RNC, Pass By

Clint Eastwood at the RNC (©Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)

In past years I have watched both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, or at least larger portions of the former (and nearly all of the one in 2008), and smaller ones of the latter. This year, however, has been different. I only watched snippets of several speeches delivered during the broadcast hour of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, one of my nightly staples, and in each case I had to turn them off, either because of the dishonesty being trumpeted (cf. the misrepresentation of the President's comments on government helping to build the infrastructure that makes American business success possible), the race-baiting, the nasty tone, or a combination of all three. I only heard and saw after the fact the truthless spectacle that was Paul Ryan's speech; the same was true of Clint Eastwood's now infamous mimicry with the empty chair. 

Certainly there are many issues on which to criticize President Barack Obama, though it appears that few of them, at least the ones I would lodge, such as a critique of his excessive support of the banking industry, his failure to firmly address the housing crisis, his war against whistleblowers, his steady advancement of the national security state and its attendant apparatuses, and his horrendous record on civil liberties, received any airtime in Tampa. What did get airtime were relentless, simplistic attacks on his handling of the economy, without any mention of the failed Republican and neoliberal policies, such as non-stimulative tax cuts, deregulation and non-regulation, unfunded wars and fiscal profligacy followed by fiscal austerity, bubble-producing monetary policy, and so on, which reached their apogee under Republican president George W. Bush, that led to the global economic collapse in 2008, or the almost continuous GOP obstructionism from the moment that Barack Obama took office in 2009. In fact, given what he had to deal with and the economic team he chose, as well as his half-hearted embrace of conservative austerity policies, his record, as lackluster as it has been, doesn't look so bad at all, and the GOP's obstructionism on taxes could produce an even better outcome if (when) Obama is reelected, as the Clinton tax rates would by law return, along with a resetting of the estate and hedge fund manager taxes (I believe), meaning the starvation the GOP has forced the government to endure, along with the savage cuts they have imposed, could spur a striking change in the country's fortunes.

In fact, the specter haunting the circus in Tampa was W. Bush, by most measures the worst president in US history. Obama, for all his faults, has steadily dug the country out of the abyss W created. We are mostly out of Iraq, and are scheduled, despite the neocons' best efforts, to get out of Afghanistan. The US car industry has not only survived is moment of crisis but is thriving. The private sector, even with the gross lack of demand, is growing. The stimulus bill, inadequate as it was, not only saved and created jobs, but underwrote a major shift, still mostly hidden to us, in terms of the US's technological and infrastructural future. Though I disagreed with the lawless manner in which he was killed, and with the attendant policies that violate the Constitution, Osama bin Laden is dead, and his Al Qaeda network is severely weakened.  Both Obamacare and Dodd-Frank are major improvements on the laissez-faire approach to health care and the financial industry than what came before. And so on. All of this naturally was going to be elided in Tampa, but what it represented a response to, the GOP's practical and ideological failures, in economic, military and social policy, were also not  mentioned. Of course one could look at things another way: these "failures," or "#FAILs," turned out to benefit the top 1% handsomely, so in fact they were weren't failures at all, but the outcomes, disastrous for most of us, of where the GOP has been heading for over half a century, towards a repeal of the New Deal, reconcentration of wealth and power in the hands of social and political elites, and corporate dominance of government so that it benefits corporations. Or, as Calvin Coolidge pithily put it, "the business of the government is business." That is a truism if there ever was one for the GOP. People, regular people that is, the 99% majority of us, be damned.

One of the most egregious examples of the Republicans' dishonesty is their continual charge about the president's actions on Medicare, one of the most vital elements of the United States' social safety net. Since I have seen TV commentator after TV commentator, and countless high level Democrats stumble in explaining what the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) does with regard to Medicare, I took it upon myself to state, at Twitter-length, what the ACA/Obamacare does. Not that a single person in the media will be listening to me, nor will any high level Democrats, but if any J's Theater readers encounter someone who asks about that $716 billion that supposedly was "cut" to "fund Obamacare," you can say this:

Obama is saving #Medicare & extending its life by putting $716 billion in savings from ending waste, fraud & overpayments to providers. #ACA

That's 140 characters, and simple enough to state without rambling. You don't even have to credit me, and you can add: the ACA/Obamacare does not cut benefits for beneficiaries. So there you go. Obama did not raid the Medicare Trust Fund. He did not cut Medicare benefits to fund Obamacare. He is not ending the program--at least not yet, especially so long as that awful Grand Bargain scheme, which is really another means for preserving and extending tax cuts for the rich, doesn't pass--but extending it. Extending, not ending. Saving, not drowning. That $716 billion will no longer be overpaid to the providers, who in any case will all be getting more patients because of Obamacare! 

On the other hand, as countless people have pointed out, Paul Ryan's plan not only takes into account these savings from the Affordable Care Act, which he has nevertheless pledged and voted to repeal, but he furthermore wants to VOUCHERIZE Medicare, which would destroy it as it now exists.  The Republican Party fought against Medicare before it was voted into law under Lyndon Johnson, with Ronald Reagan making particularly outrageous claims about its effects, and repeatedly since, leading Republicans in Congress, as well as the GOP caucus, have attempted to gut it. But there is only one way that will happen outright: if Romney and Ryan are elected in November, along with a Republican Congress. 

That, and the knowledge that they want to do the same harm to Social Security by privatizing it (Ryan led the Congressional charge to do so with President Bush in 2005), and to Medicaid by block-granting it (Ryan also led the push for this as well), along with all of their other platform positions--extremely anti-women, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-people of color, anti-middle/working class/poor, etc.,--articulated on the campaign stump and by such leading Republicans as Todd Akin (R-MO), Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Phyllis Schlafly, Jan Brewer, and Ann Coulter, among others, was enough for me to pass by them. I may watch parts of the Democratic convention, though I feel much as I did in 1996; I worked to get the then-president elected, he was a severe disappointment, but he was a better choice than his opponent, and ultimately the country was better off four years later. 

Maybe a bit of my enthusiasm from 2008 will return. Even if not, I can say I helped add a bit of clarity on the Medicare issue, something millions Americans badly need. The clarity AND their Medicare!

Iraq War (Finally) Over + Hitchens Passes

Panetta, in Iraq

This is the way the war ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.  And though American troops are still there, though in severely reduced numbers, the Iraq War, one of the US's worst foreign policy and political blunders, has finally wound down to its sad end.  The Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, yesterday traveled to Iraq to declare the military mission officially over.  Most of the troops and much US equipment and matériel are finally departing that shattered country, as per schedule (and through the haplessness of this current administration, a small favor in all its irony), after nearly a decade of tumult. I won't recite the litany of the war's costs, its destructiveness over its lifespan (or deathspan), and what it has bequeathed, to the US, Iraq, Iran, the rest of the Middle East, the globe, but the costs have, by most measures, been astronomically high, whether one cites the number of US and coalition troops killed or wounded, the toll on Iraq's citizens and the sea of refugees it has provoked, the political crisis that now plagues Iraq's government, the regional empowerment of Iran and destabilization of neighboring states, and on and on.

And still we have never had a thorough investigation of how the country ended up in this disastrous war; no investigation, let alone prosecution, of those behind it, despite the revelations of their lies and duplicity; no censures of any of the many ancillary dramatic personae, the Perles and Wolfowitzes and Chalabis and Judy Millers and on and on; no reprimands in or of the Congress that lay prostate before the war's architects; and no bulwarks to prevent another such disaster. Instead, the US has barreled forward into even more treacherous territory: wars without any Congressional oversight; bloated and rising military budgets; increasing privatization of military services and a strengthening of the military-industrial complex; and creeping un-Constitutional laws and alegal structures, such as wiretapping of US citizens without need of warrants, indefinite military detentions, extrajudicial killings of suspected "terrorists," including US citizens deemed such by the President or secret tribunals, and on and on. War without end is the permanent condition of our politics and polity.

As much as we might criticize many awful moments in US history, we also should recognize that where we are today is perhaps among the worst places, in terms of a complete mockery of the rule of law, as we've ever seen. And worse it gets, day by day, under a president who ran a campaign of changing the disasters this war not only symbolized, but embodied. His challengers are as bad or worse. Meanwhile, the soldiers are coming home, but to what?  And why were they ever over there in the first place?  Really? Beyond the "sea of oil" and the fanatical plans of PNAC, and the undying neoconservative dream of perpetual war against enemies near and far, so long as the neoconservatives themselves never have to go into combat, never have to witness their children being slain on foreign soil or sand or seas, never have to do much beyond rant into prose or a microphone, in coddled ideological seclusion, while the results of their febrile passions unfold in gory spectacle continents away.  The Iraq War has been a tragedy we have only begun to reckon; we won't know its final accounts, there, and here, for years to come.

***

Christopher Hitchens (David Levenson/Getty Images)

Speaking of ironies, on this very day, one of the Iraq War's staunchest supporters, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), died of esophageal cancer at the age of 62. The encomia for the British-born, American-naturalized former far-left, neoconservative-turned, Oxford-educated essayist and critic have, I noted from the time I signed onto Twitter yesterday, been steadily mounting. I was not and am not an admirer. Glittering prose and wit always have a place in my heart, but used to such devices as Hitchens did, especially over the decade of his life, left me cold.  His prodigiousness is worthy of citation; his charm, even when he was at his most repellent, was undeniable; his fearlessness at challenging the media's commonplaces, touchstones and darlings, like the silence around atheism, or the public characters known as Margaret Thatcher, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Diana, Princess of Wales, was peerless, among his media set and many others.

Yet I also recall how awful he became on political matters in the United States, how he went after Bill Clinton and how he slavered over George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. What comes to mind is Paul Johnson's slashing description of the Young British Artists, adapted and shorn of Johnson's gross homophobia, to Hitchens, during his neoconservative state, which deepened into something much more and worse than a phase: brutal, horribly modish and clever-cunning, exhibitionist, loud-voiced and stone-fisted, aiming to shock and degrade, arrière-garde, and, as with those he so deeply championed, arrogantly, utterly and indefensibly wrong.  Hitchens, a self-described "Marxist" who made deep peace with global capitalism and its depredations, was unfortunately still unwilling to apologize for having championed the Iraq disaster even at the end of his life; fast as a magnet he held to his convictions. What awaits him is anyone's guess. It is no guess, however, that he probably knew by heart the following lines, and with them may he rest, wherever he's headed, in peace:

...But whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.
 Richard II, Act 5, Sc. 5, William Shakespeare.