E.J. Dionne puts the rising partisan battle in Washington in clear terms:
The partisan battles in the coming weeks -- on judges, Social Security and the future of Tom DeLay -- are part of a larger struggle in which Republicans are seeking to establish themselves as the dominant party in American politics. Essential to their quest is persuading Democrats, or at least a significant number in their ranks, to accept long-term minority status.
More Dionne, and more pundits below, including:
- Mark Brown on corruption in Illinois
- Daniel Sneider on the virtue of allies
- Robert Scheer on Nationalism at its worst
- Cory Franklin on reviving Schweitzer
- George Mitchell on Smith vs McCarthy
- Victor Erofeyev on Putin's error
- Today's Cartoon
Dionne finds the roots of the partisan trifecta--judges, Social Security and Tom Delay, in parallel battles fought during the Clinton years over Democratic judges, health care reform and the impeachment. Rank hypocrisy in reversing their positions and roles once they secured majority power and the White House have fueled strong Democratic resistance to "permanent minority" status.
DeLay himself drew the line sharply the day after the 2004 elections. "The Republican Party is a permanent majority for the future of this country," DeLay declared. "We're going to be able to lead this country in the direction we've been dreaming of for years."
Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform and a leading figure in both the DeLay and Bush political operations, chose more colorful post-election language to describe the future. "Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans," he told Richard Leiby of The Post. "Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant. But when they've been 'fixed,' then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful."
If you wonder in the coming weeks why Democrats are so reluctant to give ground, remember Norquist's jocular reference to neutering the opposition party. Democrats are neither contented nor cheerful over the prospect of being "fixed." Should that surprise anyone?
I'll reiterate from what many of us have said: we are better off with 45 Senators than 49 or 50, now that we have a fighter like Harry Reid as Minority Leader.
Blagojevich: The beginning of the end?
The Chicago Sun-Times' Mark Brown comments on the arrest yesterday of two key players in Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's administration, Stuart Levine and Nicholas Hurtgen. This may be a local story, but those of us in Kosland with Reform on our minds need to be clear: corrupt Democrats are no better than corrupt Republicans.
The indictment of political insiders Levine and Hurtgen along with construction executive Jacob Kiferbaum is a big deal because it's the first major scandal in Gov. Blagojevich's administration to reach the level of criminal charges, and federal authorities were going out of their way Monday to let it be known there's plenty more to come.
"This investigation has only just begun," said Robert Grant, special agent in charge of the FBI's Chicago office.
With the feds already in deep at City Hall, Illinois Democrats suddenly are looking at the same kind of problems the Republicans have been facing for six years.
Unlike some other recent scandals, though, this case won't play favorites with the Republican or Democratic side of the ledger because the defendants didn't. Although Levine and Hurtgen were both products of Republican politics -- with Levine attached at the hip to former Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan and Hurtgen to former Wisconsin governor and ex-Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson -- they were faring quite nicely under Blagojevich, too, proving once again Illinois politics has less to do with ideas and philosophies than with power and money. [...]
Somebody on the governor's team wanted to keep Stuart Levine aboard because they knew he was the kind of guy with whom they could do business.
After the George Ryan scandal, you would have thought Blagojevich would have realized his most important order of business was to keep the crooks out of state government. He appears to have failed, and for that he's going to pay a price.
What Bush should learn from Churchill and FDR
The Detroit Free Press's Daniel Sneider compares Bush's juggling of Russian versus European sensibilities in his trip to Moscow, Latvia and Georgia with the tensions managed by the Allies during WWII.
Undoubtedly, it is far easier to conduct war without having to take into account the domestic politics or the military commands of other nations. But as the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan have also made clear, the United States simply can't run the world on its own.
That is even more evident as we confront other challenges in Iran and North Korea. These are problems that don't lend themselves to purely military solutions. They require diplomacy in concert with allies -- with the Europeans in dealing with Iran and with Asian allies such as South Korea and Japan. [...]
Alliances are by their nature a burden. "You pay a price in sovereignty, autonomy and freedom to maneuver," said Sherwood-Randall, who managed defense relations with the former Soviet Union during the Clinton administration. "What you gain is legitimacy, capability and the sharing of burdens -- blood and treasure, literally."
One of the virtues of alliances, [University of Chicago political scientist John] Mearsheimer pointed out, is that you can pass the buck. "You can get someone else to do the heavy lifting," which in this case meant asking the Soviets to bear a horrible burden of casualties. Similarly, during the Cold War, if the United States had to contain the Soviet Union all by itself, "we would have had to maintain much larger military forces in Europe," he said.
Churchill, in typical fashion, delivered the most famous one-line judgment on alliances. "There is at least one thing worse than fighting with allies," the British leader said, "and that is to fight without them."
Memories of Nationalism at its worst
The LA Times' Robert Scheer, the son of immigrants--a German Protestant father and a Russian Jewish mother--gives us a personal journey that leads to his family's connection to Nazi Germany:
In the six decades since, I have visited Europe a dozen times trying to figure out why my father's relatives went along with killing the relatives of my mother, and am most often drawn back to Hannah Arendt's defining phrase, "the banality of evil."
Sadly, if not unsurprisingly, I could find no trace of my mother's family left in Lithuania or Russia; whether any survived Hitler, the war and Stalin, I'll probably never know. In my father's hometown in southwestern Germany, life goes on as if uninterrupted, however, and one day I managed to find and surprise another uncle, who had only heard of me as the half-Jewish son of his brother, yet welcomed me warmly.
It was hard, though, while eating the Scheer family's dumplings, to connect the dots between Auschwitz and these pleasant, normal people. When I asked if the Nazis had been strong in the area, my uncle just shrugged. "You were either Red or Brown, and we were not Red," he said.
Even the Protestant church where my father was baptized has been led by a minister who wore a Nazi uniform. My aunt and uncle's wedding certificate was bound into a hardback copy of Hitler's "Mein Kampf," signed by the village mayor.
After the war, my late father never visited Germany. He couldn't get over the shock that his "landsmen," whom he had respected as the best-educated and most industrially proficient people in the world, had descended to the lowest level of primitive barbarism yet recorded in human history.
What disgraced the German people indelibly was nationalism gone mad, and against that rapacious force the high standards of civilization offered scant protection.
Would you like fries with that transplant?
Cory Franklin, a physician at Chicago's Stroger Hospital, calls upon fellow medical doctors to return to the spirit of Albert Schweitzer:
I heard a story at a recent gathering suggesting Voltaire may have a point. A mother, with a developmentally disabled teenage son who required care, described her visit to a prestigious academic medical center. The round-trip car ride, including battling traffic and foraging for parking, took well over two hours. The wait to see the specialist, another 2 1/2 hours. When they were finally seen, the specialist spent barely five minutes with her son before telling her they would have to return in a week for blood work (which could have been done more cheaply at her local clinic, five minutes from home). None of this is what bothered her. What really set her off is that the specialist never so much as acknowledged her son. Not even a single word to him.
There wasn't much for me to say in response to her story. Not only was it not surprising, it was merely the latest in a host of negative experiences friends have shared with me. Many people, some of whom have serious illnesses or family members with serious illnesses, tell of unreturned phone calls, unanswered e-mails, discourteous rebuffs by office staff and curtness from the physician. I tend to believe them because my family and I have experienced the same things.
Now, being a doctor, I know the excuses: too many patients, too much paperwork, not enough time, bureaucratic administrators. All true, but insufficient to explain or excuse such execrable behavior. Medicine has become the latest victim of society's growing culture of impersonality and indifference, a result of the paradox of technology. Computers, e-mails, cell phones and iPods make life more convenient and enjoyable but do so at the cost of human interaction. [...]
It is time for the medical profession, at all levels, to revive the spirit and lessons of Albert Schweitzer, the physician and surgeon whose name is synonymous with compassion and humanitarianism. Schweitzer, who won the Nobel Prize but who, unfortunately, doesn't have much "street cred" in hospitals or medical schools these days, once summarized the profession thusly: "It is our duty to remember at all times and anew that medicine is not only a science but also the art of letting the doctor's individuality interact with the individuality of the patient."
The real Smith who went to Washington
Former Senator George Mitchell in today's NY Times invokes the memory and wisdom of the late Margaret Chase Smith, like Mitchell, a former Senator from the great state of Maine, but from the other side of the aisle:
Everyone recalls "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," but too few remember the real-life Mrs. Smith. So, as the Senate nears a vote on a proposal to unilaterally change Senate rules for confirming federal judges, I am reminded of the words spoken 55 years ago by Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine in her famous "Declaration of Conscience" against the tactics of Senator Joe McCarthy, a member of her own party.
"I don't believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest," the senator said. "Surely we Republicans aren't that desperate for victory. While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican Party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be suicide for the Republican Party and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system."
The circumstances are obviously different; there is no McCarthyism in the current dispute. But the principles of exercising independent judgment and preserving our system of checks and balances are at the heart of the Senate rules debate.
Putin's error
Russian author Victor Erofeyev criticizies Vladimir Putin for his embrace of Stalinist imperialism:
Today's Kremlin has neatly split the history of the Soviet Union into two, like splitting a block of birch wood with an axe. It has cast aside the country's communist experiment as an unworkable utopia and begun glorifying Soviet Russia's imperial pretensions. In other words, what has happened is pretty much the opposite of what Khruschev did in the 1950's when he sacrificed Stalin's dictatorship in the name of Lenin. Now the Kremlin is sacrificing Lenin in the name of Generalissimus Stalin. [...]
The Kremlin does not seem to understand that it no longer has any Warsaw Pact satellites that will applaud its every move. Rather, Russia's neighbors now resent the way the Soviet Union treated them, and are new members of NATO who like not feeling afraid of the Kremlin any more. They are justifiably furious at being offered old versions of history in the Kremlin's new packaging.
Political quarrels lead to scandalous rows. I regret that some Polish politicians want to name a square in Warsaw after the slain Chechen separatist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev. My position is closer to that of the Poles who believe that while the Soviet Union reduced Poland to subjection, it also saved it from the national extinction that Hitler intended.
But if Russia stubbornly persists in taking everything that was once politically useful to the Stalinist superpower as its own priorities, I am afraid that she will lose the ability to distinguish her victories from her defeats. Russia has never been as ideologically isolated in Europe as she was on this Victory Day.
Today's cartoon
From Mike Luckovich at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: