League of Women Voters in Oregon refuse to let major parties set terms of gubenatorial debate

This article came from Third Party Watch.com from an online Oregon newspaper. Kudos to the League of Women Voters for not letting the majors push them around.

Sorry I haven't be blogging much lately because I've been busy. Hopefully after Labor day I'll get into a new routine.

- Sean Scallon



The League of Women Voters of the Rogue Valley has withdrawn its sponsorship of a planned gubernatorial debate because the two main candidates refused to allow challengers from minor parties to participate.

The League of Women Voters of Oregon recently opened its sponsored debates to any candidate who receives at least 5 percent support in an independent poll. Until last year, the league required a candidate to poll at least 10 percent to participate.

After seven months of planning, the league decided it wouldn’t co-sponsor the debate with KOBI Channel 5 because Gov. Ted Kulongoski, his Republican challenger Ron Saxton, and KOBI managers were all unwilling to open the debate to candidates who could show at least 5 percent support to participate, said Trish Bowcock, president of the League of Women Voters of the Rogue Valley.

“We were put in the position of saying we wouldn’t follow our own rules, and we couldn’t do that,” Bowcock said.

“They were given the format,” she said, “but they agreed to everything but the 5 percent rule.”

The decision means the debate will be closed to Mary Starrett, the Constitution party’s candidate for governor, as well as Libertarian candidate Richard Morley and Joseph Keating of the Pacific Green Party of Oregon.

Although the league has dropped its sponsorship, the debate is still scheduled for live broadcast on Channel 5 from 6:30 to 8 p.m., Oct. 24. The league estimated that the debate could reach as many as 380,000 registered voters in Southern Oregon.


Kulongoski and Saxton will field questions from members of the news media, including Bob Hunter, Mail Tribune editor.

Representatives from the Kulongoski and Saxton camps had their own explanations for why the league decided to withdraw.

Anna Richter Taylor, said the Kulongoski campaign’s only condition concerned when the polling had to be completed to determine which candidates would be involved in the forum.

“We wanted to know when they were going to make the decision,” she said.

Richter Taylor said the governor’s campaign welcomed the league’s sponsorship.

“We never put conditions around their involvement,” she added.

Angela Wilhelms, spokesperson for the Saxton campaign, said she wasn’t aware of any concern about minor-party candidates.

“We were given a format and asked to participate and we agreed,” she said. “We haven’t had any follow-up conversations with anybody about this.”

Bob Wise, vice president and general manager of KOBI, said, “I would have loved to have worked with the League of Women Voters.”

Wise said that after discussing the 5 percent issue with the Kulongoski and Saxton campaigns “It became apparent that that was an issue.”

He said the Kulongoski and Saxton campaigns wanted to set the limit at 10 percent support for a minor candidate, which Wise described as “reasonable.”

“It didn’t seem like an unrealistic expectation of the candidates participating,” said Wise. He said it was important to continue to hold the forum in the interests of his viewers even though the league has dropped its sponsorship.

Margaret Noel, chairwoman of the League of Women Voters of Oregon education fund, said it is very difficult for any minor party candidate to get 5 percent support. She said she had not seen any polls so far that showed any of the minor candidates with 5 percent.

Noel said the filing deadline for gubernatorial candidates is next Tuesday, so it would have been premature to say that no other contenders should be in the debate.

She said the league also wants to extend the deadline for minor candidates to show 5 percent support right up until the time of the debate.

“If a candidate had got the 5 percent, they would deserve to be in the debate,” she said.

The Christian Conservative Who Opposed the Vietnam War

I found this article on Antiwar.com today. I wish there more leaders like Eugene Siler around.

-- Sean Scallon

The Christian Conservative Who Opposed the Vietnam War

by David T. and Linda Royster Beito

To the extent a Religious Right of any kind existed in 1964, Eugene Siler easily qualified as a platinum-card member. In his nine years in the U.S. House, he was unrivaled in his zeal to implement "Christianism and Americanism." Yet 42 years ago this month, on Aug. 7, 1964, he did something that would be extremely rare for one of his modern counterparts on the Religious Right. He dissented from a president's urgent request to authorize military action in a foreign war. It was Siler who cast the lone vote in the U.S. House against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Because he "paired against" the bill (meaning he was absent during the vote), however, most historical accounts do not mention him.

A self-described "Kentucky hillbilly," Siler was born in 1900 in Williamsburg, a town nestled in the mountains in the southeastern part of the state. Unlike most Kentuckians, he, like his neighbors, was a rock-ribbed Republican. The people of this impoverished area had backed the Union during the Civil War and had stood by the GOP in good times and bad ever since. Siler served in the Navy in World War I and two decades later as an Army captain during World War II. His experiences with the realities of war left him cold to most proposals to send American troops into harm's way.

After graduating from Columbia University, Siler returned to Williamsburg to be a small-town lawyer. A devout Baptist, he gained local renown as a lay preacher, eventually serving as moderator of the General Association of Baptists in Kentucky. He abstained from alcohol, tobacco, and profanity. As a lawyer, he turned away all clients seeking divorces or accused of whiskey-related crimes.

He began service as an elected judge of the Court of Appeals of Kentucky in 1945 and promptly refused his regular monthly allotment of $150 for expenses. Instead, he gave the money to a special fund he set up for scholarships. Not surprisingly, Siler often quoted the scriptures from the bench. He did the same in his speeches as the unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor in 1951, earning him a statewide reputation as a "Bible Crusader."

Siler consistently stressed social conservatism during his tenure in the U.S. House, which began in 1955. He sponsored a bill to ban liquor and beer advertising in all interstate media. He said that permitting these ads was akin to allowing the "harsh hussy" to advertise in "the open door of her place of business for the allurement of our school children." Of course, he was "100 percent for Bible reading and the Lord's Prayer in our public schools."

Like his good friend, and fellow Republican, from Iowa, Rep. H.R. Gross, Siler considered himself to be a fiscal watchdog. He disdained all junkets and railed against government debt and high spending. Siler made exceptions for the homefolks, however, by supporting flood control and other federal measures that aided his district.

As with Gross, Siler was a Robert A. Taft Republican who was averse to entangling alliances and foreign quagmires. A consistent opponent of foreign aid, he was just one of two congressmen to vote against Kennedy's call-up of reserves during the Berlin crisis. He favored Goldwater in 1964, but never shared his hawkish views. The people back home did not seem to mind. Sometimes, the Democrats failed to even put up a candidate.

Siler was an early, and prescient, critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In June 1964, shortly after deciding not to run again, he quipped, half in jest, that he was running for president as an antiwar candidate. He pledged to resign after one day in office, staying just long enough to bring the troops home. He characterized the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized Johnson to take "all necessary steps" in Vietnam, as a "buck-passing" pretext to "seal the lips of Congress against future criticism."

The worsening situation in Vietnam prompted Siler to come out of retirement in 1968 to run (unsuccessfully) for the U.S. Senate nomination on a platform calling for withdrawal of all U.S. troops by Christmas. Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon, the only two U.S. senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, also went down to defeat that year.

Although Siler lived on until 1987, few remembered his early stand against the Vietnam War. It is doubtful that this particularly bothered him. He knew that his reputation was secure among the plain, Baptist, Republican mountain folk of southeastern Kentucky who had sent him to Congress for nearly a decade.

Reprinted courtesy of the History News Network.

Lieberman the liar

In another time I would have welcomed Sen. Joe Lieberman's call for Domald Rumsfeld's resignation and criticisms of the war in Iraq. The problem is, all of this is nothing more than a transparent attempt to curry favor with anti-war voters in Conneticut. If he had said such things six months ago, chances are, he probably would have won the primary. Now he says such things and pretends he said them for the past two years when blantanly lying. This is the same man who criticized war opponents for trying to undermine the presidency itself. I may not share Ned Lamont's politics, but I hope he beats the pants off of Lieberman the liar just to get that neocon slime out of the Senate.

Who's the real radical, McGovern or Lieberman?

The neoconservatives throw around George McGovern's name a lot, especially in the wake of Sen. Joe Lieberman's (D-Conn) Democratic primary defeat by Ned Lamont. It's a given that most U.S. citizens don't know who George McGovern is, weren't even born when the former South Dakota senator was the Democratic Presidential nominee in 1972 or if they were around back then, have forgotten him altogether.

So why be name droppers?

To the neocons, McGovern is a symbol rather than a real person. He's a symbol of something lost, namely, the Democratic Party itself away from them and to their opponents. When Joe Lieberman lost, it just reminded them of 1972 all over again. It reminded them of how the liberal post-World War II consensus was shattered irrevocably by those questioning the Cold War and U.S. entanglement away from home. To them, the McGovernite seizure of power was a coup de tat of campus radicals they were thoroughly opposed to.

But who are the real radicals?

I have written recently about the incoherence of McGovernite foreign policy because its natural instincts were towards Robert Taft isolationism while clashing with traditional liberal idealism about the community of nations (the one-world internationalist types). Part of this came from McGovern's background as a former Republican himself from a traditionally isolationist Midwestern state like South Dakota. In this his forefathers are more Robert LaFollette and George Norris rather than Adlai Stevenson as he would like to claim. Being a Midwestern, former Republican Methodist from a prairie state, McGovern is a huge culture clash with urban, ethnic, Catholic and Jewish intellectuals who call themselves neoconservatives.

Yet just to point out the dubious pasts of two prominent neocons? such a foreign policy is hardly radical, certainly when we compare it to neoconservative doctrine of creative destruction and nation building. In McGovern's 1972 acceptance speech of his party's nomination, he exclaimed "Come home, America." Could not Taft have said it any better? How about George Washington or John Quincy Adams? Does a man like McGovern who has five kids, was a World War II bomber pilot and church deacon sound anymore radical than an Irving Kristol who spent his college days at CCNY in Trotskyite sects or David Horowitz, who pimped for the Black Panthers

No, the real radicals are those neocons and other Jacobins who think the right amount of bomb tonnage can produce a "democracy" amidst the ruins. Well, in the ruins of Lebanon and Iraq right now, "democracy" is becoming a sick joke as the IEDs go off or as the Israeli bombs fall. "Come home, America" is hardly a utopian or radical call in comparison to the calls the current Administration make for nation building around the world or to construct a "new Middle East." To George Will, neoconservatism is astounding misleading label for such radicals.

McGovern himself was no radical. But the people around him were. To win the Democratic Party's nomination in 1972, he needed support of the New Left and the growing New Class that were rising to challenge for power in what was then the major party of the nation and the world's oldest continuous political party. Using rules that he helped to design along with strong grassroot support, McGovern won a first ballot victory over the neocons candidate of choice Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash.) along with Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie and George Wallace. Yet if even my liberal tree-hugging parents (God bless them' still) were put off by some of McGovern's supporters, you can imagine what the rest of America must of thought of them. Like Barry Goldwater to a certain extent, the antics of McGovern's supporters tagged the candidate with an extremist label he simply could not shake thanks largely to a poorly run general election campaign (McGovern campaign practically hid both his family and military background which would have made him more acceptable to voters.). This is something Ned Lamont should keep in mind every time he appears with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. People do judge you by the company you keep.

The neocons, back then just plain old liberal intellectuals, were just sick. The very campus radicals they had opposed had taken over the party. And what was worse, they didn't go away when McGovern was thrashed by Richard Nixon. "The old politicians who think that once McGovern is defeated it will be politics as usual are dead wrong and do not understand the social forces at work in the country…" wrote Peter Bourne, an adviser to Jimmy Carter, who's 1972 memo this statement is from accurately described how the McGovernites stayed on in the party even after his devastating defeat. Like the Goldwaterites, they integrated themselves into the party because they weren't just activists but a whole community of like minded people. A demonstrator at the 1968 Democratic Convention was asked in a public television documentary once why her fellow demonstrators protested the Democrats. Her reply: "Because we were the children of the Democratic Party." Indeed. And those children, locked out in 1968, broke down the door in 1972 and became the thing that wouldn't leave. Indeed, once upon a time Joe Lieberman was one of these persons, running and winning as a reform candidate in 1970 for the Connecticut State Senate helped along by Bill and Hilary Clinton who were both at Yale Law School at the time. Of course Clinton was McGovern's Texas campaign manager. Lieberman may very well have been opposed to Vietnam, but he doesn't mind the same kind of nation-building project in Iraq. If this is because of his strong support for Israel, well, I'll let the readers be the judge of that.

All this meant the neocons had to go and by 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, go they did, to the Republican Party. But the GOP is not their natural home and it explains why the neocons have been caterwauling over Lieberman's fate. His loss was like a repeating bad dream, another defeat to the so-called radicals who have driven them into political exile. Yet in reality, it may very turn out that sanity triumphed in the end against radicalism.

---Sean Scallon

Meeting the real enemy

An online corresponder of mine Doug Newman sent me this article he had written and I'm happy to post it here on Beating the Powers that Be. Enjoy.

----Sean Scallon

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY IN THE WAR ON TERROR … AND HE IS US
By Doug Newman

August 12, 2006


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Is it just me, or does anyone else feel the vise grip tightening?

Thursday’s news read as follows: “Airline passengers around the country stood in line for hours and airport trash bins bulged with everything from mouthwash and shaving cream to maple syrup and fine wine Thursday in a security crackdown prompted by the discovery of a terror plot in Britain.”

Imagine this. In “the land of the free and the home of the brave” there is a “security crackdown.” Crackdown on whom, may I ask?

United Airlines posted updated TSA regulations – including a ban on all liquids or gels in carry-on baggage -- on its web site on August 10, in response to the discovery of the terror plot. Hmm. Perhaps I am naïve, but I thought that things like this had to be passed by legislators and signed by the president before I could be arrested for violating them.

But no. We have a War on Terror. The executive branch has to act and act fast! It is for your protection. I mean they have to do something.

We are told that we are fighting a war against terrorists who “hate our freedom” and seek to “undermine our very way of life.”

If America succumbs to full-blown tyranny it will not be because of crazed, diabolical “Islamo-Fascists.” It will be because the American people willingly relinquished their freedom in the name of security.

America has two constitutions. One was ordained and established in Philadelphia in 1787. The other exists in the hearts and minds of the American people and far more important. If “we the people” are ignorant, apathetic and downright unwilling to defend their God-given rights, the written Constitution becomes just a piece of paper.

Ever since September 11, the American people have been all too happy to let the FEDGOV do whatever it pleases. We applaud the USA PATRIOT Act. We submit to the TSA grope-and-grab at airports. We have no objection to warrantless searches. We could care less if Uncle Sam monitors our e-mails and phone calls. After all, “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” and “your civil liberties don’t matter if you’re dead.”

My response to this is: “Just how do you know you have nothing to hide?”

Consider the following:

Americans have already accepted all ten policy planks of the Communist Manifesto as the law of the land.
Millions of Americans don’t mind one bit that we have the world’s highest incarceration rate.
The Federal Register – Uncle Sam’s compendium of laws and regulations with which you and I are required to comply – runs 70,000 pages. Do you know what is in there? Do you? If you violate it, prepare to don an orange jumpsuit.
The Internal Revenue code runs 11,000,000 words. Again: do you know what is in there?
The worst part of the post-9/11 agenda is Uncle Sam’s assumption of power to imprison terror suspects arbitrarily and indefinitely without formal charges, without the right to face their accuser, without a jury trial or without any semblance of due process whatsoever.

What was that about “threatening our very way of life”? This is not the doing of some psychopath in Afghanistan. It is the doing of our own government. And it is all in the name of freedom, of course.

As one observer put it: “On September 11, 2001 a horrible crime was committed. On September 12, 2001 the American people became suspects.” Of far greater danger than terrorists abroad is how unquestioningly so many Americans have accepted their new status.

First it was 9/11 and the growth of the surveillance state. Then it was Thursday's unveiling of a terrorist plot in Britain and new restrictions on what we can carry on planes. What will come after the next terrorist episode, be it an attack or an arrest? And how calmly will the American people accept whatever laws or regulations Uncle Sam hands down? As an old German proverb says, freedom dies in little pieces.

During the Clinton years, it was popular to say that you loved your country but you feared your government. Under Bush II, the same people want you to think that if you do not follow in lockstep with your government, you are all kinds of unspeakable things.

Police state groupies tell us that these are temporary measures necessary to keep us safe from terrorists. Ben Franklin once remarked that those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither. The German people in the 1930s were happy to sacrifice their liberties to a leader who would keep them secure. They did this for 12 years. For the 8871st time, Bush II is not Adolf Hitler. However, the American people are in total denial that their own government, left unchecked, can do far more harm than any foreign terrorist.

In the case of Ex Parte Milligan in 1866, Supreme Court Justice David Davis wrote: “The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism.”

The anarchy of which Justice Davis wrote was that of unrestrained power. When you let people do whatever they want, you get Woodstock. When you let governments do whatever they want, you get Auschwitz.

So what do we do about terror? Simple. Get out of the superpower business. Stop trying to run the whole world. When you have troops in 130 countries, is it any wonder that so many people hate you? Bring the troops home. Use your military to defend your shores and borders and be done with it.

It is hard for a lot of Americans, blinded as they are by hubris, to understand, but most of the world does not want our way of life. And the more bombs we drop, the more they will hate us.

As Pat Buchanan has stated, "To Islamic peoples, whether the Crusaders come in the name of God or in the name of democracy, they are still Crusaders." And they want the Crusaders gone. Buchanan has also stated that, “The price of empire is terror. The price of occupation is terror. The price of interventionism is terror.”

Terrorists do not “hate us for our freedom.” They hate our relentless meddling in the internal affairs of their nations. The problems of the Arab world are not America’s to fix. So let us quit trying to fix them.

The people who have no problem with the advancing police state are many of the same people who so harshly criticized France for not joining America in invading Iraq in 2003. France had a terrorist problem at one point. And then they pulled out of Algeria.

The whole business brings to mind the comic strip character Pogo, who once remarked that “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Such is the case in the War on Terror. It is not “the terrorists” who want to take away our freedom. It is the United States government, aided and abetted by the ignorance and apathy of so many Americans who will gladly trade freedom for security. The German people did this 70 years ago, with grisly results. Let us pray that this does not happen in America. There is no guarantee that it can’t

Sore Loserman - Joe just doesn't get it

Now I know what they meant by the nickname “Sore Loserman.”

The non-concession concession speech for Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn) after he lost his Democratic Party primary to Ned Lamont shows a man still in denial.

Denial about why he lost and why the voters of his own party decided to dump him for an amateur politician who had never run a statewide campaign before and whose highest public office ever obtained was town selectman of Greenwich.

No, to Joe, what happened last Tuesday was not an important event but a mere bump in the road, just the first half of a long game or mere Southern primary to which there will be a runoff in the fall.

In fact he’ll even spin it as a victory. “I was 13 points behind five days before the election and I only lost by four points. If I only had another week I would have won the thing. Now I’ll have three months to put down this little upstart trying to take away my entitled Senate seat.”

If Democratic Party primary voters in Connecticut thought that Lieberman had become too arrogant and too aloof, he didn’t do anything to dissuade them from that judgment Tuesday night. If such voters were at least looking for a little humility or little “message received” from Lieberman, they didn’t get it.

Instead, Joe will have to wait until November before he finally stares the reality of the political landscape right in the face.

Lieberman may very well be standing by his principles when supporting the war in Iraq (a quality far seldom seen in politics) but when 60% percent of the U.S. public is against the war, voters are hardly going to reward candidates who stand by the wrong principles. And when he says that he’s been a critic of the way the Bush II Administration has handled the war -- the same Joe Lieberman who attacked anti-war persons for undermining the president -- he’s telling a blatant lie. And voters don’t reward liars either.

Nor does Lieberman get the fact that while centrism and bi-partisanship are nice concepts, they are also abstract concepts and not much of foundation of a campaign.

Politics is ultimately about making choices and making decisions. Where you come down on an issue and what you vote for or against is what matters. And for the past six years Lieberman has made choices that has angered Democratic primary voters whether its been supporting the war, supporting Social Security privatization, supporting federal intervention in the Schiavo case and supporting the Alito nomination. To claim, as Lieberman does, that he’s on a higher plane of existence because he is “bi-partisan” and “moderate” is laughable when the record is boiled down to basic votes, speeches and actions in support of one thing or another. Ultimately you take a stand and for many voters, the stands Lieberman has taken has made them decide to support someone else. To say he should not be judged upon his record because he makes nice with everyone is also silly.

It’s amazing that a man that’s been in politics for over 30 years did not see this coming. After all, did he not run for the Connecticut State Senate in 1970 against an incumbent campaigning as a reformer while at the same time an upstart named Joe Duffy took down incumbent Senator Thomas Dodd because of his support of the Vietnam War? Did he not see the parallels from 1970 to 2006 when another unpopular war helped to take him down? Thirty-Six years ago the state’s Democratic machine could not help Dodd in the face of rising anti-war sentiment and 36 later the same establishment that Lieberman is now a part of couldn’t save him either despite outspending Lamont (who, 36 years ago, would have probably been Lieberman’s GOP opponent as the scion of a rich investment banking family just like the Bushes) $12 to $4 million. Joe seems blind to history.

He’s also deaf to the entreaties of the same establishment not to run an independent campaign for his seat as Dodd did. He’s not listening to them anymore now that they have to back Lamont. Instead he’s listening to the New York Sun, New York Post and the Weekly Standard all neoconservative publications who are urging him to run if only to preserve his pro-war vote in the Senate (along with the possibility that the neocons could still worm their way back into the Democratic Party if they are ever spewed out by the GOP because of the war.) But Dodd finished third back in 1970 as an independent candidate and even though Joe has a good shot of winning because the GOP candidate is a cipher, there’s a good chance Lieberman’s message won’t resonate among independents and Republicans either. This is still a state that went overwhelmingly for Kerry, warts and all; this still a blue state where the local GOP is not exactly the kind of Republicans you would find in red states and this is still an unpopular war with an unpopular president leading it. What pray tell is Lieberman’s campaign going to be about that’s going attract voters through all these trends? Is he going to tell Republicans and independent what a good Democrat he’s been? Is he going to tell Democrats how bi-partisan and centrist he is? Is he going to tell an anti-war public to stay the course? Plus, given all the other obstacles non-major parties face (which Lieberman will now become familiar with), Lieberman’s denial could very well be shattered into itsy-bitsy pieces come November.

Lieberman was one of three incumbents who lost party primaries last Tuesday. What this goes to show is that for those who on the outside looking in at social-democratic establishment, the primary is an effective way to influence that establishment, shake-it up or even replace it in this case. My book, Beating the Powers that Be, had a section on the Club for Growth, which helped an insurgent candidate Mark Walberg upset Rep. John Schwartz (R-Mich.). in a party primary. MoveOn.org and other bloggers provided the same kind of aid to Lamont. In many cases, the primary is the only real democracy voters will get. Had there been no primary, Lieberman would have cruised to an easy re-election victory against his sacrificial lamb opponent. Without a primary, Schwartz would have been easily re-elected in his heavily Republican district. Beating an incumbent is not easy, but primary elections, with their limited turnouts and selective voter screenings and lesser costs, is a good way to make an incumbent sweat if not outright lose. And it’s a good way to steer the major parties in a direction away from establishment control. Lamont’s win, the first win over a blatantly pro-war candidate, has already sent the shockwaves through the system. Hopefully more people will take advantage of them if only teach the Lieberman’s of the world valuable lessons whether they want to or not.

See Emily at play with bombs: The unserious War on Terror

I recently got into argument on an internet political positing site with one the "World War III" (or maybe its IV, I've lost count) enthusiasts when I told him that despite his longing for a world wide conflict emerging from the current Israeli invasion of Lebanon, he wouldn't get it. There would be no invasion of Syria, no bombing of Iran or anything else outside of what's going on southern Lebanon by U.S. induced parameters on the Israelis.

In other words, he would be "All dressed up and no place to go."

I asked him if that made him mad at the Bush II Administration for imposing such limitations and he responded by attacking me for my Manichean view of war as a choice of either total pacifism or total war Goebbels-style 1942.

Some World War III this is turning out to be.

It's becoming increasing obvious watching the current Israeli campaign and the war the U.S. is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the current supporters of war in general, whether they are Bushbots, neocons, misguided but sincere patriots or those who simply like war for its own sake, are not serious about either fighting it or leading the western world to victory in such conflicts.

Yes, there are war freaks out there. Read Chris Hedges book War is the Force that Gives us Meaning or Andrew Bachevich's The New American Militarism and you'll know who they are. Such people formed the core of Fascist movements post-World War I because they, many of whom were former soldiers, could not find any place in the liberal bourgeoisie world of the 1920s. They thought it corrupt and decadent and worshipped war's supposed nobility of extreme sacrifice, courage, honor and selfless duty. One can be all such things in peacetime, but only war constantly tests the mettle of men, or so theory goes. For them, war brings clarity, a purpose, a drive to lives that would be little more than meaningless. They want to be a part of war's history and its ability to change such history. It's no coincidence that Hitler was a former soldier. So was Mussolini. It was no coincidence either that Japanese expansionism or imperialism was championed by the military. And of course, Franco was a generalissimo.

Such people live on today of course. Unfortunately, many are not former soldiers at all. Some are College Republicans who prefer beer bongs on Friday night at the frathouse rather than fighting for their country. Some are neoconservatives whose mettle is only tested when they're fighting writer's cramp from a day's wasted keyboarding on online chat rooms. And some are just loud-mouth punks who style themselves as amateur generals and gung-ho go-getters but wouldn't be caught dead at an enlistment ceremony. It's a good thing for them we're not in total war, otherwise they certainly would be testing their mettle like it or not. But in unserious war, one can enjoy the pleasures of conflict without the logical consequences. The internet, video replays of bombing runs and instantaneous satellite cable TV allows a person to feel as if thought they are a part of the action without so much as bullet whizzing by their heads. It's either the equivalent a great big video game or sporting event, take your pick. As for being an actual soldier well, isn't that somebody else's job?

You can tell both Israel and the U.S. are not fighting serious wars. Let's start with the Israelis. In 1982, the IDF invaded Lebanon with 100,000 troops that took them just 48 hours to reach Beirut. Not only that, but the IAF downed many a Syrian plane in the process. The PLO was expelled from Lebanon which meant the initial goal of the Israeli campaign was achieved. Fourteen years later, we are nearing the fourth week of this conflict and the IDF is finally using not even a quarter of the 1982 force in its current invasion. Not only that, but Hezbollah has been able to kill Israeli soldiers and continuously fire rockets into Israel despite total IAF dominance of the skies. And given the fact Israel knows full well that Hezbollah is being resupplied by both Iran and Syria, nothing has been done militarily to make either country think twice about doing so. Instead we see the Israeli government changing their objectives every week of the conflict and then go about alienating all their potential allies within the region with a merciless bombing campaign upon the whole of Lebanon instead of just Hezbollah controlled areas. They've also enacted a naval blockade of the whole country which is an act of war in of itself.

As for the U.S. in Iraq, the current Administration expects 134,000 soldiers and Marines to act as the main police force for a nation of 18 million the size of California along with defeating an armed insurgency, guard Iraq's borders, protect its economic assessts, support the government and engage in rebuilding projects all at the same time. Warnings were issued at the beginning of the war that the U.S. needed 380,000 troops to effectively police Iraq after Saddam Hussein and his Baathists were driven from power, but they were ignored. Not only that, but anyone reading the best-selling book Cobra II knows that the military was not properly equipped nor had the right kind leadership and planning to deal with the aftermath of the war. Indeed, there was a serious unreality among top U.S. policy makers and generals that pullouts of U.S. forces would begin almost as soon as Baghdad was captured. After all, the troops said it themselves: "The quicker we get to Baghdad, the quicker we come home." Nobody told us about any occupation duty or nation building. And as with Israel, Syrian and Iranian meddling in Iraq goes unpunished.

Boston College Political Science Professor Alan Wolfe termed U.S. foreign and defense policy as a "Scoop Jackson foreign policy with a Robert A. Taft military." Given that Donald Rumsfeld will go down as one of the worst defense secretaries ever in the nation's history, it's amazing there hasn't been more of an outcry for his ouster from the proponents of the Scoop Jackson foreign policy, the neoconservatives. Now some have called for his firing, like Bill Kristol. But most have not. And there's a reason why. The neocons were part and parcel to every bad decision made in the Pentagon throughout the war and none has to unmitigated gall to make Rumsfeld the sole scapegoat of failure. What it boils down to is that neocons were just as unserious about the war as anyone. Was it not Richard Perle who said that Iraq would be a cakewalk and that only 50,000 troops would be needed to invade and pacify it? Was it not Ken Adelman who said only 80,000 troops were needed? Was it not Doug Feith who argued that we had to disband the Iraqi military? Was it not Paul Wolfowitz who assented to every bad decision made by the Pentagon in the course of the war?

Unserious nations do not win wars. This was supposed to be the lesson of Vietnam; you do not fight a war behind with one's hand tied behind one's back. You do not have half your population fighting and dying and the other half enjoying peace, love, dope at the same time. You're not supposed to hide the cost of the war in black or off-budget accounts or with deficit financing which causes inflation and higher interest rates. You're not supposed to fight for ground and then give it up later. You're not supposed to go into a conflict with unclear objectives and no sense when victory will be achieved. You're not supposed to micromanage the war from afar or make it fit some sort of ideological or technological construct. You're not supposed to destroy the village in order to save it. Unfortunately, when you put Lyndon Johnson's cheerleaders and the son's of those cheerleaders in charge of war, such lessons tend to be forgotten.

Maybe it’s a Texan thing. You know, drugstore cowboys, all hat and no cattle.

No, war leaders since the U.S. became a global empire have tried to keep the costs of their colonial wars away from the public as the British Empire and the French Empire did so. The reason for all this unseriousness is quite simple. A serious war requires sacrifices from the public. This would include conscription, a war levy, rationing, giving up luxuries and trivial pursuits. Even a Declaration of War to make it all official. After all, as George Bailey once so famously said: "Dontcha know there's a war on?" None of that has happen here. In fact, none of aforementioned has happened all at once since World War II, the last serious war the U.S. fought. No, after 9-11 George Bush II told the U.S citizenry they should go out and shop for more stuff if only to keep the economy from collapsing. Not exactly a Churchillan "Blood, Sweat and Tears" moment there. The aims is for both guns and butter to keep the empire going, to allow the citizenry to go on with their lives as if though nothing has happen or has changed to disrupt their routines or bring unalterable change while other people go and fight the war in their stead. This is why empires use professional militaries instead of conscript armies because the one lesson from Vietnam that did sink in is that the misuse of a conscript military causes upheaval at home as Vietnam and even War Between the States showed. Notice any antiwar movement or protests in the street over Iraq? I haven't.

The problem that has arisen is that 9-11 did happen and is seared into the nation's psyche just as much as Pearl Harbor did half a century ago. And yet, five years later, what do we have to show for it? The world that once proclaimed its sympathy with us now hates us. Iraq has become an ungovernable mess instead of a shining beacon of democracy and even in
Afghanistan the persons who committed this atrocity still remain at large, including one Osama bin Laden. From the moment 9-11 happened, forces that could have brought the nation together in a serious common war effort drove it apart because some were more committed to their utopian dreams rather than punishing the perpetrators who killed 3,000 or their fellow Americans, others were committed to using the war to scoring partisan political points, others were just committed to seeing any kind of war at any time of after the years of peace following the Cold War and the first Gulf War for their own viewing pleasure and still others, as alleged murderer Steven Green said, "just wanted to go out and kill people."

On the battleship Missouri after accepting the Japanese surrender, Gen. Douglas MacArthur once hoped nations would refrain from using war as a means of settling international disputes. Yet if there was no other choice but war, then MacArthur said there was no substitute for total victory (which got him fired by Harry Truman). That requires a total effort. Unfortunately in this day and age, instead of the MacArthurs, we have jokers who like to talk about World War III and "clashes of civilizations" in the abstract, but do not wish to see or fight such wars in reality. Alas, like Vietnam and Korea, the U.S. public will turn away from and tune out the unserious war because it is unserious and those left holding the bag as per usual, will be the brave men and sadly women (thanks to the neocons) who sacrifices will be in vain unless someone grabs hold of the reigns and says "It's time to get serious."

--Sean Scallon

A few words to CP dissidents

I had interesting conversation with John Lofton on the phone today. Lofton is former Washington Times reporter and a, to use his words, "recovering Republican." He has website called The American View and a radio show as well with former Constitution Party candidate Michael Peroutka. The website is the nerve center of the CP dissidents who are displeased that the party's national committee would expel the Nevada IAP affiliate because its chairman Christopher Hansen has differed with the national party with the no exceptions on abortion plank in the party platform.

Judging from this conversation and others I've had with other CP dissidents, I can sense alienation and disgust with the process of politics altogether. If that process calls for them not to expel the Nevada state party for Hansen's views on abortion, then they would rather not have any part of it. In fact I told one CP members who deciding on whether to continue with the CP that he best leave politics altogether if all he wished for the CP was to be a sect that didn't really care if it won or loss elections. Ultimately, like it or not, winning and losing, having influence and making a difference is what politics is all about.

But even then they are not quite ready leave the arena altogether. Abortion alone compels them to stay. But what can they do if they wish not to violate their sincere beliefs by engaging in the pragmatism of politics?

There were two main points to my book Beating the Powers that Be that I wanted to make to non-major parties. 1). That they had to get away from ideology alone and focus on culture, demographics and economics to build their parties into effective organizations. 2). One need not engage in elections alone in order to have an effective political movement. In this regards, the CP dissidents who are pondering their next move, should forget about forming a brand new party and instead devote themselves to educating or "preaching" their views on the Christian foundations of the United States and the U.S. Constitution to Christians across the country whether through churches or Bible study groups. I think they will find a receptive audience. There's a lot murmuring going in such venues that they want more out of their political activity than to be just ward-heelers for the GOP and getting little to show for it. They're fearful that they will be perceived as controlling and supporting an unpopular president and an unpopular war. Me thinks they're looking for a new purpose and a new meaning in politics which is a need that's waiting to be met.

Peroutka's Institute on the Constitution could meet that need and serve themselves far better than forming a new a political party. After all, you can run in as many elections as you like and yet you'll be wasting your time unless the culture is favorable to your policies and positions on issues. Culture is what drives politics and religion (or lack thereof) drives culture and the dissident CP members feel (and I concur) that modern Christianity is doing a great disservice to the current political climate. Promoting their beliefs on the Constitution and law to a larger Christian audience and influencing that audience could do the CP and other true conservatives more benefit in the long than fighting destructive intra- party battles. If they're looking for a new path to follow, hopefully God will show them the way.

---Sean Scallon