Friday, November 14, 2003
Heavy Surf on Friday Morning
The Republican National Committee is out with a strategy memo for the 2004 campaign (I linked to it the other night and here it is again) which states, among other things, that Bush should not get bogged down in details like soldier deaths in Iraq, but should focus on his broader remaking of the world through preemption. This will involve criticizing Democrats as obstructionist, indecisive, faint-hearted, and unpatriotic--and blaming September 11 on Bill Clinton. The Boston.com story linked above quotes Senator John McCain as saying it's unclear to him what the Democrats would do that Bush hasn't. Former Republican National Committee chairman Rich Bond says that Democrats' answers "are propelled by the loony left at this point." (And Bond would know from loonies.)
Well, here's one possible answer, from George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni, writing in the International Herald Tribune via ICH News, listing several key missions for the post-empire world. The most interesting one would be perhaps the easiest to get by our current crop of empire builders--restructure the UN "to reflect the power realities of the emerging multipolar world." (Even I think its time for France to be kicked off the Security Council; Etzioni suggests that countries who know nothing of human rights shouldn't be allowed on the UN Human Rights Commission.)
Of course, there are plenty of devils hiding in the details of Etzioni's piece--but his brief article represents one outline of what Democrats could be talking about as an alternative to Bush's "the beatings will continue until morale improves" foreign policy.
The RNC memo also plans to make an issue of "political hate speech"--which sounds to me like a shot across Howard Dean's bow aimed at his "take our country back" rhetoric. The irony of Republicans being offended by political hate speech has been widely noted already and I needn't get into it much here, except to link to a piece in The New Republic by Jonathan Chait last September in which he laid out the case for Bush hatred and analyzed right-wing reaction to the phenomenon. Their schoomarmish finger-wagging at unruly Democrats is precious. It wasn't Democrats who coined the phrase "Where's Lee Harvey Oswald When You Need Him?" It was Republicans during the Clinton years, and not fringe loonballs, either--you could buy buttons and T-shirts with the saying on it at almost every Republican gathering big enough to attract people with wares to sell. Seems to me recommending that the other guy be shot in the head is a bit more hateful than suggesting that the other guy has failed miserably and should be tossed out via the democratic process.
Alan Bisbort is a name I've come across previously--he's a newspaper columnist in Hartford, Connecticut, and every time I see his stuff, I like it. He writes today about the amazing transformation of Waterbury, Connecticut--a longtime Democratic stronghold that installed Republican mayors and city councilors in the wake of the 1980s economic decline only to watch them sink in a sea of graft and outright criminality (one of its mayors, who was running for the U.S. Senate at the time, was sentenced to 38 years in prison for, among other things, having sex with children aged 8 and 10). In the general election earlier this month, Waterbury tossed every last Republican officeholder out, mostly in favor of Democrats. All the minor-party slots are held by independents.
Let's dream about that kind of a world for a while.
The Republican National Committee is out with a strategy memo for the 2004 campaign (I linked to it the other night and here it is again) which states, among other things, that Bush should not get bogged down in details like soldier deaths in Iraq, but should focus on his broader remaking of the world through preemption. This will involve criticizing Democrats as obstructionist, indecisive, faint-hearted, and unpatriotic--and blaming September 11 on Bill Clinton. The Boston.com story linked above quotes Senator John McCain as saying it's unclear to him what the Democrats would do that Bush hasn't. Former Republican National Committee chairman Rich Bond says that Democrats' answers "are propelled by the loony left at this point." (And Bond would know from loonies.)
Well, here's one possible answer, from George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni, writing in the International Herald Tribune via ICH News, listing several key missions for the post-empire world. The most interesting one would be perhaps the easiest to get by our current crop of empire builders--restructure the UN "to reflect the power realities of the emerging multipolar world." (Even I think its time for France to be kicked off the Security Council; Etzioni suggests that countries who know nothing of human rights shouldn't be allowed on the UN Human Rights Commission.)
Of course, there are plenty of devils hiding in the details of Etzioni's piece--but his brief article represents one outline of what Democrats could be talking about as an alternative to Bush's "the beatings will continue until morale improves" foreign policy.
The RNC memo also plans to make an issue of "political hate speech"--which sounds to me like a shot across Howard Dean's bow aimed at his "take our country back" rhetoric. The irony of Republicans being offended by political hate speech has been widely noted already and I needn't get into it much here, except to link to a piece in The New Republic by Jonathan Chait last September in which he laid out the case for Bush hatred and analyzed right-wing reaction to the phenomenon. Their schoomarmish finger-wagging at unruly Democrats is precious. It wasn't Democrats who coined the phrase "Where's Lee Harvey Oswald When You Need Him?" It was Republicans during the Clinton years, and not fringe loonballs, either--you could buy buttons and T-shirts with the saying on it at almost every Republican gathering big enough to attract people with wares to sell. Seems to me recommending that the other guy be shot in the head is a bit more hateful than suggesting that the other guy has failed miserably and should be tossed out via the democratic process.
Alan Bisbort is a name I've come across previously--he's a newspaper columnist in Hartford, Connecticut, and every time I see his stuff, I like it. He writes today about the amazing transformation of Waterbury, Connecticut--a longtime Democratic stronghold that installed Republican mayors and city councilors in the wake of the 1980s economic decline only to watch them sink in a sea of graft and outright criminality (one of its mayors, who was running for the U.S. Senate at the time, was sentenced to 38 years in prison for, among other things, having sex with children aged 8 and 10). In the general election earlier this month, Waterbury tossed every last Republican officeholder out, mostly in favor of Democrats. All the minor-party slots are held by independents.
Let's dream about that kind of a world for a while.
