[NV Greens] A forward with punch!

[charleslaws at att.net]

Note: Roger Morris was co-author with Sally Denton of "The Money and the Power: the Making of Las Vegas" that I recommend most highly to all NV politically involved people.  Know thy State!  -and country..
/charles


Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 
From: "\"Dean Myerson\"" <greens at deanmyerson.org>
Subject: [usgp-dx] The War for the Future
To: natlcomaffairs at green.gpus.org
http://www.egp360.net/midnightride/morris_2005_08_29.shtml

The War for the Future
Publication/Source: eGP360, a project of the Green Institute
By: Roger Morris
Senior Fellow, Green Institute



Over the dying summer. I have known
No truce with Time nor Time's accomplice, Death.
--Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

What a surreal moment­ this faded end-of-summer 2005.

We are locked in an evil lost war of staggering costs. Some flail at the 
atrocity in a cause that seems equally lost. Most play on in the ebbing 
season's sun, oblivious to reckonings.

In Washington rules the worst regime in memory. Yet it falls to a fiercely 
bereaved 48-year-old mother, camping beside a dusty ditch in Texas, to 
embody the conscience of the culture, at least until the media move on.

The regime in its outrage struts essentially unopposed in our supposed 
democracy. Protest rises powerless. The oblivious go uninformed, unled. 
Ignorant of the issues, cravenly afraid of risking privilege for principle, 
hostage to corrupt advisors and a corrupted calculus of national interest, 
Democrats not only mistake the public mood and fail the minimal duty of 
opposition, but join the folly. From Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, 
Capitol Hill barons to camp-following bloggers, they stand bravely for more 
fodder more efficiently fed to the calamity, huddling earnestly to the 
right of the most egregious right-wing aggression in our history. Add to 
the Iraqi disaster the defining debacle of our second intellectually and 
morally derelict party.

Even if Democrats poll to find courage convenient, as some surely will, it 
will do us little good. Like the odd rebel Republicans (Senator Hagel & 
Co., who exhibit, ironically, what conservatives always said about 
enlisting more integrity than the other side of the aisle), they will find 
this Presidency peculiarly, frighteningly immune to advice and consent.

There is quixotic talk about George W. Bush reprising Lyndon Johnson or 
Richard Nixon, variously undone by intra-party revolt, demonstrations, 
defection of the Establishment, scandal. I was in the White House when the 
"Wise Men" of postwar American foreign policy told LBJ that Wall Street as 
well as Main Street had deserted the Vietnam War. I was there later as 
Nixon sullenly, anxiously watched a million protesters engulf Pennsylvania 
Avenue. I saw those politicians, however grudgingly, however slowly, 
respond to reality.

We must be clear. Bush is no Johnson or Nixon. This president is not simply 
the least competent ever thrown up. He is also the most pathological. Every 
shred of evidence of the man and his rule, every witness, leak, and gesture 
reek of it. Freshman psychology students and amateur therapists smell it 
instantly.

To quote a distinguished analyst who'll remain anonymous for the sake of 
his Republican patients:

George W. is a narcissistic personality. He is self referent. He sees 
things only from his point of view--and by extension sees and represents 
the America that reflects it. He is able to create a seamless ball into 
which nothing else can penetrate. As with other narcissistic personalities, 
he lives his entitlement and grandiosity--in his case even seeing himself 
as fulfilling God's wishes on earth. He does not need to check any other 
reality. He knows that what feels right to him is right for everyone. The 
rules do not apply to him (college, the reserves, etc)--only to those who 
need rules to do what is right. Unlike Senator Frist, I tend not to 
diagnose in absentia, but with George W., all of us could go on and on.

On and on is how the pathology will be manifest in the torment of Iraq. It 
hardly matters how vested Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, the Generals, 
corporations, media claque, complicit Democrats. Bush is enough. The 
cowardice and blindness, craftiness and stupidity of the war policy, and of 
the whole myth-encrusted and corrupt mentality around it, will persist so 
long as Bush and all who used and accepted him remain in office.

Despite the seeming death of politics, we have never known a crisis and 
opportunity more political. The moment cries out for politics fought as 
never before.

Not for more wailing at how venally awful it all is, marveling at how the 
reactionaries did it, as if Churchill's British spent the autumn of 1940 
shaking their heads and endlessly writing one another about how it happened 
Nazis were at the gate. There is no time for that. The poet is right. For 
this generation of progressives, time's accomplice is death­senseless, 
generations-haunting death in Iraq, and all the other deaths of body and 
spirit inflicted by America's misrule at home and abroad. What to do is plain.

Fight now. Fight everywhere. Take the battle first and foremost to where 
power lives.

Progressives must contest all 435 House seats and all 33 Senate seats up in 
2006, along with every governor, legislator and local official not 
unequivocally against the war and more, everywhere a Republican or a 
compromised Democrat presumes to govern. Never mind Beltway braying that 
it's not practical and a waste, the myth of non-competitive races 
reinforcing the one-party system. The point is to stop playing by the old 
rules. Like the RAF in 1940, we must take on even the impossible. In the 
underlying volatility of the American electorate, every challenge is a 
threat, every spark a potential burn clear. Politicians know this. No 
Democrat will face a primary challenge on the war, no Republican will face 
it in the general, without risk. No progressive will run without gain. No 
lesson will be lost.

The campaign everywhere is simple. Stop the dying. Stop the lying. In Iraq 
and beyond. About foreign policy, energy, jobs, and so much, much more.

To carry that message progressives have never been stronger, never so 
mobilized, conscious, savvy. If they are serious about spending their money 
to save the century, the new progressive donors will add to the strength by 
funding genuinely new policy thinking and answers for candidates to carry. 
 From dealing at last with the scandal of our health care system to 
conducting at last a civilized foreign policy. From finding the tipping 
point in lifting the root oppression of campaign money to adopting non 
lethal alternatives to guzzling away as if there's no energy or 
environmental crisis, as if a global warming-unleashed hurricane were not 
now pounding away to ravage 25% of the nation's oil supply off Louisiana, 
with more like it to follow.

None of this will happen in old ways and institutions under yesterday's 
men. We will never have a chance to stop the dying and lying until we stop 
the irrelevant and self-indulgent, the jockeying and empty debating. 
Winning means unity, and unifying means ready sacrifice of credit, 
precedence, postage-stamp domains of power and prestige we substitute for 
serious politics. It is an ancient adage. We cannot lead without humility, 
govern a nation without governing ourselves.

Most important, our fatal attraction, we must go unseduced by the 
Democrats, who have made seduction and abandonment of progressives a 
lucrative career.

We can, of course, stand by wringing as the Democrats nominate Hillary 
Clinton and the Republicans Giuliani, McCain or some more transparent 
throw-back. We can easily go on blogging and bandaging in this half-mad 
twilight.

Or we can act as the free people our soldiers in the deadly sun of 
Mesopotamia, however deluded, misused or misled, think they are defending. 
We can take up the fight for them and more, street to street, door to door, 
with $20 bills or $20 million. We can turn weakness into strength, retreat 
into advance, defeat into victory.

We lost the invasion of Iraq and the election of 2004, not our souls. We 
lost battles. The war for the future­America's and the world's­is only 
beginning. But there can be no more waiting to fight. No truce with time 
nor its accomplice.



Roger Morris, an award-winning historian and investigative journalist who 
served on the National Security Council Staff under Presidents Johnson and 
Nixon, has just completed Shadows of the Eagle, a history of American 
policy and covert interventions in the Middle East and South Asia, to be 
published early next year by Alfred Knopf. Morris is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0895263025/counterpunchmaga>Partners 
in Power: the Clintons and Their America and with Sally Denton 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375701265/counterpunchmaga>The 
Money and the Power: the Making of Las Vegas. He serves as a Senior Fellow 
of the Green Institute, where this column appears originally, along with 
his previous and ongoing work on American politics, on the Institute's 
world affairs web site, <http://www.eGP360.net/>www.eGP360.net.