RUTHFULLY YOURS

Will America, nine months into Donald Trump’s unexpected presidency, continue to chase its tail while a nuclear Korea looms, tax and immigration reform are pending, and the country is torn apart by identity politics—or will it return to sanity?

Presumably, special investigator Robert Mueller is focused mainly on whether former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, or ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, or members of the Trump family, or Trump himself colluded with agents of the Russian government.

Allegedly, either individually or in combination, they racketeered for money or business opportunities or for inflated honoraria—in exchange for abetting Russia’s efforts to hack information from the Clinton campaign affiliates that would vault Donald Trump to the White House.

Ostensibly, Mueller would be looking for suspicious bank deposits, sudden increases in cash spending, or any of the other tell-tale signs of quid pro quo profiteering. By extension, he would be pursuing leads that might show how such efforts actually altered the election, in a way that Barack Obama on the eve of the election—and a purportedly assured Clinton victory—suggested was impossible.

So far little seems to have turned up in nearly a year of intensive press and political probing—other perhaps than the lurid Christopher Steele/Fusion GPS file accusing Trump of criminal conspiracies along with a host of sexual perversions. But that dossier apparently was paid for by opposition candidates and even may have been purchased by the FBI. Its preposterousness and weird origins have turned attention back to the authors and financiers of this calibrated smear document.

As Mueller continues this inquiries (if the history of special counsels and investigators is any indication, the time, money, and effort expended is inversely related to the number of successful convictions), several investigations are underway on the other side of the aisle.

Unmasking the Unmaskers
The House Intelligence Committee at some point may turn over its findings to the attorney general to ascertain whether John Brennan, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and other high Obama intelligence, cabinet, and diplomatic officials were requesting covert intelligence findings on American citizens, having their names unmasked, and then leaking them to pet reporters. The Obama team’s activity apparently spiked during the 2015-2016 campaign season and may well have been directed at perceived political opponents. If ­­so, the leaking likely constituted criminal activity—and would represent a violation of government trust not seen in decades. The committee may also finally take a careful look at the Steele file to ask what exactly was the relationship between this political hit job and James Comey’s FBI—and those implications are every bit as serious as the unmasking mess.

Meanwhile, the FBI and Capitol police are scrutinizing former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her former information technology team, headed by Imran Awan and various members of his family. Imran, et. al., allegedly engaged in bank and procurement fraud, and may have been peddling classified government information.

Al-Qaeda marked the 16th anniversary of 9/11 by releasing previously unseen footage of Mohand al-Shehri, one of the hijackers aboard United Airlines Flight 175 that crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, noting that the terrorists have “longed for your beautiful lands” and find the blood of Americans “delicious.”

Al-Shehri, 22, was a Saudi who trained in Chechnya and Afghanistan months before being granted a student visa to the United States. He arrived in the U.S. four months before the attacks and trained on a flight simulator in Vero Beach, Fla.

According to the video, al-Shehri shot the statement April 17, 2001, before he arrived in the United States that May.

The 35-minute English-subtitled video from al-Qaeda’s as-Sahab media apologizes for the video quality of the 16-year old reel, shot back in the days when terrorists released rough cuts of videocam footage instead of the highly produced films that now come from terror groups’ studios.

It begins with a few minutes of archive footage of late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden before moving on to al-Shehri reading his statement. “The tyrants have led the ummah [Muslim community] to this abyss. Filth and immorality have become widespread and has deprived the hearts of sobriety and filled them with lowliness,” he said.

“So accompany me in this last will as I address you from the deck of my ship as to guide you to the shores of salvation. Perhaps your boat will hear my words of inspiration and rock with enthusiasm and you would stop in your way and change course to head for the gardens of eternity. Allah will surely replace those who have chosen to sit back and refrain from the obligation of jihad with others who will rise and act on the basis of the Islamic creed, be willing to pay the price of honor and overcome the enemies of Allah,” he continued. “Those who have chosen to sit back will then be left worthless, and their reckoning will neither be delayed nor hastened, for Allah is all-powerful and nothing can stop him from replacing you with another people.”

As the 9/11 hijacker spoke, the al-Qaeda production showed footage from 9/11, including parts of a PBS documentary, and from other attacks including the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, for which late Libyan dictator Moammar al-Gadhafi accepted responsibility.

Al-Shehri vowed that “this ummah has been molded by the Quran and the sword, and neither of them can be separated from the other,” and decried the “Judaization of Palestine.”

“If we abandon this cause, do not wake up from our slumber and do not dedicate to this cause except for the little spare time that we have, the Arabian Peninsula itself will become a killing ground of Muslims, just like Palestine,” he said, stressing that jihadists need to “defeat America and the Cross.”

This time one year ago, I was touring America to see the country in the grip of the agonistic election campaign and to prepare, like other foreigners before me, to write a book. I had only one afternoon in New York. I also had a remarkable guide, a friend who had spent his childhood weekends—before the city descended into the criminal madness of the 1970s—getting on the train from suburban Connecticut and tramping around Manhattan with his friends. https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/11/debasing-memory-911/

We grabbed a cab at Grand Central in the morning and travelled all the way to the Battery, marveling at the gleaming buildings in New Jersey. Then we spent all day walking back to 42nd Street, through an almost empty city—it was Labor Day weekend. The only queue we saw was a long, spindly, but seemingly funereal procession of very pretty girls. I crossed the street to ask them why they were all lined up and seeming so morose only to be told the obvious: It was a casting call for models. I’m no more used to Manhattan than anyone else…

We only spent significant time in two places. The first was the Empire State Building, which felt like a tourist trap. I felt compelled to go up to the top, and it’s worth thinking about what this iconic building reveals about New York—but it’s not important right now. The other place was the World Trade Center site and the memorial to the 9/11 victims.

This, off course, was much more shocking. It is a heartbreak that sends the blood throbbing to the temples even now. The newfangled skyscraper is quite beautiful, but perhaps it is more impressive to Americans than to a foreigner. We did not enter to the memorial museum. Even so, we saw the twisted metal remains—the skeleton of the once-proud towers. That is the only thing that I can remember seeing there to remind me of the sheer scale of the atrocity.

I felt confusion and anger well up in me, all the more as I realized I was all alone in these emotions at this place. The Americans I saw at Ground Zero did not seem exactly to be tourists, but neither were they pilgrims. I thought I saw the heart of easygoing American law-abidingness there, and I did not like it. No one was revolted at the travesty that is Ground Zero. If you’re a student of American history, you know that public architecture died sometime around 1950, just after the Jefferson Memorial was completed.

Since then, and for complicated reasons, influential Americans of various kinds, from politicians to architects, have been busy using their prestige to plan and execute what amounts to the desecration of the great heroes of America and, accordingly, to remove from Americans their dignity as citizens. The Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial is a fearful joke, recalling Communism, as it does. The Dwight Eisenhower memorial is, thank God, never going to happen, having been taken over by madmen not fit to polish the Liberator of Europe’s boots. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the great, world-spanning war president of American history, has not fared significantly better. I am told American veterans treat the Vietnam memorial as sacred, which is altogether fitting and proper, but the memorial is no more fitting to the war or to the country than the reception of the returning soldiers was. I will not talk about the other war memorials. A conspiracy of incompetence and ignobility has robbed the American people of what ought to be the necessary focus of their reverence.

Then the 9/11 memorial happened. The efforts of two generations of influential people humiliating the public memory reached their apex and betrayed the need to memorialize the most shocking attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Now there’s a black marble hole in the ground where one of the towers stood, and along its perimeter, water running down there endlessly, one supposes to symbolize the void where patriotism should be. Names are written into the marble on the edge. There’s a paved park around it. A few benches. A few trees. Everything screams, “Relax, nothing to see here. Carry on! Nothing more than tragedy happened here.” But it wasn’t a tragedy. It was an outrage.

The people; the parties; the politicians; the influential clever speakers on the radio, TV, and Internet—none of them seem to care much about this matter. What tremendous effort of the will would it take to raise a scandal so that Americans remember they deserve much better than this and that they owe more to the dead?

The Obama rapid response team quickly swung into action against the latest Republican move on immigration last week. The new policy was “wrong.” It was “self-defeating.” It was “cruel.” It wasn’t “required legally,” but was “a political decision.”

Only two things were unusual about this strong Democratic pushback: Barack Obama was no longer in office at the time — and yet all the above responses came from the former president himself.

If the 2016 presidential election seems like a never-ending contest, with vanquished Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton constantly relitigating the campaign and criticizing the man who ultimately bested her, the tug-of-war between President Trump and his immediate predecessor has been just as intense.

“He is like our president-in-exile,” joked a Democratic operative who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the former president. “His profile makes sense, because while we Democrats and really the whole country owe President Obama a lot, he does have some things to answer for in terms of our current situation” with Republicans controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

What merited Obama’s latest statement against his successor was Trump’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama executive order put in place to shield young illegal immigrants from deportation when Congress declined to pass immigration legislation the former president supported. The announcement that it would be phased out after six months, with Congress given an opportunity to pass legislation replacing it, was made by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a leading opponent of Obama’s immigration policies as a Republican senator from Alabama.

An Obama-era predecessor of Sessions’ was quick to rebuke the current attorney general for calling DACA “an ‘open-borders policy’ that admitted ‘everyone.’ ”
Former Attorney General Eric Holder has emerged as a front man of sorts for his former boss President Barack Obama’s unprecedentedly activist post-presidency. (AP Photos)

“To the contrary,” former Attorney General Eric Holder wrote in the Washington Post on Sept. 6, “it was a beacon of hope for a narrowly defined group who crossed our borders before they could have fully understood what a ‘border’ was.”

Holder wasn’t done. “States must resist Trump’s inevitable deportation efforts,” he continued. “The private sector must come together to defend its employees. Americans must raise their voices — and use their ballots.”

Obama and Holder remain partners in an effort to persuade Democratic voters to do just that. This involves playing defense when Obama policies are attacked by the new administration, and also offense as they try to elect Democrats, especially in races that will influence redistricting after the 2020 census.

One of those efforts is getting an assist from left-wing billionaire George Soros, who spent half a million dollars on ads into a district attorney race in Texas in which a Democrat challenger beat the Republican incumbent. That has prompted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to tell other Republicans that they need to “wake up” to what Obama and others are up to.

Holder has emerged as a front man of sorts for his former bosses’ unprecedentedly activist post-presidency. Before Obama even left office, Holder launched the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a tax-exempt 527 political action committee that bills itself as “an organization of Democratic leaders enacting a comprehensive, multi-cycle Democratic Party redistricting strategy over the next 5 years and beyond.” The group will also support legal challenges and ballot initiatives as they try to wipe out what they argue is an unfair Republican advantage.

It was around the time of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that memorials stopped being remembrances of virtue, and became therapy sessions. The old statues of determined men gave way to empty spaces to represent loss. Their lessons of courage and sacrifice, were replaced by architecture as therapy session, clean geometrical shapes, reflective pools and open areas in which to feel grief at what was lost and then let go of it.

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September 11 memorials have inevitably followed this same pattern, empty spaces, still pools of water groves and names tastefully inscribed in row after row. How do you tell the Ground Zero memorial from the Oklahoma City memorial? The Oklahoma City memorial has one reflecting pool and the September 11 memorial has two pools.

There is no larger meaning to these memorials and there isn’t supposed to be one. A hundred years from now they will be nothing more than giant pools surrounded by trees with nothing to say. These new memorials are not about teaching us to remember… but about helping us to forget.

To find a memorial that actually in some way addresses what happened on September 11. you would have to leave New York to go across the river to New Jersey where the much maligned Teardrop hanging between a torn tower at least represents something concrete, even if it is more grief and pain. Unlike the useless winged shapes of the Staten Island Memorial and the Pentagon Memorial, it at least acknowledges that something terrible happened here and transforms into a symbolic image.

But the abstract symbolism is still the problem. There’s an American eagle overlooking the Battery Park World War II memorial a few blocks from Ground Zero, but to find an American eagle on a memorial to the attacks you have to travel 30 miles across the river to Allendale, New Jersey.

The official September 11 memorial has sustainable architecture, but Dumont, NJ with a per capita income of 26,000 dollars managed to acquire and place one of the steel beams from the World Trade Center as their memorial.

The closest to a traditional memorial that tells you what actually happened and why it matters, as opposed to handing you a three acre handkerchief of empty spaces and waterfalls, is across the street from the monstrosity of emptiness. Just turn your back to it, cross Liberty Street and walk up to Firehouse Ten where the FDNY Memorial Wall depicts the events of the day in bronze. You may have to dodge some trucks and search for it underneath the scaffolding, but it’s there.

That’s more than can be said for the identity of the attackers which is invariably absent, except as a crescent that pops up ominously in memorial design after design, entirely by accident of course. But the memorials are not about history, they exist only to allow us to release our grief and move on by expressing life-affirming sentiments in response to this “tragedy” through community service that helps others.

From cries for revenge to serving soup to the homeless at a community kitchen– that is the intended trajectory. If it hasn’t worked as well as intended, as shown by the people who gathered to loudly celebrate Osama bin Laden’s death, instead of sighing at the cycle of violence, this is the long game.

The Pew polls show a steady growth in the number those who believe that American wrongdoing led to the attacks– from a third after the attacks, to 43 percent today. Give the enemy another decade to do its work and those numbers will be in the sixties. And their game is simple enough, remove the actual history and the images of the massacres– and replace it with an emphasis on foreign policy. Mix in news stories about Islamophobia, stir the pot a little and you’re done.

Numbers like that are why Obama was able to win and why Ron Paul is polling better than ever. When revisionist history becomes mainstream, then people will accept anything so long as it sounds good. So long as it lets them forget.

Alongside the usual Noam Chomsky 9-11 essay collections and conspiracy theory books on display on Amazon and at every bookstore; those who want purely fictional history can get pick up a copy of Amy Waldman’s The Submission about a ‘secular’ Muslim architect’s 9/11 memorial and the bigotry he experiences from the right-wing.

Or if they want to dig through the remainders bin, there’s John Updike’s next to last novel, Terrorist, an overwritten teen novel by one of America’s most famous literary authors, who shares his protagonist’s hatred for the country. “They can’t ask for a more sympathetic and, in a way, more loving portrait of a terrorist,” Updike said of his book. ‘They’ being the literary critics, not the Taliban who don’t need to rely on the author of ‘Rabbit Run’ for that sort of thing.

Finally there’s ‘Forgetfulness’ by Ward Just, whose title encompasses the literary goal of the left in the story of a man who loses his wife to terrorists but avoids the “climate of revenge” and the “anger of the sort that swept all before it… the anger of the American . . . after September 11”. Instead he learns to relate to the men who murdered his wife.

Forgetfulness is the underlying theme of everything. Stop being angry. Stop being vengeful. Forget!

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It is the commandment that echoes from the empty spaces and the revisionist histories, the slabs of events gouged out and dumped as landfill in Staten Island or sold off in bulk to China. The endless degradation of memory turned into a national ritual. A way to test ourselves to see how much better we feel about it– how much more we accept what happened on that day as being in the past.

Drown history in enough reflecting pools and it stops mattering. Put up enough empty benches and people will remember to forget. Tell them that they’re courageous for moving on and they’ll admire themselves for putting it all behind them. And if they won’t forget, then fill them with grief until they can’t take it anymore and willingly forget.

But by all means avoid outrage, keep messy emotions like anger out of the way. Anger is not part of the healing process, which begins with an empty bench and ends with a visit to a mosque to reconcile with your killers. It retards the process, it says, “Hey wait, we’re not done here yet!” It says, “These bastards are still walking around here plotting to kill us.” It says, “They’re building a mosque right here to look down on your reflecting pools.” And all that is most unhelpful.

Let’s take a brief detour from all the forgetting and travel up Broadway some eighty or so blocks to Central Park. There at the entrance to the park stands the Maine Monument to the hundreds of dead in the destruction of the USS Maine. There are no reflecting pools or geometrical shapes here. Instead there is a warrior, the figure of justice and the representation of the dying avenged by Columbia Triumphant, standing atop, cast in bronze out of the guns of the lost ship.

The New York Times, being what it always was, sniffed at it as a “cheap disfigurement” and the history of the war has since been revised to American jingoism and the sinking of the Maine is invariably described as an accident. If this goes on, we will no doubt live to see experts promoting the theory that it wasn’t the suicide attacks that killed thousands of Americans on September 11, but the flaws of the buildings.

Yet the Maine Memorial is still there towering above them all. In bold text so different from the carefully selected fonts of modern memorials it proclaims unashamedly; “The Freemen Who Died in the War with Spain that Others Might be Free.” And of the men who died on the Maine it declaims: “Valiant Seamen who Perished on the Maine by Fate Unwarned, in Death Unafraid.”

There are mourning figures on the memorial and there is grief and pain, but it takes place in the context of a larger struggle. The struggle against those who committed the crime and the triumph of a nation against those who would attack it.

It is inconceivable that anything so bold and proud would ever go up at Ground Zero. The culture that represented virtues through the figures of men and women has given way to one that represents abstract feelings in geometrical shapes and reflecting pools. It is why we have no new buildings like the Empire State Building, and why we won’t even be able to replace the stark geometry of the WTC with anything but smaller ‘green’ buildings which exist as a calculated show of ugliness and a rejection of human aspiration.

On the way back from Central Park, stop by the Bank of America Tower, the second tallest building in New York, the most ecologically friendly tall building in the world constructed by Obama’s BOA pals. And I defy you to spend more than a minute looking at it and then describe it. It isn’t just ugly, it’s forgettable. Your eyes move past it even as they look at it. Its peak is a deliberate mockery of symmetry and order.

Then pass by the New York Times Building, the fourth tallest building in the city, in hock to Mexican-Arab billionaire Carlos Slim, built through eminent domain land seizures with money from the Lower Manhattan Development Fund, even though it’s firmly in midtown. Then repeat the same exercise with this glorified apartment building. Again you come away with nothing, because nothing is there.

Finally after you pass by the Bloomberg Tower, even more devoid of personality, the jumbled twin towers of Time Warner Center opposite the Maine Memorial, and the rest of them all, return to the site of the former Twin Towers, and look up at the Woolworth Building, once the tallest building in the city. It hasn’t been for a long time, but yet it is. It stands as a monument to human endeavors. And that is what makes it human.

Let us consider what memorials are for and what skyscrapers are for. Are they meant to be empty spaces or are they ways of reminding us who we are?

We don’t need more holes in the ground, more places to feel empty and alone. What we need are things to aspire to. The World Trade Center’s towers were not targets of convenience, no more than the Saudi and Emirati skyscraper building spree is. Towers are symbols of achievement. They are guardians of the skyline who remind us of what we can accomplish.

The terrorists and the memorialmakers have a common purpose– to make us forget what we are capable of. To drown us in our own pain and grief, to make us drink of the Lethe waters of reflecting pools until we forget who we are. The terrorists and the memorials have done their best to break us. But it is not in grief that we must remember the day. Grief is for the foregone conclusion. But though thousands upon thousands are lost– we are not yet lost. And the war is not over.

The holes in the ground are not symbols of grief, or empty places in our hearts, they are open wounds inflicted on us by our enemies. Filling them with water will not change that, only anesthetize the pain of a fatal injury. To forget that is to sink into a mirage and die in delirium that we are recovering.

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The attacks of September 11 are not a time for reflection, or personal remembrance, but a sharp reminder that we are bleeding. And we can only bleed for so long before we die. There are worse things out there than four hijacked planes used as missiles. There are actual missiles and suitcase nukes, nerve gas, toxins and whatever else can be dredged out of laboratories by Western trained researchers.

And even worse than these is the endless struggle, the constant waiting for another attack, the security measures meant to keep us safe while imprisoning us in our own security, the waiting for the day when an attack succeeds. The day we die.

September 11 is not the day we cry, it is the day we get angry. It is the day we remember who our killers were, how many have been lost, and how little has been done to bring down the ideology responsible as completely as they brought the towers down. It is the day we remember not to forget. It is the day we remember that the war has just begun and that until it ends, there can be no comfort or solace. The fight goes on.

WASHINGTON – Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said the statues of Confederate leaders present in the U.S. Capitol building should be replaced with “female heroes.”

Schakowsky also said other members of Congress should support the proposed resolution “censuring and condemning” Trump over his reaction to the white supremacist violence last month in Charlottesville.

“We should be aware that there are 10 statues within the Statuary Hall collection that represent Confederate leaders. They do not have a place in our Capitol. I, for one, want to see some more women heroes to be there in Statuary Hall, but there are plenty of really heroic Americans who have stood for our values that could replace those statues in Statuary Hall,” she said during a press conference Thursday on Capitol Hill with the nonprofit organization Bend the Arc Jewish Action. “So this fight is far from over.”

Bend the Arc’s official website says the organization’s vision is to “build and activate Jewish power to help transform our country to be inclusive, equitable, and supportive of the dignity of every person across race, class, gender and faith.”

According to the censure resolution backed by Democrats, President Trump’s “immediate public comments rebuked ‘many sides’ for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia and failed to specifically condemn the ‘Unite the Right’ rally or cite the white supremacist, neo-Nazi gathering as responsible for actions of domestic terrorism.”

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) shared a similar view of the Confederate statues in the Capitol building and added that Confederate symbols should be moved out of veterans’ cemeteries.

“Right behind me in the people’s house there are statues that glorify racist Confederate leaders who committed treason against the United States and fought to defend the institution of slavery. We’re going to have to change that as well, but mainly today I want stand in solidarity with all of you,” he said.

Huffman also called for passage of his amendment that would cut off taxpayer funding for the salaries of Trump administration officials including White House Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller for supporting what he called “white nationalist” policies such as the travel ban and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program repeal. The amendment was proposed with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.).

“Trump keeps filling his administration with people with these twisted ideologies and sowing their division, racism and bigotry,” he said. “Stephen Miller is still there, and of course he’s the mentee of arch-racist Richard Spencer.”

Huffman said he recently learned that the Republican leadership is not going to allow his amendment to be put up for a vote.

“So we’re going to press forward in every other way that we can,” he said. “We have to stand up and confront this hate, bigotry and racism, and we’ll keep doing it.”

Fulfilling his role as the titular head of “The Resistance,” Barack Obama took to Facebook Tuesday to snipe at the Trump administration’s announcement that it was rescinding the 44th president’s 2012 executive action called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

“We shouldn’t threaten the future of this group of young people who are here through no fault of their own,” Obama said. His post was florid and self-serving. But five words in his lengthy screed —“through no fault of their own” — are undeniably true.

It’s not the fault of the “Dreamers” that their parents brought them here, without papers, as minors. On that we can agree. But whose fault is it that they are still in limbo? For that answer, Obama needn’t take to social media. He can simply look in the mirror.

Ten years ago, a narrow consensus was forged in Washington, if only briefly. Its architects were Edward Kennedy and John McCain. Their carefully crafted legislation created a new temporary work visa, established an electronic data base for employers to check employees’ work status, and earmarked money for border enforcement. It also provided a path to citizenship for an estimated 11.6 million illegal immigrants, provided they paid a fine and back taxes, met English and civics requirements, and stayed on the right side of the law.

President George W. Bush signaled his support. But the vote was going to be close, which Kennedy and McCain knew. Conservatives dismissed the path-to-citizenship as a fig leaf for amnesty. Organized labor hated the guest-worker program, known as Y-1. McCain and Kennedy could have overcome that opposition, albeit narrowly, except for one last little group of senators. Call it the Senate Presidential Wannabe Caucus. Its membership included Illinois freshman Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. That’s only two votes, but it was enough.

On June 6, 2007, Sen. Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, introduced an innocuous-sounding rider to the McCain-Kennedy bill. Its official description was “an amendment to sunset the Y-1 non-immigrant visa program after a 5-year period.” As everyone in the Senate understood, this was a “poison pill” designed not to shore up the bill, but sink it. Dorgan got his way, too. The amendment passed 49-48, essentially killing comprehensive immigration reform.

Kennedy was incensed. He’d implored Dorgan and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid not to do it. McCain felt particularly sandbagged by Obama, who’d inserted himself into the legislative negotiations uninvited, wrangled a concession he wanted, then voted with Dorgan. McCain assumed Obama didn’t want George W. Bush or himself — the man Obama expected to face in 2008 — to get credit for immigration reform. Ted Kennedy, who ended up endorsing Obama over Clinton anyway, believed this, too.