Paul Street - Lunching with the Brute

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=11386


As I edit these lines, Madam Speaker Elect Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) – so long, Denny – is heading over to the White House for lunch with a president she has recently described as “incompetent” and as (imagine) out of touch with reality.

But it needn’t be testy meeting. Bush and Pelosi can trade pleasant recollections on what it was like to be born into privileged, politically connected families (Pelosi’s father was a congressman and the Mayor of Baltimore) and attend elite private schools from K through college. To alleviate the royal brute’s fears, Pelosi can reiterate her aprioristic decision not to meet her moral and constitutional obligation to initiate legal and political mechanisms leading to his overdue removal. She can pass on the New York Times’ comforting observation today that “about half the incoming Democratic freshmen are already planning on joining the New Democrat Coalition – a generally centrist group that emphasizes economic competitiveness and national security issues” (Carl Hulse, “New Democrats Pose Challenge,” New York Times, 9 November, A1, P3) .

She can remind Bush of the Democratic Party’s commitment to joining him in opposing the Iraqi and American peoples' shared, repeatedly expressed desires to see U.S. troops rapidly removed from illegally and murderously occupied Mesopotamia. She can assure him that Congress will not “cut and run” from its solemn duty to keep funding his blood-soaked oil war.

She can remind of him of vital Democratic collaboration in the murderous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the passage of CAFTA, and the installment of reactionary Supreme Court Justices, and the passage of the repressive PATRIOT Act. She can mention Democrats’ partnership in the passage of the vicious, school-privatizationist No Child Left Behind Act, business-friendly “tort reform,” the corporate-backed Bankruptcy Act, and, of course, the hyper-plutocratic tax cuts.

She can remind Bush of Democratic congressional participation in the dismantling of Habeus Corpus in last October’s proto-fascistic Military Commissions Act and of the Democrats’ support in backing his and Israel’s bloody assault on Lebanon.

Maybe Bush and Pelosi can put their heads together on how to help the business lobby act on its plan to get rid all those aggravating new laws and regulations that were enacted after the scandalous Enron and WorldCom meltdowns. They can take a shot or two at peace and justice “gadflies” (centrist Obama’s disdainful description of the late progressive Senator Paul Wellstone) like congressional representatives Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers (the new head of the House Judiciary Committee, who has suggested that Bush has engaged in impeachable offenses). They can share a chuckle at the welcome rhetoric of Bernie Sanders, the newly minted socialist Senator from Vermont, who speaks passionately against(imagine)America’s grotesque combination of obscene wealth at the top and growing poverty at the bottom.

THE LUNCH WE NEED

Now, here is how the lunch would go if the kind of American political rebellion this nation (and the world) needs had occurred. The next Speaker would arrive with at least four sharp steel knives – one for Bush, one for Dick Cheney, one for Darth Rove, and one for Rumsfeld (resignation is no reprieve).

She would ask the bubble president’s staff to provide live television footage of millions in American streets, including hundreds of thousands converging on the White House.

She would present Bush with a CD containing a petition containing 650,000 names calling for: his immediate resignation and that of Cheney; the installment of Pelosi as interim executive and the calling of an extraordinary new presidential election within three months; the immediate removal of U.S. military forces from Iraq and the setting up of an international peacekeeping force there; the development of a long-term plan for the payment of large-scale U.S. reparations to Iraq; and the rapid holding of a Constitutional Convention to pass a Democracy Amendment to institute the democratic restructuring of the U.S. electoral process.

It would be helpful if Pelosi could present Bush with a note of concurrence from top military officials and a mass petition from illegally deployed soldiers stationed in Iraq.

Bush, Cheney, Rumbo, and Rove would be told to choose between three options: (1) accept all of these conditions and voluntarily surrender to specially appointed federal authorities for corruption and war-crime trials conducted in cooperation with relevant international agencies; (2) immediate deportation of all of them and (if they wish) their loved ones (except Lynn Cheney, who will be kept for observation in a psychiatric clinic in an undisclosed location near the Mexican border) to Bush’s newly purchased estate in Paraguay (a nation accustomed to hosting war criminals), where they will be placed under internationally monitored house arrest supervised by the Organization of American States; (3) death by suicide, in the respectable Japanese tradition whereby failed tyrants admit and act on their shame through appropriate self-elimination.

Whichever option they choose, each of the deposed criminals will be required to make internationally televised apologies to the survivors of all people (American GIs and Iraqis alike) killed by “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”