Hey Jack! Fuck You! And Rudy, Fuck You Too!

Hey, I never said the blog was PG-13, so deal with it. You remember the scene in Godfather II where Michael sees a Cuban rebel push one of Batista's lackeys into a car and detonate a grenade, killing them both in a suicide attack? Michael immediately deduces, from the rebel's determination, that future business in Cuba isn't likely to be as fruitful as Johnny Ola, Fredo, and Hyman Roth want to think. None of that trio survives the film, of course, which is as it should be.

I had occasion to watch a couple of interviews today that seem apposite, (Flash Video) one with former GE CEO Jack Welch, the (Flash Video) other with the endlessly-dubbed "Mayor of America" (except that Republican America really didn't seem to want that Republican mayor) Rudy Giuliani. Both clips, in their own ways, deal with the genuinely-laudable Supreme Court decision (PDF of the decision) Boumediene v. Bush. Both of these distinguished gentlemen opposed the narrow 5-4 vote that SCOTUS handed down last week, a decision that took the bold step of noting that the right of habeas corpus was enjoyed by those in the Gitmo gulag. Welch took the American-reputation angle, while Giuliani hewed to the talking-points memo, focusing on criticizing Obama.

I really admire the United States; the reasons for that are numerous and probably boring and certainly subject to mockery from my Canadian and especially European associates; the latter I find rather rich, given the fact that Europe--in the twentieth century alone--produced the worst catalogue of crimes against humanity imaginable. The best thing about the United States is not the Constitution of the United States itself, but the notion of constitutionialism, of fair dealing, of basic decency. Tocqueville rightly spotted, almost two hundred years ago, that race would become the Americans' great national scar, in great part due to the denial of that basic decency to black and native Americans.

One of the primary reasons that I grew to admire the United States was how broadly the term "American citizen" could be used. I was lucky enough to come across one such citizen, a Jew who was chosen to integrate, religiously at least, an important American law firm co-founded by the son of Abraham Lincoln, and another, who strikes me as a Yankee of the best kind and was raised all over the world and not very much in the States. The former man, much to my surprise (shows you what I know), was happy to build a flagpole for raising the American flag (and I was happy to buy him a flag for it), while the other has always served to remind me of the real promises of the United States and of that nation's failure to live up to it. He recently wrote to me of his outrage at John McCain's statement that the Boumediene decision was "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country," suggesting that Dred Scott, Plessy, or Korematsu were indisputably worse, and horrifically so. My correspondent was entirely correct in his analysis. It says something about American intellectual life--and I mean the real one, not the one parodied all over the place--that I knew exactly what all three of those decisions were about. The best Americans I know are quite willing to hammer the administration and mood of the day, generally on the basis that some actions are simply un-American, in the best, and indeed only estimable, sense of that word.

So what about Welch and Giuliani? The former is guilty of the kind of "happy talk" rightly ridiculed by a recently-deceased Chicago writer. Just as Michael's doomed associates ignored the realities of the Cuban revolution, Welch seems to ignore the realities of the 42,000 miles he is so proud to have recently traveled. He gaily notes that several European leaders are more pro-American than their predecessors, which along with $2.60 will get you a cup of coffee, and prattles on about the gee-whiz enthusiasm of Eastern Europeans who attend the high-end conferences at which Welch prostitutes himself. Welch is very worried that the Bourmediene decision will somehow give away a decade's worth of intelligence, a claim that, beyond its prima facie absurdity, would seem to neglect the near-universal acknowledgment of the catastrophic failure of the ginormous American intelligence establishment with respect to Islamic terrorism. If I recall correctly, an NBC engineer died in the 9/11 attacks, and one of the many GE tentacles may have had offices somewhere in the World Trade Center complex. I don't dispute Welch's genuine sense of loss about 9/11, but this palaver about what transpired that day is more than a little hard to take.

As for Giuliani, I don't quarrel with the fact that he was the mayor of a city that was brutally attacked on 9/11. The loss of life on that day, in terrorism terms, was sadistic; if you were above the floors that the planes hit, you probably didn't get out, and if you were below those floors, you probably did survive. I choose not to pick on him for the placement of the NYC Emergency Response Center, or for any other of the other missteps he may have made before or after that event, though others are welcome to do so. Let's keep in mind, though, that Rudy made his bones by prosecuting the real-world equivalents of Michael Corleone's inheritors. To hear someone who once held the indisputably-serious position of United States Attorney dismiss the missile attacks that followed the 1998 Embassy bombings is genuinely shocking.

There are laws, and they matter. One would hope that Welch and Giuliani, who between their Catholic selves somehow managed to have six wives, would have grasped that, but it is clear that they don't. That is a goddamned shame. Unlike most of the readers of this here blog, I've actually been to places like Egypt and Israel and Iran. I have no sympathy for these Al-Qaeda or Taliban scumbags, who hate Westerners, Christians, Jews and women in no particular order, and I take real pride in the fact that the first war my essentially-pacifist nation has entered since Korea was against those bastards. I'm not at all sure that we will end up on the winning side, but if you don't fight this war against these motherfuckers, what war do you fight?

Having said that, nothing would make me prouder of the United States than its choosing to accord all of the Gitmo detainees every legal opportunity imaginable. Despite the O.J. and R. Kelly juries, I have every faith that any random group of Americans would decide fairly whether of any of these people should live free or die.