This is the second of a three-part series about the media.

Blind Newsman Gums Internet Dog

Last week, I discussed the blind faith that is leading media executives to invest heavily in online ventures at the expense of print. This week: will the Internet ever be profitable?

Americans are optimistic to a fault. Overthrow Saddam, we thought–yeah, that “we” includes a lot of liberals–and whatever came next would be better. I was skeptical. You couldn’t ask for a worse government than the Taliban, yet what followed them in Afghanistan–anarchy, chaos, rape, genocide–was even worse. Which is what happened in Iraq.

Optimism is for suckers. Entropy rules the universe. In the absence of a powerful positive force to counterbalance it, things usually get worse.

Media executives are like the neocons, in their blind faith that a brighter future will inevitably emerge from the rubble of the crumbling edifice of print media. Sometimes the old order just goes away. Sometimes there is no new one.

U.S. newspapers report that quarterly revenues are up 21 percent for online, and down 9 percent for print. At first glance, it looks like new media is picking up the slack from dying old media. But total print revenue was $10.1 billion. Online totaled $0.8 billion. As a percent of overall newspaper industry revenues, online is up a smidgen over 1 percent. There’s more Internet money coming in, but not nearly enough.

At The New York Times, which analysts point to as one of the most Web-savvy old media outfits, 13 million people read NYTimes.com every day. Only 1 million read the dead trees version. But print readers–7 percent of their customers–continue to generate 92 percent of the company’s revenue.

The old order is in trouble. And the Thrilling! Shiny! New! Internet can’t take its place. Online evangelists are tearing down the ancien régime without planning for the occupation phase. And they’re inflating another Dot-Com Bubble.
If the future of media looks like the Web does now, things are about to degenerate from grim to grisly. Media outlets are firing professional journalists, replacing them with random bloggers. Musicians with sizeable audiences are collecting insulting pittances for downloads of their albums. Some creators are soldiering on, working for free or for pennies. But they won’t do it forever.

Venture capitalists are investing in “consolidators,” websites like the Drudge Report and Huffington Post that link to columns and articles written by unpaid bloggers and professionals who’ve managed to hold on to their jobs. Creative people who actually make the product they sell, meanwhile, are receiving squat.

It’s inevitable that, sooner rather than later, these intellectual property vampires will suck creators dry. Professionals with mortgages and car payments will flee for greener pastures, replaced by hacks and rank amateurs happy to work for “exposure.” We’re already seeing the effect as journalism increasingly suffers deprofessionalization; 16-year-old bloggers with mad HTML skillz are demanding, and often receiving, equal access to readers.

Last week, I wrote about the content-is-dead mantra. The principle that intellectual property has value, and that those who create it ought to be paid, is in mortal danger. But people are willing to pay for content on the Internet. It just has to be easy.

Would you pay for Mapquest? I’d pay a quarter or a dollar for reliable directions from the airport to my hotel in a new city. Sometimes, while researching this column, I encounter a link to an archived newspaper article that I could use, but it charges a $2 or $3 download fee. The cost isn’t the problem–it’s a miniscule, and in my case tax deductible, expense to make my work better. But I don’t bother. I don’t pay for Mapquest, either.

I don’t care about the money. I just can’t stand filling out all those fields.

Each website requires you to enter personal data–your name, address, credit card number, expiration date, that stupid security code next to the signature on your card, and the billing address (as opposed to the shipping address). Frequently, website interfaces are buggy; make a mistake and you have to start all over again. I’ll suffer through the ordeal if it’s a site, like Amazon or Expedia, that I’ll use repeatedly. But an archived article? Ain’t worth my time to figure out how to get them my two bucks.

There is a solution to the online payment problem, says Simson Garfinkel, a fellow at the Harvard University Center for Research on Computation and Society and the author of “Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century.” (Disclosure: We’re friends.)

“If content is appropriately priced, of an appropriately high quality, and easy to access, people will pay for it,” asserts Garfinkel. “What is required is a system that is easy to use and licensing terms that are not onerous.”

A universal single-click payment system won’t work, he says, because it would be vulnerable to hackers. We could overlay a national ID card or credit card system over the existing Internet. One of several competing micropayment systems may become dominant, creating a market-based solution. You’d register your debit or credit card info at one place. Then, when you wanted to download a song or read an electronic book or order shoes, you’d go to the vendor’s website and click one button: “Buy.”

Amazon sort of does this. After you’ve registered, you can buy a book by clicking one button. Just like that, it’s on its way. We need something similar for vendors we’ve never dealt with before.

The solution will almost certainly have to be technology-based. And it will require us to give up the illusion of privacy. The government doesn’t–and can’t–know every time you access the Internet. But they do know enough, enough of the time, to separate the Usenet Bible study group members from the kiddie porn fans (OK, so those are sometimes the same folks, but you get the point).

Newspaper editors and publishers could reverse their decline by agreeing, en masse, to charge a substantial fee for their online editions–at least as much as for print. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Avoidance of long-term thinking is what’s gotten the news biz where it is today.

In the long run, despite their suicidal tendencies, I suspect newspapers will survive, and even thrive, after the current shakeout. When radio was introduced in the 1930s, many analysts predicted the death of the record industry. Instead, radio promotion increased record sales. When television became popular in the 1950s, people said radio was doomed. The radio business is bigger than ever. The Internet was supposed to kill TV.

The newspaper business will change. Three major trends ensure that. They will also make it bigger than ever.

Next Week: The bright (sic!) future of newspapers.

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

When Media Content is Free, It’s Worth Every Cent

This is the first of a three-part series.

August J. Pollak was thrilled when the Huffington Post asked him to blog for them. Joining the widely-read liberal website was a great break, thought the astute political cartoonist/blogger whose work appears at the perfectly-named “Some Guy with a Website.” Then they told him about his salary: Zero.

“I love the Huffington Post, and I love the exposure I get from them,” Pollak told me. “But it’s never going to pay my rent.”

He’s right. The Huffington Post, capitalized to the tune of $10 million, employs 43 full-time employees, all of whom presumably receive actual cash money, and health benefits, and maybe even a 401(k), for their efforts. But, USA Today reports, “it has no plans to begin paying bloggers. Ever.” Ken Lerer, company co-founder, former Time Warner executive, and probably himself in it for the money, says: “That’s not our financial model. We offer them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company.” Sorry, August. Vampire capitalism offers its sincere regrets to you, and your 1600 unpaid colleagues.

(Disclosure: I interviewed Pollak for my alternative cartoon anthology “Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists.” We are friends.)
Content is king, dot-com gurus of the 1990s told us. People who made cool pictures, songs and strings of word cashed in. Then Andrew Odlyzko of AT&T Labs wrote an influential essay titled “Content Is Not King.”

“Content certainly has all the glamour,” wrote Odlyzko. “What content does not have is money…The annual movie theater ticket sales in the U.S. are well under $10 billion. The telephone industry collects that much money every two weeks! Those ‘commodity pipelines’ attract much more spending than the glamorous ‘content.'” Moving and packaging information pays. Producing it does not.

Leaders of America’s corporate mass media have embraced a financial model that relies upon a fatal internal conflict. The future of media, they believe, belongs to “consolidators” like the Drudge Report and Huffington, who pull together creative content–in these examples, news stories and opinion columns–they don’t pay for. But who will write the stuff they steal–er, consolidate?

In the short run, they’re getting luminaries such as late JFK biographer Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. They buy the pitch, sold by scruffy cool 29-year-old guys who look like the Mac guy in the “Mac vs. PC” commercials, that the intangible benefits of exposure online will lead to tangible paychecks. (When, they don’t say. From whom, they know not.) In the long run, hacks and amateurs like the right-wing bloggers who destroyed Dan Rather’s career at CBS by “debunking” his scoop about George W. Bush’s Air National Guard records. (Rather, it turned out, was right all along. Sorry, Dan.) And who will produce boring old content in the really long run? No one. No one worth paying attention to, anyway.

Hardly a day passes without finding a pitch from some wannabe freeloader in my e-mail. “Our magazine doesn’t have a budget for content, but we’d love to use your cartoon about…” “We can’t offer a salary per se, but you would get amazing exposure to thousands of discrete users if…” Content is still king. Online leeches just don’t want to pay the kingmakers.

“Internet idealists like me have long had an easy answer for creative types…who feel threatened by the unremunerative nature of our new Eden,” computer scientist Jaron Lanier wrote recently in the New York Times: “Stop whining and join the party!” Like other old media types, I’m working overtime to try to smash these economic lemons into sweet, lucrative lemonade.

In the meantime, I called the bank that holds my mortgage. “I don’t have a budget to pay you per se,” I cooed. “But think of the awesome prestige your corporation receives just by being associated with a cartoonist and columnist whose work is literally read by millions of–” Click. Citibank (Bangalore), Ltd., signing out. Back to work!

So I’m cranky. I’ve already been through this give-it-away-for-the-exposure crap before. It wasn’t any more fun in the 1980s than it is now.

In my 20s, when I was starting on my quest to become a full-time dispenser of drawings mocking the president, I let shoestring operations like “Poetry Halifax North,” a tiny review in Nova Scotia, and “Against The Current,” a socialist magazine out of Detroit, print my cartoons for free. They didn’t offer much exposure, but I needed the tearsheets. Not getting paid sucked, but giving away my “content” was understandable–my “clients” were broke.

Over the years, I got better known. Big newspapers and magazines published–and paid for–my cartoons. Working for free had paid off. I became a full-time cartoonist.

But then the big newspapers and magazines started giving away their content. Violating the first rule of capitalism (charge as much as the market will bear, stupid!) publishers became obsessed with securing “market share” online. It costs tens of millions of dollars a year to produce, but you can now read all of today’s New York Times–plus special Web-only articles that don’t appear in the print edition–for free.

The Times projects that online will account for 8 percent of its revenues this year. But that’s not so impressive when you consider that NYTimes.com has 1300 percent more readers than the Old Gray Lady. Why don’t newspaper executives understand that a 50 percent market share, times online advertising rates that basically round off to zero, equals zero? Internet ad rates have been, remain, and will likely remain for the foreseeable future, a joke.

Online media is growing too slowly to make up for the decline of print. “Despite the popular belief that young people are flocking to the Internet, [a Harvard University study] found that teenagers and young adults were twice as likely to get daily news from television than from the Web,” reports The New York Times. Yet newspapers are eviscerating print operations to invest in an online presence without a discernible fiscal future.

Print is dead, Internet evangelists have convinced media executives. But, financially, there is no Web.

True, newspapers are boring, stodgy, and losing circulation. But abandoning them in favor of their possible-maybe-cross-your-fingers online successors is like getting rid of Saddam without planning for his successor.

Print media is dragging content providers into the abyss. First comes downsizing. Writers, cartoonists, and photographers are losing their jobs to peers willing to do the work for less or, in the case of readers invited to submit their comments and images for the thrill of appearing in the local rag, nothing. Then they squeeze those who remain for pay cuts. A cartoon that runs today in Time, Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times or The Washington Post–the most prestigious and widely disseminated forums in the United States–brings its creator less than The Village Voice would have paid for it in the 1980s. Some print venues offer no payment at all.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that Internet users won’t pay, technology blogger Dan Bricklin asserted in a 2000 column: “People will pay money for things that give them emotional satisfaction, especially those things that involve interacting with others, or have a high emotion content, like music.” (I found the essay online, for free. Sorry, Dan.)

I think people are willing to pay for more than iTunes and text messages. So does Jaron Lanier, who now renounces his days as an information-wants-to-be-free cheerleader. “Information is free on the Internet,” he writes, “because we [computer scientists] designed it that way. We could design information systems so that people can pay for information–so that anyone has the chance of becoming a widely read author and yet can also be paid.”

Unless something changes soon, deprofessionalization will further erode journalistic quality. The resulting dumbing down of our politics and culture will accelerate. We can’t get the toothpaste back into the tube. The Internet is here to stay. Unfortunately, the best way to make it more profitable–to stimulate all e-commerce, not just journalism–will require us to give up something dear to our rugged individualist American hearts: the illusion of Internet privacy.

NEXT WEEK: The solution.

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

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