[Peace-discuss] Stopping lese-majeste in the local media

[C. G. Estabrook]

Recently I fell into dispute with the Public i, owing to their distress at an (accurate but) disobliging reference I made to that paragon of civic virtue, Bill Clinton (viz., that he is a mass murderer, with perhaps more dead Iraqis to his credit than G. Bush Jr.), in a piece I wrote for them.  Now I seem (once again) to have offended liberal sensibilities by being unpleasant in regard to B. Obama and the Democrats.

An airshifter at our local alternative radio station asked me for a series of brief (3+ minutes) recorded comments ("drop-ins") of the sort that air on the Saturday morning radio program that I do with Paul Mueth.  But when I provided him with the first comment, he refused to air it, on the grounds that it was "a bunch of emotional propaganda geared to support a third party and for the most part a group of ideas that are going nowhere." 

The substance of his critique was as follows: "First you made unsubstantiated charges against the best and most electable political candidate to come before the American electorate in the last 50 years and then you attacked the political party that currently holds the potential for some progress..."  The references are apparently to Mr. Obama and the Democrats.

I'm appending the text of the scorned comment, so that you can judge for yourself.  --CGE

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It's May, 2007, six months after the last federal election in the United States.  I don't think anyone doubts that the swing to the Democrats in that election was a vote against the war in Iraq.  But since then the Democrats in Congress -- and the Democratic presidential candidates -- have been working to neutralize that vote and support the war policy.

Yes, I know there are exceptions, but they're thoroughly marginalized -- look how the press is treating Sen. Mike Gravel and Representative Dennis Kucinich, while it cries up the candidate who most mendaciously declares himself anti-war but isn't: Barack Obama.  Obama's just opposed to the administration's losing both the war and (even more) the popular support for it.

The Democrats are not of course a political party as parties are understood in much of the rest of the world.  They are a candidate-selection system -- working for the small minority of Americans who hold wealth and power.  Their principal job is to promote the fiction that the interests of that small group coincide with the interests of the majority of Americans, when in fact they're mutually opposed.

The Democrats provide the appearance of debate -- but only on safe topics, such as religiosity and guns -- to steer it away from dangerous ones, like the distribution of wealth and effective access to power (such as war decisions).  The Republicans of course are the same.  The African leader Julius Nyrere said acutely years ago, "You Americans have a one-party state.  Of course, with your usual exuberance, you have two of them!"

But it's the Democrats' role as supporters of the war that's been hidden by the press and their own propaganda in recent months.  It's true that some people have noticed it, and not just on the left: neoconservative writer Robert Kagan published an approving piece in the Washington Post last month entitled "Obama the Interventionist." Kagan points out that Obama's foreign policy views are quite in line with the policies of the Bush administration, despite Obama's anti-war smokescreen.

How about the Democrats in Congress?  Didn't they just try to add some limitations on the war to a massive bill to pay for it?  Well, not really.  Here's how ABC News described the aftermath of Bush's veto of that bill last week:

	"A serene group of Democratic Senate leaders indicated this afternoon that they were willing to give up on forcing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq ... 'There are many different ways of focusing on the problems in Iraq,' [Senate majority leader Harry] Reid said ... 'Timetables is one. Benchmarks is one. We could have waivers from the president. We could have waivers from the secretary of defense. There are just many different things that can be done ... We have benchmarks. We may need more benchmarks. We may need a way of enforcing the benchmarks' ... Reid and other members of his leadership team -- Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Patty Murray (D-WA) -- spoke today almost as if their last bill didn't call for a U.S. troop withdrawal..."

Yes, exactly.  On the excellent blog stopmebeforeivoteagain.com, Michael J. Smith describes this as "a funny story: Reid happily burbling about benchmarks, waivers here and waivers there. The sense of relief is palpable, isn't it? They think they wiggled out of a bind. The public expected 'em to do something about the war, and now they think they've gotten us to believe that they tried."

That sounds about right to me; I'm Carl Estabrook, from News from Neptune, Saturday mornings ten to eleven on WEFT-Champaign.

[The audio version will be posted at <www.newsfromneptune.com>.]

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