THIS WEEK’S SYNDICATED COLUMN: BIGOTRY, APOLOGY, REPEAT AS NECESSARY

The Rise of John McCain

In the 1993 film noir “Romeo is Bleeding,” the late Roy Scheider plays a mob boss. “You know right from wrong,” he tells a hopelessly corrupt cop portrayed by Gary Oldman. “You just don’t care.” It’s a perfect summary of John McCain’s political career.

Time after time, McCain weighs a decision. Then, after careful consideration, he chooses evil over good. In the short run, evil gets him what he wants. Later, when the devil comes to collect his due, McCain issues a retraction.

Running for president in 2000, John McCain squared off against George W. Bush in the key South Carolina primary. Asked whether the Confederate battle flag should continue to fly over the state capitol, McCain sided with the rednecks: “Personally, I see the flag as symbol of heritage.”

A few months later, he’d lost South Carolina and quit the race. He apologized–not to the African-Americans he’d offended, but to a friendly audience of Republicans. “I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary,” he admitted. “So I chose to compromise my principles.” It wasn’t the first time, or the last.

Also in 2000, McCain insulted Asians. “I hate the gooks,” John McCain hissed, “and I will hate them for as long as I live…and you can quote me.” After a few days of negative press attention, he took it back: “I apologize and renounce all language that is bigoted and offensive, which is contrary to all that I represent and believe.”

What does McCain “represent and believe”? In 2000 McCain attacked George W. Bush for speaking at Bob Jones University, a freaky institution that smeared Catholics, banned jazz and interracial dating. Six years later, however, it was McCain’s turn to suck up to the Christianist right. He appeared at the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s extremist Liberty University, which–like BJU–bans gays and denies pregnant students the right to seek an abortion.

No apology for that one.

In 1983, John McCain was a freshman congressman from Arizona, then one of the most right-wing states in the country. In order to appease his Republican Party’s base–racist whites–he voted against the bill that established Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. “I thought that it was not necessary to have another federal holiday, that it cost too much money, that other presidents were not recognized,” he explained in 2000. Do Chester Arthur or Gerry Ford deserve holidays? Anyway, MLK Day didn’t cost employers a cent; Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday were replaced by the generic President’s Day.

He also floated the “states rights” excuse (with its own racist signifiers) that referenced his support for Confederate “heritage” in South Carolina. “I believe it’s an issue that the people of South Carolina can settle, just as we in Arizona settled the very divisive issue over the recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King as a holiday. I resented it a great deal when people from Washington and pundits and politicians and others came to my state to tell us how we should work out a very difficult problem.”

Healthcare is “a very difficult problem.” Iraq is “a very difficult problem.” MLK Day, like the Confederate flag “issue,” was a simple question of right and wrong.

True to his pattern, McCain understood that the racist pandering he used to launch his political career could come back to haunt him in the more enlightened–the John Birchers who contributed to his early campaigns might say “politically correct”–election year of 2008. Time for another apology: “I was wrong and eventually realized that, in time to give full support for a state holiday in Arizona,” he concedes. “We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans.”

A little late?

“Well, I learned that this individual was a transcendent figure in American history, he deserved to be honored, and I thought it was appropriate to do so,” McCain explained about his change of, um, heart. Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. McCain voted no on the MLK bill in 1983. That’s 15 years later. How much longer did McCain need to “learn” about “this individual”?

The big question is: Is McCain racist? Or is he pandering to racists? And is there a difference?

His 2007 use of the term “tar baby” pretty much settles it. Unless, of course, you’re a sucker for yet another apology: “I don’t think I should have used that word and it was wrong to do so.”

It’s the 21st century. Even Nazi skinheads don’t use terms like “tar baby.”
God, if you’re up there, please grant us this wish: Don’t let John McCain become president. But if you do, don’t let him meet any foreign leaders who don’t happen to be white.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Next Prez Must Make Bush an Unperson

“No one owes obedience to a usurper government or to anyone who assumes public office in violation of the Constitution and the law. The civil population has the right to rise up in defense of the constitutional order. The acts of those who usurp public office are null and void.”
–Article 46, Constitution of Peru

Comedian Bill Maher is a brilliant contrarian. He dislikes George Bush. Yet his view of the stolen 2000 election is conventional, ahistorical and quintessentially American: Forget it! Move on! “Oh, Ted,” he replied when I mentioned the judicial coup d’état on his TV show, which aired October 3, 2001. “That’s so September 10th. It really is.”

It has been nearly eight years since the U.S. Supreme Court violated the Constitution by installing George W. Bush as president. Their ruling was immaterial. They shouldn’t have agreed to hear Bush v. Gore in the first place. Under Article II of the Constitution, Federal courts don’t have jurisdiction in election disputes. The state supreme courts–in that case, Florida–have the final word.

It’s tempting, as Maher suggested, to try to move past 2000. But we can’t. What followed doesn’t allow it.

When a ruler seizes office by extralegal means he rules the same way. Because he does not derive his power from the people–indeed, his rule relies on their passivity–he is not beholden to them. Selling the public on his policies is hard enough for a legitimately elected ruler; an illegal one has to resort to bullying, presented as a stern, autocratic triumph of the will. He is forced to order his lawyers to find legal loopholes using the most tortured reasoning imaginable. In the end, when citizens turn against him, the tyrant shrugs his shoulders. “So?” This is what the vice president replied when a reporter asked about polls showing that Americans have turned against the Iraq War. Cheney’s question was perfectly reasonable. Why should he care what we think? We didn’t elect him. He doesn’t owe us the slightest consideration.

Electoral illegitimacy begets illegitimate rule: Secret detentions and torture redefined into meaninglessness. Secret prisons. Ending habeas corpus, the right to have one’s case heard before a judge–a right English-speaking people had enjoyed for 800 years. Secret “signing statements” purporting to negate laws signed in public. Spying on Americans, lying about it to Congress, and then, after getting caught, trying to legalize it retroactively. Destroying evidence. An executive order granting the president the power to declare anyone–without evidence–an “enemy combatant,” then order that person imprisoned for life, or even assassinated.

Even if the next president has promised to end extraordinary renditions (which began under Bill Clinton), close Gitmo, outlaw torture and overturn the Military Commissions Act, which eliminated habeas corpus, he or she will surely be tempted to retain some of Bush’s beefed up new executive powers upon moving into the Oval Office. Who wouldn’t want to read their political opponents’ email and listen to their phone calls?

But let’s posit, for the sake of argument, that Bush’s evildoing comes to an end next January. There will still be a mess to clean up.

One million Iraqis and Afghans are dead. Tens of thousands more have been tortured and maimed. Thousands of dead soldiers; tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Millions of Americans have had their privacy violated. They deserve justice. We deserve justice. The war criminals, torturers and phone companies deserve due process. If there are consequences for driving fast and cheating on your taxes, after all, there surely ought to be a price to pay for urinating on an innocent man in a dog cage at Guantánamo.

America might want to move on. How can the rest of the world let us?

Bush v. Gore gave us an illegitimate president. Bush presided over an outlaw government. If we sit on our asses, as we’ve done since that weird, soul-crushing day in late December of 2000, illegality will be hardwired into the U.S. government. The country itself will become, like the Soviet Union and its wonderful freedom-guaranteeing constitution, a caricature of itself. “What is the difference between the Constitutions of the USA and USSR? Both guarantee freedom of speech,” the old Russian joke went. “Yes, but the Constitution of the USA also guarantees freedom after the speech.” A gangster regime presiding over the trappings of law and order is a vicious joke–illegitimate and ultimately doomed.

There’s one way–only one way–to avoid ratifying Bush’s legacy. The next president must do the following three things immediately upon taking office:

1. Issue an executive order declaring all laws and actions undertaken by the Bush Administration, the states and local municipalities (because many state and local ordinances are influenced by national politics) between January 2001 and January 2009 null and void.

2. Act quickly to restore the rule of law–freeing Gitmo inmates, offering compensation to victims of torture and rendition, order immediate withdrawals of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and other undeclared wars.

3. Create a cabinet-level department to investigate top officials and subordinates of the Bush interregnum for crimes they may have committed and refer them to the appropriate courts for arrest, prosecution and imprisonment.

When Charles de Gaulle took over as president of France at the end of World War II, he erased the Vichy regime from the history books. “Vichy is, and remains forever, null and void,” he declared. Yale historian Jay Winter explained de Gaulle’s reasoning: “Pétain’s government was de facto, not de jure; therefore, the Republic had not died [in 1940]; it had been usurped by the traitors who had signed the Armistice with the Nazis.” It’s a kind of fiction (Vichy had a stronger case than Bush to be considered legitimate), but defining Vichy as an aberration reaffirmed France’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law. Pétain was convicted of treason. His death sentence was commuted to life in prison. Hundreds of officials were prosecuted during the postwar épuration (purge). France moved on.

I know none of this is likely to happen. But this is no time to be “realistic.” The German patriot Henning von Tresckow, leader of a circle of officers who tried to kill Hitler in 1944, knew that their plot was a long shot. Nevertheless, the general urged his comrades to go ahead “at any cost…We must prove to the world and to future generations that the men of the German Resistance movement dared to take the decisive step and to hazard their lives upon it.”

Now it is time for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain to prove that they are true patriots. Unlike Tresckow, they need risk neither life nor limb. Their supporters should press them to declare that, should they become President, they will erase George W. Bush and his deeds from American history.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL