The Spoiling ‘B’

In the USA, spelling bee competitions are the rage.  Also, in the USA, ‘B’ is the letter for raging Republicans spoiling for a fight with Barack Obama.  From the very start, there was the ‘Birther’ conspiracy myth, asserting that Obama had no right to claim Bruce Springsteen’s anthem Born in the USA with a straight face.  In election year 2012, there was the Benghazi controversy, where the US ambassador to Libya and his security detail were murdered – Obama was accused of failing in his role as Commander-in-Chief to protect American lives.  Now, most recently, we have the Bergdahl affair where the president is denounced for releasing Taliban prisoners without notifying Congress in sufficient time to protect an American life in peril, an American for whom right-wing commentators feel should have rotted forever in an Afghan dungeon.

You may notice that all these are technicalities to try and oust Obama rather than taking the man himself’s advice of “go out win a presidential election” if they didn’t want a Democrat in the White House.  It’s like trying to impeach Bill Clinton because he had ‘sexual relations’ with Monica Lewinsky but officially not because he had ‘sexual relations’  with Monica Lewinsky but because he lied about it.

The constitutional stipulation of being born in the USA, like well regulated militias being able to bear arms, is an anachronism when the Republic was young and feared being undermined by outside (notably British) efforts.  The first nine US presidents (based on formal recognition of the country in the Treaty of Paris 1783) weren’t born in the USA, as it didn’t exist, rather they entered this world in one or another of the 13 colonies.  Ridiculously, a man born on the Canadian side of the border with the USA, a day before his all-American parents return, before spending the rest of his life not setting foot outside the 50 states cannot become president, but Boris ‘The Animal’ Johnson can for he abandoned the womb in New York.  Think about that constitutionalists: if you were relived that Schwarzenegger could not make the grade (despite the fantasy of the film Demolition Man), BoJo could.  Be afraid, be very afraid.

Benghazi was a more serious case with the deaths involved. Hillary Clinton, as State Secretary, took the heat off Obama by claiming responsibility for the lives of all American ambassadors.  This was supposed to be the administration’s ‘Watergate’ moment, but though they bungled its handling, the only criminality lay with the Libyan jihadists.  Obama ‘manned up’ and said the buck stopped with him but Clinton’s intervention dissipated the electoral threat.  After striking a serious tone in a speech, Mitt Romney’s smirk (caught by a well-positioned camera) as he walked backstage, killed the issue for Republicans.

And now we have Bowe Bergdahl, a double ‘b’.  The side of logic rests entirely with the administration and it seems the Republicans have not heeded the assertion of their own Bobby Jindal to stop being ‘the stupid party’.  Okay, these five Taliban prisoners are high-ranking but with the US drawdown in Afghanistan, they would probably have been released in six months time anyway.  To get a US hostage in return is kind of like a free pass.  On Question Time, Nev Wilshire tried to single-handedly destroy the concept of the ‘celebrity panellist slot’, first by joking (or was he), that “as a businessman, five in exchange for one is bad deal,” like he was dealing with backroom stock, before going on so say that Obama’s desire to close Guantanamo always baffled him – with a hint of disdain, Wilshire pondered “maybe he just likes releasing people.”  A more hopeless assessment of Guantanamo Bay’s prison facilities would be hard to find, though the rest of the panel were fairly clueless on the Bergdahl story (Ed Miliband wouldn’t be, with his devotion to the RealClearPolitics website).

Such ignorance as displayed by Wilshire is typical of ‘debate’ in the USA.  When Supreme Chief Justice John Roberts mucked up Barack Obama’s first inauguration, we saw Obama stumble because Roberts had read out the wrong formulation of words and threw the president.  Except because of that, some right-wingers Obama wasn’t the president and even when a video was released of Roberts and Obama doing the procedure correctly in the Oval Office, they claimed the oath of inauguration was only valid on inauguration day, as if winning a presidential election by a crushing margin was irrelevant.  But people like Wilshire would have assumed Obama had goofed and not following up the story would have persisted in that belief.  And ‘something, something’ he heard about Guantanamo Bay means Obama doesn’t believe in the punishment of criminals.

But to return to the Bergdahl incident, it’s lucky that the USA isn’t Thailand where Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra was forced to step down by the elitist Constitutional Court not because she moved an official but because she did it too quickly (though this still didn’t stop the military coup that would take place weeks later).  And the legal charge against Obama isn’t that he released Taliban fighters per se but that he did it without notifying Congress 30 days in advance.  Knowing that such legalese won’t resound with the public at large, Republicans are wheeling out old members of Bergdahl’s platoon to argue that his life wasn’t worth that the release of the five Taliban (who will be confined to Qatar for one year as part of the deal, sleeping in their ‘embassy’ there).  There is talk of how he was a ‘loner’ and ‘weird’ and ‘not a team player’ but best of all, one said that Bergdahl bought Rosetta Stone tapes to learn languages like Pashto and Arabic.  The horror, that he was trying to educate himself and might be able to converse with the local population and with imams.  To criticise someone for learning foreign languages that American anti-intellectualism (like its British strain) is alive and well.

The destruction of Bergdahl’s reputation has forced his home town to cancel a homecoming celebration for ‘health and safety reasons’, namely they can’t guarantee the health and safety of Bergdahl after the council was inundated with threatening letters and emails.  It is all reminiscent of the attack on John Kerry when he was making his presidential run in 2004.  Kerry was mocked for speaking French and ‘looking French’ and the Swiftboat Veterans campaign, funded by Republican-affiliated organisations, told lies about his bravery in Vietnam (two purple hearts are fairly definitive contradictory proof).  George W Bush acted in the same scumbag way he treated John McCain in the 2000 primaries by refusing to condemn slanderous accounts against an opponent (by contrast, a CNN investigation into Dubaya’s cushy job in the Texan National Air Guard as part of the draft, which a role which in itself finished prematurely, ended the 24-year career of anchor Dan Rather).  Like the Swifties, some of Bergdahl’s platoon have thrown him under a bus for political advantage.  He has been accused of desertion and so causing the unnecessary deaths of a search party that went out to look for him – all before the facts are fully known and Bergdahl has had a chance to speak for himself.  Instead, his ‘unpatriotic’ parents are made into his avatars, bring calumny and obloquy down on the family in equal measure.

Why such hatred?  Because Bergdahl and his kin serve as proxies for the seething hatred felt for Obama by Republicans and the Tea Party in particular.  This anger has reached such a fever pitch that it has long passed the point of rationality.  Anything that Obama does must be attacked, nay, assaulted.  Bowe Bergdahl is made collateral damage by his own side, merely because Republicans can’t win presidential elections and are reduced to trying to impeach Obama on technicalities that always fail in their ambition.  This attempt will fall flat too.  Initially wary of invoking executive privilege after a feeling that it was abused under Bush the Younger, the Obama team confected a workaround that said the law about due notice to Congress could be circumvented because of the delicate nature of negotiations and time constraints.  This was held by impartial observers to be unsatisfactory from a legal standpoint, so ahead of the Normandy celebrations, Obama went ahead and used the executive privilege which trumps the Congressional law, namely that as Commander-in-Chief it is his duty to ensure the safety of all serving military personnel.  And for all the hue and cry, it’s not like Obama broke the Constitution as the sainted Ronald Reagan did with the Iran-Contra scandal and the activities of Colonel Oliver North and John Poindexter in that scheme.  But hypocrisy reigns in the Republican house and while focusing on minutiae, they miss the big picture.