Libby-Cheney-Rove: What is to be done?

“… when something is not true it’s very difficult to prove.”

The Harriet Miers nomination went down yesterday with all the aerodynamic properties of a set of car keys. “Oh, nobody knows the trouble they seen.” Administration fingerprints on ten-pads. Tsk tsk. What does this all mean? Combined with the White Sox winning the series and this hurricane season, this MAY very well indicate the fulfillment of Revelations.

Many on the left — and by this I mean something more discriminating than a “left” inclusive of Hillary Clinton and Al Franken — are not sure what to make of the whole Plame-gate affair. We seem to be WRITING on it, but mostly for the purpose of showing simultaneously that (1) we knew the war was based on lies when the press was still giving the Bush regime the presumption of goodwill, that (2) normally we would consider outing CIA agents to be a very positive thing (this preserves our self-images as REAL leftists), that (3) the cover-up is not the real issue but the war-lie is, and (4) the Democrats — true to form — are hiding in the hedges hoping the administration will collapse without them having to suffer any dilemmas between restive massess and their capitalist funding streams.

I don’t know when exactly the tendency emerged to “stay out of the fray,” as it were, but I suspect the reasons for this tendency trace back to periods of extreme marginalization when the left experienced periods of incapacity and all they could do to “keep hope alive,” to coin a phrase, was issue positions and critiques and wait for the next social upsurge. But the habits established during these peirods of relative quiescence become institutionally imprinted and are carried into more turbulent times by a kind of inertia.

When called upon to act, we organize demonstrations. Some are just TOOO sophisitcated to do even that…

Combine that with a strong dose of creeping philosophical idealism, and you get the “More Revolutionary Than Thou Syndrome,” which presents as allergic responses to (a) any public pronouncements that fail to explain the news all the way down to the two-fold character of the commodity and (b) any activity that involves wading into the contaminated waters of “bourgeios” politics… that is, anything that involves putting pressure on actually-existing elected officials.

The fear associated with the latter is that we might be bourgeois-baited by other leftists or that we might find ourselves compelled to actually work with (ugh!) Democrats.

The Plame-gate affair is fraught with peril on these accounts, precisely because the Democrats (the Party, not the rank-and-file) are in the catbird seat on this one. They will undoubtedly use this scandal, and the recent epidemic of Republican indictments in the most shamelessly opportunistic ways, attempting all the while to avoid responding in any meaningful way to the real needs and concerns of their own constituents… or exhibit any real commitment to ending the war in Southwest Asia.

Yes, Chuck and Hillary, we know ye! And there is a special circle of Hell reserved for you in a just universe.

Having made my ritual denunciation of Democrats, I want to says something about political organizing… not merely ideological persuasion, but struggling for power.

I hesitate to quote dead communists at any length, because it sounds a bit too much like bibilical exegisis sometimes, but the fact is, some of these people did take political power, so they merit our attention. The independence of the world’s most populous nation — China — was won under the leadership of Mao Zedong, and while I have many criticisms of Mao and that whole epoch, he did have one idea that was at the core of their organizing philosophy that has proven effective. It’s called “mass line.”

It begins with the premise that when the thinking off the masses begins to correspond to the real social conditions, that ideas become become a “material force which changes society and changes the world.”

Mass line then poses the question, how do ideas come to correspond, rather than misrepresent, social reality? And here is what I believe to be an extremely important point. It does not happen that a well-formulated ideological latticework must be accepted by mass movements to become effective — the “correct” theory guides mass practice to ultimate victory, and all that — but the experience of actual struggle in actual conditions gives rise to theory that reflects social reality. We learn IN and FROM the struggle. We do not pre-learn the accepted dogma then impose it ON our struggles. Effective theory is the summary and explication of experience — and NOT just the experiences of the past, which often do not correspond to the conditions of the present.

But if we are to mobilize mass movements, then left leadership has to connect with the masses around the needs and concerns that most preoccupy those masses. The antiwar movement in the United States is NOT on the cusp of a socialist revolution. It just isn’t; and we can shout about the necessity of socialist revolution (I write about this all the time) from every street corner, but it won’t mobilize any mass movement to overthrow capitalism. Conditions are required for that. If we are organizing students, then we have to fight against tuition hikes. If we are organizing workers, then we have to fight against speed-ups, sexual harrassment, benefits cuts, etc. If we are organzing women, then we have to address domestic abuse. If we are organizing oppressed nationalities, then the aftermath of Katrina becomes crucial.

If we are organizing against the war in Iraq, and the mobilized anger of that movement is directed at the Bush administration, then we probably need to unite with efforts that attack the Bush administration… even if Demorats will make some hay from it.

Mass line further means that we work in a principled way within these social movements, and use our relationships and credibility in those movements to attract (through patient persuasion) more people to a revolutionary consciouness. Part of that persuasion process is taking the experience of a social movement and summing it up in ways that make the experience more intelligible by providing it with a coherent and accessible popular theoretical framework. Leaders in movements must encourage a culture of summation, and not merely as a mechanical excuse to force new experiences to fit into the Procrustean bed of pet shibboleths. Identification of real contradictions in day-to-day struggles is essential, and any inability to synthesize lessons learned must be dealt with honestly… Amilcar Cabral’s warning to revolutionary leadership to “tell no lies, mask no difficulties.”

One method of assessing the changing character of a social movement, that is part of this “mass line” approach, is to think of the movement as divided into three general categories. This is not cleanly demarcated, but simply a way of thinking that helps achieve strategic focus. Those categories are backward, intermediate, and advanced… and they refer to the level of intellectual clarity about the social movement’s aims.

In organizing military families, for example, we have encountered new people who join the movement with ideas like, “Those Arabs have been killing each other for centuries, and I don’t want my husband dying for them.” This is WAY backward. But do we exclude this person from joining with others who want to end the war? No. We isolate and contain this backward thinking, unite with her fears about a loved one, give this person something useful to do, and make new information available that debunks some of her premises. Another person in the same movement might say, “This whole thing is because Bush wanted revenge for his daddy.” On the high side, this at least doesn’t express racist xenophobia; but on the low side, it is conspiratorial, and sees no system behind the situation. This is less backward. This person needs to be shown, through patient persuasion and her activist work, that there was wide Democratic Party support for the war, and that the “first Gulf War” (of course, there was never a break between “first” and “second”) was equally cynical, and that three consecutive administration warred on Iraq — which leads a person to ask critical questions about why… these questions being the flagstones to intermediate clarity. The question of oil and US foreign policy comes to the fore — even if it is still in the framework that sees these as moral failures. Intermediate. From within the intermediate group, as people work on this issue for a period of time, we have inevitably seen people adopt new language, which a fairly decent understanding of what it means, that includes terms like “imperialism.” This is shifting into the advanced column, and here is where people can be approached with more explicitly socialist ideas.

If you want to fuck this whole process up, you show up at a big meeting of these developmentally heterogeneous folk and pass out Red Vanguard news-sheets.

(This blog is more or less aimed at people who are already won over to socialist ideas (SI), or who are strongly SI-curious — and of course for the handful of goofy freepers who will inevitably drop by. And Ed hangs in here as a kind of combatively friendly and not freeperish give-the-line military presence.)

Our interactions with each of these categories of people have to be different. And the slogans and campaigns of a mass movement must be developed not with an eye to comprehensive analysis that outruns the intellectual clarity of the masses, but with the demands that unite the largest numbers around the central goal of that movement, while isolating backward ideas.

Part of mass organizing, then, is the development of an advanced pole WITHIN that movement that actively works at isolating the backward, consolidating the advanced, and winning over new layers of the intermediate to the advanced. This is obviously a very simplified representation of the actual process, but there it is.

The reason I bring all this up is that there is confusion right now about where to go with the mass movement against the war, and how it relates to this whole Libby-Cheney-Rove scandal bubbling up through the bourgeois media and into mass consciousness as a kind of corruption scandal.

I was on a military operation once, where the target we had to approach was along a street. The only way to safely approach and cover the front of the target with observation and fire was from a deep, concrete-and-stone sewage ditch across the street. I had to walk for around ten hours after that with my trousers soaked in shit-water, wondering what kind of microorganisms might be boring through my skin, colonizing my cuts and scratches, or crawling up my ass. It was unpelasant. But sometimes to do the job, you have to get into the shit. Politics can be like that. You can’t be real about it and not get dirty.

Shit happens. (-:

At any rate, here we are with the whole scandal thing around Bush and his merry band.

In the next few days, the Bush administration will nominate some right-wing apellate court judge (just guessing here) with excellent academic credentials and plenty of experience on the bench. They are in a very defensive posture right now, and the right-wing torpedo of the Miers nomination was a signal to Bush that as the polls continue to slide, so shall the monolithic discipline of the GOP. When the Titanic makes that loud can-opener sound, its time to unlash the lifeboats. The Bush group has to reconsolidate its control over its restive fellow Repugs, and it needs to kowtow a bit.

Meanwhile, the more disciplined members of the DP will carefully nudge at key points of vulnerability without risking opposition to the war or any violation of the neoliberal orthodoxy.

But the rank-and-file of the DP — most of whom have long chafed at the rightward shift of their party — are in a mood to drag George, Dick, Condi, Donald, Scooter, and Karl out into the street, shoot them, and make a Mussolini display of their charred corpses. It’s mixed consciousness, to be sure, but it’s overall a good thing when people’s blood is up that way.

The left should unite with that anger and whatever momentum is generated from it and use it to drive a figurative locomotive right through the breach of the Bush legitimacy crisis. Lynch mobs around the White House might not indicate that the masses have embraced the revolution yet, but it sure makes for a great spectacle, and it is very very disruptive. Anything that helps knock the political stuffing out of this administraton — even if it DOES help some opportunistic Democrats — is a big plus, because it is a reversal in the direction of power-flow back to the masses.

Once folks sense that power, they are often reluctant to surrender it again.

While the Republicans AND Democrats are focusing on the legal minutiae of the cover-up, we can focus on amplifying the message that this is ONLY the cover-up, and that a cheap forgery was used to scare the crap out of everyone in order to invade Iraq. But we have to explain what happened, not wave it off with chatter about the contradictions of capital.

People like stories. This is actually a pretty weird story about a group of mean, not-overly-bright guys, who managed to take power in the richest country in the world with a combination of money and gamesmanship and — at critical times — fascist bullying. It’s a story about a huge fraction of a nation plugged into an electronic indoctrination datastream that fed them a continuous cocktail of ignorance, fear, islamophpbia, and Manichean simplicity, as a kind of anesthetic. And it’s about interagency rivalry mixed with (what should have been seen as) a clumsy con game.

Now it’s turned Iraq into a political beast that requires a steady diet of human bodies and money that flows like water from a broken hydrant.

There may be an indictment today of “Scooter” Libby (and less likely, Karl Rove). It’s only 7 AM as I write this. There may be more than one indictments, or there may be none. But the White House is shitting screw worms right now, and tabloidesque rumors keep coming from Capital Hill Blue and others that Bush is acting like a Caligulan psychotic these days.

The clique around Bush is a sort of grandiose group that has been fantasizing for some time now about how they believe the US should prepare for the future after the defeat of the Eastern Bloc. They are actually pretty unabashed about their goal — which is domination of the entire planet through a militarily enforced Pax Americana. They’ve written quite extensively about this through a collection of think tanks, but they also realize that no more than one percent of the public takes the trouble to find out what these whack jobs write. So they can write about taking over the world on the one hand and make disingenuous noises for the popular media about spreading democracy on the other. And they’ve gotten away with this shit because the educational enculturation of America for critical thought is a kind of offensive joke.

Let’s not be confused however. Al Gore was baiting Bush the Elder before his stolen run for the presidency… for not having “taken out” Saddam Hussein. The conquest of Iraq is seen by virtually the whole US ruling class — and that includes the leadership of the Democratic Party — as a necessity. The argument has always been about HOW, not IF. The Dems have been better about recongizing their real limitations and seen patience as a virtue. The Republican neocon faction has been more inclined to think like a high school football squad drinking Purple Jesus. And at a certain stage in their drunken lunacy, they showed the ability to rev up their fans with wild-eyed masculine bluster.

Most Congressional Democrats, for example, are continuing to support the war, and treating the antiwar movement as anathema — even now that we are the majority — not purely out of opportunistic cowardice (though there is plenty of that), but because they are committed to the resuscitation, by any means necessary, of flagging American imperial power that’s been held together by trickery ever since around 1971. This is important further along in the “what is to be done” part. They want to stay in Iraq… and the only way to get them to turn their backs on that desire is to present them with a more powerful disincentive.

I’m recalling a line from Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles.”

“We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen!”

But back to the story.

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a war on the Central Intelligence Agency. Rumsfeld wanted to gut the Agency (which he has accomplished to a signficant degree) in order to consolidate its covert operations activities within the Department of Defense. Cheney wanted the Agency’s intelligence analysts (a different part of the Agency) to act as ad writers for his foreign policy agenda.

I’m no defender of the CIA. A walk down their memory lane is a journey past the serial wreckage of bloody and blundering criminality. But a good deal of that criminality was committed by the paramilitary covert operators, who are not the same as the agent handlers of the Directorate of Operations, nor the analysts. Some of the analysts are smart, geeky people who speak foreign languages, have advanced degrees in history and international relations, and do pretty credible research. Over the whole Agency, every President appoints a chief bureaucrat — the Director of Central Intelligence (that’s being changed now by Bush, but I digress). George Tenet was called the “chief spy” by the media, but that’s not even close to the truth. He — like George H. W. Bush in his day — is in fact the chief bureaucrat.

In September 2002, George Tenet spoke in secret with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and — as a loyal obedient bureaucrat — told that committee that Iraq was preparing centrifuges to enrich uranium to build nulcear weapons. He also told them that Iraq was arranging the purchase of 500 tons of uranium oxide (called “yellowcake”) from the African nation of Niger. Roughly speaking, five tons of yellowcake is enough to make one bomb, so Tenet was telling the Senate that Iraq was developing the capacity to build a hundred nuclear weapons.

A couple of days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the same committee the same thing.

Two weeks later, the Senate passed the resolution authorizing the Crawford nitwit to make war on Iraq whenever and however he wanted.

In public pronouncements thereafter, including the State of the Union address in 2003, members of the Bush administration told the public of a clear and present danger from Saddam Hussein — now painted as a frothing lunatic that was a world threat on par with Hitler.

“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” became an administration mantra directed at the American public, still replaying the images of the collapsing twin towers in its simple collective head.

… bad Muslims want to blow up America …

On March 7, 2003, just two weeks before Bush launched the debacle into Iraq, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency told the UN Security Council that the documents supporting this allegation were pure horse shit. Powell dismissed this, saying that other (unnamed) sources validated the claim, and Dick Cheney went onto “Meet the Press” and attacked ElBaradei. That was March 17th, and two and a half days later, the 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division crossed the line of departure into Iraq.

There are some journalists still worthy of the title, and Seymour Hersh is one of them. His book detailing how this all came to pass, “Chain of Command,” is a good read and recommended from here.

There are three key groups that were involved in this particular fabrication that was used to stampede Congress and the public toward the transformation of Iraq into a slaughterhouse: Rendon Group, the White House Office of Global Communications, and the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.

Rendon is a high-dollar PR outfit that is on contract with the executive branch to spin their policies and promote their agendas. They wrote many of the bogus stories that were trotted out every day in the early stages of the invasion at CENTCOM press briefings — including the serial fictions about Jessica Lynch.

Rendon is a private contractor that runs the “public” White House Office of Global Communications (OGC).

Rendon bascially invented the Iraqi National Congress — the Potemkin exile government ostensibly directed by embezzler and con artist, Ahmed Chalabi — Judith Miller’s “source” for many of the lurid and completely fabricated stories about Iraq she wrote for the NYT to whip up the war fever. Said one unnamed State Department official in a moment of anonymous candor, “Were it not for Rendon, the Chalabi group wouldn’t even be on the map.”

This is one reason this story is so interesting. Chalabi became Dick Cheney’s chief advisor on Iraq, and is the one who told both Cheney and Rumsfeld that the whole invasion would be a walkover and that within weeks the US would be happily pumping Iraqi oil money into Wall Street while the US military could begin the preparatory bombing of Iran for the next operation.

You see… the chiefs of this administration hired people to tell them what they wanted to hear, then believed what they were told. Beyond what leftist political analysts know about class contradictions, imperial crisis, etc. etc., this is a distinctly bizarre and therefore interesting story. Behaviors that would lead us to commit Uncle Homer to a special home were now standard operating procedure in the executive branch of the United States government.

Cheney and Rumsfeld had one big stone in their shoe, and that was the CIA. Several of those geeky analysts were not conforming to the script. They kept insisting that Iraq had no real WMD capability — exactly what former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter had been saying for several years. So Rumsfeld created the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (OSP), an insider group of key neocons that supplanted the CIA as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

Hey, if your intelligence agencies won’t tell you what you want to hear, then invent your own intelligence agency that will. A former DIA Middle East intelligence chief, Patrick Lang, described the process as the Pentagon “band[ing] together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi.”

While Cheney browbeat the CIA every chance he got, stomping with disruptive regularity through Langley like a baby-rhino on PCP, the OSP went about the business of “proving” a connection between Iraq and 9-11 — their first mission. Insiders say that Rumsfeld was so pathologically committed to an invasion of Iraq from the minute he heard about the attacks of September 11th that he actually convinced himself that there WAS a connection between Osama and Saddam, and that Iraq WAS developing an arsenal of WMD — to include nuclear weapons.

So, in a sense, the lies for the invasion are not pure lies. They are only partly indicative of perfidy; moreso indicative of profound mental illness.

While Rendon and OGC were spinning the public, OSC was spinning the government. Hersh was told by an inside source, “Rumsfeld’s got to discredit the CIA’s analyses to make his intelligence more reliable.” The CIA started referring to OSP as Rumsfeld’s GRU.

Of course, when something is not true it’s very difficult to prove.

The whole Plame-gate affair that will likely cause Cheney’s chief of staff “Scooter” to be fingerprinted today relates only superficially to the “outing” of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. The apparent intent of outing her was not for “revenge,” but to show that (her husband) Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger that exposed the Niger yellowcake documents as a very cheap forgery was being coordinated by the mean old CIA… that Plame herself sent Wilson on this little fact-checking foray. In fact, Plame was asked to check into it by State and the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, and she nominated her husband who had substantial and relevant experience for just such a mission.

The deeper issue, of course, is that this fabrication was seized upon by the administration so eagerly to further support the case for invasion.

But the most interesting part, at least from a story standpoint, is where was this klutzy forgery spawned? I don’t know, and neither do most people. But Hersh posits a very intriguing hypothesis that — for my own reasons — strikes me as borderline probable.

The CIA was being attacked and sidelined by the Bush administration, so the administration could “stovepipe” intelligence that supported their case for invasion. Correspoinding to the hubris that underwrote the administration’s military overstretch was a belief in their general omnipotence. These intellectual pipsqueaks believed they could shit all over the Agency with no consequences. So they made a lot of Agency people very angry, and these are people who are uniquely positioned to do a great deal of damage to the administration.

Hersh spoke with a former intel official who suggested that someone in the CIA itself created the Niger uranium forgery as a vengeful joke to set the administration up.

“It could not have gotten into the system [from Hersh's book, quoting the source] without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up… the agency guys were so pissed at Cheney… they said, ‘okay, we’re going to put the bite on these guys… Everyone was bragging about it — ‘Here’s what we did. it was cool, cool, cool.’”

The source suggested is was drafted by retirees who passed it along to active analysts. But instead of creating a blip of short term embarrassment, as hoped for, it took on a life of its own, leading up to today, when Scooter may be telling Sandy that he could have to go away for a while.

See what I mean? This is great stuff.

So back to Joe Wilson, who for whatever reason went to Niger and confirmed that this document no more represented reality than a Jules Verne novel. Wilson did not come back and announce to the whole world that this document was a prank. He delivered his report on the report to the Agency in February 2002, and quietly went back to his own business.

It was only after this idiotic fiction resurfaced — repeatedly, beginning with claims of absolute certainty by Dick Cheney in August that year, then Blair’s famous memo in September and Condi Rice’s first airing of the “mushroom cloud smoking gun” the same month, followed by the remergence of these claims in Italy through one of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s publications… well… whomever the author of this prank was must have been duly amazed at its virulent indestructability.

The Italian account recurculated back to Washington, whereupon George Tenet warned George Bush against any reference to the Niger uranium tale in a Cincinnati speech scheduled for that October. Nonetheless, the thing resurfaced in Condi’s NYT op-ed in January, followed by the other house-slave Colin Powell repeating this lie to the World Economic Forum days later. Then on January 28th, Bush himself included this fabrication in his State of the Union address.

Now the defenders of Bush are saying that Wilson had an agenda against Bush; but Wilson had discredited the report many months earlier and dropped quietly back below the surface. it was only after it has been repeatedly flogged by the Bush group from August through the January State of the Union speech that he began thinking about putting a stop to all that. It is likely that this is when Wilson decided to support the candidacy of any Democrat who got the nomination, and when he joined the Kerry Campaign in May, the White House suddenly went on alert.

In June, State perpared a memo that explicitly mentions Wilson and Plame, which means the administration — contrary to Cheney’s later claims — was very aware of Wilson. Wilson was probably becoming increasingly aware of this attention, too.

On July 6th, Wilson — for whatever reasons, and with the war itself grinding to a bloody stalemate — wrote the now-famous op-ed for the NYT, “What I didn’t find in Africa.” Then the shit hit the fan.

Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary, was forced to publicly retract the State of the Union claims, and Rove went into high gear to preempt the story that Cheney’s office ordered the inquiry into the Niger story. Apparently, that office DID in fact do precisely that in the hope that it would bear fruit. But here’s the rub.

The outing of Plame was not a question of revenge… which would be stupid even for this administration. Rove contacted Mat Cooper of Time magazine to begin a process of preemption (against precisely what we are seeing today with the Fitzgerald invstigation) with the claim that Plame and the Agency ordered the trip. The “outing” was not to get Wilson through his wife, but to establish the basis for plausibly denying that Cheney had ever seen the report Wilson brought back. They wanted to deny that the request for the trip to Niger originated with Cheney… which it seems about 99% sure that it did. So they were saying that the CIA (read: Plame) ordered the Niger visit.

So there is a thumbnail account of this whole affair, but now I return to my original question about what to do.

What can a mass movement accomplish given the implications of this scandal? Let me review what some implications are, at least from where I sit.

The Republican Party is on the ropes, so they will be working overtime to deal with serial indictments and metastasizing scandals.

The war is so unpopular that an online poll by MSNBC two days ago, posing the question, “Should we stay the course in Iraq?” received a 75% NEGATIVE response.

The center-right Democrats are behaving like the reptiles they are, and trying to duck the war while the Repugs rot from the inside. The leftish end of the DP is spinning out idiocies like alternative “exit strategies” that only extend the bloodbath for another year or so, in the hope that people will run back and hide in the House of the Lesser Evil.

But the only election that really gets people het up is the general election, and that’s not for another three years, so the masses are not responding to their righteous fear of Republicans by seeking the kinder faces of Democratic charlatans.

The executive branch has been crippled by this scandal, and it appears Fitzgerald intends to extend and deepen his investigation. The likely Libby indictment is a way for him to smack the bushes with a stick and encourage the other snakes to haul ass. A new word will now enter the daily vocabulary of some Washington functionaries, and that word is “immunity.” Libby himself may become familiar with the term “cop a plea.” His spouse won’t want to dwell alone for the next thirty years… or maybe she will.

The people with the most to lose right now — aside from the casualties of war, that is — are members of Congress. they are as edgy as a caged cat in heat, because both Republicans and Democrats have to worry about their “phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen.”

That’s why instead of another expensive, difficult-to-organize mass demonstration that can be duly ignored by the press and elected officials, I suggest we adopt a new and bolder strategy directed at individual legislators… who, oh by the way, have the power to stop the war by cutting its funds.

Fuck a bunch of exit strategies! These people must be told that they will be punished if they vote another single dime for the extension of the war. Out now, and no equivocation! We are tired of your bullshit!

My legislative strategy is this.

We organize locally all over the country to occupy local Congressional offices. Find 200 people from each district, go visit them during office hours, call the press, weasel your way into the office with the maximum numbers possible, sit down, and refuse to move until your official agrees not to vote another dime. Those unwilling to risk arrest can provide the necessary support to maintain the sit-ins until the place smells like a poorly maintained stable.

The we see what happens, and take it from there. There is the potential here for hundreds of such actions, leaving any Congressperson or Senator who agrees not to fund the war alone (Republican or Democrat), and who knows what it might grow into.

That concludes today’s rant.

Thank you for your attention.