"I Like Ike" -- but not Rush and Ann

John McCain (who's doing very well in tonight's primaries, by the way) isn't really my cup of tea. What I will grant him, however, is that he's a Republican with the traditional beliefs of a Republican. Not the "borrow and spend," neo-Conservative, damn the Bill of Rights, "the poor deserve their poverty," sort of Republican we've seen in the last few years. Ironically, because he sticks to the traditional beliefs of the Republican party, McCain's been damned as a RINO (Republican in Name Only) by today's idealogues.

Tonight, I bring a guest speaker to the Northwest Corner. An older guy with a military career behind him. A lifelong, "I Like Ike" Republican, a supporter of Barry Goldwater, a guy who even voted for the "W" in 2000. He supports McCain now, and spells out just what's wrong with today's Republican party.

I might suggest that if General Eisenhower were alive in 2008, he'd be running as a Democrat. He'd have to -- today's Republican party would never nominate him.

Here's what our anonymous guest speaker had to say in the on-line edition of today's New York Times:

I am a former conservative. I knew what I wanted to conserve–strong National defense, and I made a career of active military service. I voted for Goldwater and I consider Ike to be the greatest president by far of my adult life. I voted for Bush in 2000, but now consider his administration to be hideously flawed and the worst in our history.

Now I ask, what do conservatives want to conserve. Apparently not the environment, not manufacturing jobs in the US, not the middle and working classes, nor labor unions. If they support Bush, then they don’t want to conserve the Constitution, the rule of law, respect for science, or even the English language. In my estimation, they want to conserve greed, bronze age supernatural mythology, and redneck bigotry against gays, reproductive freedom of choice, and Latino immigration. They want to conserve their disregard for the unfortunate in our society.

McCain is a National hero and was correct in condemning vermin bigots like Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson. McCain was correct in condemning the criminally inept conduct of the war by the arrogant Rumsfeld. McCain has been correct in matters that matter most to average Americans. Today’s conservatives are the remnants of the intolerant and poorly educated denizens of dixie and the Bible belt, and are not representative of concerned and aware Americans. Coulter, Limbaugh, and fox noise do not speak for true Americans.

— Posted by bigjimbo

Hail to the Chief

When George V, By the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India, arrived in Delhi in 1911 to receive the joyful tribute of his imperial subjects at an Imperial Durbar, he entered the city in a five-mile long procession through the Elephant Gate. The effects on Delhi traffic, even in those early days of the horseless carriage, can only be imagined.

When George W., By the Grace of the Florida Secretary of State and the Supreme Court, President of the United States, Defender of Big Oil, and Decider for the Entire World, arrives in Seattle on Monday to receive the joyful tribute of Eastside Republicans at a $1,000 a plate dinner ($10,000 for those wishing to purchase a brief personal audience with the Divine Presence), the impact may be somewhat less if only because we have fewer elephants in our highways and byways.

Traffic in Seattle is always congested, because of the geography of the area. We have many bodies of water surrounding small amounts of densely populated land. This August has been worse than usual because of the closure for re-paving of many of the northbound lanes of I-5, the most heavily trafficked route through downtown. And the two bridges across Lake Washington, connecting Seattle to the the Eastside suburbs, are daily nightmares on the best of days.

According to this morning's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, drivers can expect the afternoon commute on Monday to be totally snarled. All streets and roads on the President's route will be entirely closed to all other traffic while he is en route. The Secret Service will not announce the President's route in advance, and will not indicate which airport he will use for his arrival and departure. It will be therefore impossible for motorists to plan alternative ways to go home from work.

But we are of course honored to have our President visit the Northwest Corner. His visit will obviously be an expensive nightmare for our police, a major inconvenience and elevator of blood-pressure for our motorists, and a serious logistics problem for the Secret Service. But, of course, whether we are Democrat or Republican, he is our President and we welcome him.

President Bush's only purpose in making the trip is to raise money for the re-election campaign of Dave Reichert, a suburban Republican Congressman for a swing district. As stated in the P-I, "Contacted Friday, Reichert's campaign staff declined to comment on the event."

The President will make no public appearances. Seattle's citizens probably are not considered part of his core constituency, such as it is. Unless they have $1,000 to pony up for dinner.

Photos: (t0p) State Entry into Delhi (1911 postcard); (bottom)King George V in imperial robes

Empathy: Its Uses in Foreign Policy

em·pa·thy

[em-puh-thee] –noun

the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

The Sunday New York Times seems full of stories today that discuss the on-going meltdown of the Bush administration, stories provoked by this week's hasty resignation of Karl Rove, and by the continuing bad news from Iraq.

What went wrong over there? I don't discount the importance of conflicting intellectual approaches to geopolitics. But I wonder if many of this administration's difficulties don't stem from Republicans' traditionally poor sense of empathy for persons from backgrounds unlike their own.

We usually think of "empathy" as benefitting the person with whom we empathize. But the ability to get "inside the skin" of others also benefits the empathizer. Every salesman, businessman, attorney, advertiser, public relations consultant needs to understand how others think and feel. No one ever disputes this need when dealing with other Americans. And yet, even a highly successful American business frequently falls flat on its face when it attempts to sell goods and services abroad. Its sales force fails to understand the minds, customs, emotions, and motivations of the people to whom they're trying to make the sale.

"You gotta know the territory," as the itinerant salesmen sang in "The Music Man."

The Bush administration didn't know the territory before it went into Iraq. I doubt if its officials do now. Back in 2003, the organizers of the Iraq debacle seemed almost gleeful in discounting and ignoring the opinions of career officers in the State Department, persons who may have had some sense of the history, culture, ideals, taboos, aspirations, and daily lives of Iraqis and other Arab peoples. I pick on the Bush administration, because I disagree with it in so many respects, but this same failure is endemic historically in American foreign policy. Not understanding what makes others tick is a very human weakness, but if we are to have a successful foreign policy, it's a weakness we can't afford.

The British Foreign Office, stuffy as it may have been at the height of the Empire, nevertheless put up with eccentrics like Lawrence of Arabia, Arab head dress and all, just so long as his expertise remained of use. We desperately need such expertise, wherever we can find it.

Republicans need to recognize in themselves -- and I speak only in generalities, of course -- an even greater than average tendency to narrow their horizons to the set of people and peoples who look, act, dress, talk, and feel like themselves. Republicans have to force themselves -- in their role as government officials, regardless of their preferences in their private lives -- to expand their universe, to learn to understand -- to empathize with, if you will -- peoples very unlike themselves. Over the years, Republicans can expect to control foreign policy roughly fifty percent of the time. As a nation, we can't afford another two presidential terms of foreign policy like those now approaching an end.

Most of us -- at least, those of us apt to be reading this blog -- spent some time, during or shortly after college, bumming around foreign countries. Those were times we rubbed shoulders with all kinds of foreigners, both locals and other travelers, because we didn't have the money to shut ourselves off in expensive hotels. I think that experience provided us with a sense, at least, that human life is rich in the multitude of ways it can be led, that humans can live lives in ways very different from our own with very different objectives, and still live lives that they find deeply meaningful. They may envy our wealth and the comfort of our lives, but many are unwilling to buy our external affluence by abandoning the riches of their own internal traditions.

Maybe all future foreign policy appointees, when facing Senate confirmation hearings, should be forced to respond to certain questions: How many youth hostels have you ever stayed in, and in what parts of the world? With how many local families have you lived abroad? Ever been so broke overseas that you hitchhiked? With how many fellow students in foreign countries did you ever discuss politics, economics, jobs, education, religion, love, sex, family life -- not as a debate but kicking ideas around informally, over a beer or lying on your backs staring at the stars? How have all these experiences affected you?

Republicans like "litmus tests." This might be a good one to implement.

Photo: Future voters. Kargil, India. 2005.

Cassandra's Voice

Sometimes I read an essay that's so good that I think, "Wow, that's great, I couldn't have said it better myself." I've developed a subconscious protocol for handling such material.

My neurotransmitters immediately route the essay to my brain's "Cool Idea Storage Unit" (CISU). On its way, my Rhetorical Processing Unit (RPU) filters the essay through my cerebral delamination filters, where it is stripped of its author's name, place of origin, and, indeed, any internal suggestion that the essay has already been written and published. The delaminated essay next passes through a brain stem neuro-centrifuge, where the connective tissues binding the ideas and the phrases contained in the original essay are dissolved. They are then stocked in Immediate Access Storage (IAS) in random form, like a stack of so much lumber. The neuro-centrifuge's solvent is designed to leave clever analogies, stirring phrases and bons mots in general untouched and fully intact for appropriate re-use.

All these ideas and phrases, thus stocked in Immediate Access Storage (IAS), are by that time totally removed from their original context, and available for my "innocent" use in my own writing. The next time I feel inclined to write on the same or similar subject, they pop into my consciousness, one by one, as though handed to me by my Muse, while I write. I naively believe that, thus inspired, I am engaged in "creativity." We call this process "unconscious plagiarism."

Occasionally, however, an essay or editorial is so true and so clearly written that I'm moved to overrule this unconscious process, and republish it as it was written, with full attribution to its author. That is how I felt today, after reading a column in the Seattle Times, written by Times editorial columnist Bruce Ramsey. The column discusses the wisdom of Rep. Ron Paul, the predictable fact that the Republicans will ignore his wisdom, and the fate, as a consequence, of the Republican Party in 2008. I quote the conclusion of the column:

It is fairly clear now that America will leave Iraq, and not in triumph. It will be tempting for the Republicans to blame the result on the Democrats, because that would mean that the Republicans were "right" in some theoretical way. But they were not right. They did not understand Iraq, or the history of imperialism or much of anything beyond knocking over Saddam Hussein.

In foreign affairs, the Republicans are our nationalist party, and there is a role for that. But they need to question the idea of a "global war on terror." The 9/11 attacks were acts of desperation by 19 men with box cutters. What these men did looked and felt like acts of war, but really it was an audacious crime, planned and executed by a political gang financed with private money.

Fighting such gangs is the job of cops, security workers, customs agents, G-men, diplomats and alert citizens. It is an important task, but we are not at war. America hasn't been attacked in nearly six years.

Republicans need to settle on a foreign policy that asserts American interests in a realistic and humane way. Whether they go as far as the noninterventionism of Ron Paul is another question, but they have to jettison the Bush policy of preemptive war. That the leading Republican contenders refuse to question that policy is a sign that they have not learned and, 17 months from now, will not win.

Not a prayer, Rudy

Has former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani lost his mind? In a speech in Houston, yesterday, he told fellow Republicans that his personal views on gun control, abortion, and gay rights were not the most important concerns facing the United States of America today. He said they'd be better off worrying more about winning the 2008 election than in choosing a nominee who is pristine in his right wing social ideology.

In the real (i.e., non-Republican) world, such a speech would hardly raise an eyebrow. As Democrats and independents approach the next presidential election, they hope and intend to select a President who is capable of ending the war in Iraq, controlling the threat of global terrorism, restoring respect for American ideals and conduct, combating world-wide poverty, placing social security and Medicare on a sound financial footing, restoring fairness to the tax laws, making American industry competitive globally (insofar as can be done by public policies), and ensuring that increases in national prosperity are shared to some degree by all levels of our society.

Most of these goals, if not always the means, are shared by the great majority of Americans. Some are more divisive. But they are all natural subjects of public policy at the federal level. Which policies are to be adopted will depend upon the party in power.

Giuliani pointed out the importance of such national issues, as contrasted with the “social issues” that are divisive even among Republicans, and that are of importance only at a personal and, perhaps, state level. He urged members of his party to focus on legitimate national issues, the ones of concern to most voters, if they hope to retain the White House after 2008.

Hardly newsworthy, in normal times, right? But Tony Perkins, a right wing religious leader, responded immediately: “When people hear Rudy Giuliani speak about taxpayer-funded abortions, gay ‘rights’ and gun control, they don’t hear a choice, they hear an echo of Hillary Clinton.” (Why Christians, conservative or otherwise, would be opposed to gun control is not clear to me; why Hillary Clinton seems the apotheosis of “Liberal” also puzzles me.)

Pundits immediately declared that no Republican could win nomination while standing on the “libertarian” ground that Giuliani has staked out. That appears correct. The Republican party, as an organization, is now largely the political wing of the Southern Baptist church, with some additional allies from other groups in the Mid West.

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” --George Santayana

Democrats have been through all this before. In 1972, they nominated George McGovern, who was defeated in a landslide by an unpopular president who also was bogged down in an unpopular war. An anti-Vietnam war campaign, competently run, should have won in 1972. The McGovern campaign ran into many problems, including Nixon's “dirty tricks” operations. But the single most important reason for the size of his defeat was the public perception that McGovern was a freaky, extreme liberal whose views on many issues, the war aside, were far outside the mainstream.

This public perception was fed by an unruly Democratic convention, largely managed by political amateurs and single-interest enthusiasts, accompanied by loud televised demonstrations supporting issues that to “normal” Americans of the time seemed Communist and/or “hippy,” and that were supported by demonstrators and delegates who looked bearded, long-haired, freaky, stoned, obscene, and, in a word, totally un-American.

My point is that the Democrats suffered in 1972 -- and for years afterward -- from having turned their party over to its far left wing. (Whether that wing was right or wrong on the issues is irrelevant for this discussion.) The Republicans show every sign of heading in the same direction next year, albeit in their own typical manner -- duller, buttoned-up, more boring, less imaginative -- but appearing just as loony to the voters.

As a Democrat, I should be happy that Giuliani doesn’t have a prayer of winning the 2008 nomination from his party’s convention in St. Paul. But as an American, I’d like to see a campaign in which the two parties debate legitimate national issues crucial to our era. Such a campaign requires two parties that agree on the issues that are legitimate and important, but disagree on the solutions. I don’t see such a campaign occurring.

I see the Democrats and Republicans talking past each other, like two ships passing in the night.