Joe Biden for President. Let me be among the first to lend my support to the presidential aspirations of Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve been a Biden supporter for several years, and felt that he, rather than John Edwards, should have gotten the vice-presidential nod in 2004. Sunday, on Face the Nation, Biden formally announced his intention to seek the presidency:

"My intention now is to seek the nomination. But it may very well be that by the end of the year I find out I can't raise the money, I can't get the support, in which case, then, the best thing for me to do is find someone to support. But that's my intention now. And we'll see."

Biden’s straightforward discussion of his 2008 goal, reflects one of his great strengths as a politician: He is one of the most credible, plain-spoken, spin-free politicians in Congress. Since the war’s inception he has been the most farsighted, authoritative voice on American foreign policy. For two years now, Biden has been warning Bush that we have too few troops in place, that our approach is not sufficiently multi-lateral, that we’ve been late and lethargic about training Iraqi forces, and that the “happy news” progress reports from the Bush administration both confuse the public and damage the administration’s credibility. Biden, who just came back from his 4th trip to Iraq, is one of the few commentators to point out that the best measure of our success in Iraq is not the number of insurgent attacks; rather, it is the amount of raw sewage piled in front of people’s homes, it is the quality of the electrical grid and whether Iraqis can turn on their lights at night. Biden is that rare war critic who is also a bipartisan guy, a bridge-builder, and a straight-shooter.

Biden also offered another shocking piece of information on Face the Nation. He told host Bob Schieffer that when fallen soldiers return to Dover, Delaware (Biden’s state), the Defense Department will not let Biden view the returning caskets:

“I'm allowed in the military base. I'm not allowed to go to the mortuary. I'm not allowed to be there when the flag-draped casket comes in. As a matter of fact, Bob, one family asked me whether I would meet their son who was tragically gunned down, actually car bomb in Iraq. This is several months ago. I said I would be honored to be with them. They wanted me to come with the minister. They wanted me through the whole process. The commander of the base told me that he couldn't allow that to happen…until he cleared it with the Pentagon. So in order for me to literally go in and accompany a mom and a dad and a son to pick up the body of a dead son, a young Marine killed in Iraq, I was not just able to do it as a senior United States senator, former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee…”

I have only one word for this situation: Disgraceful.

The End of the “Capital Gang”. CNN, reeling from its decline in ratings, has finally waved the white flag of surrender to rival FOX News. After 17 years, CNN has cancelled its signature roundtable opinion program, “The Capital Gang.” Sadly, this Saturday, June 25, will mark the end of the program. Why would CNN cancel such a venerable and influential show? The answer is simple: Tired of losing audience share to FOX, CNN is now trying to reinvent itself as the “hard news channel.” (This, despite its nauseating blanket coverage of the Michael Jackson trial.) Apparently, the "suits" at CNN misguidedly think that the existence of an opinion program undermines its image as a hard news channel. CNN’s cancellation reminds me of the time that ABC’s “This Week” ended its own roundtable segment when it banished Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts in favor of George Stephanopoulos. And you what what? A year later, their roundtable segment is back, with rotating panelists who include Sam and Cokie.

Last Saturday, the Capital Gang reminisced about some of its most memorable moments, including the time pompous, right-wing, moralist William Bennett came on the show during the Florida election controversy of 2000. Bennett waxed indignant about the Gore campaign, calling Gore surrogates “goons” and “thugs,” before being put soundly in his place by Al Hunt and Mark Shields. With a twinkle in his eye, Hunt summed up the donnybrook during last week’s show: “Bennett came looking for a fight, and you know what? He got one!”

A second memorable moment came circa 1990, when Pat Buchanan was moderating the show. The prince of darkness, Robert Novak, groused that the “gay lobby” had taken over the Democratic party. Upon hearing this, a fed up Mark Shields erupted, “Bullshit, Novak. That’s bullshit.” A suddenly gentile Buchanan cautioned Shields, “Mark, this a family show.” Shields, still annoyed, retorted that they would edit out his expletives. Responded Buchanan, “Mark, we’re live!”

While I have chosen two of the more heated exchanges from the show’s archives, week in and week out, the Capital Gang offered an enormous amount of light to match its heat. The core message of the show for seventeen years was that some things are worth arguing about, and if argued well, make for excellent, entertaining television. Let us hope that the show is reincarnated on another network, and kicks CNN’s rear in the ratings. Finally, kudos to Al Hunt, Mark Shields, Margaret Carlson, Kate O’Beirne, and Robert Novak for their years of good work.

“The Gulag of Our Time”. The strident reaction to Amnesty International’s description of Guantanamo Bay as “the Gulag of our time,” has exposed one of the major problems with the American self-image and its foreign policy. The Bush administration’s narcissistic view is that because we are well-intentioned in our military goals, the rest of the world should share our presumption that we are above scrutiny, beyond international law, and exempt from criticism. The right wing chafes at the notion that we might be subject to the World Court, or that we should be constrained by those pesky Geneva Conventions, or that we should pay our dues faithfully to the UN. Recently, Chris Wallace, moderator of FOX News Sunday, was belligerent from start to finish in interviewing Amnesty International's USA Executive Director William Schulz, and expressed this narcissistic fallacy perfectly:

WALLACE: Mr. Schulz, if I ask you, when you accuse the Bush administration of, in using your words, "atrocious human rights violations," where do you fit into that equation the liberation of 50 million people from oppressive regimes?

SCHULZ: These are two entirely different questions...you know, someone can do a good thing one day and a bad thing the other and it doesn't vitiate the bad thing that they have done good things as well. That is not the point. Amnesty tries to hold one plumb-line universal standard to every government: - to Chile, to Cuba, to North Korea, to China - every government. And the United States applauds Amnesty when we criticize Cuba and North Korea and China. Indeed, that Secretary Rumsfeld, who just called us reprehensible, that is the same person who quoted Amnesty regularly in the run-up to the Iraq war when we reported for 20 years on Saddam Hussein's violations - years during which Rumsfeld himself was courting Hussein for the U.S. government.

All governments are imperfect. Even the best can pursue courses of action that are stupid, contradictory, and self-defeating. The indifference to post-war planning, the criminal negligence embodied in Abu Ghraib, and the housing of detainees off American shores in an attempt to circumvent US law, are appalling failures of the Bush administration that warrant sharp criticism. The human rights report issued by Amnesty concerning Guantanamo Bay is 308 pages long, but it articulates the corruption of the Guantanamo detentions succinctly:

"Attempts to dilute the absolute ban on torture through new policies and quasi-management speak, such as 'environmental manipulation, stress positions and sensory manipulation,' was one of the most damaging assaults on global values."

Amnesty International is one of the true heroes of our time, and I hope that it will keep reminding George W. Bush of the fact that governments who don’t truly trust democracy and the rule of law, become very poor salesmen of democracy and the rule of law.