Rant of the Union
It occurred to me that in the weeks since I've been making my journal an everyday 2000-word event, I haven't really discussed politics. I don't want you to think I've forgotten...

I remember having a lot of respect for Republicans. I mean if it’s just lower taxes and less government interference, I can see that. Not so long ago, there were Republicans like Newt Gingrich who liked to innovate. I may not have agreed with every proposal of Gingrich’s, but I never doubted his intellect, his perspicacity, his rational assessment of the way things were.

Newt Gingrich's style could never be stomached by today’s draconian GOP power-mongers. He told the truth way too often. He didn’t base every policy on a gross obfuscation of the facts. He cared about fostering healthy relations -- not bullying -- when it came to other world leaders. Hence his snit with Clinton over his treatment at Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral. And he wasn’t interested in denying rights to some, i.e. gays, or in rolling back every damn social program to the point of anarchy.

If I sound even a little critical of Bush or his people, I must be one of America’s enemies, allied with Abbie Hoffman, Hillary Clinton, and all the freakiest leftists and dictators on the planet. Here’s what I say: fine. Here’s where I embrace the “with us or against us”-ness of this administration: yeah, I’m against you. Send the same dogs to me that you sent this week to 30-year government employee, registered Republican Richard Clarke.

The Florida 2000 election debacle convinced me that America, at least right now, is trapped in a bipolar conflict. We couldn’t look to Jesse Ventura or Ross Perot or Bill Gates or anyone else to be impartial. Every step of the process, from registering voters to preparing the ballot box on up to the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, was all tainted by partisan hands acting in a polarizing way. Oh sure, I’d love for there to be a third alternative. You may as well ask for transsexuals to have a clothes section of the department store. There’s just not enough to make a critical mass right now. No, liberal-conservative shouldn’t mean Democrat-Republican, but we’re painting by numbers. We only get to use the GOP’s Crayola box, and all they’ve got is red and blue.

I really want to kill Ralph Nader. I’m completely serious. If I could wish one person in the world would drop dead, it would be him. Most other evil people – Bush, Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Kim Jong Il – kill them, and three more heads rise to take their place. Dead Nader is like Dead Franco. No replacement. Threat removed.

I know you’re supposed to let go of bitterness, but I’m still angry with half of my friends for voting for Nader in 2000. Living here in California, they say “I was a safe Nader voter,” meaning that they knew Gore would take the state. Fuck that. By voting for Nader, by letting him poll 5% in the state before the election, you’re sending a signal to the rest of the country that says “Hey, this guy’s cool to vote for.”

A vote for Ralph is a vote that agrees with Ralph’s statement that “there’s no major difference between the parties.” I told my friends in 2000 that the Gore presidency will not be the same as the Bush presidency. Has there been a bigger I-told-you-so in history? I tell my Nadery friends that I think they were hypnotized by that “compassionate conservative” rhetoric. They truly thought, not without reason, that Bush junior would be roughly the same as Bush senior, and that they’re all sufficiently Clinton-like when it comes to affecting our lives. I smelled the evil wind blowing in from Texas, but my friends weren’t listening.

My friends would say, Daniel, we need more than two parties, shouldn’t I be able to vote for a candidate I agree with for once, shouldn’t I be able to vote my conscience? I have an answer for that. If you saw Japanese Zeroes coming over the Pacific horizon, would you support President Roosevelt, or would you “vote your conscience,” and perhaps ally yourself with Switzerland? The religious right in this country are almost worse than Japanese Zeroes for being more insidious. The fundamentalists have declared absolute war on the rest of this country. So yeah, great, stick to your principles, assholes, while you stand by and allow any semblance of a great American way of life be destroyed. War makes strange bedfellows, and we have to ally ourselves with Kerry, or watch as the radical right reduces our tolerance level and social contract quotient to Zero.

There should be nothing “conservative” about beating other nations with a club. I am perpetually amazed by the right-wing’s ability to absorb and defend every act of international arrogance by this President. The left was never so charitable with Clinton. I recall all sorts of global mistakes Clinton made for which he was crucified by the left. There was the ousting of Boutros-Boutros Ghali in favor of the less leftist Kofi Annan. There was the absolution of the American pilot that killed 20 innocent tourists by flying too low and clipping the gondola cable by which they were suspended. There was the unjust and racist imprisonment of Wen Ho Lee. There was the war in Colombia. Pacifica Radio was merciless about such matters. This President Bush has been easily as reprehensible, from Iraq to the Pakistan nuclear fire sale to the World Court, but right-wing radio and TV acts as though President Bush can do no wrong abroad. It’s astonishing.

From the day that Bill Clinton took office, January 20, 1993, I never once heard him, or anyone working for him, blame President Bush for anything. The Clintonites never even mentioned him. The past was the past. This administration has a very different outlook. Just this week, Dick Cheney responded to Clarke’s devastating charges of Bush-Cheney incompetence by asking what Clarke was doing under Clinton. Ari Fleischer habitually blamed the Israel problems on Clinton.

Another thing about Clinton is how he treated confederates. Lots of people who worked for Clinton came to criticize him later, including Colin Powell, the “Travelgate” staff, George Stephanopolous, Leon Panetta, and perhaps most famously, David Morris. The Clinton people would grumble about “hatchet-jobs,” but they never personally impugned the characters of the accusers, and they certainly never questioned their patriotism. The Bushies have a very different approach to people like Joe Wilson, Hans Blix, Scott Ritter, Valerie Plame, Max Cleland, Paul O’Neill, General Zinni, and Dick Clarke. These career government employees must be made to look like raving, unpatriotic, liberal-loving, agenda-promoting wimps. I remember this same right-wing defending other government castoffs from the slightest whiff of Clinton’s disapproval. The hypocrisy is what I find baffling.

Right-wing radio and TV has picked up the call, and blames Clinton for September 11. Most right-wingers have decided that Clinton was asleep for eight years and only Bush got serious about the threat. First, why is it “conservative” to see history through this gross distortion of facts? The partisanness is appalling. I wonder if these people that get their worldview from Fox News will change this aspect in light of statements made this week by Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and the President. Powell said that we could never have had public support for an invasion of Afghanistan before 9/11. Rice said that Bush and Clinton were doing good anti-terrorist work before 9/11. Bush said that if he had known about 9/11 in advance, he would have acted. I actually believe them: I don’t blame Bush, I blame terrorists. Okay, dumb-ass conservatives: in light of those statements, still gonna say that Clinton was asleep for eight years? I can hardly see how Hannity and Scarborough and Coulter and Limbaugh and the New York Post can stop saying it – that would be like ceasing to breathe. For the right wing, which controls all three branches of government, to continue to blame Clinton, blame Kerry, blame a supposedly left-wing media, reminds me of National Socialist Germans in 1938 blaming Jews for problems. Oh, nice bogeyman. How much more preposterous could a sense of persecution be?

I realize that this long, erratic rant is something less than an effusive endorsement of John Kerry. That means I’ve achieved the proper tone. I’m not crazy about Kerry. Is this a “real” contest between the real left and right? No, it’s just different corporate contributors. But our national fabric is being very deliberately flayed, and Kerry, like Clinton, can at least stop the bleeding for a while. This is war. Support FDR or move to Canada.

William Saletan does a good job analyzing the situation here. He says:

[Kerry] has been telling Democrats Bush is "the biggest say-one-thing, do-another" president ever…Kerry's campaign [has] responded to Bush's ads by accusing the president of "unsteady leadership." In the Democratic primaries, this accusation worked for Kerry, because liberals think Bush is a liar. But most voters don't, for a good reason: It isn't true. If Kerry makes the election a referendum on Bush's honesty, Bush will win.

How can Kerry persuade moderates to throw out Bush? By turning the president's message against him. Bush is steady and principled. He believes money is better spent by individuals than by the government. He believes the United States should assert its strength in the world. He believes public policy should respect religious faith. Most Americans share these principles and think Bush is sincere about them. The problem Bush has demonstrated in office is that he has no idea how to apply his principles in a changing world. He's a big-picture guy who can't do the job.
From foreign to economic to social policy, Bush's record is a lesson in the limits and perils of conviction. He's too confident to consult a map. He's too strong to heed warnings and too steady to turn the wheel when the road bends. He's too certain to admit error, even after plowing through ditches and telephone poles. He's too preoccupied with principle to understand that principle isn't enough. Watching the stars instead of the road, he has wrecked the budget and the war on terror. Now he's heading for the Constitution. It's time to pull him over and take away the keys.

Bush was right to go to war against the terrorists who struck us on 9/11. He was right to demand the overdue use of force against the scofflaw Iraqi regime. But he couldn't tell the difference between the two threats. He figured that since both Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were evil, they had to be connected. Saddam must have helped orchestrate the 9/11 attacks. He must have built weapons of mass destruction to sell to al-Qaida.

That's Bush all over: Certainty. No doubt. No difference. But it makes a difference to Britain, France, and Mexico, which no longer trust our requests, based on U.S. intelligence, to cancel flights to the United States. And it makes a difference to China, which refuses to accept our report, based on U.S. intelligence, that North Korea is operating a highly enriched uranium program. Bush's overconfidence—reflected in a series of exaggerations wholly unnecessary to the punishment of Saddam for his noncompliance with U.N. inspections—has trashed our credibility and cost us vital help with other terrorist and WMD-related threats.

Bush was right to propose tax cuts in 1999. The economy was booming. The surplus was ballooning. Liberals were itching to spend the money on new programs, despite Bill Clinton's promises to pay down the national debt. Bush wanted to get the money out of Washington before that happened. That's why, under his plan, the size of the tax cut was to grow from year to year. The point was to keep the surplus from piling up, refunding more and more money as it poured in from a growing economy. That's also why Bush cut taxes across the board instead of targeting middle-class families who would spend the money immediately. He wasn't trying to stimulate the economy. He was trying to give the money back to the people who had paid it in, which meant largely the rich.
Then everything changed. The stock market tanked, and the economy slowed. Sept. 11 shook the nation's confidence and drastically altered military budget projections. Bush didn't need to drain a surplus anymore. He needed to fund national defense and stimulate the economy. He needed to get rid of his back-loaded across-the-board tax cut and replace it with front-loaded tax cuts aimed at consumers. Instead, Bush claimed that his original tax-cut elixir was just as good for the new malady as for the old one. The deficit exploded, the economy failed to recover the jobs it had lost, and much of the country remained unprotected from terrorism. The world changed, but Bush couldn't.

When Bush banned federal funding of research on new embryonic stem cell lines, he said sufficient research could proceed because "more than 60 genetically diverse stem cell lines already exist." Bush's HHS secretary, Tommy Thompson, said of the 60 lines, "They're diverse, they're robust, they're viable for research." In truth, nobody knew whether the cell lines were diverse, robust, or viable. To date, only 15 have been made available, and no one knows how many more will turn out to be usable. But Bush hasn't budged. Last fall, in the name of human life, he signed into law a bill that required any doctor performing a second-trimester abortion to cut up the fetus inside the woman instead of removing it intact. Good principle, atrocious policy. His initiative to fund faith-based social programs has been a classic liberal misadventure, adding religious mini-bureaucracies to various Cabinet departments despite a study last year that showed faith-based job training programs were no more effective, and in some ways less effective, than regular job training programs.

Now, to save the family, Bush proposes to monkey with the Constitution. Why is this necessary? Because conservative states might be forced to honor gay marriages performed in liberal states, says Bush. But didn't the Defense of Marriage Act void that requirement? Yes, Bush argues, but DOMA might be struck down. Unwilling to wait for a ruling on DOMA, Bush prefers to circumvent the court system and local democracy by reopening the nation's founding document. He seeks to impose a permanent federal definition of marriage on "any state or city," regardless of what the voters in Boston or San Francisco want.

President Bush. Strength and confidence. Steady leadership in times of change. He knows exactly where he wants to lead this country. And he won't let facts, circumstances, or the Constitution get in his way.

Yeah, that’s why I’m amazed about the flip-flopping charges about Kerry. I like that Kerry has changed his mind from time to time. If the Bush types are to be believed, there’s something hypocritical about going to war and then coming back to protest it, but there’s nothing hypocritical about supporting a war and doing everything in your family’s power to avoid it. Amazing. By the way, anyone who tells you that “no one cares” about wartime service is a hypocritical Republican. People care, and in fact, in Bob Dole’s speech at the 1996 convention, many times he talked about how Clinton and his people had “sacrificed nothing,” how they could not defend America because they never heeded the call to service. The people who now say that no one cares are the ones who were applauding Dole’s speech eight years ago.

I like to imagine the swing voters of America, these Reagan Democrats, looking at all this nonsense from the right-wing echo chamber and saying, you know what? Let’s take something away from these guys. They have Congress, the Supreme Court, and the news: let’s take their Presidency away. I like to imagine it, but I don’t. Hundreds of millions of dollars speaks much louder than logic. People don’t listen to sentiments like mine in the Heartland – they listen to the mendacious Bush-Cheney commercials. Bush will win in a landslide.