Op-Ed

I gave John Edwards more money than I've given to any candidate in my life, and I'm glad I did. He raised critical issues about America's economic divides, and got them on the Democratic agenda. He was the first major candidate to stake out strong comprehensive platforms on global warming and health care. He hammered away on the Iraq war, even using scarce campaign resources to run ads during recent key Senate votes. He'd have made a powerful nominee—and president.

I've been going through my mourning for a while for his campaign not getting more traction, so his withdrawal announcement didn't shock me. But sad as I am about his departure, I feel good about being able to switch my support to Barack Obama, and will do all I can to help him win.

“Many in this chamber understand that America must not fail in Iraq, because you understand that the consequences of failure would be grievous and far-reaching . . .”

There it is again, that choking lie, so smoothly administered — with just enough fear to help America gag down all that righteousness.

President Bush told it again in his final State of the Union address the other night, of course. What choice did he have? The truth, coming from him at this point, would be . . . too weird, too offensive, impossible to comprehend.

But the truth is that we’ve already failed in Iraq, and throughout the Middle East and Central Asia — failed with consequences beyond reckoning. God knows someone will have to take a swig of political courage and acknowledge it one of these days, simply to stop the lie — the lies, a governmental cluster bomb of them — from doing further harm.

Hillary Is blaming the Iraqis. I flip on the debate and that's the first thing I have to hear. Sheesh.

Then she says they'll stop Bush's abuses by... passing more legislation. Sheesh.

Now she's explaining that she voted to let Bush go to war because she trusted him not to. Sheesh.

Now CNN is pushing Obama to admit that Petraeus is making progress in Iraq, and Obama is buying it. But then he says that's setting the bar way too low. (APPLAUSE- Hey, there's an audience!)

Now he's saying he was smart enough to oppose it from the start (up until he voted to throw some half a trillion dollars into it). He says Clinton would have a very hard time debating the Republicans because she voted for the thing. (APPLAUSE!)

Wolf BSer asked Clinton yet again to admit that her vote was a "mistake." She's now rambling on about nothing and avoiding the question. The audience has gone back to sleep. Now she's saying she would have kept our focus on killing Afghanis.

My god, will she ever shut up? It's been about 20 minutes.

Now Wolf BSer is calling her naive. (APPLAUSE, and BOOS.)

"In the past six years, we've stopped numerous attacks, including a plot to fly a plane into the tallest building in Los Angeles, and another to blow up passenger jets bound for America over the Atlantic."
--George W. Bush, 2008 State of the Union

"We stopped an al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast."
--George W. Bush, 2007 State of the Union

An October 8, 2005, LA Times story, headlined "Scope of Plots Bush Says Were Foiled Is Questioned," cited "several counter-terrorism officials" as saying that "the plot never progressed past the planning stages.... 'To take that and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous,' said one senior FBI official….At most it was a plan that was stopped in its initial stages and was not an operational plot that had been disrupted by authorities."

On the day of the State of the Union, apparently hoping nobody would notice, President George W. Bush posted a statement on the White House website announcing his intention to violate major sections of the Defense Authorization bill that he just signed into law.

For their part, the Democrats in Congress have chosen not to push for a just and decent economic stimulus plan, because they want to work amicably with Bush. They've chosen not to vote on contempt citations for Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten in order to work more amicably on the economic stimulus package. They've scratched impeachment out of the Constitution, and Congressman Dennis Kucinich even backed down on his plans to introduce articles of impeachment on Monday. And of course, Congress is committed to throwing every possible dime down the blackhole of the Iraq occupation. What has been the president's response to all this bipartisan cooperation?

Hillary Clinton is now campaigning in Florida and arguing that the state's delegates should count, along those from the Michigan primary. This would sound fair enough, unless you know that both Michigan and Florida moved their primaries up, except that after the Democrats agreed that the only states to vote before February 5th ("Super Tuesday") would be Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina (picked because they were relatively small states, representing different demographics). The Democratic Party agreed that votes from the two renegade primaries would not count. The major candidates made an explicit agreement not to campaign in either state. Florida law required that all candidates keep their names on, but Obama and Edwards pulled their names from the Michigan ballot.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich is facing a tough primary in five weeks in his working class district in Cleveland, Ohio. He's up against better funded opponents and the concerted effort of the corporate and media powers of Cleveland that have opposed him since long before he took that seat away from a Republican.

Kucinich is a progressive candidate who inspires passionate support from many in Cleveland who might not turn out to vote for a DLC Democrat. If he loses his primary, the Democrats may lose the seat. And if he loses the primary, the Democrats will, without any doubt, have lost something more valuable: their spine.

Politics can be a rough game. Candidates need to hold their competitors accountable, to challenge distortions and lies. And God knows, we need a Democratic nominee who's willing to fight. But Hillary Clinton's campaign has crossed so many ethical lines it risks embittering so many potential supporters as to cost the Democrats the November election. If all the new voters that Obama's bringing in are so angered they decide to stay home, it's going to be extremely difficult for the Democrats to beat a candidate like McCain, particularly if the Republicans have Hillary to mobilize against.

In a December 31, 2007, editorial, the New York Times faulted the current president and vice president of the United States for kidnapping innocent people, denying justice to prisoners, torturing, murdering, circumventing U.S. and international law, spying in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and basing their actions on "imperial fantasies."

The last time my mother was in a hospital, an essay by Thich Nhat Hanh moved in front of my eyes. "Our mother is the teacher who first teaches us love, the most important subject in life," he wrote. "Without my mother I could never have known how to love. Thanks to her I can love my neighbors. Thanks to her I can love all living beings. Through her I acquired my first notions of understanding and compassion."

My mother, Miriam A. Solomon, died on January 20, which happened to be the seventh anniversary of the inauguration of a man and a presidential regime that she loathed. Once, several years ago, when I referred to George W. Bush as "an idiot," she made a correction by pointing out he's much worse than that; she used the adjective "evil."

At my parents' apartment, taped on the front door for a long time, a little poster said: "The America I Believe In Doesn't Torture People." The poster was from Amnesty International USA -- an organization that my mom wrote many protest letters to dictators for -- and it summed up her devotion to human decency rather than counterfeit versions of American democracy.