(Scharzenegger quote pointed out by Ghost in the Machine 2004-09-01.)

Arnold Schwarzenegger, speech to the Republican National Convention, 2004-08-31:

My fellow immigrants, my fellow Americans, how do you know if you are a Republican? Well, I tell you how. If you believe that government should be accountable to the people, not the people to the government, then you are a Republican.

Zell Miller, speech to the Republican National Convention supporting George W. Bush, 2004-09-01 (emphasis added):

In the summer of 1940, I was an 8-year-old boy living in a remote little Appalachian valley. Our country was not yet at war, but even we children knew that there were some crazy man across the ocean who would kill us if they could.

President Roosevelt, in a speech that summer, told America, All private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger.

In 1940, Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee. And there is no better example of someone repealing their “private plans” than this good man.

He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the time.

And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.

(This passage got loud applause and vocal cheers from the Republican audience.)

Hiding the Truth? President Bush’s Need-to-Know Democracy by Stephen Pizzo:

It’s been said that the first casualty of war is always truth. But with the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, it’s hard to know, because even before 9/11 the administration had begun hermetically sealing formerly public sources of government information.

It began when Vice President Dick Cheney refused to provide details of his energy task force meetings with energy companies, particularly top Enron officials. Then, came President George Bush’s November 2001 executive order allowing the administration or former presidents to order executive branch documents withheld from the public. At the time, the administration said the new restriction on presidential papers was to protect the privacy of former presidents and those they dealt with while in office.

But, the order also shields from public view documents from President Bush’s father’s term in office that could be awkward now. The suspicion was that the executive order was designed to protect several current White House officials who served in the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations from embarrassment –specifically, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and former Budget Director Mitch Daniels, Jr.

Each official had brushes with controversial policies in earlier administrations — not the least of which was the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. The elder Bush, then-Vice President, maintained he was out of the loop. Documents in the Reagan archives might contradict that version of history.

Both Cheney’s refusal to hand over his energy task force documents, and the presidential order shielding past administrations’ archived documents caused uproars among open-government advocates, historians and members of Congress.

. . .

Effectively, keeping secrets means never having to say you’re sorry. It also means never having to admit you made a terrible mistake, or even lied.

White House press flack Ari Fleischer:

They’re reminders to all Americans that they need to, to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that. It never is!

John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States of America, 2001:

To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberties, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists — for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.

I suppose that I’ll read some of the commentary on the speech tomorrow. But, as happens so often with this administration, it’s just the same damned stuff, and there’s little to do other than repeat what you’ve already said. Thus, here is my summary and commentary for the night:

Are you surprised by anything that’s been said by anyone at this convention? If so, why the hell are you surprised? Why even bother talking about it at length? When the Bush League give speeches, they just lie. There’s very little left to be surprised at; save your indignation for throwing the bastards out.

In his comments on my post yesterday, Mark Noonan asks what my answer to his challenge is–to wit:

We’ve given the left a pass long enough — its [sic] time for those who are of leftwing opinion to make their final call: which side of the river are you on? If you’re on America’s side, then you want total and overwhelming US victory — and just to really spell it out; this means that our enemies are dead or begging for mercy. I challenge you — choose, and let you be known for what you are by what you choose — patriot, or traitor.

The easy answer would be to say that I don’t take the challenge seriously (which I don’t) and that I regard the question Do you want complete American victory in Iraq, or are you of another opinion? as fundamentally confused (which I do). However, perhaps it will be best to lead off by repeating what I said the last time Mr. Noonan asked me for my opinion on the matter:

Finally, even if you were to convince me that Kennedy is entirely in the wrong, I could not possibly see it as an instance of the general principle that you set out: “If you’re on America’s side, then you want total and overwhelming US victory — and just to really spell it out; this means that our enemies are dead or begging for mercy.” It could not be an instance of that principle because the principle is jingoistic claptrap that is obviously and wretchedly false–not to mention dangerous to basic points of republican virtue.

The highest form of love is the love of the virtue in the beloved, and those who are truly “on America’s side”–in any sense of the word that would make it an attitude worth having–are those who want America to live up to its better self. Whether that involves victory in war or not depends entirely on whether the war in question is just or unjust; even if you are right (as I think you are not) that support for this war is righteous, the idea of extending unconditional support for victory in any war that the United States government has committed itself to strikes me as nothing more than belligerent foolishness.

To that I should only add that, as I have argued in The War on Iraq One Year On and What You Mean “We”?, the assault on Iraq and the on-going occupation were not and are not, in fact, anything approaching just or righteous, and that it is becoming more obvious with every day just how ridiculous the demand to take a side is–where the only sides on offer are the Imperial Legions of the United States and the newly sovereign Iraqi junta, on the one side, and terrorist jihadis aligned with thugs such as Muqtada al-Sadr, on the other. If those are the two sides of the river, I would rather drown.

I am not on the United States government’s side. Nor am I on the jihadis’ side. (As a secessionist republic of one, I have an official policy of non-alignment in this conflict.) I don’t think that loyalty to any side in any conflict is, or can be, a virtue unless it is conditioned by loyalty for the truth and for justice, and what I’ve repeatedly argued in this space is that there is precious little of those in the Bush Administration’s case for war or practice of the war and occupation. (And the same, of course, goes for Mr. al-Sadr and his militia.) If I am on anyone’s side, it is innocent Iraqis who continue to be caught in the crossfire and to have their freedoms squelched, their rights trodden upon, their dignity insulted, and their lives and livelihoods destroyed, by two gangs caught in a bloody, apparently endless turf war.

The best thing that the U.S. government could achieve at this point would be to make it right to what degree they can. And that would mean:complete and immediate withdrawal, an official apology, and war reparations to Iraqi civilians maimed or dispossessed by the war and occupation–or to their heirs if they were among the tens of thousands killed. (The funds for reparations should, ideally, be expropriated from the personal fortunes of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, Tom DeLay, Tony Blair, Jack Straw, José Maria Aznar, Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay Hussein, Tariq Aziz, Ahmad Chalabi, et cetera.)

That’s not “complete victory,” in any sense, but there is an important sense in which–since “victory” is, by definition, something worth having, and since it is not worthwhile to achieve dominance in an unjust war–there is no victory possible for the American military in Iraq. There is only conquest. And mere conquest is not something worth having, nor is it something worth wishing for your friends to have.

CSPAN is always a bit hard-up for programming at 12 in the morning, except when a marathon Congressional debate happens to be stretching into the long, cold hours. Tonight they’ve managed to do–maybe without realizing it–quite a public service, for those who had the chance to see it: they replayed, in its entirety, a remarkable episode of the Dick Cavett show from 1971, featuring a debate between a 27-year-old John F. Kerry, representing Vietnam Veterans for the War, and John O’Neill, representing a small administration front-group calling itself Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. In a generation endlessly bombarded with pre-packaged popcult nostalgia, where whole channels are devoted to sit-com reruns and to musical has-beens, this is something unique, and valuable: a chance to sit your fat ass in front of the television and see some actual political history–some of the stuff that people were actually worried about in the 1970s. Of course, that remembering and witnessing basic points of the political debate at a time so recent in living memory counts as mining history, by the standards of our day, is sad enough in itself–but that is another diatribe for another time.

John Kerry testifies before Congress in 1971

As for the show itself: it’s interesting, but I’m not really that concerned with the current well-publicized flap between Mr. Kerry and Mr. O’Neill, or how the Cavett debate illuminates it. It’s obvious that Mr. O’Neill is a two-bit character assassin; and it’s also obvious that he’s a dishonest tool. You could tell that from his recent appearances, and you could tell it from his endless, vituperative red herrings from the encounter in 1971. Nothing new here. And while I do think that the tenor and the conduct of the debate–where, for all of Mr. O’Neill’s interruptions and hectoring, Mr. Kerry’s tightly-argued case was given the space and time and moderation to win the audience over by force of reason–is remarkable as a point of contrast to Howler Monkey cognitive style that is so favored in contemporary public debate, that’s also not what grabs my attention most tonight. What I’m more interested in is what Mr. Kerry said then, when he was younger and wiser:

I want to know why we can’t set a date when we know that the prisoners will come home, when we know that people will stop being maimed for the most senseless purpose in the world …

…

Whether or not the group on the other side knows it or not–in fact, they should change their name from Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace to Vietnam Veterans for a Continued War because that in fact is really what Vietnamization is. It is nothing more than a way of getting the United States out of Vietnam by changing the colors of the bodies in that country. It’s a military solution in a problem that requires a very, very sophisticated political solution. And all that it will do in the end is possibly intricate us into a much, much deeper war than we are in now or at least allow us to withdraw in time for the elections of next year when the president can say, Yes, indeed, we did withdraw, at which time more Americans will have lost their lives and more Vietnamese will have lost their lives needlessly.

…

The bigger issue at hand is the question literally of how the United States is going to get out of Vietnam now, and I have said again and again this evening that we can set a date, that we can bring the prisoners home, but the point is I think this administration is still seeking some kind of victory over there.

…

as long as you do not settle the political question of how the Vietnamese communists are going to fit in to some kind of regime, as long as you continue the hypocrisy of saying that we are fighting for a democracy when you have a regime which only recently passed a law which may not let them have other candidates in an election, which has some 40 thousand to 100 to 200 thousand political prisoners in jail, which 14 days ago closed down–excuse me–10 days ago closed down 14 newspapers because they printed a key speech about the corruption of the government, as long as we’re supporting this kind of government that doesn’t allow representative forces to be part of it, you are asking for trouble, and that’s what we’re doing.

…

But I’m glad you’ve raised the question of the Pentagon Papers because I think that … they are a terribly, terribly important aspect of what has happened because they do show–well, they show a great many things and they are partially incomplete, but they certainly show the duplicity and the deceit which has been involved in building up this war because clearly there was a peace candidate who ran in 1964 who was not a peace candidate, and clearly we had–we were committing aggressive acts against–covert warfare against Laos and against North Vietnam prior–without telling the American people. We’ve been bombing Laos now for seven years, and only this year the American people were told, and I think that this typifies a great deal of the most recent approach of the American government to the people, that they’ve shown a kind of disdain for the ability of the American people to determine for themselves the difference between right and wrong, and I think clearly that when it comes to a question of sending men off to fight and to die, the people of this country have the ability to make that decision for themselves.

–John F. Kerry, on the Dick Cavett show in 1971. You can read a decent full transcript online from an anti-John Kerry hatchet site.

John Kerry hangs out in Congress, 2004

What is it about walking in the halls of power that has put John Kerry so far away from the man who said these words in 1971, with a sense of urgency and earnest moral conviction? When did the mental and moral rot of national honor and winning the peace sink in? Why doesn’t he seem to believe, anymore, that we have a real duty to honestly account for the human costs of a seemingly endless, futile counter-insurgency war?

Why doesn’t he see how living up to his younger seriousness and earnestness would help him (both morally and practically)? Is it controversial, at this point, that Vietnam was a dreadful mistake? How much longer will it be controversial that the Iraq war and the ongoing occupation are also dreadful mistakes, for almost exactly the same reasons as in Vietnam? Why doesn’t Kerry feel that he can connect with the people he’s trying to win over on these grounds? (Hell, when Kerry is facing a steady barrage of character-assassination over how he spent the late 1960s and early 1970s, why aren’t the Democrats paying to run the tapes of this show during prime-time?)

And why don’t we, as citizens, remember what it was like then, and what he was like then? Why can’t we do a better job of urging Mr. Kerry to live up to his best self, and hold him to the standards that he set for himself three decades ago?

Utah Phillips put it this way, and I think he was right: The long memory is the most radical idea in America.

In other news, Senator Kerry tried to head off charges of inconsistent dithering by announcing the other day that he still would have voted for the Iraq war even if he’d known it was all a bunch of goddamned lies. Mr. Bush responded by claiming that this vindicated his bunch of goddamned lies and attempted to slam Mr. Kerry by saying My opponent has found a new nuance–apparently suggesting that nuanced political positions are a sign of weakness. May God continue to bless America, and may God have mercy on our souls.

Further reading

• GT 2003/11/11: Winning the Peace

(I owe the link on Al-Jazeera to Roderick’s News from the Front)

Now that Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical regime is nothing more than a terrible memory, and resistance to the new, friendly, liberal regime is just about almost sorta kinda crushed, we can no doubt look forward to dramatic progress toward the creation of a vigorous, free, American-style democracy in Iraq. For example:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Police ordered Al-Jazeera’s employees out of their newsroom Saturday after the Iraqi government accused the Arab satellite channel of inciting violence and closed its office for 30 days.

Iraqi Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib said the closure was intended to give the station a chance to re-adjust their policy against Iraq.

They have been showing a lot of crimes and criminals on TV, and they transfer a bad picture about Iraq and about Iraqis and encourage criminals to increase their activities, he said. We want to protect our people.

from Iraqi Government Shuts Al-Jazeera Station, the Guardian 2004-08-08

You might think I’m just being sarcastic–and very heavy-handedly so. Not at all: I really do think that, in spite of many obvious differences, the new state of Iraq and the polity of the United States are growing more alike with every passing day:

Michael Moore may be prevented from advertising his controversial new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, on television or radio after July 30 if the Federal Election Commission (FEC) today accepts the legal advice of its general counsel.

At the same time, a Republican-allied 527 soft-money group is preparing to file a complaint against Moore’s film with the FEC for violating campaign-finance law.

In a draft advisory opinion placed on the FEC’s agenda for today’s meeting, the agency’s general counsel states that political documentary filmmakers may not air television or radio ads referring to federal candidates within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election.

The opinion is generated under the new McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, which prohibits corporate-funded ads that identify a federal candidate before a primary or general election.

. . .

The FEC ruling may also affect promotion of a slew of other upcoming political documentaries and films, such as “Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War,” which opens in August, “The Corporation,” about democratic institutions being subsumed by the corporate agenda, or “Silver City,” a recently finished film by John Sayles that criticizes the Bush administration.

. . .

Since the FEC considers the Republican presidential convention scheduled to begin Aug. 30 a national political primary in which Bush is a candidate, Moore and other politically oriented filmmakers could not air any ad mentioning Bush after July 30.

from Fahrenheit 9/11 ban?, The Hill 2004-06-24

Welcome to the new Iraq and the new America: where democracy is defended by giving the State massive new powers over citizens, and where speech is free as long as you don’t criticize the government.