Afghan War Plagued by "Mendacity" and "Lies"

With the Trump/Pence regimes relying on lies to try to take America to war with Iran, it is perhaps timely that the truth about the Afghan War is finally coming out and that truth is ugly: Americans have been repeatedly and deliberately lied to both senior members of the military and by politicians. Meanwhile, Americans died and were grievously wounded, some bearing the physical and mental scars for the rest of their lives.  Afghanistan has been called the "graveyard of empires" and with good reason to anyone with a knowledge of history.  It turns out that America, despite its hubris and misguided (and false) sense of exceptionalism has done no better that would be conquerors of the past. Belatedly recognizing this will not bring back the dead, heal the forever wounded or restore the squanders taxpayer dollars. It should, however, educate the American public to refuse to be played for fools again by the military and/or hawkish politicians.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the trail of lies and wasted taxpayer money.  The takeaway, in my view, is that if Afghanistan was unwinnable, Iran would be an even larger disaster.  Here are excerpts:

The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction told Congress Wednesday that U.S. officials have routinely lied to the public during the 18-year war by exaggerating progress reports and inflating statistics to create a false appearance of success.

“There’s an odor of mendacity throughout the Afghanistan issue . . . mendacity and hubris,” John F. Sopko said in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The problem is there is a disincentive, really, to tell the truth. We have created an incentive to almost require people to lie.”

As an example, Sopko said U.S. officials have lied in the past about the number of Afghan children enrolled in schools — a key marker of progress touted by the Obama administration — even though they “knew the data was bad.” He also said U.S. officials falsely claimed major gains in Afghan life expectancy that were statistically impossible to achieve.

In addition, Sopko criticized the Trump administration for classifying information that shows the war is going badly, including data on Afghan troop casualties and assessments of the Taliban’s strength. . . . . “It turns out that everything that is bad news has been classified for the last few years.”

Since 2001, the United States has spent more than $132 billion to modernize the country — more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to rebuild Europe after World War II.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee summoned Sopko to testify in response to a series of articles published last month in The Washington Post that revealed how senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the conflict had become unwinnable.

The inspector general had drawn on the interviews to publish seven reports — called “Lessons Learned” — about policy failures in Afghanistan. But the reports left out the harshest and most frank criticisms and omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people who were interviewed for the project.

The Post obtained about 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and transcripts from the interviews under the Freedom of Information Act, but had to sue SIGAR in federal court — twice — to force it to release the records.

Several lawmakers said they were shocked by revelations in The Afghanistan Papers, including blunt admissions from generals, ambassadors and White House officials that they didn’t know what they were doing in Afghanistan and that the war strategy was fundamentally flawed.

Sopko defended his agency’s attempts to withhold the documents, saying he had an obligation to protect the identities of people who criticized the war and wanted to remain anonymous.

“These people who spoke to us risked a lot,” he said. “You know what this town is like, you know what it’s like if somebody bad-mouths their old boss or ­whatever.”

Everyone seeking to cover their own asses and keeping their own jobs while Americans needlessly died and billions of dollars might just have well been set on fire and burned.   We must not be tricked by lies again when it comes to the Middle East.

Why Congress Would Not Be Able to Rein in a President Trump

Paul Ryan and other Republicans who are acting much like German politicians and business leaders in the early 1930's who thought they could rein in and control Adolph Hitler truly need a wake up call.  They need to face the frightening reality that if elected to the presidency, it will be difficult if not impossible to rein in Donald Trump.  As commander-in-chief, Trump could initiate military action and create chaos and potentially unleash irreversible disasters on America.  Similarly, he could act through executive orders that would stand until struck down by the courts or overturned by Congressional legislative action.  A piece in Salon reminds us that  by the time Congress could act, it might be too late.  Here are highlights:

Donald Trump has made many promises on the campaign trail about things he will fix (a broken immigration system), change (the way trade deals are negotiated) and build (a wall on the southern border) if elected president. Those who do not support Trump, regardless of political party, comfort themselves with the constitutional reminder that our government includes three co-equal branches designed to protect against the accumulation of too much power in too few hands. Those checks and balances aside, could President Trump accomplish any of his stated objectives through unilateral actions?

Scholars of the presidency and political pundits alike have noted the expanding presidential powers during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Each relied on executive action (executive orders, agreements, proclamations and signing statements) to implement and at times to bypass Congress on policies both foreign and domestic (particularly regarding war powers in the fight against terrorism since 9/11). This trend is not new, as the expansion of presidential power has often occurred during times of political crisis.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about executive power is that there is nothing to stop a president from initiating action, even if unconstitutional. The consequences — whether legal or political — come after the fact. If Trump issued an executive order to ban Muslim immigrants, the directive would stand unless and until checked by Congress or the courts. Congress can pass legislation to overturn an executive order, or through its power of the purse, it can refuse to provide funding. Federal courts can place an injunction on an executive order (as was the case earlier this year regarding Obama’s executive order to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation), or declare a presidential action to be unconstitutional. Public opinion can also turn against a president, as can support within the president’s party, and both can have electoral consequences.

Would any of this be enough incentive to give President Trump pause before taking action? An accurate prediction would be difficult, but aggressive action by Trump regarding key issues on his policy agenda would not be shocking. 

A reader sent me a link that reminds us sometimes a single unilateral action can unleash unexpected and ultimately vastly deadly consequences that could damage or end the lives of  literally millions of people.  The link is here.  Can we really believe that a narcissistic and politically and historically ignorant would not trigger what the author calls the "Archduke Francis Ferdinand moment,"referring to the assassination that triggered World War I.  A war that that lead to the downfall of nations and empires and likely cost 17-20 million lives.  

Pope Francis Poses a Threat to the GOP Economic Order

Up until now, Republicans have been only too happy it inject religion into politics and make one's adherence - at least outwardly, if not in fact - a litmus test for running for office and, most of all, to hold public office. Ben Carson's recent anti-Muslim statements illustrate this reality.  Now, however, the same folks who readily prostitute themselves to Christofascists as a means to garner votes are up in arms that Pope Francis is pushing for action on climate change and arguing that religion and churches, such as the Catholic Church, have no business in raising the issue of, much less discussing climate change.  They take similar offense at the Pope's targeting the evils of vulture capitalism and support for labor unions.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the GOP hostility towards Francis and his message.  Here are excerpts:

The pope addresses Congress Thursday, and conservatives are fearing the worst. Their belief systems can tolerate a lot — laissez-faire economics, xenophobia — but Pope Francis’s emphasis on the Roman Catholic Church’s historic antipathy to capitalism has them in a dither.

The Wall Street Journal laments his overt embrace of the “progressive political agenda of income redistribution.” My Post colleague George F. Will writes that, “Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.”

It’s not clear, however, whether the Journal and Will’s argument is with the pope or with the Christianity of the saint whose name he took, or even more fundamentally, with the Nazareth carpenter whom Christians believe was the son of God.

Suppose, for instance, that the pope elects, in his address to Congress, to repeat one of that carpenter’s most famous quotes: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

Based on past performance, can we expect some Republican congressman to leap to his feet and shout, “You lie,” or Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. to shake his head in dissent? Both occurrences greeted addresses to Congress by President Obama, speeches that were nowhere remotely as inflammatory as those in a recent papal encyclical, much less the Sermon on the Mount.

In place of our current system, Francis has recommended giving workers more power — in particular, promoting worker-owned and -run cooperatives. . . . . On the U.S. political spectrum, this kind of advocacy for worker control plunks you down firmly on the left: Indeed, the primary author of legislation that would promote worker co-ops if Congress ever sought fit to pass it is one Bernie Sanders. But Francis’s critiques of capitalism aren’t peculiar to the left wing of the church. 

Where Francis has departed from his predecessors is that he has moved from talking the talk to walking the walk. The simplicity of his lifestyle, his emphasis on spending time among the poor and giving workers more control of economies where the deck, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has said, is stacked against them, are all radical departures from past papal practice. So, too, is the tolerance he has shown to gays, lesbians and divorcees — a tolerance that has roused the ire of church conservatives, for whom intolerance to these and kindred groups seems to express the essence of their Catholicism.

These conservatives lament that Francis has de-emphasized the church’s traditional fear and loathing of women and sex. How a church governed by male celibates should have come to view its areas of core competency as gender relations and reproduction is a good question.  By returning to the kind of issues that St. Francis and the Nazarene focused on — stewardship of the Earth, championing of the have-nots — Francis has been a great disappointment to those Catholics nostalgic for the spirit, if not the letter, of the Inquisition. 

A pope infused by the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi and Jesus poses a threat to the current economic order. Conservatives are right to fear and despise him, as they would be right to fear and despise his role models.

The final scene of George Bernard Shaw’s play “Saint Joan” places Joan of Arc in a dream sequence in which all her persecutors, once she’s safely dead and canonized, praise her and acknowledge her sainthood. When she asks them if she should return to Earth and live again, however, they answer with fear, loathing and a resounding “no.” That, in essence, is the conservatives’ response to Pope Francis, and to the spirit and faith he embodies. 

It would be delicious to see the tables turned on the GOP which has insidiously used religion to do evil and support greed.

The GOP on the Brink - Can Crisis Be Avoided

As noted in a post yesterday, as the GOP takes control of both houses of Congress, a number of looming "cliffs" exist and it is questionable whether or not Messrs. McConnell and Boehner can keep the lunatic, reality denying elements of the Republican Party reined in sufficiently to avoid a crisis on one or more issues.  A piece in Slate looks at the likelihood of a crisis soon ensuing.  Here are highlights:

For the first time since 2006, Republicans have control of the Senate. And what’s their goal for the next two years, ahead of the presidential election? To govern like a sensible party. “I don’t want the American people to think that if they add a Republican president to a Republican Congress, that’s going to be a scary outcome,” said new Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in a pre-holiday interview with the Washington Post. “I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority.”

That may be a tall order. The last time Republicans had political momentum, after the 2010 elections, they plunged the United States into a year of crisis governance, including a threat to default on the debt if they didn’t get concessions on spending cuts. The hit to the GOP’s popularity was enormous, and it played a part in the 2012 presidential election, where President Obama ran against the Republican-controlled House and its dysfunction.

House Speaker John Boehner’s caucus was, and remains, an unwieldy beast of deal-making Republicans and conservative true believers. Yes, McConnell’s Senate has its share of the latter, but he doesn’t seem to face the same internal dissent as Boehner . .

{T]he present Senate has a healthy number of Republicans who represent Democratic states, who—ahead of an election year—have a vested interest in working with the opposition. Boehner risks rebellion when he defies the majority of his majority. McConnell doesn’t, at least not to the same extent.

For McConnell, this calculation is complicated by the composition of his majority. The 114^th Congress brings a gaggle of new conservative senators on top of the existing bunch. In addition to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who played Pied Piper to House Republicans during the 2013 shutdown drama, there’s now Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Joni Ernst of Iowa, and Ben Sasse of Nebraska, all of whom fall on the right wing of the Republican Party. You could also add Sens. Cory Garnder of Colorado and Thom Tillis of North Carolina to that list, given their previous careers as right-wing congressman and right-wing state house speaker, respectively.

[T]he White House has promised a whole host of executive actions for 2015. Will conservatives react with calm? Or will they forgo a tactical approach for, as Sargent says, “maximum confrontation?”
A constructive Republican Congress might be good for our democracy, but an obstructionist one—that rallies the base and builds enthusiasm—might be better politics.

DC Repeals Anti-LGBT Exemption That Allowed Religious Schools To Discriminate

Brace yourself for shrieks and spittle flecked rants about Christians being persecuted now that the District of Columbia has repealed an exemption that has been used to allow religious schools to engage in discrimination.  It is part of the move to ban so-called "reparative therapy" which has been used by the "godly folk" and charlatans to torment LGBT individuals and keep the myth alive that sexual orientation is a "choice" or something that is changeable.  The big issue now is whether Congress - read the Christofascists' political whores in the GOP - will act to void the legislation.  Here are highlights from The New Civil Rights Movement:

While many were heralding the Washington, D.C. City Council earlier this week for passing an ordinance that bans the practice of anti-LGBT "reparative therapy," also known as "ex-gay therapy," on minors, few noticed that the body also passed another important piece of legislation. The city council repealed a 1989 amendment forced on D.C. by Congress, to the city's Human Rights Act, known as the Armstrong Amendment. That law allowed religious educational institutions, which were loosely defined, to discriminate against LGBT people.

Congress has 30 days to void the repeal of the anti-LGBT provision.

“The time has come for us to get rid of that obnoxious provision,” Rick Rosendall, president of the D.C. Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance, said, according to the Washington Blade.

The anti-gay legal group Liberty Counsel registered extreme opposition to the move.  "The Act's repeal of the religious exemption for religious schools and church schools from D.C. Code provisions regarding homosexual acts, lifestyle, orientation, or belief is of grave concern," Liberty Counsel wrote to the city council. "The First Amendment directly prohibits government from prohibiting the Free Exercise of religion," it reminded them.

“Sexual Orientation” and “Gender Identity or Expression" or "Transgender” are subjective, changeable, behavior-based categories subject to moral choice, and are not immutable characteristics such as race, sex, skin color or ethnicity, nor are they in the category of fundamental rights, such as religious belief.

Of course, that's an opinion being purveyed by Liberty Counsel, an anti-LGBT hate group.

Liberty Counsel did not detail how a religious educational institution would be penalized by the repeal of the ordinance, but claimed, "attempting to impose employment regulations on church schools and religious schools whose doctrines and sincere religious convictions forbid homosexual or cross-dressing affiliation and employment is flatly unconstitutional."  The letter also referred to transgender women as "a man claiming he is a woman on a given day," . . .

For the "godly folk," religious freedom means having a license to mistreat others and to disseminate hate and bigotry towards others.  Just like ISIS in the Middle East.

GOP's Darrell Issa - A Failed Would be Modern Day Joe McCarthy

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Not only do many in the Republican Party want to take the nation back to the Gilded Age with all of its abuses of the poor and working classes, but some Republicans in Congress also seem to want to return to the days of Joe McCarthy and the trampling on rights of citizens.  A case in point?  The always despicable Darrell Issa.  Thankfully, the effort seems to be failing. A column in the Washington Post looks at Issa's demagoguery.  Here are excerpts:

I have here in my hand a list of six people who think Darrell Issa is a fellow traveler of Joseph McCarthy. I compiled these names while watching Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, lead his panel’s proceedings Thursday to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress.

[T]he Democrats are wrong. Darrell Issa is no Joe McCarthy.  It’s not for lack of trying. As I’ve noted, the California Republican, during his lamentable tenure running the committee, has been reckless, dishonest, vain and prone to making unsubstantiated accusations. 

But Issa’s McCarthyism is a faint echo of the real thing, for one very important reason. McCarthy was feared; Issa isn’t taken seriously. This is a rare bit of good news about modern politics: It’s a bad time to be a demagogue.

There may be some who fear Issa, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) or other practitioners of neo-McCarthyism. But at least as many are unafraid to call these men dangerous or buffoons. This is largely because there is no enemy that poses the sort of threat the Soviet Union did. But there is also a felicitous side effect of the polarization of the two parties: Because there is no longer ideological overlap, as there was in the 1950s, Democrats are unafraid to challenge the likes of Issa.

Strains of demagoguery run through both parties, of course.
On the right, Cruz has specialized in McCarthy-like allegations, suggesting, for example, that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel may have been on the payroll of Saudi Arabia or North Korea.
But in neither case is the opposition intimidated by the allegations.

Consider the efforts of Issa, who famously said the IRS targeting of conservative groups was “coordinated in all likelihood right out of Washington headquarters — and we’re getting to proving it.” Instead, he ended up fixing blame on Lerner, a career employee at the IRS who took the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions from Issa’s committee. Issa claimed she had waived her Fifth Amendment rights, and this week his committee voted to hold her in contempt.

The way to fight McCarthyism is to denounce its purveyors — ad hominem and ad infinitum.

Release the Torture Reports

Some of the darkest deeds done in recent American history were done under the Bush/Cheney regime which authorized torture, committed war crimes and willfully violated the Geneva Conventions.  Many Americans would like to sweep those crimes under the rug and pretend that they never happened at the direction of a sitting president and vice president of the United States.  But they did, and the best way to make sure that such crimes never happen again is to release the reports on the torture and crimes done in the name of the American people.  We need to learn from this dark chapter of American history so that it may never happen again.  It is important that Barack Obama stop stonewalling in an apparent effort to avoid embarrassment to America and those who cooperated in lawless torture.   The New York Times concurs and is call for the release of the full reports.  Here are editorial excerpts:

A dozen years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it is appalling that official reports about the extent and nature of the rendition, detention and torture that came in their aftermath are still being kept from the American public and even members of Congress charged with overseeing intelligence activities. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s exhaustive 6,000-page report was completed last December. But it has yet to be declassified. Likely the closest to a full accounting the nation is going to get, the report is said to contain unsparing criticism of the program. News reports have said it chronicles the Central Intelligence Agency’s repeated misleading of the White House, Congress and the public about the value of brutal and lawless methods that yielded little valuable intelligence despite the claims of former Vice President Dick Cheney and other defenders of torture.

The lack of transparency was underlined on Tuesday during a hearing on the nomination of Caroline Krass to be the C.I.A.’s top lawyer. Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, disclosed the existence of an internal study done by the C.I.A. under Mr. Brennan’s predecessor, Leon Panetta, that contradicted the agency’s response to the Senate study. Mr. Udall said he believed it was “consistent with the Intelligence’s Committee’s report.” Mr. Udall said: “This raises fundamental questions about why a review the C.I.A. conducted internally years ago — and never provided to the committee — is so different from the C.I.A.’s formal response to the committee study.” 

The committee must insist on the Obama administration’s cooperation in making public all three documents — the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the official C.I.A. response to it, and the internal C.I.A. study. 

Rendition, illegal detention and torture did not arise on President Obama’s watch. He has repeatedly denounced the use of torture and ended the detention program as one of his first White House acts. But his expansive claims of secrecy have succeeded in blocking victims’ lawsuits and helping to keep details of rendition and torture secret, denying the country a reckoning necessary for the historical record, establishing accountability and avoiding similar human rights violations in the future. 

Mr. Obama has a duty to ensure prompt public release of the documents — minimally redacted to protect genuine national security secrets, not to avoid embarrassment. 

An Out of Touch Congress: Off 239 Days This Year While Workers Are Guaranteed Zero Days Off

Last evening Rachel Maddow was reviewing all the legislation that has not been passed by Congress this year - including routine legislation like a Farm Bill, Water Bill, Defense Bill, etc. - even as the GOP controlled House voted on the symbolic repeal of Obamacare roughly four dozen times.  House Republicans like to chide the poor to get a job and be responsible for their own security, yet Congress most assuredly is NOT doing its job.  But then, it's hard to do your job when you have more than two-thirds of the year off from work.  The gulf between the lives of professional politicians in Congress and average Americans has never been so stark.  Think Progress looks at this out of touch Congress.  Here are highlights:

Congress has just eight days on the job between now and the start of the next session on January 7, with the House coming back on Monday and adjourning for the year by December 13 and the Senate returning on December 9 only to most likely adjourn for the year on December 20. In total, the House will have had 239 days off this year with even more scheduled for next year. 

Certainly members of Congress have work to do when they’re not required to be in D.C., including meetings with constituents, running their other offices, talking to local community leaders, and doing media interviews. Some may also use those days off on other jobs for supplemental income, but most make side money by owning businesses or from investments.

The picture is very different for the rest of Americans, however. The country doesn’t guarantee its citizens any paid vacation or holiday time off, unlike 20 of its developed peers. All European Union countries guarantee workers at least 20 paid days of vacation a year, with France going so far as to lock in 30, the United Kingdom mandating 28, and Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden guaranteeing 25.
Of course, many American employers still give their workers paid vacation time and holidays off. But that holds true for fewer and fewer workers. . . . . The biggest drops have come for those who work part-time — a position more and more find themselves in — or for employers with fewer than 100 workers.

The U.S. also lags developed peers in other kinds of paid time off. It is the only one out of the top 15 most competitive that doesn’t guarantee paid sick days, which leaves 40 percent of private sector workers out of paid leave. Those who do get paid sick days also get fewer of them than two decades ago. The country is even more lonely when it comes to maternity leave to take care of a new child, joining just three countries out of 178 in failing to guarantee paid time off. Fathers similarly get no guarantee of paid time off when a new child arrives.

Syria: A War That The Pentagon and Americans Do Not Want

Despite the drumbeat of the Obama administration and some Congressional leaders, a significant majority of Americans want nothing to do with another war in the Middle East.   We have heard the arguments all before and the result was that a gullible public and lazy mainstream media allowed America to plunge into the disaster of the Iraq War.   Some call this public reaction the "Iraq Syndrome"  as if it is some phobia to be overcome.  Other - rightly in my view - call this aversion to a new war common sense and a case of learning from past mistakes.   Andrew Sullivan cites a piece in the American Conservative that makes this latter argument.  Here are highlights:

Larison dismisses the argument that anti-interventionists are suffering from “Iraq Syndrome”:

[T]his is becoming a common way to describe the absolutely justifiable and sane reaction of the public and even many in Washington to the disaster of the Iraq war. Interventionists call this a syndrome because it is supposed to be seen as an affliction or something from which Americans need to recover, as if there were something unhealthy or harmful in becoming extremely wary of waging wars of choice in countries that we don’t understand very well for dubious and often unobtainable goals. On the contrary, the existence of this so-called “syndrome” is proof that the public is very sensibly recoiling from the repeated misjudgments and mistakes of their political leaders.

Most Americans are firmly against making yet another major foreign policy error, and what they keep hearing from Washington and from much of the media is that they are suffering from some kind of malady that needs to be cured with another war.

This truly is becoming a battle between the Washington war-machine and the people it is supposed to protect. And yes, Iraq is relevant. Of course it is relevant. And no, as Daniel argues, this is not a syndrome. It is not a syndrome to look twice before crossing the street, when you have been run over by a truck twice in the last decade. In any case, the parallels are so close as to be almost absurd. The president is trying to get support for a military campaign against a Baathist leader in a murderously divided Middle Eastern country in order to prevent the use of WMDs and to send a message to Iran. I mean: is there any more obvious analogy? Now I know the president has ruled out “boots on the ground”. But there are already boots on the ground, in a covert war the war-machine has already launched.

But it is not just the American public that opposes another intervention disaster.  An op-ed in the Washington Post authored by a retired Army major general and former commandant of the U.S. Army War College makes the case that the Pentagon for once doesn't want this war either.  Here are some highlights:

The tapes tell the tale. Go back and look at images of our nation’s most senior soldier, Gen. Martin Dempsey, and his body language during Tuesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Syria. It’s pretty obvious that Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, doesn’t want this war.

 Dempsey’s unspoken words reflect the opinions of most serving military leaders. . . . . After personal exchanges with dozens of active and retired soldiers in recent days, I feel confident that what follows represents the overwhelming opinion of serving professionals who have been intimate witnesses to the unfolding events that will lead the United States into its next war.

They are embarrassed to be associated with the amateurism of the Obama administration’s attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense. None of the White House staff has any experience in war or understands it. So far, at least, this path to war violates every principle of war, including the element of surprise, achieving mass and having a clearly defined and obtainable objective.

They are repelled by the hypocrisy of a media blitz that warns against the return of Hitlerism but privately acknowledges that the motive for risking American lives is our “responsibility to protect” the world’s innocents. Prospective U.S. action in Syria is not about threats to American security.
They are outraged by the fact that what may happen is an act of war and a willingness to risk American lives to make up for a slip of the tongue about “red lines.” These acts would be for retribution and to restore the reputation of a president. Our serving professionals make the point that killing more Syrians won’t deter Iranian resolve to confront us. The Iranians have already gotten the message. 

They are tired of wannabe soldiers who remain enamored of the lure of bloodless machine warfare. “Look,” one told me, “if you want to end this decisively, send in the troops and let them defeat the Syrian army. If the nation doesn’t think Syria is worth serious commitment, then leave them alone.” But they also warn that Syria is not Libya or Serbia. Perhaps the United States has become too used to fighting third-rate armies. As the Israelis learned in 1973, the Syrians are tough and mean-spirited killers with nothing to lose. 

[T]oday’s soldiers know war and resent civilian policymakers who want the military to fight a war that neither they nor their loved ones will experience firsthand. 

Will Congress Say "No" to Attacks on Syria?

Barack Obama seems to have put himself in a bad spot with all his sabre rattling on the need to attack Syria in response to alleged use of chemical weapon against civilians by the Assad regime.  First, Britain backed out of joining Obama's coalition after a heated debate in the House of Commons.  Now, a growing number of voices are calling for Congress to step up. grow a spine and veto a US attack.  And then, of course, there is the vast majority of the American public which opposes US intervention.  Given this situation, Obama did the smart thing: he's tossed the decision into the lap of Congress.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the quickly changing situation.  Here are excerpts:

Barack Obama did the right thing Saturday, on a number of levels. The first and most obvious one: The Constitution calls for it. Yes, we’ve got a history now of more than 50 years of presidents not going to Congress. One of them is named Obama (on Libya). But today he did the right thing by the Constitution:  “Having made my decision as commander-in-chief based on what I think are our national security interests, I’m also mindful that I’m the president of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.”

Kind of sad that it’s so stunning and refreshing to hear a president acknowledge that he shares constitutional power, but stunning and refreshing it was. This precedent will now be cited by congresses well into the future whenever a president wants to undertake a jolly little shoot-up, he’ll need to go to Congress first (for big, real, ground-troop wars, the pressure to consult Congress will always be great). It’s a big relinquishing of power, a major constitutional recalibration that will outlast him and the yahoos whose votes he’s going to be seeking, and Obama deserves props for it. It was also manifestly clear that this is what the public wanted him to do—79 percent, in yesterday’s NBC poll. If he had launched a strike without consulting Congress in the face of those kinds of numbers and something went really wrong, look out. That way leads political calamity and, as I wrote on Friday, possibly impeachment.

[I]n terms of the domestic political interpretation of any potential military action, no matter what he does, Obama can’t lose. If Congress says no (more on which in a moment), then he doesn’t have to launch a strike that is making Americans very jumpy. If it says yes, then public opinion will presumably come around, and probably world opinion, too, in the 10 or so days between now and the House vote. So those are the upsides. Now let’s do some nose-counting. In the Senate, I presume a resolution will pass. Obama might lose a very small number of Democrats, and maybe Independent Bernie Sanders. But he should get several Senate Republicans  . . . .

[S]till consider approval a real long shot, though. Consider first the number of possible Democratic defections. So far, we know that 18 Democrats signed a letter circulated by Republicans stating that a strike undertaken without congressional approval would violate the Constitution. That concern is taken off the table, so maybe those 18 will play ball. But you have to think that maybe a couple dozen of the most liberal members, representing districts where three-quarters of their constituents are telling them no, will vote against. If I’m right about that, it would mean that Obama would need around 45 Republican votes. Possible? 

Obama is still in a spot. After all, he might be forced into a position where, after all this tough talk about century-old international norms, he can’t take action. Depending on how things play out, this could do enormous damage to his international standing. And more importantly, Assad would go unpunished. All of which makes this week one of the most important in Obama’s tenure. The argument to the Republicans in the House and the American people is simple. He’s fulfilled his constitutional duties. Will Congress fulfill its moral ones, or is their hatred of Obama so great that they will instead choose the side of a monstrous murderer?

NSA Gathered Tens of Thousands of Americans’ E-mails

With each passing day we seem to discover more details on just how extensive domestic spying on American citizens has become - and how national politicians from Barack Obama on down have been less than honest about just how badly the privacy of citizens has been violated.  Whether the extent of the abuses is due to a run away National Security Agency or our elected officials knowingly allowing the abuses to take place, average citizens ought to be seriously disturbed.   It is particularly disturbing that government officials seemingly were deliberate lying to the court which supposedly protects Americans from domestic spying abuses.  If one thinks that they have any privacy in America, they need to think again.  The Washington Post looks at the latest revelations on the gathering of citizens' e-mails.  Here are excerpts:

For several years, the National Security Agency unlawfully gathered tens of thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans as part of a now-revised collection method, according to a 2011 secret court opinion.

The redacted 85-page opinion, which was declassified by U.S. intelligence officials on Wednesday, states that, based on NSA estimates, the spy agency may have been collecting as many as 56,000 “wholly domestic” communications each year.

In a strongly worded opinion, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court expressed consternation at what he saw as a pattern of misleading statements by the government and hinted that the NSA possibly violated a criminal law against spying on Americans. 

“For the first time, the government has now advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe,” John D. Bates, then the surveillance court’s chief judge, wrote in his Oct. 3, 2011, opinion.

“The court is troubled that the government’s revelations regarding NSA’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program,” Bates wrote in a scathing footnote.

[T]he NSA collects more than 250 million Internet communications each year, the opinion said. The vast majority — 91 percent — are obtained from Internet providers such as Google, Yahoo and AOL through a program code-named PRISM.

“By expanding its Section 702 acquisitions to include the acquisition of Internet transactions through its upstream collection, NSA has, as a practical matter, circumvented the spirit of [the law],” Bates wrote. “NSA’s knowing acquisition of tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications through its upstream collection is a cause of concern for the court.”

The newly released opinion also reflects Bates’s frustration with the court’s inability to independently verify the NSA’s assertions, a sentiment underscored in a recent statement made to The Post by the current chief judge, Reggie B. Walton.

Bates continued: “Contrary to the government’s repeated assurances, NSA had been routinely running queries of the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the required standard. . . . The Court concluded that this requirement had been ‘so frequently and systematically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall . . . regime has never functioned effectively.’ ”

FISA Section 702, as written, is insufficient to adequately protect the civil liberties and privacy rights of law-abiding Americans and should be reformed.” 

Ironically, my son who can be a bit of a computer geek had told me several years ago that all of this was happening.  I did not believe him at the time.  Obviously, now I do.

Immigration Groups to Target House of Representatives GOP

With Congress headed into summer recess and GOP House members headed back to districts where they will pander to the racists and white supremacists in the GOP base - most of whom, of course, profess to be godly Christian despite the fact that they are filled with hate towards others - pro-immigration reform groups are planning to target these GOP Congress members and perhaps convince them that doing the right thing should trump pandering to horrible people.  A piece in Politico looks at the planned effort.  Here are excerpts:

Outside groups plan to target more than 100 House Republicans over the August recess with an aggressive ground game aimed at persuading lawmakers to embrace immigration reform.

Their goal: prove that it’s not just Washington insiders who want a comprehensive immigration overhaul, but that conservative voters in their districts support it as well.

The unusually coordinated effort to win the recess includes a major grass-tops initiative by pro-reform groups like American Action Network, the Partnership for a New American Economy, Republicans for Immigration Reform and others to connect local business leaders, mayors, pastors and activists with GOP lawmakers on their home turf.

“During the previous debate when President [George W.] Bush pushed for immigration reform, there was no grass-roots effort and a loud minority that opposes reform controlled the dialogue. This time, proponents of reform are not going to be caught off-guard.” 

Unions and other immigration activist groups like the SEIU, AFSCME, the National Council of La Raza and others are going to lay out their immigration reform summer plan Wednesday on Capitol Hill that includes holding hundreds of events in districts across the country in an effort to target key lawmakers while members are at home during August.

Of course, the reform groups won’t have the battlefield to themselves.  Groups like NumbersUSA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, who oppose the Senate’s immigration bill, have plans to gin up activists across the country to attend town halls and vocally oppose reform.

But reform advocates believe they’ve got the infrastructure in place to beat back those appeals.  Pro-reform outside groups have been coordinating in recent weeks in a nearly unprecedented way. Senior strategists from numerous groups are engaging in daily conference calls to ensure that they are targeting districts in a comprehensive way.

It will be an interesting spectacle to watch.

The Backlash Against the NSA's Spying on Americans

Reactions to the news that the National Security Agency ("NSA") has been spying on millions of Americans are all across the board.  Some are cheering the agency's aggressiveness in "weeding out terrorists" and "stopping terrorist attacks."  Others in contrast are highly upset now that they know that literally nothing may be private in their lives.  The defense for the spying is that it uses "meta analysis" and that our personal e-mails are not being read and our phone calls are not being monitored.  But is this actually true?  Less than three months ago, government officials denied that they were doing what we now in fact know they were doing.  The questions thus become (i) who do we trust and (ii) what could happen if the wrong individuals misuse information.  I for one, do not have a high level of trust of government when it comes to this type of information.  Perhaps I's a product of my youth in the 1960's and early 1070's when the U.S. government routinely lied about Vietnam.  Here are highlights from a column in the Washington Post that looks at the issue:

Keep your distance: The director of national intelligence is having intestinal distress.
“For me, it is literally — not figuratively, literally — gut-wrenching to see this happen,” James Clapper told Andrea Mitchell over the weekend, referring to leaks about the government’s secret program to collect vast troves of phone and Internet data.

There might be a bit more sympathy for Clapper’s digestive difficulty if he hadn’t delivered a kick in the gut to the American public just three months ago.  Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper at a Senate hearing in March, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”  “No, sir,” Clapper testified.

“It does not?” Wyden pressed. “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”

We now know that Clapper was not telling the truth. The National Security Agency is quite wittingly collecting phone records of millions of Americans, and much more.

[Government] officials have only themselves to blame. It is precisely their effort to hide such a vast and consequential program from the American public that caused this pressure valve to burst. Instead of allowing a democratic debate about the programs in broad terms that would not have compromised national security, their attempts to keep the public in the dark have created a backlash in which the risks to national security can’t be controlled.

Edward Snowden, the leaker, did the honorable thing in revealing his identity; it would be more honorable if he would turn himself in and face the consequences for his law-breaking. But there is little honor in the way administration officials and lawmakers have avoided responsibility. Obama administration officials are blaming Snowden, while some lawmakers complain disingenuously that the administration kept them out of the loop.

All 535 members of Congress had authorization to learn all about the programs. Senators even received a written invitation in 2011 to view a classified report. Likewise, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), a former chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said Monday that members “could have gotten a briefing whenever they wanted to.” But apparently few bothered. Worse, lawmakers quashed efforts to allow even modest public disclosure of the broad contours of the program.  

“The pervasive secrecy on this topic created an information vacuum. If congressional oversight was not going to fill it in, it turned out leaks would. That’s not the optimal solution.”

Not optimal, but probably inevitable. Officials who denied the public a responsible debate on surveillance will now have a debate on Snowden’s terms — and there’s no use in bellyaching about it.

Obama Takes on Gun Extremists

It will be interesting to see if Barack Obama holds his resolve to push through meaningful control measured that should have the support of all but the most extreme gun fanatics and the political prostitutes of the NRA in Congress.  It will likewise be interesting to see whether moderates will get off their asses and make it clear to members of Congress that they need to enact gun control legislation or else facing the wrath of the NRA will be the least of the politicos' worries.  This needs to be a real come to Jesus moment for Republicans who are only too happy to regulation the womb and police the bedroom, but who prostitute themselves all too readily to the NRA and the gun manufacturers who finance it.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the coming political fight.  Here are excerpts:

President Obama went big in offering a remarkably comprehensive plan to curb gun violence, and good for him. But his announcement Wednesday is only the beginning of a protracted struggle for national sanity on firearms. Extremists have controlled the debate on guns for many years. They will do all they can to preserve a bloody status quo. The irrationality of their approach must be exposed and their power broken.

Far from acting as if his work was now done, the president made clear that he is fully invested in seeing his agenda realized — and fully prepared to lead a national movement to loosen the grip of resignation and cynicism in the face of brutality and carnage. Gun violence is not some “boutique” issue, as it is occasionally called. We are in danger of having mass shootings define us as a nation. As a people, we must rise up against this obscenity.

This fight is especially challenging for many who view themselves as “moderates” or “centrists.” Moderation is a thoroughly honorable disposition, and Obama’s proposals are moderation incarnate. By international standards, they are very cautious. The president did not call for registering all guns or confiscating assault weapons. He strongly endorsed the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. He is operating within a broad consensus about what is possible and what can work. 

An assault-weapons ban received 38 Republican votes in the House in 1994 and is backed by 58 percent of Americans, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll. Were those Republicans outside the mainstream? And what about that 58 percent of Americans? The poll also found that 65 percent favored a ban on high-capacity magazines, another part of the Obama plan, and 86 percent favored closing the gun-show loophole, part of the effort to make sure there are background checks for all gun purchases.

But the lobbies that purport to speak for gun owners (while actually representing the interests of gun manufacturers) don’t care what the public thinks.

Too often, moderation has become a synonym for cowardice. Too often, moderates lack the guts to define the sensible middle of the road themselves — as Obama has done on the gun issue — and then to defend it. Instead, they yield to the temptation to calibrate where everyone else stands before deciding what they believe. This allows extremists who lack any shame to drag our discourse off the road entirely, into a ditch of unreason, fear and invective.

[T]he NRA’s vile new advertisement that uses Secret Service protection for the president’s daughters to make a small-minded political point .  .  .  .  .  tells us all we need to know, that the gun lobby is deeply afraid of the facts and the evidence. This is why one of the most important actions the president took was to end the ban on research into gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

He [Obama] acknowledged that the battle ahead would be difficult. He predicted he would have to fight the lie that his plan constituted “a tyrannical assault on liberty.” And he sought to mobilize a new effort to counteract the entrenched power of those who have dictated submissiveness in the face of bloodshed. “Enough,” Obama declared, insisting that change would come only “if the American people demand it.” Will we?

I hope readers will contact their members of Congress and make it clear that they need to support the President's proposals or face the consequences in 2014.

GOP Freshmen Turn into Frankenstein Monster

Just as the Republican Party leadership prostituted itself to the Christian Right, so too did the leadership pander to the Tea Party and Neanderthal elements seeking to sweep the party in 2010.  Having won a majority in the House of Representatives, these extremists soon showed their true colors and have been much of the cause of the GOP's inability to get legislation through Congress and its default position of opposing every Democrat initiative.  It's a classic case of focusing on short term advantage without thinking through the longer term consequences.  An article in the Washington Post addresses a new book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do,” that looks at the debacle.  Here are highlights:

Time and again last year, House Republican leaders faced a nearly in­trac­table opponent: the very freshman class that propelled them into the majority with the historic 2010 midterm elections.  Revolting from the very outset of the 112th Congress and later wreaking internal havoc during talks to increase the Treasury’s ability to borrow funds, the massive freshman class repeatedly created problems for House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), according to a new book.

The infighting reached such a point in the fall that some newcomers requested that the weekly freshman meetings be disbanded, because they had turned into shouting matches, with freshmen loudly criticizing the leaders.  “You’ve created a monster,” Rep. Renee L. Ellmers (R-N.C.), a former nurse elected in 2010, warned House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), according to Draper’s book.

Draper’s book was based on interviews with more than 50 House members, including some freshmen he interviewed more than a dozen times, as well as many current and former senior aides. The resulting work paints a different picture than that often presented by Boehner’s leadership team, which frequently proclaimed there was no “freshman problem,” as the group’s overall voting patterns were similar to those of the rest of the GOP conference.

Accounting for nearly 40 percent of Boehner’s conference, the freshmen exercised their clout early and often, imposing their will on the rest of the House Republicans. 

“I didn’t come to Washington to be part of a team,” Rep. Raul R. Labrador (R-Idaho) told the book’s author.  The very first major bill brought the first revolt, when leaders presented a funding bill for federal agencies that cut $33 billion from the previous year’s tally. Labrador rushed to the microphones at the Capitol basement meeting to promote the $100 billion in cuts that had been promised in the 2010 campaign manifesto.

“Some of the freshmen don’t have a grasp of what the facts are, and they’re going to rebel. You’d be finished,” Reps. Tom Latham (R-Iowa), Steven C. LaTourette (R-Ohio), Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) and Patrick J. Tiberi (R-Ohio) warned Boehner, according to Draper’s interviews with two of the men.

The leadership has clearly lost control of the patients who constitute the majority in the asylum know as the GOP.  The Frankenstein Monster has been unleashed and only severe electoral defeats will rein it in.

Going Dark on Jan 18 to Protest SOPA

As a blogger and frequent user of the Internet for both business and personal matters, I - like may, many others including Google, Wikipedia and countless others - I am very concerned about the censorship powers the U. S. House of Representative's proposed Stop Online Piracy Act and it's U. S. Senate equivalent, the PROTECT IP Act, would give the government. The strongest protection from a tyrannical government and abuse of the government's police powers is a free and unfettered press. Nowadays, that press includes the power of the blogosphere. One of the blogs participating in the Internet blackout tomorrow is the Bilerico Project for which I have been a contributor for almost 3 years. Frankly, this legislation is the first step towards government control of the Internet such as exists in China and other dictatorships. Here are highlights from Bil Browning's explanation of the importance of defeating these bills.

This legislation simply gives the government way too much power to censor America's internet and as a minority community that's something that should particularly concern us. While nothing in this suggests it would be used to target the LGBT community, the broad reach of the proposed laws could be used to censor any group worldwide.

This is not a decision I've made lightly. Quite frankly, my income is mostly based on our ad revenue and subtracting an entire day's impressions will take its toll - especially since our traffic has continued to climb.

SOPA, however, gives the government the ability to force search engines to hide bilerico.com, put me in jail, and take all of my ad revenue whenever they decide. This is a longterm decision - one day versus any potential day the government decides.

We will display a black page on every page tomorrow with a message about the importance of defending the freedom of the internet. We'll link readers to more information about SOPA and the protest by Bilerico Project and sites like Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, and Facebook.

To learn more about this threat and to take action, go here. Be assured, I have already registered my opposition.

Super Committee Fails and Obama Threatens to Veto Attempts to Unwind Cuts

The so-called Super Committee in the Senate has admitted defeat in reaching a budget compromise to address the nation's deficits. All sides have a share of the blame for the failure, but ultimately, the most blame not surprisingly falls on the GOP which sought to protect wealthiest Americans over the rest of us. Now, beginning January 1, 2013, automatic spending cuts will kick in and one of the biggest casualties will be the GOP's sacred cow - defense spending. Not surprisingly, some in the GOP are talking about undoing some of the automatic cuts. Enter Barack Obama who in a stunning example of a suddenly found backbone has said that he will veto any such legislation. This threat, if followed through upon, will put the GOP in the bind of either sacrificing defense or making the wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes. It's truly a fun situation to contemplate. The Washington Post looks at the unfolding saga. Here are highlights:

A special congressional committee created to try to curb the national debt abandoned its work and conceded failure Monday, the latest setback in a long effort by Washington to overcome ideological differences and stem the rising tide of red ink.

In a joint statement issued hours before a midnight deadline, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the panel said that they were “deeply disappointed” by their inability to reach an agreement and that they hope for progress in the months ahead.

The breakdown left the nation facing the prospect of automatic reductions to government agency budgets in January 2013 — an outcome that both parties agree could damage the military and government services such as law enforcement, food inspection and transportation safety.

Some GOP lawmakers immediately issued statements vowing to stop the Pentagon cuts. But President Obama sought to block that effort, threatening Monday to veto any legislation aimed at softening the impact of the cuts unless Congress approves a broader debt-reduction plan. Obama urged lawmakers to revisit that task as soon as they return from the Thanksgiving break.

“Already, some in Congress are trying to undo these automatic spending cuts. My message to them is simple: No,” the president said in a televised statement that marked his reentry into the debt debate after weeks of keeping his distance as Congress flailed.

Although the supercommittee’s failure will not result in an immediate calamity, analysts said it probably will further erode public confidence in Washington — particularly in Congress, which already is held in historically low regard.

At a scathing news conference, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) blamed Obama and lawmakers in both parties for the stalemate, calling the supercommittee collapse a “damning indictment of Washington’s inability to govern this country.”

Although Republicans offered to raise taxes by $300 billion over the next decade, they insisted on conditions that all but guaranteed that the wealthy would not be hit hard. And Democrats refused to agree to deep cuts in spending on health care for the poor and the elderly unless the rich were forced to make greater sacrifices.

Fort Monroe and the Future of Hampton

Since 1828 Fort Monroe has stood in Hampton at the mouth of Hampton Roads harbor and remained an active military base. Today, that will all change after almost 200 years after the Army departs Fort Monroe. The 565-acre fort will no longer serve as an active military base and its future uses and development are still not fully resolved. It seems destined to remain home to hundreds of residents and, potentially, to businesses and nonprofit and academic institutions such as the Casemate Museum.

The Fort Monroe Authority, a state agency, will oversee leasing 300 residential units and 1.5 million square feet of commercial space. Officials also are working to designate much of the land a national park. To date Barack Obama has not acted to designate the Fort as a National Monument and Congress has yet to act as well. If handled properly, Fort Monroe could be a huge tourist draw and a wonderful asset to the region. Much of the control over the fort's future rests with the Commonwealth of Virginia - I truly hope this jewel doesn't get squandered and/or misused. More on Fort Monroe can be found here.

Interestingly enough, the City of Hampton has asked HRBOR to hold its December, 2011, business networking event at Fort Monroe. Information on the effort to secure national park status is here.

Career GOP Staffer - The Party Is Full of Lunatics

As a one time Republican from a family of long time Republicans, I note frequently the mental illness like state that has over taken the Republican Party. Ignorance is now celebrated, self-centered partisanship trumps the interests of the nation, and individuals who not too many years ago would have been viewed as lunatics are potentially viable presidential candidates by the party base. Add to that the reality that the GOP is now a de facto sectarian party and it adds up to a truly toxic brew. I'm not the only one who fled the GOP because of the sickness - and that's what it is - that has turned a once rational and respectable political party into a veritable insane asylum. Mike Lofgren, a retired 28 years veteran GOP Congressional staffer, has a piece on TruthOut.org that explains why he has now fled the GOP like so many others. It is a lengthy piece and I urge all readers to look at his full discussion of the three current tenants of the GOP. Here are some excerpts:

Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots . . .

But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way: "Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. . . . If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness.

Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements

This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama.

Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

[T]he faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: . . . It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis.

Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican tactics, rather than Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are important indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise and conciliation.

As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy.

2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries.

3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."

It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets.

Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials.

It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. . . . . I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them.

If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.

Sadly, I believe the analysis is correct and that if something isn't done to stop the increasingly dangerous lunatics now in control in the GOP, the future of this country does not look promising either economically for most citizens or in terms of sustained personal freedoms.