Latimer on Law

Lindsay Graham's Big Problem

                                                                 Lindsay Graham's Big Problem

                                    "The big problem I have is that you're criminalizing the war...."

                                                                      -Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-SC

        "They committed murder here in the United States and we'll seek justice here in the United States,"

                                                                      -Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

                                 "Military justice is to justice what military music is to music."

                                                                               -Groucho Marx

 "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

                                                                           - Benjamin Franklin

                  "My country right or wrong; if right to be kept right, and if  wrong to be set right."                                        

                                                                   -Sen. Carl Schurz, R-Wisc.

               The GOP's attack du jour on President Barak Obama is focused on Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed on criminal charges in the Southern District of New York.  We hear the usual right wing bellyaching, with allegations by "Rush" and others that Sen. Lindsay Graham "stumped" Holder because Holder refused to give a simple answer to a complex hypothetical question about where bin Laden would be tried if he were captured. 

               In fact, Graham revealed the basic phoniness of the GOP in his objection that Holder is "criminalizing the war."  Graham and the rest of the GOP desperately seek to have all Guantanamo detainees tried in military tribunals because that's the only way to legitimize the Decider's "war on terror," and they well know that apart from warmongering and carping about "liberals" the Republicans really have nothing to offer the American people.  

              The Republicans have no policy alternatives other than the failed policies they used to run America into the ground over the last eight years, and they've got no ideas.  So they cling to their tried and true agenda based on fear and obstructionism.  By insisting on military trials for Guantanamo detainees irrespective of where their alleged terrorist acts occurred, the GOP is in fact legitimizing them in the eyes of the world, and certainly in their own minds, as military combatants as opposed to the thugs and murderers they really are.

             We have a criminal justice system that recognizes the rights of the accused, unlike military tribunals, so foreign nationals tried in civilian courts will be accorded basic rights just like any other common criminal, say, Timothy McVeigh.  McVeigh, too, you will recall, claimed through his lawyers that he was part of the militia movement, an armed force opposed to the Government of the United States. 

            So why should Khalid, who is accused of killing civilians in a commercial office building here on American soil be considered an enemy combatant while McVeigh, who killed civilians in a federal government building, was considered a non-combatant? Both of them were driven by extreme ideology to commit mass murder here on American soil, targeting non-military facilities, and therefore both should be tried as common criminals here, in our criminal courts. 

            To do otherwise sends the wrong message to the rest of the civilized world and undermines our credibility, making us seem no better than how we viewed the Soviet Union under Stalin, or China today.  It is to tell the world that we don't trust the criminal justice system that is the hallmark of our basic liberties as a free people, a criminal justice system that is based on principle and not expediency or politics.  The GOP today is howling to sacrifice that principle solely in the name of expediency, based primarily on a politics that puts ideology ahead of the national interest.

            How does the GOP  differentiate between Khalid and McVeigh in principle?  Does it turn on the focus of their respective ideologies in the minds of Graham and the other GOP obstructionists, Khalid's Islamic jihad vs. McVeigh's right wing paranoia, ?  If so, that violates the essential purpose of the Constitution which is to protect the rights of the "people" and the individual "person," with no reference to citizenship, to ideology or to politics.

           The Fifth Amendment particularly states that no "person" shall be held to answer for a capital offense unless under presentment and indictment of a grand jury, i.e. a civil proceeding:

except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual  service in time of War or public danger.

 It is quite a stretch to claim, as the GOP would have us believe, that 9/11 was an act of war as opposed to terrorism such as militiaman McVeigh's attack on the Murragh Federal Building. 

           If we're going to define these issues by hyperbole, then let's try all the Mexican drug and gun smugglers in military courts as well.  After all, we're in the middle of a 40-year  "war on drugs," and those Mexican thugs should therefore be treated as enemy "combatants" no less than Khalid and his fellow Islamic thugs who violated the law here on American soil.

          The braying that we're hearing from Graham and the right-wing media jackasses about trying these murderers in civilian courts claims that holding military trials for all Guantanamo detainees is based on issues of national security.  That is to say, unquestionably, it is a matter of expediency for them, and it is an expedient that defies and diminishes the moral authority of our Constitutional rights and our criminal laws which either protect everyone, every "person," or they protect nobody in the final analysis.

          This fits exactly within the meaning of Franklin's aphorism, where those like Sen. Graham and the right wing media hacks that parrot him are willing to compromise our essential Constitutional rights in the name of security and expediency.  Such people and their supporters deserve neither the liberty our Constitution guarantees nor the false security they seek to achieve by the expedient of trying Khalid in a military tribunal, the judicial equivalent of a military band playing "Onward Christian Soldiers" as Groucho suggested.

          The single most ludicrous statement to emerge concerning this affair is Graham's remark that Holder and the President are making "bad history."  Huh?  Where's he been the past eight years of the Decider and Darth Cheney making history, bringing us two costly unwinnable wars, increasing our national debt and trade imbalance geometrically and nearly bankrupting the country.  Are we to believe that was "good history?" 

          All Obama and Holder are doing is trying to follow Sen. Carl Schurz mandate -our country right or wrong, when right to be kept right and when wrong to be set right.  Given the past eight years of flat out wrong policy decisions by the GOP, they've got a lot of setting right to do, and trying mass murderers as such in civilian court, treating them as the common criminals they are instead of according them the dignity of enemy combatants, while upholding our fundamental constitutional principles, is clearly the right thing to do.

          Graham's real problem, meanwhile, and that of the GOP in general, is they really have no sound policy initiatives and no ideas other than more of the same small government, jingoist nonsense that created the eight year era of "bad history" from 2001 through 2008, so they keep trying to tear down Obama personally and obstruct his efforts to set things right politically.  And that's really a big problem -for the American people and for our constitutional democracy.

8 comments »

ATTA GIRL, MARTHA!

                                                                         ATTA GIRL, MARTHA! 

                                                                   Politics is the art of the possible.

                                                                              - Otto von Bismarck

                                        I went to a hockey game last night, and a prize fight broke out.

                                                                            - Rodney Dangerfield

              Martha Coakley sought to separate herself this past week from the other contenders for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat by saying she couldn't support the Democratic health care reform bill because it would exclude funding for abortions.  At first, both of the other leading contenders distanced themselves from her on that issue, but then Capuano did a flip flop and came out with a similar statement.  He's apparently afraid of losing some of the feminist vote that Coakley is pandering to.

             We might have expected better from a self-proclaimed Washington pro like Capuano, but it seems that the political neophyte, Pagliuca, is the only one who gets it -the only one who understands the basic truth of Bismarck's aphorism that politics is the art of the possible.   He's also the only one who seems to understand the harsh lesson of 2004 when a vulnerable George W. Bush squeaked by John Kerry, winning a close count for Ohio's twenty electoral votes, votes which would have given Kerry the presidency by a five vote margin in the electoral college, because the issue of gay "marriage" got the bible thumping religious right out in droves in states like Ohio that had anti-gay marriage petitions on the ballot.

            Coakley's pronouncement on abortion, like the gay marriage issue, is an exercise in putting ideology ahead of policy, understanding that policy only works if it can be enacted and that requires that you win office first, or win the close votes on issues like health care reform.  The caption above every one of these posts is:  "Ideas, not ideology, in service of our shared ideals and the common good."

              In present context, the common good is to get a  health care reform bill passed, one which will achieve President Obama's stated goal of taking insurance industry profiteering out of health care and provide coverage to all Americans.  If that requires making concessions on controversial ideological issues like abortion, then that is what must be done. 

             We are talking here about making health insurance available to some 34 million uninsured Americans, and making coverage fairer for millions more whose existing coverage contains insurance industry goodies like the exclusion for pre-existing conditions and non-portability of ERISA coverage when people change jobs, which most often triggers the pre-existing condition exclusion when they sign up for coverage with a  new employer.

           Coakley, and now Capuano, are just pandering to the feminist ideological agenda when they insist that any health care reform bill must provide coverage for abortion.  They're also playing right into the right-wing GOP's game plan, which has always been to divide and conquer based on divisive social issues like abortion, just as they did with gay "marriage" in 2004 after the 2003 ruling in the Massachusetts Goodridge case. 

              Jim DeMint, Rush, Dick and Sarah are all saying "Atta girl, Martha," on this one, after they stop drooling that is.  Coakley's injection of the abortion issue into the campaign for Kennedy's seat can only serve to derail any kind of meaningful health care reform, just as injection of the gay marriage issue killed Kerry's shot at the presidency in '04.  The political upshot of that would be the Waterloo for Obama that DeMint and the right wing GOP are praying for, and in terms of public policy that would mean another indefinite reprieve for the insurance industry's obscene profiteering off health care.

              Some people claim that Bismarck's aphorism about doing what's possible in politics is simply an expedient because it sacrifices principles to results, but that is a false objection.  The issue being debated in Congress today is health care reform for everyone, not abortion or feminism.  The policy to be served is to provide for universal health care that is both fair and economical, not to advance the feminist pro-choice agenda or any other ideology. 

             What's expedient is the kind of ideological pandering adopted by Coakley, and Capuano's flip-flop, for a short term advantage in the polls.  That's ultimately stupid in the long term because it serves up a tasty "values" issue for Mitt Romney or any GOP candidate to work up the Catholic bishops and other religionist factions and maybe win Kennedy's seat for the Republicans.

            We liberals and moderates have already seen disastrous long-term results from the gay marriage issue in '04, when Bush got to appoint two Supreme Court justices during his second term, perpetuating the 5-4 conservative majority as opposed to the 7-3 liberal majority a President Kerry would have been able to create.  And just how do you suppose that 5-4 conservative majority is going to vote when gay marriage gets up to the Supreme Court under the federal Constitution?  Like I said, putting ideology ahead of practical policy initiatives is just plain stupid politics.

             So just think about Romney as the junior senator from Massachusetts, either using the seat as the perfect springboard for a run at Obama in 2012 or, even worse, deciding he's comfortable there and occupying the seat for the remainder of Kennedy's term and then running for re-election as a GOP incumbent who has proven he can win a statewide election in Massachusetts.  How do you suppose that would work out for all of Obama's progressive initiatives, not just health care?

             Think about it, because it's clear that neither Coakley nor Capuano have given it much thought, if any.  Again, what we need are ideas,  not ideology, in service of our shared ideals and the common good.  That's been the theme of my posts on this site from the beginning, and Coakley's injection of the abortion issue into the race for Kennedy's seat is nothing but ideological demagoguery that can only serve to energize the religious right.

             For responsible American citizens, including many independent voters, as well as the Constitution itself,  it's like Rodney Dangerfield said: "We don't get no respect" when every issue on matters of common interest like health care get polarized by partisan ideological antipathies.   Some folks like to watch hockey, others like to watch a good fight, and each has its place.  But there's really no place in hockey for fighting as it only detracts from the game, which was Dangerfield's point, except for the morons who support fighting in the NHL. 

            The same is true for an important issue of public policy  like reforming health care to provide fair and economical coverage for everyone.  It's not really the time or place to be waging ideological battles over abortion or any other so-called "values" issue on which the right-wing GOP can always "win" just by making sure nothing gets done to change the status quo.

            Way to go, Martha!  Ditto to you, Mikey.

305 comments »

Tort Reform and Other Shibboleths of the Wingnut GOP

                                            Tort Reform and Other Shibboleths of the Wingnut GOP

                                                 The contingent fee is the poor man's key to the courthouse.

             But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal-there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. . . . Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal."

              - Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird    

             It is unwise to pay too much but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much you lose a little money. When you pay too little you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common sense law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot. It can't be done.

             - John Ruskin

            In any health care lawsuit, the amount of noneconomic damages, if available may be as much as $250,000, regardless of the number of parties against whom the action is brought or the number of separate claims or actions brought with respect to the same injury.

            -Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute to H.R. 3962, Div. C, Sect. 302(b)

               The GOP's all-out obstructionist war on President Obama's efforts to restore prosperity and equality to American society is focused right now on the issue of health care.  It's just one of many fronts, but as GOP Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina has stated they want health care to be Obama's "Waterloo," public health and welfare be damned.

              Predictably, the Republican scaremongering has focused on the big government bogeyman - not when that big bad federal government steps up to bail out private corporations after they run the economy into the ground, mind you, nor when it starts an overseas war of corporate opportunity to steal another country's natural resources as in Iraq.  No, the big federal government is bad only when it proposes to provide a basic service like health care both fairly and economically for all Americans.

             That's when we hear all the tried and true right wing shibboleths, calling Obama's public option health care plan "socialism."  Never mind that the Constitution expressly states at Article II, Section 8, that the federal government can raise taxes for the specific purpose of promoting the general welfare -where nothing could be more in keeping with that objective than providing adequate health coverage for everyone. 

            Never mind, too, that neither the word "socialism" nor "capitalism" is found anywhere in the Constitution, as they are merely economic models, either or both of which can comfortably work within the constitutional framework of our democratic government.  No, that just can't work for the Republican right wing, the success of publicly funded health care in other democracies aside, because it contradicts their small-government, anti-tax ideology.  Ronald Reagan's Freudian slip that "facts are stupid things" sums it up nicely for them, because the facts always get in the way of  their right wing ideological purity.

              So the GOP true believers still cling to that laissez faire nonsense based on Adam Smith's magic "invisible hand" that guides the unregulated market to attain the best of all possible worlds.  You know, that's where greedy profit oriented entrepreneurs working solely in their own self-interest will somehow, presto, achieve the best possible outcome for everyone.  But Adam Smith wasn't around in 1929 or 2008, was he?  After the crash of 2008, even the staunchest latter-day intellectual exponent of that nonsense, Alan Greenspan, had to admit after the debacle of the Bush administration became manifest, that he and the John Galts of the world were wrong all along. 

           Meanwhile, the GOP has finally released a draft of its own Insurance Industry Relief Bill of 2009 this week -otherwise known in GOP double speak as a "health care reform" bill, and its preface contains all the usual right wing shibboleths straight from the Ouingnut Ouija board, including taxes, privatization vs. big government and, of course, "tort reform."  That one's a beaut, too, blaming all excessive health care costs on doctors scared of being sued as opposed to, say, insurance industry greed. No, Dorothy, don't pay any mind to that man behind the curtain because we're still in Oz as far as the GOP is concerned.

            So let's think this through. When you have that pain in your chest or lump on your breast you want to go to the doctor who tests you only because he's scared of being sued as opposed to the doctor who takes advantage of the latest diagnostic technologies in order to get it right and provide you with appropriate treatment, consistent with the oath he took.  You want the doctor who, because of lower insurance premiums, will say to hell with all that testing junk and just make his diagnoses by throwing darts and seeing where they hit so he can make his tee time. Isn't that right, Binky?  Well the wingnut GOP solons in Washington apparently think you're that stupid -in fact, they're depending on it.

          So-called "tort reform" is one of the most enduring of the right-wing GOP shibboleths.  President Obama wants real health care reform, to make affordable health care available to everyone while getting doctors paid fair compensation by reducing or, even better, eliminating insurance industry profiteering from the equation. Obama's approach recognizes that the real difficulty with providing affordable health care today is based on insurance industry excesses having little or nothing to do with actually getting your doctor paid.  Just consider how much of your premium dollar, or your employer's, actually gets to pay the doctor.

           There are the outsized insurance executive salaries, bonuses and perks, the risky speculative investments, the competition based on expensive media advertising rather than actual competitive pricing, the self-aggrandizing real estate development with phallic office towers jutting up over every major city skyline, the high priced corporate lawyers fighting with unlimited budgets against local plaintiff's lawyers who dare question a claim denial in court and the cadre of lawyers and actuaries hired to devise "perfectly legal" ways to deny the coverage we pay for.  That's all in addition to the millions being paid to the swarms of K-Street lobbyists talking to your congressman as you read this.

          Only then, after being repeatedly stepped on by such non-essential costs does the first penny of your premium dollar go to paying your doctor.  The GOP is blind to those factors as the real source of the problem because they don't fall into lockstep with right wing "free market" ideology.  For them the problem must be the tort lawyers, and here we see a right wing double-dipper as well.

           The GOP's right wing corporatists get to stick their chips into our dip twice with this one, so forget about reforming the health care system in ways that will actually benefit both doctors and patients by reducing insurance industry profits.  Here, the GOP proposal for "tort reform" seeks mainly to protect health insurer profit margins by presumably getting doctors to order fewer costly tests like MRI, CAT Scans et cetera, characterized as "defensive medicine," while at the same time certainly protecting liability insurer profitability immensely.

           They seek to protect liability insurer profitability by putting arbitrary and wholly inadequate limits on tort recoveries by patients injured or killed by a doctor's negligence, as with the Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute to H.R. 3962, Sect. 302(b), offered this week by Mr. Boehner of Ohio on behalf of the Republican Party:

 In any health care lawsuit, the amount of noneconomic damages, if available may be as much as $250,000, regardless of the number of parties against whom the action is brought or the number of separate claims or actions brought with respect to the same injury.

This would limit the total amount any personal injury claimant can receive from any and all sources for "non-economic loss."

           "Non economic" loss means anything other than direct medical costs and lost earning capacity.  This term includes intractable pain, loss of a limb, severe scarring  and other disfigurement, loss of sight or hearing, loss of sexual function, severe depression, anxiety et cetera, all of which would be limited to $250,000 -or about five percent of the cost of an insurance CEO's private jet -assuming he's a stiff who buys a low end bird for around six million.

            While they're at it, the GOP corporatists have also slipped in liability limits for drug manufacturers and corporations making medical devices that malfunction, or are inadequately designed, causing death or serious injury:  

The term "health care lawsuit means any health care liability claim concerning the provision of health care goods or services or any medical product. . . .

See Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute to H.R. 3962, Div. C, Sect. 307, Definitions (7).  Here, by the reference to "health care goods . . . or any medical product," we see "tort reform" working not only for doctors who screw up under principles of medical malpractice but also for manufacturing corporations of medical devices under principles of product liability law.

            This way, the GOP seeks to protect both health insurer profiteering and liability insurer profiteering in one neat package, without really doing anything to expand coverage to all Americans or control the costs of health care.  Never mind the fact that in states that have enacted so-called tort reform, Texas for example with a liability cap on damages for pain and suffering since 2003, it has had zero effect on curbing the escalation of health care costs.   Consider the following facts:

(1)        The limit of $250,000 on pain and suffering for med mal cases in Texas has in fact reduced malpractice insurance premiums by about 30 per cent, but the consumer's cost for medical services and for health insurers has risen, clearly indicating that the real benefit goes to the insurers -people like the "too big to fail" AIG, rather than either the doctors or the patients:

 http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/columnists/jlanders/stories/DN-Landers_21bus.State.Edition1.9be351.html

Thus, the GOP's latest proposal is just another cynical attempt to continue the parasitic scam that private health insurers have been working to bleed consumers, increasing their bottom line, while denying adequate coverage to more than 20 percent of Americans, mostly working people who aren't covered under ERISA and who don't earn enough to purchase coverage on their own.

(2)        The proposed GOP legislation also would cap the amount of punitive damages available in any case at $250,000 in states which allow for punitive damages at common law. Massachusetts, however, has never allowed punitive damages except in very limited specific contexts governed by statute, still our health care costs have risen by eight percent since the enactment of Romney's mandatory health insurance plan in 2006;

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/05/28/more_mass_residents_report_trouble_paying_medical_bills/?page=2

Meanwhile, the cost of basic coverage for middle income earners in Massachusetts making $30,000 or so per year can exceed $9,000, almost one third of total income.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/03/02/mass_healthcare_reform_is_failing_us/

(3)        The proposed GOP legislation, at Sect. 303, would also place limits on the amount attorneys can claim as a contingent fee, similar to the one already in place under the Massachusetts Medical Malpractice Act of 1986.  This section, cynically, is entitled "maximizing patient recovery," which is to be accomplished by creating disincentives for attorneys to take meritorious cases where, due to insurance industry defense practices, even meritorious med mal cases have become prohibitively expensive.

            Let me give you a clear example of how this works based on my own experience.  I do not handle med mal cases as a rule, but several years ago I took the case of a woman who had been taking a treadmill test for a coronary problem when the doctor told her to take a rest but stay on the treadmill while he made some notes.  While she was standing there, the doctor clumsily hit the start button catching the patient unaware and causing her to fall ass over teakettle, and she suffered a broken arm.

            That should be an open and shut case of the doctor's negligence, right?  He was careless, if not in asking that his patient remain on the treadmill at least for hitting the start button without warning to her, and that carelessness was clearly the cause of her injury, all that is needed to make out a case of negligence generally.  But, oh no, this was medical malpractice, subject to the statute don't you know.  So, what should have been a routine negligence case with modest damages as we demanded, and minimal case expenses, became a full blown med mal case under the statute.

            We therefore had to present the case to a three-doctor medical malpractice tribunal as the statute requires, which typically serves to "screen" med mal cases by requiring that the plaintiff post a prohibitively expensive bond before proceeding through litigation.  The insurer who had such difficulty in seeing its way to simply make a reasonable offer to settle a case of obvious negligence had no trouble paying it's high priced law firm to oppose the case before the tribunal, adding significantly to litigation costs which, of course, were just passed on to the doctor in the form of a higher premium.

            Usually, when a case goes before the tribunal the plaintiff needs to retain an expert witness to testify as to the doctor's medical negligence, at a greatly prohibitive cost, which also benefits the liability insurers as a deterrent to medical malpractice suits.  I chose not to hire an expert, however, and the negligence issue was so clear that, after hearing and briefing the issue, the tribunal did not require that we post a bond.  After several more months of pre-trial discovery, the case finally settled for an amount we would have accepted in the first place if the insurer had just made a reasonable counter offer instead of seeking to derail this basically garden variety negligence case, and driving up litigation costs, by invoking the cumbersome and costly med mal tribunal procedure.    

          The GOP bill now pending in the House goes even further than the Massachusetts statute in restricting the rights of individuals injured by medical negligence, and like the Massachusetts statute and the Texas statute, there is no basis to believe it would even have the slightest effect in reducing health costs generally.  Yes, it may reduce your doctor's insurance premium somewhat, but in reality it is nothing more than the Insurance Industry Relief Bill of 2009.

          Such insurance industry relief would be paid for by you and me, of course, in the form of losing our common law right to just compensation for negligently inflicted injuries, while creating a statutory scheme which, if correctly premised by its proponents, will allow doctors who are so inclined greater leeway to cut corners when diagnosing serious and potentially life threatening conditions. 

            That's bad health policy and, as the Ruskin quote above suggests, bad economic policy as well.  If that's what is needed to maintain the present "free market" health insurance business, then it's just another clear argument in favor of a government run, single payer health care system that covers everyone and costs less in the long run by eliminating all those extraneous expenditures private insurers take out of your premium dollar. We need a different approach that allows the bulk of your tax dollar to pay your doctor's bill instead of grossly obscene insurance industry CEO salaries and bonuses, along with other irrelevant corporate costs, as your premium dollar does today.

299 comments »

KUMBAYA!

KUMBAYA!

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

            In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

                       - President Dwight David Eisenhower, Farewell Address, Jan. 1961

                                                    Someone,s laughing, lord, kumbaya
                                                    Someone,s laughing, lord, kumbaya
                                                    Someone,s laughing, lord, kumbaya
                                                    Oh lord, kumbaya

                                           - "Kumbaya," American folk spiritual, ca. 1930s

             In the last prior post I recited several pearls of wisdom about the proper use of power in world politics taken from the several public speeches by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.  I "plagiarized" them actually, because I quoted them without attribution.  I omitted attribution purposely, however, not to claim the ideas as original to me which I did not do, but simply to make a larger point about how far to the extreme right today's GOP has strayed from the constitutional ideals Ike bravely defended in W.W. II, and then courageously upheld while serving in the White House.

             As expected, certain people who chime in on this site from the far, far wingnut extreme of the political spectrum, took the bait hook, line and sinker.  Thus we heard from one of them:

 If you want to live in a warm and fuzzy Kumbayah type of world then we have common ground. If you are naïve enough to believe we can "compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose" then we are "open to debate."  

Well, like I said, that statement about composing difference not with arms but with intellect and decent purpose  was Ike's, not mine.  So what we are seeing with the post-Reagan, right wing GOP is a rejection of Eisenhower's "naïve" beliefs about the use of American power and influence.

           Moreover, all of the Eisenhower quotes I recited in the prior post are clearly much closer to the principles on which President Obama has based his foreign policy than the fear mongering shibboleths that defined the Bush administration.  For example:

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without;

 Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed;

In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims;

 This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect;

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace;

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security;

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it; and, yes,

Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.

The fact is that those are the same principles which underlay Obama's Cairo Speech, e.g. America is not at war with Islam, and America is not engaged in Afghanistan to impose any kind of regime change but simply to neutralize al Qaeda and it's enablers as a real, hostile threat to our own security.

            These are principles which most of the free world outside the airless, toxic confines of the American right wing "think tanks" both appreciate for their own conduct of affairs, viz. the European Union, and welcomed hearing from an American president so much that they awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize just for advocating them. 

            No. Obama hasn't done all that much in his brief ten months as Commander in Chief to reverse the eight year debacle of Bush's tenure as the "Decider," but the Nobel is a clear message that the rest of the free world anxiously expects, and demands that Obama follow up on his principled words with equally principled actions. 

            Ike surely would tell those still carping from the extreme right that such principled actions are far less "naïve" than their simple-minded belief that American troops could invade a politically, ethnically and religiously fractured nation like Iraq and create a "democracy" that would welcome the invasion force with open arms and then roll over for the American petroleum industry like a puppy dog.  That wasn't merely naïve, it was stupid as events have proven.

            Saddam, was a brutal dictator who stifled all political dissent.  But he posed no real threat to American security, was both socially and religiously tolerant and stood as a viable obstacle to the expansion of Iranian influence in the mid-East. Thanks to Bush's "pre-emptive non-agression," however, Saddam's been replaced by a religiously and socially intolerant theocracy which, in principle, conforms more closely to Iran's religious, political and regional agenda than with American interests.  Those Bush clowns didn't even get the sweetheart oil deal for Exxon-Mobil that was the real purpose of invading Iraq in the first place.

            But, hey, what did a guy like Eisenhower know about world affairs, spouting off all those "naïve" ideas about resolving differences, "not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose."  He only led the Allied troops to victory over the forces of world fascism during W.W. II, while Ronnie Reagan was slogging in the trenches, along with that other right-wing "hero" John Wayne, on the back lots of Warner Bros. in Hollywood. 

            How can Ike's "naive" belief  in the limited efficacy of war in international relations even begin to compare with Bush's wisdom in the ways of war, based on defending the friendly skies over Texas as an ANG pilot while thousands of other young men were being killed in the jungles of Viet Nam.  How can Ike's "naïve" beliefs about war and peace stand up against the hard-nosed sagacity of Richard Cheney who, while eligible to fight in the war of his generation -a war he fully "supported,"  just didn't support it enough to actually fight in it because he had "other priorities" like making a fortune in the petroleum services biz.

            Like I've been saying all along, today's right wing GOP is both intellectually and morally bankrupt, and it's a far cry from Eisenhower's Republican Party.  Ike, like General Powell today, wouldn't have a place in today's GOP as defined by the likes of Cheney, Limbaugh and Palin and, unlike Powell, he really wouldn't want to either.  This point is amply supported, too, by the wingnut response to the last post I quoted, taking issue with Eisenhower's statements as being "naïve," and in keeping with the warm and fuzzy "Kumbayah type of world." 

            That's what I mean by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of today's "conservative" Republican Party.   It seems that today's GOP elephant doesn't even have a long memory and is clueless as to the principles that  guided the last honest, conservative Republican president, and the last truly great man to occupy the White House as well, the one who said:

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

Today's GOP is driven by the economic elite in the arms industry and petroleum industry, i.e. the "military industrial complex" that Ike warned about in his 1961 farewell address, a confluence of wealth and militarism that promotes war in order to enrich itself, in an unholy alliance with the religious right which makes up the GOP's political clout.

            The religious right is even scarier than the military industrialists, however.  A significant number of them vote Republican because they want war in the mid-East, in "Babylon," to bring about the biblical prophesy of Armageddon after which the Israelites will be killed and all those good SBC "Christians" will be raptured into Heaven.   

            It is here, if anywhere, that Ike was naively optimistic, not about external threats like Russia or Iran, but about the looming internal threat to both our precious democratic, constitutional freedom and world peace, as when he said that the people want peace, and "there is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs."  Here, the GOP today panders to the religious right, and so many of them do not want peace, but instead seek glory through battle, not by expropriating other peoples' oil reserves in this world like the industrialists, but by killing them in order to secure a place in their lily white skinned, anthropocentric "Heaven" and, to them, that's worth all the blood it takes.

            The really funny thing, though, is that I posted the very same Eisenhower quotes back in March under the title "Pearls of Wisdom."  As with this last post, I quoted them without attribution, on purpose,  and I got the same kind of response, with one wingnut who called himself Snakedog vehemently attacking me as a "liberal" based on my belief in Ike's principles. As with the present post, I called him out as arguing with Ike, not me, and he hasn't posted anything here since then. 

            Well, like the song says, "Someone's laughing, Lord," and that someone is me about the response I expected and got to the last post about casting pearls before swine.    But I'm sure Ike would be crying if he saw what's happened to American society today thanks to the Republican Party's pandering to the religious right, and he certainly wouldn't vote Republican.

            Kumbaya!

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Truth, Justice and The American Way, Or Pearls Before Swine

                                Truth, Justice and The American Way, Or Pearls Before Swine

             My country right or wrong: when right, to be kept right; and when wrong, to be set right.

                     -Senator Carl Schurz, R., Missouri

            The never ending battle for truth, justice and the American way.

                      -Superman Comic Book, cover slogan

Here are a few observations which, as a center-liberal Constitutionalist, I believe contain great wisdom and insight as to the proper role of government, the  duties of an informed citizenry and our true path toward peace, justice, the common defense and our general welfare.

 -The purpose is clear. It is safety with solvency. The country is entitled to both.

 -The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.

 -Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

 -I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

-In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

-Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.

-There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.

 -This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

-Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

-Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.

-We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.

-When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it.

-Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

-The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.

 All of my topical  posts in this series touch on one or more of these basic ideas, and I believe they all contain an essential wisdom that is necessary for America to attain peace and justice, first for ourselves and then, by our example rather than force and the hollow rhetoric of those who advocate force, for the rest of the world. 

            The most significant question we face in America today is whether the 18^th Century ideals, derived from the European Enlightenment and written into the Constitution of the United States of America, can survive as we proceed into the 21st Century, or whether those ideals will continue to devolve, under the divisive right wing demagoguery that permeates our public media, into nothing more than a comic book slogan.  Do you agree, or am I just casting pearls before swine?

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