Trim Bush from American History

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column that resonated with a lot of people.

Since 2001, I noted, “We’ve lost our right to see an attorney, to confront our accusers, even to get a fair trial. Government agents have kidnapped thousands of people, most of whom have never been heard from again. Bush even signed an edict claiming the right to assassinate anyone, including you and me, based solely on his whims. Torture, the ultimate sign that civilized society has been replaced by a police state,” has been legalized.

None of the major presidential candidates are currently promising to do what it would take to restore democracy: close Gitmo and the CIA torture chambers, get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, revoke the protofascist USA-Patriot and Military Commissions Acts, obey the Geneva Conventions and turn over Bush, his torturers, his Congressional allies and his top civilian and military officials to an international war crimes tribunal for their role in the murders of more than one million Afghans and Iraqis.

The politicians are too timid to do what’s right. But we can bully them into it. Let’s begin America’s long slog toward moral and political redemption by demanding that our next president’s first act be to declare the Bush Administration null and void. Every law and act carried out between 12 noon on January 20, 2001 and January 20, 2009 should just…go…poof.

My readers are cranky, distrustful and smart. (You can read their comments at tedrall.com.) readers are all over the place politically: old-school Democrats, Goldwater Republicans, libertarians, socialists, anarchists, even neoconservatives. But they’re speaking out as one about my call to expunge the legacy of the Bush Administration: Yes. Yes. Hell, yes!

Let’s make it happen!

Now is the time. Write (an actual letter, not email) to your favorite presidential candidate and declare that you are a single-issue voter. Swear that, if he or she agrees to sign the following Pledge, your vote is assured. If not, promise to stay home or vote for someone else.

Pledge for American Renewal

“I, ______________, hereby solemnly pledge that my first act upon assuming the office of President shall be to sign an American Renewal Act of 2009, which shall declare all laws, regulations, executive orders, treaties and actions undertaken by the federal government during the illegitimate and unlawful administration of George W. Bush to be null, void and without effect.”

Sound crazy? So did Thomas Paine in 1775. As a practical and legal matter, however, consigning Bush to the dung heap of history makes more sense than revolting against the British.

First, the law.

George W. Bush’s January 20, 2001 inauguration was unconstitutional. This isn’t because Bush lost the popular vote. Nor is it because he lost Florida and thus the electoral vote. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Florida recount lawsuit, Bush v. Gore, violated the U.S. Constitution. It’s a states’ rights issue. Elections fall under state law; the highest court that may resolve a legal challenge about an election is a state supreme court. The U.S. Supreme Court–a federal body–didn’t have jurisdiction in the case.

An American Renewal Act is merely a confirmation of two centuries of standard practice.

There are precedents. After France was liberated in 1944, incoming president Charles de Gaulle declared the collaborationist government of Marshall Henri-Philippe Pétain null and void. (It was a stretch. Unlike Bush, who carried out a judicial coup, Pétain came to power legally.) In any case, Pétain vanished from textbooks. Numerous laws passed between 1940 and 1944, dealing with matters like taxes and construction projects, had to be debated and passed all over again.

The Southern secession of 1860 was perfectly legal, yet laws and currency issued by the Confederate government in the South were invalidated by the victorious Union in 1865.

The main argument for erasing Bush and his nefarious deeds is a legal one: official acknowledgement that the 2000 election was stolen gets the U.S. back on the path to democracy. (Should Al Gore should be allowed to serve the term he won in 2000? I don’t know.)

There’s also an ethical principle at stake. As de Gaulle said about Pétain’s partnership with the Nazis, the Bush Administration so disgraced itself and our nation that we have to renounce it in order to restore our moral authority, to be able to face citizens of other, less despicable, countries in the eye.
Another argument is based on power. Imagine that Gore had seized power in 2000 instead. Now imagine that he had turned as rabid as Bush, that he had ruled as far to the left as Bush has to the right. Businesses would have been nationalized. Healthcare would have been socialized; doctors would be federal employees. Taxes on the rich would have soared while the poor got off scot-free. Republican protesters at the Democratic National Convention would have gotten beaten up and thrown into filthy internment facilities for days on end. Crazy Gore would have apologized for foreign policies that provoked the 9/11 attacks. To prove he meant it, he would have sent troops to overthrow the world’s most heinous dictators, all U.S. allies, in Uzbekistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

Now imagine that, over the years, Gore’s policies had ruined the economy and mired the military in endless, losing wars. That people had turned again him to the same degree that they’ve rejected Bush. As Frank Rich writes in The New York Times, only 24 percent of Americans approve of the Bush Administration–almost as bad as the image of the U.S. in Pakistan.

You can bet that the Republicans, after they took back power, would carry out the mother of all rollbacks. Gore, the rogue president, would probably wind up in prison. There’s no reason to treat Bush and his policies any more gently.

“We are a people in clinical depression,” writes Rich. “Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.” Anyone who reads Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA” knows the U.S. was damned far from perfect before Bush came along. But Rich’s broader point is correct. Falling short of lofty ideals is better than forgetting about them.

Demand that the major presidential candidates sign the Pledge for American Renewal. We know the woman and half-dozen men who are leading in the polls want to rule us. But will they lead?

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

Pakistan’s Con Man Still At It

“You’re either with us, or against us.” Bush had his then-Secretary of State, Colin Powell, deliver that stark message to Pervez Musharraf after 9/11. “Be prepared to be bombed,” Musharraf says Powell’s number two at State, Richard Armitage, told him. “Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.” Faced with that bleak choice, the military dictator promised Pakistan’s cooperation in the “war on terror.”

Like Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi codenamed “Curveball,” Musharraf was nothing more than a con man. He collected $10 billion from American taxpayers. Six years later, all we have to show for it is Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, alleged Al Qaeda strategist, poster boy for waterboarding and a candidate for worst morning face ever. But don’t blame the general for selling us a line of crap. Allying himself “with us” was never an option.

In October 1999 I was traveling along the Karakoram Highway from Kashgar in western China to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. As my bus crossed the high-altitude Khunjerab Pass from China, we were startled to find the Pakistani border unguarded. The passport control station had been abandoned in such haste the door was wide open. A cup of lukewarm tea sat on the registration desk. The bus driver shrugged. We drove on into the “Northern Areas”–the section of Kashmir that had been on Pakistan’s side of the ceasefire line at the end of its 1965 war with India.

A few hundred miles south in Islamabad, Musharraf had just overthrown Nawaz Sharif, the democratically-elected prime minister. The two men had spent the summer blaming each other for a disastrous new offensive against India. Musharraf settled the dispute by jailing and torturing Sharif–and launching a desperate attempt to win the Kargil Conflict, also known as the Third Kashmir War.

Opening Kashmir’s border with China was beside the point. The real action was taking place at the newly-open frontier with Afghanistan, where agents of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) invited the Taliban to send thousands of jihadis into the Northern Areas to fight India before winter brought an end to the war season. As usual, Pakistan claimed it was too poor and weak to man its border posts and stop its proxy fighters.

Before long my bus was passing columns of Taliban soldiers on foot and riding pick-up trucks and tanks. Pakistani Kashmir, an Afghan commander manning a checkpoint told me, was under Taliban control.

The Kargil War ended in stalemate. But Musharraf’s first act as president was to forge an alliance with the Taliban and, by extension, his country’s radical Islamist parties. The marketing of Musharraf as a bulwark against radical Islam and the Taliban is one of the biggest jokes of the post-9/11 era. He wasn’t for the Taliban before he was against them. He was the Taliban.

I’ve been writing and speaking about Musharraf’s pro-Islamist affinities since 1999. Perhaps now, with thousands of journalists, lawyers and political opponents imprisoned and Pakistan under martial law, Americans will take notice that he’s no better than Saddam.

There’s no such thing as a “moderate dictator.”

Actually, Musharaff is worse than Saddam. Despite occasional kowtowing to fundamentalists in Iraq’s Koran Belt, he was a secular socialist who jailed radical Islamists. Musharraf’s political prisoners, on the other hand, are journalists, judges, lawyers, artists and peace activists. “The first people to be arrested after the imposition of emergency were not the leaders of Pakistani Taliban, nor their sympathizers in Islamabad,” wrote Mohammed Hanif, head of the BBC’s Urdu service. “There was no crackdown on sleeper cells that have orchestrated a wave of suicide bombings across Pakistan.”

The biggest joke of all was the war against Afghanistan, which has become a political I.Q. test. Most of the presidential candidates, the media and therefore the American people, think Iraq was a distraction from the war we should be fighting in Afghanistan. In fact, the war against Afghanistan is less justifiable, and even less winnable.

If U.S. officials had wanted to catch Osama bin Laden, all they had to do was call Musharraf. On 9/11, the Al Qaeda leader was laid up in a Pakistani military hospital in Islamabad. If the dictator refused, invading Pakistan–if you’re into that sort of thing–would certainly have been more justifiable than Afghanistan or Iraq. A Pakistan War could have neutralized the world’s most dangerous nuclear threat, established a valuable strategic American foothold between India and China, and–if we worked with the UN–scored us popularity points for restoring democratic rule.

Such a war would have been far more justifiable than Afghanistan or Iraq. No country was more responsible than Pakistan for 9/11. Pakistan hosted Al Qaeda’s headquarters in Kashmir. Most of its training camps were in Kashmir and Pakistan’s Tribal Areas–not Afghanistan. On July 22, 2004, The Guardian reported that General Mahmoud Ahmed, chief of the ISI under Musharraf, had sent $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker. The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Pakistani intelligence had financed 9/11, but the 9/11 Commission decided not to investigate our “strategic ally in the war on terrorism.”

Since the Taliban were funded and armed by the ISI, we would have gotten Afghanistan for free in an invasion of Pakistan.

In November 2001 Musharraf was asked on PBS’ “NewsHour” why reporters were able to find and interview bin Laden. “Why can’t Pakistani intelligence find him or help the U.S. to find him?” asked Robert MacNeil.

“There’s a general suspicion on–it’s surprising that maybe ISI is not contributing to the intelligence, yes–to the intelligence,” replied the military ruler. “Now it’s not that simple. After all, then you send in people. They’re on the other side; they know who they are, and they know what they have come for…It’s not that easy that you send your operatives in and find locations. One is trying one’s best for that–but if a reporter goes through contact–through some contact and, after all, Osama bin Laden’s purpose is to project himself in some way and create some negative effects in the world, that maybe he would welcome receiving a reporter and projecting whatever his thoughts are.”

Musharraf was always a huckster. Anyone who paid attention could see that, but that’s the problem: we never do.

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

Hillary Clinton, Joyless Uniter

“The fact that a lot of people dislike you is troubling,” says the director of the Quinnipiac University poll, talking about Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbagger, Slept Her Way Into National Prominence, NY). She scores 47 percent of likely Democratic primary voters, leaving Barack Obama (21 percent) and John Edwards (12 percent) in the dust. This is supposed to make her inevitable. Why bother to hold primaries? But a funny thing happens when Democrats and Republicans talk about 2008: they find common ground.

“I can’t stand Hillary,” the Republican opens.

“She’s disgusting,” the Democrat agrees. At last, a Uniter.

Half the electorate hates her–and not just members of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. She’s a juggernaut, at least in a Howard Dean-in-November 2003 kind of way. Liberals will vote for her if she’s the nominee. But it’ll be a chore. She epitomizes joylessness. Win or lose, who cares?

She’s the time-to-make-the-doughnuts candidate.

Every voter has his or her limit, a moment or an act or just a general sense about a politician that makes the idea of voting for them feel so unpleasant they’d rather cross party lines, or stay home on election day. For me, and for a lot of people, it was Hillary’s vote to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a “foreign terrorist organization,” unleashing new sanctions and U.S. military “instruments”–a step toward war–against Iran.

I forgive easily. I could have let Hillary off the hook for supporting NAFTA, screwing up healthcare in 1993 and voting for the proto-fascist USA-Patriot Act. I could have overlooked her Reaganesque cluelessness about the lives of ordinary people. (Reneging on her “baby bond” proposal that Americans receive $5,000 at age 18, she now wants to give everyone a 401(k) and have the government match it “up to $1,000.” Thanks to this windfall, she says, “they will be able to access it to go to college or maybe they will be able to make that down payment on their first home.” Lame idea, obviously. What I want to know is: Where can you buy a house or a college education for $1000? On the moon?)

I might have even have forgiven Hillary’s vote to authorize Bush to start the unprovoked war against Iraq, though she never apologized for a cowardly (and miscalculated) act of triangulation that contributed to the deaths of more than a million Iraqis. As Tim Grieve wrote in Salon: “She has gone from 1) voting for the use-of-force resolution, to 2) questioning the intelligence that formed the basis of that vote, to 3) arguing that the Bush administration distorted the intelligence, to 4) saying she didn’t regret giving Bush authority to use force but did regret the way he used that authority, to 5) saying the resolution never would have come to a vote if Congress knew then what it knows now, to 6) saying that Congress wouldn’t have voted for the resolution if Congress knew then what it knows now, to 7) saying that she wouldn’t have voted for the resolution if she knew then what she knows now.”

Hillary’s October 2003 speech to the Senate is a fair summary of her defense: “The idea of giving our president authority to act…against Saddam Hussein, was one I could support and I did so. In the last year, however, I have been first perplexed, then surprised, then amazed, and even outraged and always frustrated by the implementation of the authority given the president by this Congress.” Good idea, fouled up by hyper-aggression and lousy implementation. Well, what did she expect? Bush was a warmonger, a liar who’d already attacked Afghanistan, where Osama wasn’t, and sucked up to Pakistan, where he was, after 9/11. She gave him a blank check. She can’t have been surprised when he cashed it.

As I said, I’m the forgiving type. I get it: Hillary can’t apologize for her Iraq vote. It would make her look weak. As she said in September 2006 on ABC News, “I can only look at what I knew at the time because I don’t think you get do-overs in life. I think you have to take responsibility. And hopefully, learn from it and go forward. I regret very much the way the president used the authority he was given because I think he misled the Congress, and he misled the country.”

Except…except…she did get a do-over. The same president who misled her, Congress and the country, asked for her vote on yet another resolution based on phony intelligence that starts us down the path to war–this time against Iran. She had a chance to prove that she’d learned her lesson. She voted yes. Again.

President Hillary won’t close Gitmo. She won’t stop torturing. She won’t stop listening to our phone calls. She won’t stop the war in Iraq, much less in Afghanistan. Heck, she might even start a new one.

Fool you once, shame on Bush. Fool you twice, I stop thinking how cool it would be for the United States to finally elect a woman president.

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

George W. Bush has shoved American politics into the dark realm of the lunatic right, zipping past Joe McCarthy into territory previously covered by historical accounts of Germany in the 1940s. We’ve lost our right to see an attorney, to confront our accusers, even to get a fair trial. Government agents have kidnapped thousands of people, many of whom have never been heard from again. Bush even signed an edict claiming the right to assassinate anyone, including you and me, based solely on his whims. Torture, the ultimate sign that civilized society has been replaced by a police state, was repeatedly authorized by government officials who smirked the few times reporters had the temerity to ask them about it.

The 2000, 2004 and 2008 presidential elections have been and will prove to be decisive moments in American history. In each case the American people were offered a stark choice between a future of freedom and one under tyranny.
In 2000 the American people chose dictatorship, watching passively as a rogue Supreme Court violated the Constitution and handed Bush the keys to the White House. We had a chance to restore the vision of the original Framers in 2004. Instead, we sat on our asses while Bush stole yet another election. The 2008 race could mark our last chance to get back the system of government we enjoyed before the December 20, 2000 coup.

We must elect–by an overwhelming, theft-proof majority–a candidate who promises to renounce Bush and all his works. A reform-minded president’s first act should be to sign a law that reads as follows: “The federal government of the United States having been illegitimate and illegal since January 20, 2001, all laws, regulations, executive orders, and acts of commission or omission enacted between that infamous day and 12 noon Eastern Standard Time on January 20, 2009 are hereby declared invalid and without effect.” Guantánamo, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, spying on Americans’ phone calls and emails, and “legal” torture would be erased. Our troops should immediately pull out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Somalia; we should apologize to our victims and offer to compensate them and their survivors. Bush should never appear on any list of American presidents. When he dies, his carcass shouldn’t receive a state funeral. It ought to be thrown in the trash.

Unfortunately, no one like that is running for president. To the contrary, most of the major presidential candidates want to accelerate America’s slide into outright moral bankruptcy.

Inspired by what good people find appalling, America’s Mayor has turned into America’s Maniac. Torture, says Rudy Giuliani, is smart. He endorses the medieval practice of waterboarding, revived in CIA torture chambers after 9/11, in which a person is strapped to a board, tipped back and forced to inhale water to induce the sensation of drowning.

“It depends on how it’s done,” Giuliani said when asked about waterboarding and whether it is torture. “It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.” Giuliani used to be a federal prosecutor. Would he have used similar logic in the prosecution of an accused torturer?

The mayor-turned-monster even used a campaign stop in Iowa to mock the victims of sleep deprivation, long acknowledged by international law as one of the severest forms of torture. “They talk about sleep deprivation,” he said. “I mean, on that theory, I’m getting tortured running for president of the United States. That’s plain silly. That’s silly.”

Waterboarding causes pain, brain damage and broken bones (from the restraints used on struggling victims), and death. Survivors are psychologically scarred. “Some victims were still traumatized years later,” Dr. Allen Keller, director of the Bellevue/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture, told The New Yorker. “One patient couldn’t take showers, and panicked when it rained.”

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin described the sleep deprivation he suffered as a captive of the Soviet KGB: “In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep…Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.”
Giuliani isn’t the only wanna be Torturer-in-Chief. Congressman Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican, offered this Lincolnesque rhetorical gem at one of the debates: “What do we do in the response to a nuclear–or the fact that a nuclear device or some bombs have gone off in the United States? We know that there are–we have captured people who have information that could lead us to the next one that’s going to go off and it’s the big one…I would do–certainly, waterboard–I don’t believe that that is, quote, ‘torture.'”

In an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes,” Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said the U.S. does and should torture: “We have received good solid information from [torture], and have saved American lives because of it.”

Duncan Hunter made fun of the concentration camp at Guantánamo: “You got guys like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [a detainee victim of U.S. waterboarding], “who said that he planned the attack on 9/11. You got Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards. Those guys get taxpayer-paid-for prayer rugs. They have prayer five times a day. They’ve all gained weight. The last time I looked at the menu, they had honey-glazed chicken and rice pilaf on Friday. That’s how we treat the terrorists. They’ve got health care that’s better than most HMOs…They live in a place called Guantánamo, where not one person has ever been murdered.”

Three inmates have been found dead at Gitmo. (The military claimed they were suicides.) As of August 2003, at least 29 POWs had attempted suicide. Scores of hunger strikers are being force-fed.

Fred Thompson says he won’t authorize waterboarding “as a matter of course” but likes to keep his options open. Mitt Romney punts questions about waterboarding: “I don’t think as a presidential candidate it is appropriate for me to weigh in on specific forms of interrogation that our CIA would employ. In circumstances of extreme threat to the nation, where we employ what is known as enhanced interrogation techniques, we don’t describe those techniques.”

At a Democratic debate in New Hampshire, Barack Obama refused to rule out torture. “Now, I will do whatever it takes to keep America safe. And there are going to be all sorts of hypotheticals [presumably, Tancredo’s hoary “ticking time bomb” fantasy] and emergency situations, and I will make that judgement at that time.” Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden said they agree with Obama. Democrats Bill Richardson, John Edwards and Chris Dodd have offered unequivocal stances against torture. On the Republican side, only John McCain and Ron Paul have done so. Even McCain, himself a victim of torture in Vietnam, refuses to rule out voting to confirm Bush’s attorney general nominee, Michael Mukasey. “If it amounts to torture,” Mukasey said of waterboarding, “then it is not constitutional.”

“If”?

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

Troops Suck Up to Bush, Ask for Support

Over a year ago, in March 2006, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes published the results of a Zogby poll of troops serving in Iraq. 72 percent said U.S. forces should withdraw within a year. Twenty-five percent thought we should pull out right away. But 85 percent said a major reason they were there was “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the September 11 attacks.” These people are confused, to say the least.

Even more confusing is the persistent flow of complaints by Iraq War veterans that Americans on the home front are partying like it’s 2009 while their comrades back in Vichy Mesopotamia are getting blown up.

Army infantry officer Will Bardenwerper gave voice to this oft-stated sentiment in an October 20th New York Times op/ed. “As I began my 13-month deployment (in Tal Afar, Iraq),” wrote a dispirited Bardenwerper, “I imagined an American public following our progress with the same concern as my family and friends. But since returning home, I have seen that America has changed the channel.” He was struck by “the disparity between the lives of the few who are fighting and being killed, and the many who have been asked for nothing more than to continue shopping.”

Typical suggestions for fairer distribution of sacrifice and a military draft–the latter to obtain additional manpower and inspire antiwar marchers to fill the streets like they did during Vietnam–follow. At least he left out the usual calls for victory gardens and gas rationing.

The war sucks. On that point, the millions of Americans who were against it from the start (and the many millions more who’ve come around to agreeing with us) agree with the soldiers serving in it. Forced reenlistment through the “stop-loss” loophole is placing thousands of lives in suspended animation, destroying marriages and small businesses. Troops aren’t getting enough protective gear.

It’s also true that Americans have stopped paying attention. I’m a news junkie. And even I flip the page past the same old “2 Dead, 7 Wounded in IED Blast” headline.

But hey, soldier, you volunteered. If not for you, there wouldn’t be a war in the first place.

“Supporting the troops means supporting their mission.” That’s been the mantra of the pro-war right. It’s been hard for those of us who oppose the war to argue with them because so many of the troops have repeatedly allowed themselves to be used as propaganda shills for Bush Administration officials and the Republican Party in general.

It’s bad enough that a majority of soldiers voted for Bush in 2004. Over and over since the war began, American troops have been seen on television applauding Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice and others whose cynical recklessness have sent their buddies to their graves. Sailors cheered wildly when Bush staged his notorious “Mission Accomplished” photo op on an aircraft carrier. They swooned when he joined them for Thanksgiving dinner in Baghdad.

“The shocked and elated soldiers jumped to their feet, pumped their fists in the air, roared with delight, and grabbed their cameras to snap photographs,” reported CNN about Bush’s visit. A “standing ovation” followed. “It gave us a little extra oomph,” said a member of the 1st Armored Division. “It really boosted my morale,” said another. No one heckled or booed the imposter president. No one threw tomatoes. No one told him where he could stick his plastic turkey.

Even after soldiers get killed, their parents promote the war so their dead kids won’t be lonely in heaven. At Fort Benning, Georgia met Deb Tainsh, whose son was killed by a roadside bomb near the Baghdad Airport. She presented Bush with more than 100 e-mails from parents of soldiers who have died or are presently serving in Iraq. “Every one of these letters says, ‘Mr. President, we support you,'” she said. “The consensus is that they…want him to do everything he can to win this war and that our prayers are with him.”

“Bush, 61, has so far met with more than 1,500 relatives of the 4,255 American troops who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the Bloomberg News wire service reported last week. “In most of the meetings, [Bush’s] aides say, he hears support for his policies, hardening his resolve to stay the course in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Few Gold Star mothers tell him off. Those who do are polite to the man who murdered their children as surely and as viciously as if he’d shot them himself. Why don’t they spit at him?

Four years after the WMDs and liberation flora failed to turn up, people still enlist. After soldiers die, their parents insist that theirs was a noble sacrifice. Tell me again: Why should I care about the war? Why shouldn’t I go shopping?

Soldiers who want antiwar Americans to march to demand that they be brought home should take a cue from Vietnam veterans. They marched with peace protesters and threw their medals at the Capitol. Soldiers serving on the front refused orders. Some fragged their officers. Vietnam Veterans Against the War claimed more than 50,000 members by 1971. That year saw numerous dramatic acts of dissent by U.S. troops, including 50 veterans who marched to the Pentagon and demanded that they be arrested as war criminals. Fifteen vets took over and barricaded the Statue of Liberty for two days. These acts swayed opinions and helped convince lawmakers it was time to withdraw.

Some soldiers in Iraq have offered resistance. After being denied conscientious objector status, Petty Officer Third Class Pablo Paredes went AWOL in 2004. He was sentenced to two months in the brig and three months hard labor. Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada refused to be sent to Iraq in 2006, telling the media that the war’s illegality would make him a party to war crimes. Army Specialist Darrell Anderson, faced with a second tour of duty after being wounded by a roadside bomb, deserted and fled to Canada. “I went to Iraq willingly,” said Anderson. “I wanted to die for my country. I thought I was going to go there and protect my family back home. All I was doing was killing other families there.” The Army decided not to prosecute him. Several other deserters have applied for political asylum in Canada, but they’re only a fraction of the thousands who went there during the 1960s and 1970s.

When Bill Clinton was president, Republicans said he should be afraid to speak at military bases. That should go double for Bush. The next he shows up to use you as a TV prop, soldiers and fellow Americans, boo the crap out of him. What’s the worst he can do? Kill you?

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

Pols Push U.S. Toward Theocracy

A poll finds that 55 percent of Americans think the U.S. was created as a Christian theocracy. “The strong support for official recognition of the majority faith appears to be grounded in a belief that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, in spite of the fact that the Constitution nowhere mentions God or Christianity,” says Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center.

Sadly, these morons are allowed to vote. Tragically, one of them is a major presidential candidate. “The Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation,” John McCain recently told an interviewer.

Here’s an offer that an erstwhile front-running shoe-in, now low on cash, ought not to refuse. Senator McCain: If you can show me where the Constitution makes us a Christian nation, I’ll donate $10,000 to your campaign. If you can’t, please explain why we should trust your presidential oath to preserve, protect and defend a document you haven’t read.

Lest you think McCain’s comment was an isolated brainfart, check out his pandering morsel from the same interview: “We were founded as a nation on Judeo-Christian principles. There’s very little debate about that.”

Speaking of war criminals, Bush won 80 percent of the Christian fundamentalist voting bloc in 2004. (If they can show me where Jesus advocates the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, I’ve got another ten grand set aside.) This year, however, the Christian soldiers are in play, dissatisfied with the entire field of presidential candidates.

It’s not for lack of sucking up.

Mitt Romney is one-upping McCain, misrepresenting Mormonism as well as the secular nature of American government. “The values of my faith are much like, or are identical to, the values of other faiths that have a Judeo-Christian philosophical background,” he said in New Hampshire. “They’re American values, if you will.” Or if you won’t. As The New York Times notes, “Mormons do not believe in the concept of the unified Trinity; the Book of Mormon is considered to be sacred text, alongside the Bible; and Mormons believe that God has a physical body and human beings can eventually become like God.” Also, the Mormon Jesus will eventually return to Independence, Missouri. “Much like.” Right.

McCain, Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback have all signed up to address this week’s right-wing Christian “Values Voter Summit.” So has Democrat Bill Richardson. But when it comes to indulging the whims of Christianists, these guys have nothing on the Big Three Dems.

Hillary Clinton has hired an “evangelical consultant” to court the quarter of voters who tell pollsters that God favors the United States in foreign affairs. Barack Obama deploys evangelical imagery at campaign stops in the Bible Belt. At an evangelical church in Greenville, South Carolina, he said he wants to be an “instrument of God” and expressed confidence “we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.”

“That terminology,” said the Rev. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance, “has a very specific, indisputable definition that is exclusive rather than inclusive.” On the campaign trail, Gaddy continued, Obama “has sounded precisely like George W. Bush.”

Even John Edwards, the most reasonable person running, isn’t above whoring his faith for votes. “I think that America is a nation of faith. I do believe that. Certainly by way of heritage–there’s a powerful Christian thread through all of American history,” he told BeliefNet. To his credit, he doesn’t go as far as his opponents. Yet he can’t bring himself to condemn prayer in public schools: “Allowing time for children to pray for themselves, to themselves, I think is not only okay, I think it’s a good thing.”

Between 10 and 14 percent of Americans are atheists. Devoting a “moment of silence” in schools sends a message to their children: you and your parents are out of step with American society.
If people want to believe in God, the Great Pumpkin, or a Jesus who lives in Missouri, that’s up to them. But religion has no place in the public life of a democracy. None.

Right-wing Christians started questioning their support for the GOP last year, when former White House staffer David Kuo published “Tempting Faith,” a bestselling book that revealed that Bush Administration officials privately ridiculed evangelicals and ignored them between elections. Bush betrayed “the millions of faithful Christians who put their trust and hope in the president and his administration,” wrote Kuo, who was the White House’s deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives until 2003.

Who knew? Bush isn’t all bad.

McCain, meanwhile, is getting ready to get soaked to score Christian votes. “I’ve had discussions with the pastor about [undergoing a full-immersion baptism] and we’re still in conversation about it,” he says.
COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL
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