On the war

One thing I hope the CNN debate tonight spends some time on is how each of the remaining Democratic candidates felt about the war in Iraq in 2003, how they assess it now, and what each of them plans to do about it once they are in office.

Their presumed opponent, John McCain, has an unambiguous position: he will stay in Iraq indefinitely or for 100 years, whichever comes first.

So the Democratic nominee had better have a clear and precise position to contrast with McCain's.

The Democrats, in this election, must be the antiwar party. As sixty percent of Americans still want us out of Iraq, and nearly seventy percent now say beginning the war was wrong, there is a huge constituency out there waiting to vote for a real antiwar candidate.

Obama opposed the war from the beginning, and would begin removing troops immediately. Here's his position from his campaign website:

Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months. Obama will make it clear that we will not build any permanent bases in Iraq. He will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda.

Hillary voted for the authorization to invade Iraq, has not directly admitted her vote was wrong, and says she would convene military leaders to discuss beginning withdrawal within sixty days. From her website:

The most important part of Hillary's plan is the first: to end our military engagement in Iraq's civil war and immediately start bringing our troops home. As president, one of Hillary's first official actions would be to convene the Joint Chiefs of Staff, her Secretary of Defense, and her National Security Council. She would direct them to draw up a clear, viable plan to bring our troops home starting with the first 60 days of her Administration.

It seems to me there's a lot more wiggle room in her plan, a lot more fuzzy language. Perhaps that's what is needed in a commander in chief. Perhaps we also want a commander in chief who can't admit a mistake. That's obviously what we have now.

Maybe Obama makes promises that he can't keep. Maybe that's his inexperience. On the other hand, at least he's direct and firm in what he says.

So tonight I'd really like to hear more from these candidates. I want them to give more substance to these brief statements, and I'd like to see Hillary pressed once again on her war vote and how she looks at it now.

If the Democrats don't have a presidential nominee who can be clear and firm in a debate with each other on their Iraq position, how on earth will they do it against McCain, who couldn't be more clear?

McCain's views may not be in sync with the majority of Americans, but most Republicans who didn't agree with him on the war still voted for him in Florida. They saw the clarity, confidence and strength he exudes on this issue.

Our candidates must show the voters that same clarity and confidence of belief.

Big Brother emerges from retirement

Most of my friends on the left have re-read Orwell's 1984 within the last five years and have noted the many similarities between the fictional world of Big Brother and the real world of George W. Bush, especially in the distorted use of words and language. The three slogans of Oceana, the fictional country in which 1984 takes place ("freedom is slavery," "war is peace," "ignorance is strength"), remind us of some of the titles of legislation offered up by the Bush administration ("clear skies initiative," "no child left behind," etc) which mask the real purpose of the laws. It doesn't require too much stretching to see how the Bush administration, with its mastermind Karl Rove (who just might qualify as the modern embodiment of the mythical "Big Brother"), learned how to distort language in order to fool the public.

The Bush administration also has a long history of distorting facts, as in the infamous WMD rationale for the Iraq War. Again, the truth is the exact opposite of what the administration tried to claim. And again, like the mythical country Oceana, which would be at war one day with Eastasia, and then the next day with Eurasia, with all references to the war with Eastasia gone from the public record, the Bush administration went to war in Afghanistan one day, and a few months later was at war with Iraq, with references to Afghanistan all but gone from the news. Likewise, just as Oceana was involved in a perpetual war that bestowed unlimited power on its leader, so George W. Bush has begun a permanent "war on terror" which he insists gives him unprecedented powers.

However, the blatancy of the lying has gone one step further with the re-emergence of Rove from his recent "retirement." Now Bush's Brain is blatantly rewriting history, accusing the Democrats of being the ones pushing for war with Iraq in the year 2002, when they were in fact the ones trying to delay a vote even as Rove's boss was preparing for a war he was determined to wage, even without a Congressional vote. Peter Baker of the Washington Post does a good job of proving Rove a liar by quoting former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer and former Bush chief of staff Andrew Card. According to Baker, Card said Rove's "mouth sometimes gets ahead of his brain" and Fleisher asserted "It was definitely the Bush administration that set it in motion and determined the timing, not the Congress. I think Karl in this instance just has his facts wrong."

Now if we really were living in Orwell's 1984, Card and Fleischer, like Winston, the hero who rebelled against the mind control of Big Brother, would have their faces stuck in rats' cages to have their noses eaten off. But this is Bush country, 2007, and Rove cannot stop the news media and the Democrats from refuting his lies.

But it doesn't matter to Rove. He knows he doesn't have to use torture and thought police to be effective. In a country of couch potatoes and mindless consumers, and a media controlled by a few corporations who care more about profit than truth, all he has to do is get the lie out there, just like the Swift Boat ads, and he can create a stir. Even with a few reporters finally rebutting him, the lie is still there and some people will believe it.

Rove has always implemented a strategy of winning with narrow majorities. He doesn't have to discredit the Democrats with a large number of voters, he just has to fool or confuse enough people to allow his side to win. So he lies, the lie is spread on page one of the major papers, the media belatedly and unenthusiastically rebuts the story on page nine, and he has "catapulted the propaganda," as his great leader once said.

This has been the Rovian strategy for the past two presidential elections, and now that Rove no longer has an official job in Washington, he is free to make similar mischief in this election. And, so far, just as the citizens of Oceana were powerless to confront Big Brother, the Democrats do not have an effective strategy to fight him.

And that is very bad news for all of us.