Naomi Klein (The Nation): Ditch the Distraction in Chief

[Jack Rabbit]

Form The Nation
Issue of August 16
Posted online Thursday July 29

Ditch the Distraction in Chief
By Naomi Klein

Last month, I reluctantly joined the Anybody But Bush camp. It was "Bush in a Box" that finally got me, a gag gift my brother gave my father on his sixty-sixth birthday. Bush in a Box is a cardboard cutout of President 43 with a set of adhesive speech balloons featuring the usual Bushisms: "Is our children learning?" "They misunderestimated me"--standard-issue Bush-bashing schlock, on sale at Wal-Mart, made in Malaysia.
Yet Bush in a Box filled me with despair. It's not that the President is dumb, which I already knew; it's that he makes us dumb. Don't get me wrong: My brother is an exceptionally bright guy; he heads a think tank that publishes weighty policy papers on the failings of export-oriented resource extraction and the false savings of cuts to welfare. Whenever I have a question involving interest rates or currency boards, he's my first call. But Bush in a Box pretty much summarizes the level of analysis coming from the left these days. You know the line: The White House has been hijacked by a shady gang of zealots who are either insane or stupid or both. Vote Kerry and return the country to sanity.
But the zealots in Bush's White House are neither insane nor stupid nor particularly shady. Rather, they openly serve the interests of the corporations that put them in office with bloody-minded efficiency. Their boldness stems not from the fact that they are a new breed of zealot but that the old breed finds itself in a newly unconstrained political climate.
We know this, yet there is something about George W. Bush's combination of ignorance, piety and swagger that triggers a condition in progressives I've come to think of as Bush Blindness. When it strikes, it causes us to lose sight of everything we know about politics, economics and history and to focus exclusively on the admittedly odd personalities of the people in the White House. Other side effects include delighting in psychologists' diagnoses of Bush's warped relationship with his father and brisk sales of Bush "dum gum"--$1.25.

Read more.

[Cha]

1. And stem cell research...there are a myriad of ways that

Kerry is Much Better than bush. And it looks like Chavez is going to win!

[tylerdurden74]

2. I love NO LOGO, and saw her in THE CORPORATION

And I have such a huge crush on her. She makes a denim jacket soooooo sexy.

[newyawker99]

6. Hi tylerdurden74!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[CHIMO]

3. Sounds Like

Kucinich and Moore talking.

[Dirk39]

4. Dissapointed...

"We'll also have to let go of the archaic idea that toppling a single man, or a Romanesque "empire," will solve all, let alone any, of our problems."

Naomi, wake up, please!
We've gone through this at least 100 times. Wasn't Clinton allready the prove that replacing one corporate corrupt republican with a corporate charming corrupt democrat will not solve any of our problems?

Wasn't Clinton the president of the USA, when the most brutal economic genocide the world has ever faced became stronger and stronger!

And Kerry is even worse. The Public Relation and advertising show, he offers, is as contentless, cynical and bigot as anything Clinton ever did. It's not just this, it's much worse.

I'm tired of seeing millions of people dying, losing their jobs and existence to prove that the lesser evil is evil too.
Too many people died for this.
And maybe we should ask those, who die, if they're amused about dying to prove "we put away the fridge magnets and Bush gags and get serious". We might get serious, but they die. As if there were not enough reasons to get serious before. Noone, who is serious about democracy and social justice, noone, who is fighting against the genocide that's called "globalisation" has any illusions about Bush. None of those people is joking about Bush or his drinking habits or his mental handicaps.


And why the hell do we need Kerry after Clinton and Carter and Blair and Schröder?
The left and the real democrats will lose THEIR credibiltiy if they support someone like Kerry and everything will just get worse for those, who gave him his vote, 'cause we supported him. And if WE support a liar and corporate whore like Kerry, someone who is willing to sell the crimes he commited and witnessed in Vietnam as something that contributes to his credibility: why should people believe us anymore?


And if Kerry tells stories about how he learned about "freedom" in East-Berlin...
Instead of telling the truth about his American comrades, who raped vietnamese women, who took a knife and did mutilate vietnames women to "liberate" the world from "communism", who commited the most criminal genocide in the history of mankind after Ausschwitz: and Kerry is still proud of this! And he witnessed this. He reported this, he knows the truth. He is as corrupt and criminal as Bush. He was one of those, who massmurdered 2-4 million people in Vietnam, and the first thing he did during his speech was offering his duty again!


Kerry will even be worse. Unilateral hegemonic imperialism with a smiling face. Moore troops in Iraq. More lies about health care in the USA. Preemptive wars with a smiling face.

Naomi Klein's article reminds me of those communists and democrats, who thought, the worse capitalism gets, the better for those, who oppose it.
History has not much to offer to prove this.
And the working class people, who will vote for Kerry, will not vote anymore, after 4 years of corporate welfare under Kerry, after being deceived once more.
And I simply don't see any advantage for those, who fight for democracy and social justice, if Kerry is elected.

I simply can't believe that Naomi Klein did write this article:
people like Kerry don't prove "that the system is wrong, no matter if Kerry, Carter, Bush, Nixon or Bush II is the president": People like Kerry prove that there is no alternative at all. That everything is the same. That there is no choice. That the have-nots, the working class and the unemployed will always lose, that democracy offers no choice.
The worst and most disgusting thing about Kerry is that he knows, what he is talking about. Bush might really be an idiot, but Kerry knows that he is lying. Kerry knows the USA from Vietnam to Iran Contra to his lies about Venezuela.
What the fucking hell is the difference between Kerry, advertising how many people he killed with his own hands in Vietnam, and a German, who is proud of killing jews during WWII?
What the fucking hell is the differance?
And many years before, as a young guy, Kerry knew this. And today, he's using it in an advertising campaign to reach the average American?

The only differance between Bush and Kerry is, that Kerry represents all corporations, while Bush and his comrades only represent a small but very powerfull minority of American corporations. That's all. And the job, these corporations wanted to be done by Bush is fullfilled anyway.

Now it's Kerry's turn. But I don't care at all and please Naomi: don't care about, who is lying to us during the next years, too.
We have better things to do.

Hello from Germany,
Dirk

[Lindacooks]

5. You are so wrong.

"The only differance between Bush and Kerry is, that Kerry represents all corporations, while Bush and his comrades only represent a small but very powerfull minority of American corporations. That's all."

Good God, man, haven't you been listening these last three and a half years? Kerry will not destroy the environment like Bush* has been. Kerry will protect a woman's right to choose, unlike Bush*. Kerry will raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, unlike Bush* who has destroyed our economy to make the rich richer. Bush* is relaxing regulations on pesticides. Bush* allowed corporations to pump more arsenic and mercury into the environment. Kerry is against both of these 'policies'.

If you think Kerry and Bush* are the same, then you deserve four more years of Bush*, which will destroy this country. Wake up. And grow up.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. Distractor in Chief is right perspective

In the Wizard of Oz Neo-Con Bush-wanna-be-Reagan but channeling Nixon Whitehouse, Bush is the distractor in chief. Cheney, Ashcroft, and Wolfowitz are the men behind the curtain. Every time we laugh at a Bushism, his base loves him more for being "just folks", and Cheney silently pulls another lever.

20 "out-of-session" appointments were made (forgot the exact term) while the Dems were unifying in Boston, but I only heard about it on DU here. Notice how quiet Rumsfailed has been lately?

Maintain focus.

[aneerkoinos]

11. I'm a grown up

And I don't your condescending "grow up" remarks are helpfull. I understand Dirks argument and frustration quite well and share it to some extent.

And Dirk's remark that Kerry is not different from Bush being a corporate goon is hard to argue against. Kerry is the official establishment candidate selected to clear up the mess Bush has caused and to save the Imperial corporate America from the damage Bush has caused to it world wide. And selected to halt the advance of a grass roots candidate to power.

But the truth is that your country has been allready destroyed by Reagan, Clinton and the Bushes, you just don't know it yet because the reality will hit hard during the next four years with depression and Peak Oil, and Kerry offers no hope but promises to stay the course - the course of destruction. And destroying your Democratic party on the side.

Well it will not be greatly missed, but for us Globalization critics who observe what is happening to America from abroad, it is sad that true progressives will have no voice when that voice would be most needed, and when Kerry fails, the poverished masses will see no alternative but more nationalism and more militarism - more fascism, sold to them by the Goebbelses of corporate media.

[Jack Rabbit]

9. You couldn't be more wrong

If it were just a matter of ideology, I'd might agree with you and vote third party. But it's a lot deeper than that.

Kerry is a pragmatist. While he might make noises about extending US influence, he also makes it clear that he believes military power has its limits; because even American military capability can be spread too thin, Kerry realizes that in order to get what is important in his agenda he will have to seek international cooperation. That means having to make deals and forgoing less important parts of the agenda.

Bush and the neoconservatives are dangerous precisely because they don't recognize those limits. For them, sending in the Marines is always an option and there's no reason to consider diplomacy first. Bush and his lieutenants knew they were lying about Saddam's military capabilities and his ties to al Qaida and even about "bringing democracy" to Iraq; they wanted Iraq for its resources, period. They honestly thought that they could hunt for Osama, topple Saddam, seize Iraq's resources and assets and put down a popular uprising against colonial occupation. These guys still think we could have won in Vietnam and blame people like me, who demonstrated against the war and actively supported peace candidates like Senator McGovern, for the fact we lost. I suppose we could have won, too, if, like the neoconservatives, one thinks turning Vietnam into a parking lot and burning every peasant in the countryside out of his home is a worthwhile victory.

That brings up the point that Europeans perhaps do not understand about the American reaction to Bush. Bush is not simply dangerous because he is a threat to world peace, as you Europeans are aware, but because he is a threat to American democratic institutions. Recently, Bush and his Republican allies in Congress won a narrow victory to keep provisions in the Patriot Act that allow federal investigators to examine the records of library and book store patrons to see what they are reading. Such provisions of the Patriot Act are the most audacious assaults on civil liberties since some Jim Crow legislation effectively deprived Afro-Americans of the right to vote in the South after the end of Reconstruction. Why do they think it is so important to intimidate Americans into conformity?

When Kerry says he supports the Patriot Act, he is speaking of some provisions in it that deal with money laundering and the like; he is opposed to those parts of it that enable the Bush police state. As if those measures aren't bad enough, the Justice Department drafted legislation to allow the President and Attorney General to strip an American of his citizenship without due process simply in order to deny due process. That is something we in America shouldn't even discuss seriously.

I am voting for Kerry because I want my right to dissent back; I am confident he will give it back and that he will cease to threaten it further.

I am also voting for Kerry because, while I don't entirely agree with his world view, I am certain that he will take a more cautious approach to military action and has a more realistic view of what military action can and cannot accomplish; this will put an end to Bush's ridiculous unilateralist approach to solving world problems. I believe that Kerry, unlike Bush, would have evaluated the information gathered by our intelligence agencies without filtering it through the OSP or strong-arming analysts into writing reports that supported a pre-determined course of action before invading Iraq and, had he done so, would have elected not to invade.

When I use such arguments to justify my decision to vote for Kerry in spite of my differences with him, I am often accused of being content to choose the lesser of two evils. However, at no time do we criticize the French Resistance for following the direction of General de Gaulle, who believed a liberated France should maintain its overseas colonies in Indochina, Algeria and West Africa, because he was the lesser of two evils, the other being the Nazis and their collaborators. There are times when even the lesser of two evils is a clear choice. This is one of them.

[arikara]

10. I have no doubt that Kerry will be better than the chimp

But I sure wish that I felt better about him. I wasn't bowled over by the DNC at all with their razor wire free speech zone and how they stifled anything in the conference that didn't go with their scripted program. How they dragged a woman out in handcuffs for displaying a banner that said End the Occupation in Iraq, and they threw delegates out for wearing peace hats and shirts. So much for respecting the right to dissent, and I think if they do that there then it isn't going to change.

I listened to Kerry's wonderful, inspiring 1971 speech against the Vietnam War and I have a really hard time reconciling that the same person made that speech as who made his acceptance speech at the DNC. I suppose he thinks that he has to play right of centre to win votes, but that's what Gore did and it didn't work for him.

I wish someone could make me feel better about Kerry. I can see people who listen to that war talk having to make the decision on whether to go to the polls and vote for Kerry or to stay home and not vote at all. And I'm afraid that if he continues on his right of centre direction that he will lose the grand momentum of the left and the chimp will somehow manage to steal another election.

[struggle4progress]

8. The continuing mistake of the American Left (to the extent ...

... that such an entity even exists) is the common mistake of Americans with respect to government: it is the belief that if we simply elect the right people, everything will proceed well, without further effort on our part.

The simple fact is: we have ideological enemies, who work hard, day after day, for good money, to push the interests of their corporate masters -- which effectively requires them to oppose our ideals -- and as soon as our officials seated in office, our opponents are working full time to undermine our political agenda.

In this context, it will always remain our task to force government to do the right thing, EVEN IF WE ARE IN CONTROL OF GOVERNMENT. Unless we ourselves create the ongoing political will for a progressive agenda, that agenda will falter. We must stop EXPECTING our elected officials to do the right thing and must instead organize ourselves politically TO FORCE THEM TO DO THE RIGHT THING.