Both Sides-- But Not The Joni Mitchell Version

The Wall Street Journal ran an OpEd by Robert Gates Friday evening, To End the Shutdown, Try Thinking Big on Immigration. It almost doesn't matter what his "big idea" is since his presentation is so utterly flawed. "Both parties are to blame for this embarrassing impasse," he wrote. Really? Both parties. Pin a pin in that. We'll come back to it. First I want to make sure you know who Robert Gates is. Since 2012 he's been a principal in the Silicon Valley-based neocon consulting firm RiceHadleyGates LLC, with Condoleeza Rice and Stephen Hadley. ("We offer advice based on extensive experience in the international arena. We work with companies to develop and implement their international strategic plans and help them expand in major emerging markets, including in Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas. The advice they offered Trump was to hire Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, which worked out badly for everyone concerned.) He also serves as chancellor at the college of William and Mary (his alma mater), on the board of Stabucks and as president of the Boy Scouts of America.

Before all that, Gates was a CIA intelligence analyst who worked his way up to director, despite his terrible reputation for corruption and his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. George W. Bush appointed him Secretary of Defense in 2006 and Obama made the foolish decision to keep him on.

His OpEd is a typical "both sides" concoction, part of a false national narrative. The government shut-down was not caused by "both" parties. It was caused by Trump as a way of forcing Congress to give him money for a useless vanity wall. Remember what Gates seems to have forgotten-- it was Trump who unilaterally ended DACA, took the Dreamers hostage, shut down the government, took 800,000 workers paychecks and the nation's safety hostage and is now magnanimously offering to give those back as part of a phony compromise if his blackmail is successful and the Democrats agree to fund his monument.

Congress should impeach him tomorrow instead. Gates' bullshit lies-- or maybe he's lost his mind-- is premised, in his own words, on the idea that "Few politicians in Washington-- Republican or Democrat, in Congress or the White House-- consider the best interest of the country a priority. The fight is all about politics, partisanship and power. To win the day, both sides are willing to upend the lives of 800,000 government employees and their families-- and countless others who depend on the spending of those families for their own livelihoods."

That's flat-out false. Did Gates miss this classic piece of film? Does this sound like "both sides" to you?



About a decade ago-- a little more-- I visited Myanmar. It was kind of surreal going to a fully functioning fascist state in the 21st Century. (There are more of them now, come to think of it.) In Yangon, the capital, the top tourist attraction, indisputably, is the Shwedagon Pagoda. That's me, in the picture below, walking around the complex back then. Notice one of my feet is bare. That was the result of a compromise I made with the ticket seller. He demanded I remove my shoes-- fine-- and my socks. I didn't want to take off my socks and wind up with some exotic foot disease. So I argued with him forever. We finally reached a "compromise." Both shoes, of course. But just one sock. When the Nazis put the Jews in concentration camps, were "both sides" wrong? Someone should ask Robert Gates sometime.