Yesterday presented some hard choices on which congressional hearing to attend. Capitol Hill offered a subcommittee hearing on Iran by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform; a hearing about drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP); and a subcommittee hearing on the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ by the House Judiciary Committee.

I ended up splitting the difference between two important hearings, taking the panel statements at the hearing on Iran by the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, chaired by John Tierney (D-Mass.) and then part of the hearing on the Civil Rights Division by the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, chaired by Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). The hearing on tuberculosis fell by the wayside, even though a friend of mine, a woman I admired wholeheartedly, died from tuberculosis less than two years ago.

In case anybody cares, this little choice is a microcosm of the way our democracy and polity are being turned into a harpies’ banquet by the corporate absolutists and demented militarists who have shanghaied our government and most of our large media outlets. We could be working on ills like tuberculosis, even taking tiny steps like ending the practice of spraying roses with streptomycin – an environmental hazard to anyone ever treated for t.b. with streptomycin in childhood. But instead we must spend time and resources trying to stave off the global war that this White House seems determined to achieve. We have to do what little we can as citizens and as human beings to stymie the illegal pursuit of $16 trillion or so in world petroleum reserves by an out-of-control president and vice president.

Btw, Dennis Kucinich is right in calling for impeachment. But space constraints prevent dealing with last night’s Democratic presentation on MSNBC here.

For now, the Iran hearing, which was valuable for its solid information and good sense but was NOT attended by any Republican members except Chris Shays, who read his prepared statement and left. All the Democratic members were present.

Fortunately, witness testimony and transcripts from the hearing are made available to the public. The modest proposal of the subcommittee, as Tierney said, is “First, let’s learn about the Iranians,” whom far too few Americans know much about (in spite of a large Iranian-American community in this country). As Tierney pointedly remarked, there has been a great deal of inflammatory rhetoric from the White House about Iran, more than slightly reminiscent of the ratcheting up of rhetoric about Iraq in 2002 and 2003, when the “commonsense approach was unfortunately missing.” “It will not be missing this time,” Tierney said; one thing the leadup to Iraq demonstrated was the need for vigorous congressional oversight.

Incidentally, this is exactly the kind of point that tends to be omitted in horse-race ‘news coverage’ of politics. As is the HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT point that Iranians are actually disposed to be friendly to the outside world, including the United States.

Iran expert Kenneth Ballen, at one time counsel to the Iran-Contra Committee and now at the Center for Public Opinion, testified that the Iranian people are speaking and asked whether we are listening. Iranians tend to be largely pro-West, largely pro-American; the country has a sizable middle class and a strong interest in reaching out to the rest of the world. Iran over-all, as more than one witness testified, is not on board with its President Ahmadinejad. As Ballen testified, ordinary Iranians overwhelmingly engaged in an act of political courage by participating in a 2007 public opinion poll – and overwhelmingly endorsed full trade with the West and normal relations instead of nuclear weapons.

So, as Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace testified, most Iranians are disengaged from the political process. The rabid-mouthed president “was elected with one clear mandate, to improve the economy” – and did not fulfill that mandate.

Needless to say, this perspective clashes quietly and studiously with White House and Murdox News representations of Iran as one big bearded and foaming-at-the-mouth “street” wanting nothing in the world so much as to get nukes and use them. (In psychology, this is called projection.) Unfortunately, as Sadjadpour further testified, the numerous liberal democrats in Iran tend to be shouted down by the rabid elements who control parts of their government. And the hardliners in leadership, he said, “really thrive in isolation.” Sadjadpour said, “I compare them to a weed that grows in the dark.”

This would be a good time to think, and to think very clearly, about who exactly benefits from the Bush-Cheney campaign to isolate Iran, which misidentifies all of that large and diverse country with a rigid minority.

As the speaker pointed out, Iran is integral to all of our major issues in the Middle East and borders on both Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have three options: ignoring Iran; bombing Iran; and talking to Iranians.

Only one option is a good one.