During the 2008 presidential campaign Hillary Clinton famously used the image of a telephone ringing in the middle of the night to serve as the ultimate test of Barack Obama as a leader, with the implied suggestion that he was certainly not up to it. In reality, when such a single call does come into the Oval Office, more often than not, it does not bring huge decision moments- but importantly- if it does, the president has many around him with far more experience and knowledge on the subject to advise him. For example, if military action might be required, the president himself is not versed enough on military operations to come up with his own. He will ask for recommendations, and 9 out of 10 times, follow them (one great exception, thankfully, being John Kennedy’s decision not to follow his military advise to invade Cuba). The point being that most of the time world events happen, while hard choices will certainly present themselves, for the most part, courses of action, alliances, etc, are pretty much predetermined. A president will certainly be unfairly judged by the success or failure of those decisions, as Carter is forever seen as a wimp because of the failure of the hostage rescue mission. Once they are launched, these outcomes are far beyond a president’s control. Such presidential decisions are simply a roll of the dice.
But the true tests of a president are not the decisions made in the heat of crisis, but those that are made in the calm and quiet solitude when he himself is in possession of the facts. Lyndon Johnson’s decisions to push for the Voting Rights Act and to escalate the war in Vietnam, or John Kennedy’s apology to the nation after the Bay of Pigs disaster, or George W. Bush’s call to launch a war in Iraq did not happen instantly or because of late night phone calls. These decisions were deliberated long and hard and showed the mind and character of the men who made them. The true test of anyone is when what the do when what is right may be not only inconvenient or hard, but potentially devastating. That is where Barack Obama is at this very moment with regard to allowing prosecutions of Bush Administration officials who broke the law. He has, in fact, the hardest presidential decision to make in almost a hundred years.
The reality is that his predecessor and his administration knowingly, and egregiously broke the law in a naked, cavalier way before the eyes of the whole world. This was not some sort of gray area of finance or tainted campaign contributions which can be obfuscated to the general public. This was torture and war crimes and EVERYONE understands that. The very same eyes around the world that were so appalled by the pictures of Abu Ghraib are now on us all to see what we do about it- what “America” really means.

The problem for Obama, just a hundred days into his presidency, is that doing what is right- allowing justice and evidence to go where they will unfettered by political consideration- would very likely dominate the news for the next year and so inflame an already painfully divided nation as to render it paralyzed. The whole country would be captivated by the spectator sport of seeing how high the actual justice would go, especially given that this is not Watergate and we all already know who the villains are and what they did. It would become like Jaws, with us all watching to see if the shark gets caught in the end except that a very vocal and well funded twenty percent of the country would not only be rooting for the shark, but going for political broke with everything they have to save their name. Given that they control a major network, Fox, and the majority of “talk radio,” it would redefine the term “media circus.”

President Obama- and ignore all the blather about this being anyone else’s decision- is going to have to decide if we are indeed a nation of laws, and that no one is above those laws. We all know it’s not true, that wealthy people get away with more and get lighter sentence when they do get caught. There were virtually no prosecutions for the Savings and Loan fiasco that cost us all billions of dollars, and there are yet to be any indictments for the massive Wall Street frauds we all know happened, yet our prison cells are filled with poor people of color whose crime is smoking and selling weed. But inconveniently for Obama, because of it’s graphic images and global profile this will become the test of American integrity in the world. To be fair, it is a test that almost no other country could ever muster the courage to face, but that is never the measure of leadership. The cure- prison time for the offenders- would be invaluable to not only our standing in the world, but the future of our politics. Future administration’s would think long and hard about breaking the law, and it would mean the almost certain demise of the reckless, cowboy strain of the Republican party that has so damaged us all- if not the national party itself. But after so many revolutions and catastrophes- from the election of the coolest black dude in the country as president to the collapse of Wall Street, the all but certain death of the American car industry, and seemingly on and on, could this national patient take another round of chemotherapy? The answer is, it has to. It simply has no choice.

The one aspect of President Obama that continues to confound his detractors, and what really does make him so different, is how secure his is in his own skin, and how patient he is when it comes to politics. It’s the gift of the long view, something that is absent from most politicians who are too busy nursing grudges and pursuing vendettas around their immediate offices. That’s how American politics works for the most part, and why Obama is such a very different animal. If the GOP wasn’t in bad enough shape right now, few of them realize that Obama has them in a boa constrictor’s grip with the Bush Torture Memos, and he is very slowly squeezing them. The only question, seriously, is how bad does he want to do them. If he wants, he can crush them like the wadded paper his predecessor used to spend his days launching towards the wastepaper basket. The only one who gets it, and feels the pressure, is former Vice President Dick Cheney, which is why he is mounting his defense on Fox News, the only place he can without being asked questions he can’t answer without inviting a subpoena.

Consider the scope of the problem for the the GOP. The Bush Administration is nakedly guilty of war crimes. That’s not a left-wing rant, it’s simply the truth and they all know it- and they knew it at the time. As former State Department policy representative under Condelezza Rice Philip Zelikow’s Foreign Policy article shows, there were clear and dissenting voices within the White House who alerted the Administration to the gross illegality of their ideas- the fact that these were indeed criminal activities. The fact that the Bush Administration took pains to try to round up and destroy all copies of Zelikow’s memo speaks without question to the fact that the knew how damaging their airing would be. Instead of a terrorist embattled administration united in the “war on terror” it would be very clear that there were people inside who were calling this what it was- torture- and that the voices of prudence were shouted down by the most radical faction in the building. And so, the Republican Party now is being squeezed by two problems, the moral one and the political one (and yes, sadly, the two are not always the same). It’s the political problem that poses the most dire storm clouds.

When President Obama released the four “torture memos” that so graphically detailed the gruesome level of “enhanced techniques” that the Bush crowd was allowing, if not even encouraging, he was like a referee tossing the basketball up in the air to start a game. He was not inserting himself as a player, but simply tossed the ball out for the forces in Congress who want to pursue investigations and prosecutions and the Republicans who are now forced to play defense. If congressional hearings to get started, or if a special prosecutor is named as seems all but likely at this point, with midterm elections a year and a half away, Republicans have to ask themselves long and hard how they want to play this. Given not only how viscerally disturbing this will all be, but how seriously fucked up the day to day running of the Bush White House was, they have to know that once this starts to unravel it’s going to be a jawdropping media circus. One by one, more and more indefensible arguments, conversations and memos are going to be uncovered, and each one will be yet another paper cut in the Republican Party. Will Republicans really want to go to the voters defending Bush and Cheney as the “party of torture?” Or will they do what most have already done regarding Bush’s budgets- abandon ship and join the rest of us. But either way, if Obama wants to he can slowly squeeze the GOP elephant over the next year and a half, but he won’t kill it. He needs it to be weak but alive in four years, rather than face an energetic phoenix that would have to replace the vacuum it left.

Yesterday, on ABC’s This Week, Newt Gingrich previewed a likely Republican strategy for 2012 by again venting his frustration and criticism of the Obama Administration’s apparent inaction in the face of a wide morass of international challenges. Somali pirates, North Korea’s missile launch, Iran’s advance towards nuclear weapons were all bully’s on the beach kicking sand into the skinny Obama kid’s face to which he was too much of a wuss to respond. It was the “Democrats are soft on national defense” theme song being struck up again and for a party on the verge of regional extinction digging up the old hits makes perfect sense. Actually reinventing themselves around the contemporary world is a daunting challenge indeed for people who question Evolution and whose base believes in the power of prayer and can only order food from menus with pictures on them.

What Newt had to say makes for good sound, just the way George Bush sounded good to American ears shouting into a bullhorn at Ground Zero that “the people who did this will hear from us soon.” The problem is that while it makes the Yahoo’s stomp their feet and yell “Fuckin’ A,” the reality is that both men are totally, and unquestionably, full of shit. “Those that did this” never heard diddly squat from George, who was, as they say in Texas, “all hat and no cattle.”

When you look around us, we do not see the America of the last generation that defeated the Nazi’s and the Imperial Japanese in the world’s greatest war. We are certainly well enough armed, and could quickly become well enough manned and motivated if another similar enemy ever materialized, but that is clearly not going to happen. Conventional warfare between countries is not over because people all of a sudden decided war is bad, it’s just over because it makes no more sense than opening veins and bleeding people to cure them. Conventional war is too costly, kills too many people, and worst of all makes too much of a mess that has to be cleaned up at great expense to the victor. What does make sense in the 21st century, as anyone who’s been awake has witnessed, is guerilla and insurgency- and terrorist- tactics. It’s really not that complicated, it’s just like the Olympics. If one country totally dominates an event people look for others they can compete at. If you have no chance in the 100 meter hardware and uniformed soldiers event, you try the bomb hurling. But just because we can’t find anyone to compete in our event doesn’t mean the Olympics ends.

So what does this mean?

It means, quite simply, that there is really nothing we can do about North Korea’s missile or Iran’s nuclear program. Nor could Harry Truman be reasonably accused of “losing China to Communism” as he was- but he let that foolishly egg him into jumping into the Korean mess. The reality that Newt and others who grew up in the immediate post-war era can’t get their mind around is that we are only 2% of the world’s population and we can’t control the other 98. Back in the 1950’s, with the world’s premiere military and economy, and the smoke still clearing from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we were the big swinging dick in the world. But like most big swinging dicks, we over reached first in Korea, then Vietnam and then in Somalia and then in Iraq, the doozie of them all. The reality is that we have become the world’s Kevin Costner. We still think of ourselves as an Oscar winning movie star, but everyone else only sees Waterworld and The Postman and other smaller, but no less disastrous efforts. While it’s true that we do many good things- Tsunami relief and AIDS work, nevertheless, our name has become synonymous with military foreign policy disaster and rightly so. As George W. Bush learned, we are no longer the big kid on the playground who can just threaten to beat the shit out of any other kid who pisses us off. While most of us are loathe to admit it, we’ve been publicly beat now not once, not twice, but THREE times. Our threats now ring as hollow as a homeless on a park bench punching the air which is why the Iranians and North Koreans- the the Somali pirates- dismiss us as they do.

So, like Kevin Costner, Newt and the rest of us simply have to ratchet down our self image. We are simply not capable of the big budget production number anymore. We can’t really do anything about Kim Jung Il and the North Korean regime, or the Iranian nuclear weapon. We could try to bomb them or sanction them or yell at them through a bullhorn, but none would produce any result any more than taking a knife and scraping off a poison oak rash. As the Obama Administration will hopefully soon figure out in it’s equally futile attempt in Afghanistan, all we get-over and over- is a bloody mess.

There are times in our lives when really obvious axioms become, well, finally obvious. Such a moment happened to me some years back during a rally at UC Berkeley over “Affirmative Action.” The main courtyard was filled with angry protesters shouting, waving signs and all the rest of it. Once particularly vocal protester was only a few feet away, and out of curiosity, I asked him just what he thought “Affirmative Action” was, or what it should be. After first dolling out boilerplate drivel about equality and all the rest, he confessed that he didn’t actually know. But, he said, that didn’t matter because that wasn’t really why he was there. The real reason, he told me as he produced a clipboard, was to get signatures to demand that the United States give California back to Mexico. Not even sell, but just give it back. It was one, needless to say, of the better laughs I’d had in some time but it also illustrated the obvious fact that this protest, like most of them, was not at all what it might look like. It was not the manifestation of public sentiment, it was simply a turd magnet.

Today in London we are seeing this writ much larger, and quite frankly, even more ridiculous. There is certainly a serious issue on the table with the global economy, and rage against the bankers is real, no doubt. But the folks filling the streets near the Bank Underground Station are not normal citizens upset about the banks. They are the lunatic fringe taking the opportunity of someone else’s party to get drunk (notice in the image at left, for example, a large banner of a panda, the logo of the World Wildlife Fund). We are talking about “Anarchists,” a rich assortment of clueless losers who promote the total breakdown of society, which is a reality that would horrify them should it ever happen. Awoken too were the old “Socialists” who once proudly carried the banner of Marxism in a variety of re-invented and watered down forms. Transgenders against the war in Iraq have also made an appearance as had hundreds of others who can’t pass up an opportunity to dress up in costumes or to show up hoping that their “passion for justice” will get them laid. Or, of course, both.

The lesson here is clear. Governments need to avoid to this sort of hooliganism by keeping any single issue from swelling up enough to get anyone out in the street in the first place. Once that happens it simply opens the door for the flotsam and jetsam of splinter nutcases to join the party. That is, of course, easier said that done because governments have to make unpopular decisions sometimes, and events routinely envelope them. It’s going to happen, and these events make for great television so they will continue to be covered ad nauseum. But we should never be confused about what we’re seeing. These protests are not the voices of the people, they are the clusterfucks of the disenfranchised lunatic fringe and should be treated as such.