to government. All the universes will be saved! Do people actually believe this nonsense? All such investigations will be exactly like all other government investigations of itself. People seem congenitally incapable of grasping that all politicians are now part of the same corrupt system, which aims only to protect itself and its existing prerogatives, as it simultaneously seeks to expand them. (The exceptions in the political class are so few that they don't matter.) In the end, all such investigations and committee hearings will conclude just as the 9/11 investigation concluded (and any other investigation you care to name): some criticisms will be made, general fault will be found but no one in particular will be condemned in terms that might cause distress, and some new guidelines and regulations will be proposed and enacted. Neither party wants to judge the other too harshly or cause irreparable harm: they don't want to, because they count on the same consideration in return. Both parties are happy to accede to this deal, for it is precisely how their system continues on its merry course, guaranteeing their lives of immense comfort and privilege, together with their hold on power.

Many of the rest of us, both here and abroad, will be screwed, maimed or dead -- and just when exactly did that concern the governing class?

Do you understand now? Do you finally get it? I truly am weary of explaining facts that should be obvious to a not very bright, woefully underachieving six-year-old -- particularly when I'm dealing with adults who are resolutely determined to render themselves deaf, dumb and blind in perpetuity.

There is still a chance -- now a very dim and remote one, I grant you -- to prevent an attack on Iran. Here's that detailed program again, with a more recent version of part of it in the concluding part of this essay.

Oh, that's right. You don't want to hear about any of that. It's just too goddamned depressing.

God, most Americans are abysmally pathetic. I don't know why I even bother any longer.

posted by Arthur Silber at 2:32 PM

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Impeach Cheney, Bush and Pelosi

Impeach Cheney, Bush and Pelosi! 11/29/07. Ted Lang. As has been consistently reported by the real American news media, the Internet, a vast majority of Americans want the war in Iraq ended, and also want Cheney, the real head of the ...

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