I taped with Congressman Kucinich for “The Daily Briefing” (5 to 6 PM PT on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and at www.kpfk.org). I was about to ask him to answer charges that he was the Ralph Nader of health care but he abruptly bailed to take a vote. My producer then sent him a text: “We just did a quick interview with you. Would you be willing to respond to charges you are the Nader of health care? Call this number.” I was on the air running the incomplete interview when he called in, and we went live with the Congressman.

I was prepared to dismiss him like Marcos Moulitsas did as a suicidally self-righteous progressive in the Nader mould (see here and here), but after trying to pin him down on what he is up to, it appears Kucinich might be the only Democratic Congressman with the guts and brains to get something done about reforming healthcare, as opposed to health insurance.

As Kucinich told me, this is a matter of doing what an elected representative should do:

KUCINICH: I have a responsibility on behalf of all those people who want to see a public option to help the White House cross that divide. . . . If I cave in without any public option, that could kill any hopes of keeping it alive in the Senate.

I asked him what he thought of the comparisons to Nader. His response showed his appreciation of the consumer activist, but also his continuing loyalty to the Democratic party:

KUCINICH: If being the Ralph Nader of health care means I’m against consumer fraud and against monopolies, that’s OK. But if being the Ralph Nader of health care means that I’m scuttling the Democratic Party, that’s not true. I’m inside the party. I represent a voice inside the party that has helped to make health care an issue in three successive Democratic Platform committees and two national campaigns . . . I haven’t gone outside the party, and the party still has a chance to be able to deliver to the American people a health care bill that would be worthy of broader support.

After watching the Democrat’s Progressive Caucus dutifully roll over for the White House, Kucinich’s original House vote against the bill has meaning now, unlike Lynn Woolsey’s and others. Since the House has to vote on the Senate bill as is, without changing a comma, this is the only time to make a deal, not later during reconciliation when some Senate parliamentarian gets to slice and dice it. In taking a stand as the critical vote that the White House needs, Kucinich appears to be giving Democratic Senators cover as more and more of them declare their support for the public option.

I have a new show in drive time every weeknight at 8pm ET/5pm PT on KPFK, which is available via live stream here.

Tags: Dennis Kucinich, healthcare, Ian Masters, kpfk pacifica, progressives, public option

[Welcome Amy Goodman, and Host Sara Robinson] [As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book.  Please take other conversations to a previous thread.  - bev]

Breaking the Sound Barrier

Back in 2007, at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly (the church’s big annual national gathering), I had the remarkable experience of hearing Amy Goodman moderate a panel of extraordinary gentlemen. One was Daniel Ellsberg. One was Mike Gravel, then a contender for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. And the third was Robert West, a former president of Beacon Press, which is owned by the UUA.

Together, with Amy as moderator, these men told the untold story of how the Pentagon Papers were brought to the public. Ellsberg gave a copy of the 7,000 pages to The Washington Post’s Ben Bagdikian — but only on the condition that Bagdikian deliver a copy to Senator Gravel, so he could read them into the Congressional record. (The transfer involved a midnight cloak-and-dagger meeting in a dark parking lot, with Gravel transferring the boxes by himself because only he had senatorial immunity should they be caught.) While Bagdikian fought the government to print the papers in the Post, Gravel played hide-and-seek with the Senate’s leadership (then in the form of Mike Mansfield) to get the the Papers on record; and at the same time arranged with Beacon Press (after 35 other publishers turned them down) to print them. The agreement to publish– which church leaders well understood was putting the entire future of one of the nation’s oldest denominations on the line, as well as committing themselves to an act of capital treason — ended up in front of the Supreme Court, after two years of ongoing government persecution of the church.

I was in the front row for this spellbinding bit of group storytelling, along with my daughter, then not yet quite 17. “This is what heroes look like,” I told her. “Take a good look — because this is what your faith and your family will expect of you on the day that history knocks on your door and insists that you take a stand.”

Amy Goodman knows a lot about taking unpopular and personally risky stands that threaten the powers that be. She’s had a lot of experience breaking the sound barrier — that wall of silence that allows Americans to remain blissful in our too-easy denial of the many injustices that make our comfort possible. And she knows things about keeping your wits and courage about you in the resulting sonic booms that fellow progressives caught in the winds of change can learn from. Amy’s unwillingness to compromise her principles has made all the difference — for her, for the country, and for the people whose unheard voices become audible through her work. That stubborn insistence not only put her where she is — as the host of Democracy Now!, which runs every weekday on over 800 radio stations across the country and around the world — but also gives her work its forthright, earnest, and powerful flavor.

Breaking the Sound Barrier is a compilation of several dozen of Amy’s newspaper columns which ran between the summer of 2006 and the fall of 2009. At just 500 words each, the columns are shorter than this introduction; but brief as they are, they’re sharp, vivid vignettes, each one offering up a telling detail, a pointed moral, a transformative moment, or a wicked irony. Amy shows us US generals comparing the process of invading a country to a work of art in progress — and then invokes Guernica. She notes wryly that the ancient home of one of Maryland’s most notorious slave torturers, then known as “Mount Misery,” now belongs to Donald Rumsfeld.

“It is the responsibility of journalists to go where the silence is, to seek out news and people who are ignored, to accurately and clearly report on the issues — issues that the corporate, for-profit media often distort, if they cover them at all,” Goodman writes. To that end, she recounts not only the stories told by Gravel, Ellsburg, and West that night in Portland; but also writes movingly about being a witness to a massacre in East Timor, which she only survived herself because she could produce an American passport; gives her account of being arrested at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis in 2008; and takes on the American Psychological Association for its unconscionable unwillingness to sanction members who participate in US government torture. Her insights into the 2008 election cycle, including a full section on Obama, reveal the full range of progressive hopes and fears for this president.

Many of us are already very familiar with Amy’s work and exploits, so I imagine we’re going to have a lot to talk about today. Personally, I’ll be asking her about her recent brush with the Canadian border patrol during a visit to my adopted hometown of Vancouver. I cross that same patch of border weekly — indeed, I crossed it just last night — so her experience with this has been nothing short of sobering for me, and I’m interested in knowing what’s shaken out from this since. Have your questions ready, too: more than usual, this is one Book Salon guest who will sidestep no answers and pull no punches.

Welcome to FDL, Amy!

Tags: Amy Goodman, Breaking the Sound Barrier, Democracy Now!, Sara Robinson

Dennis Kucinich (photo 2007, courtesy of CAPAF)

Let me get this straight. The Senate will pass a public option if the House will. And the House will, because it already did. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won’t allow it. So the mortal enemy of public-option backers is . . . Dennis Kucinich.

Why? Because when Congressman Kucinich said he’d stand for a public option he stupidly thought he was supposed to mean it.

Let’s review a brief history of the disease known as “health insurance reform.”

When the president and the speaker of the House thought it would be strategic to censor any talk of single-payer healthcare, almost every member of Congress and almost every astroturfing party-before-country activist group and labor union, and almost every follower of those groups, fell obediently into line. “We’ll open the debate with the least we’ll settle for, a pathetic token public-option,” they thought cleverly, rubbing their hands together. “Then we’ll compromise down from there.”

But after demanding the “public option,” too many people refused to toss it overboard, and public pressure grew to keep it in. So 60 congress members signed a letter to the speaker last summer insisting that they would not settle for a health insurance bill that lacked a serious public option. When they were presented with a bill that did not meet their demands, almost all of them voted for it anyway.

Now 51 senators say they will pass a bill including a super-pathetic token public option of the sort passed by the House last summer, but Pelosi wants to pass a bill without anything even called a “public option” in it. Almost all of the congressional public-option stalwarts want to go along with the speaker and the president. And almost all of the astroturfing party-before-country activist groups want to fall obediently into line.

Meanwhile several states are moving single-payer healthcare bills through their legislatures, but they face likely lawsuits from insurance companies over conflicts with federal law if they try to actually get their residents healthcare. Senator Bernie Sanders is advertising the Senate bill as solving this problem, routinely failing to mention that his solution, if it is one, does not kick in for seven years. But an amendment passed in a House committee last summer would have clearly and unequivocally taken care of states’ concerns. The president told the speaker to strip that amendment out of the bill, and almost no members of Congress complained when she did so.

Where does Dennis Kucinich fit into this story? He’s the reason the word “almost” appears in it so many times. He didn’t open negotiations by proposing the lowest he’d accept. He pushed for a real single-payer solution. He single-handedly framed the public option as a compromise rather than a communist plot. Kucinich signed the letter committing to take a stand for at least a public option. But he made the mistake of thinking people actually wanted him to mean it. So he took that lonely stand. And he introduced and passed the amendment that would have allowed states to provide their residents with a serious healthcare solution.

Now, all the astroturfers applauded and encouraged taking a stand for a public option when there were 60 congress members pretending to do it, without apparently giving any thought to how greatly weakened progressives would be in Congress if they didn’t follow through. Did they think the chance that a bluff might work was worth damaging all future campaigns? Did they disbelieve all their own talk about how the bill would be worthless without the “public option.” It’s hard to know. The so-called public option had shrunk to such a token gesture that it was always hard to know what good they imagined it would do if included. And today they talk about passing a bill without even that token included, and passing it “for political reasons,” usually avoiding the question of whether the bill is actually better or worse than nothing.

But suppose that you honestly thought the public option was worth at least pretending to take a stand for, and now you no longer do, but you think the remaining bill does more good than harm. Why would you have no complaint with Pelosi who could put the “public option” back in and pass the bill? Why would you have no complaint with congress members who oppose the bill on the grounds that it protects abortion rights? Why would your complaints be focused on the one guy who stuck to what you used to want him to stick to? Could embarrassment be a factor here? Shame? Humiliation? Do you feel uneasy about asking that ever congress member be an obedient slave to the president? Do you sense that progressives would then be excluded entirely? Does it worry you that you’re protesting insurance companies in support of a bill that causes insurance companies’ stocks to rise?

Even the activist groups that have acted on principle throughout this ordeal have fallen short of Kucinich’s actions. Kucinich knew that real progress would come through the states, so he worked to pass an amendment permitting state single-payer. And virtually nobody backed him up. Activist groups either prattled on in a fog about national single-payer, or they focused exclusively on the so-called public option. These two camps wouldn’t talk to each other, but they both agreed on leaving states’ concerns by the wayside.

If, in stark contrast to what was done, labor unions and activist groups and progressive media had taken their agenda from their membership and brought it to Washington, rather than the reverse, then very quickly Kucinich would not have been alone in demanding single-payer, and the right-wingers would have soon been begging for a token public option as a compromise.

Healthcare is only one issue. There are dozens of stories like the one above, with different issues but the same characters and plot. When dozens of congress members commit to opposing war funding, Kucinich commits and then follows through. When it comes to ending the wars or impeaching the war criminals, Kucinich leads, in opposition to his political party but in support of his constituents, the American people, the rule of law, and the stated goals of progressives.

I hope self-loathing partisan sycophants realize that the corporate media will equally depict either passage or nonpassage of a “health insurance reform” bill as a defeat for Democrats. And, in this case, rightly so. But the long-term impact of a reform that doesn’t reform, one that rather compels Americans to pay their hard-earned money to institutions even more hated than Congress, namely health insurance companies — THAT would be the real political loser, with or without a privately run program for 3 percent of us called “the public option.” And, again, rightly so. Kucinich is saving the Democrats from themselves by helping to block their health insurance bill, but they can’t see what’s in front of them through the fog of their constant dreaming about mountains of money and a naked Rahm Emanuel poking them in the chests.

Tags: Dennis Kucinich, healthcare, progressives, public option, single payer

photo: Bsivad via Flickr

Sadly, it appears that Barack Obama is unwilling or unable to take on corporate America. He talks tough, but accommodates when the chips are really on the table – as the health care debate has conveniently demonstrated. More and more Americans are waking up to the fact that with a few notable exceptions, both Republicans and Democrats in Washington are basically employees of corporate lobbyists.

Perhaps one of the best ways to counter the stranglehold large corporations have on our economy and our government is to go underground. We can take the legs out from under the Wal-Marts, Exxons, Monsantos, and Coca-Colas of the world by finding alternatives to the corporate-consumer culture we have been raised in. Here’s a quick list of 5 ways we can get started:

1) Refuse to purchase anything from the three largest companies in any industry. This would eliminate the incentive to glean maximum profit no matter what the cost to human lives or the environment. For example, imagine how the oil business would change if all of a sudden Exxon, Shell, and BP were trying to be #4 instead of #1. If you’re feeling really daring, you can refuse to buy anything sold by a Fortune 500 company.

2) Shop more at yard sales and thrift shops, and engage in the ancient practice of bartering. Our culture is already saturated with material goods. Anything we buy new is probably already sitting unused in one of our neighbors’ houses. The idea that we should purchase something new every time we need something is a false imperative created by the corporate marketing and advertising machine.

3) Eat locally grown and unprocessed food. It’s better for you, better for the planet, and better for the non-corporate farmers. Plus, it almost always tastes better.

4) Stop watching television. Or at least watch it with an awareness of how the advertising is manipulating you. Marketing firms pay the best psychologists a lot of money to help them produce commercials to make you buy their products. The best defense against them is the “off” button.

5) Read, write, and talk about the dangers of corporate control. Even the most knowledgeable of consumers have been “branded” and make shopping decisions for reasons they’re not consciously aware of.  Research shows that children begin forming brand loyalties at a very young age. I’m a pastor, but my 4-year old son can name more brand names than Biblical characters. It’s not unreasonable to say that consumerism and corporatism have become the true belief systems in our country. Like an addiction, the first step to recovery is admitting we have a problem. And we can’t admit it unless enough people know about it.

What would you add to this list of underground ways to fight the corporate beast?

Tags: Barack Obama, big business, Corporate greed, Corporate Power, underground

China's high speed rail line (photo: henrie via Flickr)

The Chinese are going to bid for the contract to build the U.S. high speed rail system. “China has built 4,000 miles (6,500 kilometers) of high-speed rail for its own train system and President Barack Obama issued a pledge in November with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, to cooperate in developing the technology.

“We are organizing relevant companies to participate in bidding for U.S. high-speed railways,” Wang Zhiguo, a deputy railways minister, told a news conference.”

China Wants U.S. Rail Project

OK, we won’t discuss why the president made that statement to the Chinese (considering the amount of intellectual property that has probably been sucked up by the well-organized hacking operations in China over the past several years, I’m not sure we really have to “cooperate” in order to develop the technology since they’ve probably stolen it electronically already, but I digress), but I’d like to offer a suggestion to anyone looking for a reason to write their Congress critters…

1) The Chinese have not awarded a non-Chinese company any contracts for any of their big infrastructure projects. Not wind energy, not high speed rail, not roads, nuthin. Remember – they have national industrial policy and it is NOT to give any other country’s companies any opportunities in China. As a matter of fact, U.S. wind energy companies who tried to participate in the bidding for that system complain that the Chinese gave contracts to companies that were created expressly for the purpose of bidding – that were brand new, had no experience or technology in wind energy to offer, but had the one thing that counted: they were Chinese.

2) If we give the Chinese the contract for this – not only with U.S. taxpayer dollars leave the country, but we have no guarantee that anything will be built here. Shipped here, certainly but not built here.

3) This will probably be the biggest (and perhaps the last) big rail project that the U.S. will ever see. We have companies in this country in that business, whether it’s for rail engines, rail cars, or steel.
US Companies Want In On Rail

Some of the companies are like GE, which builds locomotives and already is ramping up to build a new engine that can reach high rates of speed. We have rail car companies (some U.S.-owned; some like Alstom and Bombardier which are French-owned) which already are building and also ramping up. If the United States is ever going to save its industrial (and, shall we also point out, union-supported middle class jobs) infrastructure, this project is the cornerstone. The Chinese don’t need this project – they are already building rail systems in places such as Turkey. We actually do need this project and we need to support the advancement of U.S. industrial infrastructure to do it.

So, I’m writing to Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, and my Congressman – how about you?

Tags: Alstom, Bombardier, China, economy, federal stimulus, foreign policy, GE, high-speed rail, Infrastructure, Labor, outsourcing

But for the ADL, it’s the Obama administration that’s the problem.

“We are shocked and stunned at the Administration’s tone and public dressing down of Israel on the issue of future building in Jerusalem,” ADL director Abraham Foxman said in a statement. “We cannot remember an instance when such harsh language was directed at a friend and ally of the United States.”

Maybe you can’t remember one, Abe, because “friends” of the United States typically don’t pull fuck-you moves like that on our Vice Presidents.

The fact is, the US was making a good-faith effort to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinian people, and the Israeli government expressed its gratitude by doubling-down on a reckless, aggressive policy that every US president since Jimmy Carter has opposed. But how dare anyone criticize Israel for it.

The ADL has officially become as relevant as the Catholic League.

Heckuva job, Abe.

Tags: ADL, Anti-Defamation League, Hillary Clinton, Israel, Joe Biden

But then we get something different: Hedges asks why we should resist? Why don’t we just carve out a comfortable place for ourselves in the corporate state and spend our lives satisfying our personal needs? After all, he points out, the elites have done just that, as have countless functionaries, the people who tell us we must work within the system, and compromise in the spirit of compassion and generosity.

Hedges’ answer is the real surprise. He turns to the French philosopher Albert Camus, and his book The Rebel, for an answer. You don’t see a lot of references to philosophy, or to French existentialism today. It was popular when I was at Notre Dame (the 60s). I took a course in Christian Existentialism which met a requirement of all graduates. I hardly need add that it isn’t on the list of courses today. In fact, philosophy itself has lost its place in the curriculum at most colleges.

The Rebel was published in 1951. Camus and Sartre had gotten into a big fight because of Sartre’s support of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. Camus, a native of Algeria, was sensitive to colonialist oppression, and knew it when he saw it. Sartre attacked the philosophy bona fides of Camus as part of that fight, and Camus responded with The Rebel.

The Rebel is a think piece. There are no data tables, no empirical studies, no effort to place the work in the pantheon of knowledge about things. It is purely a meditation on the position of the intellectually aware person in a world that ignores his existence; it asks what that person should do?

It took Camus two years to write The Rebel, mostly spent in solitude because he was recovering from tuberculosis. Two years of thinking and writing. That is what makes the book so interesting. Two years of thinking. What on earth, people today would say, requires thinking for more than a minute or two? That thinking stuff is hard, and focused thinking about a single problem for two years in the age of full-time wired-in life? Well, that is unthinkable. What does it even mean to think about the same thing for two years?

If this were a scientific exploration, an effort to understand a physical phenomenon, we would at least be able to grasp it. After all, that would mean experimenting, doing something, observing the results, thinking about them, doing another experiment, observing the results and eventually writing them up. Or if it were translating, we would understand: what did Proust mean by some specific sentence, not the word for word transliteration you get from Babelfish, but a translation that conveys the meaning he wanted to convey?

The Rebel isn’t like that, and philosophy generally isn’t like that. The Rebel isn’t a search for knowledge, but for meaning. Camus burrows deeply into his own experience of the world, and considers the experiences of others and tries to distill something worth saying about the meaning of life in the face of an uncaring universe and a society riddled with injustice.

Thinking like this is hard, and certainly we can’t expect everyone to do it, or even expect Camus to do it all the time. Here’s Hannah Arendt’s thinking:

Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.

The Life of the Mind, p. 4. That perfectly describes today’s state of the art political and social discourse. Politicians and a lot of the rest of us rely on stock phrases to make decisions or at least to explain publicly the reasons for decisions. The ability to express doubt and question a stock phrase has more or less disappeared. So, when lobbyists hired by Sallie Mae tell legislators that 35,000 jobs will be lost if SAFRA passes, Senators heard the words “job loss”, and didn’t think to ask how an industry that employs about 35,000 people would vanish. That failure is repeated over and over.

Everything about modern life makes it easy to avoid reality. Thinking is our only defense, even if it is hard.

Tags: Albert Camus, Chris Hedges, Hannah Arendt, philosophy, thinking

You could see it coming. Somewhere, a young boy in a dinosaur t-shirt holds his dying mother’s hand and remembers that the distant voice on the phone, the Insurance Voice, said simply, “No.” He could be forgiven for fearing he’d spoken to someone he shouldn’t have.

You could see it coming. Wall Street banks are too big to fail, and the black-souled ghouls of hate radio and FoxNews tell us our neighbors’ lives are too small to save.

Schoolbooks are being rewritten to redeem Joseph McCarthy, make of Phyllis Schlafly something like an authoritarian madonna, and turn the Separations Clause into a guarantor of theocracy.

Andrew, Son of Schlafly, is rewriting the Bible, too, no doubt replacing Amos with Milton Friedman and “justice like a mighty stream” with trickle-down economics. Joseph saw seven years of famine in Pharaoh’s dream. “Merely the lower strings of a cats cradle in the Market’s invisible hand,” Schlafly’s Joseph will say, adding with certainty, “It’s the business cycle.”

Joseph’s coat of many colors is back in his father Jacob’s mournful hands in the traditional American tune, “When First Unto This Country.” It was an Austin group, The Gant Family, who brought the song to folklorists in the 1930s. Bob Dylan called it “my foreign language song, my only foreign language song.”  And I wonder what he means, because isn’t Jacob’s 11th son a little like us, post-Declaration America’s 11th generation, give or take? In a dream our ancestors hold our bloodstained coat and say, “We warned you to be careful.”

It’s an authentic American Joseph who sings “When First Unto This Country.” He wears his innocence like his “cap set on so bold.” He loses it, along with his coat of many colors. Still, we should remember that Joseph had enough sense to outsmart Pharaoh and to make sure his people got his bones out of Egypt.

How fine it would be for the young man with the dying mother to sing this song to the Insurance Voice on the other end of the phone line. But that’s the thing. He did, and if you don’t believe me ask Walt Whitman, who heard it and knew the young man and all America learned it from the delicious singing of their mothers.

Look again at Evans’ Allie Mae. It’s not condemnation in her eyes, it’s defiance and a promise of solidarity. Sure enough, we brought rats with us when we came to this country, and those of us who would have made peace with the Natural and Free Human Beings already here soon found ourselves outnumbered. But not silenced.

When we elected America’s first African-American president in 2008, it seemed we’d earned a song like Whitman’s tribute to Lincoln: “O Captain My Captain! Our fearful trip is done.” Ours was not a requiem, of course, but a christening, a raising of the sails. We cheered departure, not arrival. Democracy means we come new unto this country, every day.

We saw it coming, of course. Those frightened of freedom and equality heard our singing and set about banging their pans. There’s nothing new about this. Some see the open country and the untamed spirit that makes America what it is. But others see only a place to be conquered and a people to be subjugated.

Why this song, now? To remind ourselves of the mighty stream of justice and hope that courses through the people’s America. Tactical demands of the day require us to look down at our feet as we walk along a precipice. But when we raise our eyes to the horizon, we find that the singer of “When First Unto This Country” might just be ending the song where it began, on a new departure. We’re always strangers in a land of possibility and danger, and maybe that’s what Dylan meant when he called it a foreign-language song.

Here’s Dylan’s apparition, caught among the voices of the crowd, the videoed soul of a nation singing our varied carols.

Tags: ” Walker Evans, “When First Unto This Country, Allie Mae Burroughs, Andrew Schlafly, Bob Dylan, health care reform, Jacob, Joseph, Pharaoh, Phyllis Schlafly, Texas State Board of Education

I went to dinner Saturday night at a popular DC political watering hole. I’d never been there before. The atmosphere was so heavy and the mood of the room so strange it was hard to concentrate.

“It’s Paths of Glory, and these are the trenches,” said my dinner companion.

I had no idea what that meant.

“You know, Stanley Kubrick, World War I — the generals know it’s a suicide mission but they don’t care.  They think they might get a promotion so they send the troops in anyway. But the troops won’t go, so the generals start firing on their own men in the trenches.”

Yep, that was it was it: fear. Icy cold fingers up your back, smell-of-death fear.

“You mean over the health care bill?  I said.  “Because they’re forcing everyone to sacrifice themselves and take the vote.”

“Yep.”

I’d had dinner with another Democratic operative the night before who referred to it as “sati” (where the widow of a deceased Hindu would throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, either voluntarily or by force).

“That’s funny,” I said, “I’ve been calling it ‘Jonestown.’ But “Paths of Glory” — the generals — much more apt.”

As I recall, in the movie they wind up shooting one soldier for his “cowardice” as a lesson to them all.

There were a few oily chislers in the restaurant who added a cheap, edgy euphoria to the atmosphere, destined as they were to make a buck off the proceedings.  But the sad, desperate thing about the entire affair is just how low rent it all is.  No robber barons or captains of industry here:  just the errand boys to power who are easily bought for pennies on the dollar.

If this is the best we can do after the nation pours its collective hope into something, it really is the end of empire.  And everyone in town, at one level or another, seems to know it.

Tags: Chris Van Hollen, health care bill, Jonestown, Paths of Glory, sati, Stanley Kubrick, Steny Hoyer

My friend Daniel Levy has forgotten more about Israeli politics than I’ll know and he writes that Netanyahu may be the last best hope for the two-state solution. For the life of me I just don’t understand the logic. As best as I can understand, Daniel believes Netanyahu’s obstructionism, combined with statebuilding efforts from Salam Fayyad in the West bank, will strengthen international support for… what? Imposing a solution on Israel?

It’s so easy to be cynical and downtrodden about the prospects for peace and to say that Obama isn’t strong enough and Biden will be content to be bitchslapped in Israel and on and on and on. Maybe Clinton can speak half as bluntly to AIPAC later this month, but I won’t despair if she doesn’t. Because when it comes to Israel/Palestine, it’s tiresome to even talk in terms of hope and other emotional outbursts. There is a cause and a vision and a destination and fuck how hard it is, we have to keep going. Two states, two peoples, no alternatives, no obstructions, no choices, no divergences, nothing else matters. We must run a marathon.

Update: Also, one more fucking thing and then good Shabbos to you. If and when the two-state solution dies and the horrific choice really is the end of a Jewish state or the end of a democratic state, so many writers who wrung their hands over every difficult choice Israel had to make and found it easier to condemn those who urged those difficult choices to be made will suddenly find themselves denouncing the inaction of the past that their irresponsible intellectual choices encouraged.

Tags: Hillary Clinton, Israel, Joe Biden, Netanyahu, Salam Fayyad, settlements