John McGowan, September 2, 2008
How extensive was the background check performed by John McCain and his campaign team on Sarah Palin? We now know that McCain only met Palin once four months ago and that he spoke to her once briefly on the phone before presenting her as her VP choice. That presentation included her lie about being against the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere," while the McCain campaign apparently was unaware that she, as governor, supported - and got passed - a windfall profits tax on the oil companies. They also seemed to have missed that she is under investigation from a bipartisan legislative committee for abuse of power. With all these oversights, can we really believe that they did know all about her daughter’s pregnancy? Are these really the people we want running our government? At best, McCain and his team have been revealed as incompetent; at worst, they have displayed an astounding lack of judgment about something that is not only important but also that they had every reason to do right.
John McGowan, August 19, 2008
That didn’t last long, did it? Ten years, give or take a few months, between America's triumph in the first Gulf War and the start of the insurgency in Iraq. Ten years when America stood alone, the supreme power in a post-Communist world.But now China, some kind of capitalist-communist hybrid, challenges American economic supremacy, while Russia is making a comeback as the troublesome giant at Europe’s back door. Bogged down in the Middle East, in wars that deplete its economic and its military resources, the United States doesn’t have many options at the moment. It can bluster, but it can’t do anything to change China’s or Russia’s behavior significantly.No wonder Russia is taking its own sweet time about leaving Georgia. There’s no penalty for its staying. Americans - and American foreign policy - would do well to face the fact that the United States is not alone in the world and is no longer, if it ever really was, in a position to dictate the terms of international conflicts or agreements.
John McGowan, August 10, 2008
To understand the current hostilities in Georgia, you have to go back to the 1999 NATO action in Kosovo. It was NATO, not the United Nations, that intervened in Kosovo to protect the ethnic Albanians there from the Serbians, because Russia blocked any UN action. NATO, in effect, made Kosovo’s bid for independence from Serbia possible in the name of the humanitarian protection of an ethnic group that was in the majority in the particular province but not the ruling group in the whole nation. Russia (as well as China) condemned NATO’s action—and both Russia and China have refused to recognize Kosovo’s independence. Now Russia has played the same game in South Ossetia that NATO played in Kosovo; it has intervened militarily to prevent a central government—in this case, Georgia—from bringing a secessionist province back under control. To revive a term that hasn’t had much play lately, Russia considers Georgia within its “sphere of influence,” just as NATO considered chaos in the Balkans as too close to home to ignore. The larger point is that, in the post 1989 world, the ability of the superpowers to prevent or contain local sectarian, ethnic, or tribal disputes has proved almost nil, but that doesn’t keep them from trying. Meanwhile, the UN is as paralyzed as ever, lacking both the moral legitimacy and the raw power it would need to be effective.
John McGowan, August 4, 2008
I first heard of Alexander Solzhenitsyn when I was a sophomore in high school, probably from an article in Time magazine. I got a copy of his novel, First Circle, from the public library and took it that night to a babysitting gig I had in the neighborhood. The father of the seven year old I was minding took one look at the book and said, “You’ll never read all that.” Needless to say, that insured that I finished the six hundred page book. In fact, it wasn’t a hard read, almost a page-turner. I went on to read two more Solzhenitsyn novels while in high school, but it wasn’t until may years later that I read his non-fiction masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago. Of course, left-leaning apologists for the Soviet Union had plenty of reasons—the murder of Trotsky, the Moscow show trials, the non-aggression pact with Hitler, the invasion of Hungary—before Solzhenitsyn’s exposé of the Soviet prison system to abandon all trust or hope in Russia. But there was something about Solzhenitsyn’s first-person testimony and the banked fury of his eight hundred page tome that brooked no argument. After 1975, it really became impossible for anyone to deny that Communist Russia had been a disaster of staggering magnitude for the Russian people. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989 was partly a result of its utter loss of moral legitimacy—and Solzhenitsyn did more than any other single human being to show the Russian Communists’ crimes to the world.
John McGowan, July 27, 2008
We’ve got inflation. How could that news surprise anyone? The mystery is how the government could claim that inflation was practically non-existent over the past 10 years. For those of us actually paying the bills, costs have steadily gone up for years. So why is it only now that the statistics bear out what everyone knows? The big difference is the cost of commodities. It is true that things like scissors, light bulbs, computers, and cars have been remarkably constant in price over the past 10 to 15 years. Food wasn’t quite as stable, but still only climbed moderately. The big increases were in services, everything from college tuitions to getting your leaky faucet fixed. The biggest increases of all were in housing costs—as if the competition for prime housing soaked up all the savings on commodities. Now we have a reversal; the housing market is down just when the cost of oil is driving commodity prices up. And since the government’s way of calculating inflation is heavily reliant on the price of commodities, the government is finally catching up with reality: life just keeps getting more expensive.
John McGowan, July 15, 2008
Today’s question: What ways are open for intervention in the criminal practices of another nation? Since World War II, there have been four favored routes: economic sanctions, multilateral military intervention, multilateral negotiation (with aid serving as the carrot, and military action as the stick), and criminal proceedings such as the Nuremburg trials or the trials of the Libyan plane bombers. The Bush Administration has generally scorned all four of these methods, with the exception of economic sanctions. And the Republicans are adamantly against the US accepting the authority of the International Criminal Court. The actual impact of the court is doubtful. The indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for crimes in Darfur may have the awful effect of making things worse for the victims of al-Bashir’s murderous policies. So the American reluctance to join the court is somewhat understandable. But that same reluctance is also connected to the Americans’ desire to remain a law unto themselves. Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, makes it clear that the current administration has, by every international standard, tortured prisoners. Who will call the Americans to account?
Tom Murphy, July 9, 2008
Not so long ago, a president couldn't go to war on his own. After Pearl Harbor, for example, President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war and it did without hesitation. The War Powers Act of 1973 changed that. In the nuclear age, the thinking was the president wouldn't have time for permission. But since then, presidents have ordered attacks on other countries, and committed American troops to full-fledged conflicts in places like Grenada, Nicaragua, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. In some cases, Congress gave the president authority for short-term action that turned into long-term action. In others, the president acted alone. Now a bipartisan panel recommends laws that require the president to ask Congress before going to war. The present state of affairs in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention ongoing threats against Iran, suggest it's time for a new approach, or perhaps an old one.
John McGowan, July 7, 2008
Calling Jesse Helms “the polarizer” is exactly right. None of the obituaries I’ve seen have credited Helms with two of the inventions that have contributed greatly to the partisan brickbats thrown in Congress these days. The first was the trick of adding amendments on flag burning or funding for the National Endowment to the Arts to every bill that came before the Senate. Then you can run an election campaign ad that says “my opponent voted for flag burning 97 times. ”The second was the creation of a personal PAC. The Senator collects money from across the country through the mail-order route (in those days) and then doles it out to various congressional colleagues to help them in their campaigns, thus accumulating power through a new kind of patronage system. And, of course, also drives up the cost of Congressional elections as a by-product. That Helms could be a charming man I can attest through the stories told by many friends and colleagues here in North Carolina for whom he provided his signature exceptional service for constituents. But to insist, as Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has this week, that “Helms was no bigot” flies in the face of what the man stood and fought for in Congress over three decades. Just think of it this way: do you think anyone felt called upon to say, when Paul Wellstone died, that “he was no bigot?”
John McGowan, July 1, 2008
There are no easy answers in foreign policy.When corrupt rulers like the military junta in Burma and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe bring death to thousands of innocent people, it seems more than heartless to stand by idly and let it happen. Yet the track record for successful military intervention is not good. NATO is still in Kosovo 10 years later, and the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have arguably caused more deaths than they have prevented. Not to mention the fact that exit from those two countries seems further away than ever. Concerted international action in the form of sanctions worked in the case of South Africa, while the Soviet Union finally collapsed from the weight of its own corruption.But no particular case establishes a rule for how to deal with subsequent cases. In every such instance a new decision, with a new effort to coordinate various partners to the deal, is required, with nothing but sheer plodding and pleading diplomacy to do the job.China stands in the way of concerted action against Mugabe because Chinese economic interests in Southern Africa are perfectly content with the status quo. The US and NATO ignored similar Russian objections in the Balkans; can the UN and the Organization of African States do the same in Zimbabwe, at least putting in place effective sanctions since military action appears neither feasible nor advisable? I wouldn’t bet on it.
Tom Murphy, June 20, 2008
It almost seems naive to raise issues of fairness with regards to politics or the courts anymore. But where does the Supreme Court get off in saying states can't block companies from using taxpayer funds to fight unions? The California legislature sought to stop such abuse, but the court ruled states are barred from interfering in union matters. Never mind that the issue at hand is the use of taxpayer funds; don't the states have a responsibility to control that? And what's with Barack Obama's decision to opt out of the public campaign finance law, saying it would put him at a disadvantage to Sen. McCain? The campaign finance law was enacted during the Watergate area specifically to level the playing field between wealthy candidates and poorer ones. The idea was to keep rich people from buying their way into office. Now that Obama has a huge war chest, this noble concept is no longer appealing to him. Ironically, this makes the senator less appealing to many voters.
John McGowan, June 16, 2008
Never put rights to a vote. That old saw is based on the notion that you need to build a firewall between the majority and all minorities in a democracy. That’s what a constitution - and especially a Bill of Rights - is for: to protect the minority from the voters at large. And, of course, it’s the rule of law and respect for the courts that uphold the law that makes the rights worth more than the paper they are written on. The Bush Administration has, for over seven years now, proclaimed the quaint doctrine that what the president says is the law. The only thing that has stood between Bush and the complete triumph of that doctrine has been the Supreme Court. Congress has dropped the ball entirely, as has the various appellate courts full of Republican appointees. But three times now the Supreme Court has reminded the president that we do have a Constitution. But the votes have been a razor-thin 5-4, reflecting the importance of November's election. John McCain has made it clear that he wants to appoint more judges like Roberts and Alito, the Bush appointees who, along with Scalia and Thomas, think a commander in chief should be given a blank check. Come November, maybe American voters will think the rights of terrorist suspects are not worthy of protection.And we will no longer be a constitutional democracy, but a pure democracy in which the will of the people and the will of their elected president can set the Constitution aside.
John McGowan, June 12, 2008
And they’re off! Obama and McCain are trading punches over how to handle the American economy. However, the quality of the conversation so far is not encouraging. Our current economic woes are due, in large part, to an across-the-board addiction, from the government to the little guy, to debt. Somehow the American sense of entitlement now includes the idea that we can have what we want right now and somehow the bills will never come due. We can conduct two wars, bail out over-extended financial firms and the home-owners they foolishly financed, and keep providing corporate welfare and farm subsidies on the old generous terms while never raising taxes a penny. This is fantasy land, as unsustainable as America’s gas-gulping habits. But the truth-telling maverick McCain is clearly going to ride the Republican mantra of no tax hikes all the way to November, which puts Obama into the same corner Democrats have occupied since the Reagan years: terrified to tell the people the facts. Our economy and our politics both have been utterly infantilized. That one has to actually pay for what one gets is now a fact too harsh to be uttered in public.
John McGowan, June 7, 2008
News flash! President Bush calls on Congress to make his tax cuts permanent. Edward Lazear, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said that not renewing the tax cuts amounts to a tax increase. He said, "It's always important to remember that taxation means taking money from the people." The Bushies also said that the current “uncertainty” (apparently today’s code word for recession) in the economy made it imperative that the tax cuts not expire. The logic exactly mirrors the one governing decisions about troop levels in Iraq. When there’s violence, we can’t leave because the country needs to be pacified. When it’s peaceful, we can’t leave because it’s our presence that is keeping things calm. When times are good, the government doesn’t need the people’s money to pay its bills, so cut taxes. When times are bad, the people need to spend the country back into prosperity, so cut taxes. It’s always nice to have a one-size-fits-all solution. Saves the trouble of thinking.
Tom Murphy, June 4, 2008
Now that the two candidates running for president have finally been decided, we can only hope the next few months will bring debate on the issues that really matter to Americans, and that the media will focus on those. Far too much attention went to other topics during the primaries. For example, we all heard too much about the preachers who plagued the McCain and Obama camps, even though the candidates tried to deny any ties. And we also heard a lot about what the candidates have for lunch, or how they spend their off time. But there are bigger issues for the voters - like what these men would do to create new jobs, solve the mounting healthcare crisis, end the war, seek world peace and ensure financial stability in municipal governments that are being strained by the burdens of retirement benefits. It's still a long way to November, and there's a lot to talk about between now and then. Hopefully the media will cover it.
John McGowan, May 28, 2008
So it’s official: Bob Barr is the Libertarian candidate for President. It took six ballots. Who says they don’t make conventions like that anymore? Too bad it wasn’t on TV. The chances that Barr will take enough votes away from McCain to influence the election range from very slim to none. But I do highly recommend visiting Wikipedia to read about Barr’s colorful life. The news reports of his nomination have been inexplicably silent about his past, from his leading role in the Clinton impeachment to his outright hypocrisy about extra-marital affairs. Not to mention his bizarre history on the topic of medical marijuana. He (not once, but twice) lashed Congress into nullifying an initiative passed by the voters of Washington, DC, legalizing the medical use of marijuana. Yet he has not only changed his views today, but actually lobbies for the organization that is trying to overturn the Barr Amendment. Meanwhile, he must be one of the few Americans who works actively for both the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union. Kookiness of this sort is almost endearing, but then one remembers his consistent and rabid opposition to gay rights. Here’s a guy who claims to be all about liberty, but has throughout his career gone out of his way to hurt people who are doing him no harm. Guess he can’t overcome the training he received during his early years at the CIA before he turned to politics.
John McGowan, May 21, 2008
Power is a funny thing. It rarely proves the adage about using it or losing it. Just the opposite. Using power very often leads to its decline because people resent being coerced and often find subtle or not so subtle ways to resist. That’s why it should not surprise us that the American misadventure in Iraq has made Iran more powerful. And so John McCain chastises Obama for saying he would talk to Cuba’s dictatorial leader. Horrors! What possible reason could we have for abandoning a policy toward Cuba that has accomplished nothing for almost 50 years? Cuba’s successful defiance of America has only demonstrated for all to see how powerless America has been to change a single thing in how Cuba’s history has unfolded under Castro. What good have we done for ordinary Cubans by trying to isolate their country from the whole world? Surely the lesson of Eastern Europe in the 1980s - or of China today - is that the more a country is opened to the West, the less chance closed-minded and dictatorial regimes have to continue holding sway over their people. American foreign policy contributed mightily to Castro’s longevity by giving him a scapegoat for his own failings and an external threat that justified his holding on to power. And now a desire to abandon the failed policies of the past is decried as “dangerous” to America. Will we never learn?
John McGowan, May 8, 2008
Politicians are, no doubt, not like you and me. Many of them truly believe that they are indispensable, that they are the one and only person who can get the job done right. They hang on to position and power long past the point when people with their best interests in mind tell them to quit. Hilary Clinton seems determined to become the Willie Mays or the Ricky Henderson of our day, someone who humiliates herself and embarrasses us by refusing to leave the stage. After a few years, Mays' and Henderson’s painful last days on the baseball field were eclipsed by our glowing memories of their glory days. Maybe it’s because Clinton does not believe she has got those kinds of memories already in the bank. In any case, she may have already wiped out all the good will of her public. But it is absolutely certain that if she does not withdraw from the race in the next few days that she will have sullied her reputation forever. This absurd refusal to quit will be the thing she is most remembered for - and it will not be a memory anyone will cherish.
John McGowan, April 29, 2008
The new poll that shows Hilary Clinton beating McCain by 10points (while Barack Obama only leads him by 2) is very surprising.It not only reverses numbers that have held steady for a good five to six months, but also defies the conventional wisdom about Clinton’s being as deeply unliked as McCain is respected. But the vagaries of how the two Democratic candidates are doing in such polls as they stagger toward the finish line, each bloodied and diminished, obscures the larger story here. Why hasn’t McCain been able to capitalize? He has never topped 45 percent in any of the polls, and he hasn’t gained any ground on either Democrat for months now. There is still a long way to go, of course, but despite the Democrats’ best efforts (in their tried and true inimitable fashion) to fumble this election away, there is no evidence to date that the Republicans, under McCain’s leadership, can take advantage.
John McGowan, April 9, 2008
We currently have more troops in Iraq than were deployed for the invasion five years ago. And who knows how long they will be there? The Bush Administration, hiding behind General Petraeus, wants to maintain 140,000 troops there indefinitely. Who can deny that Iraq is a mess - and one that the US did a lot, but hardly everything, to create? Still, it seems fair to ask just what it would take to decide to bring the troops home. When things are quiet, that proves our troops are keeping the lid on a violence that would erupt if we left. Don’t abandon a policy that’s working. When things are unquiet, that just proves we can’t leave now. No matter that no political progress has been made nor is there firm evidence that the Iraqi army or police force are minimally functional. Even worse, the US seems to have no way to facilitate any progress on either front. So long as we just keep on keeping on, with an open-ended commitment, we have no leverage at all. McCain’s 100 years may move from being a sick joke to a sad reality.
John McGowan, March 31, 2008
In a nutshell, here’s the real problem Democrats will face in the general election. Polls show that those with an unfavorable view of Obama are likelier to say rights for minorities have gone too far and to oppose interracial dating. And a quarter of them still think Obama’s a Muslim. In many ways, America has made astounding progress on racial relations. But the battle is far from won. People, it seems, will tolerate (just barely) public integration, and mostly keep their private misgivings to themselves. That doesn’t mean they are with the program or even in touch with reality. Here we have Obama publicly castigated for his relationship to his Christian minister, and a significant number of voters think he's Muslim. This campaign is going to get uglier before November, and Hilary Clinton is only a minor contributor to that sad fact.
John McGowan, March 25, 2008
The Feds have stepped in and cleaned up another financial mess but Wall Street culture isn't likely to change. Business today is all about transferring the risk. And in our current financial crisis the risk shift was out into never-never land, onto those much ballyhooed “financial instruments” called derivatives that are far removed from the holders of the debt or the collateral that secure them. It’s the S&L debacle all over again, except now conducted in terms that no one can understand. Thirty years of deregulation of the financial markets and a general “greed is good” mentality have only been made possible by the now-proven truths that the government won’t let the chickens come home to roost.
John McGowan, March 19, 2008
Can the United States turn its back on history and step into a new era? Nothing less is at stake in the whirlwind that now surrounds Obama. For almost nine months it seemed like he might succeed in running a campaign for the presidency in which race was irrelevant. Obama came to symbolize America’s best self, the self we could be if we overcame our scarred history. But we also know that political campaigns in this country don't call forth our best selves. It was inevitable that anti-Obama candidates, from either party, were (and are) going to tie him back to race, and turn off an electorate that wants to believe that race no longer matters in America. Obama has, all along, had to work the tricky patch where he admits that race still plays a large role in determining the destinies of Americans, embraces his own racial identity with pride, and still portrays himself as being oriented to the future rather than past crimes. I don’t think the response to his speech will say very much about the arguments he offered, the person he is, or even the vision that he projects. Rather, his fate is in the hands of the public at large, and whether it allows the fears and patterns of racial divides to trump the hope that we can find another way of living together.
John McGowan, March 3, 2008
The lame-duck Bush Presidency has become almost entirely irrelevant. With the exhaustion so evident, the Democrats are in a tough spot. Trying to bring the administration to account makes the Democrats look like they are picking on an already fallen foe. But letting the administration get away with its reckless disregard for the law - and, perhaps more importantly, for Congress - sets a horrible precedent. The Constitution is currently in tatters, and maybe that won’t matter after Bush is gone. It is irresponsible, however, to pretend it all never happened, or to ignore that the Bush administration got away with it all too easily. So despite the fact that I don’t think it will do any good, and despite the fact that I usually detest futile gestures that only serve to prove one’s own self-righteousness, I think Nancy Pelosi has made the right call. Congress has to sue the administration, or else Congress courts its own irrelevance in the short and the long term.
Tom Murphy, March 1, 2008
The presidential campaign has begun in earnest, with John McCain and Barack Obama already exchanging shots even though neither has been chosen as the nominee of their parties. They don't care. They're more than ready for the main event, and aren't we all. The phony love-hate relationship of Obama and Hillary Clinton has been dragged out far too long. Huckabee's insistence that he's still running borders on pathetic. It's time to get into some real issues. In fact, if they want to hold the election itself in a week or two, I don't think anyone would complain.
