Throw The Bums Out!

Now, we know where everyone stands, and now, we know what we have to do next year.  We have to vote Representatives Ribble and Petri out of office.  They have shown that they are part of the problem and can never be part of a solution. Last night, both of them voted with the radical rightist crazies in the house to hold the government hostage to their extremist views on The Affordable Care Act. 

The latest insanity passed by the House of Representatives promoted a year-long delay in the implementation of the central parts of the act and tried to repeal one of the means of paying for it: the tax on medical devices.  Ribble and Petri cast their votes in favor of this nuttiness in spite of knowing that the bill they supported stood no change of being passed in the Senate.  Their vote was a clear vote for shutting down the government.  They will of course say that if the president and the Democrats in the Senate weren’t so stubborn, the government wouldn’t have to shut down, but that is disingenuous: they knew what they were doing.

The Affordable Care Act is not perfect. It has problems that will need to be fixed, but it is one of the best things that have been done in Washington for many years. It will provide a way for millions of  people to have health insurance, and in the long run, it will help  to bring down the cost of health care in the United States.  That is why the radical rightists in Washington are so afraid of it. They're afraid it will work, and they're willing to shut down the government rather than allow that to happen.

If we want to have a rational government instead of a government that is held hostage by radical rightest ideologues, we have to vote Ribble and Petri out of office in 2014. 

If we want to have a government that is   responsive to the people and works to solve the real problems of our time, we have to vote Ribble and Petri out of office in 2014.

During the next 12 months, we have to devote ourselves to the cause of getting rid of Ribble and  Petri.  Of course, merely getting rid of two congressmen won’t solve the problem People all over the country must work with us: Republican legislators who voted with the radical rightist crazies must be thrown out of office.

The campaign starts today. Let’s get busy!

 

Dialogs In Place of Competing Monologs

Yesterday, on Facebook, I responded to an article that had been posted there, and I want to expand here on what I said on Facebook and explain why I think the issue is important. The article to which I responded was entitled “Misinformed USA: Why average Americans vote for Republicans,” and it had originally appeared on the web at http://www.examiner.com/article/misinformed-usa-why-average-americans-vote-for-republicans

My response said,

I really hate this kind of thing. This article is patronizing and demeaning to millions of people, and statements of this kind offend them and turn them away from progressive political action. People know when they are being looked down on, and it makes them angry. It does not persuade them to adopt the views of those who look down on them. Moreover, while it is true that right wing media distort the news, it does not follow that people on the right are stupid or uninformed. Issues like abortion or gun control revolve around genuine moral and political dilemmas, and the Republicans have exploited those dilemmas very intelligently. We progressives have not been nearly as clever in our approach to these issues, and the recognition of our clumsiness should make us feel a little humble. We need to learn that we can support progressive political positions without denigrating those who oppose us.

We have to stop talking about our political opponents as if they were stupid and engage their concerns directly if we are to succeed in engaging them in dialog or in persuading some of them to change their minds. For example, we have no dialog with our opponents over the issue of abortion. Instead, we have competing monologs. We on our side frame the issue in terms of “a woman’s right to choose,” while our opponents frame it in terms of “a child’s right to life.” There can be no easy compromise between these two views.

If we are to make progress, we must find a way to do an end run around the confrontation. One way to do that might be to refocus the discussion on birth control. Those who oppose both abortion and birth control are vulnerable to the accusation that they increase the likelihood of women being injured or killed by illegal abortions. If one is “pro-life,” one must be concerned about the life of the mother as well as that of the child. If we can engage people in this kind of a discussion, we may have a chance of changing some people’s minds, and along the way, we may reduce the need for abortions, too.

The issue of gun control is another one where we have competing monologs instead of dialogs. Those who favor gun control cite the horrendous damage that is done by people with guns every day in this country. Those opposed to gun control root themselves in the established, American tradition of the use of guns by citizens to defend their rights and their safety. This tradition is deeply rooted in American culture. It is a part of the mythology of the Old West, and hundreds of films and novels tell stories about law-abiding citizens who had no choice but to use their guns to defend themselves from evil-doers. In addition, the use of guns by citizens to defend themselves against an oppressive government occupies a respectable place in our culture that goes back to the “embattled farmers” of Lexington and Concord.

If we are to make progress toward better control of guns in our society, we must find a story that resonates in our culture in the way that the stories of the Battle of Lexington and the mythology of the Old West do. One such story might cite the struggles of farmers and ranchers in the Old West too free themselves from the dominance of hired gunmen. For example, the story of the Battle at the OK Corral may be seen as a story of legitimate law-enforcement ridding a community of private gunslingers. Today, people in the West do not need to carry guns because our western towns and states have effective law-enforcement.

These are a couple of examples of the kinds of things that we could do if we took seriously the views of our opponents and tried to find ways to engage them in dialog on our terms. I don't know whether they do what I hope they will do, but I am sure that if we were to put our heads together, we would be able to find more ways to turn the  current pointless, competing monologs into useful dialogs.

Why We Should Not Attack Syria

A Limited Set of Strikes?

President Obama has asked Congress to approve a limited set of strikes in Syria. The strikes, he says, are intended to punish the Syrian government for gassing its own people but not to affect the outcome of the Syrian civil war.  We should do this, he says, because we must send a message to the world that the use of poison gas is unacceptable to us and that we will attack anyone who uses it.  If we allow the Syrian government to get away with using poison gas, we will embolden others who might want to use it and thus make the world into a more dangerous place than it already is. In other words, this will be a purely humanitarian series of bombing raids or missile attacks.

When we put it bluntly that way, we can see immediately how absurd it is. First of all, there is every chance that our bombing raids will kill lots of people (collateral damage) even if our targeting is excellent, and we know that our targeting, while it may be good, will not be excellent. Mistakes will be made. Intelligence will be faulty, as it always is. So, we will probably end up killing nearly as many people as Assad’s gas attacks did.
Second, the idea that we will make a single series of strikes and then walk away is not believable. We have been through this before. After the strikes, we will discover that Assad continues to be a bad guy who does bad things to his people, and as the civil war grinds on, the people will continue to suffer. How, we will ask ourselves, can we allow that, and how can we allow the effort of the first strikes to be wasted?  With just a little more effort, we will tell ourselves, we will be able to attain our goal, whatever it is.

So, we will conduct more raids, or we will put in teams of Delta Forces or Navy Seals to “advise” whichever groups of insurgents we decide to support. Those teams will be insufficient for us to attain any worthwhile goal, but along the way, some Americans will be killed. So, we will expand our effort because, after all, we have to support our troops in the field.  Then, more Americans will be killed, and we will increase our effort again. And so it will go. You know I’m right. You’ve seen this movie before.

What is Our Goal?

Then, there is the question of what our goal is. The idea that we only want to act as a referee to insure that the Syrian civil war is fought according to the Marquis of Queensberry rules is nonsense. We have interests in the Middle East. We care about the oil, and we care about the shipping lanes that run through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. We have allies in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Israel, and we have enemies there like Iran. So, it is disingenuous for us to act as if we only wanted to be an honest referee. We do care how the civil war ends.

Unfortunately, we have no idea how to advance our interests in Syria.  We cannot stomach Bashar Assad, but his opponents in this war include radical Islamist groups, and replacing Assad with a radical Islamist government would not help us much. Moreover, such a government would be opposed by Israel, by Saudi Arabia and by Egypt. (Remember? The Egyptian army has just deposed an Islamist government, and we have tacitly supported the army’s action by refusing to label it as a “coup.”)  If we were living in 1918, we could just walk in and take over Syria. It would become a “protectorate.”  But we live in 2013, and that is not an option.

So, we don’t know what our goal is in Syria, and committing military force in the absence of a clearly defined goal is stupid and criminal.  The first requirement for a successful military campaign is that it must have a clearly defined objective than can be attained by military action. If you haven’t defined what “winning” means, or if you have defined an unattainable objective, you can never win. You can only inflict damage on your enemy.  That was the core problem in Vietnam. We never defined a goal there that was attainable. Our military forces in Vietnam performed splendidly, and our troops made enormous sacrifices, but in the end they were all for nothing. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died in the war, and when we left Vietnam in 1975, we got the same deal that we could have obtained for free in 1945, in 1954 or in 1965.

We would like to say that our goal in Syria is to establish a peace-loving, democratically-elected government that is friendly to us, but such a goal is not attainable by military means. We tried it in Iraq, and what is the outcome? Today, Iraq has a Shiite government that is friendly to Iran and that supports Bashar Assad.  Today, people in Iraq are being killed every day by Sunni insurgents. 

We have been fighting in Afghanistan for more than a decade, and what is the outcome?  The Afghan government is famously corrupt, and the Taliban continues to be important in the Afghan countryside. Maybe, the Taliban will be defeated, but that will not make the government honest or democratic.

Stay Out of Syria

So, we should stay out of Syria because we don’t know what we could do there to advance our interests. That is hard to accept, but it is true. If we attack Syria, we will be drawn into a war that will cost many American lives and far more Syrian lives, and we should not do that without an objective that we really believe we can attain.