A year ago at Thanksgiving, I was still reeling from the presidential election just weeks before. Most sobering for me was the survey where 70 percent of prospective Bush supporters said they would not support Bush if he had misled them about weapons of mass destruction prior to declaring war in Iraq, opposed the International Criminal Court, or taken various other positions - all of which he clearly had done or taken. The gap between known important facts and people's working knowledge of them shook me up.
You read that correctly. It's not a misprint. The writer is actually placing the blame for the re-election of George Bush squarely where it belongs — on the American public's ignorance of events.
What makes the statement so surprising is that the American media reflexively genuflects at the altar of the American public. We are the most wise, the most caring, the most informed, the most generous people ever to have graced the earth. Saying otherwise is virtual sacrilege.
But having flogged the sacred cow, the writer goes on to say how encouraged she is that America's awareness of events has sharpened over the last year. By the end of the column, she has fully atoned, paying the obligatory homage to "the practical good sense of the American public."
Whatever goes wrong in our society never seems to be our fault. It is always them — the Republicans, or the Democrats, the greedy corporate executives, the corrupt officials, and on and on.
With apologies to Gertrude Stein, in a democracy, there's no "them" there. We, the people, are ultimately responsible for everything from our neglected infrastructure to our exclusionary health care system to the war in Iraq.
The sad fact is, "the practical good sense of the American public" put this administration and its pack of wolves into power. Twice.
And all the while, the media pretends not to notice that the populace has no clothes.]]>
Robert Kennedy emerged from the shadows of his brother's presidency to take on the three great moral injustices of his day — inequality, poverty, and war. For those of us who remember the hope for a better America that Kennedy virtually personified back then, it is almost impossible to think of him today and not wonder what might have been.
Kennedy's aggressiveness, even combativeness, gave him a reputation for being ruthless, which he vehemently denied — sort of:
People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.
But his drive only served his finer qualities: honesty, compassion, intelligence, genuineness. An admirable, remarkable man, to be sure, but not unique. When he died, so young, it was a tragedy for his family and a loss for the nation. But the 60s were blessed with remarkable leaders — John Kennedy and Martin Luther King among them. Surely there were more right behind them, somewhere. So when Robert Kennedy died, I never doubted for a minute that we would see his like in politics again.
I was wrong.
A tribute to Kennedy in today's Boston Globe sees it this way:
Looking back over the decades since the death of Robert Kennedy, I realize that for many years we simply assumed that another comparable leader would appear to battle for the causes he cared about. Every four years, we've been bitterly frustrated by the failure of our candidates for the White House to live up to RFK's standards. Now that I am much older, I realize what I should have known in 1968 -- that Robert Kennedy was irreplaceable.
But I think the truth is more complex than that, and we, the people who choose the men and women who lead us, and who define the spirit and character of this nation, have to bear much of the blame.
The Globe article might have oversimplified the reason for the problem, but it articulates the problem itself quite well:
These days, when I have had enough of listening to so-called political leaders who cut corners and waffle on fundamental issues like poverty and war, I close my eyes and I see the youthful and passionate RFK. I see him as he was in the '60s, going to South Africa to take on apartheid, to Delano to support grape workers, to Appalachia to show us its desperate poor, speaking out against the war in Vietnam.
I hear him speaking boldly, without fear, urging us to become involved, to make a difference. I open my eyes and I feel unspeakably sad about what we lost.
Yes, and what we have been left with.]]>
This week, Vice President Cheney accused "certain politicians" in Congress of being dishonest and spineless for accusing the administration of misleading them and the nation into war.
And as much as I hate to give this VP in Charge of Torture any credit whatsoever, he's absolutely right.
Three years ago, when it was the easy and popular thing to do, Congress abdicated its constitutional responsibility for declaring war and gave President Bush the authority to launch an invasion of Iraq at will.
Today, those who voted for the war before riding their moral high-horse against it whine that they were fed false information three years ago. And they, too, are absolutely right.
If there is a God in Heaven, and if He is not a Republican, a presidential impeachment trial will determine whether the administration deliberately used false information to mislead the nation into an unjust war.
But whether the administration's stated reasons for starting this war were deliberately false or not is beside the point. The Founding Fathers gave the responsibility for waging war to Congress for a reason — to prevent a president from pursuing a personal agenda of aggression, and to ensure that the horrors of war are not unleashed unless there is absolutely no other choice.
With Iraq, war was not the only choice, or anything close to the best choice. And the only thing we can say in defense of the administration, the Congress, and the intelligence community is that they were all hopelessly incompetent.
But incompetence is an unlikely excuse for all but the president himself. More likely, Congress, which could have stopped this war before it became anything more than a sneer on Dick Cheney's lips, was quite simply, spineless.
The Boston Globe's Joan Vennochi gives the situation just the right perspective:
In 2005, belated spine is better than no spine. But it should never be confused with real political courage, the kind that stands up to presidents when it is unpopular to do so.
America deserves better. When will we finally demand it?]]>