When did fearmongering in a time of war become an act of patriotism?

Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try al-Qaida strategist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other residents of the Guantanamo prison in...]]> Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Within hours after the House of Representatives approved health care reform by a narrow margin, Republicans predicted retribution at the polls next fall. They promised to make every Democrat regret that historic vote as the first step toward the reversal of power in Washington. And as the current debate has proved, they aren't going to let honesty become an obstacle.

For a preview of coming attractions, simply turn on the Fox News Channel or any right-wing radio talker, where the falsehoods of the 2010 midterm campaign are being field-tested today.

You can watch Dick Morris blather about the "death panels" that will terminate your mother and father while illegal immigrants...]]> Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 When Newt Gingrich warned Republicans that they were making a grave "mistake" by driving out moderates and enforcing the angry orthodoxy of the far right, the sober tone of his remarks was stunning.

This is a politician who is no stranger himself to the wilder shores of extremism, a populist and a purist who rose to great power against the GOP establishment, and a demagogue whose lexicon lacerated the "Democrat Party" as decadent, elitist, unpatriotic and immoral.

In his day, Gingrich channeled the same phobias and fury as the Tea Party activists whose growing influence in Republican ranks seems to have shaken him so badly. Why is Newt scared now?

Despite his...]]> Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The Senate leadership's decision to include the "public option" in its health care reform legislation seemed at first almost miraculous, especially to anyone who believed the hundreds of obituaries recited in the media over the past several months. But by acting on their convictions rather than their fears, the Democrats could ultimately find that the politics of consumer choice can be turned to their advantage for years to come.

Prognostications by the Washington press corps are so often wrong that it is usually safe to bet against the pundits -- but in the case of the public option, their skepticism was warranted. While polls have consistently showed strong majorities in favor...]]> Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 With outraged Washington journalists and Republican politicians crying "Nixonian!" over the public scuffle between the Obama White House and the Fox News Channel, what began as a mundane spat is turning into a cosmic jest. Somewhere, Nixon himself is enjoying a mordant laugh to hear this shrill defense of his old servant Roger Ailes, the television wizard whose deceptive campaigning ushered him into the presidency more than 40 years ago -- and who then became the living symbol of everything negative and nasty in American politics during the two decades that followed.

To understand what is going on today, it is essential to remember that where Ailes came from, "Nixonian" was not an...]]> Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Popular disgust over the fat premiums that financial executives bestow upon themselves is burgeoning, and rightly so. Those Wall Street piggy banks are filling up with billions upon billions of government-subsidized dollars.

But anyone infuriated by the grossly inflated compensation of the masters of finance should check out the incredible earnings of the top executives in the health insurance business. They're among the most highly paid suits in the country -- not owing to any skill in providing health care, which they don't do, but because they have succeeded in denying care, quashing competition, driving up costs and winning federal subsidies for their companies.

Last...]]> Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Outraged babble and sanctimonious tut-tutting over President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize will pour forth until the very evening he accepts the prize in Oslo, and then for years afterward. His critics are infuriated, they say, because he didn't earn the prestigious award, or because he didn't refuse it -- or just because those left-wing Norwegians have a lot of nerve. How dare they insult us by bestowing their highest honor on the president of the United States and inviting him to deliver a lecture?

The conservative media machine has nearly seized up, filling hours of airtime, reams of newsprint and zillions of pixels with glowing rage.

A columnist for The Wall Street Journal,...]]> Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The latest signals from the White House suggest that President Obama now realizes he must do more -- and quickly -- to ease the economic suffering of working families. He knows that most Americans believe his administration and Congress have so far provided more help to major banks and Wall Street investment firms than to workers and small companies, as a survey released by pollster Peter Hart reported recently.

If voters still feel the same way a year from now, the midterm consequences for the Democrats will be severe, and deservedly so. Yet that same poll, conducted for the Economic Policy Institute, showed that most Americans would support the only action that might relieve the...]]> Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Listening closely to the politicians with the most clout in the debate over health care, it is startling to discover how little they actually seem to know about the subject.

Ignorance rules, even among the bipartisan group of senators known as the "Gang of Six," who supposedly have immersed themselves in the details of this life-and-death issue for many months. If they understood even the most basic facts about how the United States and other advanced countries provide and finance medical care, they simply could not utter the stupid comments that regularly emanate from their lips.

Every catalog of mindless remarks about health care must include at least one rant by Charles...]]> Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The stupid misconduct of entertainer Kanye West and politician Joe Wilson demonstrated, if any fresh proof is necessary, that thoughtless rudeness isn't confined by ethnicity, ideology or background. With their highly public episodes of misconduct, both earned sharp public censure.

Yet while West has expressed real remorse for his misbehavior at the MTV Music Awards, Wilson has swiftly left behind a quick apology to cash in on his historic insult to the president of the United States.

The South Carolina conservative's political consultants have raised upward of a million dollars from donors across the country who want to express solidarity with him for blurting, "You lie!"...]]> Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The wild furor over President Obama's speech to the nation's schoolchildren raises many questions, but there is only one that really matters. How did America surrender its political discourse -- not to mention the news cycle -- to the most unreasonable and unstable elements of the far right?

Not so many years ago, nobody would have imagined that a bland presidential address to young students, urging them to remain in school, study hard and nurture their aspirations for success, could engender a raging national controversy. Nobody would have believed that such an ordinary event could excite suspicions among a significant part of the population that the chief executive is...]]> Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Predictably as always, the Republicans in Congress and in the conservative media are berating Attorney General Eric Holder for deciding to investigate the CIA's use of abusive interrogation methods on terror suspects.

They warn that probing this sensitive history will compromise intelligence operations and endanger the nation. They insist that these techniques have, in the words of former Vice President Dick Cheney, saved thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. They suggest that the attorney general should simply ignore the evidence of illegal conduct and "investigate the terrorists instead," as if the Justice Department cannot do both.

But as those...]]> Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If the Democrats fail to pass real changes in the health care system this year -- rather than a sham that mimics and mocks reform -- they will have nobody to blame but themselves. Or at least nobody to blame but other Democrats, notably those in the White House who have never been committed to this most venerable and fundamental aspect of party policy.

Of course, the right-wing rumormongers have done their share of damage, spreading lies about "death panels" and stirring up the boob cohort with warnings about socialism. Republican elected officials have decided to damage the president rather than address an issue they know is critical to the nation's future. Health insurance...]]> Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Long before many of today’s frothing right-wing demagogues were born, American conservatives came to idolize Winston Churchill, the late Tory prime minister whose wartime leadership of the British people transformed into the living symbol of democracy armed. That reputation was cemented by his legendary Missouri speech in 1946 warning of the “Iron Curtain” drawn by the Soviet Communists across Eastern Europe. Indeed, journalists and bloggers on the right admire the old warhorse so much that he has even outpolled Ronald Reagan as their “Man of the Century.”

Yet by the standards of the present moment, as these same conservatives mobilize against health...]]> Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 When Republican politicians and right-wing talking heads bemoan the fictitious "death panels" that they claim would arise from health-care reform, they are concealing a sinister reality from their followers. The ugly fact is that every year we fail to reform the existing system, that failure condemns tens of thousands of people to die -- either because they have no insurance or because their insurance companies deny coverage or benefits when they become ill.

The best estimate of the annual death toll among Americans of working age due to lack of insurance or under-insurance is at least 20,000, according to studies conducted over the past decade by medical researchers, and is...]]> Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Aug. 7, 2009 | Like a seasonal flu, the verbal virus that is sometimes called Clinton derangement syndrome has struck again, beginning only moments after the 42nd president of the United States appeared on television screens around the world with the two journalists he had helped to rescue from prison in North Korea. And like certain viruses, the syndrome tends to hit hardest among a very specific segment of the population. Most Americans appear to be immune most of the time, as do the majority of human beings on the planet, so this pathology will probably never become a global pandemic.

But pundits everywhere -- from the newsrooms of the "liberal media" to the blogosphere to...]]> Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In his struggle to change the nation's health care system, Barack Obama again faces certain obstacles that almost stopped his amazing march to the presidency. Aside from the Washington chattering class and the right-wing media, which always oppose progressive reform, Mr. Obama is losing his grip on the middle class and working families in swing states. He is losing Democratic senators and members of Congress in places like Florida and Arkansas. He is losing the propaganda war with his professorial style of explanation.

So perhaps he should stop trying to walk this treacherous path alone. Perhaps the time has come, if it isn't already too late, to look for a companion who went here...]]> Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "Fiscal conservative" is one of those terms used by politicians of all sorts to describe themselves, without any real justification. Parroted mindlessly from one news cycle to the next by major media outlets, that phrase is often used to mislead the public about the priorities and policies favored by those who claim to embody budgetary prudence.

Consider the Democrats in the Blue Dog caucus, who constantly trumpet their fiscal conservatism and enjoy hearing that claim echoed in the media, especially now, when they are threatening to block health care reform. The Blue Dogs don't like the public option for national health insurance; they bemoan the estimated trillion-dollar cost of...]]> Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Very soon, Congressional leaders are expected to announce the creation of a new commission to investigate the real causes of America's crippling financial disaster. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that this investigative panel will be modeled on the legendary "Pecora Commission," which held a series of hearings on Capitol Hill in 1933 that arraigned the nation's biggest bankers and stock swindlers before an angry and suffering people. Named for Ferdinand Pecora, the cigar-chomping New York prosecutor who oversaw the proceedings, those confrontations mobilized public support for the financial reforms of the New Deal -- which curbed the...]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The new senator from Minnesota is a comedian, writer and actor who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and raised a lot of money from friends in Hollywood. The departing governor of Alaska is a hockey mom from a small backwoods town who likes to hunt and fish. Yet today, Al Franken looks wholesomely mainstream, while Sarah Palin seems headed for the tabloid fringe.

That unexpected contrast reveals much about the current configuration of Republicans, Democrats and politics in America -- a story of two parties that crossed paths while traveling in opposite directions over the past dozen years or so.

Before he entered politics, Franken had a long and highly successful...]]> Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If Americans hope to discuss health care, climate change, green economics or public infrastructure with any degree of realism, then the time has come to acknowledge that hearing someone say "a trillion dollars" is no reason to panic. Politicians and pundits cite that figure to argue that we cannot afford health care reform, following recent cost estimates by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), but the plain truth is that we spend (and
squander) more than that on purposes not nearly so wise and humane as universal quality health care.

As a matter of fact, America's current health care system wastes considerably more than a trillion dollars every year. We know that because...]]> Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 June 26, 2009 | Whenever the latest Republican politician is caught with his zipper undone, a predictable moment of introspection on the right inevitably ensues. Pundits, bloggers and perplexed citizens ruminate over the lessons they have learned, again and again, about human frailty, false piety and the temptations of flesh and power. They express concern for the damaged family and lament the fall of yet another promising young hypocrite. They resolve to restore the purity of their movement and always remember to remind us that this is all Bill Clinton's fault. What they never do is face up to an increasingly embarrassing fact about themselves and their leaders.

They're really...]]> Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If Congress fails to enact health care reform this year -- or if it enacts a sham reform designed to bail out corporate medicine while excluding the "public option" -- then the public will rightly blame Democrats, who have no excuse for failure except their own cowardice and corruption. The punishment inflicted by angry voters is likely to be reduced majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives -- or even the restoration of Republican rule on Capitol Hill.

Many of those now talking down President Obama's health care initiative were in Washington back in 1994, when Bill Clinton's proposals to achieve universal coverage were killed by members of the president's own...]]> Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Campaigning to build the widest possible consensus for reform of the nation's health care system, Barack Obama told the delegates of the American Medical Association (AMA) that he wants their support, too. Persuasive and always polite, the president did not mention the embarrassing truth about his hosts -- namely, that the AMA has undermined universal care with mindless zeal for more than 70 years.

The real question is not what the AMA will support or whether the attitudes of the AMA have changed, but why anyone would still heed its policy prescriptions. Very few national organizations have been so wrong for so long about the matters most salient to its own members.

The...]]> Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Within the coming weeks, Americans will begin to consider critical issues concerning the future of health care for themselves and their children, including universal coverage, taxation of benefits, computerized records and the controlling of costs. But before the debate commences in Congress and the media, big insurance and pharmaceutical companies are lobbying frantically (and spending millions of dollars) to foreclose the possibility of the most promising aspect of health care reform: a public insurance option.

After decades of denigrating government -- and worshiping corporations -- the idea that a public program might work as well or better than a corporate provider may well...]]> Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If right-wing broadcasters don't want to be blamed when someone murders a person they have demonized repeatedly -- as in the case of George Tiller, the doctor shot dead in his Wichita, Kan., church last Sunday by an anti-abortion zealot -- then they ought to moderate their rhetoric. No doubt they will choose their words more carefully for a while, and they will whine piteously about anyone who calls attention to their screaming extremism.

This familiar cycle of shaming and blaming, which often follows incidents like the Tiller killing, may well be pointless. By now, it should be obvious that nothing, not even a murder in a church, will mute the most aggressive and irrational...]]> Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Choosing Sonia Sotomayor as his first nominee to the United States Supreme Court will allow Barack Obama to prove three important things. As a politician, he is not afraid of a fight. As a constitutional lawyer, he is willing and able to defend his conception of that living document. And as president, he is prepared to brush aside the phony consensus of Washington's gossipy elite.

When battle commences over the nomination of Sotomayor, a judge currently serving on New York's Second Circuit federal appeals court and a woman with working-class Puerto Rican roots in the Bronx, the president should welcome it, because he cannot lose politically. If he wins, as he almost certainly...]]> Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Choosing Sonia Sotomayor as his first nominee to the United States Supreme Court will allow Barack Obama to prove three important things. As a politician, he is not afraid of a fight. As a constitutional lawyer, he is willing and able to defend his conception of that living document. And as president, he is prepared to brush aside the phony consensus of Washington's gossipy elite.

Whatever battle ensues over the nomination of Ms. Sotomayor, a judge currently serving on New York's Second Circuit federal appeals court and a woman with working-class Puerto Rican roots in the Bronx, the president should welcome it, because he cannot lose politically. If he wins, as he...]]> Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Defending their record in office these past eight years, figures from the last administration seem especially touchy on the subject of torture. Led by the former vice president, Dick Cheney, they have argued that there was no torture, preferring more vague and delicate terms such as "enhanced interrogation" or simply "the program." They have insisted that any harsh tactics were used only to extract "actionable intelligence" from recalcitrant terrorists in order to save "thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands" of innocent lives.

But now we are learning that those methods, long banned as torture in our own laws and treaties, may well have been employed for a very different and...]]> Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Uplifting as it was to see insurance executives, pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospital officials and doctors gather at the White House on May 11, pledging cooperation toward health care reform, nothing they said or did was inconsistent with precisely the opposite objective. According to the famed pollster who is helping Republicans in Congress to block reform, in fact, the first critical step toward stopping real change is pretending to support it.

"You simply must be vocally and passionately on the side of reform," urges a recent strategy memo authored by Frank Luntz, the opinion research expert who has counseled Republicans since the heyday of Newt Gingrich....]]> Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Hoping to re-brand their declining party, a group of prominent Republicans recently launched a national "listening tour," presumably as an exercise in market research. They would like to know why voters -- and especially younger voters -- increasingly reject the GOP. They want to "ask the American people what their hopes and dreams are" while engaging in a "wide-open policy debate." And they believe that all Americans deserve "access to high-quality, affordable health care," and "a high-quality education ... not dependent on a parent's income," among other good things.

It all sounds very nice and very humble, as politicians on the edge of utter irrelevance probably should. It...]]> Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In the turbulent imagination of the hard-core conservative, American foreign policy should be about telling off the rest of the planet. According to the right-wing mind-set, a manly foreign policy would curtail any effort at seeking influence abroad, cut off assistance to developing countries, forget about improving our global image and, above all, withdraw from the existing international organizations, especially the United Nations, which is nothing more than a gargantuan waste of money and a hive of parasitic bureaucrats. Only if we brusquely and even violently dismiss the obnoxious foreigners who annoy us can we vindicate our political and moral superiority.

Then there is the...]]> Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Few aspects of American politics are as ridiculous and dangerous as the right-wing urge to substitute macho posturing for foreign policy. That irrepressible habit surfaces constantly now that President Obama is in the Oval Office, most recently when he shook hands with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the Summit of the Americas, a smiling moment that provoked calls for impeachment among the most deranged conservatives.

Such emotional excesses arise from deep insecurities, of course, and almost always involve bouts of amnesia, hypocrisy or both. For if the wingers could be honest for even a moment, they would have to admit that all of their complaints about Obama's diplomatic...]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If conservative leaders no longer even try to offer serious solutions to national problems, nobody should underestimate their capacity or their will to mobilize angry Americans. Behind the April 15 "tea parties" rallying against President Barack Obama's economic program -- promoted as a new phenomenon by Fox News Channel and right-wing bloggers -- stands a phalanx of Republicans whose ideology is all too familiar.

    At the apex of the tea-party movement, aside from such Fox revolutionaries as Rupert Murdoch, there is a well-funded organization known as FreedomWorks, headed by a former politician named Dick Armey. His past career should be instructive to any...]]> Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Touring the ancient Ottoman capital of Istanbul, Obama stood as a living refutation of extremist propaganda before he spoke a single word. Son and grandson of African Muslims, he symbolizes what is often called "American exceptionalism" -- the durable belief that the United States is the world's hope to escape the old and bloody divisions that have been so ruinous for humanity over the centuries.

He rose through an open and democratic process, despite the legacy of racism and the vicious smears that denigrated his Christian faith while depicting him as a secret adherent of radical Islam. His middle name, uttered with a sneer by bigots during the campaign, is now an...]]> Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500