In northern New York State, they are staging a 21st century version of an American classic, old-time hardball without the Iowa corn.
"People will come," said the prophetic Voice in the 1989 movie. "They'll turn up not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive as innocent as children, longing for the past. They'll pass over their money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack."
In a trance of hope, they are handing over more than $3 million and cheering in the bleachers--new true believers like Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty and Glenn Beck, along with ghosts of old-timey all-stars like Dick Armey, Fred Thompson, Steve Forbes and Rick Santorum, wearing retro uniforms and waving rhetorical pompoms.
A fist fight breaks out, and Newt Gingrich dons his umpire's uniform to be shouted down by Michelle Malkin and a chorus from the cheap seats.
Of course, cynics are baffled. They see all this as only a contest for a GOP House seat vacated by the President's appointee as Secretary of the Army.
"The battle for upstate New York," Frank Rich observes, "confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama."
But Rich and his ilk fail to see the deeper meaning--that the routing of Dede Scozafavva and her gay-loving, baby-killing cohorts from the Republican ranks is a struggle for the soul of America, that rallying behind Clueless Doug Hoffman will bring back the pride and glory of the past.
Scoffers don't understand that New York's 23rd Congressional District has become, in the words of Dr. Archibald "Moonlight" Graham in the movie, "the most special place in all the world. Once a place touches you like this, the wind nevers blows so cold again. You feel for it, like it was your child."
These days, Americans need their fields of dreams so badly that many are paying to be buried in them or have their ashes scattered there. Whatever has been lost in their lifetimes can be found again in the hereafter.
Showing posts with label Frank Rich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Frank Rich. Show all posts
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
The Passion of President McCain
If the election had gone the other way, Americans would have been spared all this doubt and deliberation about what to do in the Middle East.
Asked today whether adding 10 or 20,000 troops for Afghanistan would suffice, John McCain tells CNN it would be "an error of historic proportions" not to meet Gen. McChrystal's request for 40,000 or more.
If Barack Obama were as sure of anything as McCain is of everything, there would be no need for agonizing over what conservative Peggy Noonan calls "a choice between two hells":
"The hell of withdrawal is what kind of drama would fill the vacuum, who would re-emerge, who would be empowered, what Pakistan would look like with a newly redrawn reality in the neighborhood, what tremors would shake the ground there as the U.S. troops march out...a great nation that had made a commitment in retreat...
"The hell of staying is equally clear, and vivid: more loss of American and allied troops, more damage to men and resources, an American national debate that would be a continuing wound and possibly a debilitating one, an overstretched military given no relief and in fact stretched thinner, a huge and continuing financial cost in a time when our economy is low," with no guarantee or even definition of success.
A resolute President McCain would have little patience for this kind of hemming and hawing even though, as Frank Rich points out, "He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the war 'easily.' Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would 'probably get along' in post-Saddam Iraq because there was 'not a history of clashes' between them.
"What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq."
But the Might-Have-Been Republican President is content to keep shooting from the hip even as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, another Republican, joins Hillary Clinton in emphasizing a more considered approach:
"(T)he new commander has done an assessment and found a situation in Afghanistan that is more serious than we anticipated when the decisions were made in March. So that's one thing to take into account.
"The other is, clearly, a flawed election in Afghanistan that has complicated the picture for us...
"The president is being asked to make a very significant decision. And the notion of being willing to pause, reassess basic assumptions, reassess the analysis, and then make those decisions seems to me, given the importance of these decisions...among the most important he will make in his entire presidency--seems entirely appropriate."
With McCain in the White House, Gates would be in deep trouble for waffling like that.
Asked today whether adding 10 or 20,000 troops for Afghanistan would suffice, John McCain tells CNN it would be "an error of historic proportions" not to meet Gen. McChrystal's request for 40,000 or more.
If Barack Obama were as sure of anything as McCain is of everything, there would be no need for agonizing over what conservative Peggy Noonan calls "a choice between two hells":
"The hell of withdrawal is what kind of drama would fill the vacuum, who would re-emerge, who would be empowered, what Pakistan would look like with a newly redrawn reality in the neighborhood, what tremors would shake the ground there as the U.S. troops march out...a great nation that had made a commitment in retreat...
"The hell of staying is equally clear, and vivid: more loss of American and allied troops, more damage to men and resources, an American national debate that would be a continuing wound and possibly a debilitating one, an overstretched military given no relief and in fact stretched thinner, a huge and continuing financial cost in a time when our economy is low," with no guarantee or even definition of success.
A resolute President McCain would have little patience for this kind of hemming and hawing even though, as Frank Rich points out, "He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the war 'easily.' Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would 'probably get along' in post-Saddam Iraq because there was 'not a history of clashes' between them.
"What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq."
But the Might-Have-Been Republican President is content to keep shooting from the hip even as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, another Republican, joins Hillary Clinton in emphasizing a more considered approach:
"(T)he new commander has done an assessment and found a situation in Afghanistan that is more serious than we anticipated when the decisions were made in March. So that's one thing to take into account.
"The other is, clearly, a flawed election in Afghanistan that has complicated the picture for us...
"The president is being asked to make a very significant decision. And the notion of being willing to pause, reassess basic assumptions, reassess the analysis, and then make those decisions seems to me, given the importance of these decisions...among the most important he will make in his entire presidency--seems entirely appropriate."
With McCain in the White House, Gates would be in deep trouble for waffling like that.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
The Damage Bush Is Still Doing
Frank Rich's New York Times column today, headed "Obama Can't Turn the Page on Bush," is a sad symptom of America's best and brightest still obsessing over eight years of a national nightmare to the detriment of what needs to be done now.
With an economy in shambles and the Mideast a potential nuclear tinderbox, the Obama Administration has its hands full without "a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried."
Although the Bush gang--Cheney, Rumsfeld et al--was a disaster, the American people elected them twice (originally with the help of some of the now-outraged idealists who voted for Ralph Nader), but they are gone.
The only power they have now (pace Cheney) is to control our consciousness with debates over past torture that Obama has now outlawed, with squabbles over what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it, with new "revelations" that Rumsfeld was an arrogant, lying son of a bitch.
Nobody wants to forgive and forget, particularly those of us who spent years blogging and howling about Bush abuses, but living in the past is no recipe for undoing it.
Instead, it channels our passion into recrimination and self-righteousness when we should be getting on with the battles over health care reform, regulating Wall Street and the banks, finding the best balance of military power and diplomacy in the Middle East and the mind-numbing dilemmas that eight years of non-government have given us.
It will take brains not bile to concentrate on those issues, and that's where our energy should be going now.
What Bush, Cheney and the rest did was unforgivable, but the lessons of their folly are clear. Let them rant in interviews and memoirs as a sideshow like the political freaks they were and are, but get them off center stage. We don't need commissions to keep telling us what they did. The historians will do that job while we devote ourselves to cleaning up the mess and stop playing Madame Defarge.
With an economy in shambles and the Mideast a potential nuclear tinderbox, the Obama Administration has its hands full without "a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried."
Although the Bush gang--Cheney, Rumsfeld et al--was a disaster, the American people elected them twice (originally with the help of some of the now-outraged idealists who voted for Ralph Nader), but they are gone.
The only power they have now (pace Cheney) is to control our consciousness with debates over past torture that Obama has now outlawed, with squabbles over what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it, with new "revelations" that Rumsfeld was an arrogant, lying son of a bitch.
Nobody wants to forgive and forget, particularly those of us who spent years blogging and howling about Bush abuses, but living in the past is no recipe for undoing it.
Instead, it channels our passion into recrimination and self-righteousness when we should be getting on with the battles over health care reform, regulating Wall Street and the banks, finding the best balance of military power and diplomacy in the Middle East and the mind-numbing dilemmas that eight years of non-government have given us.
It will take brains not bile to concentrate on those issues, and that's where our energy should be going now.
What Bush, Cheney and the rest did was unforgivable, but the lessons of their folly are clear. Let them rant in interviews and memoirs as a sideshow like the political freaks they were and are, but get them off center stage. We don't need commissions to keep telling us what they did. The historians will do that job while we devote ourselves to cleaning up the mess and stop playing Madame Defarge.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Obama's Janus Dilemma
As he takes the oath in this aptly named month, Barack Obama is faced with looking both forward and back over an enormous list of national problems.
Steering the country through economic minefields will obviously take almost all of his administration's energies but, to the extent that present difficulties are rooted in the disastrous Bush years, the past can't be totally ignored.
In cataloguing the major frauds and deceptions, Frank Rich in the New York Times asserts, "The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New Deal."
In his interview, George Stephanopoulos asked the President-Elect about appointing a special prosecutor to "investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping" and got an ambivalent response, "I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."
Those who were outraged by the Bush-Cheney assault on traditional American freedoms may be disappointed by such hesitation but will have to consider the priorities of doing things right for the future against punishing the wrongs of the past.
Stephanopoulos asked about Dick Cheney's advice: "Before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it."
Obama agreed but not in the way Cheney had in mind. Perhaps the best way to resolve his Janus-like dilemma is the answer Frank Rich got from Henry Waxman, Capitol Hill's "most tireless inquisitor into Bush scandals."
Though Waxman "remains outraged about both the chicanery used to sell the Iraq war and the administration’s overall abuse of power, he adds: 'I don’t see Congress pursuing it. We’ve got to move on to other issues.'
"He would rather see any prosecutions augmented by an independent investigation that fills in the historical record. 'We need to depoliticize it,' he says. 'If a Democratic Congress or administration pursues it, it will be seen as partisan.'”
For Obama, that may turn out to be the best Janus-like approach.
Steering the country through economic minefields will obviously take almost all of his administration's energies but, to the extent that present difficulties are rooted in the disastrous Bush years, the past can't be totally ignored.
In cataloguing the major frauds and deceptions, Frank Rich in the New York Times asserts, "The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New Deal."
In his interview, George Stephanopoulos asked the President-Elect about appointing a special prosecutor to "investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping" and got an ambivalent response, "I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."
Those who were outraged by the Bush-Cheney assault on traditional American freedoms may be disappointed by such hesitation but will have to consider the priorities of doing things right for the future against punishing the wrongs of the past.
Stephanopoulos asked about Dick Cheney's advice: "Before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it."
Obama agreed but not in the way Cheney had in mind. Perhaps the best way to resolve his Janus-like dilemma is the answer Frank Rich got from Henry Waxman, Capitol Hill's "most tireless inquisitor into Bush scandals."
Though Waxman "remains outraged about both the chicanery used to sell the Iraq war and the administration’s overall abuse of power, he adds: 'I don’t see Congress pursuing it. We’ve got to move on to other issues.'
"He would rather see any prosecutions augmented by an independent investigation that fills in the historical record. 'We need to depoliticize it,' he says. 'If a Democratic Congress or administration pursues it, it will be seen as partisan.'”
For Obama, that may turn out to be the best Janus-like approach.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
The Nation as Head Case
Joe Lieberman and Frank Rich agree about something: America is mentally ill.
"We are a people in clinical depression," Rich writes in his New York Times column today. Sen. Lieberman dissents slightly, saying it is only Democrats who are “politically paranoid.”
Depressed or paranoid, according to the good doctors, we have to pull up our socks and get our heads straight.
But our mood disorder may be more like the "national malaise" Jimmy Carter diagnosed, which lifted as soon as he left the Oval Office.
After seven years of Bush-Cheney syndrome, who wouldn't be more than a little crazed? At Johns Hopkins University the other day, Dr. Lieberman presented “a case study in the distrust and partisan polarization that now poisons our body politic on even the most sensitive issues of national security.”
The Bush-Cheney quack cites "wild conspiracy theories" of left-winger bloggers that the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment was an excuse to attack Iran. After Iraq, he contends, only mad people could suspect that.
More evidence of political derangement, from the other direction, is Rich's equating the Democrats' confirmation of Martin Mukasey as Attorney General with what Pervez Musharraf is doing in Pakistan.
Rich, normally a voice of reason, goes off the rails today asserting that Sens. Schumer and Feinstein were "willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb" in approving Mukasey without his condemnation of waterboarding in a way somehow parallel to Musharraf's power grab in Pakistan.
Metaphors can stretch only so far without getting nutty. The Administration's madness should not become a contagion that keeps critics from making the distinction between the repression of a dictator and a political compromise over starting to undo some of Bush's damage to the US Justice Department.
That way lies madness.
"We are a people in clinical depression," Rich writes in his New York Times column today. Sen. Lieberman dissents slightly, saying it is only Democrats who are “politically paranoid.”
Depressed or paranoid, according to the good doctors, we have to pull up our socks and get our heads straight.
But our mood disorder may be more like the "national malaise" Jimmy Carter diagnosed, which lifted as soon as he left the Oval Office.
After seven years of Bush-Cheney syndrome, who wouldn't be more than a little crazed? At Johns Hopkins University the other day, Dr. Lieberman presented “a case study in the distrust and partisan polarization that now poisons our body politic on even the most sensitive issues of national security.”
The Bush-Cheney quack cites "wild conspiracy theories" of left-winger bloggers that the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment was an excuse to attack Iran. After Iraq, he contends, only mad people could suspect that.
More evidence of political derangement, from the other direction, is Rich's equating the Democrats' confirmation of Martin Mukasey as Attorney General with what Pervez Musharraf is doing in Pakistan.
Rich, normally a voice of reason, goes off the rails today asserting that Sens. Schumer and Feinstein were "willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb" in approving Mukasey without his condemnation of waterboarding in a way somehow parallel to Musharraf's power grab in Pakistan.
Metaphors can stretch only so far without getting nutty. The Administration's madness should not become a contagion that keeps critics from making the distinction between the repression of a dictator and a political compromise over starting to undo some of Bush's damage to the US Justice Department.
That way lies madness.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Crazed Converts: Bush and Giuliani
Half a century after a book inspired President Eisenhower to warn about political fanatics, Americans have one in the White House and another who would get there by exploiting the hatred and fears described by Eric Hoffer back then.
The life paths of George W. Bush and now Rudy Giuliani fit Hoffer's description of how "The True Believer" converts personal failure to political success: "Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance."
The disastrous consequences of Bush's midlife crisis are now clear, but the effects of Giuliani's conversion are just coming to light. On September 11, 2001, a lackadaisical lame-duck mayor with no political prospects and two failed marriages was transformed into a money-making preacher and then the zealous leader of a crusade against Islamofascism.
In today's New York Times, Paul Krugman cites the Republican front runner's dedication to spreading what Franklin Roosevelt called “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror” inspired by those described by Frank Rich as "the mad neocon bombers shaping his apocalyptic policy toward Iran" after giving Bush an outlet for his new-found religious zeal in attacking Iraq.
For a time, Giuliani seemed merely cynical in courting Republican extremists who find his social values distasteful, but more and more, the alarming truth seems to be that he may really believe what he is saying about a holy war.
As he surrounds himself with more and more Podhoretzes and Kristols, the future Republican nominee may want to ponder the words of Hoffer, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan: "The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led."
The rest of us will have to take comfort in another Hoffer observation: “It is cheering to see that the rats are still around--the ship is not sinking.”
The life paths of George W. Bush and now Rudy Giuliani fit Hoffer's description of how "The True Believer" converts personal failure to political success: "Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance."
The disastrous consequences of Bush's midlife crisis are now clear, but the effects of Giuliani's conversion are just coming to light. On September 11, 2001, a lackadaisical lame-duck mayor with no political prospects and two failed marriages was transformed into a money-making preacher and then the zealous leader of a crusade against Islamofascism.
In today's New York Times, Paul Krugman cites the Republican front runner's dedication to spreading what Franklin Roosevelt called “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror” inspired by those described by Frank Rich as "the mad neocon bombers shaping his apocalyptic policy toward Iran" after giving Bush an outlet for his new-found religious zeal in attacking Iraq.
For a time, Giuliani seemed merely cynical in courting Republican extremists who find his social values distasteful, but more and more, the alarming truth seems to be that he may really believe what he is saying about a holy war.
As he surrounds himself with more and more Podhoretzes and Kristols, the future Republican nominee may want to ponder the words of Hoffer, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan: "The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led."
The rest of us will have to take comfort in another Hoffer observation: “It is cheering to see that the rats are still around--the ship is not sinking.”
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