US politics: about the November elections (real important - if Dems take the House & the Senate, the world will be changed)

I’m going to be blogging about this as we get closer to the mid-term elections (only a matter of nine weeks away), but as you shall see, my advice to the Dems is simple:

1. Internationally, out-national-security the Republicans by promising to get out of Iraq sooner and promise to catch Bin Laden instead. Sample rhetoric: “We will go after Bin Laden and nail his ass. We won’t forget who attacked us, like the GOP has. Bush was cowardly enough to pick a fake target, Saddam, but we’re not – we’ll go after the real evildoer, Osama Bin Laden.”

2. Domestically, say Americans are a big family and we will start looking after the whole family instead of just taking care of the rich. “America is a big family, and we should take care of our own, which includes the middleclass and our soccer moms, students and poorer people. We’re not the GOP, who only take care of people who are rich already, and don’t need any more help from the rest of us. If you’re rich, vote Republican. If you’re middleclass, vote Democrat.”

Meanwhile, here are some pundits with advice for the Dems.

1. 'New Democrats' Rendezvous With Oblivion -- by Thomas Frank

Over the last month I have tried to describe conservative power in Washington, but with a small change of emphasis I could just as well have been describing the failure of liberalism: the center-left’s inability to comprehend the current political situation or to draw upon what is most vital in its own history.

What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have argued, is a broad reversion to 19th-century political form, with free-market economics understood as the state of nature, plutocracy as the default social condition, and, enthroned as the nation’s necessary vice, an institutionalized corruption surpassing anything we have seen for 80 years. All that is missing is a return to the gold standard and a war to Christianize the Philippines.

Historically, liberalism was a fighting response to precisely these conditions. Look through the foundational texts of American liberalism and you can find everything you need to derail the conservative juggernaut. But don’t expect liberal leaders in Washington to use those things. They are “New Democrats” now, enlightened and entrepreneurial and barely able to get out of bed in the morning, let alone muster the strength to deliver some Rooseveltian stemwinder against “economic royalists.”

Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer — that is, when they’re not gushing about the glory of it all at Davos — is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation and to try to understand how we might retrain or re-educate ourselves so we will fit in better next time.

This last point was a priority for the Clinton administration. But in “The Disposable American,” a disturbing history of job security, Louis Uchitelle points out that the New Democrats’ emphasis on retraining (as opposed to broader solutions that Old Democrats used to favor) is merely a kinder version of the 19th-century view of unemployment, in which economic dislocation always boils down to the fitness of the unemployed person himself.

Or take the “inevitability” of recent economic changes, a word that the centrist liberals of the Washington school like to pair with “globalization.” We are told to regard the “free-trade” deals that have hammered the working class almost as acts of nature. As the economist Dean Baker points out, however, we could just as easily have crafted “free-trade” agreements that protected manufacturing while exposing professions like law, journalism and even medicine to ruinous foreign competition, losing nothing in quality but saving consumers far more than Nafta did.

When you view the world from the satisfied environs of Washington — a place where lawyers outnumber machinists 27 to 1 and where five suburban counties rank among the seven wealthiest in the nation — the fantasies of postindustrial liberalism make perfect sense. The reign of the “knowledge workers” seems noble.

Seen from almost anywhere else, however, these are lousy times. The latest data confirms that as the productivity of workers has increased, the ones reaping the benefits are stockholders. Census data tells us that the only reason family income is keeping up with inflation is that more family members are working.

Everything I have written about in this space points to the same conclusion: Democratic leaders must learn to talk about class issues again. But they won’t on their own. So pressure must come from traditional liberal constituencies and the grass roots, like the much-vilified bloggers. Liberalism also needs strong, well-funded institutions fighting the rhetorical battle. Laying out policy objectives is all well and good, but the reason the right has prevailed is its army of journalists and public intellectuals. Moving the economic debate to the right are dozens if not hundreds of well-funded Washington think tanks, lobbying outfits and news media outlets. Pushing the other way are perhaps 10.

The more comfortable option for Democrats is to maintain their present course, gaming out each election with political science and a little triangulation magic, their relevance slowly ebbing as memories of the middle-class republic fade.

(Thomas Frank, a guest columnist for NY Timrs, is the author, most recently, of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”)


2. Give Voters a Choice About War -- by Helen Thomas (doyenne of the White House press corps)

WASHINGTON -- The war and the U.S. occupation of Iraq certainly are going to be the crowning issues in the Nov. 7 mid-term elections.

That's why it's time for the Democratic candidates to call for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

We don't need more phony timetables to prolong the agony. We need a quick exit from a bad show.

It's distressing that The Washington Post has found that most Democrats in competitive congressional races are resisting pressure to call for a speedy pullout. Those spineless Democrats are apparently frightened by the prospect that the Bush administration would use the "cut-and-run" fear card against them.

Where is the opposition in the opposition party?

If politicians live and die by the polls, the evidence is there to support a strong anti-war position. I refer to polls that show Americans are losing faith in this no-win war. For example, a Newsweek poll conducted Aug. 24-25 said 63 percent of those polled disapprove of President Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq. Approval was 31 percent.

Maybe Americans have had it with all the deception that led to the invasion of Iraq in the first place. Bush continues to brand the war in Iraq as part of the "global war on terror." However, when the president was asked at a news conference last week what Iraq had to do with the 9/11 terrorist attack, he replied: "Nothing."

New York Times columnist Frank Rich doesn't believe Bush will leave it at that when the fifth anniversary of the al-Qaida attack rolls around soon. Bush will go back to his drumbeat, subtly trying to link Iraq to 9/11.

"The new propaganda strategy will be right out of Lewis Carroll ('Alice in Wonderland')," Rich wrote last Sunday. "If we leave the country that had nothing to do with 9/11, then 9/11 will happen again."

Despite growing proof that the Iraqi resistance to the U.S. presence is becoming more lethal, the president insists on adhering to his unpopular course. "Leaving before the job is done would be a disaster," he told reporters.

"What all of us in this administration have been saying is that leaving Iraq before the mission is complete will send the wrong message to the enemy and will create a more dangerous world," he said.

Where have we heard this familiar refrain before?

Of course, this baloney is almost verbatim from President Johnson during the Vietnam War era when protesters hit the streets en masse to express their disenchantment with the war.

In his book "The Logic of Withdrawal," author-journalist Anthony Arnove wrote: "During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government learned how quickly the discipline of an army fighting an unjust war can break down.

"Today the soldiers in the field can see contradictions between the claims of their officers -- and especially the politicians who sent them to war -- and the reality of the conflict on the ground. They now know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and posed no imminent threat.

"And as the resistance grows, more soldiers have come to see they are fighting not to liberate Iraqis but to pacify them."

Arnove rebuts some arguments against pulling up stakes and leaving Iraq. One is that the U.S. presence is preventing a civil war. He points out that the various religious factions in Iraq already are pitted against one another.

If it's not a civil war, it's a reasonable facsimile.

Then there is the contention that Iraq is the "central front in the war on terror," a popular refrain from the Bush administration.

Arnove points out that al-Qaida made its first appearance in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003.

If they fail to take a courageous stand against an impossible war, the "me too" Democrats will deny the voters a choice.


3. Republicans target 'Islamic fascism' -- by TOM RAUM

WASHINGTON - President Bush in recent days has recast the global war on terror into a "war against Islamic fascism." Fascism, in fact, seems to be the new buzz word for Republicans in an election season dominated by an unpopular war in Iraq .

Bush used the term earlier this month in talking about the arrest of suspected terrorists in Britain, and spoke of "Islamic fascists" in a later speech in Green Bay, Wis. Spokesman Tony Snow has used variations on the phrase at White House press briefings.

Sen. Rick Santorum ( news ,bio ,voting record ), R-Pa., in a tough re-election fight, drew parallels on Monday between World War II and the current war against "Islamic fascism," saying they both require fighting a common foe in multiple countries. It's a phrase Santorum has been using for months.

And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday took it a step further in a speech to an American Legion convention in Salt Lake City, accusing critics of the administration's Iraq and anti-terrorism policies of trying to appease "a new type of fascism."

White House aides and outside Republican strategists said the new description is an attempt to more clearly identify the ideology that motivates many organized terrorist groups, representing a shift in emphasis from the general to the specific.

The White House on Wednesday announced Bush would elaborate on this theme in a series of speeches beginning Thursday at the American Legion convention in Salt Lake City and running through his address to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 19.

"The key is that all of this violence and all of the threats are part of one single ideological struggle, a struggle between the forces of freedom and moderation, and the forces of tyranny and extremism," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters traveling with Bush aboard Air Force One.

Depicting the struggle as one against Islamic fascists is "an appropriate definition of the war that we're in," said GOP pollster Ed Goeas. "I think it's effective in that it definitively defines the enemy in a way that we can't because they're not in uniforms."

But Muslim groups have cried foul. Bush's use of the phrase "contributes to a rising level of hostility to Islam and the American-Muslim community," complained Parvez Ahmed, chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Conservative commentators have long talked about "Islamo-fascism," and Bush's phrase was a slightly toned-down variation on that theme.

Dennis Ross, a Mideast adviser to both the first Bush and Clinton administrations and now the director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said he would have chosen different words.

"The `war on terror' has always been a misnomer, because terrorism is an instrument, it's not an ideology. So I would always have preferred it to be called the `war with radical Islam,' not with Islam but with `radical Islam,'" Ross said.

Why even mention the religion? "Because that's who they are," Ross said. "Fascism had a certain definition. Whether they meet this or not, one thing is clear: They're radical. They represent a completely radical and intolerant interpretation of Islam."

While "fascism" once referred to the rigid nationalistic one-party dictatorship first instituted in Italy, it has "been used very loosely in all kinds of ways for a long time," said Wayne Fields, a specialist in presidential rhetoric at Washington University in St. Louis.

"Typically, the Bush administration finds its vocabulary someplace in the middle ground of popular culture. It seems to me that they're trying to find something that resonates, without any effort to really define what they mean," Fields said.

Pollster Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, said the "fascist" label may evoke comparisons to World War II and remind Americans of the lack of personal freedoms in fundamentalist countries. "But this could only affect public opinion on the margins," he said.

"Having called these people `evildoers,' fascism is just a new wrinkle," he said.

The tactic recalled the first President Bush's 1990 likening of Iraq's Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler.

"I caught hell on this comparison of Saddam to Hitler, with critics accusing me of personalizing the crisis, but I still feel it was an appropriate one," the elder Bush later wrote in a memoir.

It was one of the few times the younger Bush has followed his father's path on Iraq.

Charles Black, a longtime GOP consultant with close ties to both the first Bush administration and the current White House, said branding Islamic extremists as fascists is apt.

"It helps dramatize what we're up against. They are not just some ragtag terrorists. They are people with a plan to take over the world and eliminate everybody except them," Black said.

Stephen J. Wayne, a professor of government at Georgetown University, suggested White House strategists "probably had a focus group and they found the word `fascist.'

"Most people are against fascists of whatever form. By definition, fascists are bad. If you're going to demonize, you might as well use the toughest words you can," Wayne said.

After all, the hard-line Iranian newspaper Jomhuri Eskami did just that in an editorial last week blasting Bush's "Islamic fascism" phrase. It called Bush a "21st century Hitler" and British Prime Minister Tony Blair a "21st century Mussolini."


4. Bush's Plebiscitary Presidency – by Barney Frank

(This is the edited version of a speech Massachusetts Democratic Representive Barney Frank delivered to the House of Representatives on July 13, part of The Nation 's Moral Compass series that focuses on the spoken word.)

I meet with people in my district and elsewhere in the country, and I have for a couple of years now been engaged in some debate with some of my liberal friends on the nature of our disagreements with this Administration. And up until a few months ago, my argument was that we should focus on policy issues where we disagreed: the war in Iraq, and policies that undercut working people, promote inequality, weaken the environment and undercut the rights of minorities.

Others have said, Go beyond that. We have to indict this Administration for the philosophy of governing, and people have questioned its commitment to democracy. I continue to disagree that we should question this Administration's commitment to democracy.

Some of the words that get thrown around--authoritarianism and worse--should not be used lightly. This remains today, in the sixth year of the Bush presidency, a very free country. People are free to speak out, to dissent and to be critical. So while I agree that this Administration believes in democracy in the broadest sense, I am now convinced that it is a very different kind of democracy than that which has prevailed for most of our history.

Yes, the President agrees that the source morally or the power of the government is an election, and he believes that the President ought to be elected. I agree that the President honors the concept that you gain power in a democratic society by winning the election. But here is the difference.

We have historically talked about checks, about balances, about our three branches of government. We have contrasted that to the more unitary governments in other parts of the world, even democratic ones. We have separate legislative, judiciary and executive branches.

This is an Administration which considers checks and balances to be a hindrance. They believe that democracy consists essentially of electing a President every four years and entrusting to that President almost all of the important decisions.

I believe we have seen a seizing of power that should not have been seized by the executive branch. But thanks to the acquiescence of a Republican majority in this Congress, driven in part by ideological sympathy, the President has been allowed to be the decider. So we have had a very different kind of American government. It is democracy, but it is closer to plebiscitary democracy than it is to the traditional democracy of America.

Plebiscitary democracy: Political scientists use this to describe those systems wherein a leader is elected but once elected has almost all of the power. Indeed, I believe, it certainly would seem to me the aspirations of the Vice President.

Elect the President. Let him win and then get out of his way. We had a debate here a month ago on the floor of this House on the right of the President to ignore legislation passed thirty years ago, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, by which the President and Congress together set forward a method for wiretapping and eavesdropping in cases where we thought there were foreign threats to the US.

This is a case where the President and Congress together, in the Carter Administration, explicitly adopted a scheme to listen in on people who meant us ill. It was followed by Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton. And then this President said, I don't like that, it's too confining, so I will ignore it. I will instead use my power to do what I want to do and forget the requirements of the law.

But where the law has been set out in a prescribed constitutional manner as to how to do something, and the President says, I am not going to do it that way, I will do it my way, then you are into plebiscitary democracy. Then you are into the democracy that says no checks and balances. No, Congress, I will do what I think necessary.

Some have argued that this power is contained in the "vesting clause" of the Constitution. So I relooked it up--it says: "The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."

That is it. That's the vesting clause. From those words the President and his defenders draw the conclusion that the President can ignore a duly enacted law of Congress if he thinks it should be done a different way.

So what they have done is take a simple sentence that says the President is the boss of the executive and use that to justify the assertion of executive power in areas which should have been legislative or judicial. And that has been the pattern in this Administration.

We voted to authorize a war in Afghanistan to get Osama bin Laden. We later found the President citing that as authority to order the arrest of American citizens on American soil who would then be held indefinitely in prison with no formal charges brought against them and no opportunity to defend themselves and no way to get out of prison.

That was one of the cases in Chicago where they arrested an American citizen they said was up to no good. He may well have been up to no good, although ultimately they did not even prosecute him. But they arrested him and said they had the right to just lock him up forever--an American citizen--with no recourse of any kind because the President ordered it.

Well, there is a statute that says you cannot in America lock up an American without statutory justification. And people said, Where is the statutory justification? And the Administration maintained, until the Supreme Court majority in the Hamdan case finally repudiated it----they said that in 2001, Congress authorized the President to do whatever he had to do to deal with the situation of the attack in America. And that outrageously, illogically was cited as support for this.

We had the Patriot Act situation, where the Judiciary Committee unanimously adopted a very reasonable, balanced bill, which gave law enforcement expanded powers to fight terrorism but had some safeguards against abuse.

But the Attorney General said, No, we do not like that bill. Here is a new one. And a new bill was written overnight and "debated" on the floor of the House with no ability to amend it.

These examples demonstrate that Congress was now ready to do whatever the Administration wanted. They don't want Congress to agree on their ability to detain people at Guantánamo or track terrorist financing because accepting the right of Congress to agree with them implies that at some future date Congress might disagree. And plebiscitary democracy has no room for Congressional disagreement once the President has made his decision. So we have a situation of unilateralism and a refusal even to take Congress in when Congress wants to be a willing partner.

I believe that law enforcement people are the good guys and women. I believe that we need to give them new powers when we are dealing with murderous fanatics who are ready to kill themselves. Our basic law enforcement theory of deterrence doesn't work against people who are ready to commit suicide.

I believe that the law enforcement people are the good guys, but I don't think they are the perfect guys. I think there were mistakes made by the FBI in Boston, Mayfield in Oregon, Captain James Yee at Guantánamo, Wen Ho Lee under the Clinton Administration and a number of cases in Guantánamo of innocent people captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan in the fog of war.

People make mistakes. What we should be doing is giving law enforcement full power, but also having some checks so that people who are unfairly accused can defend themselves. Our problem is that when the Administration does these things unilaterally, we have no way to know whether or not those safeguards are there. When the Administration asserted the right to arrest an American citizen on American soil, and lock that man up forever, fortunately the Supreme Court said, You can't do this, this is America. The problem is not that they are being tough on terrorists, it is that they are being tough on individuals accused of terrorism who have no conceivable way to defend themselves to say that there might have been a mistake.

But the problem of shutting Congress out is that you don't get that input that allows you to exercise powers in a reasonable way, but helps you with safeguards. You have things which are not, in themselves, controversial, like tracking terrorist financing. Of course we should be doing that, or surveilling foreign terrorists or wiretapping--of course, with the right reasons, you should do that.

But when the Administration does them unilaterally and refuses to allow Congress in and refuses to follow some of the rules that Congress has set down, they take noncontroversial things or less controversial things and make them controversial. That is, they become politicized. The debate over the terrorist financing tracking is not over the substance of that program but over the secretive, unilateral and arrogant way in which the Administration decided to do it and shut out any chance for Congress to participate.

So that is the problem with the plebiscitary approach. Yes, you elect a President, but we don't elect perfect Presidents. And then we also have a Congress and a court that are supposed to be involved as well; and this Administration has time and again refused to do that.

One of the things this Administration has used more than every other Administration in history is the right, when signing a bill, to say that we are really signing these parts and not the other parts, because we consider some of it unconstitutional, so we will ignore it.

The President has a right to say, This is unconstitutional, I don't like it. His job then is to veto the bill. But what he now does is, he picks and chooses; he thinks the legislation is a supermarket.

The signing statements are an assertion of plebiscitary power, the right of the President to do whatever he wants, to take laws that Congress passed and pay attention to parts of them and not other parts.

I have to reiterate that this could not have happened without the collaboration of a supine Congress. Never in American history has Congress been so willing to give away its constitutional function. I know people have said, Well, what do you expect, it is a Republican President and a Republican Congress? No, the history of the United States is that even when the same party controlled the presidency and the Congress, Congress did oversight.

Harry Truman became a national figure when he chaired a Senate committee in a Senate in which the Democrats were a majority, supervising closely the conduct of World War II by the Departments of War and Navy under Franklin Roosevelt. Can you imagine what a Halliburton would have been subjected to in World War II given that Harry Truman was there?

Let's take a recent example. When Bill Clinton was President for the first two years and the Democrats were in the majority, we had a very tough, emotionally searing hearing doing oversight on Waco. We had a hearing in the Banking Committee on Whitewater. Republicans thought it wasn't sufficiently condemnatory, but they got a chance to present witnesses; we had the hearing.

So we have seen no oversight. That has played into the hands of the plebiscitary presidency, into the hands of a President who is allowed more power than is healthy for a society.

I am not charging authoritarianism. It still is a free country, and I encourage people to use that freedom and to be critical and to organize. But we are still talking about a very, very different mode of governance, the mode of governance in which, instead of the checks and balances and the collaboration and the input of a lot of people, you get one man making the decisions.

Now we face a terrorist enemy. And if in fact these things detracted from our ability to defend ourselves, we would have a real dilemma, but they don't. The argument that democracy, that collaboration with Congress, that judicial review, that an independent media, somehow detract from our ability to defend ourselves is not only morally flawed, it is factually wrong. This Congress would be very willing to participate with the President. And I think if a process in which thoughtful and well-informed members of Congress were able to meet in a collaborative way with members of the Administration, the result would be to strengthen what we do. Instead, what we have is controversy after controversy because this Administration does not learn, and they continue to follow the pattern of We will do it unilaterally, we do it without anybody else, we will do whatever we want. And it fails.

Presidents can get away with this assertion of extra-constitutional authority. Congress doesn't have to give them the authority; all it has to do is not stop them. That is what we have not done. And I want to repeat, with regard to national security, the problem is in many cases not what the Administration has done but the way in which they have done it.

Yes, this is a Congress overwhelmingly ready to give them the power to combat terrorism. We understood after September 11 that we needed a new law enforcement mode in which we got more aggressive, that simply deterring people by the threat of punishment doesn't work in an era of suicidal fanatics.

So whether it is signing statements or misuse of the authorization of use of force in Afghanistan, or refusal to talk to members of Congress, or exploiting the fact that it is very hard to get judicial decisions, all of these things come together in a pattern. I acknowledge now that when we just go policy issue by policy issue and not talk about the overall framework of governance, I was wrong.

It is now clear to me there is a pattern to this Administration's actions, and it is one that rejects not democracy but the democracy of checks and balances and participation and cooperation and collaboration; and it substitutes the democracy of the plebiscite, the democracy of the strong man who gets elected and is then allowed to go forward without interference.

I think the insistence of this Administration to doing it by them and by rejecting efforts to draw in other sectors of this society weaken America, which makes things look more controversial than they need to be.

Now, there have recently been some stirrings here. I was struck when we had a Financial Services oversight hearing and the strong and articulate voice of the Republican chair of that subcommittee, Mrs. Kelly, objected to the unilateralism of it. Some senators have said, No, you can't just ignore what the Supreme Court did and you can't just put a lipstick on this and forget about it.

I wish the Administration would understand that what we are talking about is strengthening America, not weakening it; that the democracy we have had, the checks and balances, they weren't suspended during World War II. People made mistakes during World War II, some terrible mistakes, but you had the Truman Committee and you had a very active Congress.

We believe that a process in which we work together will yield a better result; that a process which assumes that law enforcement is perfect and therefore can operate in secrecy, without any kind of input--that that will do more harm than good.

I believe there is a very strong majority in this Congress prepared to work with this Administration in ways that preserve the need for discretion and in which the expertise collectively in this body on a number of issues can help us go forward with the measures we need to protect ourselves and, at the same time, preserve our liberties. And if this Administration continues the pattern of these past years, it will damage our ability to come together and make this effort, and I think, over the long term, diminish the nature of our democracy, because the democracy of the plebiscite meets minimal democratic standards, but it does not represent the full richness of a democracy in which all can participate.

What we have is an Administration that is radically trying to change the nature of our democracy. They want to simplify it, they want to neaten it. Democracy is not good when it is neat, certainly not in a country as vast as this one. No single individual, no matter how popular, can embody all of the wisdom and all of the values of the country.

The democracy we have evolved of full participation isn't always convenient for those of us in power. It isn't always as quick as people would like, but it has proven over time to be effective, and it could be not only effective today but even more effective in our collective self-defense than the current model, which produces controversy where none is called for and division where we could have unity.

I am not optimistic that we will change the approach of this Administration. But I do hope that Congress will continue what I think are stirrings of change and reassert our historic role and restore the kind of messy and inconvenient and much better and more inclusive democracy that has been our country's legacy.


5. Slowly Sidling To Iraq's Exit
Many GOP Candidates Part Company With Bush
By E. J. Dionne Jr.

By Election Day, how many Republican candidates will have come out against the Iraq war or distanced themselves from the administration's policies?

August 2006 will be remembered as a watershed in the politics of Iraq. It is the month in which a majority of Americans told pollsters that the struggle for Iraq was not connected to the larger war on terrorism. They thus renounced a proposition the administration has pushed relentlessly since it began making the case four years ago to invade Iraq.

That poll finding, from a New York Times-CBS News survey, came to life on the campaign trail when Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.), one of the most articulate supporters of the war, announced last Thursday that he favored a time frame for withdrawing troops.

Shays is in a tough race for reelection against Democrat Diane Farrell, who has made opposition to the war a central issue. After his 14th trip to Iraq, Shays announced that "the only way we are able to encourage some political will on the part of Iraqis is to have a timeline for troop withdrawal."

In July Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R-Minn.) returned from Iraq with an equally grim view. Americans, he said, lacked "strategic control" of the streets of Baghdad, and he called for a "limited troop withdrawal -- to send the Iraqis a message." Just the month before, Gutknecht had told his fellow House members that "now is not the time to go wobbly" on Iraq.

Nearly as significant as the new support for troop withdrawals is the effort of many Republicans to criticize President Bush without taking a firm stand on when the troops should come home.

Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), facing a challenge from Democrat Patrick Murphy, an Iraq war veteran, took a page from former president Bill Clinton's playbook by triangulating between Murphy and the president. A Fitzpatrick mailing sent earlier this month said that Fitzpatrick favored a "better, smarter plan in Iraq" that "says NO to both extremes: No to President Bush's 'stay the course' strategy . . . and no to Patrick Murphy's 'cut and run' approach."

Notice: A Republican is suggesting that Bush's Iraq policy is extreme. That would not have happened in 2004.

Other Republicans have taken their distance from the president more subtly. In May Rep. Jim Gerlach (R-Pa.), facing a difficult rematch against Democrat Lois Murphy, called on Congress "to step up and be more assertive in assessing the level of progress" in Iraq. He added: "The Iraqi government needs to know that American patience and support are not blank checks that Iraqi politicians can cash with American lives and tax dollars."

And judging from the Web sites of other Republicans in close races, many would prefer to make the Iraq issue disappear between now and November.

Consider the campaign Web site of Rep. Mike Sodrel (R-Ind.), who faces a serious opponent in Democrat Baron Hill, a former House member. On the "Issues" portion of his campaign site, Sodrel is proud to describe his stands on border security, gas prices and energy, tax relief, creating jobs, veterans, health care, supporting small business, and agriculture. As of yesterday evening, there was no entry for Iraq on the site, though he does discuss the issue on his House Web site.

All this Republican uneasiness underscores the importance of the New York Times-CBS poll showing that 51 percent of those surveyed found no link between the war in Iraq and the broader war on terrorism, an increase of 10 percentage points since June. A majority now rejects the administration's core foreign policy argument.

The cracking of Republican solidarity in support of Bush on Iraq has short-term implications for November's elections and long-term implications for whether the administration can sustain its policies.

With a growing number of Republicans now echoing Democratic criticisms of the war, Republican strategists will have a harder time making the election a referendum on whether the United States should "cut and run" from Iraq, the administration's typical characterization of the Democrats' view.

And even the war's strongest supporters are offering increasingly critical assessments of past decisions. Last Tuesday Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) recited a litany of past administration statements -- "stuff happens, mission accomplished, last throes, a few dead-enders" -- as indications that "we had not told the American people how tough and difficult this task would be." On Friday McCain reiterated his loyalty to the Iraq mission, but he had already made his point.

The Republicans' restiveness suggests that Bush may not be able to stick with his current Iraq policy through Election Day. Even if he does, he will come under heavy pressure from his own party after Nov. 7 to pursue a demonstrably more effective strategy -- or to begin pulling American forces out.


6. The Mayor Who Challenged the President -- by Sasha Abramsky

The night before Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson hosted a crowd of several thousand protestors on the grounds of City Hall, Anderson's friend and advisor, the sculptor Steven Goldsmith, told me that the mayor was about to become "a folk hero of the American West."

Goldsmith, a middle-aged, balding man, with a trim gray beard and a perennial twinkle in his eye, was amongst Anderson's inner-circle; he had met him back in the early 1970s, when Anderson, an up-and-coming young attorney, was working with Planned Parenthood to open up Utah's conservative anti-abortion and anti-contraception laws. When Anderson stunned the political establishment by winning election to the mayorship in 1999 as a take-no-prisoners populist, Goldsmith was brought aboard as the city's planning director, helping to rejuvenate the downtown, using money leveraged around the upcoming winter Olympics, expanding the light railway system, encouraging the creation of vibrant restaurant dining hubs, helping to bring cutting-edge cultural events to town.

Anderson is surrounded by extremely intelligent, idealistic, and, it has to be said, adoring people. His administration has a sort of Camelot-in-the-Wasatch Mountains feel to it, a glamorous, energetic sense of possibility. In a city more known as the center of Mormonism than as a focal point for progressive politics, Anderson has instituted some of the most creative, thoughtful and radical urban policies anywhere in America. He has pushed to implement the Kyoto Protocols locally; has recreated the way in which city officials interact with their constituents; has restructured the city's criminal justice system; has gone out on a limb to defend gay rights; and has repeatedly taken on big developers, from "sprawl mall" advocates to those in favor of unregulated suburban growth in the large Salt Lake valley region surrounding the 182,000-strong city itself.

I liked Anderson and his team, but their praise of the boss seemed hyperbolic. "A folk hero of the American West??" Surely that was a bit much.

But, having been present at Mayor Anderson's searing, and devastatingly articulate, critique of President Bush on August 30, I have to say Goldsmith was onto something. Most of the event itself was run-of-the-mill, a few thousand anti-war, anti-Bush protestors, a platform of entirely forgettable, sometimes embarrassingly inept, speakers, many of whom mouthed nothing but platitudes. But Rocky's speech (everyone calls him just "Rocky"), Rocky's speech, now that was something else. It was orders of magnitude more powerful than any critique of Bush I've seen by an elected political figure, not so much because of his particular denunciations of Bush's Iraq policies, but because he synthesized sentiments about the whole way in which Bush governs and the nature of his relationship with the electorate.

Anderson spent more than thirty hours endlessly writing, and rewriting the speech that he planned to deliver as a counter to the presence of Donald Rumsfeld, Condaleeza Rice, and President Bush at the American Legion convention at the Salt Lake Palace.

"Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism," he told the excited crowd, a slender, gray haired man in a black suit, standing alone, and entirely unprotected, at a microphone on a podium on the steps of City Hall. In a booming bass, denouncing the hundreds of angry callers who had phoned his office to urge him not to embarrass the city by protesting the presence of the nation's leader, he continued. "A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to sit down and be quiet in the name of politeness."

And then he really got into his stride. For the next half hour, he detailed all the ways in which he believed the Bush administration was being dishonest with the American public--from its justifications for the Iraq war through to its cavalier approach to the separations of power mandated by the Constitution--and all the moral failings of a populace content to sit back passively and lap up the dishonesty. In an era in which most politicians try to say nothing too controversial, Rocky Anderson went for the jugular. The administration, he said, was "an oppressive, inhumane regime, that does not respect the laws and traditions of our country, and that history will rank as the worst president our nation has ever had."

Quoting Teddy Roosevelt, he declared that silence in the face of injustice "is morally treasonable to the American public."

He built to a call-and-response crescendo detailing all the administration policies, domestic and foreign, he took umbrage with. "No more dependence on foreign oil," he called out; and the crowd roared back "No more!" "No more phony, inhumane, and ineffective so-called War on Drugs." "No more!"..."No more silence by the American people." "No more!" "We will continue to resist the lies, the outrages, the deception of this Bush administration. We must pursue peace as vigorously as the Bush administration has pursued war." And then the one-time philosophy student and reader of existential tracts issued his sucker punch. "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

Rocky Anderson raised his right fist in the air, a slightly relieved smile on his face, and stood in front of the crowd. Just stood there. Welcome to Salt Lake, Mr. President. Welcome to my city.

(Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow for democracy at Demos , a New York City think tank and author of Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House and Hard Time Blues: How Politics Built a Prison Nation)


7. Donald Rumsfeld’s Dance with the Nazis -- by Frank Rich

President Bush came to Washington vowing to be a uniter, not a divider. Well, you win some and you lose some. But there is one member of his administration who has not broken that promise: Donald Rumsfeld. With indefatigable brio, he has long since united Democrats, Republicans, generals and civilians alike in calling for his scalp.

Last week the man who gave us “stuff happens” and “you go to war with the Army you have” outdid himself. In an instantly infamous address to the American Legion, he likened critics of the Iraq debacle to those who “ridiculed or ignored” the rise of the Nazis in the 1930’s and tried to appease Hitler. Such Americans, he said, suffer from a “moral or intellectual confusion” and fail to recognize the “new type of fascism” represented by terrorists. Presumably he was not only describing the usual array of “Defeatocrats” but also the first President Bush, who had already been implicitly tarred as an appeaser by Tony Snow last month for failing to knock out Saddam in 1991.

What made Mr. Rumsfeld’s speech noteworthy wasn’t its toxic effort to impugn the patriotism of administration critics by conflating dissent on Iraq with cut-and-run surrender and incipient treason. That’s old news. No, what made Mr. Rumsfeld’s performance special was the preview it offered of the ambitious propaganda campaign planned between now and Election Day. An on-the-ropes White House plans to stop at nothing when rewriting its record of defeat (not to be confused with defeatism) in a war that has now lasted longer than America’s fight against the actual Nazis in World War II.

Here’s how brazen Mr. Rumsfeld was when he invoked Hitler’s appeasers to score his cheap points: Since Hitler was photographed warmly shaking Neville Chamberlain’s hand at Munich in 1938, the only image that comes close to matching it in epochal obsequiousness is the December 1983 photograph of Mr. Rumsfeld himself in Baghdad, warmly shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein in full fascist regalia. Is the defense secretary so self-deluded that he thought no one would remember a picture so easily Googled on the Web? Or worse, is he just too shameless to care?

Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t go to Baghdad in 1983 to tour the museum. Then a private citizen, he had been dispatched as an emissary by the Reagan administration, which sought to align itself with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam was already a notorious thug. Well before Mr. Rumsfeld’s trip, Amnesty International had reported the dictator’s use of torture — “beating, burning, sexual abuse and the infliction of electric shocks” — on hundreds of political prisoners. Dozens more had been summarily executed or had “disappeared.” American intelligence agencies knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons to gas both Iraqi Kurds and Iranians.

According to declassified State Department memos detailing Mr. Rumsfeld’s Baghdad meetings, the American visitor never raised the subject of these crimes with his host. (Mr. Rumsfeld has since claimed otherwise, but that is not supported by the documents, which can be viewed online at George Washington University’s National Security Archive .) Within a year of his visit, the American mission was accomplished: Iraq and the United States resumed diplomatic relations for the first time since Iraq had severed them in 1967 in protest of American backing of Israel in the Six-Day War.

In his speech last week, Mr. Rumsfeld paraphrased Winston Churchill: Appeasing tyrants is “a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.” He can quote Churchill all he wants, but if he wants to self-righteously use that argument to smear others, the record shows that Mr. Rumsfeld cozied up to the crocodile of Baghdad as smarmily as anyone. To borrow the defense secretary’s own formulation, he suffers from moral confusion about Saddam.

Mr. Rumsfeld also suffers from intellectual confusion about terrorism. He might not have appeased Al Qaeda but he certainly enabled it. Like Chamberlain, he didn’t recognize the severity of the looming threat until it was too late. Had he done so, maybe his boss would not have blown off intelligence about imminent Qaeda attacks while on siesta in Crawford.

For further proof, read the address Mr. Rumsfeld gave to Pentagon workers on Sept. 10, 2001 — a policy manifesto he regarded as sufficiently important, James Bamford reminds us in his book “A Pretext to War,” that it was disseminated to the press. “The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America” is how the defense secretary began. He then went on to explain that this adversary “crushes new ideas” with “brutal consistency” and “disrupts the defense of the United States.” It is a foe “more subtle and implacable” than the former Soviet Union, he continued, stronger and larger and “closer to home” than “the last decrepit dictators of the world.”

And who might this ominous enemy be? Of that, Mr. Rumsfeld was as certain as he would later be about troop strength in Iraq: “the Pentagon bureaucracy.” In love with the sound of his own voice, he blathered on for almost 4,000 words while Mohamed Atta and the 18 other hijackers fanned out to American airports.

Three months later, Mr. Rumsfeld would still be asleep at the switch, as his war command refused to heed the urgent request by American officers on the ground for the additional troops needed to capture Osama bin Laden when he was cornered in Tora Bora. What would follow in Iraq was also more Chamberlain than Churchill. By failing to secure and rebuild the country after the invasion, he created a terrorist haven where none had been before.

That last story is seeping out in ever more incriminating detail, thanks to well-sourced chronicles like “Fiasco,” “Cobra II” and “Blood Money,” T. Christian Miller’s new account of the billions of dollars squandered and stolen in Iraq reconstruction. Still, Americans have notoriously short memories. The White House hopes that by Election Day it can induce amnesia about its failures in the Middle East as deftly as Mr. Rumsfeld (with an assist from John Mark Karr) helped upstage first-anniversary remembrances of Katrina.

One obstacle is that White House allies, not just Democrats, are sounding the alarm about Iraq. In recent weeks, prominent conservatives, some still war supporters and some not, have steadily broached the dread word Vietnam: Chuck Hagel ,William F. Buckley Jr. and the columnists Rich Lowry and Max Boot . A George Will column critical of the war so rattled the White House that it had a flunky release a public 2,400-word response notable for its incoherence.

If even some conservatives are making accurate analogies between Vietnam and Iraq, one way for the administration to drown them out is to step up false historical analogies of its own, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s. In the past the administration has been big on comparisons between Iraq and the American Revolution — the defense secretary once likened “the snows of Valley Forge” to “the sandstorms of central Iraq” — but lately the White House vogue has been for “Islamo-fascism,” which it sees as another rhetorical means to retrofit Iraq to the more salable template of World War II.

“Islamo-fascism” certainly sounds more impressive than such tired buzzwords as “Plan for Victory” or “Stay the Course.” And it serves as a handy substitute for “As the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down.” That slogan had to be retired abruptly last month after The New York Times reported that violence in Baghdad has statistically increased rather than decreased as American troops handed over responsibilities to Iraqis. Yet the term “Islamo-fascists,” like the bygone “evildoers,” is less telling as a description of the enemy than as a window into the administration’s continued confusion about exactly who the enemy is. As the writer Katha Pollitt asks in The Nation , “Who are the ‘Islamo-fascists’ in Saudi Arabia — the current regime or its religious-fanatical opponents?”

Next up is the parade of presidential speeches culminating in what The Washington Post describes as “a whirlwind tour of the Sept. 11 attack sites”: All Fascism All the Time. In his opening salvo, delivered on Thursday to the same American Legion convention that cheered Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush worked in the Nazis and Communists and compared battles in Iraq to Omaha Beach and Guadalcanal. He once more interchanged the terrorists who struck the World Trade Center with car bombers in Baghdad, calling them all part of the same epic “ideological struggle of the 21st century.” One more drop in the polls, and he may yet rebrand this mess War of the Worlds.

“Iraq is not overwhelmed by foreign terrorists,” said the congressman John Murtha in succinct rebuttal to the president’s speech. “It is overwhelmed by Iraqis fighting Iraqis.” And with Americans caught in the middle. If we owe anything to those who died on 9/11, it is that we not forget how the administration diverted our blood and treasure from the battle against bin Laden and other stateless Islamic terrorists, fascist or whatever, to this quagmire in a country that did not attack us on 9/11. The number of American dead in Iraq — now more than 2,600 — is inexorably approaching the death toll of that Tuesday morning five years ago.