Losing America

By Ellen Ratner
A recent column on the Internet asked the question: Why now? Why here and now, has immigration become an issue unlike any in recent memory? Some of the usual suspect motivators such as looming elections, political-party platforms, huge ad campaigns, charismatic politicians, or 9-11 are nowhere to be found.



Our borders have been open since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. We won our independence, beat the British back a second time at New Orleans, fought World Wars I and II and all the wars associated with the Cold War without building a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border.

In my daily grind as a talk-radio personality, I can also agree with another observation that this is a grassroots phenomenon. So I have to repeat this very good question: Why now, and not in the days after 9-11? Why now, and not in the immediate aftermath of invading Iraq?


However good that Internet columnist's question, my answer is my own: America has lost its confidence and, thus, has lost its way. We are in the grip of a new isolationism, not only, as in the past, a disinclination to avoid what George Washington called "foreign entanglements," but also a sense of political and cultural friendlessness. This is new.

During the nativist period, few attempts were made to hinder immigration – who else would build the young country? At the most, the anti-immigration forces sought to prevent their becoming citizens. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when non-English speaking immigrants poured through Ellis Island and San Francisco, the Senate never passed a bill to make English the official language. But now the Senate has done just that. And this time around,there's a new wrinkle: Bush hatred – sometimes called Bush Derangement Syndrome by my friends on the right when talking about angry liberals – has now shown up on the right as a visceral right-wing dislike of President Bush, the kind of hate that comes from a sense of betrayal, of having been lied to, double-crossed, used. This is also new and very significant.

Sorting through the above mix is complex, but worth the effort. In modern times, the American right has always had an isolationist flavor that some presidents who wanted entrepreneurial wars – like Bush – have sought to counter by appealing to a deep and often admirable patriotism that is also present on the right. That patriotism is sometimes expressed as a willingness to back the military, but not necessarily the ventures politicians like Bush order the military to undertake.

As I've argued here before, Bush blew his credits on the Iraq War. Not just the decision to invade, but on the horrible mismanagement that followed. And in the eyes of the right wing, Bush has proven as sloppy a bookkeeper with the federal deficit as any Democrat under the sun. The right and most other Americans have lived long enough to see America transformed from the world's wunderkind – the liberator of Europe and Asia, the beacon of the world, and the last, best hope – into an ogre regularly denounced by our former friends, as well as enemies. America has become a pariah, and we don't like it.

Conservatives especially don't like it, because they backed Bush on every stupid, mismanaged venture his administration proposed, many against their better judgment. And what did they receive after a 6-year-old, faithful marriage? They came home one day and caught "their" president with Vicente Fox and every exploitative corporate fat cat looking to screw native workers by turning a blind eye to the coyotes smuggling 500 peasants in a U-Haul so they can compete with the Wal-Mart which just hired the last four truckloads of peons. It turns out, as I once put in a long-ago column, that the Bushies motto is, "Salute the flag, cash the check."

Separated by two oceans, the normal American reaction has been to pull in our horns, take our ball home, and tell the world to kiss off. And indeed, I predict that the next administration, whether Republican or Democrat, will do just that – no more wars, no more messy diplomacy, no more pre-emptive strikes. Instead, there's going to be Fortress America. We will wall ourselves off from Europe, Canada, Latin America and Asia.

What we are witnessing today is a new isolationism, a reaction to the incompetence and betrayals of this administration. Too bad that a bunch of unemployed Mexican farmers are the one who will have to pick up the check.

Patrick Kennedy a victim of addiction

By Ellen Ratner
This was a great week for the Kennedy haters. All of those who despised JFK for his courageous stand on civil rights and nuclear disarmament, RFK for his anti-war politics and Teddy Kennedy for being America's greatest living liberal enjoyed the spectacle of his son, Congressman Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) again gripped by symptoms of substance addiction, a disease that has probably afflicted someone from every family in our country.



No decent human being experiences this kind of schadenfreude when the victim of alcoholism or substance abuse is one of their own children, a best friend, or their Uncle Max or Aunt Hattie. But when a Kennedy reveals the illness, some people are just plain cruel. All this week, the talk-radio airwaves were filled with callers haranguing Patrick Kennedy, a six-term (and effective) congressman, with lectures on "personal responsibility" or "how he had it coming" or "didn't he learn his lesson the last time?"

Why the delight by so many twisted minds? What's really happening here is that Patrick Kennedy, a man who has the courage to admit his mistakes and face up to his problems (were that President Bush was as candid about the bloody Iraq War and the staff he appointed to wage it), is a convenient surrogate for a certain type of right-winger who is simply too weak, politically and mentally, to attack the real objects of his or her rage – Patrick's more successful father Teddy, and his no-longer-living uncles, JFK and RFK.

The liberal legacy of Patrick's family speaks for itself. Despite the recent conservative turn in American politics, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy remain virtual martyrs in our history. As for Ted Kennedy, despite having to wrestle with tragedy and his own personal demons, he remains the embodiment of liberal America – and is hated by those right-wingers who won't be satisfied until the last liberal voice is extinguished from the American scene.

And Teddy Kennedy's voice is one that stings the right-wing soul. While most conservatives were cheerleading President Bush and his Iraq disaster, Teddy Kennedy, almost alone, was decrying the war and its all around tragic consequences. It was Kennedy who kept returning to the subject of Bush's derangement of our historic European alliances abroad while he abrogated the Constitution at home, especially concerning the things that used to separate America from the rest of the world – civil rights, human rights and the rule of law.

The right wing doesn't like to hear that "signing statements" are now the equal of the Bill of Rights or that NSA wiretapping was somehow the equivalent to securing our ports and borders, which Bush, despite hyping his invented "war on terror," refuses to do because some corporate interest might be offended.

If the right wing has one consistent, long-term project, it's trying to force Kennedys out of American life. They've tried ballots, smears, lawsuits, Kennedy personal weaknesses, tragedy and bad luck, whatever it might take. But the Kennedys prevail. And that annoys the right-wingers more than anything.

Now comes Patrick Kennedy, a politically talented and very personable young man. Patrick has had a longstanding problem managing addictive substances – no secret there, for he has been open and candid about his personal issues. And despite knowing all that there is to know about these matters, his constituents have returned him to office six times. (For some odd reason, the right-wing morality machine only goes into hyper-drive with Democrats – when Republicans Duke Cunningham pled guilty to taking outright bribes, or Tom DeLay was indicted and forced to resign the House leadership for alleged ethical improprieties, the talk show call-in lines from conservatives were strangely silent.)

Indeed, if Patrick Kennedy's last name had been Jones or Wilson, he'd be on Oprah or touted as role model for coming clean and seeking help in the face of addiction. But his last name is Kennedy and he's the son of perhaps the most hated Kennedy of them all – Teddy – so everything that the lip-frothing right can't lay at the feet of the senior senator from Massachusetts now gets express-mailed to his son.

It's an odd twist – instead of suffering for the sins of his father Patrick Kennedy suffers for his father's great virtues. And when the day arrives – may it not arrive for long years – when Patrick Kennedy will lay his own burdens down, he will be revealed as a man of great virtue himself.

But in the crazy world of today's politics, all that makes him is a target of the crazies.

Republican $3 bills

By Ellen Ratner
This week, President Bush decided to recognize National Volunteer Week by calling for volunteers to help rebuild the mess that Hurricane Katrina left behind. Does Bush's call strike you as a day late and a dollar short? How about eight months late and billions of dollars short?



What rankles me personally about this is that last September, I sent a note to someone I see almost every day – White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan – pleading with him to persuade Bush to immediately call for an all-out volunteer effort by every American to help the rebuilding effort. When nothing happened, I didn't call for anything – instead, I teamed up with airline pilot Cholene Espinoza, and together we loaded up a van with food and health supplies and drove down to Mississippi.

This was nothing special – millions of decent Americans were doing exactly the same thing, on their own, answering only to their consciences and sense of humanity. And believe me, last September, other than flapping lips there wasn't much help from the White House. (To read about these efforts, see Espinoza's book, "Through the Eye of the Storm: A Book Dedicated to Rebuilding What Katrina Washed Away.")

Bush's call also struck me as being typical of this administration – its own lack of execution and follow-through and its refusal to ask the American people for help in crises that it claims are crises tends to undercut its own credibility. Think about the number of occasions during this president's one-and-a-half terms where this has been true:
The 9-11 attacks killed more people than Pearl Harbor. Why didn't the president ask for a Declaration of War? Instead, he rushed through a mealy-mouthed, open-ended resolution that has served as the basis for every unconstitutional claim for domestic surveillance and war powers since then. Why wouldn't he go to the people and ask them directly for war powers? Does he not trust us? Or rather, did he want to conserve his "flexibility" by obtaining the foolishly granted resolution rather than trust the American people by asking for their support, and pointing out that war takes real sacrifice and costs lives and money?

While the president was paying lip service to the "global war on terror," did he issue any meaningful calls for volunteers to help police the Northern or Southern border, to help inspect containers, or provide port security? Did he call for a meaningful public-service conscription, in which young people might be given a choice between military, domestic security or public health and welfare service? Of course not, and no doubt because Karl Rove thought it would damage Bush's re-election prospects. Bush is not what I would call a real wartime president.

To help finance the war in Iraq, has President Bush called for meaningful tax increases? Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt did, and under their leadership, the public agreed to make the sacrifice. The only wartime president who didn't call for these was Lyndon B. Johnson – he promised guns and butter, and what he delivered, after his presidency, was ruinous inflation. Bush hasn't promised guns and butter – but he claims guns and butter almost daily by pointing how the economy is "booming" and we're simultaneously "winning" the war on terror. Unfortunately, I predict that Americans can't have it both ways, and Bush's easy promises will at some point produce another bout of ruinous inflation.

Why are we up to our necks in Middle East nonsense to begin with? If it wasn't for oil, do you think any American would or even should care about a monarchy like Saudi Arabia, the Iranian mullahs, or those all those Persian Gulf kingdoms? Cue-While-U-Wait (for gasoline)? I don't think so. So why doesn't Bush do something (other than gum-flaps) to meaningfully conserve oil? How about fleet mileage standards? SUV taxes? Conservation incentives? Crash programs to develop energy alternatives and put the Saudi oil pimps out of business? With the right leadership, the public would back him to the hilt. But Bush won't do it, probably because he's afraid of alienating the gas guzzlers in his SUV-addicted constituency.

When the history of this administration is written, chief among Bush's failures will be his incompetence at discharging the first duty of a commander in chief in a democracy – his failure to ask for the peoples' help in making the hardest of choices.

Bush's bad credit rating

By Ellen Ratner
What's wrong with this administration's policy regarding Iran? A few right-wingers cheered President Bush's recent saber rattler that "all options were on the table" regarding a response to Iran's nuclear program – the president had just been asked whether the United States would use nuclear weapons against Iran. Is this the same as in Hiroshima or Nagasaki?



I ask this question because this week Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chair of the House Intelligence Committee, was asked about how much we really know about the Iranian nuclear program. "I'd say we really don't know," Hoekstra candidly declared. "We're getting lots of mixed messages ... We don't have all of the information we would like to have." Does any of this sound familiar, as in Saddam's WMDs, Niger "yellowcake" uranium, and the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons suits our troops were forced to wear during Operation Iraqi Freedom, only to discover that the only biological threat was the diseases ravaging Iraq's children?

Contrary to what the Republican spin machine would like you to believe, this isn't really a liberal-conservative issue. No sane American or European (and many Iranians, for that matter) want to see Iran's mullahcracy possess a nuclear weapon. But our experience in Iraq has proven that no decent American of any political stripe wants to send our national children to wage a war that (to adopt the explanation most charitable to this administration) is based on flawed intelligence. For those readers who supported Bush's 2003 decision to invade Iraq, would you do so again, knowing what you know now? Some might, but many conservatives have privately told me (and many have publicly declared) that they would not.

So the question is: What exactly are you going to do about it? Accept this administration's assurances that the Iranians are a pitched penny away from a nuclear weapon? Or this time, will you be content to wait until the much derided United Nations' Mohamed El Baradei and his IAEA has the opportunity to fully investigate? It galls many conservatives, but it turns out that Hans Blix and former Marine Scott Ritter were right – Saddam didn't have WMDs. But on Bush's say-so, we fired a couple of hundred U.N. inspectors and sent in a couple of hundred thousand U.S. soldiers who confirmed the truth. And while Hans Blix basks in retirement somewhere, we've got at least 132,000 brave American men and women who risk their necks every time they go outside the wire.

One way to imagine the American presidency is to think of a credit card with a credit limit. Any president – left, right or center – has a certain credit limit which probably peaks the moment he takes the Oath of Office. From then on, he (and someday, she) has to carefully guard their credit, using it wisely. Miss too many monthly payments, and forget about it, you're maxed out and denied. Whatever President Bush had after his election in 2000 – and whatever he might have added in the aftermath of 9-11 – is gone, spent, blown, squandered on bad foreign-policy decisions, bad advice, and bad management.

At every turn, he's lost a more than a few points (and lives) – Iraq, Katrina, Dubai Ports World, his conservative base on immigration issue, you name it. He's actually done to himself what liberals like me only dreamed of – the political equivalent of personal bankruptcy, bad results delivered with a remarkable speed from bad policy.

Those of a certain age may remember a once well-known 1960's bumper sticker often stuck on the rears of liberals' automobiles: "What If They Gave a War and Nobody Came?" While I admire the sentiment, I always thought of it as a bit naive. In all of recorded history, I'm unaware of any war that was ever cancelled due to lack of attendance. If history proves one thing, it's that wars happen because people like them, no matter the sanctimonious "war is hell" declarations that are made later. But now I'm actually beginning to wonder whether this president is so politically tapped out, so broke, approaching deadbeat no-credit-score status that nobody will attend the next war he decides to throw.

After what the Bush administration has put this country through (not to mention Iraq) I think it's time to cry "halt" before the next adventure puts in us in Tehran with everyone scratching their heads and wondering why we did it.

The pusillanimous president

By Ellen Ratner
The latest flap within the Bush administration illustrates better than nothing else what has gone wrong with our war in Iraq. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice recently understated the obvious – that the United States has made "thousands of tactical errors" in its management of that conflict. Compared with other statements made by this administration – which concede no errors, not one, in its Iraqi policy – Secretary Rice came off as paragon of honest candor.



Predictably, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the man responsible for most of those thousands of errors – strategic and tactical – was having none of it. "I don't know what she was talking about, to be perfectly honest," Rumsfeld dishonestly declared to talk-show host Scott Hennen who asked him about Rice's admission. "If you had a static situation and you made a mistake in how you addressed the static situation, that would be one thing," he added. "What you have here is not a static situation, you have a dynamic situation with an enemy that thinks, uses their brain, constantly adjusts, and therefore our commanders have to constantly make tactical adjustments." He declared that Rice and other critics simply didn't understand war.

Our reporters at Talk Radio News Service tell me that many American senior commanders in Iraq as well as the ones at home don't agree. Speaking off the record for obvious reasons, these commanders cite the Bush administration's disastrous approval of Paul Bremer's stupid decision to eliminate the Iraqi Army with the stroke of a pen – and thereby unemploy several hundred thousand Iraqi males of military age, arm them with a grievance, and render them a ripe recruiting pool for the Baathists who are killing our men and women with roadside bombs and small-arms ambushes.

The early decision, of which Bremer was the face, to divide the administration of post-invasion Iraq between military and civilian commanders – in effect, to divide command, a classic military blunder that's been on the books for several millennia – was another astoundingly stupid decision, the consequences of which are being paid in blood by our troops.

It actually gets worse. Most of my readers know of Muqtada al Sadr, the man whose private militia challenged Coalition forces two years ago, which were attempting to arrest al Sadr for murder. It was a credit to our troops that al Sadr's militia was neutered – and a discredit to this administration that al Sadr was ultimately allowed to skate from justice in exchange for joining some fantasy called the "Iraqi political process."

Today, al Sadr has joined that process, while his rebuilt militia cheerfully volunteers for the anti-Sunni death squads that are a major reason why no Baghdad central government (that mainly exists in press releases issued from the International Zone) has yet been formed. Al Sadr's militia – and others, of course – remain a cancer on the "new" Iraq, and demonstrate that for all this administration's purported resolve, once our troops did the heavy lifting to arrive in Baghdad in 2003, Bush and his minions have demonstrated nothing but weakness. Once again, our uniformed men and women have picked up the check, with their lives, limbs and mental fortitude.

There is an important lesson here about democracy and war. Long term, democracies tend to be more successful in waging war. The reason, I believe, is that traditionally, democratic leaders, when they level with the people, can count on their support against incredible odds. One thinks of Winston Churchill promising the British people nothing but "blood, sweat, toil and tears" – and the people then responded with bottomless loyalty despite disaster at Dieppe and V1 and V2 rockets that killed almost 100,000 Londoners. Can anyone imagine George Bush leveling with the American people in that way? Regularly confiding to them in "fireside chats" the broad outlines of strategy, asking for their help, admitting errors, but gathering strength as he forged ahead?

By failing to take the people into his confidence, Bush has left the field open to Democrats to do what an honest, secure, commander in chief has traditionally done – lead. Bush the pusillanimous administrator of Iraq then sits back and accuses the loyal opposition of a lack of patriotism because they fill the vacuum he has created through his own arrogance and incompetence.

How different the judgments of history are from what we mortals often believe at the time events unfold! One day, the history of this president will be written and the Iraq War fully assayed. I believe that he will be seen then as the great squanderer, a man whose bluster was reserved for "enemies" at home, while saving weakness for adversaries abroad – a man who refused to trust his own people enough to tell them some simple truths in a timely fashion.

Bush will be remembered as the Republican version of what many Americans think of Jimmy Carter.