In the gusts, dead leaves scuttle ghost-like in the darkness. The promise of rain as the clouds darken the moon brings the odor of autumnal ending. It is Halloween. Some will hope for the Great Bumpkin, Georgie Bush.

If you remember the legend of the Great Pumpkin, each Halloween the Great Pumpkin will appear in the pumpkin patch he deems the most sincere. He then delivers toys and goodies to all the true believers. George Bush has been like that for a lot of people, only call him the Great Bumpkin.

Some Americans have persisted in being true believers almost as long as Linus, insisting that this year the Great Bumpkin will appear and bring with him all those things he promised. But each year there have been fewer and fewer of them willing to sit in barren fields as one after the other they have come to realize that the Great Bumpkin is nothing but a figment of misplaced longings and twisted beliefs.

Too many Americans made the mistake of projecting on The Great Bumpkin their own hopes and dreams for the country. He promised something called “Compassionate Conservatism,” and with it he also promised to end the divisiveness of the Era of Bad Feelings. All that began to go sour from the beginning, when a bitterly divided Supreme Court picked our President for the first time in American history. The Great Bumpkin became President by one vote.

But true believers kept their faith in the Great Bumpkin even as he took our treats in the form of tax cuts and then figuratively played his tricks, vandalizing our houses as we watched our one tangible asset slowly evaporate in a mortgage crisis that only figures to get worse. Meanwhile the Great Bumpkin does a disappearing act worthy of Herbert Hoover trying to deal with the oncoming Great Depression.

Then there were all those costumes he loves to dress up in. He decked himself out in a flight suit as if he were a Top Gun pilot and walked onto the deck of a carrier named the Abraham Lincoln unable to hide his smirk, like a child dressed as his favorite hero. He stood on the deck of that carrier and told America and the world “mission accomplished.” The major military operations of the Iraq War were over. It was May 1, 2003. Is there anyone left who still believes that one. It’s the Great Bumpkin.

Out on his ranch he dressed up like Lance Armstrong and took reporters mountain biking over miles of dirt and rocks and mesquite, while outside a woman named Cindy Sheehan tried to get us to see the Great Bumpkin wasn’t real and his war was a fraud.

On baseball’s opening day he donned a Cardinal jacket so he could look just like one of the coaching staff and tried to show us he could deliver a mean curve ball over the plate. At least it didn’t bounce in the dirt or end up a wild pitch, but for many Americans he might as well have done that. We’ve been swinging at his curve balls of spinning rhetoric that when we try to make contact with them turn out to be only dead air.

Of course, he had to make sure he had his picture taken in a cowboy hat, riding in a pickup truck like someone in a television commercial, but by then a lot of people were saying, “It’s the Great Bumpkin and you’re no Ronald Reagan.” But he has an attitude towards the environment and Native Americans a lot like some of those big ranchers in the movies.

He’s also tried to imitate a lot of other presidents. His guru, Karl Rove tried to dress him up as modern version of William McKinley, who was manipulated by the Rove-like Mark Hanna. It would be back to the Gilded Age when tycoons ruled the land and you dealt with workers by bringing in goons to beat them into submission. There was also some talk of him as Harry Truman, but the Great Bumpkin trips over too many words to be a credible imitation of a man with a biography titled Plain Speaking.

Some even tried to suit him up as Woodrow Wilson Jonah Goldberg wrote in the National Review:

The Bush Doctrine, until recently, was hailed or derided as the greatest resurgence of Wilsonianism since Wilson himself.

Talk of Bush as Lincoln, the beleaguered wartime president, prompted Salon.com to put an oversize top hat on the Great Bumpkin and tell the world:

You, sir, are no Abe Lincoln!

That a sitting President should try so hard to wrap himself in the costumes of his predecessors seems almost unprecedented in American history. It would have appeared unseemly for a previous president to have assumed what can only be described as an obsession with history as if it were a child-like fantasy.

This is the American Presidency as Halloween, a holiday that began as a a time when the other-worldly became real and spirits stalked the night, especially those of the dead. As too many Hollywood shockers and slashers have portrayed, the maws of graves open and ghosts and ghouls attempt to take over the earth. On this one night, the line between fantasy and horror disappears.

In no one does that seem more true than the Great Bumpkin, Georgie Bush. With his love for wearing costumes it seems appropriate that this President is now the figure most chosen to be Photoshopped by creative and not-so-creative people on the Web, who have grafted his face on to everything from porn sites to a montage called bushorchimp.com. The chimp seems to be winning.

But nothing personifies the Great Bumpkin better than the War in Iraq. He keeps promising peace will appear and every time he says it millions of Americans have believed him, but as this fiasco has stretched into the longest war in American history that belief is wearing thin. I ran into a teacher at a reunion of leadership fellows yesterday and she told me that she had been teaching GIs for over a decade and that servicemen with twenty years experience were saying to her, “Korea and Vietnam at least made some sort of sense, but this one smells.”

This Halloween a lot of Americans are wondering if the Great Bumpkin isn’t preparing to try on a new costume, this one resembling Richard the Lionheart, the crusader who tried to win back the Middle east for Christendom. The Great Bumpkin will invade Iran and conquer the infidels. He has used the word crusade almost as often as Richard and certainly believes he can recover a piece of the true cross.

Today the Net will be full of images of pumpkins with Bush faces on them. I Googled Bush pumpkin and in turned up 58,000 pages–a pretty good indication of where he stands. Instead of having his fgace carved on Mt. Rushmore, this President has it carved on a jack-o-lantern. There also will be a goodly number of Halloween stories about the Great Bumpkin, stories that make Linus’ fantasy appear quite rational.

But like Linus in the Pumpkin Patch, there are still Americans who fear what will happen if they quit believing in this President and his policies, especially in Iraq. So this Halloween again finds Americans still awaiting the Great Bumpkin to bring them something. In a long–yes even longer than me-essay on the Great Pumpkin, Michael Koresky writes:

Linus’s piety, his belief in an imminent transcendence, ultimately allows him to be perceived as what else, but a “blockhead.”

You might say the same about the Great Bumpkin.

But the wind has picked up and the rain has begun to fall and anyone sane has given up on that myth.

Tagged with: Abraham_Lincoln • bumpkin • bush_or_chimp • bush_smirk • Bush_tax_cuts • compassionate_conservatism • crusade • disappearing_act • figment • future_of_the_Democratic_Party • George_Bush • georgie_bush • Great_Depression • great_pumpkin • halloween • Harry_Truman • Herbert_Hoover • Hillary_Rodham_Clinton • hopes_and_dreams • Iowa_caucuses • Iraq_War • linus • No_Child_Left_Behind_Act • president • promise_of_rain • pumpkin_patch • remember_the_legend • richard_the_lionheart • smirk • tangible_asset • true_believers • William_Mckinley • Woodrow_Wilson

Condoleeza Rice loses her memory at the most convenient times–call it diplomatic Alzheimers. Asked why America sent an innocent Canadian, Maher Arar, to be tortured in Syria, she answered:

My memory of some of the details has faded.

Those words are reminiscent of her testimony to the 9/11 Commission in which she repeatedly invoked her imperfect memory. One exchange with Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste virtually mirrors her testimony this week:

BEN-VENISTE: Did the president meet with the director of the FBI?…between August 6 and September 11?

RICE: I will have to get back to you on that. I am not certain.

Here is some more evidence of Rice’s Alzheimer’s from her 9/11 Commission testimony:

I cannot tell you that there might not have been a report here or a report there that reached somebody in our midst.

I don’t remember the discussion that Dick Clarke relates… So I don’t know the context of the discussion. I don’t personally remember it.

I really don’t remember, Commissioner, whether I discussed this with the president.

I was not made aware of that. I don’t remember being made aware of that, no.

I don’t remember anything of that kind.

Congress has repeatedly tried to get Rice to testify about various matters, but she has successfully fended them off until this week. With the Iraq War continuing to sour, the Bush Administration needed someone to try to plug the holes in a policy that more and more seems stitched together with rotting threads.

While the American media focused their coverage on her remarks about the Blackwater fiasco, Connecticut Representative Ron Delahunt wanted to ask Rice about Maher Arar. Under his pointed questioning she finally admitted:

Our communication with the Canadian government on this [case] was by no means perfect; it was in fact quite imperfect.

We have told the Canadian government we do not think this was handled particularly well … and we will try to do better in the future.

But that was not good enough for Delahunt. He pressed Rice as to whether the United States sought assurances from Syria that he would not be tortured if sent there. Her answer sounded like the one she gave Ben-Veniste. She offered to provide details of the case at a future time because:

My memory of some of the details has faded.

Told of Rice’s testimony, Arar responded with less anger than most people who had been illegally tortured, which only helped to strengthen his image as an unlikely terrorist:

I am pleased that the U.S. administration has taken the encouraging step of acknowledging that my case was mishandled. I fully support the very important work of the congressional committees which are trying to get to the bottom of the extraordinary-rendition program.

A lot of people are still trying to get to the bottom of the extraordinary-rendition program, whose name evokes the old dodge of calling a lie a misstatement, for the extraordinary-rendition program is one of this government’s most despicable actions in history. It involves sending suspected terrorists to countries whose methods of extracting information go far beyond waterboarding.

At this point I should, as a good reporter, tell you my bias in this story and also why it moves me to depart from my usual focus. My grandfather was a famous German politician who fiercely opposed Hitler, which earned him a death sentence in 1933. He worked for the League of Nations for a while in China, then ended up in France. Long before the first shots were fired in World War II, the Nazis pressured France to arrest my grandfather and deport him. My family spent some time in a French jail before cooler heads prevailed, whereupon my family came to this country. The punchline of the story is that the Gestapo actually tried to abduct my grandfather, but my father saw them coming when he happened to look out the window. He tried to drag my father to the fire escape to get away, but for a minute my grandfather hesitated, saying, “They can’t do anything here, this is a democratic country.”

I imagine Mr. Arar having similar thoughts. Unfortunately he did not have the same luck as my family. The Canadian government investigated the entire affair and issued a much-publicized report last September, following which the Canadian House of Commons formally apologized to Arar and the Canadian government awarded him $10 million in compensation. Arar was detained in New York while awaiting a connecting flight home to Canada from a trip to Tunisia. He was arrested by American authorities based on what turned out to be faulty information supplied by those red-coated heroes of Hollywood the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Our “extraordinary-rendition program” spirited him off to Syria where he spent almost a year being interrogated and tortured.

Arar described his experiences in a news conference held in November 2003, a month after he was finally released:

Interrogations are carried out in different rooms. One tactic they use is to question prisoners for two hours, and then put them in a waiting room, so they can hear the others screaming, and then bring them back to continue the interrogation.

The cable is a black electrical cable, about two inches thick. They hit me with it everywhere on my body. They mostly aimed for my palms, but sometimes missed and hit my wrists. They were sore and red for three weeks. They also struck me on my hips, and lower back. Interrogators constantly threatened me with the metal chair, tire and electric shocks.

The tire is used to restrain prisoners while they torture them with beating on the sole of their feet. I guess I was lucky, because they put me in the tire, but only as a threat. I was not beaten while in tire. They used the cable on the second and third day, and after that mostly beat me with their hands, hitting me in the stomach and on the back of my neck, and slapping me on the face. Where they hit me with the cables, my skin turned blue for two or three weeks, but there was no bleeding. At the end of the day they told me tomorrow would be worse. So I could not sleep.

Then on the third day, the interrogation lasted about 18 hours. They beat me from time to time and make me wait in the waiting room for one to two hours before resuming the interrogation. While in the waiting room I heard a lot of people screaming…

They kept beating me so I had to falsely confess and told them I did go to Afghanistan. I was ready to confess to anything if it would stop the torture.

The most bizarre part of the Arar story is not just that we send anyone anywhere to be tortured but where we sent him. It is a sad comment on how low morality has sunk in this nation that we contract out our dirty work to others, as if somehow that makes our hands cleaner. But Syria?

In 2003, the Bush administration strongly pushed for the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. It called on Syria to:

Halt Syrian support for terrorism, end its occupation of Lebanon, stop its development of weapons of mass destruction, cease its illegal importation of Iraqi oil and illegal shipments of weapons and other military items to Iraq.

The Act gave the president the power to impose at his discretion two of six of the following sanctions:

• 1) Reducing U.S. diplomatic contacts with Syria;
• 2) Banning U.S. exports to Syria;
• 3) Prohibiting U.S. businesses from investing or operating in Syria;
• 4) Restricting the travel of Syrian diplomats in Washington and the United Nations;
• 5) Banning Syrian aircraft from taking off, landing in or flying over the United States;
• 6) Freezing Syrian assets in the United States.

Speaking about Syria that year as part of an effort to drum up support for the bill, then Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a BBC interview:

Syria has been a concern for a long period of time. We have designated Syria for years as a state that sponsors terrorism.

The impossible twist to all this is that according a CBC News timeline on the Arar case, US officials deported Arar to Syria on October 7th or 8th 2002. He spent the next 375 days in jail! This timeline very closely parallels the path of the Syria Accountability Act, which was introduced in April and signed in December of 2003. In other words, at the same time we were condemning Syria and threatening to ban exports or not allow US businesses to invest or operate in Syria, we were willing to export people for torture in Syria. The juxtaposition of this indefensible act with Bush Administration quotes at the time Arar was being beaten, represent yet another example of their moral bankruptcy.

Those who sent Arar to Syria knew what they were doing. During the interrogation Arar underwent in this country he said:

They wanted to know why I did not want to go back to Syria. I told them I would be tortured there. I told them I had not done my military service; I am a Sunni Muslim; my mother’s cousin had been accused of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and was put in prison for nine years.

In other words, We used Syria as a threat and when Arar refused to confess being a terrorist, we sent him there.

Arar, of course, is not the first person we have sent off in the extraordinary-rendition program. The American Civil Liberties Union issued a fact sheet about the practice in 2005. It stated:

The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, what had been a limited program expanded dramatically, with some experts estimating that 150 foreign nationals have been victims of rendition in the last few years alone.

The report quotes former CIA agent Robert Baer:

“If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear — never to see them again — you send them to Egypt.

Baer’s statement confirms we knew exactly what we were doing when we bundled Mr. Arar off to Syria. The problem is that, as the ACLU points out , the practice is illegal:

It is clearly prohibited by the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment, ratified by the United States in 1992, and by congressionally enacted policy giving effect to CAT.

The European Union has been especially angered by the practice. Earlier this year a yearlong European parliamentary investigation into CIA flights transporting terror suspects to secret prisons revealed according to TimesOnline:

Fourteen governments in Europe turned a blind eye to at least 1,245 CIA flights through their airspace, some of which were used to illegally abduct terrorist suspects for questioning.

The Times also noted:

The report revealed that all EU countries had been fully informed of the practice of extraordinary rendition by Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, at a Nato-EU meeting in February 2005 and subsequently at high-level meetings in Brussels on February 8 and May 3 last year.

All this background makes Rice’s convenient memory loss about the Arar affair seem ingenuous at best. She may not have known the specifics of the Arar case, but she was obviously aware of the policy that sent him to Syria. However, her “diplomatic Alzheimers”–should we call it “Bushheimers?”–has worn thin. Increasingly, this administration appears top have a short memory about much that has happened in the Iraq War.

Lurking behind all this is a disquieting question. Someone please tell me why we were sending a suspected terrorist to be tortured by a country we had labeled as a terrorist sympathizer? If the Bush Administration believed its characterization of Syria, did they really think Syria would punish a “fellow terrorist” or that we would get accurate information? And, if not, then the anti-Syria rhetoric and putting Congress through seven months of bill writing was all a sham. In other words, is this administration crazy or beyond hypocrisy? I can’t think of another administration we have ever asked that question of.

Tagged with: abduct • alzheimers • American_Civil_Liberties_Union • Bill_Clinton • Bush_administration • Canada • canadian-givernment • canadian_house_of_commons • CIA • Condi_Rice • Condoleeza_Rice • cooler_heads • death_sentence • democratic_country • dirty_work • european_union • extraordinary_rendition_program • german_politician • gestapo • league_of_nations • maher_arar • Nato • Nazis • restoration_act • Syria • syrian_support • torture

If Star Wars captures the mix of religion and patriotism that characterized the Reagan era, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films are a trilogy for the Bush era: its imperial pretensions, computer-game view of reality and apocalyptic, myth-like sense of history.

I first encountered J.R.R. Tolkien many years ago when I had just completed reading T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and friend who had recently returned from Europe said this writer named Tolkien was turning heads with a fantasy series that was even better. Normally I am not much of a fan of fantasy literature, but this friend had insisted so strongly I read The Hobbit and Tolkien’s trilogy and was enthralled. My friend must have been on to something because not long after that Tolkien became what can only be termed a cult that would eventually attain a status on a level of those who dress as Captain Kirk and can speak Klingon.

When Peter Jackson’s massive publicity effort detailed plans for the movie version, I had my doubts whether he could pull it off. The Net was ablaze with leaks about the film with the Tolkien cult weighing in on each leak, which I suspect Jackson planned like a political campaign. The result is the Star Wars of our times: a massive, special effects-laden effort that is the film equivalent of Wagnerian opera–which is appropriate because Tolkien drew on many of the same sources.

The poster for The Return of the King, captures Jackson’s bewildering cast of characters, bombastic battle scenes and computer-generated world. How much Jackson’s film will be remembered as a complete movie or regarded as a curiosity will depend on time, for one thing is certain the next generation will have special effects that make those in Jackson’s movie seem as primitive as the toy dinosaurs battling in King Kong. One thing is certain, like Kong–and like the Star Wars movies–Jackson’s films WILL be remembered for like those other classics it goes beyond mere special effects to connect with that part of our subconscious that is wired for myth.

I will spare readers a plot summary, because it is hard to believe there is anyone out there who has not seen at least one of the films. Besides it would take too much space.

Perhaps nothing captures the contrary feelings people have about the Lord of the Rings movies better than Aragorn’s speech before the final battle of the film. Some have called it Shakespearian, likening it to the immortal St. Crispin’s day speech in Henry V and others have called it drivel.

To even mention it in Shakespeare’s class shows how far our standards have fallen in an era when our president cannot get through a paragraph without making some gaffe. Just three words from Henry V exceed anything in Return of the King: “band of brothers,” words that have been appropriated by many since Shakespeare first wrote them.

To show you I present the two, first Jackson, then Shakespeare:

The Return of the King
Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers!
I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.
A day may come when the courage of Men fails
When we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship
But it is not this day
An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the Age of Man comes crashing down
But it is not this day!
This day we fight!
By all that you hold dear on this good earth
I bid you stand, Men of the West!

Henry V

This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Tagged with: bush_era • captain_kirk • computer_generated • cult • enthralled • fantasy_literature • George_Bush • henry_V • j_r_r_tolkien • klingon • lord_of_the_rings • massive_publicity • once_and_future_king • otherworldly • peter_jackson • publicity_effort • reagen_era • return_of_the_king • shakespearian • special_effects • star_wars_movies • st_crispins_day_speech • the_hobbit • tolkien • toy_dinosaurs • trilogy • t_h_white

Sometimes cliches hold true–like a picture is worth a thousand words. The graphs below demonstrate the impact on America of the Counterrevolution’s trickle-down economics. After eight years most Americans have not seen even a trickle.
There is a line in an old Bessie Smith song, “When I get my hands on a dollar again, I’m gonna hold on to it till that eagle grins.” A lot of Americans are squeezing their dollars these days.

Unfair Labor Practices

Health Insurance Premiums

Median Sales Price of Existing One Family Homes

Income Disparity

Household Debt and Income

Consumer Prices

Tagged with: bessie_smith • cliches • consumer_prices • eagle_grins • health_insurance_premiums • hold_true • home_prices • household_debt • household_income • median_sales_price • middle_Americans • New_Deal • prime_motivation • proverbial • real_wages • strange_death • thousand_words • trickle_down_economics • unfair_labor_practices

On October 25, 2002 a gray day turned black. All morning the weather had been trying to make up its mind, like an irritating, indecisive child. Clouds would reach down, touch the earth, then melt away, alternately and sometimes simultaneously spewing icy rain, stinging sleet, and clinging snow. In such an atmosphere it was easy to imagine the Anishinabe trickster, manabozho, painting ghostly outlines with the mist. Somewhere in the tumbling gray shapes wrestling above a small plane carried Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife, daughter and campaign aides.

As the pilot began his approach to land, he inexplicably veered off course only a few miles from the airport runway and the plane spun out of control into the ground. An eyewitness recalled that he heard an impact he likened to a rifle shot. As the airport radar display swung yet again in its sweeping arc, it recorded only empty darkness where once had been a ghostly signal. When the tangled mass of metal was finally spotted, it took a great deal of effort to reach the site, hacking through thick pines, spruce and underbrush. It has taken a great deal more effort to understand the consequences.

One certainty emerged, that freakish accident was one of those serendipitous events, like Robert E. Lee accidentally dropping his battle plans before Antietam, that can change the direction of a nation. Along with the one vote of the Supreme Court that gave George W. Bush the presidency, the death of Paul Wellstone gave the Republican Party control of all the executive and legislative branches of the federal government for the first time since before most Americans had been born. It is a story manabozho would find intriguing.

The deaths of Paul and Sheila Wellstone also represented a serious blow to what many have proclaimed an endangered species: those who openly accepts the label of liberal. By the time of the Wellstones’ untimely deaths, liberalism had lost its luster in an argumentative and angry atmosphere punctuated by the raucous chatter of talk radio and the vitriol of extremism.

Had they both lived there is no doubt America would be a different place today. Both spoke strongly for what I have termed the core value of Liberal America–equity. Fortunately their commitment lives on in Wellstone Action. In honor of Paul and Shelia, I would ask readers of this essay to pause for moment of reflection, and then spend a minute at the Wellstone Action website, for this is a group that has it right as it trains a whole generation of leaders dedicated to the ideals Paul and Sheila fought for. They hold sessions all over the country for those who want to put liberal ideas into action. Check for one near you. They are well worth it.

In Minnesota people still sport bumperstickers saying, “What would the Wellstones do?” It’s not a bad question to ask.

A Personal Note: My book began with the deaths of the Wellstones and is dedicated to the people who died in that plane crash. Something is in the air when this site celebrates its millionth hit for the year on the 25th of October.

Tagged with: airport_radar • airport_runway • anishinabe • branches_of_the_federal_government • campaign_aides • deaths_of_paul_and_sheila_wellstone • empty_darkness • freakish_accident • ghostly_outlines • gray_day • great_deal • indecisive • legislative_branches • manabozho • minnesota_senator • Paul_Wellstone • senator_paul_wellstone • serendipitous_events • Sheila • Sheila_Wellstone • tangled_mass • touch_the_earth • untimely_deaths • Wellstone • Wellstone_Action • wife_daughter

As many of us have watched debate after debate, an uncomfortable feeling has grown in the pit of our stomachs. America’s greatest Yogi described it, “Deja vu all over again.” Once again, we feel shut out of an election because no one wants to discuss principles.

Principles have received a bad rap ever since the media coined the label “values voters,” their misleading and ingenuous term for radical theocrats. The media forget there are also “values voters” who are not Christian fundamentalists–in fact many of us are neither Christian nor churchgoers. Call us Principles Voters.

We Principles Voters are tired of programs and proposals. Principles, not programs have driven the movement for racial, gender and sexual-preference equality. Principles Voters made possible most of the Constitutional amendments since the original ten including the income tax, civil rights, women’s suffrage and the abolishment of poll taxes. Principles Voters elected most of the Democratic presidents in the last century and a few Republicans as well. Principles Voters were largely responsible for the 2006 Congressional election turnaround. Principles Voters are also angry with a Republican Party that has been taken over by extremists and a Democratic Party that has substituted triangulation for ideals.

Who are we Principles Voters? We are union members who fight for the principles that have guided working Americans for over a century. We are millions of women who ask only that someone finally smash the glass ceiling and recognize that our bodies do not belong to either a church or government. We are millions of gay people who wonder when equal rights will finally include us. We are millions of people of color who have seen a dream articulated in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial continue to be a nightmare where the sound of guns, the sight of nooses and the foul odor of discrimination has persisted far too long. And we are your neighbors who wonder what happened to the American Dream as we dread a foreclosure note, catastrophic health bill, layoff announcement, tuition payment.

Principles Voters believe too much emphasis has already been placed on programs by the media and the candidates. Exhibits A and B for this are the Iraq War and health care. With Iraq the argument over who will be the first to withdraw our troops remains clouded by questions generated by a situation too volatile for pat answers.

What will Iraq be like in six months? Will the festering crises on the Turkish and Iranian borders escalate? Will the meddling of other nations such as Iran and Syria become more serious? Will a crisis in another nation like Pakistan complicate our options? Will there be another terrorist attack like 9/11? Will an unforeseen domestic economic crisis arise?

Instead arguments about whether January 25, 2008 is better withdrawal date than February, Principles Voters favor a discussion of what will govern our policy not merely in Iraq but with the rest of the world. We yearn to hear the contemporary equivalent of William Jennings Bryan’s anti-imperialism, Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. We want to ask, “Will this nation renounce torture? Will we collaborate with other nations rather than behave like an international bully? Will we give something to the people of other nations rather than just take?”

As for health care, Principles Voters are not fools. We know the carefully detailed plans laid out by all the candidates will have to run the deadly gauntlet that has killed off previous reform attempts. We want to know what will guide how we care for the elderly, those with chronic and catastrophic illnesses, children whose only care is in the emergency room, and every American who is being forced to choose between eating or taking their daily prescription? We Principles Voters recognize that only firm principles will allow true leaders to successfully survive the gauntlet.

Across America today millions of principles voters still wait for someone to acknowledge that we exist. We are here and we are fed up with candidates who do not speak to us, media that does not write about us and the pollsters and policy advisors who do not recognize us. We are bored with debates where no one asks or answers our questions. We are weary of having to choose between Plan A and Plan B as if public policy were a supermarket aisle.

Some of us have become so disgusted with it all that we no longer vote. Others dread yet another election where we have to hold our noses and cast our ballots for the lesser of two evils. All of us are tired of being taken for granted or treated as if we were too naive to understand how democracy works. We understand only too well. We understand because we know that to ignore us is to risk descending into a nation without principles and history has told that story too many times.

Tagged with: American_democracy • borders • catastrophic_illnesses • collaborate_with_other • collapse • Democratic_Party • Democrats • Democrats_and_Republicans • economic_crisis • Fourteen_Points • Four_Freedoms • Franklin_Roosevelt • health_care • Iraq_War • league_of_nations • marshall_plan • Peace_Corps • present_government • principle • principles • renounce • Republicans • Republican_Party • troop_withdrawal • values • William_Jennings_Bryan • withdrawal_dates • Woodrow_Wilson • Yogi_Berra

I have always been fascinated by the mind of a traitor. What could prompt someone to betray their country, organization, family, friends–political party? Why deliberately undermine those who to whom you have declared your loyalty? After the vote to override President Bush’s veto of SCHIP, those questions had to be asked of two traitors to the Democratic Party: Mississippi Representative Gene Taylor and Georgia Representative Jim Marshall. They are the only two Democrats who voted with the Republicans–thereby becoming traitors not only to their party but also to millions of poor and working American families.

Taylor and Marshall are members of the notorious Blue Dogs, a group that has frequently voted with the Republicans and stymied many efforts to enact Democratic Party legislation. Yet on SCHIP the Blue Dogs, who frequently have evoked fiscal responsibility, remained silent. Other than Taylor and Marshall, the rest of the Blue Dogs went along with their party on this one–although it took some last-minute arm-twisting and grassroots campaigning to convince some of them.

Project Vote Smart notes that Taylor and Marshall have both refused to provide issue statements to the National Political Awareness Test, which is supported by over 100 news organizations. Project Vote Smart explains why NPAT is so important:

The public integrity of candidates and the quality of their campaigns can be viewed, in part, as a measurement of their willingness to provide their prospective employers (voters) with this information during a campaign, the point when voters need the most help and when the candidates are asking for their vote.

Taylor and Marshall’s refusal to answer the survey, which is nicknamed the “courage survey,” shows a lack of political courage on their part.

In a “B” Hollywood movie you can usually spot the person who is going to turn traitor early because they are the ones who act devious and are always hedging their answers. Unlike the heroes and heroines, who are straightforward and dedicated to the cause, the traitor is usually the one who waffles and refuses to make an ironclad commitment to the cause or the group.

A common movie motivator for traitors is money. In the case of Marshall, there do not appear to be any groups on his contributors list that have given him large sums of money and are against SCHIP. In fact his largest health care contributor is the American Health Care Association, a group mainly associated with long-term care that advocated overriding Bush’s SCHIP veto. Taylor’s largest health care contributor was the American Medical Association which also was in favor of SCHIP.

Both Marshall and Taylor have also benefited from funds supplied by various Democratic groups including the Blue Dogs and Steny Hoyer’s AmeriPAC. Nancy Pelosi even gave Marshall $4,000. The totals from Democratic Party sources range from $34,000 for Taylor to over $100,000 for Marshall. So if anything, both members betrayed those who funded their campaigns!

If the evidence seems to support that neither Taylor nor Marshall can be accused of being traitors for the money, what motivated their betraying their party on SCHIP? Here we need to turn from money to ideology. Again project Vote Smart helps us to understand the minds of both men. Marshall has a staunch–almost scary–conservative record. In 2004 he supported the interests of the John Birch Society 50% of the time; in 2006 this still was an eye-popping 24%. He also has earned high ratings from the Eagle Forum, the Christian Coalition, and the American Conservative Union. The latter gave him a 72% rating in 2006.

As for Taylor he scored an astounding 63% with the John Birch Society in 2004 and 46% last year! In 2006 the Eagle Forum gave him an 86% rating and the American Conservative Union a 68% rating. He also has been supported by the Christian Coalition and Christian Action Network.

According to the Washington Post, Marshall and Taylor have voted with their party 81% of the time which compares unfavorably with the records of their fellow Blue Dogs. Alabama’s Bud Cramer scores 91%, Dan Boren 85%, Allen Boyd 93%, Mike McIntyre (who switched his SCHIP vote at the last minute) 90%, In fact Taylor and Marshall have the worst Democratic voting record among the Blue Dogs, with the exception of Marshall’s fellow Georgian John Barrow who has a measly 79% record. To show just how pro-Republican Taylor and Marshall rank, 29 Blue Dogs had pro-Democratic records of 89% or above. Only 14 had records below that.

What this voting analysis tells us is that if anyone was going to buck the Democratic Party on SCHIP it was probably going to be Taylor and Marshall. But then, Taylor, in particular has been a thorn in the side of the Democrats from the beginning of his term in the House.

Taylor first ran in his district in 1988 when Trent Lott gave up the seat to run for the Senate. Taylor lost, but when the man who beat him, Larkin Smith, died in a plane crash eight months after the election, Taylor went after the seat again even though the Democratic Party supported Lieutenant Governor Mike Moore. Thumbing his nose at the Party, Taylor whipped Moore in the primary and then went on to beat Republican Tom Anderson, who was Lott’s chief of staff. Since then he has been well-entrenched in the district.

Marshall, one the other hand, has represented one of the more volatile districts in the country, a district that has been a political football in the Georgia legislature as first one party and then the other have tried to gerrymander it to give them a majority. In 2006, with the GOP again in control of the legislature, Marshall found himself in a Republican-leaning district running against an opponent whose birthplace was in the district. Marshall barely escaped defeat, earning the dubious honor of coming in second to last of Democrats who had close races for reelection.

The picture of our two traitors now becomes clearer. One of them is nothing more than a New Dixiecrat. My prediction is that at some point he will join his predecessor Lott and switch parties. In the movies this traitor would be the man on the make who has little loyalty for anyone but himself. As for what values he does hold, a man with a 46% voting score from the John Birch Society does not belong in the Democratic Party.

As for Marshall, a party switch might also not be out of the question. The Republicans have announced that retired Air Force Major General Rick Goddard will challenge Marshall in 2008. That this contest will be closely watched and highly competitive explains the huge amounts of money flowing into Marshall’s coffers, but the bigger question is why support a candidate who apparently does not support his party? SCHIP could not have possibly been a make or break issue in Marshall’s district. Marshall, then, represents a different type of traitor–the guy who turns tail because he is scared. His type is a Hollywood staple.

Behind all this lies the issue that was at stake–health care for children. None of those children vote–and if statistics are right–many of their parents may not vote either having become cynical about whether either party really cares for them. It is people like Taylor and Marshall and votes like SCHIP that have made many other Americans also cynical about politics.

We have to remember that SCHIP is a bipartisan bill, supported by a majority of the members of both the House and Senate. For President Bush to veto the bill because it is “socialized medicine” is to thwart the will of the majority of the country and the health of our children for ideological purity. Even more disturbing is the fact that, as one Republican put it, George W. Bush doesn’t have to run for reelection but the rest of us do.

The ultimate traitor is neither Taylor nor Marshall but the President who has betrayed his country and the American people. As much as Bush tried to portray his act as heroic it was either foolhardy or selfish. But then that has been the pattern of his presidency for quite some time. Should we have expected anything else?

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