[Peace-discuss] Democrats not just feckless

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I think there's more reason for an impeachment campaign than Cockburn 
admits here -- as John Nichols points out, an impeachment can occur 
after an office-holder committing high crimes and misdemeanors has left 
office, in order to condemn those crimes for his successor -- and I 
don't think he makes explicit why the the Democrats have cooperated so 
much with the administration -- it's not just spinelessness.  But he 
still seems to see more clearly than most commentators on national 
politics. --CGE]

	August 11 / 12, 2007
	CounterPunch Diary
	How the Democrats Blew It in Only Eight Months
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Led by Democrats since the start of this year, the US Congress now has a 
“confidence” rating of 14 per cent, the lowest since Gallup started 
asking the question in 1973 and five points lower than the Republicans 
scored last year.

The voters put the Democrats in to end the war and it’s escalating. The 
Democrats voted money for the surge. They voted for the next $459.6 
billion military budget. Their latest achievement is to provide enough 
votes in support of Bush to legalize warrantless wire tapping for 
“foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States.” 
Enough Democrats joined Republicans to make this a 227-183 victory for Bush.

The Democrats control the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have stopped 
the bill in its tracks if she’d really wanted to. But she didn’t. The 
Democrats’ game is to go along with the White House agenda while 
stirring up dust storms to blind the base about to their failure to 
bring the troops home or restore constitutional government.

The row over the U.S. attorneys and the conduct of U.S. Attorney General 
Alberto Gonzales has always been something of a typhoon in a teaspoon. 
The Democrats love it since they imagine it portrays them to the public 
as resolute guardians of the impartial administration of justice, a 
concept whose credibility most Americans sensibly deride. The Democrats 
now plan to track Gonzales’s firing of the US attorneys back to that 
comic opera villain of the Bush era, Karl Rove, another great provoker 
of dust storms.

The one Democrat acting on principle in the Gonzales affair has been 
Senator Russ Feingold. He at least tried to dig into the visit of chief 
White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, as he then was, to the bedside of 
Attorney General John Ashcroft, to get him to sign off on the illegal 
wiretaps. And how did the Democrat-controlled Congress deal with 
Feingold’s efforts to nail Gonzales for his efforts to undermine the 
constitution and for his prevarications under oath? It promptly 
legalized the eavesdropping.

Just as the Democrats work tirelessly to demonstrate to the voters that 
it makes zero difference which party controls Congress, the political 
establishment forces all candidates for the presidential nominations 
next year to sever any compromising ties to sanity and common sense.

Has the left the political capacity to influence the conduct of the 
Democrats? In terms of substantive achievement the answer thus far has 
been No. People didn’t like it when I write that the antiwar movement 
was at a low ebb. They invoke the polls showing 70 percent of Americans 
want the troops to come home. This is presumptuous, like a barking dog 
claiming it made the moon go down. It didn’t take an antiwar movement to 
make the people antiwar. People looked at the casualty figures and the 
newspaper headlines and drew the obvious conclusion the war is a bust. 
Their attention is already shifting to the economic crisis: housing 
meltdown, credit crisis, threats from the Chinese to destroy the dollar. 
What war?

The left is as easily distracted, currently by the phantasm of 
impeachment. Why all this clamor to launch a proceeding surely destined 
to fail, aimed at a duo who will be out of the White House in sixteen 
months anyway? Pursue them for war crimes after they’ve stepped down.

Mount an international campaign of the sort that has Henry Kissinger 
worrying at airports that there might be a lawyer with a writ standing 
next to the man with the limo sign. Right now the impeachment campaign 
is a distraction from the war and the paramount importance of ending it.

For sure, there are actions around the country: Quakers and Unitarians 
picketing outside shopping centers, campus vigils, resolutions by city 
councils and so forth. It’s all pretty quiet, in a conflict that has now 
- as my brother Patrick recently pointed out - gone on longer than the 
First World War. At the liberal blogger convention, Yearly Kos, held 
across the first weekend in August, the organizers nixed any serious 
strategy session on the war in Iraq. John Stauber of PR Watch had to 
force an impromptu (and very successful) session with leaders of the 
Iraq Veterans Against the War.

A war people hate, Gitmo, Bush’s police-state executive orders of July 
17 -- the Democrats have signed the White House dance card on all of 
them, and guess what, their poll numbers are gong down. Bush’s, on the 
other hand, are going up by five points in Gullup from early July. 
People are beginning to think the surge is working, courtesy of the New 
York Times. So, are we better or worse off since the Democrats won back 
Congress?

A Message from China

Bush can smile as the air whistles out of the Democrats’ boomlet, but 
the respite in his troubles is fleeting. Dire economic news is 
shouldering Iraq out of the headlines.

There’s a housing market meltdown consequent upon the puncturing of the 
subprime mortgage bubble. Auto sales have collapsed, the Chinese have 
threatened to destroy the dollar and the world’s credit system teeters.

On Wednesday, August 8, spokesmen for the Chinese government pointed out 
that China’s large holding of US dollars and Treasury bonds “contributes 
a great deal to maintaining the position of the dollar as a reserve 
currency.” But, the spokesmen continued, if the US proceeds with 
sanctions designed to cause the Chinese currency to appreciate, “the 
Chinese central bank will be forced to sell dollars, which might lead to 
a mass depreciation of the dollar.”

As Paul Craig Roberts, number two in the US Treasury in the Reagan 
years, pointed out on this site, only hours after the Chinese 
announcement, “In an instant, China has made it clear that US interest 
rates depend on China, not on the Federal Reserve.” As Roberts also 
points out, If China ceased to buy US Treasuries, “Bush’s wars would 
end. With Bush’s budget in deficit and with no room in the US consumer’s 
budget for a tax increase, Bush’s wars can only be financed by foreigners.”

So one little finger wag from the People’s Republic may carry the day, 
where the Democrats have so signally failed.

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