Dear Winston,

I know that most of the regulars at The Last Chance Democracy Cafe are hardcore Democrats.  But in light of the way the Democratic Congress caved on the Iraq funding bill, can you give me one good reason why I should ever support them again?

Signed,

Furious in Fresno

*  *  *

Dear Furious,

Believe it or not, there actually are a lot of good reasons for liberals to continue voting Democratic, even if we sometimes have to hold our noses while we’re doing it.  But the one overriding reason, against which all others pale in comparison, is the future of The United States Supreme Court.

And, yes, I know how sick many liberals are of hearing what some call the “Supreme Court scare tactic” — the argument (the very one I’m making now) that we need to keep voting Democratic, despite the party’s shortcomings, because otherwise that awful bogeyman of an ultra-right wing Supreme Court will jump out of the closet at night and get us.  As Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in a column for The Nation back in August of 2000, titled Vote for Nader:

Ah, the Supreme Court! Never mind that pro-choice Justice O’Connor was a Reagan appointee or that Clinton’s man Breyer is one of the most economically conservative Justices around–the Supreme Court gets dragged out every four years to squash any attempt to escape the Democratic Party.

But, of course, Ehrenreich was dead wrong in most of her underlying assumptions in 2000, as she herself has since reluctantly admitted.  Sadly, the Big Bad Bush Wolf she downplayed the fear of turned out to be pretty damned big and bad after all.  And frighteningly, the Big Bad Supreme Court Wolf may very well turn out to be far worse over the long haul. 

Bush will disappear in shame into the mists of history soon (I won’t say he’ll disappear “soon enough” because tomorrow morning wouldn’t be soon enough, but he will be gone relatively soon); the extremist Supreme Court he’s leaving behind, on the other hand — a Court that will become even more extreme and long-lasting if the Republicans win the presidency and the Senate next election — may well be with us for another generation if not longer.

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What’s left to say?  How many times do we have to speak the obvious — that Iraq isn’t on the brink of a civil war, it’s in the middle of one, and that we have already proven ourselves powerless to stop it — before we can finally bring our people home?  

(AFP) Five Britons kidnapped in Iraq

Gunmen in Iraqi police uniforms kidnapped five Britons — a computer expert and his four bodyguards — from a finance ministry building in Baghdad on Tuesday, officials said.

The daylight raid came as the US military confirmed ten GIs were killed on Monday, as the United States marked its annual Memorial Day for fallen troops, making May the deadliest month for American forces this year.

The British government said five British nationals had been kidnapped, while the Canadian security firm Garda World confirmed that the captives were four Britons employed as a security detail and their client.

The story continues with plenty of other “good news” on the state of what’s happening in Iraq.

Meanwhile, 33 people were killed in two bomb attacks in Baghdad.

The Iraqi capital is in the grip of a bombing campaign by insurgents bent on fomenting sectarian violence between the city’s rival Sunni and Shiite factions and on undermining a 14-week-old US and Iraqi security plan.

A car bomb exploded outside a Shiite prayer hall in southwestern Baghdad, killing 21 people and wounding 53, according to medical officials.

One of the saddest things about the GOP’s decades long embrace of the politics of hate is the affect it has on the more addled members of the party’s rank and file.  For the likes of Bush, Cheney and the rest, challenging the patriotism of those who oppose them is just good — if despicable — politics.   They’re sort of like the gangsters in the Godfather movies who, before killing people, sometimes take the time to assure them that it’s just business, not personal — as though that somehow makes it alright. 

But, of course, in the case of Bush & Co. many of the rank and file Republicans who hear their words take from them only the hate itself, not the wink that goes with it.

And given this, is it really surprising that Bush & Co.’s calculated use of the politics of hate so often turns into the real thing among their increasingly desperate minions?  

A sad case in point:

(Washington Post) I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose. We Were Both Doing Our Duty.

Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss. When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.

Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son’s death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings.

This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. By encouraging “the terrorists,” opponents of the Iraq conflict increase the risk to U.S. troops. Although the First Amendment protects antiwar critics from being tried for treason, it provides no protection for the hardly less serious charge of failing to support the troops — today’s civic equivalent of dereliction of duty.

. . . in Poland!

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(NY Times) Militants Widen Reach as Terror Seeps Out of Iraq

When Muhammad al-Darsi got out of prison in Libya last year after serving time for militant activities, he had one goal: killing Americans in Iraq.

A recruiter he found on the Internet arranged to meet him on a bridge in Damascus, Syria. But when he got there, Mr. Darsi, 24, said the recruiter told him he was not needed in Iraq. Instead, he was drafted into the war that is seeping out of Iraq.

We will be paying the price for Bush’s madness for a generation or more to come.

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After Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, I thought my capacity for feeling shame over this administration�?Ts outrages had been exhausted — leaving only rage.

I was wrong.��

Check out Frank Rich�?Ts latest here if you�have Times Select or here if you�?Tre one of the unwashed masses who doesn’t.

Here are a few of the key paragraphs:

Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That�?Ts a total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported this month that Iraq�?Ts child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation�?Ts. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what�?Ts happening in the country he gave �??God�?Ts gift of freedom.�??

*� *� *

Since the 2003 invasion, America has given only 466 Iraqis asylum. Sweden, which was not in the coalition of the willing, plans to admit 25,000 Iraqis this year alone. Our State Department, goaded by January hearings conducted by Ted Kennedy, says it will raise the number for this year to 7,000 (a figure that, small as it is, may be more administration propaganda). A bill passed by Congress this month will add another piddling 500, all interpreters.

In reality, more than 5,000 interpreters worked for the Americans. So did tens of thousands of drivers and security guards who also, in Senator Kennedy�?Ts phrase, have �??an assassin�?Ts bull�?Ts-eye on their backs�?? because they served the occupying government and its contractors over the past four-plus years. How we feel about these Iraqis was made naked by one of the administration�?Ts most fervent hawks, the former United Nations ambassador John Bolton, speaking to The Times Magazine this month. He claimed that the Iraqi refugee problem had �??absolutely nothing to do�?? with Saddam�?Ts overthrow: �??Our obligation was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don�?Tt think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.�??

*� *� *

While it seems but a dim memory now, once upon a time some Iraqis did greet the Americans as liberators. Today, in fact, it is just such Iraqis �?’ not the local Iraqi insurgents the president conflates with Osama bin Laden�?Ts Qaeda in Pakistan �?’ who do want to follow us home. That we are slamming the door in their faces tells you all you need to know about the real morality beneath all the professed good intentions of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Though the war�?Ts godfathers saw themselves as ridding the world of another Hitler, their legacy includes a humanitarian catastrophe that will need its own Raoul Wallenbergs and Oskar Schindlers if lives are to be saved.

For a more intimate account of America�?Ts betrayal of those Iraqis who came to our assistance after the invasion, be sure to read this report in The New Yorker.

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Our friend Mr. Pierce once again demonstrates the fine art of being royally pissed off and entertaining all at the same time.

Letter to Alteration:

Did it escape everyone’s attention that the president of the United States was both delusional and despicable this week? It is a considerable parlay, even by his standards. He stood up at a press conference and told David Gregory that only he, the mighty C-Plus Augustus, and his pet war are standing between Gregory’s children and a horrible death. I can tell you conclusively that, if a major-league manager stood up in his post-game presser and said anything that weird and indecent, the media paid to cover the team wouldn’t stop talking about it for a month and a half. A while back, Ozzie Guillen had some fascinating things to say on several occasions regarding gay people, and those comments haven’t just followed him, they have come to define his public persona. (Note to Jack Shafer — this may be why Al Gore ignored sports coverage in his critique of the media’s sad fascination with shiny baubles. Sports journalists do the job they way it’s supposed to be done. Presented with manifest incompetence on the part of a player at the job he has been hired to do, it doesn’t take a sports columnist seven years to feel safe enough to call the player a f**k-up.) The president ran off at the mouth in such a fashion as to call into question how closely he’s dancing with reality these days, and it just sort of filters into the news and is diluted and gone within 24 hours.

Look, sport. I’ll take care of my kids. One of the ways I’ll do it is to make sure that you and your creepazoid vice-president don’t send them off to be killed on the basis of lies, trickeration, and the fact that you never flattened Daddy on the front lawn that night you were sockless. Another of the ways I’ll do it is to make sure they fight as hard as they can to recapture the constitutional rights — and the culture of civil liberties — to which they are entitled by nature and by nature’s god, to make sure they never again have to live under a government staffed by legacy idiots and the products of fourth-rate right-wing diploma mills. The last way I’ll do it is to make sure they recognize and appreciate those things about this country that actually are worth fighting for — most of which you wouldn’t recognize if they fell off a shelf onto your head. Protect my kids? Ace, I wouldn’t hire you to mow my lawn.

I’ve avoided taking a position on the immigration reform bill because, to put it succinctly, I have so little knowledge on the subject that even I can recognize that I have nothing of value to offer.

That said, Paul Krugman‘s new column on this topic seems to me to make a lot of sense.

Read it here if you have Times Select.  Read it here if you’re one of the unwashed rabble who doesn’t have Times Select.

So, an increase in the minimum wage is, at long last, all but in the bag — something I’ve strongly favored for years.  So why does it make me feel so dirty?

The answer, of course, is the obscene price we’re paying for it: a price that’s been working out to about 100 American soldiers a month.

First the good news:

(AP) Minimum wage increase to become reality

After a decade-long wait, America’s lowest-paid workers saw Congress poised Thursday to increase the federal minimum wage by $2.10. For years, the idea of increasing the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour has been stalled by partisan bickering between Republicans and Democrats.

*  *  *

We’re very hopeful we’re going to see finally that increase in the next couple of days,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the chairman of the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee.

This would be the first change since the minimum wage went from $4.75 to $5.15 on Sept. 1, 1997, under former President Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress.

Now for the bad news: The only reason congressional Democrats are getting this done is because they’ve attached it to the Iraq funding bill.  Yup, the very same bill in which they are selling out both the voters who elected them and our soldiers by giving Bush a blank check — you know, the one they said they’d never give him — on continuing the war in Iraq.

Call me ungrateful if you must, but somehow I can’t take much pleasure out of a minimum wage increase bought at the price of brave young American blood.

In this week’s episode, you (and the café’s Wednesday night regulars) will meet Claire.  I think you’ll like her: she’s the sort of woman who changes the personality of a crowded room just by walking in.  And when the room in question is the lounge of The Last Chance Democracy Café, occupied, in most notorious part, by Horace, Tom and Winston, that takes some doing. 

We will be talking with Claire (or, actually, mostly being talked to by Claire) about something that we’ve never discussed at any length before in a café episode, the granddaddy of all emotional issues — abortion.  There’s been a lot of noise lately among Democratic bigwigs about whether it would be wise politically for the party to deemphasize abortion rights as an issue.  Before doing so, the Democratic leadership might be wise to talk to Claire. 

The Last Chance Democracy Cafe
Episode 60: The Gospel According to Claire
by Steven C. Day

We had no shortage of things to talk about at the large round table last Wednesday evening: Paul Wolfowitz’s resignation, the simultaneously horrifying and entertaining B movie otherwise known as Alberto Gonzales’ Department of Justice, the riveting testimony of James Comey — and so much more. 

So, although it had been a full two hours since Horace, Tom, Winston, Zach and I gathered in the lounge, we were still nowhere close to settling into a topic for the evening (which by tradition we always do).  We just kept bouncing from one hot news story to another.

But then Horace, no doubt feeling the tug of duty in his role as the group’s unofficial den mother, took the first step toward establishing a topic, suggesting that we should talk about global warming.

“If you don’t mind, I have something else I’d like to talk about,” came a woman’s voice.

There, next to the table, looking down at the five startled men sitting below, stood Claire.  A short, thin woman — about 70 years of age — Claire has what can only be described as a memorable face: Not exactly beautiful, certainly not ugly — but most definitely memorable.  She reminds me a little of pictures I’ve seen of an older Eleanor Roosevelt: average sized nose, deep intelligent eyes with pure white hair which, while neatly groomed, offers utterly no pretension of fashion.  Her ever present smile, on the other hand, is pure Molly Ivins — a full-throated grin, as big, as they say, as all Texas.

I smiled mischievously.  I was the one who had invited Claire to drop by.  I knew she would be a handful for Horace, Tom and Winston, none of whom had ever met her before.  And that, I thought, might prove to be fun.

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