'The World Ends Not With a Bang, But a Yawn' (Page 1 of 1)

Last week I tuned in on the Democratic debate in New Hampshire in time to hear Sen. Hillary Clinton sounding like a Republican. She was explaining why she voted for new legislation authorizing military action against Iran, why she couldn’t commit to bringing home the troops before 2013 if elected president, and why she wouldn’t rule out promoting nuclear energy. That’s when an old refrain from Garrison Keillor’s radio show bounced into memory: “We're all Republicans now; we've all come around somehow. Even old Democrats can change their hats; We're all Republicans now... ”

More and more I see Clinton as a war president. I worry she’d prove she’s as tough as a man by bombing somebody. What we’re witnessing as she pulls away from the pack is the old President Bill Clinton strategy of triangulation: You know, sound as conservative as possible on some issues without crossing to the right of your strongest opponent on the other side. That way, you’ll pick up even voters a hair’s breadth to his left in the general election. It’s a savvy but uninspiring strategy.

What this world needs is a reason-based yet passionate political revolution.

After all, a majority now believes global warming is real, that the war in Iraq was based on lies, that it was terribly mismanaged, that honest health care is a human right. Opportunities for change have seldom shone brighter. Scandal has struck down Republican after Republican. Politicos flee President George W. Bush like rats from the Titanic.

Still, Democrats displayed amazing complicity last week in our oil-based president's worst impulses (more about that in a moment), at a time when we desperately need at least three course-corrections:

*One: repudiation of the Bush/Cheney doctrine of pre-emptive war. Dennis Kucinich offers that, as do Republicans Mike Gravel and Ron Paul, but don’t bet on any of them breaking clear of the pack.

*Two: a move to hold Bush/Cheney accountable for war crimes, human rights abuses, lying, media manipulation, secret energy deals and generally poor judgment. Unfortunately, all attempts at impeachment or censure have fizzled.

*Three: consensus that global warming and nuclear proliferation are our most challenging enemies.

Democrats as well as the so-called “liberal media” threw in the towel on all three fronts last week. It’s as if they’ve made a pact to codify pronouncements of the Bush aide who famously told writer Ron Suskind, “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality —judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

Turns out the speaker was prophetic. Just last month, while media were still discussing the Surge, politicos quietly rubber-stamped the permanent occupation of Iraq, along with Vice President Dick Cheney’s dream option of war on Iran, and the elevation of military leaders to sainthood.

War must be a wonderful thing, considering that…

*In the Senate, Clinton voted in favor of Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s bill to extend the president’s powers to make war on Iran.

*In the Sept. 26 Democratic debate in New Hampshire, all three front-runners — Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John Edwards — declined to commit to withdrawal from Iraq by 2013 — which would mark a full decade of American occupation.

*Democrats as well as media mostly yawned as Bush declined to participate in last week’s major U.N. conference on Global Warming and the Kyoto Accords, holding his own conference instead. Broasting the planet makes for boring TV, I guess.

*Rattling sabers at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad evidently makes for ratings. Media fell all over themselves to portray him as another Saddam Hussein — the next Hitler.

*Some Democrats in the Senate voted with Republicans to censor Moveon.org for calling Gen. David Petraeus “Gen. Betray Us” on their way to rubber-stamping the Surge.

*Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked Congress for another $190 billion, mostly for Iraq. I’ll be amazed if Congress refuses. Watch the price tag for the war that was supposed to pay for itself the top three-quarters of a trillion dollars.

What’s most demoralizing about all this weak-kneed obeisance is how, even as Democrats signed on to the Bush program for perpetual war and environmental neglect, most media hardly took notice.

Witness media complicity in establishment of a new American embassy compound in Baghdad. Now that it’s a fait accompli, the press reports on it as if lavishing upward of a billion dollars on the project — much of it wasted on shoddy construction — were old news. Did I say embassy? No, this is a strategic command center established to protect the flow of oil. Meanwhile, the military has announced establishment of a major new base near the Iranian border.

Some of us tried calling attention to such instruments of empire years back.

Big Media seldom gave them a glance. Reporters were busy spreading the Bush line that the war was not about permanent occupation and not about oil, heaven forefend and refused to touch such stories. Even so, those stories are treated as “old news” now. But when were they ever “new news?”

An eminence as iconic as Alan Greenspan writes in a new book, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Media response? True to form, reporters on This Week with George Stephanopoulos laughed off the statement as if to say, “Old news.”

T. S. Eliot was only partly right. It’s true the world ends not with a bang, as he wrote, it can’t even muster a whimper.

Try a yawn.

* The views expressed in Commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Knoxville Voice.