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CounterPunch Diary: There's Their Way or the Galloway

So now we have the worst of all worlds: the prospect of some rotten new federal judges and the survival of the filibuster, which the Republicans have consented not to abolish and the Democrats pledged almost never to use.
As Senator Russ Feingold said, "Democrats should have stood together firmly Confirming unacceptable judicial nominations is simply a green light for the Bush administration to send more nominees who lack the judicial temperament or record to serve in these lifetime positions I am disappointed in this deal."

Since I spent my youth reading fervent denunciations of the filibuster as the tool of Southern reaction I found it beyond my powers to take the urgent advice of liberals over the past month, shed the prejudices of a lifetime and promote the filibuster to the status of progressivism's stout bulwark.

Besides which, given the collapse of liberalism as the ideological framework for any vigorous advocacy for the better things (war on the palaces, peace to the cottages, etc.,) why should we expect Democratic nominees to the federal bench to offer any last-ditch relief? The culture that produced Douglas, Brennan and Black is long gone. Happy "accidents", if they come at all, will come from the right in the shape of libertarians like Souter.

Rather than get drawn into the recent unseemly haggling it would a rather more honorable course for the left to attack the entire corrupt system of judicial selection from top to bottom. What possible justification can there be for a system in which all federal judges are within the gift of state delegations of the Democratic and Republican parties? Let's have popular election of all judges.

The US Senate, on the other hand, should abandon its comical pretensions to be being a body reflecting any democratic mandate. Senators should be installed by some version of the phonebook approach. Probably the best method was the one obtaining at the former House of Lords, now destroyed by Tony Blair: incumbency by birthright, handed down the generations. Within not too many decades this simple method produced useful numbers of decent, independent-minded people. After Blair's "reforms" the place has become a quango, meaning a creature of the government of the day.

But these are mere dreams. Can there be anything more dismal that what we do have, Democrats in House and Senate apparently brain-dead, with vacant real estate where the heart normally resides. These are times ripe with opportunity. The people hold the Republicans in derision and contempt. Bush huddles on the ledge of a 41 per cent popular approval rating, bolstered only by the fact that the Republican who not long ago towered above him in popular regard, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is perched on an even lower, 40 per cent rating. The congressional Republicans' popular standing is somewhere in the 20s.

Day by day the news gets worse for Bush. He plunges into pits of his own making, like the Schiavo case. The economy turns to rubble. He nearly lost his main prop, Laura to a coalition of the Sons of the Prophet and the Friends of Jonathan Pollard.

Yet there's no sign of a vigorous Democratic onslaught. This last week brought us Democratic surrender in the matter of the nomination of the appalling John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN. Senator Barbara Boxer indicated Tuesday, March 24, she was lifting her hold on the Bolton nomination. Senator Chris Dodd added the same day that "there's no desire for a filibuster". This was the same day that Republican senator George Voinovich sent out a Dear Colleague letter assailing Bolton and urging all to vote against the man. It's true that later there was a last spasm of resistance from a few Democrats delaying the inevitable by a week, but with the combo of Dodd and Biden, two entirely despicable legislators, leading Democratic foreign policy in the Senate, we can expect nothing but flag-wagging in Bush's wake.

What lies on the horizon by way of a renewed Democratic party? We're supposed to be welcoming The senatorial candidacy in Minnesota of Al Franken, a man who won't let the words "Withdraw from Iraq now" be uttered on the Air America network? God help us. Or the other senatorial candidacy, in Vermont, of Bernie Sanders. At least Jeffords bucked his party. Sanders can't even do that.

So it's scarcely surprising that the recent testimony on Capitol Hill of the newly elected independent Respect MP for London's East End, George Galloway, had every person with any snap left in their stride cavorting in jubilant satisfaction. Here at last was a man who could deploy coherent sentences of well merited, well structured and richly detailed abuse of US relations with Iraq at the nearest available representative of the Bush administration, who happened to be Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota. This contemptible fellow doubtless rose that morning and gazed at himself in the mirror without the slight apprehension that in a few hours a genuine parliamentary rough-houser would give him some whacks on the back on the neck whose bruises won't fade for many a long year.

Another man who rose from his bed presumably no less confident of the shape of the day was Christopher Hitchens, who repaired to the Hill with the plan of garnering himself headlines by confronting Galloway. He tried to do so, but ran into witheringly accurate small arms fire from Galloway, chanting "You're a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay. Your hands are shaking. You badly need another drink."

This was the biggest thing to happen to popinjays since Hemingway defined one in Death in the Afternoon as "a writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well bred", which is an eerily accurate characterization of the prose of C. Hitchens. The routed popinjay, plumage a-droop, fluttered wanly off to the offices of the Weekly Standard where Rupert Murdoch paid him to retaliate with 4,000 distinctly less memorable words, dedicated to showing Galloway to be a shady fellow, using the standard arsenal of "filthy", "mark the sequel" and other familiar popinjabber. At that length, using Hitchens' standards of evidence and innuendo, I reckon I could make a pretty good case for Hitchens being the Armstrong Williams of high-end punditry.

One odd bit in Hitchens' defensive diatribe was a wail about Galloway's "main organizational muscle" being "provided by a depraved sub-Leninist sect called the Socialist Workers party." In a slightly earlier incarnation the SWP was the organizational homeport of the former drink-soaked Trotskyist, C. Hitchens, also of Oona King, the Blairite incumbent Galloway routed in the East End. Maybe Hitchens's erstwhile comrades will the popinjay a ripe welcome in his upcoming tour of London with David Horowitz, assuming that outing hasn't perished for lack of subscribers.

So Galloway showed what a man with fire in his belly can do. The Democrats have no one with that capacity. They have Nancy Pelosi, whose idea of a constructive approach to the Middle East was to tell AIPAC last week,

"There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is absolute nonsense. In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.

"The greatest threat to Israel's right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran. For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology....

"In the words of Isaiah, we will make ourselves to Israel 'as hiding places from the winds and shelters from the tempests; as rivers of water in dry places; as shadows of a great rock in a weary land.'

"The United States will stand with Israel now and forever. Now and forever."

She must have meant arms and cash. Israel already has the water.



Nutty Professor Screams About "Plot" Against Him, Cites Troika of Evil

As an ongoing public display the accelerating mental collapse of Alan Dershowitz continues to afford us modest delight, and particular pleasure since he cites co-editor Cockburn as one of the contributory causes of his distress.

Dershowitz has been much agitated in recent years by the charge, leveled by Normal Finkelstein that he, Dershowitz, is a plagiarist. CounterPunchers will find my discussion of the issue on this site back in the fall of 2003, at www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09262003.html.

At the time there was blast and counterblast both here and in The Nation, where the letters page featured the bleats of Dershowitz and my definitive rebuttal. Since that time Dershowitz has been in an extreme state of agitation at the prospect of Finkelstein's analysis of his borrowings from the work of Joan Peters being published in book form, first scheduled for publication by The New Press, and latterly by the University of California Press.

There hasn't been such a commotion since the British Customs tried to keep Lady Chatterley's Lover out of England. A book that otherwise might have been a relatively modest blip on the national radar screen has been elevated by Dershowitz's frantic squawks to the status of a major cultural event. In his efforts at prior restraint Dershowitz even appealed to Austria's pride, the governor of California, who presumably has more pressing problems on his mind (such as his pell-mell schuss towards single-digit public approval in California) than an impending publication of the University of California.

The last refuge of any cornered mountebank is to invoke "The Plot Against Me", and in a curious inversion of some anti-Semitic tract, Dershowitz has now traced all his problems to an all-powerful troika, consisting of Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and me.

Dershowitz's thesis is that like some Archon of the Galaxies Chomsky croaks from his lair in the heart of darkness, "Destroy Him". The compliant Finkelstein goes to work, and the result of his researches is then publicized by Yours Truly, with devastating effect upon Dershowitz. His life is ruined! A pleasant life formerly devoted to apologias for Israel's barbarous treatment of Palestinians has now been cruelly subverted by the all-powerful Troika. The professor who once impressed young women in Harvard Yard with technical discussions of how best, (under judicial warrant, of course) to push scalpels under the fingernails of terror suspects now fills the air with threats of libel. Like some latter day Ancient Mariner, stopping one in three, Dershowitz posts interminable dissections of "The Plot Against Me" on the internet, dissections which could fairly be accused of partiality towards the male sex, since I recall that even before my own discussion of the Dershowitz-Peters conjunction in late 2003, the affair received detailed scrutiny on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now.

(To address only Dershowitz's discussion of my own role, malicious inaccuracies abound. He claims falsely I was fired from the Village Voice. Though invited to return by the Voice's then editor I had no desire to return to a publication panicked into an unfair suspension and quit. It was a sound choice and a happy day. The Nation offered me a column and a national audience. In scarce more than a decade CounterPunch had set sail!)

For our part, CounterPunch is taking the high road. Not for us the course of malice and paranoia adopted by the demented Dershowitz, who ever more closely resembles an illustration to the limericks of Edward Lear. This fall we will be publishing The Case Against Israel, by Michael Neumann. Then let constructive debate commence! On the one hand Dershowitz's shoddy, compromised apologia for a morally bankrupt state; on the other, Neumann's conclusive, scholarly and immaculate presentation, brilliant in its logic, unchallengeable in its carefully assembled facts.
 
 

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