Steven Jonas

One of Ronald Reagan's first acts on his first full day in office, January 21, 1981, was to completely shut down the alternate/renewable energy program that Jimmy Carter established in the late 1970s. At that time, a few scientists were already predicting global warming, but there was little data and most of what was going on was in the realm of hypothesis. What was known for sure at that time was that however much more oil and other fossil fuels were eventually discovered, they would eventually run out. There is only a finite supply of the stuff in the Earth. The only variable is that we don't know just how much there is or how much it would cost to extract every last ounce of it. At some time, if civilization were to be preserved, other sources of energy had to be developed. Furthermore, if all of the petrochemicals were burned up, much of the stuff of modern life, from plastics to pharmaceuticals, would disappear as well.

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A major plank of President Obama's presidential campaign was the promise to "change the atmosphere in Washington." That meant, in part, to engage in true bipartisanship on policy development. Now true bipartisanship, whether because of desire on both sides or for political necessity, has not been seen since the days of the Reagan/Bush I Presidency. During the latter, the Democrats controlled the Congress and if Reagan/Bush wanted to get anything done, they had to deal with that reality. Of course, being the usual kind of post-Lyndon Johnson-before-Vietnam Democrats, the latter pretty much gave Reagan/Bush what they wanted. And when the latter went around the Congress, as they did with Iran-Contra secret trading Ollie North style and aid to the Nicaraguan rebels (both illegal acts), Democrats in Congress let them get away with it. The last era of true bipartisanship on foreign policy was during the Cold War, when both parties were fully supportive of what came to be the last 45 years of the 75 Years War on the Soviet Union.

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Virtually everyone who follows politics to even a very limited extent (and even some folks who don't at all) has by now heard the quote in the title of this Commentary. It is from Rush Limbaugh, the (politely) "right-wing radio talk show host," or (more accurately) the leading Right-Wing Republican Screamer (although Sean Hannity might take exception to the word "Leading" in the above description.). In fact, Rush Limbaugh is the de facto leader of the Republican Party. (Boy. What does that tell you about the depths to which what some of its more self-deluded political figures still refer to as "the Party of Lincoln" has sunk?) For those of you who for one reason or another might not have heard, this is what Rush has been saying about President Obama shortly after his election. For once in his radio life (and who knows, may be in his real life as well), Rush is telling the truth. He really does want Obama to fail.

This is an amazing statement. It comes from a man who labeled every one of us who charged that the Georgite Iraq and so-called "anti-terrorism" policies as ineffective and counter-productive and called for major changes in them, as traitors. Many of us described the Georgite War on Iraq and the so-called "war on terror" as self-defeating and incapable of achieving their stated objectives. But no one I know or have read ever called for the defeat of the U.S. in Iraq. We never said that we "hoped Bush/Cheney would fail." Many of us predicted that his policies would fail, again to meet the stated Georgite objectives. Many of us predicted that if he kept going, Bush/Cheney would bring the U.S. to its present parlous state. But none of us, to my knowledge at least, hoped that Bush/Cheney would fail. I, for one, in numerous writings here and there, expressed the hope that the country would somehow make it to 2009 without the utter collapse of our domestic society. For I felt that such an occurrence, if it lead to an outbreak of serious domestic violence in protest, would give Bush/Cheney the opportunity to usher in the outright fascist state for which so many of their policies were obviously preparing.

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The current debate on our side as to whether President Obama should "go after" the Georgites, right up to, or perhaps starting with, BushCheney echoes the debate on possible impeachment that occurred when the last Congress came to power. At the time, I put forth the view that it might be a good idea, despite the political risks, if one started on the mundane, such as corruption. One could start with it rather than with the truly important, such as the use of torture by the Administration, ordered/approved (depending upon how you read the known words) from the top. Among other things, violating the Geneva Conventions automatically violated Article Six of the Constitution (which makes ratified treaties part of the supreme law of the land). Given the incoming personnel at the top levels of the Justice Department, I do think the Administration will get there, sooner or later. But it has other priorities now, such as the economy, health care, and Israel/Palestine. And Congress, led by Rep. John Conyers, is already starting in on the top level Georgites, on the matter of violating the Constitution. So what might the Administration do right away?

Well, why not start small (or relatively small) and go after corruption and possible other law violations, other than the Big T, in the Bush Administration. It was there, all over the place, from Iraq to Katrina to the Department of the Interior (and sex stuff always sells). There would be lots of actors to ensnare in any broad-based investigation of the Georgites and corruption. But particularly sweet would be to go after Cheney on it. In aid of that effort, here's just some of the stuff one could start with, dating back to the beginning of that debate on impeachment.

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This Commentary was written on January 19, 2009, the day before President Obama (my, now, those two words have a nice sound, don't they?) delivers his Inaugural Address. It is likely that you will be reading it after the event. By that time we will both know whether I got my wish(es) in whole, in part, or not at all. But here they are, and here's hoping.

A couple of weeks ago, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out a questionnaire to its contributors (of which, I must admit, I am one). It asked for one's top pick for the must-deal-with problems. The list consisted of the usual suspects, beginning with what can be called "The Five 'E's' " (with liberties taken): Economic stimulus, Education, Environment, Ealth Care, and Eraq (well some people do pronounce it that way), as well as Tax Reform (?!) and somewhere on the list "national defense/security." My answer, had I answered, would have been "None of the above." One will likely hear some version or another of the list above in Pres. Obama's address. But I am really hoping, oh boy am I hoping, that some significant percentage of the time in what will, we are told, be a relatively short speech (20 minutes or so, so we have been told) will be devoted to the Big "C:" the Constitution, and the restoration of Constitutional Democracy (C.D.) in the United States.

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Many observers on the Left have been concerned with signals coming out of the Obama Transition team that may indicate the political and policy directions in which he may be going and from our own Mark Karlin (1/11/09): "Message to Barack - You are Carrying Things a Bit Too Far with This "Bipartisan" Nonsense. The Repubs are Just Going to Betray You, So Start Punching and Stop Trying to be "Liked" by Everyone. "Obama to honor McCain on inauguration eve." Yuch!") I have shared those concerns, for example in regard of the abominable choice of Rick Warren to do the inaugural invocation.

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Many folks on the Left (U.S. and otherwise) were sure that the Georgites were going to spring an "October Surprise" just before the 2008 election. It would be "something big" to aid McCain's chances which, especially with the Wall Street collapse that started in September 2008, needed some pretty big aiding. It would have something to do with "national security," and it would come in October, that is if it had not come already. As examples of the latter were those absolutely firm predictions by authorities on the Left "in the know" that there would be a U.S. attack on Iran, "for sure," as far back as June 2006. Certain other not-so-authoritative sources for a variety of reasons thought at the time that this was nonsense. For one thing, once Jim Baker had installed Bob Gates in the Defense Department, with a strong chorus of support for a "no" from the Joint chiefs, that one just wasn't going to fly.

So OK, if there was to be no U.S. attack on Iran, how about an Israeli attack on Iran. Well, that would require Israeli flights over Iraqi airspace, controlled by, you guessed it, the U.S. Defense Department. At the same time, the original mission in Iraq, which was either oil and bases, permanent war, or both had come undone. The Georgite-negotiated Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) itself provides for a U.S. withdrawal by some time certain. (Now there's a "Mission Accomplished," isn't there? Why, by golly, on January 1, 2009, the Iraqi government took control of even the Green Zone in Baghdad.)

Gee whiz. Talk about measuring for new furniture in the White House. Bush's SOFA looks pretty much like what Obama was proposing during the Presidential Campaign, and really got skewered for by the O'RHannibaugh "Victory [without ever defining it] At All Costs" wing of the Republican Party, along with ol' Catch-up McCain. So Iraq was not good for an October Surprise either, at least not the kind of one that Republican supporters had in mind. They would hardly be trumpeting the 180 that Bush did on "no timetable for withdrawal, ever, ever, ever, that's just giving into the terrorists" within a period of weeks.

So what to do? Well, they couldn't get one in before the election. And anyway, after the failure of the years-long efforts of Treasury and the Federal Reserve to put off until AFTER the 2008 election the financial collapse that every informed observer knew was coming, McCain was pretty much a lost cause anyway. But that did not mean that Pres.-elect Obama could not be presented with a nice housewarming present, a really good foreign policy imbroglio to take up much time and political capital that the incoming Administration would otherwise need to deal with the domestic economic crisis.

And so, on November 5, the day after the election, Israel launched an assault on the tunnels leading from Egypt to Gaza, through which Hamas funneled small arms and ammunition, parts for their mainly homemade rockets and other material, under the very effective land, sea, and air blockade that Israel has imposed upon Gaza for many months now. Rearming? Sure. But after all, throughout the same six-month ceasefire, Israel was rearming as well, with weapons from the U.S. just slightly (sic) more powerful than Qassam rockets. That was the first breach in the cease-fire. Now the full-scale invasion of Gaza is underway, preceded by the methodical destruction of its civilian infrastructure by the Israeli air force, artillery, and naval forces. The world demands a cease-fire. Israel says "no." Hamas fires some more rockets (and some more sophisticated ones as well) and the carnage continues.

It is not my purpose here to get into who is "right" and who is "wrong." There are plenty of both to go around on all sides in this multi-sided conflict. But what can Israel's objective possibly be? For an indication, one can turn to a document produced in 1996 called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." It was produced by those inestimable authorities on peace in the Middle East, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, et al. You know, the folks from the Project for the New American Century who gave us the Iraq War. Their goals for Iraq were some combination of oil-and-bases, Permanent War, and "bringing Democracy to the Middle East" (out the barrel of a gun). Number one for "A Clean Break" was to end the "Oslo Peace Process" (which had already come pretty much to a halt with the convenient assassination of Yitzhak Rabin). Number two was to encumber any future negotiations with so many preconditions as to make success of same highly unlikely, and so continue Israeli military dominance of its immediate neighborhood.

Accompanied by the continual Settlement Movement for the Occupied West Bank, it was a recipe perhaps not for Permanent War but surely for Permanent Non-peace. And funnily enough, even during the Bush years, whenever there was some glimmer of hope that something might push the parties into a negotiation based on the original 1967 UN resolutions, by golly there was an "outbreak of terrorism" emanating from the Palestinian side. Even authorities in Israel thought that these coincidences might not be so coincidental, but that's another story.

And so, here comes Obama. His principal foreign policy advisor for the Middle East is Zbigniew Brzezinski, who advocates a "two-state solution" roughly based on the 2003 Geneva Accords negotiated between unofficial but formerly highly placed foreign policy experts on both sides, plus the 2002 proposal from, of all places, Saudi Arabia. The day after his election, Israel starts a process that must lead inexorably towards the present situation, which is anything but conducive to finding a workable two-state solution. The question arises, why should that be? To paraphrase the Fox "News" Channel (oh my gosh, I'm really doing that), we present, you decide.

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Right-wing commentators such as the sometimes hard-to-categorize Pat Buchanan, comedian Bill Kristol, still-trying-to-shake-her "Reagan Hagiographer" label Peggy Noonan, and so-called "even-handed" cable news personalities such as "Morning Joe and Mika" are all het-up about why the "left" (these folks wouldn't know a real Left if they saw one) is so het up about Obama's choice of Rick Warren for the Inauguration Invocation. "It's a free country," they say. "There's a wide range of views on gay marriage" (which happens to be Rick Warren's least odious on-the-gay-question position), they say. "Obama is showing himself to be tolerant," they say. Obama is looking for "common ground," they say.

"You'se guys" (which is what they would say to us lefties if they spoke Noo Yawk) are just a bunch of whiners. Or worse, you are just as bad as the Christian Fundamentalists (except I cannot remember when any of the above listed "authorities" ever criticized the latter group for anything. But that's another story.)

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Walking home from seeing "Milk," I found myself humming a song about another great American leader of people, Joe Hill. He was an organizer for the International Workers of the World who was framed on a murder charge and killed in Utah in 1915. A song by Earl Robinson that was famous when I was a boy (frequently performed by Pete Seeger) goes in part:

"I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, Alive as you or me. Says I, 'But Joe, you're ten years dead,' 'I never died,' says he, 'I never died,' says he. 'The copper bosses killed you, Joe, They shot you, Joe,' says I.

'Takes more than guns to kill a man,' Says Joe, 'I didn't die,' Says Joe, 'I didn't die.' And standing there as big as life, And smiling with his eyes Joe says, 'What they forgot to kill, Went on to organize, Went on to organize.'"

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To understand where President-elect Obama is going with is appointments, I think it is very important to understand something about his psyche. As far as I can tell from a distance, Mr. Obama has his ego out of the way. He is not making decisions based on meeting internal ego needs. He feels really good about himself, and so he should. But even people who should, based on externals, feel good about themselves, sometimes don't. In fact, Mr. Obama appears to me to be the first U.S. President since Dwight David Eisenhower (you can do your own analysis) who makes his decisions on everything, from his policies to his personnel to his choice of White House dog (see last week's New Yorker cover), based on objective reality as he sees it, not on dealing one or more self-perceived personal deficiencies or emotional needs.

This leads me to admire another important element of his thinking that is becoming clear as one analyzes his decision-making process. The first question he asks and answers for himself is: "what is the objective here?" That became oh-so-clear when he intervened in the Senate's process for dealing with poor ol' Joe Lieberman (who will be a lame duck in the Senate for so long that he will need crutches just to get into the chamber by the time 2012 rolls around). Many of us on the Left (and yes, I do count myself as being on the Left) wanted to do nothing more than "get 'im." What a SOB. "Out, out, damned spot" on the escutcheon of the Democratic Party.

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