The historian Allan Lichtman prides himself on his “13 keys,” which he’s used to accurately predict 9 of the last 10
presidential elections in the United States, with the exception being Gore vs. Bush in 2000. I predicted Gore would
lose, and feel dismay to this day.
For the same underlying reason, I feel Biden will lose in November if he doesn’t change course now with regard to the
genocide in Gaza. It’s not too late, but it soon will be.
In the fall of 1999, a friend and leading anti-corruption figure in Kenya, Edward Oyugi, who was also the head of the
academic union for universities in that nation, was invited to an anti-corruption conference in Washington with then
Vice-President Al Gore.
However, by some oversight, Edward was not issued a visa. Also preventing him from making the trip was the fact that he
didn’t have the funds to fly to DC.
I acted in a way that one couldn’t these days. I called Transparency International, an international anti-corruption
organization based in Berlin, to establish Edward’s bona fides. I knew he was the real deal, but I wanted to be able to
tell Gore’s office that they backed him.
Then I called the White House, which put me through to Gore’s office. They told me they would issue the visa, and said
to call USAID for support in getting Edward to the conference.
The pieces quickly fell into place (the USAID fellow called me back to say that it was the fastest he had ever seen a
support package go through in that agency), and Edward attended the conference.
We met in Chicago after the conference. I had arranged a meeting with the heads of Parliament of the World’s Religions
to discuss a spiritual and political project Edward and I were working on.
Over a drink at the bar of our hotel in downtown Chicago that evening, Edward asked, “Professors and people in Kenya
want to know: who will win the election in November, Gore or Bush?”
“Unfortunately Gore will never be president,” I replied. “Why?” Edward asked.
Gore was a senior senator when the United States, under George H. W. Bush, assembled a coalition and obtained UN
sanction to oust Iraq from Kuwait after Saddam Hussein invaded in 1990.
Gore knew Hussein, who was America’s boy in the 1980’s in his war against Iran, had been tacitly greenlighted by
Ambassador Glaspie to invade Kuwait. But he didn’t vote his conscience, and carried a few senators with him when he
voted to support Bush’s war in 1991. (The Senate resolution only passed by a handful of votes, 52-47.)
When it was over, the Gulf War was portrayed as a glorious victory for the United States. It wasn’t.
The war killed at least 100,000 Iraqi soldiers to less than 200 Americans. Nationwide celebrations erupted, and George
H. W. Bush triumphantly declared after the war, “The ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the
Arabian desert.”
The Cold War had just ended, and the Gulf War was intended to militarily pronounce to the world that America was the
“sole remaining superpower” and “the indispensable nation.” It was no coincidence that it also tested out America’s
latest military technologies, such as Stealth fighter jets, advanced radar and laser-guided bombs.
The Gulf War was the straw that broke the spirit’s back in America after the bales of Hiroshima, Vietnam, ad nauseum.
But the truth that America lost its basic intactness as a people is still denied.
From 1991 on however, the faith of the American people in their government and institutions totally eroded, giving rise
to the foreign policy fascism of Bush-Cheney. (Needless to say, Gore would not have invaded Iraq after 9/11.) The
chickens have now come home to roost, and the United States will become a fully fascist nation if Trump is elected
again.
(George H.W. Bush would have had his war without Gore’s vote, but the Senate would not have endorsed it. Nor would the
UN Security Council. Bottom line, America would not have lost its soul in 1991 if Gore had voted his conscience, and he
would have become president.)
So the die was cast in 1991, not by the Supreme Court’s wrongfully throwing the election to Bush in 2000.
After Bush Junior’s Oedipal repeat of Daddy’s invasion of Iraq, at least half a million civilians died as a direct result of U.S. post-9/11 wars.
Future historians will trace a crooked line from Bush and Baker’s cooked up war, through the wasted Clinton years, to
George W. Bush’s illegal and egregiously immoral invasion of Iraq.
The Obama Interregnum was a lost opportunity for an adequate response to the psycho-spiritual crisis in America.
President Obama failed to provide a reckoning regarding Bush-Cheney’s crimes against humanity, and that allowed the
malevolence of America’s racist darkside to manifest in the form of Donald Trump.
The fraught attempt over the last four years by the Biden Administration to return the United States to the status quo
ante at home and abroad hasn’t worked.
Biden’s rhetorical admonitions against the Netanyahu cabal’s genocide, while hurriedly shipping more munitions to
Israel’s hard right government to rain down on hospitals and tents in the rubble of the Gaza Strip, is paving the way
for the much greater evil of Trump reflux.
In 2020 Biden said his campaign was “a battle for the soul of the nation.” But it had been lost 30 years earlier. Biden
was elected because the Americans people were sick of Covid and Trump’s mismanagement.
Until recently, Biden talked a lot about restoring the soul of America. But he reveals the hole in his own heart by
supporting the Netanyahu government’s vengeful and eliminativist war against Palestinians in Gaza.
Hamas leaders don’t care anymore about Palestinians than they do about Israelis. The horrific terrorist attack they
meticulously planned and carried out was designed to provoke just the reaction by Israel that it has.
Netanyahu has complied, and has turned Israel into a pariah state, replicating American crimes against humanity after
9/11 against a strip of land it turned into “an open-air prison” nearly 20 years ago.
If Biden cannot prevent Netanyahu from attacking Rafah, where the IDF has driven over a million Palestinian refugees,
his weakness and complicity will bring down his presidency.
The anti-war/genocide protests on college campuses around the United States illustrate that a fire still burns in young
people, the best of us, despite the general deadness of the American people. Yet is being snuffed out.
People that naturally side with the oppressed need to go deeper, and extinguish within the atavistic tribalism that’s
raging in the world today.
Zionism is a condensed form of the evil of nationalism, and nationalism is but a modern form of tribalism. To begin to
end the madness of this world, it’s essential that we cease identifying with particular groups, however historically
repressed and scapegoated, as Jews have been, and Palestinians now are.