THE WORST CHOICE EVER: VIRGINIA'S GOVERNOR'S RACE

“Stark contrast for voters in Virginia governor’s race.”

That’s the headline on the Washington Post’s Guide to the Governor’s Race in the Old Dominion.

And the lead paragraphs of Ben Pershing’s article

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/stark-contrast-for-voters-in-virginia-governors-race/2013/10/11/1c9488dc-2d00-11e3-b139-029811dbb57f_story.html

go like this:

“They’re both Catholic men with large families who live in Northern Virginia and want to be the commonwealth’s next governor. That’s essentially where the similarities end between Attorney General Ken T. Cuccinelli II and businessman Terry R. McAuliffe.

“Elections are about choices, and Virginians will be presented with very stark contrasts on their ballots Nov. 5. … From résumé to ideology to governing style, the two hopefuls present strikingly different visions of how they would lead the state.”

It is not until the 19^th paragraph (of 24 in the story) that Pershing gets to the crucial contradiction of his “contrast” angle.  Both Cuccinelli and McAuliffe are simply unacceptable.

As Pershing most decorously puts it: “Cuccinelli and McAuliffe do have one other thing in common — ethics problems.”

Let’s start with Terry McAuliffe.  For most of his life, McAuliffe has been increasingly gainfully employed as what is known at the track as “a tout,” or more precisely at courthouses and capitols, “a fixer.”

Using his political connections, McAuliffe has connected politicians with funders (many of them simply buyers), and entrepreneurs or service providers with projects, many of them publically-funded, publically initiated projects.  For his work, McAuliffe takes a fee of the sort that has increasingly become a “price of doing business.”

It is probably only a slight exaggeration to say, a lot of the “Terry McAuliffe tax” comes right out of our pockets before being laundered in this “doing business together” way.

On the rare occasion upon which McAuliffe placed himself in a position of corporate responsibility, as Chair of GreenTech, the electric car company he co-founded, he had to resign, last December, with investigators from the SEC in hot pursuit.

Compared to McAuliffe, Cuccinelli is much more a common thief.  He got caught up in a more McAuliffe-sized caper tied to his boss, present Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell.  As Pershing reports, “Cuccinelli took $18,000 in gifts” from Star Scentific, a maker of food supplements, which, Federal Prosecutors say, was “seeking favors” from the Governor, his wife and his Attorney General, Cuccinelli.   Cuccinelli tried covering this up, but after he was embarrassed, Pershing notes, he “eventually wrote a check for the amount to charity.”

But Pershing has more: "Separately, the attorney general’s office is being investigated by the state inspector general’s office, which is probing whether a lawyer in the office gave improper legal help to out-of-state energy companies being sued over gas royalties by Southwest Virginia landowners."

Elsewhere, Pershing says one of the big “contrasts” between the candidates is that McAuliffe wants to push climate change reform and investment in “green” energy, while Cuccinelli calls this “attacking the coal companies,” whom he passionately defends.

The effect of this economically as well as environmentally significant issue on McAuliffe or Cuccinelli’s campaign treasuries is not mentioned in the article.

But there is something much more decisive that is completely absent from Ben Pershing’s Washington Post Guide to the Governor’s Race: the words “trans-vaginal probe.”

Oh yes, Pershing lists “abortion” (in as many words) as something the Democrat and the Republican disagree on, but here’s how Cuccinelli’s political persona is summed up:  “He wants lower taxes, slower growth in spending and a more efficient, less intrusive government.”

A man whose version of “less intrusive government,” includes government-mandated use of a trans-vaginal probe on pregnant females is intellectually, politically and morally unacceptable.

For the Post, the dominant newspaper of Northern Virginia, to go silent on this issue is also unacceptable.

And McAuliffe, is at least as bad.

Between the 2 of them, Cuccinelli and McAuliffe exemplify the failure of today's American politics and the utter worthlessness of both the Republican and Democratic Parties.

Real political reform should begin with outright rejection of both these assholes.  Virginians have a third choice, a lawyer named Robert Sarvis, running as a Libertarian.  Pershing says, “Sarvis has positioned himself as more fiscally conservative than McAuliffe, more socially liberal than Cuccinelli and more likable and scandal-free than both.”  Then he blows him off by noting, third-party candidates have never done well in Virginia.

Well, never before in Virginia history have the two-party choices been so reprehensible.

I would say, “Never in American history,” but some would argue, the choice in Louisiana in 1991 between famously corrupt former Democratic Governor and future Federal prisoner Edwin Edwards and Republican Ku Klux Klan-front man David Duke was even worse. To me, Edwards was, and amazingly, still is immensely entertaining, even if he imposed costs to his taxpayers of McAuliffian proportions; while Duke seemed not to take his malevolent racism anywhere near as seriously as Cuccinelli embraces his fundamentalist agenda.

And besides, the Edwards-Duke race and its unforgettable Edwards bumper sticker, “VOTE FOR THE CROOK, IT’S IMPORTANT” were a sideshow of contemporary politics, not as the Virginia race is, the epitome.

McAuliffe is the guy who helped sell America on “change is your friend,” as if Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin were any more of a change from Ronald Reagan and Donald Regan or George H.W. Bush and Nick Brady than Barack Obama and Tim Geithner would be.  Publically disgraced many times over, he sticks like a barnacle to the dead-in-the-water Democrats.

Cuccinelli is the guy who does not want government to tax private citizens or regulate large corporations, but thinks the privacy of the bedroom or birthing room is just where government should insert its probing nose.

And these are the best either party could do?!!

Wait till you see the choices for President in 2016: an aged, amiable gaffe-machine, a ruthless, perpetual self-promoter whose Senatorial and State Department careers are absolutely empty of definable achievements in original legislation or policy, versus a much younger, amiable former Fat-joke (who, as a Federal prosecutor steered an important contract for labor union oversight to the completely inexpert John Ashcroft as a reward for his service in the G.W. Bush Cabinet), or the Texas Governor who majored in memory loss, or the Florida Senator of lived on the edge of the law for years, living off expense money from his home state GOP organization.

Yikes!

If this isn’t a crisis, if this isn’t a death spiral of leadership whose consequences cover the earth from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria, and everywhere else the NSA gathers up data (which is everywhere else), I don’t know what you’d call it.

Does anyone doubt, both in coping with foreign competition and the realities of the 21^st Century, that American government, America is failing?   

Can you name two political parties who are responsible for this egregious failure? 

I’d say the same 2, the Republicans and the Democrats, who defecated on the governor’s ballot in Virginia.

Stop them!

Virginians within ear or eyeshot, spoil your Governor ballot, or vote for Libertarian Sarvis (with his 2-party legislature, he can, at worst, do little harm).

But say NO to the Devils…and withdraw your registration from either of the mainstream parties.  The country has lain with these dogs long enough.  The fleas are coming home to bite.

 

WAR IS EASY; PEACE, NOT SO MUCH

WAR IS EASY; PEACE NOT SO MUCH.

 

War is all about one thing: force.  Whoever applies force most successfully rules.  Period.  End of story.

Peace is the perfect opposite of war in this: it, too, depends on one thing, the subjugation of force to governance, and, hopefully, rule of law.  Unless and until all of the use of force within a country is brought under the command and control of government, there is no peace.

When, after defeating the government and army of Saddam Houssein, American peacemakers declined to force the Kurdish pesh merga militias to subordinate themselves to the government in Baghdad, they guaranteed and legitimized the resistance of Sunni and Shi’ite Arab militias to state control, not to mention smaller mosque or mafia-based paramilitary units.  What the international forces (i.e. the US) wouldn’t do, the al-Maliki government in Baghdad couldn’t do, and this failure to subdue the many centrifugal armed groups in Iraq is what has turned that once rich and functional country into a ruin.

In Libya, the triumph of a congeries of international and local forces over the government and army of Muammar al-Qaddafi was also followed by no effective regulation of those various heavily-armed local fighting groups by a legitimate central government.  Instead, Tripoli is the isolated capitol of a dysfunctional pseudo-country overwhelmed by internecine blood-letting.

Back in the day, when armed force was a prerogative of the state, peace was relatively easy to obtain.  One side just had to defeat the other and install its own or puppet governance.

Today, defeated governments rarely control all the armed forces within their borders.  In fact, as a government nears defeat, it usually disintegrates into a chaos of superseding loyalties to sectarian or ethnic concepts or to local tribes, clans, imams or mob bosses, each with its own paramilitary force. Under these conditions, the law of war: force wins, rules, and governments obey the gunmen. 

Another good example of what happens when American and international forces declare peace and go home is Bosnia, whose wretched state was well described recently by NYTimes columnist Roger Cohen. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/opinion/global/roger-cohen-enough-of-the-daytonians.html?hp

Oddly, Cohen leaves undescribed the American decisions, enacted through the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, which helped make Bosnia the mess it is today.

Peace a la Dayton was declared but not enforced, and so power in Bosnia was allowed to revert to the self-same warrior bands that had plunged the place into mutual murder in the first place. The UN “Peacekeepers” had neither the mandate, the will, nor the resources to subdue, much less disarm the Bosnian Serb, Croat or Bosniak (Muslim) Nationalist militias, many of them made up of underworld strong-arm squads.  Across Bosnia, they retained their wartime control of most of the “entity’s” constituent areas.  All the UN administration achieved was the creation of militia/mafia-controlled nationalist political parties to give the warriors’ absolute power a civil mask.

Mafia control of politics meant corruption-dominated governance, steeped in hyper-nationalism, insuring a fractured, multiply mutually antagonistic citizenry and a duplication, or in Bosnia’s sad case, a triplication of thieving, conniving government jobs.  Bosnian citizens were cowed but not fooled.  They knew what the international peace had brought them, and so did foreign investors, who declined to pay for the inefficiencies and extra costs of Bosnia’s criminarchy, and stayed away.  Today, Bosnia is not so much a failed as a faux-state  Still split into ethnic parts, Bosnia exemplifies the pathologies of its people, mutual hatred and self-loathing.

Peace in name, but with outlaw forces still in considerable control of government, also disfigures Bosnia’s original attackers, the governments of Serbia and Croatia, whose reputations with their own peoples and potential investors are stained by well-documented criminal impunity and administrative corruption.   

The real impetus of Dayton, never admitted and rarely suggested by critics, was the preservation, not of peace, but of the status quo.  The genealogy of American Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s Dayton deal was out of Metternich by Kissinger, an anachronistic, academic exercise in “balance of power” self-delusion, in which Slobodan Milosevic was to be America’s regent of regional stability.

The rush to conclude a treaty was to head off a humiliating military defeat of Serbian forces by a joint Bosnian-Croatian army, trained and armed with the help of the United States.  As the delegates convened in Ohio, this force was rolling up the Serbs across all of northern Bosnia.  Within weeks, it seemed likely, Milosevic’s military and their Bosnian Serb surrogates would have their backs to the Sava and Drina Rivers, without nothing less than a full withdrawal from Bosnian territory in store.

Holbrooke knew enough about Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian President Alija Itzetbegovic to doubt the results of endowing them with a post-war victor’s independent powers.  Better, he thought, to cede regional place to a Milosevic in debt to the US for his political survival.  So Holbrooke bought Milosevic, not as a failed politico turned war criminal, but as a respectable former client of Kissinger Inc. --when he ran Tito's National Bank his personal Kissinger adviser was Laurence Eagleburger -- and as America's "regent" in the Balkan region. He proved exactly as successful as the Shah of Iran had been as our -- actually Kissinger's and his pathetic smudged copy, Brzezinski’s -- regent in the Gulf region.

Somehow, Holbrooke ignored Slobo’s much greater debts to the Serb nationalists and organized crime leaders who had done his bidding in Bosnia.  Once he made “peace” in Dayton, his killers transferred their lusts for blood, plunder and ethnic triumph to Kosovo, and reining them in, just because his partners from Washington were asking him to, just wasn’t in the cards. 

After 10,000 Kosovars had been killed and 800,000 displaced by Milosevic’s security forces and associated “irregulars,” it took almost a year of US and NATO bombing (sometimes of civilian and diplomatic targets) to conclude yet another uneasy “peace” and a brace of new corrupt and mob-compromised oligarchies to the Balkans.

Yes, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo all have regular elections and civilian governments now, and the beginnings of normal regional relations.  But behind this mask, people who actually live there will tell you, are governments dominated by a few billionaires and a few organized crime gang leaders.

In Afghanistan, our real allies, the people who have staked their families and their futures on the dream of a modern, democratic state shudder as a justifiably impatient Obama rails at an unjustifiably corrupt and inept Karzai and heads for the exit, beyond which lies a false and murderous peace that an international consensus seems to think is “good enough for them.”