Sirotablog
David Sirota is a political journalist and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist at Creators Syndicate. David writes about political corruption, globalization and working-class economic issues often ignored by both of America's political parties.
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May 28, 2007 9:35 AM
The Innocent Bystander Fable
"There are 232 Democrats in the House of Representatives," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) tells us in yesterday's Washington Post. "There are 232 Democrats that believed that our policies in Iraq are failing."
On this Memorial Day these are comforting yet insulting words from a man who, according to the same Washington Post, less than four days ago "jury-rigged" a vote on the House floor to make sure the Iraq War continues - a vote that most of the 232 Democrats in the House supported (For background on this vote, see here - it was deliberately confusing). Hoyer's platitudes speak to what I will call the Innocent Bystander Fable - a myth that has become a self-reinforcing ethos in our nation's capital these days.
The Innocent Bystander Fable teaches that every politician in America except the President of the United States has absolutely no power at all to stop or even slow down the escalation of the war in Iraq - an escalation that is expected to deploy "more than 200,000 [troops to Iraq] -- a record high number -- by the end of the year," according to Hearst Newspapers. This fable says that despite Congress's constitutional power - no, responsibility - to wield the power of the purse and despite its constitutional power to declare war or revoke declarations of war, Congress nonetheless can do absolutely, positively nothing other than dutifully hand over a blank check war spending bill to the White House. We are simply expected to take comfort in the supposed fact that "232 Democrats believe our policies in Iraq are failing" - but are also expected to believe that none of them can do anything about the situation and that they are all just innocent bystanders, powerless to do anything to address the worst national security crisis in contemporary American history.
The Innocent Bystander Fable is convenient for all players involved, even if it is a fable - that is, "a story not founded on fact" or "an untruth," as defined by the dictionary. For Democratic congressional lawmakers, it serves to cast a feel-bad-for-the-martyr light on them. In the House, they use devious parliamentary procedures to create situations that deliberately help continue the war, while delivering speeches saying they are trying to do everything they can to stop it. In the Senate, presidential candidates grandstand about voting against bills to fund the war - but refuse to back up those votes with any move to engage in a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style filibuster.
For congressional Republicans, the Innocent Bystander Fable keeps the war they openly back going. Whereas in their majority years of the past, they have asserted Congress's power against a Democratic president in military actions, they now berate any congressional proposal to slow down this war as unacceptable "micromanaging."
And for media pundits, the Innocent Bystander Fable keeps them in good graces with the Beltway politicians whose approval they so desperately pine for. Take Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, who in the wake of Democrats handing Bush a blank check uses his column this week to berate "the left" for demanding Democrats fulfill their campaign promise to use their power to end the war. Alter, like other pundits, would have us believe the vast majority of Americans - Republicans and Democrats - who tell pollsters they want Congress to end the war is just a tiny segment of "the left" (for reference, 82 percent of Americans now tell pollsters they want Congress to either fund the Iraq War only with binding conditions, or cut off funds completely - apparently "the left" is now almost the entire country). Alter then says "it's juvenile to toss around threats or make it seem as if voting wrong on this bill means you aren't sincerely against the war."
This, of course, is an eloquent regurgitation of the Innocent Bystander Fable (and one that was ably backed up by E.J. Dionne last week as well). Demanding accountability is "juvenile," according to Alter, because Important and Very Smart Pundits like Jon Alter understand what he believes the rest of us in the Unwashed Masses don't have the mental capacity to fathom: That is, the very Serious and Non-Juvenile - and non-existent - reasons why Congress is supposedly just an innocent bystander that can't do anything. And, he adds, it's especially juvenile to - gasp - have the temerity to float the idea of actually using our democratic elections system to run antiwar candidates against those who support the war. The horror!
Alter does all this, of course, while actually admitting in his column that he urged Democrats to make ending the war the central thrust of their 2006 campaign. He says Democrats "lack the votes" to do anything other than write President Bush a blank check, making no mention of the fact that if they did nothing at all and didn't pass any bill, they would have taken a major step toward ending the war (I'm not necessarily saying that should have happened - I support a timetable for funding to be reduced and stopped on set dates in the future so there is adequate time to plan for a redeployment - but the point is that the ultimate power over the situation clearly rests in the Congress, no matter how many pundits try to say otherwise). And he makes no mention of the devious parliamentary tactics employed by the Democrats he worships that were designed to fool the public - precisely the secretive, manipulative and Dick Cheney-esque tactics that led folks to say they were behaving like "Dick Cheney Democrats" last week (ha, silly us for thinking a political "journalist" should bother to report on what actually went on in the U.S. Congress when writing an opinion column attacking people for criticizing what actually went on in the U.S. Congress).
But then, to Alter, expecting politicians to actually fulfill the promises he admits he asked them to make - or at least expecting them not to try to deceive us when they break said promises - is "juvenile" because the Innocent Bystander Fable and the media power-worshiping it justifies must continue soldiering on in order to insulate the Establishment from any real pressure. "Reasonable people can disagree over tactics," he sums up. That's true - but they can't disagree over the actual facts of what Congress can and cannot do to end a war, as elucidated in the Constitution of the United States. Only unreasonable people desperately clinging to the Innocent Bystander Fable in order to appease and worship power can disagree about that.
The saddest part of all this is that while the Washington Establishment seeks refuge in the Innocent Bystander Fable, the actual innocent bystanders - American troops, their families and Iraqi civilians - get stiffed. As Washington's career politicians trip over each other to delegate all of their power to the most unpopular president in three decades, as pundits desperate to be in the good graces of the Beltway's Important People come out guns blazing in defense of total capitulation, our soldiers continue to be ordered into the most unpopular war in five decades with no plan to bring them home safely, and Iraqi civilians are caught in the crossfire of an increasingly bloody civil war.
If Memorial Day is a time to remember the sacrifice our soldiers make for our democracy, then it is also a time to ask whether the democracy they are sacrificing for is living up to its promise. How can we ask soldiers to make the ultimate sacrifice of life and limb for our democracy, when those who are supposed to be guarding our democracy here at home - our elected officials and our media - so clearly believe our democracy is just another cheap cliche that exists merely for use as filler in poorly written speeches and even more poorly written horse-race punditry?
Our troops - past and present - deserve better than that. They deserve better than Washington politicians and their word-twisting consultants engineering an Innocent Bystander Fable as a transparent way to pass the buck. They deserve better than armchair columnists sitting in comfortable offices saying elections - the core of democracy, after all - are really not to be taken seriously and portraying the vast majority of Americans who oppose the war as some sort of tiny, ultra-fringe cult. They deserve, in short, a political system that actually tells the truth, and one that actually believes in democracy - not one that wages a guerrilla war against it.
P.S. I'm truly hopeful and optimistic that Democrats are going to start understanding all this - and the absurd nature of the Innocent Bystander Myth - after going home to face their constituents. I really am. But I don't think pressuring them now by letting them know that their votes for the blank check were unacceptable is somehow "counterproductive." In fact, it's the opposite. Letting them know that their behavior was unacceptable in the past will give them more incentive to stand up in the future. This is Movement Building 101.
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About David Sirota
David Sirota is a political journalist and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist at Creators Syndicate. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Hostile Takeover. He lives in Denver, Colorado. His daily blog can be found at CREDO Action. He contributes regularly to the Denver Post's Web site, is a senior editor at In These Times magazine and is working on his second book. He has been profiled in Newsweek and the Rocky Mountain News and is widely known for his reporting on political corruption, globalization and working-class economic issues often ignored by both of America's political parties. Sirota serves as co-chair of the Progressive States Network, a 501(c)3 organization that supports state legislators and that is a partner of CREDO.
You can subscribe to Sirota's e-mail newsletter by going to davidsirota.com and signing up in the lefthand corner. To find out more about Sirota, download his official biography or see his recent media appearances. You can e-mail him at sirota@credoaction.com.
The views expressed on this blog are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of Working Assets (publisher of CREDO Action) or the institutions Sirota works for.
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Recent Sirotablog entries
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Discussion
Well, besides the innocent bystander, we have the Sherrod Brown pass-the-buck types who opted to have "independent auditors" look at the funding situation and then conclude that our troops could be stranded in Iraq without even the means to protect themselves. So he was just voting based on what "independent auditors" told him. Oh, and his first priority was to the families of the troops. So basically, if I don't have a military member in Iraq, my opinion does not count. Of course, how many of these families will needlessly lose love ones by September? If I seem obsessed in harping against Brown, it is because he is the major political disappointment of my adult life (38 years) except MAYBE for Bill's inability to keep his pants zipped.
I don't know who despises the American people more, the Congress or their beltway media enablers like Dionne and Alter.
That said, unless there is a groundswell movement to remove Pelosi, Reid and Hoyer from the leadership, we should expect more capitulations to Bush in the comming months from them. They've proved they cannot be trusted.
Democrats are bullshitting themselves if they believe otherwise. These corporate puppets are a fucking threat to every person who works for a living in this country and they have the voting record to prove it.
And if the rank and file fail in holding Pelosi, Reid and Hoyer accountable, they can expect to get treated the same way Evangelicals are treated by the GOP. IOW they get reduced to a vote bloc the pols can safely ignore but yet count on for votes no matter what. Useful idiots as Stalin would say.
"If Memorial Day is a time to remember the sacrifice our soldiers make for our democracy, then it is also a time to ask whether the democracy they are sacrificing for is living up to its promise."
Semper Fidelis, motto of the Marine Corps.
It implies that Marines will always keep Faith with one another, their leaders, the Constitution.
Faith, however, must flow in both directions.
There is no such pact from the civilian leadership downward.
The Marine Corps is now being used simply as the enforcement arm of Exxon/Mobil, BP, and Chevron. This is an abject betrayal.
The Democratic leadership could have kept Faith with the Marines and the other servicemen and women by immediately initiating investigations of White House conduct in the deceptive selling of the Iraq invasion, and its catastrophically inept and corrupt execution, and then proceeding in a deliberate way to impeach both Cheney and Bush.
That would have been "supporting the troops", keeping Faith with them by ensuring that their loyalty, obedience, and expertise were not exploited and abused for illicit reasons by unfit civilian officials.
Pelosi signaled that the Democratic leadership was complicit with the exploitation of our military by taking impeachment off the table. The Democrat's cooperation in the abuse of our military's trust was cemented by the betrayal of the last week, and the stunning attempts by the Democratic leaders to distort capitulation and collusion into victory.
Lies to mask betrayal.
Bush, Cheney, Rove, Wolfowitz, Feith. Despicable betrayers of faith.
Pelosi, Reid, Emanuel, Clinton, Obama. Craven capitulators.
These people do not have the capacity to even begin to comprehend the simple two word motto of the Marine Corps.
Always Faithful.
How can they be trusted to make any decision that might impact the fate of any Marine, anywhere, at any time?
It's not just the Marines, 3rd. The Army was betrayed from the get-go.
Not only was Gen Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, fired for telling the truth about the consequences of invading Iraq, but the people who warned of a lack of readiness in training and equipment, especially in the Reserves, were blown off.
There's a reason that several retired Army generals have chosen to speak up against the war. They were fired (forced into retirement) for telling the truth, and they are seeing the bloody, and futile consequences of the Bush administrations' ignoring their warnings.
Instead, the Bushies brought in a retired general, who couldn't make the grade and put him into Shinseki's place as their yes-man.
The Army is being destroyed before our eyes, with the lowering of recruiting standards, and the refusal of the administration to provide adequate training and equipment, even now, when the dire consequences of inadequate equipment, training and man-power are so glaringly obvious.
Murtha is right! The Republi-lite sell-outs are wrong, and should be fired! Bush and Cheney need to be impeached! This war of lies needs to end!
Thanks for pushing hard all the time David. I knew Tester was going to be Mr Potato Head and was very sorry when the Montana Democratic Party, chose to go halfway with Tester rather than all the way with Paul Richards. Richards would not have betrayed us with a yes vote for the funding. Baucus is up next, let's get Paul in there next time around. We cannot reward these fake Progressives at the polls next time. They did the same thing in Ohio, nominating Sherrod Brown instead of Hackett. We as an electorate have learned a lesson (I hope) watching this repulsive congress betray the country once more.We must not fund the Democratic Party, until after the primaries. Send your donations to John Edwards, or Dennis Kucinich, the rest of them are stupid, or complicit.
Where's the outrage?
Before we can reform the party we need to get rid of most members of congress(Democrats I mean) as most of them have demonstrated they are spineless and dumb as rocks to boot.
However that takes a pissed off and organized base to can their sorry asses, but alas its something rank and file Democrats refuse to do. On this J.Alter was right, Democrats don't fire crooks and sell-outs in their own party, they keep voting them back in.
I thought the triple betrayal on Iraq, trade and immigration would do the trick but instead we were treated to a slumbering base that momentarily awakened and went back to into a coma.
I doubt now, that no matter how heineous the betrayal or crime the Democratic base will do nothing politically, they'll just continue to vote for the same crooked people destroying their lives and country like robots just like the GOP base does.
Gore Vidal was right about the Democrats afterall.
Speaking of Hackett, I sometimes wonder what would Hackett have been like had he won, the Brown/Webb type or keeping a firm NO to funding this Iraq War. Some people have told me that Hackett earlier saying that America can't cut and run would already show that Hackett would have funded the war too but somehow, I really don't think he is the Webb/Brown type. The more it all gets worse, the more my wife, her brother, and myself miss Hackett. :( By the way, her brother voted for Hackett in the primaries although Brown won.
Give up on the Democrats.
Repeat after me:
"Progressive Party
Progressive Party
Progressive Party"
Now don't you feel better, I know I do.
How can we keep electing people we don't and can't trust? Throw all the bastards out and start over. The new bunche's first law must outlaw ALL lobbyists.
Mr Sirota I'm on the same "innocent bystander" page. We in Brooklyn are way tired of Dems playing the role of victim. See below, readers, if you will.
Democrats in Congress Cultivate Our Perception of Their Victimhood
Kim Hughes
http://groups.google.com/group/WeThePeopleLeadNow
Like what I believe to be the majority of Americans, I am once again disappointed and angered by two things: 1 - Congress’ agreement to continue funding the illegal Iraq occupation, and 2 - the Democrats’ apparently deliberate cultivation of a perception that they are helpless victims.
My feelings come up after witnessing the bizarre vote trick they played this week, giving Bush his blank check while some Congresspeople appeared to vote against it, so they could gain points with their huge anti-Iraq war constituency.
One definition of a victim is " a person who is tricked, swindled, or taken advantage of." (American Heritage Dictionary)
In common usage, a victim is also someone who doesn't use the power they have to take actions on their own or others' behalf.
Here are the actions I believe were possible for Congressional Dems to take regarding the Iraq Supplemental (but chose not to):
1 – Speaker Pelosi has the power to disallow this Iraq Supplemental bill to the floor of the House for debate or voting. We know this because of all the Democratic bills that never made the floor when Republicans were in the majority. Pelosi chose not to use this power, without explanation, choosing instead to appear helpless against the situation, saying in her House speech “It’s not enough” and voting against the bill she herself brought to the floor.
2 – Louise Slaughter (D-NY), as head of the House Rules committee, had the power to shut out David Obey’s tricky "amendments to the rule" from being brought to the floor, but chose instead to allow it, paving the way for some Reps to appear to vote against war funding while actually being assured of its passage.
3 – Any and all Senators who were truly against funding the Iraq occupation could have filibustered the Senate Supplemental vote, as a group or separately.
4 – Democrats in both the House and Senate could have joined Rep. Kucinich in pointing out the fact that one of the “benchmarks” (the Hydrocarbon Law) is actually a threat that Iraqis will cease receiving US $ unless they hand over two-thirds of their oil profits to the five big oil companies, none of which are based in Iraq.
5 – The Supplemental “benchmarks” could have been written them with true accountability. As currently stated, the they represent exactly no progress toward holding this President accountable, as they all give Bush the choice to say whether or not they’ve been met. Another “fox guarding the henhouse” issue.
6 – All along, Democrats could have confronted the lie that not to fund the Emergency Supplemental Iraq War Funding Request is to “abandon the troops.” In March the Congressional Research Service printed a report saying that the funding request was not in fact an emergency, and that the Pentagon could have, with Congressional approval, transferred funds for use in Iraq. According to the report, “the Army could finance its O&M expenses through the end of May by tapping $52.6 billion in O&M funding already provided by Congress. Furthermore, the Pentagon could temporarily transfer money out of other accounts, giving the Army ‘almost two additional months’ to conduct its regular operations and the war.
7 – In either Supplemental version, Pelosi could have refused to strip the “Bush must get Congressional approval before attacking Iran” language from the bills.
8 - As a whole, the Democratic leadership could have put actually binding timelines for troop withdrawal into either of the Supplemental versions.
``````````````````````````````````````````````````Instead, Democrats are acting. Witness Obey's "I hate this bill!" and Pelosi's "This is not enough; but the debate is not over", and Slaughter's "What is more, the Republicans in this Congress willfully and deliberately ignored public opinion and supported that veto. They made it impossible for us to overturn it."
I hear the false note of the victim's whine in each of those voices.
The Democrats are going to have to get used to the fact that the peace and impeachment activists in this country see through their pathetic cries of "We're helpless! We're victims! Don't blame us for supporting this war, even though we're in the majority!"
Hello! Pelosi, Reid, Obey, Slaughter, Clinton, Obama, Schumer, and the rest of you hidden Dem hawks, hear this:
We don't buy that you are victims. That game is now over. If you want votes from us, you're going to have to actually promote peace and accountability, not pretend you tried and were prevented from it by the big bad Republicans.
As mentioned before, the dictionary defines a victim as "a person who is tricked, swindled, or taken advantage of."
We peace constituents are no longer in that category. We are not victims, and neither are you.
Time to get real, Dems, or be prepared to get out of office.
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Comments calling for another party, any "third" party, are beside the point: the
milita-moneymen can destablize whatEVER organization -- they have done this to the Green
Party, and of course the churches -- peeps out of turn.
If we can't take back the Democratic Party (which hasn't been in the best of shape
since the, er, Kennedy assassination), we all might as well emigrate, pick up the pikes
and cudgels, or join those create-your-own-reality shills whose snake-oil's sold so well
to good Germans everywhere.
Speaking of good Germans, what in the world is wrong with Jonathan Alter -- other than
that he's taken ANOTHER run at John Edwards, the only candidate who's going to save us
from a Mormon religious state presided over by manly Mitt Romney?
The return of the Revolution -- 'cause that's what we're in the middle of, ready or not
-- brings out the worst in some, the best in others: David Sirota's really done good work
this past week, explaining arcane Congressional rules-wrenching to a generally-clueless
general readership. (Maybe Newsweek could recruit Sirota, to relieve the obviously
intellectually-exhausted Alter?)
Seems like recalling a bunch of Democratic "leaders" is in order. At the other end of the
ideological food chain, the Democratic Party's county committees are mostly made up of
uncontested clots of office-holder groupies who hold their silly seats for eons. In the
primaries, we'll do well to replace about 85% of THEM, too -- while running real
candidates against a bunch of lukewarm Congressmen-for-life.
This isn't as dramatically satisfying a course as stomping off to the office of your
local
lackluster Congress-person to burn your voter-registration card -- but (short of
protracted struggle in the streets in which many MORE non-politicians would be
killed/maimed/imprisoned) it's the only way we're likely to free "our" government from
the gutless hacks and goons who presently infest it.
Read a great statement from Congressman Jim
McDermott, a Representative who DOES have some passion for reality:
"A Vote Against Giving the President a Box of Blank Checks"
http://www.house.gov/mcdermott/sp070524.shtml
Sign-in difficulty for comment above. Here it is again, hopefully in ordinary paragraphs:
Comments calling for another party, any "third" party, are beside the point: the milita-moneymen can destablize whatEVER organization -- they have done this to the Green Party, and of course the churches -- peeps out of turn.
If we can't take back the Democratic Party (which hasn't been in the best of shape since the, er, Kennedy assassination), we all might as well emigrate, pick up the pikes and cudgels, or join those create-your-own-reality shills whose snake-oil's sold so well to good Germans everywhere.
Speaking of good Germans, what in the world is wrong with Jonathan Alter -- other than
that he's taken ANOTHER run at John Edwards, the only candidate who's going to save us from a Mormon religious state presided over by manly Mitt Romney?
The return of the Revolution -- 'cause that's what we're in the middle of, ready or not
-- brings out the worst in some, the best in others: David Sirota's really done good work
this past week, explaining arcane Congressional rules-wrenching to a generally-clueless
general readership. (Maybe Newsweek could recruit Sirota, to relieve the obviously intellectually-exhausted Alter?)
Seems like recalling a bunch of Democratic "leaders" is in order. At the other end of the ideological food chain, the Democratic Party's county committees are mostly made up of
uncontested clots of office-holder groupies who hold their silly seats for eons. In the
primaries, we'll do well to replace about 85% of THEM, too -- while running real candidates against a bunch of lukewarm Congressmen-for-life.
This isn't as dramatically satisfying a course as stomping off to the office of your local
lackluster Congress-person to burn your voter-registration card -- but (short of protracted struggle in the streets in which many MORE non-politicians would be killed/maimed/imprisoned) it's the only way we're likely to free "our" government from the gutless hacks and goons who presently infest it.
Read a great statement from Congressman Jim
McDermott, a Representative who DOES have some passion for reality:
"A Vote Against Giving the President a Box of Blank Checks"
http://www.house.gov/mcdermott/sp070524.shtml
AND one MORE thing, while we're at it, about those "powerless" right-wing Democrats: what DID these whining, fatuous frauds do, the last time they DID have the power?
1. enacted "welfare reform", turning already-impoverished single mothers into Wal-Mart wage-slaves, while effectively orphaning their children
2. enacted the Estate Benefits Recovery Act, which assures that poor and working-class Americans who have any assets at all pay through the nose -- POSTHUMOUSLY, if you please -- for third-rate medical "care" and prescriptions.
The Congress, with lifetime medical care that's the best public money can buy, then passed this off as "balancing" the budget.
3. bombed Iraq, the better to start softening it up for the present -- part II under Bush II -- disaster.//
I want John Alter to explain why people who elected Democrats to Congress and gave them firm control of the House to end the war in Iraq are being juvenile in expecting them to do so.
The voters aren't playing a game here Alter. We are straight forward telling the Democrats to get this country the fuck out of Iraq. Is there something equivocal in that last statement? We don't care if Rahm Emanuel, Harman, Hoyer, and Pelosi get any more money from AIPAC or Israel.
We don't care if Murtha is worried about getting his big check from the defense contractors.
We the people put these traitorous scumbags in Congress to get this country out of that illegal war.
Bloviate all you want Alter. Call us juvenile. Then call your lame duck Democrat in Congress and tell them how irrelevant you both are now.
You see this is how it works. I voted for Democrats in the last election and I made sure that two other people got to the polls and they too voted for Democrats. I am going to redouble my efforts in the next election cycle. Except it will be for Green candidates. That coupled with the bad things I say about the Democrats will probably have a much larger negative impact on the Democrats in the next election than the positive impact I had for them in the last election.
This may sound immature to you Mr. Alter, but when the Republicans controlled the House my enemies were well defined and in front of me.
With the Democrats in control they are all around me and even eat at my table. Which way do you think I prefer it, in your wizened and mature judgement?
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