be politically active

The King Memorial was launched today with much fanfare and words from President Bush, Bill Clinton and many others. I’m pleased and proud that King’s contribution to history is being honored. I’m not sure anyone could feel any different. But I couldn’t help feeling as I listened on XM to people at the dedication singing “We Shall Overcome” a sense of despair and sadness over the irony of this event set against the backdrop of war and death occuring across the planet. The words of that hymn seemed to ring out as a very sad and futile answer to the killing and corruption that so many of us want to see come to an end.

GeorgeWBush.com :: African Americans

Frankly, I got a weird feeling when I surfed over to the African American page of George Bush’s website for the first time in the runup to the election for his 2nd term in office. It is very strange to see the welcome mat rolled out someplace where you never expected to be welcome. Not just the door’s opened, but opened with enthusiasm. Even so, on my first visit, which I made expressly for the purpose of signing up to volunteer to do something, I just couldn’t do it. It was just too scary to give over my name and information so I could wait for a call from a campaign worker with an assignment. I wimped out. I had this vision that I’d get a call from the campaign to go hand out literature at a black community event in Detroit. Scary. But thats what it means to be a reluctant republican when you are black.

I wasn’t always this way. A few years back, I was as liberal as they come. I believed everything about the republicans was wrong. Frankly, I’m not quite so sure where along the way I reached the tipping point and became a conservative. Its not clear to me when that happened, although its clear to me it did actually occur.

Being a reluctant republican is an interesting lot. Your freinds and family assume you are either a sellout or just plain stupid. I’m not sure which is the worst to be regarded as. And its pretty wild to me the extent to which there is simply no perspective on the issues at all. If you are a republican, you can’t possibly be anything good or for anything good. We (yes, the royal we) don’t think about it all, its just knee jerk sign of the cross fight or flight response when it comes to being a republican.

Now the midterms are over, and I think I’m just going to be a independent conservative for a while. The GOP has forgotten its ideals and lost itself in the raw exercise of power. They deserved the whipping they got at the polls.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/washington/12cnd-military.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=6dbdeac1a0d9a5b1&hp&ex=1163394000&partner=homepage

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Democrats to Press Bush to Redeploy Troops in Iraq – New York Times

The mid term elections have come and gone and the Dems took control. Now the question is whether they will foolishly over reach and misread the American people, or restrain the urge to whole sale reverse course in Iraq.

First off, the Dems won not because they have such great ideas for running the country, but because Americans are convinced that the President’s conduct of the war is not working and they were fed up with 12 years of Republican control of Congress and the White House in which the Republicans forgot who the heck they were supposed to be.

On Iraq, I think Americans are clear that Iraq is a mess and the administration’s strategy for prosecuting it is not adequate to the complexity of the situation. Oh yeah, I know, a lot of people have no idea what Iraq was to accomplish in the first place. To recap, the Bush administration took down Iraq in order to lean on the surrounding countries more effectively to obtain their help in going after terrorist networks. This limited goal was achieved, we got a ot of cooperation from surrounding countries. The problem became mission creep as it went from muscling regional players to implanting democracy to full scale nation building in a socio-cultural political situation the administration never fully understood. As Colin told them, “if you break it, you own it”.

While there are plenty of Americans who say bring the troops home now, I think most recognize that having gone in there and wreaked all this havoc, its not a responsible or prudent thing to simply up and leave. Furthermore, the Iraqi people have been plunged into a living hell and I think there is a moral obligation on this country to try to salvage some hope for their futures from this mess.

The other issue was corruption and plain old partisan power politics. The republicans have ruled with an iron fist, and Congress and the White House just scratched each other’s back. Congress let the President do whatever he wanted more or less, backing him with legislation. The White House for its part, hasn’t vetoed one bit of the hysterical spending being done by Congress. The deficit is getting hammered and the corporate and moneyed interests of this country were being entrenched while the little guy got screwed.

But as the article in the NYT highlights, its now time to see if the democrats are truly able to govern. Iraq is a complex situation. Bush’s strategy has failed because it didn’t recognize that, and the Dems already sound guilty of the same failure of understanding with their calls for redeployment in the short term. There was a strategic rationale to the Iraq war. The problem is that the war opened up a large can of worms, a Pandora’s box that Bush needs to close. The downside is that there are no good options in Iraq now. All we have are bad choices. The Dems make a mistake if they think that the simplistic answer of just bring the troops home is the right move. Bush’s strategy failed for lack of respect for the complexity of the problem. The Dems are poised to make a similar mistake.