So, we elected a president who promised a withdrawal from Iraq that he, or the generals who tell him what to do, is now further delaying. And, of course, the timetable he’s now delaying was already a far cry from what he had promised as a candidate.

What are we to think? That may be sad news, but what could we have done differently? Surely it would have been worse to elect a president who did not promise to withdraw, right?

But there’s a broader framework for this withdrawal or lack thereof, namely the SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement), the unconstitutional treaty that Bush and Maliki drew up without consulting the U.S. Senate. I was reminded of this on Tuesday when Obama and Karzai talked about a forthcoming document from the two of them and repeatedly expressed their eternal devotion to a long occupation.

The unconstitutional Iraq treaty (UIT) requires complete withdrawal from Iraq by the end of next year, and withdrawal from all Iraqi cities, villages, and localities by last summer. Obama’s latest announcement doesn’t alter the lack of compliance with the latter requirement. Nor does it guarantee noncompliance with the former. But it illustrates something else, something that some of us have been screaming since the UIT was allowed to stand, something that pretty well guarantees that the US occupation of Iraq will never end.

Imagine if Congress funded, defunded, oversaw, and regulated the military and wars as required by our Constitution. Imagine if the president COULDN’T simply tell Congress that troops would be staying in Iraq longer than planned, but had to ask for the necessary funding first. Here’s the lesson for this teachable moment:

Persuading presidents to end wars only looks good until they change their mind. Cutting off the funding actually forces wars to end.

When the US peace movement refused to challenge the UIT, it left Bush’s successor and his successors free to ignore it, revise it, or replace it. Congress has been removed from the equation. If Obama decides to inform Congress that the occupation of Iraq will go on into 2012, Congress’ response will be as muted as when the Director of National Intelligence informed Congress that killing Americans was now legal. And what can Congress say? It had no role in ratifying the UIT in the first place.

And the peace movement is in large part on the same path with Afghanistan, working to pass a toothless, non-binding timetable for possible redeployment of troops to another nation. Congress sees itself as advisors whose role it is to persuade the president that he wants to cease the activity that most advances presidential power. And activists share that perspective.

But what happens if the president becomes unpersuaded about ending both of these wars? What in the world are we supposed to do then?

We have an alternative to painting ourselves into this corner. The alternative is to build a movement of war opponents (and advocates for spending on human needs and/or tax cuts) that can pressure the House of Representatives to cut off the funding for the wars. Of course, this isn’t easy. It’s much harder than collecting signatures on a toothless resolution. And it’s dramatically harder than watching the president create an unconstitutional treaty (something Bush was forced into primarily by the people of Iraq) and then stepping aside to celebrate.

But there is no stronger message that could be used to persuade a president than a growing caucus of congress members denying him the money. And once a majority is reached in the caucus of war defunders, then the war simply has to end, whether the president is persuaded of anything or not.

So, the lesson to be learned from Obama scrapping his current plan for an Iraq withdrawal is not that we should phone the White House and complain. It’s not that we need 20 more cosponsors of the nonbinding timetable for Afghanistan. The lesson is that we must tell members of the House of Representatives that they can vote against war funding or we will vote against them.

Not a new lesson, I realize, but the Constitution is always less read than talked about.

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Steve Sailer Archive

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April 11, 2010

By Steve Sailer

Barack Obama is the most powerful man in
America. And David Remnick, editor of
The New Yorker, [Email
him] is one of the most powerful figures in American
journalism.

So, not surprisingly, reviewers of Remnick’s new
Presidential biography/doorstop, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,
have

prostrated themselves before Remnick with the same
shamelessness as the journalist himself does before the
politician in these 656 pages of humorless hagiography.
(Historian

Douglas Brinkley’s review of
The Bridge in the
L.A. Times is
particularly embarrassing.)[


"A
definitive chronicle of the growth and achievement of the
first black U.S. president by the prize-winning New Yorker
editor."
March 28, 2010]

A biography of

Santa Claus would be more hard-hitting than
The Bridge.
Remnick, who is certainly a bright fellow, makes himself
seem obtuse as he constantly offers insipid interpretations
of Obama’s choices.

The
Bridge
stands as a self-emasculated monument to the insidious costs
of

Access Journalism. Yes, Remnick scored a
lot of interviews.
The Bridge, for
examples, ends with Remnick reverently interviewing his
subject in the Oval Office about the meaning of his being in
the Oval Office.

Yet,

for what shall it profit a writer, if he shall gain the
whole world of access, and lose his own soul?

When you could speak truth to power, what
does it say about you that you choose to speak spin
for power?

The irony however, is that Remnick’s bland
and bloated tome lavishly confirms the interpretation of
Obama’s life I put forward in my own 2008 book,

America’s
Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and
Inheritance,”
a reader’s guide to the politician’s 1995 memoir
Dreams from My Father.  

David
Axelrod, Obama’s Karl Rove, sold him to a willfully gullible
press as the post-racial candidate with what Remnick quotes


West Wing writer Eli Attie as

calling “an
almost militant refusal to be defined by [race]”.
But Remnick’s book makes exhaustively if inadvertently clear
that, as Remnick

puts it, “race is
at the core of Obama’s story …” Remnick aptly quotes
Obama’s Harvard Law School professor
Charles
Ogletree as

saying of the white-raised, mixed-race man from
mixed-race Hawaii:
“Black identity was not given to him, he sought it”.

In contrast, the great frustration of
Obama’s life—epitomized by his soul-crushing defeat at the
hands of former Black Panther Bobby Rush in the 2000
Democratic primary for the

South Side of Chicago’s First Congressional District of
Illinois—was that he could never make himself quite
“Black Enough”
(as Remnick ironically entitles his chapter about Obama’s
loss) to become a major black leader.

Politics is fundamentally about whose side
you are on. The Bridge
marks a milestone: the Main Stream Media finally and
reluctantly beginning to admit they systematically misled
the electorate about what Obama’s autobiography has to say
about that crucial question.

Despite Obama’s hopeless struggle with
being black enough relative to other black politicians, he
was a natural at exploiting white people’s vast reservoir of
good will toward blacks—and desire to feel superior over
other whites—for his own personal advancement. He was the
one they’d been waiting for. As Eric Zorn, the liberal
Chicago Tribune columnist,

said about Obama’s campaigning among whites in 2004:

“Obama was somehow all about validating
you. … He was
radiating the sense that ‘You’re the kind of guy who can
accept a black guy as a senator.’ He made people feel better
about themselves for liking
him.”

Indeed, although I say it myself,
Remnick’s Bridge
reads much like my
America’s Half-Blood Prince—just with all the
interesting bits ruthlessly excised for the sake of message
control; and with vast, eye-glazing digressions from
Black
History Month interlarded.

Remember how, back in the 1980s under
elderly editor

William Shawn, The
New Yorker would run meandering, interminable articles?
Well, you can now relive those days. The Roman poet Juvenal
famously asked,

“Who watches the Watchmen?”
The Bridge’s 656
oversized pages raise the question,
“Who edits the Editor?”

The
“Bridge” of the title, as Remnick explains in his
23-page prologue, is the

one in Selma, Alabama where

Martin Luther King triumphed over Jim Crow in 1965.

Barack Obama wasn’t, technically speaking,
there. (He was a busy being a three-year-old in

Honolulu.) Still, Obama managed to convince Remnick that
the sacramental fulfillment of

King’s Dream required his own personal aggrandizement to
the Presidency.

When you
stop to think about it, this is one of the funnier hustles
any man on the make has ever pulled off.

Yet, to
Remnick, there’s nothing at all comical about the preppie
from paradise’s rise to power. It’s sacred stuff. (Remnick
proudly emphasizes throughout how Obama seemed like a dream
come true to countless Jewish liberals.)

Remnick retells Obama’s not very eventful
life story with appropriate piety. Thus, despite
The Bridge’s
endlessness, Remnick chose to leave out many juicy details.

Consider Remnick’s dull treatment of
Obama’s long-time friend and financial benefactor

Tony Rezko, who is
still awaiting sentencing in Chicago’s jail. There are a
lot of crooks in Chicago politics, but what makes Rezko
extremely relevant to a book that’s overwhelmingly about
race is exactly what Remnick decided to leave out: for a
quarter of a century, Rezko was in business with the Black
Muslims.

Despite the Syrian Christian immigrant’s
non-Black non-Muslimness, Rezko got his start as a big-time
Chicago operator by managing for the Nation of Islam its
most famous recruit: boxer
Muhammad Ali.
(The champ’s latest wife eventually liberated him from Rezko
and the NoI.) Rezko went on to a long career of pocketing
lucrative minority set-aside contracts using the son of the
founder of the Nation of Islam as his token black front man.

Now, you might think that, well, maybe
Remnick just doesn’t know much about the Black Muslims. But
in fact Remnick authored a 1999 biography of Muhammad
Ali. So he’s familiar with the score.

Remnick, we can infer, left out his most
amusing and germane material about Rezko
intentionally. Why?

Perhaps because allowing readers to
contemplate just how much money was made off black pride and
affirmative action by
Tony Rezko—a
white guy from
the
Levant!—would
inject a subversively farcical note into Remnick’s
sanctimonious book about race.

Moreover, Obama’s 15 years of chumminess
with the Black Muslims’ chief wheeler-dealer inevitably
raises embarrassing questions about Obama’s
cold-bloodedness. After all, Obama’s boyhood hero, Malcolm
X, was executed by a
well-organized assassination squad of…Black Muslims.
Would you pal around with the business agent for the organization that
murdered your idol?

Obama
would, if it was in his self-interest. The President is a
fascinating man, although you wouldn’t notice that from
The Bridge.

Unfortunately for the readability of
The Bridge,
Obama’s career largely consisted of showing up, asking
intelligent questions but not doing much of anything
actually to help black people’s stubborn problems; and then
getting promoted out of there by worshipful white people.

Remnick
therefore feels compelled to devote pp. 164-169 to the
community organizer’s participation in that semi-successful
1986 attempt to get some asbestos removed from certain
public housing projects.

Sure, it’s as dull as it sounds. But,
after all, what else besides the

world-famous asbestos project did the

young Obama ever accomplish—other than to promote
himself?

There are only two places where Obama’s
semi-blackness wasn’t an advantage: the South Side of
Chicago’s First Congressional District; and Indonesia, where
the local
Asian boys tried to

drown him for being black. But with whites in America,
despite all the self-pity in
Dreams from My Father,
it’s been a sweet ride for Obama.

As it
happens, one of Obama’s schoolmates Honolulu’s Punahou Prep
emailed me last week in regard to Obama’s self-pitying
portrayal in Dreams
from My Father:

“Barry was

treated very well and almost worshiped at Punahou
because he was black. This ‘poor me, nobody ever liked me’ is a
complete fabrication.” 

The
Bridge
consists in large part of white people saying that they
thought Obama should be President the first time they met
him. (Something I hadn’t known previously is that the
Joyce Foundation
offered Obama a million dollars a year to leave the Illinois
State Senate and head their organization. The materialistic
Michelle Obama was not
happy when he turned that job down to continue his pursuit
of power.)

Why did
white people love Obama so much his entire life?

BBecause he’s smart. Not with an
Al Sharpton-like
quickness, but in a conventionally white way.

At
Harvard Law School, the normally aloof professors were, in
the words of classmate David Goldberg, now a

civil rights lawyer,
“almost sycophantic”
toward Obama “because
he was brilliant and because he was African-American”.
Similarly,

political consultant Don Rose recounted that when Obama
got back to Chicago and networked with wealthy white
liberals, “they are
all bowled over to discover this brilliant black guy”.

Hmm. Well, how
“brilliant” is Obama?

My answer: certainly, he’s smart enough to
be President—but

that’s not a particularly high bar. I see no evidence in
The Bridge or Obama’s own books that he has ever had an original
thought about anything. But that’s hardly necessary in a
President.

The Obama camp has refused to authorize
the release of any of his academic records. (Bush and Kerry
didn’t release their records either, but I was able to draw

conclusions about both men’s IQ, because they had both
served in the Armed Forces, and taken the IQ-heavy tests
given to

everyone in uniform.)We have a general sense that
Obama’s grades were mediocre at Punahou, Occidental, and
Columbia, but then good at Harvard Law.

His test
scores remain particularly shrouded. It’s easy to see that
releasing them would be a no win proposition for Obama.
Either they weren’t good, which would then underline the
benefits he, coming from an upper middle class white
background, received in getting into all these gaudy
universities from racial quotas.

Or, his test scores were good, which would
emphasize the validity of standardized testing. That’s an
uncomfortable subject in polite society in general, and in
the Obama household in particularly, since

Michelle Obama continues to

complain about being dissed by standardized testing.
Yet, her failures in her abortive law career, such as
not passing
the bar exam at her first chance after graduating from
mighty Harvard Law School, are a classic example of the

failures of affirmative action in general.

My guess
is that the President did quite well on at least the verbal
sections of his tests.

Obama
has a way with words, less in speech than in text. Remnick
reprints several well-written personal letters he sent to
friends, which again demonstrate a certain literary talent
that makes him unusual among politicians.

Obama is
especially facile at restating other people’s views, which
is a highly useful skill that everyone should try to
develop.

Paradoxically, most people aren’t good at
listening to other people’s arguments because they assume
that their opponents disagree with them because they simply
don’t understand their point of view; so they are in a hurry
to reiterate it.  Obama,
in contrast, cares less about being right than about
winning. He assumes that most people’s opinions are, like
his, motivated by race, class, and self-interest, so he’s
not terribly interested in arguing with people who disagree
with him.

Remnick notes that Obama signed up for a
course at Harvard Law School taught by the prominent black
moderate

Randall Kennedy, on one of Obama’s passions, affirmative
action. Yet, when Obama discovered that Kennedy encouraged
white students to engage in frank debate with blacks over
quotas, he quickly dropped the course.

Most
young men with political ambitions would think they could
persuade their fellow students to share their views. But
Obama didn’t appreciate in-depth discussion of racial
preferences. What was in it for him?

Instead,
Obama’s usual goal is to outsmart his opponents with
apparent compromises that tempt them with a rhetorical slice
of the pie while he quietly takes the lion’s share.

Thus, for example, when TV newsman

George Stephanopoulos got up the courage to ask Obama if
his two privileged daughters should benefit from quotas,
Obama waffled, giving many the impression that, if elected
President, he would cut quotas because his election
demonstrated a decline in discrimination.

In reality, as soon as he reached the
White House, he

expanded quotas.

This
kind of thing takes skill.

On the other hand, Obama is being judged
against the low average standard of black politicians who
have emerged over the last few decades as the Voting Rights
Act has corralled blacks in majority-minority districts
where they launch their careers by playing the
“Race
Man”. It’s
not hard to look better than, say,
Marion
Barry. The poor quality of so many black politicians
reflects what the black community demands. In contrast,
Obama is a product of
white elite tastes.

Blacks who knew Obama better, such as Rev.
Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., offered Remnick more
interesting accounts of him than the endless quotes from
Obama’s white acquaintances about his super-duperness. Thus
Wright told Remnick something particularly interesting: that
“a close friend of
Barack’s” offered Wright money to shut up. Wright
refused.

But the one thing Remnick

can’t abide in a black is public reference to Jewish
political power. So, after many pages of taking Rev.
Wright’s ideas seriously, Remnick ultimately dismisses
Wright for saying:

“…
hateful things. As late as June, 2009, he bitterly told a
newspaper in Virginia, the
Daily Press, ‘Them
Jews [presumably, Axelrod and Obama’s chief of staff Rahm
Emmanuel] ain’t going to let [Obama] talk to me.’ … He also
said that Jewish voters and “the

AIPAC” vote were controlling Obama … With these
flourishes, Wright made it a great deal more difficult to
see, or care about, the complexity of his drama.”

After Wright’s years of sermons finally
hit TV (although not until

42 states had voted in the primaries), Wright and Obama
talked:

“… Obama said he
would greatly prefer that Wright stay at home and keep quiet
through the rest of the campaign rather than continue to
preach in Chicago and on the road. “He said, ‘You know what
your problem is, is you’ve got to tell the truth.’”

Obama
suffers even less from that got-to-tell-the-truth problem
than does Remnick. One of the relatively few revealing
anecdotes in this huge book comes from Obama’s class at the
University of Chicago Law School on
“Race, Racism, and
the Law”:

“’But
there was a moment when he let his guard down,’ one former
student recalled. ‘He told us what he thought about
reparations. He agreed entirely with the


theory of reparations.
But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable. … as
the complexities emerged—who is black, how far back do you
go, what about recent immigrants still feeling racism, do
they have a claim—finally, he said, ‘That is why it’s
unworkable.’’”

Of
course, the exact same questions also apply to affirmative
action—which Obama finds wonderfully
“workable”.

Obama’s
student recalled:

“You could tell that
he thought he had let the cat out of the bag and felt
uncomfortable. To agree with reparations in theory means we
go past apology and say we can actually change the dynamics
of the country …”

And make
Tony
Rezko l look like a piker.

[Steve Sailer (email
him) is

movie critic for


The American Conservative.

His website

www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily blog. His new book,
AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S
"STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is
available

here.]

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Add Congressman Bill Delahunt to the list of misrepresentatives who claim to oppose wars when a Republican is president but agree to support them when a Democrat moves into the White House.

When Bush was president, Delahunt sometimes voted for war funding bills and sometimes voted against them. The inclusion in the bills of lipstick measures, such as relief for hurricane victims, etc., was not a decisive factor. Delahunt appears to have voted No when the Democratic leadership was most accepting of that action. But, with all the Republicans voting Yes, there was never a chance of a No vote actually helping to block funding.

Since Obama became president, Delahunt has voted yes at every opportunity to support the funding of wars that the majority of his constituents have opposed for years. Several weeks back, I had the opportunity to speak with some of Delahunt’s more engaged constituents as part of a book tour, including members of Cape Codders for Peace and Justice. They had taken to calling their congressman “Dela-Won’t” and had largely given up on him. I encouraged them to sit-in at his office and demand opposition to war funding. I was encouraged when I heard that they had done so and that he had agreed to meet with them.

Apparently, Delahunt met with a coalition of groups and refused to commit to voting No on war money. As is typical of congress members who take their orders from the president or a party leader, Delahunt didn’t say he would vote Yes, he just refused to commit to voting No. Spineless servants of a party boss want to vote against unpopular bills if the bills are guaranteed to pass and they can be sure that no one will punish them for their action, but they want to keep open the option of voting yes if their vote becomes necessary for passing the bill. This is why the behavior of the people we think of as the best congress members largely amounts to voting No on bills that have been guaranteed passage and voting Yes on bills that have been guaranteed to fail.

About 30 people met with Congressman Delahunt, including military veterans, Cape Codders for Peace and Justice, members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Greens, Socialists, anarchists, and representatives of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA). Everyone was united in pressing the single request that Delahunt vote against the next $33 billion for wars.

Bruce Taub, the state coordinator for PDA-Massachusetts, represented his organization’s 4,000 members who are united in opposing more war funding. He reported that Delahunt refused to commit to voting Yes or No. Taub said that Delahunt offered two reasons for his position (or lack thereof). One was the fascistic-sounding nonsense that Delahunt called his “concern for the safety of the Homeland.” Delahunt cannot be unaware that the wars are making us all less safe, just as he cannot have been unaware of that when he voted against funding them in the past.

The second reason was, in Delahunt’s words: “President Obama is my leader. I respect him and trust him. I think he is earnest, someone who wants to genuinely do the best he can for the country, someone who considers all the options and is a thoughtful intelligent man. And if he thinks a supplemental is needed, I give that great deference.”

And if he told you to jump off a bridge?

He may be telling you to risk your political career. He himself can afford to sacrifice dozens of servile Democrats and get himself reelected two years later, just as Clinton did. You want to run for reelection on nationalizing Massachusetts’s disastrous healthcare plan AND using the money people need for jobs to fight hugely unpopular wars? Are you sure that’s what you want to do, Bill? Congressmen Kucinich and Grayson don’t need Rahm’s support because they have gone public with a commitment to decency and peace. You want to obey a president who would throw you under a bus without a second’s thought? You want to do that because you think he’s earnest and have bowed down before him as your leader? You expect to have no regrets for this on your death bed?

We claim to have separated church and state, but we obviously have not separated stupid blind faith and obedience from the rhetoric of our statesmen. Or stateswomen. Last June Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, who had voted against war funding while Bush was president, voted Yes with the explanation “I want to support my president.” Congressman Donald Payne, who voted No on war funding when Bush was president and last June as well, told me last weekend that he would not commit to a No vote on the $33 billion, and this purely because Obama is president.

Payne gave no credence to talk of protecting the “Homeland” by killing Afghans and Iraqis. Payne made a lengthy speech about his passionate opposition to the wars and his desire to move our resources to human needs. Then he told me that he would like to vote No on the funding but could not commit to it because Obama is president. I blogged about this on DailyKos, where criticizing Obama is considered at least a misdemeanor. One of the comments posted in reply read:

“The ‘only difference’ is a different person is President? That’s all the difference in the world, when one President is the apex of neoconservativism and the only President ever to govern with that philosophy, and the other is the only President to EVER run against neoconservatism [sic]. Bush wanted us in those countries, killing and destroying, as long as it made big corporations as rich as possible. He believed foreign occupation was limitlessly good. Obama believes foreign occupation is inherantly [sic] destructive to everyone involved, he watched the effects of it growing up in Indonesia and resented it everyday, not to mention its effect on his entire family history through Kenyan occupation; it’s part of the understanding of and rejection of tribalism that has guided his entire life. From being the only Democratic candidate of the main three in 2008 to have had [sic] written a bill saying ‘no permanent bases in Iraq’, to his refusal to fear-monger on Iran, to his perfect handling of the protests there this year, to his pledge in the Cairo speech not to have permanent bases in Iraq OR Afghanistan (unprovoked by any progressive pressure and completely on his own) [sic], to his beating the 6/30/09 deadline to withdraw out of all Iraqi town and cities [sic], to his rush to get troops deployed quickly as logistically politically possible [sic] in order to begin withdrawing out of Afghanistan by July 2011, to his books that outline his thought process as inherently anti-occupation from childhood, assuming Obama will act like Bush with the same variables is an incredibly ignorant statement. This is because the problem with not giving Obama any more credit than Bush is that you’re giving Bush the same amount of credit as Obama despite having done NONE of the things in the last paragraph, but rather for being the penultimate [sic] neocon and invading countries at every opportunity – and that, as someone who opposes wars vehemently, turns my stomach. I respectfully submit that this is what the Congressman gets that you do not.”

So, there you see? Obama’s obliging Congress has escalated the wars. There are more troops and mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan than ever during the Bush years, a larger military budget than ever, bases in more nations than ever, a dramatically increased use of drones, a complete failure to withdraw from Iraq the one to two brigades a month for the 16 months of Obama’s presidency as promised, horrific war crimes routinely reported, and we are supposed to view the wars as decreased and improved because of a story about the president’s childhood. This is what we’ve come to. Congress members don’t believe this hooey. They just want the Party to fund their campaigns, throw them pork, and make them chairmen. But Party loyalists around the country actually think this way. That is fundamentally what is wrong with our country and what could end up killing us all, even though these president worshippers are still in a minority on the question of war.

Delahunt knows his constituents are paying a heavy economic price for these wars and that a majority does not want them funded. Anyone in search of such information need look no further than http://defundwar.org And, to his credit, Delahunt has agreed to hold a public meeting on the topic of war funding. Let us hope the outcome is not yet another elected representative bragging about his willingness to defy the will of the public.

I think we can count on Delahunt’s constituents not to ease off on the pressure until he does, not just says, the right thing.

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