[Peace-discuss] (no subject)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Excellent stuff from Alex Cockburn -- on the Democrats'
charade, Galloway's gallantry, and liberal hysteria re Israel.]

   Weekend Edition
   May 28 / 30, 2005
   CounterPunch Diary
   There's Their Way or the Galloway
   By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

So now we have the worst of all worlds: the prospect of some
rotten new federal judges and the survival of the filibuster,
which the Republicans have consented not to abolish and the
Democrats pledged almost never to use.

As Senator Russ Feingold said, "Democrats should have stood
together firmly Confirming unacceptable judicial nominations
is simply a green light for the Bush administration to send
more nominees who lack the judicial temperament or record to
serve in these lifetime positions I am disappointed in this deal."

Since I spent my youth reading fervent denunciations of the
filibuster as the tool of Southern reaction I found it beyond
my powers to take the urgent advice of liberals over the past
month, shed the prejudices of a lifetime and promote the
filibuster to the status of progressivism's stout bulwark.

Besides which, given the collapse of liberalism as the
ideological framework for any vigorous advocacy for the better
things (war on the palaces, peace to the cottages, etc.,) why
should we expect Democratic nominees to the federal bench to
offer any last-ditch relief? The culture that produced
Douglas, Brennan and Black is long gone. Happy "accidents", if
they come at all, will come from the right in the shape of
libertarians like Souter.

Rather than get drawn into the recent unseemly haggling it
would a rather more honorable course for the left to attack
the entire corrupt system of judicial selection from top to
bottom. What possible justification can there be for a system
in which all federal judges are within the gift of state
delegations of the Democratic and Republican parties? Let's
have popular election of all judges.

The US Senate, on the other hand, should abandon its comical
pretensions to be being a body reflecting any democratic
mandate. Senators should be installed by some version of the
phonebook approach. Probably the best method was the one
obtaining at the former House of Lords, now destroyed by Tony
Blair: incumbency by birthright, handed down the generations.
Within not too many decades this simple method produced useful
numbers of decent, independent-minded people. After Blair's
"reforms" the place has become a quango, meaning a creature of
the government of the day.

But these are mere dreams. Can there be anything more dismal
that what we do have, Democrats in House and Senate apparently
brain-dead, with vacant real estate where the heart normally
resides. These are times ripe with opportunity. The people
hold the Republicans in derision and contempt. Bush huddles on
the ledge of a 41 per cent popular approval rating, bolstered
only by the fact that the Republican who not long ago towered
above him in popular regard, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is perched
on an even lower, 40 per cent rating. The congressional
Republicans' popular standing is somewhere in the 20s.

Day by day the news gets worse for Bush. He plunges into pits
of his own making, like the Schiavo case. The economy turns to
rubble. He nearly lost his main prop, Laura to a coalition of
the Sons of the Prophet and the Friends of Jonathan Pollard.

Yet there's no sign of a vigorous Democratic onslaught. This
last week brought us Democratic surrender in the matter of the
nomination of the appalling John Bolton as US ambassador to
the UN. Senator Barbara Boxer indicated Tuesday, March 24, she
was lifting her hold on the Bolton nomination. Senator Chris
Dodd added the same day that "there's no desire for a
filibuster". This was the same day that Republican senator
George Voinovich sent out a Dear Colleague letter assailing
Bolton and urging all to vote against the man. It's true that
later there was a last spasm of resistance from a few
Democrats delaying the inevitable by a week, but with the
combo of Dodd and Biden, two entirely despicable legislators,
leading Democratic foreign policy in the Senate, we can expect
nothing but flag-wagging in Bush's wake.

What lies on the horizon by way of a renewed Democratic party?
We're supposed to be welcoming The senatorial candidacy in
Minnesota of Al Franken, a man who won't let the words
"Withdraw from Iraq now" be uttered on the Air America
network? God help us. Or the other senatorial candidacy, in
Vermont, of Bernie Sanders. At least Jeffords bucked his
party. Sanders can't even do that.

So it's scarcely surprising that the recent testimony on
Capitol Hill of the newly elected independent Respect MP for
London's East End, George Galloway, had every person with any
snap left in their stride cavorting in jubilant satisfaction.
Here at last was a man who could deploy coherent sentences of
well merited, well structured and richly detailed abuse of US
relations with Iraq at the nearest available representative of
the Bush administration, who happened to be Senator Norm
Coleman of Minnesota. This contemptible fellow doubtless rose
that morning and gazed at himself in the mirror without the
slight apprehension that in a few hours a genuine
parliamentary rough-houser would give him some whacks on the
back on the neck whose bruises won't fade for many a long year.

Another man who rose from his bed presumably no less confident
of the shape of the day was Christopher Hitchens, who repaired
to the Hill with the plan of garnering himself headlines by
confronting Galloway. He tried to do so, but ran into
witheringly accurate small arms fire from Galloway, chanting
"You're a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay. Your hands
are shaking. You badly need another drink."

This was the biggest thing to happen to popinjays since
Hemingway defined one in Death in the Afternoon as "a writer
who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he
is anxious to make people see he is formally educated,
cultured or well bred", which is an eerily accurate
characterization of the prose of C. Hitchens. The routed
popinjay, plumage a-droop, fluttered wanly off to the offices
of the Weekly Standard where Rupert Murdoch paid him to
retaliate with 4,000 distinctly less memorable words,
dedicated to showing Galloway to be a shady fellow, using the
standard arsenal of "filthy", "mark the sequel" and other
familiar popinjabber. At that length, using Hitchens'
standards of evidence and innuendo, I reckon I could make a
pretty good case for Hitchens being the Armstrong Williams of
high-end punditry.

One odd bit in Hitchens' defensive diatribe was a wail about
Galloway's "main organizational muscle" being "provided by a
depraved sub-Leninist sect called the Socialist Workers
party." In a slightly earlier incarnation the SWP was the
organizational homeport of the former drink-soaked Trotskyist,
C. Hitchens, also of Oona King, the Blairite incumbent
Galloway routed in the East End. Maybe Hitchens's erstwhile
comrades will the popinjay a ripe welcome in his upcoming tour
of London with David Horowitz, assuming that outing hasn't
perished for lack of subscribers.

So Galloway showed what a man with fire in his belly can do.
The Democrats have no one with that capacity. They have Nancy
Pelosi, whose idea of a constructive approach to the Middle
East was to tell AIPAC last week,

    "There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is all about Israel's occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza. This is absolute nonsense. In truth, the history of the
conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is
over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.

    "The greatest threat to Israel's right to exist, with the
prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran. For too
long, leaders of both political parties in the United States
have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the
Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with
its nuclear and missile technology....

    "In the words of Isaiah, we will make ourselves to Israel
'as hiding places from the winds and shelters from the
tempests; as rivers of water in dry places; as shadows of a
great rock in a weary land.'

    "The United States will stand with Israel now and forever.
Now and forever."

She must have meant arms and cash. Israel already has the water.

 

Nutty Professor Screams About "Plot" Against Him, Cites Troika
of Evil

As an ongoing public display the accelerating mental collapse
of Alan Dershowitz continues to afford us modest delight, and
particular pleasure since he cites co-editor Cockburn as one
of the contributory causes of his distress.

Dershowitz has been much agitated in recent years by the
charge, leveled by Normal Finkelstein that he, Dershowitz, is
a plagiarist. CounterPunchers will find my discussion of the
issue on this site back in the fall of 2003, at
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09262003.html.

At the time there was blast and counterblast both here and in
The Nation, where the letters page featured the bleats of
Dershowitz and my definitive rebuttal. Since that time
Dershowitz has been in an extreme state of agitation at the
prospect of Finkelstein's analysis of his borrowings from the
work of Joan Peters being published in book form, first
scheduled for publication by The New Press, and latterly by
the University of California Press.

There hasn't been such a commotion since the British Customs
tried to keep Lady Chatterley's Lover out of England. A book
that otherwise might have been a relatively modest blip on the
national radar screen has been elevated by Dershowitz's
frantic squawks to the status of a major cultural event. In
his efforts at prior restraint Dershowitz even appealed to
Austria's pride, the governor of California, who presumably
has more pressing problems on his mind (such as his pell-mell
schuss towards single-digit public approval in California)
than an impending publication of the University of California.

The last refuge of any cornered mountebank is to invoke "The
Plot Against Me", and in a curious inversion of some
anti-Semitic tract, Dershowitz has now traced all his problems
to an all-powerful troika, consisting of Noam Chomsky, Norman
Finkelstein and me.

Dershowitz's thesis is that like some Archon of the Galaxies
Chomsky croaks from his lair in the heart of darkness,
"Destroy Him". The compliant Finkelstein goes to work, and the
result of his researches is then publicized by Yours Truly,
with devastating effect upon Dershowitz. His life is ruined! A
pleasant life formerly devoted to apologias for Israel's
barbarous treatment of Palestinians has now been cruelly
subverted by the all-powerful Troika. The professor who once
impressed young women in Harvard Yard with technical
discussions of how best, (under judicial warrant, of course)
to push scalpels under the fingernails of terror suspects now
fills the air with threats of libel. Like some latter day
Ancient Mariner, stopping one in three, Dershowitz posts
interminable dissections of "The Plot Against Me" on the
internet, dissections which could fairly be accused of
partiality towards the male sex, since I recall that even
before my own discussion of the Dershowitz-Peters conjunction
in late 2003, the affair received detailed scrutiny on Amy
Goodman's Democracy Now.

(To address only Dershowitz's discussion of my own role,
malicious inaccuracies abound. He claims falsely I was fired
from the Village Voice. Though invited to return by the
Voice's then editor I had no desire to return to a publication
panicked into an unfair suspension and quit. It was a sound
choice and a happy day. The Nation offered me a column and a
national audience. In scarce more than a decade CounterPunch
had set sail!)

For our part, CounterPunch is taking the high road. Not for us
the course of malice and paranoia adopted by the demented
Dershowitz, who ever more closely resembles an illustration to
the limericks of Edward Lear. This fall we will be publishing
The Case Against Israel, by Michael Neumann. Then let
constructive debate commence! On the one hand Dershowitz's
shoddy, compromised apologia for a morally bankrupt state; on
the other, Neumann's conclusive, scholarly and immaculate
presentation, brilliant in its logic, unchallengeable in its
carefully assembled facts...

[The rest, including a detailed disquisition on BBQ, is found
at <http://counterpunch.org/>. --CGE]