A Con Job On Afghanistan

It is not ignorance with Rush Limbaugh. Rush knew enough in one of his rambling discourses on October 4 to explain "McChrystal wants to shift troops away from those remote outposts that are difficult to defend and move them into more heavily populated areas as part of a new strategy to focus on protecting Afghan civilians and this is what Obama's waiting on."

Limbaugh, apparently, has some idea of what the issues are in Afghanistan. But this didn't stop him from telling a caller a few minutes later

We were there before he got there but he ramped this up and I'm wondering how much of it was genuine or because he thought he had to just because during the campaign the Democrats say we should never have been in Iraq, we should have been in Afghanistan. That's where we needed to be. Bush distracted us from the real problem. That's where Osama is. We need to going after Osama. Now they couldn't care less about Osama

Never mind that Limbaugh won't acknowledge that President Bush had no policy toward Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Gates is only the latest individual to notice "that the strategy the president put forward in late March, is the first real strategy we have had for Afghanistan since the early 1980s. And that strategy was more about [the] Soviet Union that it was about Afghanistan" (a strategically disastrous policy at that).

The manipulative nonsense Limbaugh is spewing here is the implication that President Obama is reluctant to provide the 40,000 additional soldiers requested by General McChrystal because "they (presumably the administration's doves but, as usual, Limbaugh cowardly avoids specificity) couldn't care less about Osama." But as someone with a decent knowledge about the war there, Limbaugh is intentionally misrepresenting the policy issue.

McChrystal is urging a counterinsurgency strategy (COIN), which would

underscore how much the mission in Afghanistan has shifted from the narrow focus of "get Al Qaeda" that prevailed at the start of the war to one where US soldiers and civilian aid workers are expected to reduce corruption at the local and national levels, train Afghan cops and soldiers, improve local economies, and aid in building a democratic central government.

In contrast, V.P. Biden wants to

Scale back the overall American military footprint in Afghanistan, drop the mission of rescuing the country from the Taliban, focus on strikes against Al Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border -- the real threat to U.S. national security -- using special forces and Predator missile attacks.

Does this sound like "now they couldn't care less about Osama?" Of course not, and Limbaugh realizes it. He could inform his listening audience of those facts in the public domain, as Trudy Heller did on Sunday in The Philadelphia Inquirer upon noting

Only 16 percent of Pakistanis expressed a favorable view of the United States in a recent Pew Research Center survey. Only 13 percent had confidence in President Obama - a mere bump of 6 percentage points over former President George W. Bush.

And, critically, 76 percent are opposed to Pakistan's partnering with the United States in drone attacks against al-Qaeda and other extremists - even though those drones killed the man accused of murdering former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

And then he could make a reasonable observation, such as

Unless the United States develops a strategy for reaching Pakistanis, with real stories of U.S. aid - not fake "public diplomacy" - the local population will continue to view us with hostility, no matter how much aid money we send there. That hostility translates into gains for al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Rush Limbaugh could reverse course and occasionally provide his audience with information. Understandably, though, he finds it more productive to proceed on his course of deception and disinformation in his pursuit of re-creating a Republican majority.

Not Treason, But....

According to Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution, treason "shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." So they are not traitors.

Not Republican Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina or Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma (what's with Jims, anyway?) nor Republican U.S. Representatives Eric Cantor (Minority Leader) of Virginia or Mark Kirk of Illinois. Nonetheless, Eric Kleefeld of Talking Points Memo helpfully describes their shenanigans:

• Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) is visiting Honduras in order to support the recent military coup against a leftist president, which has been opposed by the Obama administration and all the surrounding countries in the region. (Late Update: DeMint's office says he is not taking sides during his visit to the current Honduran leadership, denying the New York Times reports that this was his intention.)

• Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) will be going to the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen, bringing a "Truth Squad" to tell foreign officials there that the American government will not take any action: "Now, I want to make sure that those attending the Copenhagen conference know what is really happening in the United States Senate."

• House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) traveled to Israel, where he spoke out against President Obama's opposition to expanded settlements. He also defended Israel on the eviction of two Arab families from a house in east Jerusalem, which had been criticized by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

• Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) boasted in June that he told Chinese officials not to trust America's budget numbers. "One of the messages I had -- because we need to build trust and confidence in our number one creditor," said Kirk, "is that the budget numbers that the US government had put forward should not be believed." Since then, he has declared his candidacy for U.S. Senate.

No, they have not committed treason. But they apparently have violated the Logan Act, which codified at 18 U.S.C. [sections] 953, states:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply,
himself or his agent, to any foreign government or the agents thereof for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects.

There has been only one instance of an indictment for violation of the Logan Act, no one ever was prosecuted. Further, the language is overbroad and therefore is generally considered unconstitutional.

However, it remains on the books. Democrats, if they had a backbone, would call for the prosecution of one or more Repubs (my favorite would be Kirk, whose act was most reprehensible). When the GOP rises as one to protest, Democratic members of Congress should move to repeal the Act. Of course, none of these thoroughly irresponsible Republicans would be prosecuted; if a Democratic Administration refuses seriously to consider investigating former Vice-President Dick Cheney or lawyers or policymakers involved in torture, no member of the GOP ever would be prosecuted for going abroad and undermining his country.

But Democrats? If the Logan Act remains on the books, in some future Repub administration, there will be a move to prosecute the likes of a Jimmy Carter, Jessie Jackson, or Al Sharpton (by then, probably not any of them). And although the effort probably will fail legally, it will prove a bonanza politically.

Haughty, Thy Name Is Pawlenty

The next time you hear someone suggest that Barack Obama, Democrats, or liberals, or those on the far left are "elitists," remind them of Tim Pawlenty.

Yes, the mild-mannered, relatively reasonable Republican from the eminently reasonable state of Minnesota, who Thursday on GOP TV disparaged (video below) middle class consumers, sneering "There's a joke out now that says the main value of the Cash for Clunkers program may be that we'll get a lot of cars with Obama stickers off the road."

Tim Pawlenty wants us to know that people who could afford to drive nothing better than a "clunker" are all the same. They're all Obama voters, presumably lacking the class of Repub primary voters. Pawlenty, now rivaling Glenn Beck and Repub chairman Rush Limbaugh in scorn for the American people, apparently is in training to seek the GOP presidential nomination.

Limbaugh Misses Again

It's one thing to call the President of the United States a "moron" who "has a chip on his shoulder about this country." Personal criticism without evidence is silly and degrade the speaker far more than the object of the scurrilous attack.

And we expect such classness from Rush Limbaugh. But in between the attacks on a president's character, intellect, or race, Limbaugh actually makes baseless judgements. After claiming that the Administration's policies are "going to send us back into another recession," Rush on Friday declared

there isn't anybody with a half a brain of economic literacy who would be doing anything Obama is too good right now policy wise in the middle of a recession, nobody would dare say that what they are doing is designed to create jobs.

Apparently, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, does not have half a brain, given that she has pointed out (pdf)

the CEA found that the fiscal stimulus has raised real GDP growth by roughly 2 to 3 percentage points in both the second and third quarters. We estimated that as of August, it had raised employment relative to what otherwise would have occurred by approximately one million. We also showed that our estimates were very much in line with those of a broad range of private forecasters and the Congressional Budget Office. There is a widespread consensus (except perhaps on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal) that this aspect of the policy response has been highly effective at alleviating the real decline and counteracting the effects of the financial crisis.

Very dry, that. Here, though, an Associated Press reporter notes that as states cut their budget for combating domestic violence, money from the stimulus package keeps battered women's shelters open, preserving jobs and aiding victims of crime.

Fighting crime was one of the rationales for the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - but most of the focus has been on police, not victims.

A little over $76,000 in stimulus money helped save the job of Cindy Lyons, an advocate for the Domestic Abuse Project in Minneapolis, for the next two years. Lyons helps victims get their locks changed, handles paperwork for protective orders against their abusers and sometimes gets them out of town.

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety's Office of Justice Programs got 72 applications for $2.4 million in stimulus money for violence against women.

"It's saving jobs," said Cecilia Miller, who administers crime victim services funding.

Obviously, the fairly timid economic program, crafted for bipartisanship, has not yet turned the economy around. Paul Krugman argues yesterday in his New York Times column "unless the government does much more than is currently planned to help the economy recover, the job market.... will remain terrible for years to come." President Obama, as Krugman foresaw earlier in the year, has turned policy in the right (left, barely) direction, in part with a necessary, but fairly meager, stimulus package.

Conservative critics, however, made dire (if vague- details are not their strong suit) predictions about the disastrous impact they were confident Obama's plan would have. Inflation would run rampant, and soon, they implied; instead, recovery has been slow and sluggish, fairly ratifying the concerns of Krugman and some others on the left that Obama was being insufficiently bold.

It would be too much to expect that Limbaugh would commend President Obama for anything. Still, Minnesota's example is a reminder that stimulus funding has benefitted many Americans most in need of help- which may be yet another reason Rush Limbaugh is so exorcised about the economic recovery effort.

Reasonable Republican Statements

In the interests of objectivity- or being "fair and balanced," in the words of an apparently self-delusional* cable network- I am going to praise two Republicans.

Brian Bilbray is a very conservative member of the House of Representatives from California. A Republican, he talked to Ed Schultz of MSNBC on Thursday, October 1 about the comments on the House floor of Democrat Alan Grayson of Florida, who was (justifiably) extremely critical of the GOP stance on health care reform. And Bilbray told Schultz's audience:

He wanted to push the envelope far beyond what I know anybody would have to say that—a Congressman saying today that there‘s a Holocaust occurring in America on American soil today is going over the limit. I think anyone would agree. He went over that line.

There‘s a lot of times that goes over the line, but those of us in Congress have to remember with those special rights comes some responsibility.

Also on October 1, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, amidst an interesting (especially his comment about Obama not being a Muslim) interview, told Chris Good of The Atlantic that he hopes the GOP gives political cover to military action President Obama may take in Afghanistan. Whatever the merits of the case for that policy, Graham's expression of bipartisanship veered sharply from today's Republican style when he commented

There is a chance for the loyal opposition to become President Obama's biggest ally. The Republican leadership must stand behind this president, and if he loses that...he's in a bad spot when it comes to Congress....

Savor these remarks, folks. Given that Bilbray's remark could be turned against a few of his ideological brethren and Graham's remark was, for his party, uncharacteristically civil, there probably won't be many more like them.

Rachel Maddow And Joe Wilson

She did it again.

A few days earlier, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow had hosted a tremendous segment comparing subsidies to ACORN with those going to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman (ordered to repay the federal government $68 million and $500 million, respectively, for fraud); Blackwater (five employees charged with murder in the course of carrying out their government contract in Iraq); KBR (under investigation for electrocuting 16 American soldiers with shoddy electrical work in Iraq): ArmorGroup (under investigation for employees allegedly engaged in a prostitution ring in Kabul); DynCorp (employees involved in sex slave ring with underage girls); and Blackwater (five employees facing murder charges).

On Wednesday, Maddow took on (video below) the case of Representative Alan Grayson (D.- Fl.), who famously stated on the House floor

It‘s my duty and pride tonight to be able to announce exactly what the Republicans plan to do for health care in America. It‘s this. Very simply, it‘s a very simple plan.

Here it is. The Republicans‘ health care plan for America: Don‘t get sick. That‘s right, don‘t get sick. If you have insurance, don‘t get sick. If you don‘t have insurance, don‘t get sick. If you‘re sick, don‘t get sick—just don‘t get sick.

That‘s what Republicans have in mind for you, America. That‘s the Republican‘s health care plan.

But I think that the Republicans understand that that plan isn‘t always going to work, it‘s not a foolproof plan. So, the Republicans have a backup plan, in case you do get sick.

If you get sick in America, this is what the Republicans want you to do. If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly. That‘s right. The Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick.

Now, the Democrats have a different plan. The Democrats say that if you have health insurance, we‘re going to make it better. If you don‘t have health insurance, we‘re going to provide it to you. If you can‘t afford health insurance, then we‘ll help you to afford health insurance.

So, America gets to decide. Do you want the Democratic plan or do you want the Republican plan? Remember, the Republican plan: Don‘t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.

Maddow noted the ludicrous statements about health care made by House Republicans Ginny Brown-Waite of Florida, Steve King of Iowa, Louis Gohmert of Texas, Paul Browun of Georgia, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, and the ever-entertaining Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. After making the obvious inference about the hypocrisy of members of their party demanding Grayson apologize, Maddow noted

Holocaust? Always a bad choice of words unless you‘re talking about the actual Holocaust—at least in my opinion.

It is always a bad choice of words, inappropriate, and bordering on the reprehensible. Loathe to take attention away from the double standard the GOP is insisting on, and the accuracy of Grayson's charges, Maddow was too polite to dwell on the common application by conservatives of the term "Holocaust."

But let U.S. Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey explain. At the 31st Annual "March For Life" in 2004: "Like you, Americans want the abortion holocaust to end." Or Mike Huckabee in October 2007 at the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C.: "Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce. It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973." (This quote has to be saved for posterity, and not only because of abortion.) And several activists and religious leaders have attempted to make an analogy between abortion and "h(H)olocaust" over the past several years.

So, yes, Representative Grayson should apologize, which House Republicans want him to do. He should apologize not for violating House rules (which, unlike Joe Wilson, he did not) and not for being wrong about Repub opposition to health care (he was not). He should apologize for trivializing the Holocaust. Right after Chris Smith and Mike Huckabee do the same.

Spreading Ignorance, One Broadcast At A Time

In the midst of one of his spasms of free association about health care, TARP, General Motors, and Kin Jong-il, Rush Limbaugh compressed four decades of urban deterioration into one entertaining paragraph. He ranted:

I don't care where you go, whatever they call themselves, progressives -- go to Detroit -- what do you see in Detroit? Abject poverty. What do you see in most of Michigan? Abject poverty. What do you see where liberal Democrat socialists anywhere in the world have total unchecked power to run things, be it a country or be it a city or be it a state? You see abject poverty. Marxism, socialism, create poverty. I know it's hard to believe that this is somebody's design. But it is.

He then went on to blame this on Barack Obama, having blamed a moment earlier the nation's ills on Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and unions, who "are scheming against the American people, as they have been all along."

If you're reading this blog- not just this post, but this blog at any time- you're interested enough to have heard along the way some of the explanations for the decades-long urban decay in the U.S.A. In the recent past, political corruption (of which Detroit has had its share), drug (including alchohol) use, street crime, poverty, poor education, and more.

There are deeper causes of the ills of urban America. Cities were flourishing when, according to Bradford Snell, president and general manager Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors had other ideas:

In 1922, according to GM's own files, Sloan established a special unit within the corporation which was charged, among other things, with the task of replacing America's electric railways with cars, trucks and buses.

A year earlier, in 1921, GM lost $65 million, leading Sloan to conclude that the auto market was saturated, that those who desired cars already owned them, and that the only way to increase GM's sales and restore its profitability was by eliminating its principal rival: electric railways.

At the time, 90 percent of all trips were by rail, chiefly electric rail; only one in 10 Americans owned an automobile. There were 1,200 separate electric street and interurban railways, a thriving and profitable industry with 44,000 miles of track, 300,000 employees, 15 billion annual passengers, and $1 billion in income. Virtually every city and town in America of more than 2,500 people had its own electric rail system.

General Motors sought to reduce competition from electric railways through a variety of measures, including the use of freight leverage. GM, for decades, was the nation's largest shipper of freight over railroads, which controlled some of America's most extensive railways. By wielding freight traffic as a club, GM persuaded railroads to abandon their electric rail subsidiaries.

With a pack of notorious mobsters, GM helped purchase and scrap the street railways serving Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Members of GM's special unit went to, among others, the Southern Pacific, owner of Los Angeles' Pacific Electric, the world's largest interurban, with 1,500 miles of track, reaching 75 miles from San Bernardino, north to San Fernando, and south to Santa Ana; the New York Central, owner of the New York State Railways, 600 miles of street railways and interurban lines in upstate New York; and the New Haven, owner of 1,500 miles of trolley lines in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

In each case, by threatening to divert lucrative automobile freight to rival carriers, they persuaded the railroad (according to GM's own files) to convert its electric street cars to motor buses -- slow, cramped, foul-smelling vehicles whose inferior performance invariable (sic) led riders to purchase automobiles.

A few decades later, President Dwight Eisenhower would launch the interstate highway system, enabling the middle class to flee cities for more pastoral areas. This increased competition for the limited number of jobs in urban America. And the white middle class, lured to the suburbs by the mortage interest tax deduction, was encouraged to flee by private actors aiming to maximize income and only inadvertently helping destroy the city. Wendell Cox (pdf), who (over-) emphasizes the impact of urban renewal, attributes the description of the process to a W. Edward Orser, who explained

First, real estate operators would try to find a house for sale on an all-white block, often specifically alluding to the prospect of potential racial change in the area and to the threat of lowered property values for those not wise enough to see the handwriting on the wall. As an inducement to sell, the agent typically offered a buying price at or above the current market value. Second, having secured the first house by such means, he quickly installed a new African-American tenant in the house --- renter or buyer … Third, as soon as the new tenant had taken up residence, if not sooner, the operator moved on down the block, alerting homeowners to the initial sale, warning them of the prospect of increased African-American settlement and offering to buy their houses as well. Those who were among the first to sell might be offered prices above the market value; the next several sales might approximate the actual worth of the house; those who sold later suffered a considerable loss.

Not surprisingly, this tactic had a destructive influence on racial harmony as most homeowners suffered a financial loss and tensions among homeowners, and between races, suffered.

The decline in the nation's manufacturing base, particularly devastating in the early years to cities (now harming entire metropolitan areas) has been facilitated by outsourcing of jobs to the private sector, offshoring of jobs abroad, the euphemistically termed "free trade," and favorable tax treatment of corporations which engage in one or more of the above.

This decline, reflected in the near-dissolution of the domestic auto industry (before President Obama and the Democratic Congress recently revived it), is particularly obvious in Detroit, Michigan. Powerful demographic trends have played a role for generations,as Time Magazine, talking about the African-American migration northward, pointed out on October 27, 1961:

With little education or training, Detroit's new arrivals have had to scramble for any job they could get. But in their desperation to find work at any wage, they have crowded out thousands of the city's longtime residents; more than 70% of the 61,692 persons on relief have lived in Detroit since before 1950.

Disagree if you will, about the role of General Motors, the real estate business, white flight, or the federal government, but the deterioration of the American city was not precipitated by "liberal Democrat Socialists." This much is obvious.

The operative term is obvious. Obvious to anyone interested in public policy. Obvious to you, to me, and to Rush Limbaugh.

It is incomprehensible that Rush Limbaugh would be completely oblivious to all of these factors. Incomprehensible. Rush is not ignorant- merely manipulative and dishonest and completely contemptous of his listeners, given that he expects most of them to believe what he's selling.

There really are facts supporting the conservative worldview. There must be. But apparently the right-wing talkies believe conservatism cannot survive absent an atmosphere of ignorance. Their listeners, and American society, only suffer as a consequence.