Raping Faces for Progress
Smug liberals gleefully deployed double and triple entendres in an effort to squeeze every ounce of rape-humor from the Right's campaign against health care. But is it worth it? What do we lose when we label right wing demonstrators "teabaggers"?
by Richard Leader
http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/raping-faces-progress
There’s no point in sugarcoating it or delaying the inevitable: the term teabagging describes the act of placing one’s scrotum in or around the mouth of an unwilling or unconscious person. It’s not oral sex. It’s a spectator sport, done for the benefit of a crowd, or better yet, a camera. There are some who will argue for a more consensual definition, if only to mitigate how much trouble they might get in when using the phrase to be obnoxious. Thanks to the feminist movement, it’s hard to sell jokes about something that’s always rape — although it’s still easy enough to get away with joking about something that is almost always rape.
Familiar labels such as gay or straight miss the point of the behavior. All “lifestyles” exist in a wider culture of humiliation that is used to enforce hierarchies. This particular humiliation is both popular (over 20 definitions for teabagging have been posted at UrbanDictionary.com, with over 20,000 votes tallied in favor or against certain explanations) and is widely considered hilarious.
Teabagging received widespread attention when liberals mocked the 2009 Tax Day protests. The Republican-kindled events invoked the Boston Tea Party. They invited participants to mail bags of tea to their local and state representatives to voice their disapproval of “big government,” whatever that might mean when applied to a world superpower. Liberals seized onto this aspect of the protests, clearly preferring “tea bags” over “bags of tea,” wondering at the naivety of Party goers. Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post cheers, “There is only one thing in all the world worth noting about the people behind these things, and it is this: everyone involved is apparently unaware of what the term ‘teabagging’ means.”
Mailing small objects as a form of minor activism is on the upswing. The practice has been invigorated by several recent campaigns to save canceled television shows: if anything, the concept showed that conservatives are far more plugged in than many are willing to credit them. No one directly “behind” the Parties made any reference to “teabagging,” although there was an anonymously created channel on Twitter called “Teabag Obama.” While I suspect that the channel was set up by person without any standing, the fact that Republicans weren’t willing to claim any of the official events (in order to maintain the charade that the Parties were grass roots led and non-partisan) does make it difficult for them to deny anything in this regard.
Despite protesters never using the teabagging phraseology, it didn’t do anything to slow down hecklers who quickly named them Teabaggers. Daniel Kurtzman’s political humor blog at About.com lists almost a dozen mainstream personalities who were able to get away with graphic jokes about face-rape on cable news: David Schuster, Anderson Cooper, Keith Olbermann, Stephen Colbert, and more. Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox won the trophy as the pair managed to say “teabag” euphemistically scores of times in a segment lasting all of a few minutes. Kurtzman declares, “right-wing protesters who staged the rallies may have been oblivious to the true meaning of ‘teabagging,’ but that just made taunting them all the funnier.”
If ignorance of frat house culture alone is considered an open invitation to mock someone, liberals had a second justification for being amused at their own invocation of teabagging. The theory goes something like this: as teabagging is sexual (even if it’s almost always used to describe a sexual assault) and is typically perceived as “more gay than not,” the fact that the tax protestors, assumed to be prudish and homophobic, are engaged in “teabagging” is a delicious irony to be savored.
While being a prude has nothing to do with being a homophobe — Miss Manners and the rapper Eminem both come to mind as each possessing one quality but not the other — liberal culture is more concerned with punishing the uncool than it is with punishing the ethically bankrupt. This is why Eminem gets to skate and Tea Party goers don’t. (Eminem is even allowed to engage in jokes that celebrate the homophobic component of his persona, as he did with Sasha Baron Cohen.) However, here it's liberals who are proclaiming sexual assault to be sex and, more than that, something that gays do on a regular basis, as if this theory is doing homosexual men any favors. The alleged homophobia of “teabaggers” was used to justify using the term to mock them.
Daily Kos, a Democratic stronghold on the internet, had a topic that invited its users to post their “favorite teabagging pics” from Tea Parties. While many of the images taken of actual protestors were truly vile, people holding placards comparing Obama to Hitler and tax payers to Jews in ovens, the headline itself bore a picture of a “Kossack” who attended the event just to heckle. One Brendan Skwire is shown with a banner that read, “Down with Sodomy! Up with Tea Bagging!”Links were given to additional pictures of him licking a pair of dangling tea bags.
Although the Republicans never, as far as anyone can tell, claimed to actually “teabag” anything with their postal campaign, deliberate misrepresentations like the Daily Kos’ “sodomy” image worked to make it appear otherwise. Public perception now “remembers” public claims of teabagging. This wasn’t just to make conservatives look like ignorant old fogeys. It accomplished that well enough, but the purpose of those misrepresentations was wider than just ageism: if Republicans get to joke about sexual assault, progressives are perfectly entitled to joke about it too. The underlying desire for why progressives needed to make such jokes was never questioned.
While the jokes might have begun with the premise of “conservatives teabagging the government” (I’m deliberately invoking the classic “subject-verb-object” construction of rape), they quickly turned to liberals claiming the prerogative to rhetorically teabag anyone they found deserving. Matt Taibbi, under the aegis of TrueSlant.com, entitled a column, “Teabagging Michelle Malkin.” He wrote:
“I have to say, I’m really enjoying this whole teabag thing. It’s really inspiring some excellent daydreaming. For one thing, it’s brought together the words teabag and Michelle Malkin for me in a very powerful, thrilling sort of way.”
As “gay” as teabagging might be, it seems perfectly situated for putting women in their place. Taibbi’s article reminds me of a recent video Henry Rollins produced where he invites Ann Coulter to be his bitch and clean his house for him. Then there are the young liberal men who donned “Sarah Palin is a Cunt” shirts to impress their female friends during the election. It’s very likely that their plan was successful.
Even if one is unconvinced that there is such a thing as patriarchy, all of this is evidence that the very same white youth culture that’s celebrated for “making” President Obama is in love with bullying. Indeed, bullying is love: in personal ads today, just about every person under 40 believes that the adjective “sarcastic” is the most suitable and efficacious way to describe him or herself to potential partners, unaware of the true meaning of the word and its link to cruelty and power plays.
Liberals have criticized Bush and his cowboy swagger for the past eight years, but that was just jealousy. Obama — the anti-war candidate who wasn’t against war but only “dumb war,” sweeping aside weeping bitches like Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, and anyone who wouldn’t promise a smarter war in Afghanistan, Iran, and even Pakistan — put all of America on an even playing field: we’re all invested in the macho game now.
Of course, the playing field isn’t entirely even. It can’t be, by design. Parity only exists for white males standing across the aisle from each other as liberals and conservatives. “Politics” exists as a food fight, with talking points, gotcha-moments, and a cacophony of name calling. In the past, progressives were at a distinct disadvantage in that regard. Virtually every insulting expression in our vocabulary compares its target to a politically weak or disadvantaged group. Some attack the handicapped (lame, retarded). Others threaten sexual and ethnic minorities, with some like Indian Giver or gypped (referring to gypsies) having entered into our language wholesale. Many of the most powerful insults focus on females, portions of their anatomy, or their socially dictated sexual-roles as “bottoms” or masochists (“this is worse than ‘sucks,’ it swallows”). When progressives claim to represent the interests of all these groups, one can hardly invoke their likenesses when cursing out political opponents.
In our post-political age, however, where “progressivism” is just another facet of the Obama brand, a coolness that exists independently and above traditionally liberal causes, name calling is back in force. Just as Kossacks thought they were doing gays a favor by piggybacking an anti-homophobia message onto their teabagging jokes, many feminists concluded that because they believed Palin to be a threat to women’s rights that it was more than justified to direct misogyny her way. Political Correctness — also known as basic human decency — is now something that even liberals find themselves straining under: it’s an impediment when it comes to name calling and is thus a political liability.
The problem is that masculinity is more than “only words,” as the feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon described it in her book named exactly that. The first time I heard the term teabagging (everyone seems to be able to share a similar story, as if it were reminiscing about where you were when you heard about the death of a celebrity) was about a decade ago. It was a short segment on the radio, where explicit details were given about how the guys in the band Blink 182 would pull the stunt on sleeping friends.
Since then, I’ve listened to Judd Apatow, voiced by Jonah Hill, conclude in his Knocked Up that the practice is, in fact, more gay than not. Some consider that monologue to be among the best he’s ever written. I’ve even seen a major television network name a character T-Bag, drawing laughs from people clued in enough to know its “true meaning,” as Daniel Kurtzman would say. T-Bag was a rapist and a pedophile (so much for the consensual definitions!) on FOX’s Prison Break: the fact that the character’s given name just happens to be Theodore Bagwell was enough to get it past censors. (Yet FOX News freely complained about the use of “teabagging” by their rivals on the cable-only MSNBC.)
And then there’s Halo.
Videogames provided the cultural watershed for teabagging. While the first-person shooter genre is no stranger to controversy (whether it was DOOM’s satanic imagery or Duke Nukem’s strippers), typically the media has focused on the behavior of game designers, rather than that of players. Online matches allow defeated characters to “respawn” after a few moments’ wait. During this limbo, the player’s view is fixated on his or her corpse. Opponents can use this interval to walk over the body and rapidly toggle between standing and crouching over the player’s face, simulating a teabagging assault. While Microsoft’s flagship title for their Xbox console, Halo 2, was certainly not the first game where this was done, it brought it to an immensely larger — and younger — audience. Moreover, it did it with corporate sanction.
Bungie, the creator of the game and then a Microsoft property, wasn’t shy about using teabagging to promote their product. They held Wednesday Hump Day events where their own team would take on challengers. The “hump day” double entendre was frequently joined with a picture of Halo’s metal-suited soldiers teabagging fallen adversaries. Fully animated versions of the same images on Bungie’s website can be found on the internet, including one where the viewer sees the crotch coming directly at his or her face. Bill Gates, philanthropist that he is, wasn’t above virtual-rape to make a buck.
There is even a secondary market for teabagging imagery. One business sells tee shirts depicting what they see as “The Complete Frag.” (Frag, once the politically charged term for the deliberate killing of a superior officer, now cheerfully refers to any virtual death.) The artwork involves a series of silhouettes where one figure shoots another and then proceeds to grind up and down over its head. The final frame, much larger, shows a graphic of a bag of tea with a smiley face. The company behind the product gives discounts to those who send in photographs of themselves wearing the item, preferably while mock-teabagging a friend, someone who can take a good joke.
Not everyone is so kind natured and understanding about face-rape, however. A school in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey once disciplined a group of boys who pinned down classmates for fully clothed teabaggings as a component of their bullying regimen. Halo was given as the inspiration for the attacks. When this news hit the internet, it was primarily picked up by young hipster sites like Nerve (a destination for overeducated sex braggarts) and Kotaku (a Japanese loanword that English speakers typically interpret as “pervert geek”), demographics that would be ideally suited for conscription into Barack Obama’s campaign.
Rather than concern over the teens’ welfare, the primary worry was that gaming culture would be unfairly targeted by the mainstream media. Comments typically expressed macho-bootstrapping stories (I was bullied, I fought back and won, it was a character building experience) or complained that teabagging has been around forever and always will be a basic fact of human existence so there’s no use whining about it and being Politically Correct. It’s unlikely that very many of them could imagine that only a year later they’d be reading columns by their more successful peers, like Matt Taibbi, where rhetorical teabaggings would be given out in mainstream publications.
Matt Taibbi is best known for his work on the economy for Rolling Stone, treating the serious subject with irreverence and colorful metaphors. One might wonder if he would have been given such a plum assignment if he didn’t give teabaggings: are writers who can’t bring themselves to verbally face-rape someone at a disadvantage in the marketplace? Do female journalists and non-white men have an even tougher path to walk as they are required to act like grownups?
Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox put everything on the line to “out guy” the guys and while it keeps them employed, they get little of the respect that Taibbi garners as an authentic thinker. Columbia Journalism Review named Taibbi the “enfant terrible of the business press.” Cox, on the other hand, is largely considered a product: a face that mogul Nick Denton picked to make a corporate enterprise (Wonkette) look like a homegrown blog; her claim to fame was getting another woman a gig at Playboy. Teabagging might get you a seat at the table, but you have to have real balls for it to matter.
“Teabagging” itself is downright pedestrian at this point: “butthurt” is the most exciting addition to the male-stream vernacular, a term that describes anyone complaining (and is thus automatically feminine), as if they had been anally raped and were exaggerating the pain of the experience. This is often coupled with jokes about PMITA (pound me in the ass) prison, as jargon now exists for every conceivable absence of pathos. As Democrats now control the status quo, it’s liberals to the left of Obama’s “center-right” leadership who are destined to petty whining and accusations of acting butthurt. That dreaded victim-mentality. And yes, the same MSNBC that ran cheering sections for both Obama and the teabagging of his opponents spends hours everynight televising infomercials about the efficacy of the prison-industrial complex.
While Nerve and Kotaku might sound like niche publications, and they are, the thoughts written there are emblematic of our culture as a whole. The Tea Parties might have been partisan (but so was the peace movement, which lost corporate funding when Obama was elected and those still willing to march got exiled to the fringes of society), but rape culture is not: it infects both conservatives and progressives alike.
People want nothing more than corporate sanction to act horrendously. Every comic book hero gets to break the law and put the public at risk because someone he knew in the distant past was harmed, forming an ongoing justification. Obama offered young white people, especially, an excuse to act out their most unspeakable dreams: whatever they said or did during the elections — no matter how beyond the pale — was warranted as they were acting on the side of history.
That power was exciting and people were drawn to it. That power, however, is not absolute: many new Democrats are discovering at Obama’s healthcare “town halls” that there are others who are more than capable of out bullying them. If conservatives own the language of age-old hatreds, liberals own the language of pornography. That language is particularly attractive for use in the political “foodfight” because it’s thought to be off limits to conservatives due to their religious affiliations. But the language of pornography is just the rebranding of those same age-old hatreds. It’s just a more glossy form of racism, sexism, ageism, and classism. It still enforces hierarchies and holds those divisions as inherent to people’s nature, some natures being better than others.
While calling conservatives teabaggers has little use beyond feel good tribalism, one should remember that libertarians, whether traditional ones or the new breed of “South Park” conservatives, have no compunction about using both old style hate-speech and pornographic musings. They’ll out bully a true progressive any day of the week. So even using the language of porn alone — as misguided as it might be — is still bringing a knife to a gunfight. Audre Lorde’s famous quote seems appropriate, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
Barack Obama, himself, prefers “tea bags” to “bags of tea.” He managed to use the construction in a televised speech, mocking those who would be “waving teabags around.” Obama, as a rule, does not mock conservatives. Praise them (admiration for Reagan), placate them (gay marriage is legalizing incest and bestiality), and do everything short of installing Dick Cheney in the Lincoln Bedroom? Yes. But mock them? Never. By making a deliberate — if disavowable — joke about teabagging, he was speaking to a wider demographic, one that is truly bipartisan.
Even if you believe that the coolest man in the history of our planet was unhip to what he was doing when he put the words “tea” and “bag” next to each other, you can be sure his young Director of Speech Writing at the White House, most emphatically, did. This would be the same speech writer, Jon Favreau, who once plastered his Facebook page with an image of himself groping the breast of a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton. He did this while a buddy (wearing a shirt proclaiming him “Obama Staff”) pretended to pour beer down her throat. The dude wrote the book on teabagging.
Much has been said about how Obama “winks” to his black constituents. Writers have keyed in on brief comments, subtle clues, like announcing to wait staff that “we straight” when settling a bill, to grandstanding expressions like “hoodwinked” and “bamboozled.” All of this, according to some, is proof that he remembers his heritage and is secretly working on behalf of his people, even though his consistent policy — like Reagan’s — is that a rising tide helps all boats. Perhaps Obama is capable of speaking Black. He’s certainly just as capable of speaking other forms of English.
Far less has been said about Obama’s winks to patriarchy. I believe his “waving teabags” remark was just that. There have been others. Most notable was his interview with Katie Couric. He answered that The Godfather was his favorite film of all time (“this combination of old world gentility and you know, ritual with this savagery underneath”). It might sound ridiculous but publicly announcing one’s love of mob movies, no small feat for someone aspiring to the presidency, has become shorthand for declaring yourself part of the vicious generation, where even blog rebuttals are considered “takedowns” akin to bitch slaps and teabaggings. To be sure, Obama knows how to speak Rapist. Unlike his Black constituents, however, it’s unlikely he’ll ever sell rapists down the river.
'Obama Is Average'
In a SPIEGEL interview, Charles Krauthammer, the leading voice of America's conservative intellectuals, discusses Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, the president's failures and the state of the United Nations and the international community.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,656501,00.html
SPIEGEL: Mr. Krauthammer, did the Nobel Commitee in Oslo honor or doom the Obama presidency by awarding him the Peace Prize?
Charles Krauthammer: It is so comical. Absurd. Any prize that goes to Kellogg and Briand, Le Duc Tho and Arafat, and Rigoberta Menchú, and ends up with Obama, tells you all you need to know. For Obama it's not very good because it reaffirms the stereotypes about him as the empty celebrity.
SPIEGEL: Why does it?
Krauthammer: He is a man of perpetual promise. There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today's politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing. And in the American context, to be the hero of five Norwegian leftists, is not exactly politically positive.
SPIEGEL: It hardly makes sense to blame him for losing the Olympic bid in one week, and then for winning the Nobel Prize the next.
Krauthammer: He should have simply said: "This is very nice, I appreciate the gesture, but I haven't achieved what I want to achieve." But he is not the kind of man that does that.
SPIEGEL: Should he have turned down the prize?
Krauthammer: He would never turn that down. The presidency is all about him. Just think about the speech he gave in Berlin. There is something so preposterous about a presidential candidate speaking in Berlin. And it was replete with all these universalist clichés, which is basically what he's been giving us for nine months.
SPIEGEL: Why do Europeans react so positively to him?
Krauthammer: Because Europe, for very understandable reasons, has been chaffing for 60 years under the protection, but also the subtle or not so subtle domination of America. Europeans like to see the big guy cut down to size, it's a natural reaction. You know, Europe ran the world for 400 or 500 years until the civilizational suicide of the two World Wars. And then America emerged as the world hegemon, with no competition and unchallenged. The irony is America is the only hegemonic power that never sought hegemony, unlike, for example, Napoleonic France. Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are. Of course Europeans like to see the hegemon diminished, and Obama is the perfect man to do that.
SPIEGEL: Maybe Europeans want to just see a different America, one they can admire again.
Krauthammer: Admire? Look at Obama's speech at the UN General Assembly: "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation." Take the first half of that sentence: No nation can dominate another. There is no eight year old who would say that -- it's so absurd. And the second half? That is adolescent utopianism. Obama talks in platitudes, but offers a vision to the world of America diminished or constrained, and willing to share leadership in a way that no other presidency and no other great power would. Could you imagine if the Russians were hegemonic, or the Chinese, or the Germans -- that they would speak like this?
SPIEGEL: Is America's power not already diminished?
Krauthammer: Relative to what?
SPIEGEL: To emerging powers.
Krauthammer: The Chinese are rising, the Indians have a very long way to go. But I'm old enough to remember the late 1980s, "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" by Paul Kennedy and the prevailing view that America was in decline and Japan was the rising power. The fashion now is that the Chinese will overtake the United States. As with the great Japan panic, there are all kinds of reasons why that will not happen.
Look, eventually American hegemony will fade. In time, yes. But now? Economically we now have serious problems, creating huge amounts of debt that we cannot afford and that could bring down the dollar and even cause hyperinflation. But nothing is inevitable. If we make the right choices, if we keep our economic house in order, we can avert an economic collapse. We can choose to decline or to stay strong.
SPIEGEL: Do you really believe that Obama deliberately wants to weaken the US?
Krauthammer: The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the UN.
SPIEGEL: A nightmare?
Krauthammer: Worse than that: an absurdity. I can't even imagine serious people would believe it, but I think Obama does. There is a way America will decline -- if we choose first to wreck our economy and then to constrain our freedom of action through subordinating ourselves to international institutions which are 90 percent worthless and 10 percent harmful.
SPIEGEL: And there is not even 1 percent that is constructive?
Krauthammer: No. The UN is worse than disaster. The UN creates conflicts. Look at the disgraceful UN Human Rights Council: It transmits norms which are harmful, anti-liberty, and anti-Semitic among other things. The world would be better off in its absence.
SPIEGEL: And Obama is, in your eyes, …
Krauthammer: He's becoming ordinary. In the course of his presidency, Obama has gone from an almost magical charismatic figure to an ordinary politician. Ordinary. Average. His approval ratings are roughly equal to what the last five presidents' were at the same time in their first term. Other people have already said he's done and finished because his health care plans ran into trouble; but I say they're wrong. He's going to come back, he will pass something on health care, there's no question. He will have a blip, be somewhat rehabilitated politically, but he won't be able to pass anything on climate change. He will not be the great transformer he imagines himself to be. A president like others -- with successes and failures.
SPIEGEL: Every incoming president to the White House has to confront reality and disappoint voters.
Krauthammer: True. But what made Obama unique was that he was the ultimate charismatic politician -- the most unknown stranger ever to achieve the presidency in the United States. No one knew who he was, he came out of nowhere, he had this incredible persona that floated him above the fray, destroyed Hillary, took over the Democratic Party and became president. This is truly unprecedented: A young unknown with no history, no paper trail, no well-known associates, self-created.
There was tremendous goodwill, even I was thrilled on Election Day, even though I had voted against him and argued against him.
SPIEGEL: What moved you that day?
Krauthammer: It's redemptive for a country that began in the sin of slavery to see the day, I didn't think I would live to see the day, when a black president would be elected.
Now he was not my candidate. I would have preferred the first black president to have been somebody ideologically congenial to me, say, Colin Powell (whom I encouraged to run in 2000) or Condoleezza Rice. But I felt truly proud to be an American as I saw him sworn in. I remain proud of this historic achievement.
SPIEGEL: What major mistakes has Obama made?
Krauthammer: I don't know whether I should call it a mistake, but it turns out he is a left-liberal, not center-right the way Bill Clinton was. The analogy I give is that in America we play the game between the 40-yard lines, in Europe you go all the way from goal line to goal line. You have communist parties, you have fascist parties, we don't have that, we have very centrist parties.
So Obama wants to push us to the 30-yard line, which for America is pretty far. Right after he was elected, he gave an address to Congress and promised to basically remake the basic pillars of American society -- education , energy and health care. All this would move America toward a social democratic European-style state. It is outside of the norm of America.
SPIEGEL: Yet, he had promised these reforms during the campaign.
Krauthammer: Hardly. He's now pushing a cap-and-trade energy reform. During the campaign he said that would cause skyrocketing utility rates. On healthcare, the reason he's had such resistance is because he promised reform, not a radical remaking of the whole system.
SPIEGEL: So he didn't see the massive resistance coming?
Krauthammer: Obama misread his mandate. He was elected six weeks after a financial collapse unlike any seen in 60 years; after eight years of a presidency which had tired the country; in the middle of two wars that made the country opposed to the Republican government that involved us in the wars; and against a completely inept opponent, John McCain. Nevertheless, Obama still only won by 7 points. But he thought it was a great sweeping mandate and he could implement his social democratic agenda.
SPIEGEL: Part of the problem when it comes to health care is the lack of solidarity in the American way of thinking. Can a president change a country?
Krauthammer: Yes. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it. Back then, we didn't have a welfare state, we didn't have old age pensions, we didn't have unemployment insurance. This country was the Wild West until FDR. Yes, you can change the spirit of America.
SPIEGEL: If Obama is so radical, why is the left wing of the Democratic Party so unhappy with him?
Krauthammer: They are disillusioned because he has ignored some of their social agenda, such as gay rights; continued some of the Bush policies he had once denounced, such as the detention without trial for terrorists; and on his large agenda for education and energy, where he has had no success.
SPIEGEL: How could Obama still win Republican support for healthcare reform?
Krauthammer: He should finally realize that we need to reform our insane malpractice system. The US is spending between $60 and $200 billion a year on protection against lawsuits. I used to be a doctor, I know how much is wasted on defensive medicine. Everybody I practiced with spends hours and enormous amounts of money on wasted tests, diagnostic and procedures -- all to avoid lawsuits. The Democrats will not touch it. When Howard Dean was asked why, he said honestly and explicitly that Democrats don't want to antagonize the trial lawyers who donate huge amounts of money to the Democrats.
SPIEGEL: What would be your solution?
Krauthammer: I would make Americans pay half a percent tax on their health insurance and create a pool to socialize the cost of medical errors. That would save hundreds of billions of dollars that could be used to insure the uninsured. And second, I would abolish the absurd prohibition against buying health insurance in another state -- that reduces competition and keeps health insurance rates artificially high.
SPIEGEL: But you also need to cut back on healthcare expenses.
Krauthammer: It is absolutely crazy that in America employees receive health insurance from their employers -- and at the same time a tax break for this from the federal government. It's a $250 billion a year loophole in the government's budget. If you taxed healthcare benefits, you would have enough revenue for the government to give back to the individual to purchase their own insurance. If you did those two reforms alone, you would have the basis for affordable health insurance in America.
What the Democrats seem to be aiming for, however, is something somewhat different: the government gets control of the healthcare system by proxy; you heavily regulate the insurance companies, you subsidize the uninsured. That kind of reform would also work, but less efficiently -- and because of its unsustainable costs, we would, in the end, have to go to a system of rationing, the way the British do, the way the Canadians do, there is no other way. Obama can't say any of that, the word rationing is too unpopular.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Krauthammer, can a Nobel Peace Prize winner send more troops to Afghanistan?
Krauthammer: Sure, I don't see why not. The prize could have two contrary effects. It could give him an incentive to send more troops to show his own people that he is not an instrument of five Norwegian leftists. Or it can work the other way where in order not to lose the popularity he obviously feels from Europe, he would be less inclined. I think whatever impulses come out of those considerations neutralize each other. The prize will have zero effect on his decision.
SPIEGEL: You have called him a "young Hamlet" over his hesitation about making a decision on Afghanistan. However, he's just carefully considering the options after Bush shot so often from the hip.
Krauthammer: No. The strategy he's revising is not the Bush strategy, it's the Obama strategy. On March 27, he stood there with a background of flags, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on one side and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the other, and said: "Today, I'm announcing a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." So don't tell me this is revising eight years of Bush, he's not. For all these weeks and months he's been revising his own strategy, and that's okay, you're allowed to do that. But if you're president and you're commander-in-chief, and your guys are getting shot and killed in the field, and you think "maybe the strategy I myself announced with great fanfare six months ago needs to be revised," do it in quiet. Don't show the world that you're utterly at sea and have no idea what to do! Your European allies already are skittish and reluctant, and wondering whether they ought to go ahead. It's your own strategy, if it's not working, then you revise it and fix it. You just don't demoralize your allies.
SPIEGEL: Is Afghanistan still a war of necessity, still a strategic interest?
Krauthammer: The phrase "war of necessity and war of choice" is a phrase that came out of a different context. Milan Kundera once wrote, "a small country is a country that can disappear and knows it." He was thinking of prewar Czechoslovakia. Israel is a country that can disappear and knows it. America, Germany, France, Britain, are not countries that can disappear. They can be defeated but they cannot disappear. For the great powers, and especially for the world superpower, very few wars are wars of necessity. In theory, America could adopt a foreign policy of isolationism and survive. We could fight nowhere, withdraw from everywhere -- South Korea, Germany, Japan, NATO, the United Nations -- if we so chose. From that perspective, every war since World War II has been a war of choice.
So using those categories -- wars of necessity, wars of choice -- is unhelpful in thinking through contemporary American intervention. In Afghanistan the question is: Do the dangers of leaving exceed the dangers of staying.
SPIEGEL: General Stanley McCrystal is asking for more troops. Is that really the right strategy?
Krauthammer: General Stanley McCrystal is the world expert on counterterrorism. For five years he ran the most successful counterterrorism operation probably in the history of the world: His guys went after the bad guys in Iraq, they ran special ops, they used the Predators and they killed thousands of jihadists that we don't even know about, it was all under the radar. And now this same general tells Obama that the counterterrorism strategy in Afghanistan will fail, you have to do counterinsurgency, population protection. That would seem an extremely persuasive case that counterterrorism would not work.
SPIEGEL: You famously coined the term "Reagan Doctrine" to describe Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. What is the "Obama Doctrine?"
Krauthammer: I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.
SPIEGEL: Are you saying that diplomacy always fails?
Krauthammer: No, foolishness does. Perhaps when he gets nowhere on Iran, nowhere with North Korea, when he gets nothing from the Russians in return for what he did to the Poles and the Czechs, gets nowhere in the Middle East peace talks -- maybe at that point he'll begin to rethink whether the world really runs by international norms, consensus, and sweetness and light, or whether it rests on the foundation of American and Western power that, in the final analysis, guarantees peace.
SPIEGEL: That is the cynical approach.
Krauthammer: The realist approach. Henry Kissinger once said that peace can be achieved only one of two ways: hegemony or balance of power. Now that is real realism. What the Obama administration pretends is realism is naïve nonsense.
SPIEGEL: How do you solve problems like climate change if international institutions are failing?
Krauthammer: It's not the institution that does it, it's the confluence of interests. Where there is a confluence of interests among nations, as, for example the swine flu or polio, you can get well functioning international institutions like the World Health Organization. And you can act. Climate change is different, because the science remains hypothetical and the potential costs staggering.
SPIEGEL: You think it's a speculative theory?
Krauthammer: My own view is that there is man-made warming. On several occasions I have written that I don't think you can pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere indefinitely and not have a reaction. But there are great scientists such as Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists of the last hundred years, who has studied the question, who believes quite the opposite. The reason transnational action is so difficult is because the major problem with climate change is, A, that there is no consensus, and, B, that the economic cost is simply staggering. Reversing it completely might mean undoing the modern industrial economy.
I'm not against international institutions that would try to tackle it. But the way to go, at least in the short run, is to go to nuclear power. It's amazing to me that people who are so alarmed about global warming are so reluctant to adopt the obvious short-term solution -- the bridge until the day when we have affordable renewable energy -- of nuclear power. It seems to me intellectually dishonest. Nuclear is obviously not the final answer because it produces its own waste -- but you have a choice. There's no free lunch. If you want an industrial economy, you need energy. If you want energy, it will produce pollution. You can have it in two forms. You can have it dissipated in the atmosphere -- like carbon dioxide -- which then you cannot recover, or you can have the waste concentrated in one small space like nuclear. That is far easier to deal with. The idea that you can be able to create renewable energy at a price anywhere near the current price for oil or gas or coal is a fantasy.
SPIEGEL: Do you basically think Obama is going to be a one-term president?
Krauthammer: No, I think he has a very good chance of being reelected. For two reasons. First, there's no real candidate on the other side, and you can't beat something with nothing. Secondly, it'll depend on the economy -- and just from American history, in the normal economic cycles, presidents who have their recessions at the beginning of their first term get reelected (Reagan, Clinton, the second Bush), and presidents who have them at the end of their first term don't (Carter, the first Bush). Obama will lose a lot of seats in next year's Congressional election, but the economy should be on the upswing in 2012.
SPIEGEL: Is the conservative movement in the United States in decline?
Krauthammer: When George W. Bush won in 2004, there was lots of stuff written that about the end of liberalism and the death of the Democratic Party. Look where we are now.
SPIEGEL: A Democrat is back in the White House, the party also controls Congress.
Krauthammer: Exactly. We see the usual overreading of history whenever one side loses. Look, there are cycles in American politics. US cycles are even more pronounced because we Americans have a totally entrepreneurial presidential system. We don't have parliamentary opposition parties with a shadow prime minister and shadow cabinets. Every four years, the opposition reinvents itself. We have no idea who will be the Republican nominee in 2012. The party structures are very fluid. We have a history of political parties being thrown out of the White House after two terms -- as has happened every single time with only one exception (Ronald Reagan) since World War II. The idea that one party is done in the US is silly. The Republicans got killed in 2006 and 2008, but they will be back.
SPIEGEL: The party lacks a strong, intelligent leader.
Krauthammer: Yes. And if the Republicans don't have one by 2012, they'll lose and they'll have to wait till 2016. It could take eight years to develop. You know, people say -- the White House was pushing this idea -- that the radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the opposition because there's no other leader. Well, ask yourself, in 2001 and 2002 and 2003, who was the leader of the Democratic Party? There was none. We don't have a parliamentary system in which opposition leaders are designated.
SPIEGEL: Some people say you're that leader.
Krauthammer: I'm just getting to an age where a lot of my contemporaries are retiring or dying. So I'm on default a voice of authority. I don't attribute very much to that.
SPIEGEL: Who will be the next leader of the Republican Party?
Krauthammer: Some presidential candidates from last year will return in 2012. Sarah Palin is not a serious contender, but somebody like Mitt Romney will be. He is a serious guy, he understands the economy. There will also be some young people many haven't yet heard about, such as Rep. Paul Ryan or Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Or outsiders like the mastermind behind the surge in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who might retire from the military and run for President on the Republican ticket.
SPIEGEL: Many people, however, currently think the Republicans are the party of "no."
Krauthammer: That perception is a serious problem for them.
SPIEGEL: At the end of Bush's second term, he granted you a long interview. Afterwards, you wrote that history would judge Bush kindly. Why?
Krauthammer: Basically I think Bush will have the same historical rehabilitation that Harry Truman did.
SPIEGEL: And why is that?
Krauthammer: Truman left in the middle of an unpopular war, to use your phrase, a war of choice. Truman didn't have to go into South Korea. And he was reviled and ridiculed for the stalemate that resulted. Now, he's seen as one of the great presidents of the 20th century.
I think Bush actually handled the Iraq War better than Truman handled the Korean War. For one thing, the number of losses is about one-tenth. Secondly, he made the right decision with the surge. Thirdly, if Iraq turns out well, meaning becomes a country fairly self-sufficient and fairly friendly to the West, it will have a more important effect on the West than having a non-communist South Korea. The Middle East is strategically a far more important region.
Bush's worst mistake was the conduct of the Iraq war in the middle years -- 2004-2006 -- and the attempt to win on the cheap, with a light footprint.
On the other hand, I think he did exactly the right thing after 9/11. Look at the Patriot Act, which revolutionized how we deal with domestic terrorism, passed within six weeks of 9/11 in the fury of the moment. Testimony to how well Bush got it right is that Democrats, who now control Congress and had been highly critical of it, are now after eight years reauthorizing it with almost no significant changes.
Afghanistan is more problematic. Our success in overthrowing the Taliban in 100 days was remarkable. It's one of the great military achievements of all time. On the other hand, holding Afghanistan is a lot harder than taking it, and to this day we are not sure how to do it. But the initial success in 2001-2002 did decimate and scatter al-Qaida. It is no accident that we have not suffered a second attack -- something no one who lived in Washington on Sept. 11 thought possible.
I'm sure he will be rehabilitated in the long term.
Clare Booth Luce once said that every president is remembered for one thing, and that's what Bush will be remembered for. He kept us safe.
SPIEGEL: Is it too early to foresee what Obama will be remembered for?
Krauthammer: It is quite early. It could be his election.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Krauthammer, we thank you for this interview.