K Marx The Spot

Mortui non mordent

The old Roman adage holds that dead men no longer bite. Were that it were true.

Many a politician has noted the passing of centenarian Strom Thurmond, longtime senatior and sometime presidential candidate. Typical were President Bush, who recalled his "extraordinary life" and Tom Daschle, who termed him "a legend." Obituaries in the media have been far less circumspect and have actually tried to show the political evolution of a man from a troglodytic racist to the crazy uncle of the Senate.

I like to think that Thurmond did indeed discard the repellent views of his 1948 presidential campaign. What was truly dangerous about Thurmond was the influence that his ideas had on his party. In 1968, Richard Nixon sought out Thurmond's endorsement because he knew that it would steer segregationist votes away from George Wallace and to the Republican party.

More famously, in 1980 and 2002, Trent Lott mused publicly about how much better the country would have been had Strom won the 1948 election. Lott did not do so idly: Thurmond's switch in 1964 from Democrat to Republican was a watershed for his new party. Until then, a Democratic vote in much of the country was hardly a vote for democracy: it was a vote for the poll tax, for lynch mobs, for repression, for bigotry. The Republican party could have shunned Thurmond and his ilk, much as Democrats ignore the quadrennial spectacle of Lyndon LaRouche running for president under their banner. No, instead, it welcomed Thurmond and his ideological soulmates.

Thurmond's rhetoric surely became more moderate during eight terms in the Senate, but he never repudiated even his most egregious stances, not his run for president, not his twenty-four hour filibuster of a civil rights bill. Most Republicans find little to nothing to endorse in Thurmond's policies from his heyday. But the sad truth is that Republicans still need the votes of troglodyte-Americans, and having politicians like Thurmond on board guarantees them those votes. Thurmond may be dead, but his legacy still has a lot of bite left.

Our man in Islamabad

A while back, Ted Rall published a cartoon in which Generalissimo Bush calls Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan on the phone to thank him for his inspirational coup d'etat. The cartoon was certainly hyperbolic, but I did not think about how quickly life could imitate art.

Last Tuesday saw President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan spend some quality time with George W. Bush at Camp David. Bush was eager to lavish praise on his friend.

President Musharraf is a courageous leader and a friend of the United States. America has a strong relationship with Pakistan...Today, our two nations are working together closely on common challenges....Today, both our countries are working with the Afghan government to build a stable democratic Afghanistan with secure border regions that are free from terror and free from extremism. Pakistan and the United States also share a determination to bring the security—the benefits of security and freedom to the people of Iraq.

Ah, but there's just the slightest of problems!

President Musharraf has set out on an important mission. He's working to build a modern Pakistan that is tolerant and prosperous. Achieving this vision of moderation and progress will require movement toward democracy in Pakistan (emphasis added).

Now that's praising with faint damns. We don't need actual democracy in our closest allies, just a movement that way. Musharraf is a dicatator who overthrew a democratc government. We've cancelled $1 billion in debt for this despot, and Bush is planning another $3 billion in aid. Pakistan has actual weapons of mass destruction, its nuclear weapons that it developed in spite of widespread opprobrium. Actually, Pakistan had the support of the Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations, who funnelled billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan so that it could help those noted democrats, the Afghani mujahideen. Some enlightened leaders became the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan with the overt help of the Pakistani military. Under Musharraf's leadership, Pakistans traded nuclear weapons technology with North Korea in exchange for better missiles. And Pakistan and India have the nasty habit of threatening each other with nuclear annihilation at the slightest insult. What a brave new world order that has such people in it!

Bush had previously hosted a number of democratic leaders from South Asia to Camp David—as long as you count zero as a valid number.

Bush mocked anything good about democratic governance by touting Musharraf as a great friend of the United States, but he had a head start on insulting the public. On Monday evening, the day before his Camp David meeting, he arranged for the Secret Service to royally screw up traffic on one of metropolitan Boston's busiest highways during rush hour so a motorcade could take Musharraf to visit relatives in Canton.

I Guess We Can't Handle the Truth

Do Americans deserve the pundits that they get?

Take William Safire, the anchor of the New York Times op-ed page. Every so often, he shows a real libertarian streak, when the issue is media consolidation or personal privacy. But all too often, he works so hard to defend the Bush administration that he comes up with logic that defies credulity. In his 2 June column, for instance, he tried to justify the mendacious claims that Iraq possessed and would use weapons of mass destruction. The whopper wasn't his claim that two trucks, now determined by British inspectors to have manufactured hydrogen gas, were "mobile laboratories designed to produce biological and chemical agents capable of causing mass hysteria and death in any city in the world." That was just wishful, cynical, thinking. The whopper comes later, when he dismissed critics of the Bush administration: "a strong majority of Americans believe he did have a dangerous program running, as he did before."

Majority rule is generally a good thing, but it does not determine truth! A majority of Americans may believe in astrology, in the constant intercession of angels intercede in human affairs, or the existence of alien flying saucers. The federal government somehow manages, most of the time, not to use astrology in the legislative process. There is no federal department of angelic affairs. And the United States has done quite well without a single plenipotentiary to other solar systems. If Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, then George Bush misinformed the American people, eithe willingly—in which case he is a liar—or unwillingly—in which case Americans should demand that their government get better information before it acts.

If only Bill Safire were the only fool to think that truth is entirely socially constructed. In New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, one of the spurs off of Route 66 used to be Route 666. As of 1 June 2003, it is now Route 491. The New York Times reports:

[T]his spring, politicians in those three states, led by Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico, petitioned the federal agency that handles such things to change the highway's number, arguing that the New Testament's association of 666 with Satan was impairing the economic vitality of the towns along its route.

It's hard to decide who is more insane—Richardson and his colleagues, or those who shun a highway because of its number. I'm betting on the former. Elaine Quackenbush, hardly an agnostic (she works for the Free Trinity Navajo Mission), told the Times reporter that the number was hardly an issue: the Bible mentions 666 on the arm or forehead and "nothing about a road."

Good Schools for Me, Not for Thee

Becky Farber writes an opinion column on education, called "Report Card" for the Miami Herald. Recently, she managed to wrangle an interview with Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida and brother of George W. Bush, on issues affecting public schools in Florida. Her report is quite illuminating, and worth reading in total. Grant me leave to focus on just one part of the interview, where I can provide some actual first-hand insight. Bush tries to defend his attempt to quash Amendment 9, which mandated smaller class sizes in Florida's schools.

The governor told me that when he was my age, he grew up with class sizes that were similar to what exists today.

The governor lied. Becky Farber just finished her freshman year at Palmetto High School. At that age, Jeb Bush had just finished his ninth grade year at Phillips Academy, an elite prep school in Andover, Massachusetts. The Phillips Academy web site boasts that its average class has 13 students. In my four years at Phillips Academy, none of my classes had as many as 22 students. Becky Farber would be lucky to have that few in any of her classes.

Phillips Academy makes sure that it hires very qualified teachers; a large majority have doctorate or master's degrees. But the core of its pedagogy is the small classroom, something that holds invariant among its departments. It was good enough for Jeb and George W. Bush. But not good enough, even in the most diluted form, for the citizens of the state that Jeb is supposed to lead.

Newsweek, For Good and Ill

Anyone familiar with the likes of The New Republic knows that its radicalism is a thing of decades well past, but its politics range from the safely liberal to the stupefyingly conservative. For me, the former is Good, although often punchless, and the latter is Evil, and has been so ever since its editors decided that mass murder in Central America was somehow a good thing.

Anyone who reads the New York Times or just checks in with Atrios now and again knows that Maureen Dowd comes in two flavors: Good and Evil.

Newsweek shows this week that it, too, has a Good and a Bad, if not Evil, side. On the Good side is a fairly detailed report on where, if anywhere, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction now reside. This sort of attention to what the Bush cadre claimed was the root cause of the war in Iraq means that mainstream journalists are starting to realize that the White House sometimes lies.

A recently retired State Department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, Greg Thielmann, flatly told Newsweek that inside the government, "there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused. You get a strong impression that the administration didn't think the public would be enthusiastic about the idea of war if you attached all those qualifiers."

The proconsuls manqué in Washington and Baghdad fervently hope that this sort of critical examination of administration deeds and claims stays out of mainstream publications and stays on leftist weblogs.

The Bad side of Newsweek came in a sidebar of its "Periscope" section. Bill Clinton made a speech recently in which he mused that he might run again for president, if only the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms in office, were not in effect. Howard Fineman offers the febrile musing of a stealth Clinton presidency:

Clinton becomes the vice presidential running mate in 2004 for a Democrat who agrees to resign after being sworn in so that Clinton can ascend to the top job. Why would it work? Because the 22nd Amendment only bars someone who has been "elected" to serve two terms. Comedian Al Franken, a Democrat and Clinton friend, floated the notion last week.... Scholars such as Allan J. Lichtman and Darrell West agree that Franken has a point, though the strategy would prompt an instant Supreme Court reviewScholars such as Allan J. Lichtman and Darrell West agree that Franken has a point, though the strategy would prompt an instant Supreme Court review.

Al Franken may be many things, most of them good, but he's a lousy constitutionalist. His plan is doomed. The 12th Amendment speaks to this issue, and rather clearly. Its last sentence explains that "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."

This clause is yet another reason, I suppose, why John Nance Garner's infamous opinion of the Vice Presidency rings so true.