Grotesque Malevolent Koala

Ending Impeachment Myths IX -- "He'll just get pardoned, anyway."

2007-11-14T12:53:00.000-08:00

The source of this myth isn't exactly clear to me, but I've seen it on a regular basis. Fortunately, it is extremely simple to dispel, because impeachment convictions are specifically exempted from the pardon power by the Constitution.

Check it yourself. Article 2 Section 2 states:

"The President ... shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment."

As you can see, the Founding Fathers were thinking ahead.

There are some recent cases in history that may have contributed to the birth of this misconception. Among them:

the "pardoning" of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford -- Members of House Judiciary Committee (including John Conyers) had finished approval of the first three articles of impeachment against Nixon, conclusive evidence had emerged that Nixon was abusing his powers of office, and it was clear to all that the full House would vote to impeach soon. Conviction in the Senate seemed unavoidable. Republican leaders of Congress went to the White House to discuss things with Nixon, who was convinced to resign. New replacement President Gerald Ford issued a pardon about a month later for "all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9,1974."

This so-called "pre-emptive pardon" had a questionable legal basis, as it was completely novel. Hindsight makes clear some of its lingering effects. People were not happy: Ford's polling numbers dropped sharply once it was issued.

The very reasonable argument was put forth that, although the President does have the Constitutional right to issue pardons, a pardon cannot be properly issued until after a conviction has occurred. Since there were never any criminal charges filed against Nixon, the validity of this argument was never tried in court. However, the legality of a "pre-emptive pardon" is hardly set in stone, and it would take a ruling in a court case to see if the idea passes judicial muster.

The important part of all this is that Nixon's "pardon" was not for his impeachment. Nixon resigned before the article of impeachment against him even passed out of the House of Representatives. Also, the decision not to pursue criminal charges was optional. The legitimacy of the "pardon" issued by Ford could have been challenged.
the commutation of "Scooter" Libby's sentence by President Bush -- After "Scotter" Libby's conviction for his role in obstructing the investigation into the Valerie Plame affair, President Bush decided to commute Libby's 30-month sentence, ensuring that he would serve no jail time for his crime. As many observed, this also ensured that he would not testify about the role Vice President Cheney (Libby's boss) played in the scandal. Many people were displeased; as noted earlier, polling immediately afterward showed 54% of the public in support of beginning impeachment hearings against Cheney.

Please note: Libby was not pardoned for his crime, and the conviction remains on his record... for now. Many believe that a full pardon will be issued at the end of Bush's term, especially in light of Bush's refusal to rule this out.

It is important to reiterate that impeachment does not work like a criminal case. There is no chance of an appeal. There is no punishment other than immediate removal from office and the imposition of a ban on holding government office in the future.

Does this mean that if H Res 333 is successful, Cheney is immune from prosecution? Not at all. It means that he would be stripped of office, stripped of the dubious "executive privilege" defense, and be able to face criminal charges in a court of law as a private citizen.

While it is possible that the President would try to issue a "pre-emptive pardon" (as in the Nixon case), this could be challenged. Arguably, honorable Republicans would oppose this move in order to prevent further destruction of their party's public image.

SUMMARY:

This myth is pure fantasy: The Constitution prevents the issuance of pardons to reverse an impeachment conviction.
Impeachment opens the way for criminal charges.
Don't forget: "Pre-emptive" pardons are not necessarily legitimate.

Latest Polls on Impeachment

2007-11-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

Way back at the start of the "Ending Impeachment Myths" series, in which much of the data available six months ago is collected, I noted:

It seems reasonable to assume that support for impeachment has increased since last October, but it will take more scientific polling to confirm this. The question is: Who will be brave enough to find out?

In the wake of Dennis Kucinich's move to bypass Pelosi's "off the table" policy on the House floor, recent polls by Rasmussen Reports and the American Research Group have finally shed some new light on what Americans are thinking.

The ARG poll shows a stunning indictment by the public:

a large majority thinks Bush and/or Cheney have abused their power as members of the executive branch
in both cases, majorities believe Bush and Cheney have committed impeachable offenses

In addition, the Rasmussen poll shows more people believe that Cheney violated his oath of office than believe he did not. (The numbers are close, but not within the margin of error.)

However, there is less agreement concerning opinion on what should be done about the situation:

According to ARG, 43% believe Cheney should be removed from office
According to Rasmussen, 31% believe Cheney should be impeached and removed from office, while 40% believe he should not.

Public interest in the issue is large, but not overwhelming. Rasmussen data shows that:

the news on H Res 799 was followed either "very closely" or "somewhat closely" by 48%
37% followed it, but "not very closely"
14% report that they followed it "not at all"

Rasmussen also showed that the public is skeptical that impeachment of Cheney will occur, with 75% calling it "not very likely" or "not at all likely". Given the stance of the Democratic leadership on this issue, this result is not surprising.

Perhaps most surprising, the Rasmussen poll found that respondents asked "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for a candidate who actively works to have Vice-President Cheney impeached?" had a greater chance of saying "less likely" (36%) than "more likely" (25%). It is possible that the wording here had some effect on the end results, if some respondents interpreted the question as being about their likelihood of voting for Kucinich -- the only candidate visibly associated with the matter in the news.

Both polls were taken in the days immediately following Kucinich's introduction of H Res 799, with the ARG poll coming after the Rasmussen survey. Do the differences in support for a Cheney impeachment reflect rapidly-changing opinion, or just differences in methodology?

Back in July (immediately following the commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence), a groundbreaking ARG poll found that 54% of the public favored "beginning impeachment proceedings against Vice President Dick Cheney". Has the overall trend of support for impeachment gone down?

Maybe, and maybe not. The new ARG data finds that 27% of the public believes Cheney abused his power, but that either that the abuse is not serious enough to warrant impeachment or that impeachment should not happen even though the abuse warrants it. It is my firm belief that the start of hearings would both increase the level of public interest and start changing the minds of some of that 27%.

I look forward to more data.

Kucinich Gambit Shows Who's Who

2007-11-08T12:23:00.000-08:00

The re-introduction of articles of impeachment against Vice President Cheney on Tuesday didn't accomplish anything new... yet. Although the use of the "question of privilege" rules to introduce the resolution (H Res 799) made sure that it would receive at least an hour's worth of attention on the House floor, the end result was that the resolution was referred to the Judiciary Committee, where its twin brother, H Res 333, has been languishing for over six months.

The net effect on overall progress towards impeachment remains to be seen -- at least one member of the House Judiciary Committee who previously had little to say about the matter (Robert Wexler, whose chief claim to fame is saying "cocaine is fun" on the Colbert Report as a joke) has now openly called for hearings to begin.

There are, however, two things that the legislative upheaval most certainly accomplished:

The test has shown the limits of Pelosi's "off the table" policy regarding impeachment. Any member of Congress can interrupt normal House business as often as desired to ensure that any evidence they want to present at least makes it out on C-SPAN (with postings on YouTube sure to follow).
It has definitively revealed the fault line between real Democrats (i.e. the ones that adhere to the same values that people think of when they think of an "unnamed Democrat" in a theoretical matchup in poll questions) and the pseudo-Democrats (i.e. the ones that seem to hold power in the party and that never do as well as the unnamed Democrat in those polls since they don't adhere to those values).

Following is a chart that shows the position of "people of interest" on the impeachment question right now. (I apologize for it being tiny. Blogger keeps shrinking it.)

Each member of Congress is labelled as follows:

"Judiciary?" -- Is the representative on the House Judiciary Committee? Orange means yes, grey means no.
"333 Co?" -- Has the representative co-sponsored H Res 333? Green means yes, yellow means no.
"Table?" -- Did the representative vote to "table" (i.e. kill) the resolution introduced on Tuesday? Yellow means yes, green means no, grey means did not vote.
"Committee?" -- Did the representative vote to refer the resolution to the Judiciary on Tuesday? Yellow means yes, green means no, grey means did not vote.

Now, each representative's individual action may not mean anything, but I think the pattern as a whole is telling. There are four distinct groups.

"True believers" -- Representatives Bob Filner (CA), Edolphus Towns (NY), and Maxine Waters (CA) have all shown a consistent pattern of support. Not only have they signed on as co-sponsors to H Res 333, they voted in favor of immediate action.

If you live in the district of one of these representatives, be sure to call them up and express your support for their unwavering courage.
"Cautious supporters" -- Several representatives have gone so far as to sign on as co-sponsors to H Res 333, voted not to table H Res 799, but also voted to delay action by sending it to the Judiciary. If you want to look at this charitably, that means they wantt to take action but didn't feel they could lay out a proper case in the one-hour debate window provided for by the rules for questions of privilege. If you want to look at this cynically, that means they sent it to die in Committee while trying to pander a bit to pro-impeachment constituents. Most are probably somewhere in between. This group consists of Tammy Baldwin (WI), Yvette Clarke (NY), William Lacy Clay Jr. (MO), Steve Cohen (TN), Danny Davis (IL), Keith Ellison (MN), Sam Farr (CA), Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX), Hank Johnson (GA), Carolyn Kilpatrick (MI), Barbara Lee (CA), Jim McDermott (WA), James Moran (VA), Jan Schakowsky (IL), Diane Watson (CA), Lynn Woolsey (CA), and Albert Wynn (MD).

If you live in the district of one of these representatives, you might consider calling them and telling them you support the immediate start of hearings on the matter in the Judiciary Committee.
"On-the-fencers" -- Seven representatives, all of whom are on the Judiciary Committee, have not signed on as co-sponsors of H Res 333 but also voted against tabling H Res 799 on Tuesday. This is a very important bloc of voters on that committee, and it includes the chairman, John Conyers. (History tip for the younger kids: Conyers was instrumental in the impeachment hearings against Nixon; he also created a resolution in support of impeachment hearings last year that did not make it out of committee.)

I can't say I fathom the motives of these voters, since these people have had the ability to act on H Res 333 for six months and have not. Cynically, it's purely a case of political double-speak: They can say they supported "moving the resolution forward" and then continue to ignore. As mentioned above, at least one member of this group (Wexler) has come out in favor of hearings, so from a hopeful perspective this may mean they simply want to do things right by starting investigations. Time will tell. This group includes: John Conyers (MI), Luis Gutierrez (IL), Robert Scott (VA), Brad Sherman (CA), Melvin Watt (NC), Anthony Weiner (NY), and Robert Wexler (FL).

If you live in the district of one of these representatives, you should probably call them and tell them that you would like them to co-sponsor either H Res 333 or H Res 799, and that you support Wexler's call for the immediate start of hearings on the matter of impeaching Cheney.
"Loyal lapdogs" -- Nine Democratic representatives on the Judiciary Committee have consistently demonstrated hostility to the idea of impeachment. They haven't signed on to H Res 333. They voted to table H Res 799. When that failed, they voted to send it to the Judiciary, where they presumably have no intention of acting on it. In other words, they've shown lock-step support for Pelosi's policy. They are: Howard Berman (CA), Rick Boucher Artur Davis (AL), Bill Delahunt (MA), Zoe Lofgren (CA), Jerrold Nadler (NY), Linda Sanchez (CA), Adam Schiff (CA), and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL).

If you live in the district of one of these representatives, you might want to call them and tell them you won't be voting for them next election as a result of their failure to represent you on Tuesday. Even better, you may wish to express that same thought at this site, where you can opt to have your comments sent to your Senators and local newspapers, as well. At the very least, you may want to call them and ask them to explain the rationale behind their votes. You may even wish to compare their responses to the common impeachment myths outlined in earlier posts here.

Both Robert Brady (PA) and David Payne (NJ) have signed on as co-sponsors of H Res 333, but they didn't vote in either of the motions on Tuesday. I am not sure what this means -- either they were absent when the votes were taken or they abstained. I hope it's the former.

[Note: I threw in Ron Paul just because I found his vote to table surprising. I very much respect Mr. Paul's integrity and would be interested to see his reasoning on the matter.]

[UPDATE: It seems that Ron Paul clarified his intent on his vote to table. His reasoning is legitimate, and his support for hearings is clear. Hopefully, this means we'll see him bring more attention to this issue.]

Ending Impeachment Myths VIII -- "Impeachment will only increase the support for Bush."

2007-05-16T17:34:00.000-07:00

This myth is based on the observed net increase in President Clinton's popularity after his own impeachment challenge. President Clinton emerged more popular after his acquittal than he was at the start of the impeachment.

The problem with this idea is that, although it is rooted in an observation of association, the association is mistakenly being seen as a causation.

Let us assume that the person employing this myth genuinely believes it to be true. The obvious logic is that an impeachment automatically causes an increase in popularity. If this logic is true, wouldn't it be reasonable for Republicans to initiate impeachment in order to increase President Bush's popularity?

The absurdity of the proposal illustrates the absurdity of the underlying causal argument.

Why, then, did President Clinton's popularity go up? The prevailing opinion is that, after massive exposure to the televised proceedings, the majority of the public came to believe that the impeachment attempt was little more than a politically-motivated smear-job. The key accusation, after all, was that Clinton was lying about what can reasonably be construed as a personal and private matter with no direct implications regarding his duties as President of the nation.*

Would the same thing happen with respect to President Bush? I don't think so.

The Clinton impeachment was essentially a top-down affair. The newly-dominant Republican majority launched an unfocused investigation based on vague allegations of misconduct in a real estate involving the Clintons ("Whitewater"). The Lewinsky affair turned up after tens of millions of public tax dollars had been spent investigating Whitewater with no substantive results. Evidence of the affair was broadcast widely to the public, who suddenly took intense interest in the proceedings.

The movement to impeach Bush is essentially a bottom-up affair. Many grassroots groups across the nation have been arguing for years that impeachment is deserved for a variety of substantive reasons -- all of which are intimately tied up with the official conduct of members of the executive branch. Several accusations revolve around a failure to uphold the oath of office, which is a much more serious charge than any leveled against Clinton.

It is possible that an impeachment effort would fail. In this worst-case scenario, it is even possible that Bush would emerge vindicated in the mind of the public. I, personally, view this outcome as highly unlikely.

Notably, public demand for impeachment has been growing steadily, despite a relative lack of coverage of the topic in the major media. People are being convinced by evidence that is already readily available online -- it will not require a prolonged and expensive investigation to find a cause, only short and focused efforts to obtain relevant evidence for existing accusations.

SUMMARY:

It is absurd to believe that the impeachment itself caused the increase in Clinton's popularity. Would Republicans impeach Bush to increase his popularity?
The Clinton impeachment was organized in a top-down manner. The Bush impeachment movement is organized in a bottom-up manner. The current effort is people-driven, not politics-driven.
An impeachment of Bush requires only narrow investigations into well-defined accusations of wrongdoing, not a wide-spread and costly "fishing expedition" as was seen with Clinton.

*As stated elsewhere, while I agree with the sentiment that Clinton's affair was a private matter, I do not agree that lying about it to the public was a legitimate response to the investigation. I supported the effort to impeach Clinton.

Ending Impeachment Myths VII -- "Bush doesn't have that much time left in office. It's not worth the effort."

2007-05-15T14:25:00.000-07:00

Once again, we have an argument that sidesteps the question of whether impeachment is justifiable. It is often used in conjunction with the "more important business" argument discussed in part VI.

First, this argument pre-supposes that an impeachment trial will be a lengthy and drawn-out process. If we look at the history of the Nixon administration's last days, we can see that it is in no way certain that an actual trial would ensue. Nixon, at the urging of Republican leadership, promptly resigned when it became clear that articles of impeachment would pass in the House. If a trial did occur in this case, it would likely be as short as it could reasonably be. It would be in the interests of both Democrats and Republicans to settle the matter as quickly as possible.

Second, this argument hints that a successful impeachment would simply not be worth the time and effort to achieve. I find this stance to be frankly unbelievable. I have difficulty appreciating the mindset that allows one to look at it in this way. Does someone who thinks this way view impeachment as only a means to the end of removing Bush from office? If so, then the idea that it would take longer to impeach than to simply "wait it out" is understandable.

However, I vehemently disagree that impeachment is solely about this administration. As discussed in other posts in this series, there are greater Constitutional issues at stake. Quite simply, the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches has shown a dangerous erosion for some time, but has reached a critical tipping point in recent years. We cannot allow the example of the Bush administration's behavior to become the established precedent for future executives.

Such an established precedent should frighten Americans of any political orientation.

SUMMARY:

An impeachment trial should not take long, and may not even be necessary.
Impeachment is not merely a means to the end of removing the current administration. There are fundamental Constitutional concerns about the eroded checks-and-balance of a weakening legislative branch.
Allowing the current administration's example to become established precedent should frighten Americans of any party.

Ending Impeachment Myths VI -- "There's more important business to attend to right now."

2007-05-14T09:30:00.000-07:00

This myth is most frequently employed as a softer, gentler version of the argument discussed in part V. Like several other arguments, the user implicitly agrees that impeachment is deserved. The disagreement is the relative priority of pursuing impeachment versus other legislative agendas (e.g. ending the war, healthcare, restoring civil liberties, etc.).

This disagreement over "priority" sneaks in the false choice at the center of this myth. The speaker presumes that it is impossible to pursue any of the other worthy and important goals listed if impeachment is taken up. This is absolutely not true.

First, anyone pursuing these other goals must surely recognize that the current administration will do everything in its power to oppose any progress. Many of these goals stem from problems created by the current leadership! It is silly to expect that any progress can be made towards these other goals while the Bush administration remains in power.

Second, Congress routinely works on many tasks at the same time. Although an impeachment effort might occupy most of the time that key Democratic leaders have in a day, there are many other capable legislators in the Democratic majority that can be organized to tackle these secondary problems.

I do not label such serious problems as "secondary" lightly. As grave as they are, they pale in comparison to the Constitutional crisis currently going on. We plainly have an executive branch that the Founding Fathers would consider to be edging towards tyranny. Many of the same complaints found in the Declaration of Independence are being echoed today in more modern language.

Impeachment is the "safety valve" of our checks and balances, designed to legally and peacefully reign in an executive who refuses to acknowledge the co-equality of the legislative and judiciary branches. We have such an executive now, as evidenced by the frequent use of "signing statements" to undermine passed legislation, claims of "executive privilege" used to deny the information needed by Congress to do its job, and many other infractions.

Put more simply: If the precedent of the Bush administration is allowed to stand -- if the executive branch is allowed to build on this administration's legacy, the power of Congress will have been weakened to the point where it effectively no longer exists. At that point, there is little chance of progress on any other "more important" goals.

SUMMARY:

The "more important business than impeachment" argument is based on a false choice.
It seems reasonable to predict that progress cannot be made on other important matters while the current administration holds office.
For our government of the people, by the people, and for the people, there can be no more important business than protecting the Constitution.

Ending Impeachment Myths V -- "The Bush Administration is killing the GOP's chances in 2008. Better to let them keeping doing it!"

2007-05-12T09:41:00.000-07:00

Of all of the common arguments against impeachment that I've examined so far, this one is by far the one with the least merit.

I've seen and heard it phrased many different ways:

"Why take away the rope they're using to hang themselves?"
"Look how well 2006 went for us, 2008 will be even better at this rate!"
"There's no upside for Democrats in impeachment."

If confronted with this argument, I encourage you to drive straight to the heart of the matter: Any such partisan viewpoint on the matter is exactly the kind of "party before country" mentality that Democrats have been accusing the Republicans of for years. Such accusations have been quite accurate. For a Democrat to adopt such an attitude now is the height of rank hypocrisy, and, as such, should be strongly challenged.

The implications of impeachment go far beyond the immediate concerns of the 2008 election. Arguably, the future of our democracy is at stake.

Does the previous statement seem far-fetched? Then consider this little-known fact about impeachment: Upon successful conviction, the guilty party is not only removed from office, but is barred from ever again holding political office in the future. As it is laid out in our Constitution:

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party, (defendant), convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

Bearing that in mind, let's review a little history.

In 1974, President Nixon resigned when it became clear that a successful impeachment was forthcoming. At the time, Cheney was Nixon's Deputy Assistant to the President.
Under Gerald Ford, Cheney worked as Assistant to the President and later became Ford's Chief of Staff.
During the Reagan administration, Cheney (then a Congressman) was the ranking minority member on the congressional committee to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal.
Under the current President, Cheney (as Vice President) created the Office of Special Plans in order to bypass the normal intelligence-assessment process, build the case for the Iraq War, and promote it to the American public through official channels.

There are two things that are important to note in this brief tour of history:

First, the seriousness of the transgressions against our Constitution have become increasingly worse over the last few decades.
Second, Vice President Cheney has had a long career in government. There is every reason to expect that he will continue to be involved in government for as long as he is able to.

Clearly, impeachment matters in the long run even more than the short run. If we are going to halt this steady race to the bottom in terms of Presidential behavior, there is no alternative but to place future executives -- regardless of the party they represent -- on notice that such behavior will not be tolerated. A successful impeachment not only stops the problem now, it helps prevent problems like it in the future.

SUMMARY:

A Democrat who avoids impeachment on partisan grounds is just as guilty as the Republicans when it comes to putting "party before country".
Impeachment is even more important in the long term than in the short term.
Impeachment not only removes the guilty party from office, it also prevents that party from ever holding office again.
The trend over the last few decades suggests that impeachment is the only option for putting a stop to increasingly egregious executive branch abuses.

Ending Impeachment Myths IV -- "It takes a 2/3 vote to convict in the Senate. That will never happen!"

2007-05-11T09:07:00.000-07:00

This is another pernicious myth often employed to cut the debate on impeachment short. The implication: Yes, impeachment is richly deserved, but it's just not politically possible to pull off.

This argument implicitly makes the assumption that only party line votes against impeachment can be expected, no matter what charges are brought and no matter what the evidence submitted is. Such a deeply cynical view should be directly an unapologetically challenged.

The results of last November's election have given serious pause to many long-time Republican members of the House and Senate. Bush's popularity has recently reached record lows, and party officials are anxious to avoid a repeat of 2006, where not a single Republican candidate won a seat held by a Democrat. It seems reasonable to believe that moderate Republicans would be willing to break party ranks -- if not out of their sworn obligation to uphold the Constitution, then simply to save their own political skins!

Indeed, assuming that the evidence is as easy to obtain as impeachment proponents believe it will be, the case for impeachment should be incontrovertible to anyone regarding the situation rationally. A failure to impeach in the face of appropriate evidence would be ample evidence of bad faith in the execution of a senator's duties.

The real question that must be asked is: Are there not at least 17 honorable Republican senators in office right now? I think it's safe to assume that there are. Remember, as discussed in part II and part III, there is a path to impeachment that is both Constitutional and precedented, and that would keep the White House under Republican control.

If there are not at least 17 honorable Republican senators, the public needs to see this with its own eyes, so that it can vote appropriately in 2008.

SUMMARY:

This argument pre-supposes that Republican senators will act dishonorably.
It is by no means certain that party line votes are to be expected.
Even if the Senate fails to convict, impeachment would provide valuable information for voters in 2008.

Ending Impeachment Myths III -- "Impeaching Bush Would Just Put Cheney in Office."

2007-05-10T07:51:00.000-07:00

This myth is frequently espoused by those who wish to short-circuit the debate by presenting an even worse alternative than President Bush. As many people who favor impeachment flinch at the idea of a President Cheney, this gambit is often successful.

However, impeachment no more ensures a President Cheney than it does a President Pelosi. The reasons are laid out in more detail in part II of this series, but the short version is that, if Vice President Cheney is successfully impeached (or resigns from office) before impeachment proceedings against President Bush are begun, the danger of him ascending to the presidency is readily avoided.

There are good reasons to believe that a successful impeachment of Cheney is in the works. On April 24th, Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced HR 333, a resolution containing three separate articles of impeachment against the Vice President. Over 45 documents supporting the charges are available on his website.

An online campaign to collect public opinion (and, at your request, forward that opinion to elected representatives) sprung up almost immediately, and, at the time of this writing, it has collected over 35,000 comments from regular Americans, and the number is growing constantly. Astoundingly, even though the campaign is seeking opinion both for and against impeachment of Cheney, registered opinion as I write this is over 99% in favor.

Some in Congress appear to be being influenced by this campaign. HR 333 was introduced with no co-sponsors, but on May 1st, two other members of Congress signed on in support of the resolution. Those members are William Lacy Clay, Jr. and Jan Schakowsky. The resolution is currently awaiting a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee. That committee is chaired by Congressman John Conyers, who introduced his own resolution calling for an investigation into impeachable offenses last year.

It's too early to say how the resolution will play out, but there are encouraging signs that the Democratic leadership is exploring the possibility seriously. Recently, MoveOn conducted a quiet poll seeking input on the matter of impeaching Bush, and MoveOn is notorious for moving only at the pace Democratic leaders are comfortable with. The successful impeachment of Cheney would almost certainly be a political pre-requisite to impeaching Bush. Notably, Jan Schakowsky, one of the new HR 333 co-sponsors, has been called a member of Nancy Pelosi's "inner circle".

SUMMARY:

Any impeachment plan would likely involve impeaching Vice President Cheney first.
The process of impeaching Vice President Cheney has already begun, and there is evidence of strong public support.
Successful impeachment would very likely result in a moderate Republican taking office, as in the case of Gerald Ford.

Note: The summary takes into account some arguments already made in part I and part II of this series. Please see those posts for details.

Ending Impeachment Myths II -- "Impeachment is just a partisan power grab!"

2007-05-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

This is the second most common argument that I've seen regarding impeachment: An impeachment attempt would be nothing more than a blatant partisan power grab aiming to install an unelected President Pelosi, and such a process is inherently un-American.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Many people who adhere to this line of argument are unaware of what played out in the final months of the Nixon administration. Here's a brief timeline:

Nov 1972 -- Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew re-elected
??? 1972-73 -- Investigation begun concerning criminal wrongdoing by Agnew
Oct 1973 -- Spiro Agnew pleads "no contest" to criminal charges, resigns before impeachment filed
Nov-Dec 1973 -- Gerald Ford confirmed by Congress as new VP
July 1974 -- first article of impeachment vs Nixon approved
Aug 1974 -- Richard Nixon resigns

Time magazine has made a ton of their coverage of the saga available online. It's interesting reading for someone young enough to have never known much about the scandal. The point most relevant to today, however, is that both the Vice President and the President were removed from office while retaining a Republican hold on the White House.

How was this accomplished? Through the use of the little-known 25th Amendment to the US Constitution. This Amendment allows for the Vice President to be replaced through nomination of someone by the President, followed by subsequent confirmation by Congress.

Some people I've discussed this with have charged that President Bush cannot be trusted to make a reasonable selection for a new Vice President if Cheney is successfully impeached. It is important to note that a replacement VP cannot be installed by the President alone. The confirmation process should ensure that a new VP acceptable to both parties is brought into office. Bush may stall, but I would suspect that members of his own party would bring pressure on him to ensure a quick transition. Leaving the VP slot open indefinitely is not feasible.

With respect to the use of the label "un-American" when describing impeachment, I can only say that it is so definitively American that is has been a part of our Constitutional system since the beginning. The Founding Fathers laid it out as an emergency tool for use by Congress -- the representatives of the People -- to be used to unseat any executive branch officers with dangerously monarchical tendencies.

If impeachment is so fundamentally American, then why is it so often referred to as "the 'I' word" in recent political discussion? The reason seems to have a lot to do with the way Republicans conducted the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.* As one persuasive essay recently put it:

A few months ago, when a few voices on the far left first uttered the “I” word in relation to Dick Cheney and George Bush, I was turned off by the idea. Then I started to wonder why I felt that way. After all, if any two public officials in American history ever earned a thorough impeaching it's those two. Yet the idea of actually kicking that process into action produced a sinking, sickish feeling deep within.

Why?

Then it dawned on me — Republicans had “removed” impeachment from the arsenal that made Congress a co-equal branch of government.

The author goes on to say:

When mad-dog Republicans misused impeachment during their anti-Clinton feeding frenzy, the public — the sane majority anyway — was turned off by it. They saw it more for what is was — a legislative coup attempt by Republicans against a Democratic president, rather than the legitimate use of Congressional power.

It was also viewed as a monumental waste of time, taxpayer money and critically needed legislative bandwidth.

Over time that impression gestated into a deep national ambivalence, bordering on disgust, with the impeachment process. It's now almost a knee-jerk response when someone demands impeachment. You can almost hear a national moan:

“Oh no. Please, no. Don't take us down that road again! Please.”

So there you have it. With their unjust, frivolous, mean spirited, wolf-pack-like pursuit of Bill Clinton the GOP inadvertently inoculated its own top officials from the threat of impeachment today, even when so richly deserved.

I do not know for a fact that Democratic leadership would follow the Nixon administration model in any impeachment proceedings, but they would be well-advised to do so if they wish to retain the moral high ground. Presumably, the country can survive another unelected President like we had in Gerald Ford.

On a related note, and also in follow-up to part I of this series, I spotted an interesting piece this morning concerning very recent public opinion on the matter of impeachment. This poll was not conducted by what I would consider a strictly non-partisan source (the head of the polling firm is a former colleague of Newt Gingrich), but the data released is highly intriguing:

"Would you favor or oppose the impeachment by Congress of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney?"

Favor: 39%

Oppose:55 %

Undecided/Don't Know: 6%

The survey of 621 registered voters has been weighted for age, race, gender and political affiliation. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4%.

Now, I cannot prove this, but my experience is that many people are unfamiliar with both the 25th Amendment and the exact mechanics of Gerald Ford's ascendancy to the presidency. The fact that the poll question could be construed as asking about support for a double-impeachment of both officials is therefore telling. It is quite possible that many of the respondents believed that the result of such an action would be a President Pelosi. Nonetheless, almost two-fifths of Americans surveyed supported it!

I would very much like to see further data gauging public support for an impeachment plan that guarantees a Republican White House.

SUMMARY:

Impeachment is not "un-American", it is a fundamental part of the American way.
Impeachment does not automatically create a President Pelosi; historical precedent shows that Republicans would be able to keep control of the White House if both Bush and Cheney are successfully impeached.
Recent data suggests that as many as two-fifths of Americans support a simultaneous double-impeachment, which could result in a President Pelosi, but further research is needed to confirm this.

*For the record, I supported the impeachment of Clinton because he crossed the line when he lied to the public about the matter of Monica Lewinsky. It was entirely within his rights to simply tell the public to butt out, and, in retrospect, this would probably have been the quickest way to put the matter to rest. I make no distinction between lying under oath and lying in a press conference when it comes to the conduct of our high officials, so you can imagine how I feel about our current administration. The fact that Bush administration officials routinely avoid testimony under oath shows how carefully they tread around their own trap.

Ending Impeachment Myths I -- "Only the far left fringe wants impeachment."

2007-05-08T15:44:00.000-07:00

The call for impeachment of Bush administration officials grows louder and louder. Recently, a long-running campaign to initiate an impeachment via action at the state level was defeated in Vermont's state house of representatives, after passing handily in its state senate. This is the closest such a state-level measure has come to passing, but it is not the first such vote, nor will it be the last.

I have been following the impeachment debate online for quite a while. I'm sorry to say that most of the more prominent arguments against impeachment are based on nothing more than myths. This is the first post in a series that will explore these myths in detail, and hopefully help put them to rest.

Myth #1 -- "Only the far left fringe wants impeachment."

This is myth is easy to prove false.

The last serious poll on the matter was done by Newsweek in October 2006, shortly before the elections in which the Democratic Party made substantial gains and retook both the House and Senate. Although Newsweek was very careful in how it reported the results, a little review of the information provided shows that 28% of Americans polled said impeachment should be a "top priority", and an additional 23% said it should be a lower priority. 28%+23% = 51%. In other words, a majority of Americans asked supported the idea of impeachment, even if they did not agree on the priority level for pursuit of it.

Prior to that, the most significant serious poll was performed by Zogby International in January 2006. Conducted during the height of the furor over illegal domestic wiretapping, 52% agreed when asked: "If President Bush wiretapped American citizens without the approval of a judge, do you agree or disagree that Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment?"

In another Zogby poll, this one taken in June 2005, 42% of voters said "they would favor impeachment proceedings if it is found the President misled the nation about his reasons for going to war with Iraq".

No matter how generous you want to be with your definition of "fringe", it is clear that it cannot encompass between 2/5 and 1/2 of the entire American public. Support for impeachment is clearly a mainstream view, and has been for some time. It's even more clear that public support for impeachment has been growing steadily.

Hard to believe? Look at the trend:

Jun 05: 42% in favor if FISA laws have been broken
Jan 06: 52% in favor if public's trust abused in promoting Iraq War
Oct 06: 51% in favor of impeachment -- with no conditions attached!

Furthermore, it's clear that, if recent precedent is to be acknowledged, the threshold of public support required for action has been crossed. As one prominent blogger puts it:

[E]ven those identifying as Very Conservative support impeachment by a higher percentage than those of all political affiliations who supported impeachment and removal of President Clinton in the fall of 1998

On a final note, it's important to recognize that the 2005-2006 polling data cited above comes from a period when public approval ratings for the administration were significantly higher than their current level. It seems reasonable to assume that support for impeachment has increased since last October, but it will take more scientific polling to confirm this. The question is: Who will be brave enough to find out?

SUMMARY:

Supporting impeachment is not a "fringe" opinion, it is a majority opinion.
Support for impeachment has been steadily growing since at least 2005.
Based on modern precedent, the threshold for Congressional action on impeachment has already been crossed.

When Digg Falls Down IV

2007-03-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

Well, well, well. It looks like I'm a little late to this party, but there has been a burst of interest in the apparently-widespread abuse of digg.com's "bury" feature over the last few weeks. Does the "bury brigade" or "Digg mafia" exist? Read the following and judge for yourself.

Hunting Down Digg's Bury Brigade (Wired News)
The Bury Brigade Exists, and Here's My Proof (Pronet Advertising, hopefully not someone who attempts to abuse digg for commercial purposes)
Digg's Bury Feature Needs a Funeral (ReeVerb)
Digg's Dark Future and the Battle for Online Censorship (deep jive interests)
Watching Digg's Bury Brigade (Guardian Unlimited)
Why Digg Needs the Bury Brigade (Social Media News) (short version of hypothesis: to hide their own censorship efforts)

If you want more, just check the Google results for "bury brigade".

Based on what I've read and seen, there may not be any organized groups working to bury particular discussions or ideas. But, if there were, you'd never be able to pick them out among the vast sea of diggers driven to abuse the "bury" feature by their own personal motivations.

While the idea of the bury feature seems useful, it's rapidly becoming clear that the honor system and anonymity don't mix very well when it comes to serving the intended purpose. A tool purportedly developed to restrict the level of abuse has instead increased it dramatically.

One possible solution: Watch the watchers.

I have no idea what the algorithm for deciding an automatic bury is, but suppose that instead of an automatic bury, the item is flagged for a 30-second inspection by someone on the digg.com staff. If the staff member believes that the buries have been applied incorrectly, he can wipe them out -- ideally sending notifications to all users who had buried the story that it was overturned and that their account was flagged as having submitted an inappropriate bury.

Too many inappropriate buries, and the account in question is banned. That ought to dampen the bury abuse pretty fast. Even if this was done on a fractional sample of stories before automatic burying, I would expect a big improvement.

Another idea: Offer diggers a chance to veto.

Whatever the current method is for determining when it's OK to bury a story, it appears that the algorithm heavily favors "bury" votes over "digg" votes. Suppose, instead of an automatic bury, that digg.com just flags the entry as about-to-be-buried for the alleged reason. Let it stay up for a short time (10-15 minutes would probably be enough for front page stories) with a special "veto" vote option or the like. If the bury is overturned by veto, refer it to a human for inspection as in the first idea above. If it was an appropriate bury, flag the vetoer's accounts.

At any rate, I love digg, and I hate to see it suffer like this. I've caught a number of short-lived stories over the last couple of weeks that probably should have gotten more attention. Digg needs to be reminded as much as everyone that secrecy and democracy need to be carefully balanced if one is also trying to serve justice.

When Digg Falls Down III

2007-03-15T20:45:00.000-07:00

Digg is apparently at least aware of the possibility that there are organized attempts to bury stories, though they are careful to refer to it as an allegation only. See this official Digg blog post: http://blog.digg.com/?p=66

Of course, they appear to be trying to keep secret as much information about how burying works as they can, for proprietary reasons. If you can see who dugg something, why not who buried it?

When Digg Falls Down II

2007-03-15T19:21:00.000-07:00

So, as an interesting test, I submitted the post below as a Digg item, also in the /news/science/environment section.

It also disappeared in less than an hour. I haven't inquired about it yet... let's see if anything comes back in response to my last email to digg, in which I asked how many users flagged the Independent article before it was buried.

When Digg falls down...

2007-03-15T12:48:00.000-07:00

So, an article was published in the Independent yesterday concerning the anti-global warming pseudo-documentary that recently aired in Britain, titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle". The article demonstrates the fact that much of the "data" cited by the documentary is either already established as false or was simply made up by the film's creators.

As an example:

The programme-makers labelled the source of the world temperature data as "Nasa" but when we inquired about where we could find this information, we received an email through Wag TV's PR consultant saying that the graph was drawn from a 1998 diagram published in an obscure journal called Medical Sentinel. The authors of the paper are well-known climate sceptics who were funded by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank.

However, there are no diagrams in the paper that accurately compare with the C4 graph. The nearest comparison is a diagram of "terrestrial northern hemisphere" temperatures - which refers only to data gathered by weather stations in the top one third of the globe.

However, further inquiries revealed that the C4 graph was based on a diagram in another paper produced as part of a "petition project" by the same group of climate sceptics. This diagram was itself based on long out-of-date information on terrestrial temperatures compiled by Nasa scientists.

However, crucially, the axis along the bottom of the graph has been distorted in the C4 version of the graph, which made it look like the information was up-to-date when in fact the data ended in the early 1980s.

Mr Durkin admitted that his graphics team had extended the time axis along the bottom of the graph to the year 2000. "There was a fluff there," he said.

The full article can be found at: http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2355956.ece

I came across the article on the front page of digg.com, which I often visit as a check on what people online are actually reading about (as opposed to what the MSM is pushing).

At the time that I saw the item, it had about 70 diggs. I read the article and added my own digg, and I noticed with interest that the article was rapidly accumulating diggs and marching towards the top of the chart. However, about an hour later, having hit around 200 diggs, the item mysteriously disappeared.

I couldn't understand what had happened, and searched the site in vain for the item to see if it had simply fallen off the list. It wasn't on the first few pages and wasn't even in the environmental news section, where a 200 score should have placed it easily at the top. It appeared to have simply vanished.

I tracked down the URL in my browser's history and discovered that item is still there. It's just not appearing on any of the charts.

Interested, I contacted Digg support to discover what happened to the piece, and was told that the item had been "buried" automatically due to user reports that it was "lame" and/or "inaccurate".

I don't know how many users would have had to do this, but I highly doubt that it was 200 or more. Digg's response states:

Remember, Digg is a community and, as such, is subject to democratic process of that community.

How is it democratic to make a story disappear like that -- automatically -- based on reports of a few users?

This absolutely smacks of deliberate manipulation to me, and I am surprised that digg has made it so easy to suppress important news like this. I sent a further inquiry to find out if they would be doing any investigation into this case of apparent abuse, but there's no response yet.

History Repeating...

2007-03-14T01:13:00.000-07:00

While perusing Glenn Greenwald's excellent post today about the Republican Party's long history of lying to Congress and the people of this country, I followed the link he recommended to a YouTube presentation of a 1987 Bill Moyer's documentary titled: "The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis".

Warning #1: It's 90 minutes long.

Warning #2: The first five minutes contain the video for an unfortunately sappy song. In retrospect, this was probably an editing failure.

Warning #3: The rest of the video is absolutely worth watching, so be prepared to set aside the hour and a half it takes to watch it.

The Natural Progression II

2007-03-14T00:58:00.000-07:00

Well, obviously, Lamont didn't end up winning. Given the final numbers, it seems to me that a more serious backing of Lamont by the Democratic Party could have put him into the win. The fact that Joe Lieberman was a founding member of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), and that the DLC is the most powerful group in the Democratic Party, may very well have something to do with the seemingly-inexplicable choice to virtually ignore the person who won the primary in favor of someone who continuously undermines the progressive faction of the Democratic Party in the national debate.

It's true that not many people expected the Democrats to win control in the Senate in last November's election, but just imagine if it was Lamont in there now instead of Lieberman, who has all but defected from the Democratic Party at this point.

Two lingering questions I have about the Lamont-Lieberman affair:

1) It's very clear that a large fraction (the majority?) of Lieberman's votes came from registered Republicans. Everywhere else in the country, politicians perceived as supporting GW were being thrown out of office. Why did the Republican voters of Connecticut want to stick with Joe instead of their own party's nominee?

2) Where's the blowback from the Democratic Party's failure to support Lamont -- a patently undemocratic move, regardless of how "practical" a choice it might have been?

Amygdala Politics III

2007-03-14T00:40:00.000-07:00

Given enough time and persistence, almost anything will pop up on Google. The prepared remarks presented in the "Amygdala Politics II" post had substantially less impact than the actual speech he made, at least as I originally saw it in webcast form. The speech was the keynote address at the New School University's "Social Research: Winter 2004" conference, and I'm still looking for a surviving online video of it.

In the meantime, however, I have located a transcript of the delivered speech and ensuing conversation, which follows:

=====================================

The politics of fear

Al Gore

TERRORISM IS THE ULTIMATE MISUSE OF FEAR FOR POLITICAL ENDS. Indeed, its specific goal is to distort the political reality of a nation by creating fear in the general population that is hugely disproportionate to the actual dangers that the terrorists are capable of posing. That is one of the reasons it was so troubling to so many when the widely respected arms expert David Kay concluded a lengthy, extensive investigation in Iraq for the Bush administration with these words: "We were all wrong." The real meaning of those words, and of Kay's devastating verdict, is that for more than two years, President George W. Bush and his administration have been (wittingly or unwittingly) distorting America's political reality by force-feeding the American people a grossly exaggerated fear of Iraq that was hugely disproportionate to the actual danger posed by Iraq. Now how could that happen? Could it possibly have been intentional? It's a serious question--more serious than the laughter from the audience might imply. And there are some clues to the answer.

Here's one: the fear campaign aimed at invading Iraq was precisely timed for the kickoff of the midterm election campaign of 2002. You remember that campaign? The one where Max Cleland, who lost three limbs fighting for America in Vietnam, was accused of being unpatriotic? The curious timing was actually explained by the president's chief of staff as a marketing decision. It was timed, he said, for the post-Labor Day advertising period because that's when advertising campaigns for "a new product"--as he referred to it--are normally launched. The implication of his metaphor was that the "old product"--the war against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda--had lost some of its pizzazz. And so, in the immediate run-up to the election campaign of 2002, a "new product"--the war against Iraq--was being launched.

For everything there is a season, particularly for the politics of fear. Here's another clue: the fear campaign did serve to distract the American people and divert attention from pesky domestic issues like the economy, which were after all, if you look back, beginning to seriously worry the White House in the summer of 2002. So they needed to change the subject.

And of course the third clue is to be found in the now voluminous evidence that a powerful clique inside the administration that had been aggressively agitating for war against Iraq since before the 2001 inauguration immediately seized upon the tragedy of 9/11 as a terrific opportunity to accomplish what it had not been able to do beforehand: invade a country that had not attacked us and did not threaten us.

The members of that clique were clever and they managed to get the job done. But it is now painfully obvious to most people that, in the process, some deceitfulness took place. There hasn't been specific responsibility assigned for this deceitfulness yet, but it's being investigated by the president.

The so-called intelligence concerning the threat posed by Iraq was stretched beyond recognition, distorted and misrepresented. Indeed, some of the intelligence that the president personally presented to the American people on national television in his State of the Union address turned out to have been actually forged by someone, though we still do not know who. And amazingly enough the White House still doesn't seem to really care who forged that document.

Imagine for a moment that you were president of the United States. It's not that hard. And imagine that you were standing before a joint session of Congress on live national television, speaking on the one occasion of the year when the Constitution of our nation commands the president to report directly to the Congress and the American people about the State of the Union. Imagine that on this solemn occasion, you delivered an important message on the grave issue of war and peace. And then imagine that after your speech the United Nations publicly announced that the document you had been given was a forgery.

Would you be embarrassed? Would you be interested in who forged the document and why? Would you demand to know how it got into your hands and why you were allowed to use it in your State of the Union address? Would you ask for someone to be accountable for it?

Sherlock Holmes wrote a famous story in which the key clue was the dog that didn't bark. The White House hasn't even growled about who forged the document that got into the hands of the president of the United States and was used on national television.

I'm curious. Who forged that document? And why has no one pursued it? The CIA warned the president's staff, we are told, not to let him use that particular document, but it seems that there was some kind of regrettable communications foul-up inside the National Security Council. Indeed, it seems to me there have been a lot of those foul-ups--too many for the president to keep up with. And far more than the nation should tolerate.

Over the past 18 months I have written and delivered a series of speeches addressing different aspects of President Bush's policy agenda, including two on his decision to go to war in Iraq under what I regard as patently false pretenses, one on his dangerous assault on civil liberties here at home, several on his outrageously fraudulent economic policy, and several more on his complete and total failure to protect the global environment--indeed his open invitation to those most responsible for polluting it to step up the pace.

In preparing and delivering speeches on these and other related topics, initially my purposes were limited in each case to the subject matter of the specific speech. However, as I tried to interpret what was driving these various and separate policies, certain common features became obvious and a clear pattern emerged. In every case there was a determined disinterest in the facts. For example, the president's incuriosity about the forged document I referred to earlier is in keeping with the incuriosity shown by the president during an extra hour-long meeting with his new treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill--a meeting O'Neill recounts with astonishment in his recent book. Again, can you imagine being president and hiring someone to head your economic policies and then never asking a single question about those policies during your first protracted meeting with him on the topic? In any case, the first obvious pattern to me was the president's incuriosity about the substance of his policies or even the basic facts in each of these areas.

The second pattern common to the president's approach to all of these areas was an inflexible insistence on carrying out preconceived policies regardless of the evidence concerning what might work and what clearly would not work. In the words of Lewis Carroll: "First the verdict, then the trial."

Third, there is in each area a blatant and consistent bias favoring the wealthy and powerful (particularly key members of his electoral coalition) at the expense of the broader public interest.

Fourth, there has been a marked tendency to develop all the administration's policies in secret, and thereby avoid any accountability to the people, to the Congress, to the courts, or to the press.

Moreover, fifth, in each case there has been a disturbing willingness--even eagerness--to misrepresent the true nature of the policy involved and its real implications.

And sixth, no matter what the issue, it is now clear that in every instance the administration has resorted to the language and politics of fear to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward in a rush without regard to the evidence or the truth and without any regard for the public interest.

For example, the administration did not hesitate to heighten and distort public fear of terrorism after September 11 in order to create a political case for attacking Iraq, even though no facts to justify a connection between Iraq and the attack of September 11 could be found.

Iraq was said to be working hand in hand with Al Qaeda. Iraq was said to be on the verge of a nuclear weapons capability. Defeating Saddam was conflated into bringing war to the terrorists, even though what the adventure in Iraq really meant was diverting resources away from the pursuit of the people who actually attacked us. And it meant causing us to lose focus on that critical task.

The administration also did not hesitate to use fear of terrorism to launch a broadside attack on measures that have been in place for a generation to prevent a repetition of gross abuses of authority by the FBI and the intelligence community that occurred at the height of the cold war. I served on the House Select Committee on Intelligence immediately after the period when the revelations of these abuses led to major reforms. And conservatives on that panel were still resisting those changes and safeguards tooth and nail. They have long memories and now these same constraints have been targeted in the Patriot Act and have been either removed or sharply diminished. And of course the president wants the Patriot Act extended and made permanent.

Incidentally, I was encouraged when his political appeal for renewal of the Patriot Act in his State of the Union address was met with tepid applause at best on both sides of the aisle. I viewed that as one of the few bright spots in that speech.

Nor did the administration show any scruples at using fear of terrorists as a means to punch holes in the basic protections of the Constitution to create a class of permanent prisoners and to make it possible to imprison American citizens without due process for the first time in American history: to snatch an American citizen off of the street, put him or her in prison without allowing that citizen to see a lawyer, to see his family, to make a telephone call, to be told what the charges are, or to have any access to due process for the courts.

The president did not hesitate to totally sequester information about policies and about people, not just from the people themselves, but from the Congress and from the courts as well. All of which was justified by recourse to fear.

Our nation has gone through other periods in our history when the misuse of fear resulted in abuses of civil liberties: the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 through 1800, the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare after World War I. Indeed, this distinguished university was founded by acts of conscience and courage in the direct aftermath of the Red Scare following World War I.

In World War II the internment of Japanese-Americans was a shameful episode. Then there were the McCarthy abuses of the early cold war period. After each of these periods of excess we as a nation felt rightly ashamed and tried to make up for the abuses--with monetary payments in some cases, with apologies, with new laws and new protections. And although we have not yet entered the inevitable period of regret and atonement this time around, it is already obvious that we are now recognizing that we are in the midst of one of those periods of regrettable excess.

The administration also did not hesitate to use the politics of fear in economic policy. The fear of a recession was put forth as an argument for massive tax cuts primarily benefiting the wealthiest, while loading debt on the rest of the country for generations to come.

It used fear of energy shortages to build an energy policy made to order for the oil industry at the expense, again, of the rest of us.

It used the fear that we would somehow lose a competitive edge to block responsible action to deal with global warming, and the administration has by that action mortgaged not only our lives but those of our children and their children to consequences that are unmitigated by any acts of foresight in this generation. Meanwhile, even the Chinese have now passed us in fuel economy standards for new automobiles, to cite but one example.

This administration uses fear of the problems of old age to contrive an illusory drug bill that essentially transfers billions from the people to the pockets of the large pharmaceutical companies.

It does not hesitate to use fear even of God not only to pronounce its own views on intimacy and marriage but to try to impose those narrow-minded views on the nation in the form of a constitutional amendment at election time.

At the level of our relations with the rest of the world, the administration has willingly traded in respect for the United States in favor of fear. That is the real meaning of shock and awe. It is this administration's theory that America should seek "dominance"--to use its word--over the world, coupled with a doctrine of preemptive strikes, regardless of whether the perceived threat to be preempted is imminent or not. And incidentally, today George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, made it clear that the CIA never said Iraq was an "imminent" threat. But of course, under their doctrine, the threat to be preempted doesn't have to be imminent.

And this combination of policies, according to the administration, will be sufficient to persuade our rivals and enemies to leave the field and cower in our presence.

BUT IN ADDITION TO ASKING THAT QUESTION OF WHETHER OR NOT the administration's use of fear to manipulate the political process was intentional, I think there is another question that urgently needs attention. How could our precious nation have become so uncharacteristically vulnerable to what became such an effective use of fear to manipulate our politics? After all, it is a serious indictment of our political discourse that almost three-quarters of all Americans were so easily led to believe, falsely, that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the attacks of September 11.

It is an indictment of the healthy functioning of our democracy that nearly half of all Americans still believe, falsely, that most of the hijackers on September 11 were Iraqis. It is also an indictment of the way our democracy is presently operating that more than 40 percent were so easily convinced that Iraq did in fact have nuclear weapons. When David Kay said, "we were all wrong," he was speaking for the administration and the intelligence community, and the national security experts. But he could just as easily have been speaking for the entire country.

So how did this happen in our beloved America? A free press is supposed to function as our democracy's immune system against such gross errors of fact and understanding. What happened? Well, for one thing there's been a dramatic change in the nature of what the philosopher Jurgen Habermas has described as the "structure of the public forum"--that is, the virtual space in which our political discourse takes place. The hard truth is that our national conversation no longer operates as it once did. Our public discourse is simply no longer as accessible to the vigorous and free exchange of ideas from individuals in the way those ideas were freely and vigorously exchanged during the period of our founding.

You could say that the age of print effectively ended in the early 1960s when television overtook newspapers as the source of information for the majority of America. And that gap has grown dramatically since then. Today only 17 percent of college students read newspapers. And the dominant medium of political discourse now is of course the 30-second television commercial.

Some of the neurologists and brain researchers who will speak at this conference will describe how images--not only the image of the planes hitting the towers and the Pentagon, but other images of murders on the six o'clock news--go straight to a part of the brain that is not mediated by language or reasoned analysis.

In the news business of today, the common saying--which I'm sure all have you have heard--is "if it bleeds, it leads." And then some add: "if it thinks, it stinks." And the competition is focused on who can, again to use the vernacular, "glue eyeballs to the screen."

The ownership of the media companies has also changed and it's now rare for a media operation to be an independent family business with a deep pride in its independence and a journalistic tradition that has survived over generations. They are now mostly part of conglomerates. (Does that make a difference? Perhaps another conference on another day.) But where the political system is concerned it is a fact that the leadership of the Republican Party is augmented by its links to the corporate ownership of these conglomerates that control the majority of media outlets that dominate the news delivery process today. This is a process of ownership change that is already so far advanced that it alarmed even some conservative Republican members of Congress and caused them to join with members of the Democratic Party to oppose the FCC's efforts to make the world of information even safer for monopoly.

There is still maneuvering to accelerate that consolidation process, and the president still hopes to carry the day. In any case, when errors of fact and judgment are no longer caught and attached by the natural immune system of our democracy it is time to examine the nature of that dysfunction and to promote the recovery of good health in our political discourse. The current dysfunction, after all, includes a growing part of the electronic media that is characterized by paranoia presented as entertainment. This is the part that allows drug-addled hypocrites, compulsive gamblers, and assorted religious bigots to masquerade as moral guides for the nation.

And what are the consequences? Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction.

THIS DISTURBING DEVELOPMENT ALSO REQUIRES US TO PAY MORE attention to the new discoveries about the way fear affects our thinking process. Again, the experts on the panels tomorrow have much that is new in their respective fields to share. I'm told by those who I respect in the fields of neurology and brain science that this era is similar to the era when Galileo first used the telescope to deliver a new understanding of the way our solar system actually operates. For most of the last century the study of the human brain was based on individuals who had freak accidents and unusual injuries, and the doctors would pay attention to what part of the brain was taken out by the injury. After careful observation of strange behaviors, they would slowly piece together which functions were controlled by the part of the brain that had been injured.

Now there is the equivalent of Galileo's telescope in brain science. And scientists are able to observe healthy brains in the midst of normal operation, and actively measure the electrical activity and the other indications of exactly what parts of the brain are most active at what times.

An entirely new understanding is emerging, and it is incredibly exciting. And one of the areas that has been richest in its contribution of new understandings about how we as human beings function is the area of inquiry that has to do with fear.

In political theory the common, if usually unstated, assumption is that citizens operate as rational human beings, reasoning their way through the problems that are presented in the political system as if every question, every problem, and every opportunity can be resolved into words and debated, analyzed rationally, and subjected to a discourse with others until there is a reasoned conclusion. But as these scientists will make clear tomorrow, that's actually not the way it works at all. There are other structures that operate, to a large degree, independently of the reasoning process. And when fear is activated it is very difficult to turn off.

Fear was activated on September 11 in all of us to a greater or lesser degree. And because it was difficult to modulate or to change in particular specifics, it was exploitable for a variety of purposes unrelated to the initial cause of the fear. When the president of the United States stood before the people of this nation--in the same speech in which he used the forged document--he asked the nation to "imagine" how fearful it would feel if Saddam Hussein gave a nuclear weapon to terrorists who then exploded it in our country. Because our nation had been subjected to the fearful, tragic, cruel attack of 9/11, when our president asked us to imagine with him a new fear, it was easy enough to bypass the reasoning process, and short-circuit the normal discourse that takes place in a healthy democracy with a give and take among people who could say, Wait a minute Mr. President. Where's your evidence? There is no connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

At one point, President Bush actually said, "You can't distinguish between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden." He actually said that. And once again because of what these experts will talk about in ways that I could never talk about tomorrow, the period following 9/11 was a time of great vulnerability for our country. And during that time, we placed our trust in President Bush.

I personally placed my trust in President Bush. I went to the Iowa Democratic Convention in the fall of 2001. And I had prepared--I don't mind telling you--during August of that year a very different kind of speech for the Iowa Democratic Convention. But in the aftermath of this tragedy I proudly, with complete and total sincerity, stood before the Democrats of Iowa and said, "George W. Bush is my president. I will follow him, as will we all, in this time of crisis."

I was one of millions who felt that same sentiment and gave to the president total trust and asked him lead us wisely and well.

He abused the trust of the American people by exploiting the fears of the American people in order to take this nation on an adventure that had been preordained and designed before the attacks of September 11 every took place. And the verdict of history will not be a kind one.

OUR FOUNDERS HAD A HEALTHY RESPECT FOR THE ROLE OF FEAR. THE root word for democracy--demos--meant to them as it means to us: the masses of common people, who at that time were an object of some fear in the minds of many who were founders of our nation. What they wanted was an orderly society in which property would be safe from arbitrary confiscation. After all, the Revolutionary War was, at least in significant measure, about taxation. And what they believed was that a too pure democracy would expose that new society to the ungoverned passions of what today some call the street--to the passions of people with little to lose whose angers could be all too easily aroused by demagogues (the same root again).

We need to compromise and balance out the conflicting agendas of two kinds of Americans: those who already have achieved material success and those who aspire to it; those who are happy with the status quo and those who can only accept the status quo if it is the jumping off place to something better for themselves. But that tension can never be fully resolved and it is perfectly clear at the present moment in the profoundly differing agendas of our two major parties.

Neither has the fear that underlies these differences gone away, however well it may at times be camouflaged. And shortly, I'm going to propose when I think it was that the Republican Party became, for the core group controlling it, merely the nameplate for the radical right in this country.

The radical right is, in fact, a coalition of those who fear other Americans as agents of treason, as agents of confiscatory government, as agents of immorality. This fear gives the modern Republican Party its well-noted cohesiveness and its equally well-noted practice of jugular politics.

Even in power, the modern Republican Party feels itself to be surrounded by hostility, beginning with the government itself, which it presents as an enemy. This extends to those elected representatives and senators in the opposition party, which the Republicans are presently shutting out of conference committees, and indeed shutting out of any meaningful participation in our nation's legislative and governmental and constitutional processes. And this extends ultimately onto that entire portion of the country whose views and hopes are represented by the other party, that is to say, half the nation.

Under these circumstances, it has become natural--perhaps tragic in the classical sense but nonetheless natural--for the modern Republican Party to be especially proficient in the use of fear as a technique for obtaining and holding power. This phenomenon was clear under President Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, except it was softened to an extent by the personalities of both men. Under our current President Bush, however, the machinery of fear is right out in the open, operating at full throttle.

Fear and anxiety have always been a part of life and always will be. Fear is ubiquitous and universal in every human society. It is a normal part of the human condition. But we have always defined progress by our success in managing through our fears. Christopher Columbus, Lewis and Clark, the Wright brothers, Neil Armstrong--all found success by challenging the unknown and overcoming fear with courage and with a sense of proportion that helped them overcome their real fears without being distracted by distorted and illusory fears.

As with individuals, nations succeed or fail and define their essential character by the way they challenge the unknown and cope with fear. Much depends on the quality of their leadership. If their leaders exploit their fears and use those fears to herd people in directions they might not otherwise choose, for purposes that are not honestly disclosed, then fear itself can quickly become a self-perpetuating and free-wheeling force that drains national will and weakens national character, diverting attention from real threats deserving of healthy and appropriate fear, sowing confusion about the essential choices that every nation must constantly make about its future.

Leadership means inspiring us to manage through our fears. Demagoguery means exploiting our fears for political gain. There is a crucial difference.

Fifty years ago, when the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union was raising tensions in the world and McCarthyism was threatening our liberties here at home, President Dwight Eisenhower said this: "Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America." But only 15 years later, when Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, became president, we saw the beginning of a major change in America's politics.

Nixon, in a sense, embodied that spirit of suppression and suspicion and fear that Eisenhower had denounced. And it first became apparent during the despicable midterm election of 1970, which was waged by Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew.

I saw that campaign first hand. My father, who was the bravest politician I have ever known, was slandered as unpatriotic because he opposed the Vietnam War, and was accused of being an atheist because he opposed a constitutional amendment to foster government-sponsored prayer in the public schools.

I was in the army at the time, on my way to Vietnam as an Army journalist in the engineers. I had leave the week of the election. "Law and Order," court-ordered busing, a campaign of fear emphasizing crime--these were the other big issues that year. It was a sleazy campaign by Nixon, one that is now regarded by political historians as a watershed, marking a sharp decline in the tone of our national discourse.

In many ways, George W. Bush reminds me of Nixon more than any other president.

Like Bush, Nixon subordinated virtually every principle to his hunger for reelection. He instituted wage and price controls with as little regard for his conservative principles as President Bush has shown in piling up trillions of dollars of debt. After the oil embargo of 1973, we now know from recently disclosed documents that Nixon threatened a military invasion of the oil fields of the Middle East. Today Bush has actually done it.

Both kept their true intentions secret. Like Bush, Nixon understood the political uses and misuses of fear. After Nixon was driven from office in disgrace, he confided in one of his regular interlocutors these words: "People react to fear, not love. The don't teach that in Sunday school," he said, "but it's true."

The night before that election 33 years and 3 months ago, Senator Ed Muskie of Maine spoke on national television and said, "There are only two kinds of politics. They're not radical and reactionary or conservative and liberal or even Democratic and Republican. There are only the politics of fear and the politics of trust.

"One says you are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you.

"The other says the world is a baffling and hazardous place but it can be shaped to the will of men.

"Cast your vote," he concluded, "for trust in the ancient traditions of this home for freedom."

The next day my father was defeated. Defeated by the politics of fear. But his courage in standing for principle made me proud and inspired me, so that I really felt that he had won something more important than an election.

In his speech that night he stood the old segregationist slogan on its head and defiantly promised, "The truth shall rise again."

I wasn't the only person who heard that promise, nor the only one for whom that hope still rings loudly and true. I hope and believe that this year the politics of fear will be defeated and the truth shall rise again.

Almost 3,000 years ago Solomon warned that where there is no vision the people perish. But the converse is also surely true. Where there is leadership with vision and moral courage the people will flourish and redeem Lincoln's prophesy at Gettysburg that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

A CONVERSATION WITH SENATOR BOB KERREY

BK: Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President. I, like you, have a much easier time finding moments when Republicans use the language of fear than I do when I use the language of fear.

There was a moment in the 2000 campaign when you, or probably your campaign, said to me, we'd like you to campaign for the vice president in the upper peninsula of Michigan and central Pennsylvania, because even though you voted for the Brady bill and the assault rifle ban, for some reason they trust you in those two states, and the Republicans are trying to provoke fear in those places that their guns will be taken away from them.

I went to both places and, after failing to persuade through logic, I found that my most successful approach was to say well, go ahead and vote for Bush if you want, but you're going to lose your job. You're going to lose your healthcare. You're going to lose your pension. But you will have your gun, so you can shoot yourself when it's all over.

Now, between the two of us, we've been involved directly as candidates in 12 campaigns; you 9 since 1976, and I've been a candidate 3 times since 1982. It seems to me as I think about the language of fear, and this is where I want to get your own perception, it seems to me that the fear is typically associated with some fear of loss of some kind.

The great moment was when LBJ suggested that if people voted for Goldwater, they would lose their lives in a nuclear conflagration. But fear of death, fear of loss of health, fear of loss of loved ones, fear of loss of self-respect, fear of loss of a job, your health insurance, and so forth--it seems to me those are the fears, the loss of your guns and fear for your own ability to practice religion--it is common to talk about those sorts of things in language that provokes fear on the part of the audience. I know you never did it, but I must confess I was party to it from time to time.

How do you see it? I mean, is it the fear of loss? What is it the people are afraid of 7 Why does fear motivate?

Vice President Gore: Well, I think there are all kinds of fears, and the main point that I get from these folks that are going to be part of the panels tomorrow is that whatever the cause of the fear, the phenomenon itself is difficult to turn off once it's turned on.

Now, some fears that connect to life and death are obviously the ones that really grab people. But other fears, like the fear of unemployment, are very real, and very powerful, but different. I'm concerned about the economy; incidentally I was the first one laid off in this administration. I can tell you, you never forget something like that. It was just before noon on January 20.

But fear, as I think about it, can be a very healthy thing. It is a natural part of life. We are hardwired to experience fear.

Part of the essence of the human condition is that the intricate design of our species that resulted from our long period of evolution--and I'm always sensitive about getting into evolution. We had a trial my in my home state on this, and we lost--or our creation through evolution, if you prefer, is not always perfectly consistent with the kinds of lives we now live in a modern urban civilization.

The basic fear module, again, is one that goes back to a point very early in our evolution. When we later developed a higher order of thinking, we gained an advantage, obviously, in being able to pick up earlier indications of some emerging threats. We gained the ability to conceptualize instead of just perceive threats. But that meant we also gained the ability to conceptualize imaginary threats. And in groups, if people are led and persuaded to conceptualize threats that are not real, those can also activate the fear response.

Some of the people that you talked to in the upper peninsula and in Pennsylvania had been led to believe that government agents were going to come in and take their guns away from them, together with their ability to defend themselves and their families. This wasn't a real fear, as you and I understood, but to them it felt real.

I'm told there is a phenomenon called "vicarious traumatization." Just as we can conceive of something that activates the amygdala and starts that fear response, if somebody else, a family member, or a member of a group with which we identify, has experienced a traumatic event, it can be communicated to someone who didn't directly experience it. The physical effects--the blood pressure going up, the heart rate increasing--all of those effects are the same as if that individual had actually directly experienced it. When you look at the way this relates to memory, it becomes particularly powerful and troublesome.

One of the discussions in psychology that everybody's been talking about in recent years is posttraumatic stress disorder. This involves rape victims, child-abuse victims, combat veterans--you and I both know people who experienced that in Vietnam, Bob. According to the explanation of it that was given to me, normally when an experience is translated into memory, it's kind of given a sort of "time tag." When you recall that memory later on, you can say, well, that was "before this and after that." Or it was 10 weeks ago or 11 weeks ago.

But when it's a traumatic experience, all bets are off, because then it's coded differently, and the amygdala is activated and the memory is stored differently, so that when it's recalled later on, it doesn't have a time tag. So it feels present. And the memory then has the ability to activate the fear response in the present moment, even though the event occurred a long time ago--because it feels like it's happening right now.

If you combine that phenomenon with the group "vicarious victimization" mechanism, here are two examples of what you get.

In the early summer of 2001, Tipper and I went to Greece. The pope went to Greece while we were there, and he was met by thousands of angry demonstrators holding signs and yelling epithets. I investigated what was going on, and it turned out that they were angry about something that had happened 800 years ago. The Fourth Crusade stopped off in Constantinople on the way to Jerusalem and sacked the city, weakened it for the later overthrow by the Turks. Some people are very angry about that today, 800 years later.

Here's a second quick example: Slobodan Milosevic, in the early summer of 1989, went to the plains of Kosovo on the 600th anniversary of the battle that defeated the Serbian empire in its heyday. The Serbian media said a million and a half people came. And even according to Western estimates, at least a million people came, and were physically present, covering the hillsides to listen to that speech. Milosevic revivified the battle of 600 years earlier and the people felt the pain and victimization. In the immediate aftermath of that collective retraumatization, a genocide began first against the Croats and then the Bosnians and the Kosovars--because there was a vicarious experience of a trauma six centuries earlier that activated in the physical bodies of the individuals present in this generation a response as if they were living through that fear of so long ago.

If you look at the conflicts on the Indian subcontinent, if you look at the conflict in Sri Lanka, you look at the conflicts in Africa, you look at Northern Ireland, the Middle East, indeed, if you look at almost every conflict zone in the entire world, it has an element of "amygdala politics" based on "vicarious traumatization," feeding off a memory of past tragedies.

Now, how does our political process address that? Through reasoned discourse? It's insufficient, and we need a new politics that uses new mechanisms like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa or mechanisms that are not yet invented to deal with the interaction of the fears and the reasoning process.

BK: I've listened to Democratic candidates in this presidential campaign, and one of the things I hear, I don't know if it's intentional so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say it's unintentional, causes people to be afraid of the forces of globalism.

Look at China or India. There are four or five million people in China, living on a buck a day, who need jobs. We say in the United States of America, fine, we're for you getting all those jobs, but please don't try to sell us our cotton at world prices. Please don't try to sell us some of your other products at world prices. We're going to put trade policies in place. And that's the problem. It seems to me that I hear, when I listen closely, that somehow I can stop this.

I heard Warren Buffett say, in a rather grisly metaphor, that from 1914 to 1918 there was a great leap forward in productivity in American agriculture, going from horses for power to tractors for power as a result of the Great War and the loss of productivity in Europe. He said there were 6 million horses that were slaughtered over that four-year period. Then he went on to say that if horses could have voted, it's unlikely that would have happened.

It seems to me that, from our side as well, we use the language of fear to try to get people to say there may be something they can do to stop natural forces and stop the losses that all of us, again, understandably don't want to have in our lives.

AG: I think there's fear and then there's fear. And I think that at least two categories ought to be maintained.

Fear of the economic consequences flowing from a particular set of policies may be very significant and motivating for people, but that's different from the fear that a terrorist is going to set off a nuclear weapon in the city where you live. And economic fears are also different from the kind of fear of violent crime that Nixon used in a very despicable way in that 1970 campaign.

Where physical survival is connected to the conjured fear, it has a qualitatively different aspect. Again, even those fears should be and can be talked about in a responsible way if they're real and if they're dealt with in a way that has integrity. Anything can be translated into a fear of its consequences or a fear of something having to do with it. But I don't think it's the same as exploiting the fear of terrorism.

BK: I don't disagree that there are qualitative differences. Let me take another example. You came to Washington as a member of the House of Representatives, representing the fourth district of Tennessee in 1977, I guess. That was your first year. And over that period of time the capitol has been converted into a fortress as a result of what I think is a rather irrational fear of the loss of physical life.

It seems to me that this irrational fear that you're talking about has a nonpolitical origin as well, that one of the things that may be going on in the American political system--the question is, have we, in general, independent of the language that's being used, are we more afraid than we need to be? Is there a greater existential fear today, in 2004, than we need to have?

AG: Yes.

BK: Especially here in the United States of America?

AG: I think there is. One of your conference participants tomorrow has a powerful presentation contrasting the actual statistics on specific threats going down, down, down and the measured fear of those same threats going up, up, up." When the television portrayal of those threats goes up, the manifestations of fear go up accordingly. People who watch the television news routinely have the impression that the cities where they live are far more dangerous than they actually are, because there is an economic advantage for the local news stations that show the crime story first and foremost.

Now the national news, particularly a lot of the national morning programs, will start now with crime stories like that, and God forbid that there's some kind of chase of a criminal out there the television stations will show it for hours and hours because it has a compelling aspect to it.

So I think, yes, fear goes up even when the rational basis for it goes down.

NOTES

* See the essay by Barry Glassner, "Narrative Techniques of Fear Mongering," in this volume.

Amygdala Politics II

2006-07-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

Found it, with a little help from a Google cache entry from a Canadian blog and the Wayback Machine. Since it's not posted anywhere else online, I am taking the liberty of posting it in full here:

As Prepared for Delivery Remarks By Al Gore February 5, 2004
Thank you for inviting me to speak at this timely conference on the Uses and Misuses of Fear in our political system in America.
It is an honor to be part of a program that includes so many distinguished scholars who, unlike me, have genuine expertise in these matters. And I want to acknowledge that I have already learned a lot from them by reading some of what they have written and by calling some of them on the telephone before trying to organize my own thoughts on this topic.
It's also a personal pleasure to share a dais with my friend and former Senate colleague Bob Kerrey, who brings to this discussion not only his experience in political and academic leadership but also - it bears noting because of the subject of our discussions here - his extraordinary personal example of how to stare down the fear of death and lead with raw courage in circumstances that are hard for the rest of us to imagine.
We are meeting, moreover, in a city that has itself been forced to learn how to conquer terror. And because we are gathered very close to Ground Zero, we should of course begin our deliberations with a moment of respect and remembrance for those who died on September 11th and for those who have been bereaved.
Terrorism, after all, is the ultimate misuse of fear for political ends. Indeed, its specific goal is to distort the political reality of a nation by creating fear in the general population that is hugely disproportionate to the actual danger the terrorists are capable of posing.
That is one of the reasons it was so troubling last week when the widely respected arms expert David Kay concluded a lengthy and extensive investigation in Iraq for the Bush Administration with these words: "We were all wrong."

The real meaning of Kay's devastating verdict is that for more than two years, President Bush and his administration have been distorting America's political reality by force-feeding the American people a grossly exaggerated fear of Iraq that was hugely dis-proportionate to the actual danger posed by Iraq.
How could that happen? Could it possibly have been intentional?
Well, there are some clues... the fear campaign aimed at Iraq was timed for the kickoff of the midterm election campaign of 2002 - you know, the one where Max Cleland, who lost three limbs fighting for America in Vietnam, was accused of being unpatriotic. The curious timing was explained by the President's chief of staff as a marketing decision - timed for the post-labor day advertising period.
For everything there is a season - particularly the politics of fear.
And it did serve to distract attention from pesky domestic issues like the economy, which were, after all, beginning to worry the White House in the summer of 2002.
And of course there is now voluminous evidence that the powerful clique inside the administration that had been agitating for war against Iraq since before the inauguration immediately seized upon the tragedy of 9-11 as a terrific opportunity to accomplish what they had not been able to do beforehand: invade a country that had not attacked us and didn't threaten us.
They were clever and they managed to get the job done. But some deceitfulness took place somehow.

The so-called intelligence was stretched beyond recognition, distorted and mis-represented. Some of it that the President personally presented to the American people on national television in his State of the Union address turned out to have been actually forged by someone - though we still don't know who, (and amazingly enough, the White House still doesn't seem to really care who forged the document.)
The CIA had warned his staff not to let him use that particular document, but there was some kind of regrettable communications foulup inside the National Security Council.
But now the President has expressed his determination to find out who is actually responsible for the intelligence being "all wrong".
Over the past 18 months, I have delivered a series of speeches addressing different aspects of President Bush's agenda, including his decision to go to war in Iraq under patently false pretenses, his dangerous assault on Civil Liberties here at home, his outrageously fraudulent economic policy, and his complete failure to protect the global environment. Initially, my purposes were limited in each case to the subject matter of the speech. However, as I tried to interpret what was driving these various policies, certain common features became obvious and a clear pattern emerged: in every case there was a determined disinterest in the facts; an inflexible insistence on carrying out preconceived policies regardless of the evidence concerning what might work and what clearly would not; a consistent bias favoring the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the broader public interest; and a marked tendency to develop policies in secret, avoid accountability to the public, the Congress or the Press; and a disturbing willingness to misrepresent the true nature of the policy involved. And no matter what the issue, it is now clear that in every instance they have resorted to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit debate and drive the public agenda.
The Administration did not hesitate to heighten and distort public fear of terrorism after September 11th, to create a political case for attacking Iraq. Iraq was said to be working hand in hand with Al Queda. Iraq was said to be on the verge of a nuclear weapons capability. Defeating Saddam Hussein was conflated into bringing war to the terrorists, even though what it really meant was diverting resources away from the pursuit of the people who attacked us, and causing us to lose focus on that task.
The administration also did not hesitate to use fear of terrorism to launch a broadside attack on measures that have been in place for a generation to prevent a repetition of gross abuses of authority by the FBI and by the intelligence community at the height of the Cold War.
I served on the House Select Committee on Intelligence immediately after the period when the revelations of these abuses led to major reforms. Conservatives on that panel resisted those changes tooth and nail. They have long memories, and now these same constraints have been targeted in the Patriot Act and have been sharply diminished or removed. And the President wants the Patriot Act extended and made permanent.
Neither did the administration have any scruples about using fear of terrorists as a means to punch holes in the basic protections of the Constitution: to create a class of permanent prisoners; to make it possible to imprison Americans without due process; to totally sequester information not just from the people, but from the congress and the courts - all justified by recourse to fear.
Our nation has gone through other periods in our history when the misuse of fear resulted in abuses of civil liberties: The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare after World War I, the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, and the McCarthy abuses of the Cold War. After each of these periods of excess we have felt ashamed and have tried to make up for the abuses.
And although we have not yet entered the period of regret and atonement this time around, it is already obvious that we are now in a period of regrettable excess.
The administration did not hesitate to use economic fear of recession as a means to put in place its tax cuts, massively benefiting the wealthiest while loading debt on the rest of the country for generations to come. It used fear of energy shortage to build an energy policy made to order for the oil industry at the expense of the rest of us.
It used the fear that we would lose competitive-ness to block responsible action to deal with global warming, and has by that action mortgaged not only us but our children and their children to consequences unmitigated by any acts of foresight in this generation.
Meanwhile, even the Chinese have passed us in fuel economy standards for new automobiles.
It uses fear of the problems of old age to contrive an illusory drug bill that essential transfers billions from the people to the pockets of vast pharmaceutical interests. It does not hesitate to use fear even of God not only to pronounce its views on marriage but to impose them on the nation as a constitutional amendment.
At the level of our relations with the rest of the world, the Administration has willingly traded in respect for the United States in favor of fear: that is the real meaning of "shock and awe." It is this administration's theory that American "dominance" -- coupled with a doctrine of pre-emptive strikes (regardless of whether the threat is imminent or not; today George Tenet made it clear that the CIA never said Iraq was an imminent threat) will be sufficient to persuade our rivals and enemies to leave the field.
But there is another querstion that I believe urgently needs attention: how could our nation have become so vulnerable to such an effective use of fear to manipulate our politics? After all, it is a serious indictment of our political discourse that almost three-quarters of all Americans were so easily led to believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attacks of September 11th-that nearly half of all Americans still believe that most of the hijackers were Iraqis - and that more than 40 percent were so easily convinced that Iraq did in fact have nuclear weapons.
A free press is supposed to function as our Democracy's immune system against such gross errors of fact and understanding. What happened?
Well, for one thing, there has been a dramatic change in what the philosopher Jurgen Habermas describes as the structure of the public forum. It is simply no longer as accessible to the free exchange of ideas, which flowed during the Enlightenment. The Age of Print effectively ended in the 1960's when television overtook newspapers - and the gap has grown dramatically since then.
The ownership of the media companies has also changed. The leadership of the Republican party is augmented by its links to the corporate ownership of the conglomerates that control most of our media: a process already so far advanced that it alarmed even conservative members of Congress and caused them to join to oppose the FCC's efforts to make the world of information safe for monopoly.
Though the President is still out-maneuvering them.
And this after all, includes a growing part of the media characterized by paranoia presented as entertainment - the part that allows drug-addled hypocrites, compulsive gamblers, and assorted religious bigots to mascarade as moral guides for the nation.
What are the consequences? Fear drives out reason.
It suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. It also requires us to pay more attention to the new discoveries about the way fear affects our brains...
The root word for democracy - "demos" - meant the masses of common people, who were an object of fear in the minds of many of our country's founders. What they wanted was an orderly society in which property would be safe from arbitrary confiscation (remember the Revolutionary War was in significant measure about taxation). What they believed was that a too pure democracy would expose that society to the ungoverned passions of what today we call "the street:" of people with little to lose, whose angers could be all too easily aroused by demagogues (note the root, again) and turned against those with wealth. So the Constitution of which we are so proud is really an effort - based at least as much on fear as on hope -- to compromise and balance out the conflicting agendas of two kinds of Americans:
those who already have achieved material success, and those who aspire to it: those who are happy with the status quo, and those who can only accept the status quo if it is the jumping off place to something better for themselves. That tension can never be fully resolved, and it is perfectly clear at the present moment in the profoundly differing agendas of our two major parties.
Neither has the fear that underlies these differences gone away, however well it may be camouflaged.
Somewhere along the line, the Republican Party became merely the name plate for the radical right in this country. The radical right is, in fact, a coalition of those who fear other Americans: as agents of treason; as agents of confiscatory government; as agents of immorality. This fear gives the modern Republican Party its well-noted cohesiveness and its equally well-noted practice of jugular politics.
Even in power, the modern Republican Party feels itself to be surrounded by hostility: beginning with government itself, which they present as an enemy; extending to those in the opposition party; and ultimately, on to that portion of the country whose views and hopes are represented by it - that is to say, to virtually, half the nation. Under these circumstances, it is natural - perhaps tragic in the classical sense - but nonetheless natural - for the modern Republican Party to be especially proficient in the use of fear as a technique for obtaining and holding power.
This phenomenon was clear under both President's Reagan and Bush Sr., except softened to an extent by the personalities of both men. Under our current President Bush, however, the machinery of fear is right out in the open, operating at full throttle.
Fear and anxiety have always been a part of life and always will be. Fear is ubiquitous and universal, in every human society, a normal part of the human condition. But we have always defined progress by our success in managing through our fears. Christopher Columbus... Lewis and Clark... the Wright Brothers... and Neil Amstrong - all found success by challenging the unknown and overcoming fear with courage and a keen sense of proportion that helped them overcome real fears without being distracted by distorted and illusory fears.
As with individuals, nations succeed or fail - and define their essential character - by the way they challenge the unknown and cope with fear. And much depends upon the quality of their leadership.
If their leaders exploit their fears and use them to herd people in directions they might not otherwise choose, then fear itself can quickly become a self- perpetuating and free-wheeling force that drains national will and weakens national character, diverting attention from real threats deserving of healthy and appropriate concern, and sowing confusion about the essential choices that every nation must constantly make about its future.
Leadership means inspiring us to manage through our fears. Demagoguery means exploiting our fears for political gain.
50 years ago, when the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union was raising tensions in the world and McCarthyism was threatening freedom at home, President Eisenhower said, "Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America." But only 15 years later, when Ike's V-P, Richard Nixon, finally became President, it marked the beginning of a big change in America's politics.
Nixon embodied the spirit of "suppression and suspicion and fear" that Eisenhower denounced. And it first bcame apparent in the despicable midterm election campaign of 1970 waged by Nixon and Vice President Agnew.
I saw that campaign first hand: my father, the bravest politician I have ever known, was slandered as unpatriotic because he opposed the Vietnam War and accused of being an atheist because he opposed a Constitutional Amendment to allow government-sponsored prayer in the public schools.
I was in the Army at the time - on my way to Vietnam. I had a leave the week of the election. "Law and Order," and court-ordered "busing" for racial integration of the schools were the other big issues. It was a sleazy campaign by Nixon - one that is now regarded as a watershed marking a sharp decline in the tone of our national discourse.
In many ways, George W. Bush reminds me more of Nixon than any other previous president. Like Bush, Nixon subordinated virtually every principal to his hunger for reelection. He instituted wage and price controls with as little regard for his "conservative" principals as Bush has shown in piling up trillions of dollars of debt.
After the oil embargo of 1973, Nixon threatened a military invasion of the oil fields of the Middle East. Now Bush has actually done it. Both kept their true intentions secret.
Like Bush, Nixon understood the political uses and misuses of fear. After he was driven from office in disgrace, one of Nixon's confidants quoted Nixon as having told him this: "People react to fear, not love. They don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true."
The night before that election, 33 years and 3 months ago, Senator Ed Muskie of Maine spoke on national television for the Democrats and said, "There are only two kinds of politics. They are not radical and reactionary, or conservative and liberal. Or even Democrat and Republican. There are only the politics of fear and the politics of trust.
"One says: You are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you.
"The other says: The world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men. ...(C)ast your vote for trust ...in the ancient traditions of this home for freedom...."
The next day my father was defeated. Defeated by the politics of fear. But his courage in standing for principle made me so proud that I really felt he had won something more important than an election.
In his speech that night, he stood the old segregationist slogan on its head and defiantly promised: "The truth shall rise again!" I wasn't the only person who heard that promise. Nor the only one for whom that hope still rings loudly and true.
I hope and believe that this year the politics of fear will be defeated and the truth shall rise again.
Almost 3,000 years ago, Solomon warned that where there is no vision, the people perish. But the converse is also surely true: where there is leadership with vision and moral courage, the people will flourish and redeem Lincoln's prophesy at Gettysberg: that government of the people: by the people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.

Amygdala Politics

2006-07-11T21:25:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking recently about a speech that Al Gore made a year or so ago, in which he coined the phrase "amygdala politics". The topic of the speech was the use of fear in politics in the post-9/11 era, and his analysis was dead-on.

I wanted to provide some quotes here, but I can't seem to find a reference to the original speech anywhere online. Does anyone have the text?

The Natural Progression

2006-07-07T15:05:00.000-07:00

Commenting on the process of political change, Gandhi famously said: "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

As one ponders the way that the MSM characterization of blogging has moved from "blog-a-what-now?" to "guys in pajamas" to "blogofascists", one can't help but think that the political movement inspiring the so-called netroots is following the same progression. Cheer up, liberals -- you're 3/4 of the way there!

Will a Lamont win over Lieberman be the first victory in a resurgence of old-school liberal politics? Keep watching...