Cheney and Other War Criminals Toast Each Other

By Joan Walsh, Salon

09 October 13

A night at the Plaza for Dick Cheney and friends reminds us that Democrats just don't play as rough as the GOP does

alk about torture.

As the nation is dragged toward a debt-ceiling crisis by a band of radical Republicans determined to invalidate laws they don't like but don't have the power to repeal, party elders got together for a lighthearted roast of accused war criminal Dick Cheney in New York Tuesday night. The ad in Commentary read:

He was White House chief of staff. He was House minority whip. He was secretary of defense. He was vice president of the United States. Now … he will be the main course.

Ben Smith at BuzzFeed has the exclusive details. Read them.

Apparently guests shared details of the off-the-record gala, which featured humor from Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Mukasey and spoiled nepotista (and party wrecker) Liz Cheney, who wants to be the first Wyoming senator who's actually from Virginia. There were lighthearted waterboarding jokes, and someone - reportedly Sen. Joe Lieberman - rocked the house by saying "something to the effect that it's nice that we're all here at the Plaza instead of in cages after some war crimes trial," one of Smith's sources told him.

If only.

At least a couple of people have a conscience buried under all their money, because they told Smith they thought some of the jokes were inappropriate. "There were some waterboarding jokes that were really tasteless," one said. "I can see the case for enhanced interrogation techniques after Sept. 11 but I can't really endorse sitting there drinking wine and fancy dinner at the Plaza laughing uproariously about it."

But judging from the uproarious laughter reported, most attendees didn't have a problem with it.

I found my blood boiling after reading Smith's piece. Our tax dollars keep Cheney alive, on the best healthcare government money can buy, while his political inheritors shut down the government to stop the uninsured from getting help. Doctors keep trying, and failing, to give Cheney a working heart; instead, he seems to be kept alive by spite.

The former vice president and his neocon buddies couldn't get together to reminisce about their war service, because they all ducked the military - Cheney most famously with five deferments during the Vietnam War (which of course he supported). In fact, that's their hallmark: You might be a neocon if … you never met a war you didn't like, and never met one you would fight in, either. Instead, at the roast, they mocked a man who did serve, Gen. Colin Powell.

And while right-wing nut bags rail against President Obama for running up the deficit, let's remember it was Cheney who drove that deficit with tax cuts for his wealthy friends and two wars of choice, famously telling his minion, George W. Bush, that "Reagan showed us deficits don't matter."

In fact, Reagan showed Cheney something else: that a president could break the law, as in Iran-Contra, and get away with it. My friend Charlie Pierce at Esquire has long argued that our current political hostage situation goes back to the Democrats' failure to do more to punish Iran-Contra lawbreakers. And in fact, the guy "who functioned as lookout and getaway driver for the Iran-Contra crooks," in Pierce's words, former Attorney General Ed Meese, is apparently still a key player in the right-wing ignore-the-law thug syndicate, helping craft the Tea Party strategy to shut down the government to abolish Obamacare. The Reagan undead are still with us.

Having backed down on Iran-Contra, let's remember, Democrats saw their next president impeached after a sexual witch hunt. Then they saw Al Gore denied the White House by the right-leaning Supreme Court (Reagan appointee Scalia wrote the decision), after a vote recount in Miami was shut down by preppy GOP thugs in the famous "Brooks Brothers riot." After that, Democrats compromised with Bush on tax cuts for the rich, an education reform bill that promised but didn't deliver adequate funding. Most famously, a majority authorized the use of military force in Iraq.

When America had turned against the war, and the people who lied us into it, and Democrats took back the House of Representatives in 2006, Nancy Pelosi immediately took impeachment off the table. Likewise Barack Obama said "we need to look forward, as opposed to looking backwards," when asked after the 2008 election whether he planned to investigate - not do anything about it, just investigate - possible criminal acts of the Bush administration. (To be fair I should note that Obama has continued many Bush-Cheney national security policies.) Taking impeachment off the table may well have been the "right" thing to do for the country, but looking back, don't you wish Democrats occasionally put the fear of God into their Republican opponents? Because they don't have any.

People are down on Canada lately for giving us Ted Cruz, but let's be fair to Canada and remember Cheney doesn't feel welcome there. Last year he had to back out of an event in Toronto because of fears it was too "dangerous" for him, the National Post reported. "He felt that in Canada the risk of violent protest was simply too high," said the event promoter who had booked Cheney. The year before, the former vice president wound up trapped in a fancy club in Vancouver for seven hours after allegedly violent protesters amassed outside.

Not in New York. At the Plaza, the men who mired us in endless war while giving tax breaks to themselves and their plutocrat cronies drank wine and laughed about the good times.

The Koch Brothers' 'Samson Option'

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

09 October 13

he Koch Brothers and other right-wing billionaires who provoked the government shutdown and now are angling for an even more devastating credit default see themselves as the people who deserve to rule the United States without interference from lesser citizens, especially those with darker-colored skin.

Their "masters of the universe" world view is that they or their daddies or their daddies' daddies were the ones who "built America" and, thus, it's their right to tear down the remarkable edifice of U.S. law, politics and economics created over the past two-plus centuries — if the country's less-deserving inhabitants insist on raising taxes on the rich to fund programs benefiting the poor and the middle class.

That is what we're watching now, what might be called the Koch Brothers' "Samson Option," pulling down the temple to destroy their enemies even if doing so is also destructive to them and their fortunes.

Charles and David Koch and other right-wing billionaires and near-billionaires are blind with anger after wasting millions of dollars on Mitt Romney, Karl Rove and the Republican Party in a failed attempt to defeat Barack Obama, the Democrats and health-care reform. These were the guys who smirked knowingly when Romney sneered at "the 47 percent" of Americans who receive some government help; they got snappish when Obama called them "fat cats"; they demanded the honorific title of "job creators."

Then, they had to sit in their plush party rooms waiting to celebrate Romney's victory only to be frustrated by a coalition of voters led by African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and young urban whites who are comfortable in a more diverse country.

Despite all the money and electoral tricks, the Koch Brothers and friends failed to block the reelection of the first African-American president; they watched the Democrats defy the odds and retain the Senate; and they barely managed to hold onto a slender Republican House "majority" through aggressive gerrymandering and other anti-democratic anomalies that overcame the GOP's loss in the popular vote of about 1½ million ballots.

To make matters worse, these rich white guys had to listen to endless commentary about the coming demographic changes and the need for Republicans to improve their image with racial and ethnic minorities. Through a blinding rage, the Right's billionaires plotted revenge.

Plotting Obama's Downfall

Of course, many pragmatic rich folk understand how the extraordinary U.S. system - built by the sweat and ingenuity of countless "average Americans" and protected by the blood of heroic common citizens - has made their fortunes possible. These patriotic multi-millionaires cringe at the spectacle of a U.S. government shutdown and panic at the thought of defaulting on U.S. debt.

But the right-wing billionaires and their political front groups welcome the current chaos. Indeed, they began planning today's fiscal crisis as soon as their stunning defeat of last November sank in. Rather than behave as a loyal opposition, the Right started plotting soon after Obama took the oath of office a second time, as the New York Times reported:

"Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama's health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.

"Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed 'blueprint to defunding Obamacare,' signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups. It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off financing for the entire federal government. …

"To many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere. But interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 — waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known. …

"Groups like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight, as is Club for Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some, like Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both aimed at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, too, founded in 2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of its sister group, the Heritage Foundation.

"The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort. A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight. Included was $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure popping up between a woman's legs during a gynecological exam."

The Right also has relied on its well-financed propaganda machine to obscure for millions of Americans what is actually underway in Washington. The curtain on that was lifted briefly on Sunday with the recognition that the Democrats agreed to the budget terms demanded by House Speaker John Boehner, who then double-crossed them.

On TV interview shows, Boehner conceded that he had struck a deal with the Democrats in which the Senate would accept the lower House budget figures, which included the so-called "sequester" cuts, in exchange for passage of a continuing resolution to keep the government going.

Reneging on a Deal

As the Times reported, "the speaker acknowledged that in July he had gone to the Senate majority leader, Senator Harry Reid … and offered to have the House pass a clean financing resolution. [Boehner's] proposal would have set spending levels $70 billion lower than Democrats wanted, but would have no contentious add-ons like changing the health-care law. Democrats accepted, but they say Mr. Boehner then reneged under pressure from Tea Party conservatives."

So, Boehner had laid out terms for a deal that the Democrats disliked but agreed to accept, only to see Boehner pocket their major concession, tack on a host of new demands including stopping health-care reform, and then berating them with the "talking point" that it was the Democrats who wouldn't negotiate.

There was also the point that House Republicans had refused for six months to appoint members of a conference committee to hammer out budget differences between the House and Senate.

If not for the powerful right-wing media which continues to repeat the "Democrats won't negotiate" mantra, the American public would have no doubt who provoked the current crisis. But what's even more significant is what this right-wing strategy means to the future of American democracy.

The position of the Koch Brothers and other right-wing plutocrats is that democracy itself is the problem. It's bad enough that they have to listen to views that they disagree with; they certainly shouldn't have to sit back and watch these lesser beings elect leaders and enact policies that involve raising taxes on the rich to provide benefits to other Americans.

While reflective of "free-market" extremism, this right-wing view also has a racial component, since the Right's billionaires have relied on Tea Party foot soldiers to fight these political wars - and many of those white populist right-wingers are attracted by neo-Confederate ideology, i.e. the supposed "rights" of states to ignore federal mandates, especially those designed to help blacks, Hispanics and other minorities.

"States' rights" have had a long and grim history in the United States, touted from the early years of the Republic as necessary to defend slavery, then leading to the Civil War and to a near-century of Jim Crow racial segregation.

After the civil rights movement of the 1960s, opportunistic Republicans, such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, saw their chance to snatch the South by playing to white resentment against integration. So, they played up their commitment to "states' rights" and were rewarded by switching the Deep South from the Democrats to the GOP.

Danger of Fair Elections

Today, however, the Right fears that the nation's demographic changes could mean that fair elections would end frequently with the selection of candidates who favor stronger federal action to address problems confronting the nation and the world, from the economic risk posed by the concentration of wealth in the top one percent to the existential threat posed by global warming.

An energetic federal government is needed to address these challenges. If the Great American Middle Class is to survive, Congress will have to raise taxes on the rich and invest that money in national infrastructure, cutting-edge research, affordable education, expanded health care and other domestic programs. If global warming is to be slowed and eventually reversed, the federal government must move quickly to reduce carbon dioxide and other emissions while revamping the U.S. energy system.

But the Right wants to prevent such government activism. So, it has developed strategies to give more weight to the votes of white Republicans and less weight to the votes of blacks, Hispanics and other groups that tend to go Democratic. That's why organizations supported by the Koch Brothers and other right-wing billionaires have backed Republican efforts to impose strict voter ID laws, reduce voting hours and aggressively gerrymander congressional districts to lump Democratic votes in one while ensuring solid Republican majorities in others.

The Right is implementing a strategy as old as the southern poll tax and literacy tests for blacks, i.e. the need to negate post-Civil War amendments that guaranteed equal rights under the law and the right to vote regardless of the color of a person's skin.

Today's right-wing strategy follows the thinking of urbane conservative William F. Buckley, who explained in 1957 - when Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders were agitating for enforcement of post-Civil War provisions - that "The white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically."

Now the Buckley doctrine is being applied nationwide. But the problem for the Right is that even with all the voter suppression and shorter voting hours creating nightmarish lines especially in minority neighborhoods, the American people still reelected Barack Obama and favored Democrats over Republicans for Congress.

Thanks to gerrymandering and other anti-democratic moves, the Right still has a tenuous foothold through its control of the House and can count on the Senate GOP minority to filibuster nearly everything.

However, for the Right to have the power to implement policies of its choice, a new strategy was needed. It surfaced first in 2011 with the threat to default on the nation's debt, which coerced President Obama into accepting severe cuts in federal spending, called the "sequester."

Now, in 2013, the Republican Right has doubled down on that strategy, merging a government shutdown with an impending credit default in an effort to extort more concessions from Obama and the Democrats. But the larger goal is to create a new constitutional structure in which the Right, regardless of its minority status, gets to dictate what the federal government can and cannot do.

To make this strategy work, however, requires a readiness to play Samson and to pull down the temple on your enemies as well as yourself. That appears to be the extreme option that the Koch Brothers and their fellow right-wing billionaires have chosen. If they can't rule America, they will reduce the country to economic rubble through a fiscal crisis and a premeditated financial collapse.

Then, perhaps out of the rubble, a chastened American people will emerge to accept their subordinate position in this new plutocratic structure. In the future, they will know better than to do something that the Koch Brothers and their right-wing friends don't like.

All that stuff about a government of the people, by the people and for the people will finally have perished from the earth. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "America's Government by Extortion."]