According to National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, the White House has no plans in the works to try to delay the presidential election in case of a terrorist attack on the United States. This is good news, especially given the e-mails that were sent to one of the local TV stations about the suggestion made by "Buster" Soaries, a Bush crony who is now in charge of something or other called the "Federal Election Assistance Commission," and passed on to Congress by Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge. The TV station read some of these, which were uniformly dismayed, angry, and extremely negative about the proposal of allowing somebody in the Executive Branch to decide on whether or not, or when, we get to vote for President.
I would, however, like to remind the attractive and knowledgeable Ms. Rice that whether the White House has such a plan or not is irrelevant. It is Congress that determines the time of the presidential election.
Oops. Legendary SF author Ray Bradbury of The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451 and a host of other works (mostly eminently readable ― unsolicited advertisement), is upset with moviemaker Michael Moore and his recent very successful pseudo-documentary attacking George Bush and his administration. "'He stole my title and changed the numbers without ever asking me for permission,' the 83-year-old Bradbury reportedly said in the interview." The article containing this quote can be read here; I won't trouble you with hunting up the original interview with Bradbury, which appeared in Stockholm's Dagens Nyheter ("The Day's News"), since it is presumably in Swedish.
Did Moore steal Bradbury's title? Ipso facto, no. First, the title is not the same as Bradbury's; obviously Moore used Bradbury's well-known title as a template, but "Fahrenheit 9/11" is not the same as "Fahrenheit 451", any more than Chad Oliver's "The Winds of Time" title is the same as Robert Jordan's "The Crossroads of Twilight" (both being "The {something} of {something}").
But in the second place, you can't copyright a title. Even if the attack on the World Trade Center had (somehow) occurred on April 51 and Moore had called his film Fahrenheit 4/51, it would have been perfectly legal for him to do so. Back in the days when I was lapping up Mr. Bradbury's stuff, I read three different stories ― one of them a novel for young people, the other two short stories or novelettes (very forgettable) in SF magazines ― called Trouble on Titan. I don't remember any one of the authors attempting to sue either of the others, or even calling them naughty names like "screwed a------" (Bradbury's description of Moore) for "stealing" his title. Note: I don't think Mr. Bradbury was the author of any of those stories, and probably himself never wrote a story called "Trouble on Titan", though I can't be sure.
Bradbury is reported as failing to indicate that he would "take legal action." Wise of him. He'd lose.
The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors [of the President of the United States], and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.
― Article 2, Section 1, Clause 4 of the Constitution of the United States of America.
Newsweek reports that the Department of Homeland Security is now looking into the possibility of finding legal justification for postponing the presidential election in case of an attack by terrorists.
The motor behind this request would seem to be "DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly created U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Soaries noted that, while a primary election in New York on September 11, 2001, was quickly suspended by that state's Board of Elections after the attacks that morning, 'the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election.' Soaries, a Bush appointee who two years ago was an unsuccessful GOP candidate for Congress, wants [Homeland Security Secretary Tom] Ridge to seek emergency legislation from Congress empowering his agency to make such a call." (quoted from the article)
Constitutionally, Soaries's comment is wrong. Congress, according to the Constitutional clause quoted above, does indeed have the power to reschedule a presidential election. I don't think that clause gives Congress the right to turn that power over to an agency of the executive branch. But then the Constitution also gives Congress the right ― and duty ― of declaring war, and for all intents and purposes Congress has already abdicated that power in favor of the executive branch; and I can't see a Republican Congress getting too het up about the possibility of ceding this power to the Republic President, especially if it looks like the election is going to be less close than they hope.
Incidentally, the argument quoted in the article ― "... the success of March's Madrid railway bombings in influencing the Spanish elections" ― is fallacious. It depends on reports of a poll showing that, before the bombings, Aznar would have won the election ― but we have never had any information about the date of the poll, the questions involved, or the part of the electorate polled. Actually, Spain seems to have become pretty anti-Aznar well before the election, largely due to his insistence on participation in the war in Iraq (which some 90% or more of the population opposed), his lackadaisicalness with regard to oil-covered beaches in northwestern Spain after a major maritime catastrophe, his treatment of peripheral ethnic groups such as the Catalonians and Basques, and his general behavior with regard to the proposed constitution of the European Union. But what really did him in at the end did have to do with the railway bombings ― the night before the election, someone in his government let it slip that Aznar & company knew all along that al-Qaeda was responsible, but insisted on continuing to blame the Basque ETA, in the hope of political advantage from this ― and the populace grew rightly annoyed about the fact that they had been lied to in such an important matter.
Well, truth to tell the record of the current administration suggests that after another terrorist attack on the United States, we might have exactly the same problem ...
Not quite a quarter of a century ago, there was this presidential campaign between incumbent Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan. The campaign was fought out against a backdrop of fifty or more Americans being held "hostage" in Iran. Reagan was able to make a big thing of this, especially since Carter's single attempt to rescue the hostages ― an attempt which, perhaps luckily for them, failed when it foundered out in bad desert weather, with significant loss of life among the would-be rescuers ― came a cropper. Reagan won the election, and the new fundamentalist government in Iran eventually released the hostages just in time to celebrate Reagan's inauguration in January.
You may suppose that, after that, a number of stories made the rounds about secret meetings between leaders of the Republican party (George H. W. Bush, who later became himself one president and father of another, is often mentioned in this context) and leaders of Iran, for the purpose of convincing Iran not to release the hostages until after the election. No serious person considered those stories anything more than hot air, perhaps gripes by Democrats who lost the election.
One wonders what to make of today's revelation, in a New Republic article (posted at the NR's website, but not available to dead-tree readers for a week or so yet), in which it is claimed the the current president, another Bush, has begun pushing the Pakistani government of dictator General Pervez Musharraf to bring such scofflaws as al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban boss Mullah Mohammed Omar to justice -- before the November election. In fact, it appears that preferential target dates for producing one or more of these men, preferably dead, have been mentioned to the Pakistanis ― one set of dates coinciding with the Democratic National Convention. Apparently, if you can't beat 'em, drown 'em out with your own noise.
The article's authors (John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman & Massoud Ansari) suggest that Musharraf is eager to comply, being faced with a carrot and a stick ― the carrot being the sale to Pakistan of F-16 fighter planes and the stick being a delayed but potentially forceful American reaction to Musharraf's pardoning of Pakistani nuclear physicist A.Q. Khan, who had directed nuclear technology to several governments of which we do not approve.
The authors consider this emphasis on capturing (or, preferably, killing ― without, of course, making them unrecognizable) the above-mentioned villains as a laudable ambition, but wonder why there was no such emphasis in the years 2002 and 2003, when it would have been equally laudable.
It might also make one wonder whether this attempt by the Republicans to fit international events to an election timetable is a brilliant new political initiative ... or whether it's not the first time.
I did go to see Fahrenheit 9/11, on the day it came out. Those interested in my impressions can read them here.
I also discovered something about the difference between the left and the right.
The left wanted me to see that movie. I received e-mails from MoveOn.org, for instance, urging me to decide to go down to the theater on opening day to see it. (Okay, guys, I did. Don't trouble me any further about it.)
The right didn't want me to see that movie. Did I get e-mails from them urging me to decide not to go see it? Not one! But you can bet that the people who owned the theater I went to heard from them (specifically from a front organization named "Move America Forward") ― urging them not to show the film.
In other words, the left wanted me to make a decision favorable to them. The right didn't want me to be allowed to make a decision at all, because it might be unfavorable to them.
To me, this is not just a quantitative difference in viewpoints about the way this country is run. It's a qualitative difference in viewpoints about whether I should be allowed to participate in running the country.
Note: the right is now attempting to convince the FEC not to allow ads for the movie to be shown on TV after July 30. This strikes me as an exercise in futility. Even if the FEC rules favorably on this proposal, does anybody out there ― at least, anybody familiar with the summer blockbuster movie cycle ― seriously believe that there will be any post-July 30 ads out there to be affected by the decision? (One wonders, however, how ads for the DVD, which will probably appear a month or so before the November election, will be handled.)
One of the constants of American history -- at least as long as I've been alive -- is the following.
Every time we look at a country whose traditional political structure has been ripped apart by invading armies (often ours) or by internal dissensions aided and abetted by foreign influences (often ours), and which then somehow fails to immediately come up with a new system consisting of a bicameral parliament, a strong executive who will brook no disagreement with what we want it to do, a two-party system and a populace lulled by a media system that works with the government to manufacture a consensus (thanks for the term, Noam!), the immediate explanation that everyone jumps on is: "These people have no tradition of democracy!"
Of course, everybody has a tradition of democracy, to some degree or another, at least if you get away from the idea that a democracy is not just represented, in our particular case, by two parties, three branches of government, and a ballot box, but that it is two parties, three branches of government, and a ballot box.
Democracy is, in fact, any system in which individuals have the right, power, and willingness to help decide the rules of the society in which they live. Most societies embrace this, in one form or another. True, it's not always that obvious at the national level, but certainly at the local or tribal level it's fairly common. Even at the national level, the worst of dictators has to go to the effort to make people at least believe that they are participating in such decision-making. Note: the ballot-box may have been one of the most pernicious inventions in history, in this regard, since it provides the people of such nations with the illusion that they are participating in making decisions, while at the same time actually depriving them of that power (the dictator lets them shove their ballots into the box, and then simply ignores the result).
That people want to participate in such decision-making is obvious to those who work in the polls here in the United States. I've seen people from a number of countries, most of which belong to that class of those that have "...no tradition of democracy...", show up at my precinct, ready and willing to participate in the decision-making process, even when they don't even speak the language of this country yet (a situation which, according to many American defenders of democracy, should prevent them, like small children, from participating in the process that sets the rules that they will then have to follow along with all the rest of us). Pretty obviously, either these people have their own tradition of democracy, or they are not much affected by the lack of such a tradition.
When it comes to other countries ― Iraq immediately springs to mind, in this year 2004 ― perhaps it would be wise to note the following:
(1) It's not a tradition of democracy but a structure in which that tradition can best be expressed that is often lacking. Give 'em a little time to develop one, and in the meantime try to keep your own (often dirty) fingers out of the soup while the people who are cooking it and who will have to eat the result are stirring.
(2) Don't expect that it will necessarily look exactly like the structure your ancestors implemented more than two centuries ago. It's a different era, a different bunch of people, with different priorities and needs.
(3) Finally, once it's in place, don't expect that those people, making their own decisions, are necessarily going to make the decisions that you think they ought to make. Again, their priorities are not going to be the same as yours.
(4) And when they disagree with you, please try not to go storming in once again and kicking this new structure to pieces. And if you do, please don't blame the results on the fact that "those people" have no tradition of democracy.
About this I can only say ...
... see my posting here the night before the Iowa caucuses.