Murtha Most Foul

This blog and I have been on a short-term vacation, as I leapt across the country and back for a family visit, experiencing surprisingly good weather on both coasts. This is not an easy trick; the window for clement atmospheric conditions back east is growing smaller as global warming increases, and the hurricane season is still not over. But we can count on our Chief Executive and his cronies to continue to blow ill winds all year round.

President Bush has also been on the road, trying to persuade other heads of state that there is a grain of sanity in his foreign policy. Just recently his barnstorming took him to Beijing for a chat with President Hu. I presume the "Hu's on First" jokes cascaded back and forth on Air Force 1 beforehand. This meeting was extremely problematic for Bush, since he had to toe the line on Chinese human rights abuses--just like Google and Bill Gates--so as not to offend the country that so far is bailing us out budgetarily, while trying to justify his "spread Democracy" policies in other parts of the world. It probably galls him that China will eventually pass us as the major world power, and even he can't do a shit's worth of anything about it (except maybe nuke 'em).

All this confusion probably dogged him yesterday as he tried to escape from journalists by exiting through a pair of double-doors--which turned out to be locked. Granted, the moment did not have the classic hilarity of his father's barfing on the Japanese Prime Minister's lap, but it was sufficiently sitcomy of Dubya to remind me that in his first year of office there actually was a Comedy Central series about the First Family, starring Timothy Bottoms as a confused Commander-in-Chief. It says a lot about the turn of history that three years later Bottoms starred in deadly earnest biopic of Bush, celebrating his stalwart behavior after 9/11.

Meanwhile, back home, the biggest news was the demand by Democratic representative John Murtha, a former marine and major hawk, that we start pulling our troops out of Iraq because it just isn't working. The howls of outrage from Bush supporters could probably be heard in outer space (well, if there weren't a vacuum there). One representative labeled Murtha a coward, which was so shocking in context that she had to retract it. I seriously doubt that she had any children stationed in Baghdad. Murtha's credentials as the first Viet vet serving in Congress humble even John McCain, so the Republicans needed more than vitriol to deal with this rebellion. Cleverly, more or less, they fell back on their superior numbers, and put up the resolution to a quickie vote, an easy straw man to defeat (which they did). Even Murtha voted against it since it was not a well-reasoned resolution. And most moderates (myself included) see that a total declared withdrawal would be a regrettable policy. We made this mess, we have to rectify it sufficiently so that withdrawal would not equate to total defeat, a la Vietnam in 1975.
We owe our Iraqi supporters that much, since they don't have water or electricity.

Bush and Cheney attempted in the past few weeks the ad hominem approach to criticism, labeling war opponents as unpatriotic, but this doesn't fly as well today as it did in the psychological aftermath of 9/11. Public approval of the Iraq situation lies between 35 and 40%, so the adminstration needs some really good news to be more persuasive. Cheney, who has been even more sequestered than Bush, and who is busy sidestepping the Plame investigation, has been more vituperative in defense of the policy (since it was largely his policy), while Bush has backtracked a tad and acknowledged that the situation is at least worthy of debate. I'd suggest that Cheney's attack dog role be totally minimized. Here is a guy whose latest frenzy has been trying to assail the anti-torture provisions in McCain's amendment to the military spending bill. This amendment has passed 90-10 in the Senate. Internationally Cheney has become known as the "Vice President of Torture." Gee, that should really make his mother proud.

Now I don't know how far we are allowed to follow the Goldwater tenet that "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," but the Veep's outspoken support for cruelty in prisoner abuse is not only ill-considered diplomatically, but practically as well. McCain, who ought to know, wrote convincingly in a recent Newsweek that torture rarely extracts the necessary information, and often results in erroneous intelligence--something that could cause us to shift defenses to the wrong place and end up producing more calamity. When McCain was tortured by his Vietnamese guards in order to get the roster of his flight squadron, he eventually obliged by reciting the names of the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers. I can imagine how much this has occurred in those secret CIA gulags spread out over Europe and Asia, as semi-drowning Al Qaeda suspects (who probably don't know the names of most of their co-conspirators) spew out Ibn Al-Faqua and Muhammad El-Alamein and other non-existent but credible names of fictional terrorists. The result is international disgust for our heavy-handedness and moral hypocrisy, and bogus terrorist alerts based on fantasies, like the one that closed down Grand Central Station a month ago.

Cheney probably has watched too many episodes of "24," in which hero-torturer Jack Bauer wheedles just the right information every hour or so out of a very compliant terrorist to keep a nuclear bomb from going off. Now if only the Iraq war were over in 24 hours. But it seems more likely to last as long as "The Days of Our Lives."