E Wayne Ross

Well, the merger of the religious right and the Bush administration is not really news now is it? Nonetheless, these stories about “Justice Sunday” are exemplars of the fundamentalist take over of Washington.

Association Press: Religious Conservatives Urged to Pray and Act about Supreme Court

Monday 15 August 2005 Nashville, Tenn. Religious conservatives have been urged to pray to God and call their senators about the upcoming confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee John Roberts.

U-S House Majority Leader Tom DeLay joined former Georgia Senator Zell Miller and “Focus on the Family” Chairman James Dobson. They were among the speakers at a “Justice Sunday” rally in Nashville that was broadcast into churches nationwide.

None of the speakers explicitly called for Roberts’ confirmation. But Sugar Land Republican DeLay asserted that lawmaking is the job of lawmakers, not judges — no matter how high up or distinguished.

Miller urged people of faith to “cover this confirmation process with a blanket of prayer.” Dobson said he prays that Senate Democrats won’t be able to turn the hearings “into a circus.”

The speakers denounced Supreme Court rulings on religious expression, gay rights and abortion and expressed hope that Roberts would tip the court in a more conservative direction.

“Justice Sunday”

Nashville — The Christian conservative organizers of the weekend’s “Justice Sunday” telecast once talked about using it to rally support for the president’s Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts.

But when the cast of influential evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics and Republican congressmen assembled at the Two Rivers Baptist Church in Nashville on Sunday evening, most speakers mentioned Roberts only in passing.

Instead, they took aim mainly at the power and decisions of the Supreme Court itself.

Norman Solomon gets it right in this short piece from Truthout, when it comes to the war in Iraq both Bush and the Democrats are getting it wrong.

While Bush sees the war as a problem and Dean bemoans it as a stalemate, Sheehan refuses to evade the truth that it is a crime. And the analysis that came from Daniel Ellsberg in 1972, while the Vietnam War continued, offers vital clarity today: “Each of these perspectives called for a different mode of personal commitment: a problem, to help solve it; a stalemate, to help extricate ourselves with grace; a crime, to expose and resist it, to try to stop it immediately, to seek moral and political change.”

Here are a couple of interesting responses from MediaChannel.org to Frank Rich’s column from yesterday. I don’t think that Rich would disagree with any of the points made by Danny Schechter and Norman Solomon in these responses. I read Rich’s “war is over” statment as metaphorical/psychological, i.e., the jig is up on this episode of US global domination…politically. Of course the horror and destruction of the world’s most dangerous rouge state continues.

Solomon: Someone tell Frank Rich the war is not over

On Sunday, the New York Times published a piece by Frank Rich under
the headline “Someone Tell the President the War Is Over.” The article was
a flurry of well-placed jabs about the Bush administration’s lies and
miscalculations for the Iraq war. But the essay was also a big straw in
liberal wind now blowing toward dangerous conclusions.

Comparing today’s war-related poll numbers for George W. Bush with
those for President Lyndon B. Johnson, the columnist writes: “On March 31,
1968, as LBJ’s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn’t seek
re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.” And Rich
extends his Vietnam analogy: “What lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not
victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or
triage) strategy that may echo Johnson’s March 1968 plan for retreat from
Vietnam.”

Schechter: “What’s the best way to ‘support the troops'”

New York, August 15 — When John and Yoko sang “war is over,” they added, “if you want it.” It was a plea for peace, a call to “stop all the fighting.” It was written in l972. That war did not end for three years.

Frank Rich wrote eloquently in Sunday’s New York Times that this war, the one in Iraq, is also over.

“Like the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. ‘We will stay the course,’ he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?”

Rich offers an optimistic scenario even as he does not go the next step and appeal, as John and Yoko did, on the public to act. Perhaps he doesn’t think it necessary, concluding, “The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We’re outta there.”

Not so fast.

To my mind, Frank Rich is the best columnist writing for a major US newspaper. In this column he pretty much sums up the domestic politics of the war in Iraq, but he he does leave out one angle–the oil. (See the column below).

Also, Tom Engelhardt adds some confirming details on how out of touch W. is; how desparate military recruiters are; and the confusion in the ranks of the administration.

Someone Tell the President the War Is Over

By Frank Rich

The New York Times

Sunday 14 August 2005

Like the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. “We will stay the course,” he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?

A president can’t stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won’t stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush’s handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend’s Newsweek poll – a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.’s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents’ overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.’s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn’t seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.

But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout “don’t ask, don’t tell” and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press.

The president’s cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill O’Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann Coulter is chiding Mr. O’Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture akin to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out of a job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who helped expose the administration’s prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.’s. (On this sinking ship, it’s hard to know which rat to root for.) As if the right-wing pundit crackup isn’t unsettling enough, Mr. Bush’s top war strategists, starting with Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, have of late tried to rebrand the war in Iraq as what the defense secretary calls “a global struggle against violent extremism.” A struggle is what you have with your landlord. When the war’s number-managers start using euphemisms for a conflict this lethal, it’s a clear sign that the battle to keep the Iraq war afloat with the American public is lost.

That battle crashed past the tipping point this month in Ohio. There’s historical symmetry in that. It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, that Mr. Bush gave the fateful address that sped Congressional ratification of the war just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and hype. The president said that “we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade,” an exaggeration based on evidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from conclusive. He said that Saddam “could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year” were he able to secure “an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball.” Our own National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted State Department findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa were “highly dubious.”

It was on these false premises – that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America – that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists from a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who had served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern Ohio. Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a “chicken hawk,” received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.

These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel, are reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory “a wake-up call.” The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr. Bush (to no avail) to “show some leadership” by showing up in Ohio to salute the fallen and their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as “a matter of courtesy and decency.” Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can’t win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.

Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war’s end. That’s inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration id

In a Znet commentary posted this week, Paul Street (author of Segregated Schools: Race, Class, and Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era) offers this take on the contradictions of the “war on terrorism” and maintenance of capitalist “normalcy”:

Still, there is a very real ongoing conflict between the hard, murderous requirements of militarism and the soft, “normalcy”-craving imperatives of American consumer capitalism, which tries to reduce democratic citizenship to the uninterrupted and often trivial pursuit, purchase, and enjoyment of commodities. The “patriotism lite” charge applies reasonably to that significant part of the American populace that is content to let predominantly working-class others fight and die in imperial campaigns for which they personally refuse to sacrifice in substantive way.

“Support Our Troops” is an often cheap slogan on the back of many suburban gas-guzzling SUV’s loaded with middle-class soccer kids and with relatively affluent Moms and Dads who would never enlist their children in a dangerous American-imperial service that relies almost entirely (as Moskos and others have shown) on the children of America’s poor and working classes. Nowhere is the slogan cheaper than in the oval office, whose Fortunate Son inhabitant George “Bring ‘Em On” Bush continues his Vietnam-era record of cheering on poorer and browner other Americans to death and destruction in deceptively sold imperial campaigns he prefers to personally sit out.

Keep reading for the full commentary:Today’s commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-07/30street.cfm

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ZNet Commentary
Patriotism Lite August 05, 2005
By Paul Street

A United States History professor I know tells me an interesting story from late March of 2003. “How many of you,” she asked her U.S. History class that fateful month, “support the American war on Iraq.” Two-thirds of the 100 students in her lecture hall raised their hands. “Okay,” she said, “how many of you are willing to enlist in the armed forces to join the war?” One hand went up in response to the second question.

The first section of last Sunday’s New York Times contains an interesting article titled “All Quiet on the Home Front and Some Soldiers Are Asking Why.” The story’s author Thom Shanker cites a number of American military officials and academic experts on the disconnect between the United States’ officially declared commitment to waging an all-out “War on Terror” and Americans’ reluctance to sacrifice in support of that war.
Noticing the absence of any “serious talk” of “a tax increase to force Americans to cover the $5 billion a month in costs from Iraq, Afghanistan and new counterterrorism missions” and the lack of “concerted efforts like the savings bond drive or gasoline rationing that helped unite the country behind its fighting forces in wars past,” Shanker quotes an officer veteran of the Iraq occupation to chilling effect. “Nobody in America is asked to sacrifice,” this officer says, “except us.” By “us,” he means the armed forces.

Shanker also quotes the venerable military sociologist Charles Moskos, who criticizes what he calls Americans’ “patriotism lite,” whereby “the political leaders are afraid to ask the public for any real sacrifices.” This, Moskos says, “doesn’t speak too highly of the citizenry.” “It’s almost,” says a retired U.S. military official, “as if the politicians want to be able to declare war and at the same time maintain a sense of normalcy” (Thom Shanker, “All Quiet on the Home Front and Some Soldiers Are Asking Why,” New York Times, 24 July, 2005, A17)

There’s a lot missing in Shanker’s article, consistent with mainstream U.S. journalism’s general reluctance to take seriously the extent to which Americans are divided along related lines of class and power. There’s nothing about the sacrifice imposed on the many millions of poor and otherwise disadvantaged Americans who are seeing needed social programs cut to pay for the deadly, deficit-generating combination of massive “defense” (empire) expenditures with huge tax cuts for the rich. There’s nothing about the millions of Americans workers thrown out of work by the also-massive American trade deficit, which is widened by the Bush administration’s determination to privilege military expenditures over “homeland” economic vitality.
There’s nothing about the Bush administration’s determination to use the “war on terror” (curiously expanded to include the occupation of Iraq, a country that posed no terrorist or other threat to the U.S. in 2003) as cover for a radically regressive domestic policy agenda that (more than simply resisting a “tax increase” to pay for the war) grants gigantic giveaways (tax and otherwise) to the privileged few. There’s nothing, of course, about the racist, imperialist, and (curiously enough) terrorist nature of “war on terror,” amply displayed in the prisons of U.S. occupation and in the broad indifference that American government and media show towards the many innocent Arab victims of U.S. military actions in the Middle East – the de-personalized “collateral damage” of supposed American “liberation.”
There’s nothing about the difference between the arguably genuine threat posed to Americans by the actual fascist Axis of the 1940s (when Uncle Sam successfully advanced savings bond and gasoline-rationing drives to “unite the country behind its fighting forces”) and the concocted and imaginary threat posed by Iraq (one part of Bush’s laughable 2002 “State of the Union” construction – the “Axis of Evil”) in 2002 and 2003.

There’s little said about the American citizenry’s intelligent skepticism towards Bush’s invasion of Iraq and his determination to merge that invasion with a “war on terror.” To his credit, however, Shanker quotes a perceptive academic who notes that “the public” sees “the ongoing mission in Iraq…in a different light than a terrorist attack on American soil.” “The public wants very much to support the troops” in Iraq, this professor says, “but it doesn’t really believe in the mission. Most consider it a war of choice, and a majority – although a thin one – thinks it was the wrong choice.”

Such skepticism towards Bush’s war on Iraq is something different than Dr. Moskos’ “patriotism lite.” It seems more like a patriotism done right, one that speaks highly of a significant part of the citizenry. It rejects blind obedience to the deceptive rhetoric of militaristic elites who want mass consent to illegal wars in accordance with the authoritarian slogan, “My Country, Right or Wrong.”

Still, there is a very real ongoing conflict between the hard, murderous requirements of militarism and the soft, “normalcy”-craving imperatives of American consumer capitalism, which tries to reduce democratic citizenship to the uninterrupted and often trivial pursuit, purchase, and enjoyment of commodities. The “patriotism lite” charge applies reasonably to that significant part of the American populace that is content to let predominantly working-class others fight and die in imperial campaigns for which they personally refuse to sacrifice in substantive way.
“Support Our Troops” is an often cheap slogan on the back of many suburban gas-guzzling SUV’s loaded with middle-class soccer kids and with relatively affluent Moms and Dads who would never enlist their children in a dangerous American-imperial service that relies almost entirely (as Moskos and others have shown) on the children of America’s poor and working classes. Nowhere is the slogan cheaper than in the oval office, whose Fortunate Son inhabitant George “Bring ‘Em On” Bush continues his Vietnam-era record of cheering on poorer and browner other Americans to death and destruction in deceptively sold imperial campaigns he prefers to personally sit out.

Paul Street (pstreet@cul-chicago.org) is a writer and researcher in Chicago, IL. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004) and Segregated Schools: Race, Class, and Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005)