Liberalism

Torture is now a "foreseeable consequence"

2009-12-15T10:54:00.005-06:00

And the Guantanamo detainees are not "persons."

Via digby:

Today, the United States Supreme Court refused to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former detainees against Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse at Guantánamo.
[...]
By refusing to hear the case, the Court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all “persons” did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law. The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.”

Good god.

In WWII, we were shocked and dismayed at reports that Japanese soldiers would fight to the death, resorting to banzai charges when all hope of further resistance was lost. Part of the reasons the relatively few prisoners we did capture gave for this behavior was the loss of face and humiliation of surrender; but another part of it was fear of their treatment at our hands after capture. Some of that fear was certainly due to their knowledge of how our own prisoners were treated in Japanese prisoner of war camps. The Bataan Death March was only one of many violations of the Geneva Conventions visited on our troops who fell into enemy hands. But Japanese prisoners, though hated for their barbaric actions, were given the treatment required by the treaties to which we were signatory. Torture was unthinkable; that was what the barbaric, medieval Japanese did, what the Gestapo did. That was what we were fighting against.

That was then; this is now. Now, if you're going to fight against the United States, you'd better be wearing a uniform. Because if you're not, and we capture you, we can do anything we want to you. You have no rights whatsoever. You're not even a person; you're some indescribable thing like a piece of gum we might find on the bottom of our shoe. We can take you out of your home country and ship you off to anywhere in the world; we can waterboard you, zap your genitals with electricity, make you stand up for 36 hours straight, deprive you of sleep for days on end, cut you off from all outside contact with other human beings, strip you naked and chill your cell to 36 degrees, anything at all, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's all a "foreseeable consequence" of your being detained as a "suspected enemy combatant." You don't even have to be an actual enemy combatant; you just have to be suspected, maybe even denounced for money by your neighbor who never liked you anyway.

This is what the D.C. Circuit ruled was legal behavior (besides, "even if torture and religious abuse were illegal, defendants were immune under the Constitution because they could not have reasonably known that detainees at Guantanamo had any Constitutional rights;" never mind human rights). The Supreme Court declined to review the case, effectively agreeing with that ruling. This is America.

I need some stronger happy pills.

Existential

2009-10-19T10:07:00.004-05:00

Here is what dictionary.com has for "existential:"

1.	pertaining to existence.

2.	of, pertaining to, or characteristic of existentialism: an existential hero.

So when you hear some Neocon bobblehead yawping about how so-and-so is "an existential threat," keep this in mind. He's saying one of two things:

1) a group of criminals who like to blow up things threatens the very existence of the United States on this planet; or

2) a group of criminals who like to blow up things are stressing the individual's unique position as a self-determining agent responsible for the authenticity of his or her choices.

It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine whether either proposition makes any kind of rational sense whatsoever.

Time marches on

2009-10-19T10:07:00.001-05:00

Gee, guess I should post.

Gates-gate and "Democratic values"

2009-07-30T13:28:00.005-05:00

I've gotten involved in a back-and-forth with Bob Somerby about the Gates incident. According to the police report by arresting officer Crowley, Gates was continually verbally abusive to the officer and all his carrying on about how unfairly he was being treated is what got him arrested for disturbing the peace.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote a column wherein he stated that more was involved here than just racial bias:

If race were the only issue, there would be much less hyperventilation about Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s unpleasant run-in with the criminal justice system. After all, it would hardly be the first time a black man had unjustly been hauled to jail by a white police officer. The debate -- really more of a shouting match -- is also about power and entitlement.

Somerby found something odd about Robinson's theory:

Apparently, there was something Crowley couldn't abide, Robinson comically says. (Gee! What could it possibly have been, we’re apparently supposed to wonder.) But then too, we see Robinson tossing in the word “uppity,” thus slipping in the slick/slippery point he wasn’t man enough to stand up and state in plain language. In this passage, Robinson lets us know that Crowley has a racial problem (“apparently”). And he suggests that only this could possibly explain the “overheated commentary” he has heard from all those “conservatives.” As he ends, he still hasn’t managed to voice a complaint about the repellent conduct and attitudes of his imagined professor.

Sorry. Other people will be offended by the hypothetical conduct Robinson describes. They may not think it should lead to arrest. But they will be offended and appalled by such conduct, the kind of conduct which has long been directed at blacks by arrogant, officious, offensive white people—white people with “serious power.” Long ago, In the Heat of the Night presented a thrilling divergence from form because it showed an officious white person with serious power expecting to get away with such condescension—and then being challenged by Poitier/Stieger. Trust us: In 1967, that was a thrilling moment. Today, a chuckling pundit describes similar conduct with barely the bat of an eye.

That’s the way Harvard professors roll, the chuckling pundit seems to say. To his inner ear, those who find this hypothetical conduct offensive have engaged in “overheated commentary”—in “hyperventilation.”

In this way, upper-end liberals do just what they’ve always done—they throw away votes, in droves. Working-class voters see them speak and reject their values, their puzzling moral instincts.

Puzzling moral instincts? It's "morally puzzling" to point out that the police should not be arresting people for yelling at them? I responded thusly:

Once again, Gates' conduct is profoundly irrelevant. The issue is not whether Gates' conduct was offensive; the issue is whether Crowley's arrest of Gates showed racial bias. Personally I think it's pretty clear that it did.

That got me an email from Somerby (always nice to get a response!) accusing me of not being concerned with whether policemen should be accorded respect. Today's Daily Howler expanded on that theme:

But the only thing the mailer finds relevant is the way the policeman behaved. He doesn’t care about how the (imagined) professor behaved; indeed, he thinks it’s “profoundly irrelevant,” even if the cop got totally sassed and trashed. It doesn’t occur to him that he might care about how each of these people behaved. He cares about how the citizen was treated—not about the cop.

Two things can be true at one time: 1) The arrest may have been unwise, and 2) The cop may have been treated like an ass.

Why couldn’t both things be “relevant?”

A guess: Most American voters will have a different reaction to this event. They will care about how the cop was treated. As we said: For decades, liberals have signaled to American voters that we don’t care very much about cops—or about a range of other working-class people (examples below). When voters see that attitude on the part of liberals, they may vote the other way.

So here's what I have to say to that:

Here's why I say Gates' conduct was irrelevant: there was no chance that Gates would arrest Crowley and put him in jail, while Crowley is explicitly given the authority to arrest people and put them in jail. That power imbalance is why we hold the police to a much higher standard when it comes to dealing with mere citizens.

I understand where Somerby is coming from. He thinks that by accusing the police of racial and/or class bias in this case, liberals (and therefore Democrats) are driving away the votes of people who do care about how the cop was treated. To which I say, good riddance! Those people don't understand that what we're dealing with here isn't a question of respect and propriety; when the police are involved, it's a question of the application of state power against individuals; and in that situation, the ONLY power the police are given is to uphold the law. The law doesn't say, you can arrest people who mouth off to you. That's why, as Robinson said, the Gates matter is about more than just race; it's also about power. Crowley had the power, Gates didn't. Gates mouthed off, and Crowley sent him to jail. Crowley's action was not only stupid, it was unjustified, and Gates was quickly released.

Robinson was correct, and Somerby is engaging in what is known as "concern-trolling" when he says it will cost liberals votes. Standing up for individual rights is part of the liberal platform; if you think the police should be empowered to enforce codes of conduct towards the state, to demand submission and deference on threat of being jailed, you're not a liberal.

So good I decided to post it here

2009-06-30T01:01:00.002-05:00

I decided to apply myself to write for Examiner.com, after my wingnut friend joined up and introduced me to it. As part of their application process they ask you to submit a "writing sample," 200-300 words about some topic with a local angle. So I chose to write about the Sotomayor nomination and the Supreme Court ruling reversing the Ricci decision:

Here comes another round of Sotomayor-bashing. The Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling overturning the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals' decision on the New Haven firefighters' case has already resulted in a statement from our own Senator John Cornyn's office; despite the 5-4 ruling, Cornyn asserted that "all nine justices" were critical of the Court of Appeals ruling, and thus by implication of Sotomayor herself. You can be sure that this will only be the first of many such statements by Sotomayor opponents.

What these people continually leave out are inconvenient facts such as: the 2nd Circuit does not have the luxury of ruling as the Supreme Court does, setting aside black-letter law for their own interpretation- the Appeals court had to rule based on the law as written and the evidence before it; that rulings Sotomayor is associated with don't even come before the Supreme Court unless the Supremes feel that there is an actual question they need to rule on, which means that a 60% reversal rate on such cases (even if that statistic is accurate) should not really be surprising, and leaves out the many more cases they DON'T elect to review; and that Sotomayor's supposed "racism," er, "racialism" is based on taking a quote out of context.

The fact remains that Sotomayor is an outstanding jurist with extensive credentials that qualify her to be named to the Supreme Court. All of this sniping is merely an attempt to muddy the waters and confuse people, trying to somehow paint her as some kind of radical racist. Don't be misled.

American spending priorities

2009-06-29T16:04:00.002-05:00

Deep thoughts from The Editors:

A few trillion (more actually) to kill a bunch of foreigners in a couple of wars that have yielded almost nothing but instability and suffering? It would be unpatriotic to bring up the price tag.

A couple of trillion in tax cuts for the insanely wealth heir and heiress set? Opposing them would be class warfare.

$1.8 trillion to cover American citizens who (frequently) must choose between food and medicine, their kids welfare and medical treatment, life and death…?

Well, that is a lot of money. Government needs to be more fiscally responsible. Let’s not get carried away. Looks like socialism to me. Just think of the deficits. Does David Broder think the bill is bi-partisany enough?

Bang on.

And today I see this:

Lawmakers defy veto threat on F-22 fighter

Congress on Thursday moved forward with plans to build more Lockheed Martin F-22 fighter jets, disregarding a veto threat from the Obama administration.

Billions for "defense," but not one cent for poor people.

Funny

2009-06-22T14:50:00.001-05:00

Fafblog, an irregular blog (in every sense of that word):

before the end of the world

"How long you think we got before the end of the world?" says me.
"Forever!" says Giblets. "We'll outlast the universe with nothing but gumption and can-do and thousands of tiny robots!"
"It's true!" says me. "A year before the end of the world we will solve the everything shortage through the invention of a miraculous device that can make anything out of simple air and dirt!"
"Now all we need is a way to replenish our rapidly dwindling supply of air and dirt," says Giblets.

We Send Letters

2009-06-03T15:41:00.001-05:00

Mr. President:

In your letter yesterday to Sen. Kennedy and Sen. Baucus on health care reform, you mentioned "making every American responsible for having health insurance coverage." I want to make clear my opposition to any sort of mandate forcing American citizens to pay for health insurance. It is not only unfair to force the poorest Americans to pay for health insurance or face federal penalties (and possibly criminal charges), it may also be impractical. We should not force Americans to choose between compliance with a mandate and starvation or homelessness. We also should not force citizens who are self-employed to make similar choices between compliance and career (for those who would be unable to afford insurance while self-employed). Mandatory health insurance is not a solution to the health care crisis.

I am fortunate to be covered by an employer-sponsored health insurance plan. If I were to become unemployed, one of my first decisions would be to forgo health insurance coverage even if it were mandated by this kind of provision. It simply makes no sense to exhaust resources I need for bare survival in order to comply with a federal mandate that is not of direct and immediate benefit to me in such circumstances. I hope you will come to understand that mandating purchase of health insurance by citizens will only result in a massive enforcement headache, requiring expenditure of resources that would offset some or all of the savings you might think the nation would realize under your proposal.

Please do not pursue this misguided "reform." The only true reform that will solve the health care crisis is to join the rest of the industrialized world in implementing a single-payer health care system. Large majorities of American citizens support such a plan.

Thank you for your time,

Rob Woodard
Richardson, TX

Who Examines the Examiners?

2009-06-02T01:19:00.005-05:00

A wingnut Strat baseball friend recently signed up with Examiner.com to be Their (Conservative) Man in Tampa. Head on over and give him some love. (I think he gets paid per pageview or something like that, I dunno.) He's a good guy, just misguided. Well, and maybe a bit hypersensitive about reverse racism. And immigration. And Democrats. OK, he listens to too much Rush Limbaugh. Anyway, he's always up for a fight and he's fun to practice arguing against.

So anyway apparently Examiner.com read my browser cookies or something and figured out I live in the Dallas area, and set up links from his blog to all the Dallas Examiner.com blogs. Let's check out some of what's cooking, shall we?

The "Dallas Libertarian Examiner" Garry Reed warns of the giant sucking sound in healthcare should the government-run healthcare plan that President Obama hasn't proposed be implemented. Yes, single-payer healthcare means all the competent doctors will "go Galt" and expatriate themselves to sunny Mexico. "And Thailand and Singapore. And South Korea and Taiwan and Malaysia." Places that will continue to finance their extravagant lifestyles through "free market" (i.e. high) healthcare costs, because as you know Mexico doesn't have a problem with massive and widespread poverty, and those other countries are so easy to emigrate to. Also, your pancreas will crash and your kidneys will curdle and your rectum will rot off (eww) while you are on the government critical healthcare waiting list that doesn't exist in any single-payer system in the world. (And what about all those stories about kidney transplant waiting lists with the system we have now?) Apparently Libertarians are all about scaring you with the ugly things that will happen because of imaginary policies that no one has ever suggested implementing. At least in Dallas.

The "Dallas Republican Examiner" Victor Medina is all riled up about some African immigrant hospital office manager ordering an employee to take down an American flag she had put up in observance of Memorial Day. He didn't even order it burned, just that it be taken down because the display offended him in some unspecified way. Of course this gross act of UnAmericanism was quickly rectified (after the wingnut hissy fits started rolling in), but it just goes to show that those immigrant UnAmericans are everywhere.

More Examinations to come...

"Holier Than Thou" Effect

2009-05-05T14:12:00.004-05:00

Bob Somerby linked to an article in the NYTimes today that was interesting:

In this morning’s “Science Times,” Carey tattle-tales on the whole human race—specifically, on our tendency to attribute moral greatness to ourselves, as opposed to The Others. Naughtily, Carey starts with an oblique reference to the current debate about uses of torture. But let’s focus on the facts—the facts that Carey has discovered in some ongoing research.

“Stumbling Blocks on the Path of Righteousness,” Carey’s headline says. And yes: We thought of the growing progressive world as we scanned his tattle-tale work. Here’s the way he started:

CAREY (5/5/09): Most people are adamant: They would never do it. Ever. Never deliberately inflict pain on another person, just to obtain information. Ever artificially inflate the value of some financial product, just to take advantage of others’ ignorance. Certainly never, ever become a deadbeat and accept a government bailout.

They speak only for themselves, of course. As for others, well, turn on the news: shady bankers, savage interrogators and deadbeats are everywhere.

Indeed. I sent Somerby an email and pointed out an additional aspect:

[T]he article refers to another aspect of this phenomenon, mentioned by
Dr. Epley in the paragraph before the one you quoted:

“The gap between how I think I’ll behave and how I actually behave is a function
of how well I simulate the situation, and our simulations are guided by our
intentions,” said Nicholas Epley[.]

(end quote)

I think this is very true.  When you think about something in the abstract, how
you would like to think you would respond to the situation can be quite
different to how you respond when actually confronted with it.  We all like to
say that we don't condone torture, it's abhorrent, etc.  But when actually
confronted with the situation where torture might reveal important information
not obtainable by other means (let's not get into whether that is actually
true), we might find ourselves willing to compromise our ideals in what we see
at the time as the service of the greater good.

That's why having codified laws and established procedures is so critical.  If
you have ironclad laws against torture written in times of calm, careful
thought, you will be able to refer to them when the "heat of the moment" might
lead you astray.  Of course you can still elect to compromise your principles,
but I'd like to think it's harder to do so if it's right there in black and
white.  That's why what Bybee and Yoo did is so reprehensible.  They looked for
ways around the black-letter laws that restricted what could be done, and being
good lawyers they found those ways.  That enabled the Bush Administration to
violate our laws and the principles behind them that we supposedly fought to
protect.

We have laws for a reason. We punish violators for a reason. And when we elect not to pursue lawbreakers because it would be embarrassing or politically inconvenient, we compromise our ideals.

Wait, Stop

2009-03-20T17:52:00.002-05:00

In what I'm now forced to call "The original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the Gene Wilder one" because of the remake, when one of the rotten kids decided to hare off and do something stupid despite warnings to the contrary, Willy Wonka would try one last time to save them from whatever doom eventually befell with a very deadpan "wait, stop" or "no, don't."

I feel like I have to give the same kind of warning about this retroactive taxation legislation currently flying through the Congress. The AIG bonuses have so thoroughly incensed the American people and the politicians that (allegedly) represent them that they aren't thinking clearly, or are thinking even less clearly than usual. Everyone is so caught up in "getting our money back from the Wall Street assholes and Banksters who stole it from us" that they've thrown the Constitution right out the window. It's right there in black and white, no ex post facto laws, no bills of attainder. You can't go back after the fact and change the rules and then punish people for breaking them. You can't write laws directed at a particular class or group of people. That clause is in there for a reason, people. We don't want the law being used that way, because then you have no way to know if a particular action that is legal the day you do it is going to get you thrown in jail the next, and we don't want the law being used to persecute specific people. At least, that's what the idea was.

It's thoroughly depressing for me to go through my usual lefty blogs and find each and every one crowing about the new tax bill as if it's justice that was so long denied. Finally, the Banksters and Wall Street Wizards who screwed up the economy aren't going to get away with something! That's progress!

No, what it is is revenge. We got played, big time, but it wasn't against the law. Those bonuses were legally given out, and it's unfair to go back afterwards and say sorry, we've decided you have to give them back. Write laws to prevent those bonuses going out in the future, investigate AIG with a Nixonian proctoscope to see if any wrongdoing occurred under the laws as they existed at the time, vilify and shame the Banksters and Wall Street Wizards (lord knows they deserve it); but let's not throw away our core principles about justice and fairness out of anger.

Please.

Apropos of Nothing

2009-02-25T12:42:00.003-06:00

When I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull as a young lad, I thought it was a really cool science fiction/fantasy story about intelligent seagulls. It never occurred to me that there was any sort of underlying, subliminal Christian evangelist messaging going on. I never even thought about it that way until I read something that mentioned it on the Net somewhere.

I Believe I Can Fly

2009-02-24T23:09:00.004-06:00

Tonight I learned that there's no need to worry, and no need for government to lift a finger to help me, because I can solve all my problems myself. Bobby Jindal told me so:

Americans can do anything!

I don't need to worry about half of my meager retirement savings going poof; I wasn't going to be able to retire anyway, right? And I don't need to worry about being fired and losing my health insurance; I'll be fine, because I can do anything.

Yes, Americans can do anything. Look at Katrina, a totally incompetent group of Republican government disaster response managers behaved totally incompetently; that proves that government doesn't ever work, and it's much better to have individuals take care of their own problems, because Americans can do anything (although unfortunately that includes being incompetent disaster response managers).

Have A Nice Day

2009-02-13T16:37:00.002-06:00

From the manifesto of raving lunatic Jim Adkisson, who shot up a church in Tennessee last July:

“Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them....
“This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn’t get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It’s the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.”

“I thought I’d do something good for this Country Kill Democrats til the cops kill me....Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I’d like to encourage other like minded people to do what I’ve done. If life aint worth living anymore don’t just kill yourself. do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.

I know I feel better, knowing that there are people who think like this in this country. Of course, Adkisson's ravings have nothing whatsoever to do with what Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, and dozens more of their kind are saying on their radio shows and TV programs night after night, 24/7/365 (just as Sara at Orcinus says). Nothing at all.

When law enforcement officials searched Adkisson’s home, they found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.

Here's a golden oldie for you:

"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too."
Ann Coulter, address before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Jan. 2002

Yep, we can indeed. Old Jim did Annie one better. He actually killed some.

And just to contrast, when prominent conservatives/Republicans get shot?

Ronald Reagan got shot because lunatic John Hinckley wanted to get laid by Jodie Foster.
Squeaky Fromme tried to shoot Gerald Ford presumably because he wouldn't pardon Charles Manson. (Did you know Squeaky is supposed to get out this year? August 16th, according to Wikipedia)

One Heartbeat Away

2009-02-05T12:56:00.001-06:00

VP ex-candidate Sarah Palin, from an AP story:

Palin said she named Bristol in part for Bristol, Conn. _ home of the sports network ESPN.
"When I was in high school, my desire was to be a sportscaster," she said. "Until I learned that you'd have to move to Bristol, Connecticut. It was far away. So instead, I had a daughter and named her Bristol."

Thanks, Mom!

Fatuous

2009-02-05T11:38:00.003-06:00

In an online exchange with his paper's readers this week, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller pointed out that "there is a diminishing supply of quality journalism, and a growing demand. By quality journalism, I mean the kind that involves experienced reporters going places, bearing witness, digging into records, developing sources, checking and double-checking, backed by editors who try to enforce high standards. I mean journalism that, however imperfect, labors hard to be trustworthy, to supply you with the information you need to be an engaged citizen. The supply of this kind of journalism is declining because it is hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work."

No, Mr. Keller, it's not because it's hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work. It's because you and your corporate masters don't want that kind of work done, you don't want it in your newspapers. The wrong people might get witness borne on them, their records exposed. Can't have that.

You don't practice "quality journalism" because you don't want to. If you did, you would.

(h/t Eschaton and cab drollery)

Marginalized Conservative Talker Rush Limbaugh

2009-01-28T14:52:00.002-06:00

Back when I was still trying to discuss politics with my baseball friends, they used to always get on me for citing talk radio commentators like Rush Limbaugh; "he's really marginalized, nobody really takes him seriously" they'd say.

Then this happens:

Yesterday, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA), the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, complained to Politico about how Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talkers are able to “stand back and throw bricks” instead of offering “real leadership” in the middle of high-profile public policy battles. Gingrey’s brave remarks got him in hot water.

This morning — because of what he called “high volume of phone calls and correspondence” in response to his comments — Gingrey issued a retraction, declaring his loyalty to hate radio. “I see eye-to-eye with Rush Limbaugh,” he said, later adding that he, Sean Hannity, and Newt Gingrich were “the voices of the conservative movement’s conscience.”

Nothing says "marginalized" like having an elected official say bad things about you and then being able to force that official to do a complete 180 like that. Yep, totally marginalized.

This is not America

2009-01-08T16:06:00.002-06:00

It is the official position of the United States Senate that Israel's invasion of Gaza and "collateral damage" slaughtering of civilians is justified and good. The House will take up (and is expected to pass) a similar resolution.

Link

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US Congress is set to offer staunch and unwavering support for Israel as the Gaza conflict rages, recognizing its "inalienable right" to defend itself from attacks by Hamas.

Democratic and Republican leaders united to introduce a resolution backing Israel in the US Senate and a similar measure will soon be pending in the House of Representatives with both expected to pass by large majorities.

"When we pass this resolution, the United States Senate will strengthen our historic bond with the state of Israel by reaffirming Israel's inalienable right to defend against attacks from Gaza, as well as our support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process," said Senate Majority leader Harry Reid.

So apparently Israel is the 51st State of the Union. This pretty much closes the discussion on that.

It's OK to torture Arabs who we think might be terrorists.
It's OK to indefinitely imprison people, even American citizens, just on the suspicion (justified or not) that they might be terrorists or support terrorists or are even just sympathetic to terrorists.
It's OK to spy on our own citizens without any oversight, monitoring all their conversations and activities, because they might be terrorists or support terrorists or even just be sympathetic to terrorists.
It's OK to supply high-tech weaponry to nominal allies, when that weaponry is clearly going to be used in such a way that "collateral damage" is unavoidable, because the people on the receiving end are just a bunch of Arabs (who probably are terrorists anyway).

And now we support Israel, unconditionally, in whatever actions they take to "defend themselves" against the mighty Gaza Palestinians. After all, they elected a terrorist group to be their leaders, right? Maybe if we help kill a few thousand, they'll think twice next time.

I hardly know what country I live in anymore.

Double take

2008-12-23T12:02:00.002-06:00

Ann Coulter, commenting at Human Events on Sarah Palin:

Liberals were angry at Palin because they thought she should look and act like Kay Bailey Hutchinson: Upper crust, prissy and stiff.

Did I read that right?

Kay Bailey Hutchinson is the primary opposition to incumbent governor Rick Perry for the Republican nomination for Governor of Texas.

(h/t digby)

Deep Thought

2008-09-29T14:28:00.001-05:00

Sarah Palin is to Republicans as Dennis Kucinich is to Democrats.

We are from France!

2008-09-22T09:55:00.002-05:00

Fafnir on Fafblog said "monthly is not a very good schedule for a blog." I should change the name of this blog to "Liberalism Quarterly."

A friend on another blog pointed out this op-ed from someone named Bill Saporito:

This is the state of our great republic: We've nationalized the financial system, taking control from Wall Street bankers we no longer trust. We're about to quasi-nationalize the Detroit auto companies via massive loans because they're a source of American pride, and too many jobs — and votes — are at stake. Our Social Security system is going broke as we head for a future where too many retirees will be supported by too few workers. How long before we have national healthcare? Put it all together, and the America that emerges is a cartoonish version of the country most despised by red-meat red-state patriots: France. Only with worse food.

You know, we have a long history with France. French help was crucial to our gaining independence. We bought about half the country from France in 1803. We came to the rescue of France in 1917, and liberated it in 1944. We still to an extent treasure the French-Canadian heritage of Louisiana (and the food there is pretty darn good, I would advise Mr. Saporito). French philosophers like Montesquieu contributed to the Enlightenment traditions on which the Founding Fathers based the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. A French sculptor gave us the Statue of Liberty; a French architect helped lay out Washington D.C.

And France was rightly against military adventurism in Iraq.

Yes, we have ample reason to celebrate our long relationship with France. Why not look to them again for ideas on how to create a good society? They've been at it far longer than we have.

American Justice

2008-07-23T15:37:00.002-05:00

This is what passes for justice in this country today:

In March 2007, Australian native David Hicks, who was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, became the first person to be sentenced by a military commission convened under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Last February, Col. Morris Davis, the lead prosecutor in Hicks’ trial, told the Australian that the Pentagon “leaned on” him to rush Hicks’ trial, even though at the time he “had no regulations for trial by military commissions.”
[...]
Bush administration political appointees appear to have meddled in Hicks’ case in order to help their key conservative ally, Australian Prime Minister John Howard. In early 2007, Howard was facing a serious electoral challenge from Labor leader Kevin Rudd, who eventually went on to defeat him. Hicks’ incarceration at Guantanamo Bay was a contentious issue in Australian politics at the time.

In February 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney visited Howard in Australia, where the PM lobbied for the trial to “be brought on as soon as humanly possible and with no further delay.” A month later, Hicks was sentenced and released back to Australia with critics airing suspicions that Cheney had interceded.

In October 2007, an anonymous military officer told Harper’s Scott Horton that “Cheney interfered directly to get Hicks’s plea bargain deal” as “part of a deal cut” with Howard.

Unbelievable. Yet investigation and impeachment of Cheney remains "off the table."

Today's nitpick: "Kenner" IS "New Orleans"

2008-06-05T10:08:00.002-05:00

After McCain's impressively lame "that's not change we can believe in" speech, the lefty web is rife with lines like this:

Yesterday evening John McCain gave a speech near New Orleans...

I've got some news for y'all. I grew up in Louisiana, and none of my friends ever talked about going to Kenner or flying into the Kenner airport. Kenner is "New Orleans," like Richardson is "Dallas" or Galena Park is "Houston." It may offend some of you, but I don't know anyone (except maybe a native) who talks about going to the Bronx to see the Yankees or going to Anaheim to go to Disneyland. Everybody knows that the auto industry is centered in Detroit, although as far as I know Detroit itself actually contains few if any auto plants these days. So bashing McCain for only being "near" New Orleans or for saying he was pleased to be in New Orleans when the CNN Chyron clearly said "Kenner" is just idiotic. He was in New Orleans. He wasn't in the damaged part of New Orleans, like John Edwards was when he announced his candidacy, and one can ask if McCain ever bothered to go visit the Lower 9th Ward (he wouldn't even have needed a platoon of Marines to escort him).

"Water Treatment" != "Waterboarding"

2008-05-22T11:00:00.002-05:00

This is brilliant:

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/05/21/water-treatment/

Murat Kurnaz, “freed from Guantanamo in 2006 after a personal plea from German Chancellor Angela Merkel,” detailed the gross abuses he underwent in U.S. custody yesterday. Kurnaz said he was subjected to “water treatment” which involved a “strong punch” that forced him to inhale water. Asked if this was waterboarding, Kurnaz said “water treatment” is different:

ROHRABACHER: You suggest that you were waterboarded in your captivity. Is that correct?

KURNAZ: No, it’s not waterboarding. It’s called “water treatment.” There was a bucket of water.

ROHRABACHER: Was a cloth put over your face and you were put on a board?

KURNAZ: There was a bucket of water. And they stick my head in it and at the same time, punch me into my stomach.

Rohrabacher responded: “The CIA is claiming that only three people have been waterboarded. And this may be a loophole that they’re suggesting that’s not ‘waterboarding.’”

And since it's not waterboarding, it's not torture. Therefore, the President was not lying when he told us over and over and over that "we do not torture." Brilliant!

Liberalrob Hates the Troops

2008-04-23T11:25:00.001-05:00

Posted on Megan McArdle's blog today:

One of my favorite movies about military culture is "A Few Good Men" (I'm also partial to "The Caine Mutiny"). Its plot clearly illustrates what I consider to be the main issue we're discussing here: line personnel with the most honorable of motives are ordered to commit a violation of the official code of conduct, because their commander thinks it necessary to enforce discipline. The thing goes south and they wind up accidentally killing the soldier the commander was trying to "train," and then rather than owning his ordering the action up front the commander tries to cover it up (or at least his involvement). When the commander is called to testify at the court-martial of the line Marines, he makes a long-winded speech about honor and duty and warriors manning the walls while effete sheeplike citizens sleep soundly in their beds secure in the safety he provides through his leadership; what moral right can the sheep then claim to criticize the manner in which he provides that safety? But the fact remained that he ordered the commission of an act that went against the code of conduct governing the military, and ordered that a crime be committed; and regardless of how lofty and high-minded his intent might have been, he did order that violation. So he was punished for it. We are a nation of laws, not of men, even in the military.

I have absolutely no criticisms at all for most of the people who carry out the orders and do the fighting and dying in Iraq, Afghanistan, and everywhere else they are called on to do it. They are all heroes. Like those Marines in A Few Good Men, they do need to exercise some basic moral judgment in carrying out orders; you don't give up your knowledge of right and wrong when you take the oath, and that's what some of the displeasure here is about. But I realize that there often isn't time to think about whether what you're doing is the right thing to do, and there is a lot of conditioning to push our troops to default toward following orders without questioning them; so a heavier responsibility HAS to fall on the commanders who are giving those orders. Those are the people who most deserve scorn, those people like Col. whatshisname Miller who came up with the interrogation regime used at Guantanamo and then exported it to Abu Ghraib. Where's his court-martial? Beyond that, where is the investigation into the people who ordered Col. Miller to come up with those techniques? Where is their indictment and trial?

That's what I'm talking about, whoever wants to think I "hate the military." I don't hate the military. I hate what's being done with it (and to it).

The Coveted Liberalrob Endorsement

2008-02-19T12:07:00.002-06:00

With the Texas primary exactly two weeks away, and early voting starting today, I suppose it's time to decide who I'm going to pull the lever for on March 4th. Bill Richardson was my previous choice but he's no longer available. So, it's either Hillary or Barack. I'd be happy to vote for either of them, of course. Both are preferable to McCain.

Hillary was always the brains of the Clinton "team," or at least it seemed that way to me. Not that Bill was a dummy but Hillary seemed more ideological somehow. Probably it was her heading up the first universal healthcare initiative that gave me that impression. I also admire her strength and perseverance in being able to stand up to the relentless press hatred she's had to endure. She also does have experience being a national leader and being on the national (and global) stage. She's a known quantity.

That also cuts against her in my estimation. Not simply that she is a "divisive figure" (which is one of many execrable press-hate memes she's faced), but that she is too close to the Democratic "establishment" for my comfort. It was the Clintons who brought the DLC to national prominence and control of the Democratic Party agenda. Unfortunately the DLC turned into a corporate advocacy group, perhaps not as bad as the American Enterprise Institute or Club for Growth but certainly of that ilk, and I'm opposed to maintaining and expanding their influence in the party and the nation. It's not clear to me how aligned Hillary is with the DLC but given the past association it is a concern. I have also felt that Hillary is too willing to compromise with Republicans in the name of "getting things done," which is a huge mistake and misapprehension of their unity and fanatical opposition to any Democratic initiatives. It's also clear that while possibly not an elitist Hillary certainly is of the elite, and the nation needs to get some leadership that is not of the "ruling class" at some point. Voting for Hillary kicks that can down the road another 4 years.

So what of Obama? The first acceptably-moderate black man to run for President and have a reasonable chance of winning is a powerful symbol, especially for someone like myself who grew up in the South. Having a black man elected President would be the strongest possible statement to the racists who remain in this country, that their intolerance and hate is no longer viable; a relic of a sad and tarnished past that will inevitably disappear. Barack is a powerful public speaker, yet powerful without being strident. He has chosen to run on a generally positive basis, playing up hope for the future and a reunited sense of America as a good nation. He has a great personal story and is of humble origins. And he has Oprah's endorsement :)

My problem with Barack is his message, or more precisely the content of his message; I have no problem with the tone and I do agree that Republicans have won elections by focusing on sunny, rosy optimism. I simply don't think personally feel that rosy optimism is all I want in my candidate for President. I also
want to know specifically what my candidate will do to enact the programs I support, and this has been sadly lacking from Obama's statements. While Hillary has also been light on specifics, her long track record to a degree substitutes for detailed policy proposals; Obama's lack of history leaves this an open question. Also, given the hugely difficult situation 8 years of Republican misrule has inflicted on us, I would prefer to have someone with demonstrated experience at the helm rather than an unknown, if talented, newcomer.

So, when it comes down to it, I will be voting for Hillary Clinton on March 4th.

Happy New Year

2008-01-21T10:55:00.000-06:00

A little late.

I will be 41 on Thursday. Starting on the downslope of life. Isn't this a time when you're supposed to be inspired to do something to make your life worthwhile?

My man Bill Richardson bailed early, as did Dean in 2004. Guess there's no room for you unless you're a media darling.

On Columbus Day

2007-10-09T16:17:00.000-05:00

A day late, yes, I know. I posted this on Megan McCardle's blog at The Atlantic:

The point I want to make on the Columbus discussion is to admire the vision and determination to organize and execute the expedition, while deploring what he did subsequent to the initial voyage's success. While he didn't "discover" America he did "re-discover" it, and the voyage was indeed an epic worthy of remembrance. The horrors that came after are also worthy of remembrance, and I think it is fitting that Columbus Day serve both purposes.

Monthly post

2007-09-28T10:02:00.000-05:00

Just to disturb the spiders and dust bunnies around here...

Nothing in particular to say though.

It's not hate

2007-08-06T13:31:00.000-05:00

I keep getting accused by my friends of simply being partisan, of hating Republicans for being Republicans. It's simply not true. First of all it's not hate. If one hates something, one takes steps to physically eradicate it. I hate cockroaches. I hate wasps. I hate yard work. That's quite different from saying you hate a person. I hated people in grade school; not many, but there were a few. And always, I later looked back and wondered why I wasted so much time hating that person rather than getting on with what was important in life. Sometimes, I ended up making friends with people I had earlier hated.

Glenn Greenwald said this last Friday on the subject of partisanship and "progressive" Democrats at the Yearly Kos convention:

There are many mythologies about what are the defining beliefs and motivations of bloggers and their readers and the attendees at Yearly Kos. One of the principal myths is that it is all driven by a familiar and easily defined ideological agenda and/or a partisan attachment to the Democratic Party. That is all false.
The common, defining political principle here -- what resonates far more powerfully than any other idea -- is a fervent and passionate belief in our country's constitutional framework, the core liberties it secures, and the checks and balances it offers as a safeguard against tyrannical power. Those who fail to defend that framework, or worse, those who are passively or actively complicit in its further erosion, are all equally culpable. With each day that passes, the radicalism and extremism originally spawned in secret by the Bush presidency becomes less and less his fault and more and more the fault of those who -- having discovered what they have been doing and having been given the power to stop it -- instead acquiesce to it and, worse, enable and endorse it.

I don't hate Republicans. I disagree with them, I want to convince them why they are wrong to believe what they believe, but through reason not coercion. I am a Democrat and vote 100% Democratic not because I just love Democrats, but because they support more of the things I believe in than Republicans do.

The Fake-ibuster

2007-07-18T15:05:00.000-05:00

Man, that was one of the worst filibusters of all time. Everything scripted on both sides, no passion (except Mary Landrieu, and that was apparently only because she was tired of the Republicans accusing the Democrats of Hollywood grandstanding; yeah, like they NEVER did any of that). When you think of filibusters, you think of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (obviously) and Huey Long reading long lists of pot liquor recipies into the official record. This was just 36 hours of 10-minute speeches, some of them delivered with all the panache of a wet cardboard box.

Where were the colloquys, with Senators on each side of the aisle engaging each other seriously in substantive, point vs. counterpoint debate on the merits of their positions? Where was the passionate denunciation of Republican obtuseness, of the President's folly? At the end I was almost forced to agree with the Republicans; what did this really, in the end, accomplish? It wasn't on network TV, or even Fox or CNN; unless people tuned in to C-SPAN2 they may never have known it was happening. And then in the end, when the cloture vote was finally taken, rather than halt the Senate at that point and demand that, since the Republicans obviously felt it was necessary, debate on the Levin/Reed amendment continue; instead of that, the Majority Leader pulled the bill. What an anticlimax!

I can understand the desire to not be seen as obstructionist yourself. But come on, this is supposed to be a filibuster! Make them filibust! Keep the Senate in session until doomsday if that's what it takes. Your approval rating can't go any lower, just like the President's, so what is there to lose?

E-mail to Richard Cohen

2007-06-20T17:24:00.000-05:00

Sent to Washington Post sage Richard Cohen after his hacktackular column and chat.

Mr. Cohen:

I have a few observations on your recent column about Scooter Libby. I tried to raise these in the chat but apparently I came too late (and I'm sure you were hit with an avalanche of questions and comments, so it's not surprising).

The four main points I want to raise are these:

1) CIA Director Hayden confirmed to Congressman Henry Waxman that Valerie Plame Wilson was considered "covert" under the applicable statutes at the time her identity and employer were revealed. I find it difficult to understand how you can continue to maintain the opposite after this revelation by the man currently in charge of the CIA, who was brought in after the revelation and therefore cannot have any axe to grind, and who cannot be considered a partisan opponent of the Bush Administration and Scooter Libby.

2) You insist that there is no underlying crime because Libby himself did not initially reveal Valerie Wilson's identity. It seems to me that Libby's crime was obstructing the investigation into the revelation of the identity of a covert agent, not his faulty memory. Whether he himself committed that particular crime is not relevant; he obstructed the investigation and that is why he is being punished. Why do you disagree with that position, when a jury of 12 Americans agreed?

3) You have called for a commutation of Libby's sentence because he himself did not initially reveal Valerie Wilson's identity; that is now known to have been the work of Richard Armitage. But how is that different from the sentence of Charles Colson, who did not himself participate in the Watergate burglary? Like Libby, all he did was remain loyal to his superiors and participate in obstruction of the investigation of actions he did not himself commit.

4) You have said that high government officials should not be "called to account for practicing the dark art of politics," presumably referring to whatever dirty tricks they might engage in in the name of partisan politics. But isn't there a line that cannot be crossed in that regard, where the "dark art" subverts our political system and runs afoul of the law? And regardless of whether these violations of law might be trivial, are not high government officals expected to take responsibility when they do cross it? Further, do not high government officials have a duty to assist in the investigation and correction of these abuses, no matter how minor, and not obstruct such investigations?

Thank you for your time.

==========================================================

Let's just say I'm not shedding any tears for poor Scooter.

But who gets to be Max?

2007-06-18T17:07:00.000-05:00

Ran across this on TPM while catching up from the weekend:

Holly vowed he would never again use unarmored vehicles for convoy protection. He went to his primary shipper, Public Warehousing Co. of Kuwait, and ordered a change. PWC hired ArmorGroup, which had armed Ford F-350 pickups with steel-reinforced gun turrets and belt-fed machine guns.
Other companies followed suit, ramping up production of an array of armored and semi-armored trucks of various styles and colors, until Iraq's supply routes resembled the post-apocalyptic world of the "Mad Max" movies.

Nothing says "progress in Iraq" like comparisons to a post-apocalyptic action film in which a desert area plunges into anarchy, with roving bands of well-armed militias struggling to maintain order.

I remember when I first got the game "Car Wars", how cool it was to have cars and pickups with machine guns and flamethrowers and all the James Bond stuff, and you would get together with your buddies and design cars and have them fight each other. Lotsa fun.

And there was "The Road Warrior" (the sequel to Mad Max, but the first one seen by a wide audience here in the U.S.), but for the most part those guys just had crossbows and boomerangs. Shotgun shells were a rare commodity. So it wasn't as cool as Car Wars; but it was a movie and not a game so you could see Mel Gibson taking it to The Humongous and his gang. And of course Virginia Hey as The Warrior Woman. But I digress.

I think it's sad that all we've managed to do after the hundreds of billions spent and thousands of lives lost is to recreate the conditions of the Car Wars universe. Instead of the M.O.N.D.O.s we have the Mahdis. It's all there. Roads of death, walled fortress enclaves, the works.

We need to get out of the way. Now.

Random Ranting Room

2007-05-16T13:15:00.000-05:00

If you find you way here from one of my posts on another blog, this is a place to leave me feedback or whatever. I haven't posted here in forever...with so many other bloggers doing such a fine job posting, I haven't felt much of a need to post on my own. It's kind of a catch-22; since almost nobody comes here to discuss things, I don't post, and since I don't post, anybody who comes here probably thinks this blog is dead. Which, effectively, it is...but since it's just a personal blog anyway, I suppose that's OK.

Amanda Marcotte resigns from Edwards Campaign

2007-02-13T11:31:00.000-06:00

Since Pandagon is being hammered, here's what I was trying to post over there:

I'm sorry it came to this, Amanda. You'll be freer to speak now, and that's a good thing, but I know it's a loss and it has to hurt.

I meant everything I said, on the Edwards blog and when I commented on Atrios' blog yesterday. You would have brought Edwards something he badly needed, fire in his message. He's going to have to work extra hard now to erase his milquetoast liberal image, without your strong voice to lead the way. And his obvious cave to a bunch of religious nuts doesn't sit well with me as a secularist either. I don't care that he found your posts personally offensive; if he wants to be the President of all the people he's going to have to respect and defend those who feel strongly that organized religion intruding in people's private lives is inappropriate. I don't doubt that Edwards probably didn't know anything about you until his campaign manager told him he was going to fire you and was giving him a heads-up. The whole handling of this feels like D.C. consultant triangulation, not in keeping with my understanding of how Edwards operates at all.

I hope some day a candidate comes along that can have a blog where issues are openly and frankly discussed, instead of just being a watered-down lovefest over press releases. Apparently Edwards wasn't that candidate.

Glenn Greenwald asks a good question

2006-12-07T12:28:00.000-06:00

With regards to James Baker:

What possible rationale exists for listening to someone who urged us to pursue a course that is the greatest strategic disaster in our country's history? A person who said this should be shunned, not idolized[...]

If you go to a doctor for an operation and he completely botches your surgery and you lose an organ due to his abject ineptitude and recklessness, you don't go back to that doctor for repair surgery; you find another one. If you go to a lawyer who almost destroys your company through complete ignorance of your basic legal obligations, you don't stay with that lawyer in the hope that he will get you out of the disaster he created for you; you retain another one.

Yet here we are, revering and listening to and following the same dense, amoral people who could not have been more wrong about everything they recommended and asserted prior to this war, while we scorn or (at best) ignore those who were so right.

True enough. But let me say a few things in Baker's defense (much as it pains me to do so):

1) Despite Greenwald's disparaging it as "Friedmanesque," implying that career civil servant and experienced diplomat Baker was as unqualified as newspaper columnist Tom Friedman to be making such statements, Baker did in fact say (as Greenwald himself quotes):

The only realistic way to effect regime change in Iraq is through the application of military force, including sufficient ground troops to occupy the country (including Baghdad), depose the current leadership and install a successor government. Anyone who thinks we can effect regime change in Iraq with anything less than this is simply not realistic.

This position goes right along with Gen. Shinseki's statement when he estimated it would take 200-300 thousand troops to occupy Iraq. We did not have sufficient ground troops. We did not send sufficient ground troops. The administration hunted around until they found a general (Franks) who assured them that they could conquer Iraq with the troops available, and they put him in charge. James Baker didn't have anything to do with the planning and execution of the administration's Iraq strategy, what there was of it. To now go back and pillory him for the poor execution of a strategy he had nothing to do with is simply wrong. James Baker did not advocate the invasion of Iraq with insufficient troops to pacify the country.

2) James Baker is not advocating "stay the course," no matter how much Glenn and many many others would like to portray him as doing so. If he were, why would the President be spending so much time trying to discredit and dilute the ISG report? Obviously I haven't read the report and have to rely on second-hand analysis of its findings; but from what has been reported so far, it doesn't seem to me like "stay the course."

3) James Baker is not solely responsible for this report. He is the co-chair of the ISG with Lee Hamilton, another experienced and respected public servant. And while there may be a few "wildly extremist, warmongering" types in the ISG, there are also voices of moderation- and the report was unanimously submitted. Greenwald may be skeptical- to put it mildly- of the expertise of the people on the ISG commission; but they are all at least as qualified as Greenwald, and most have a lot more time in public service. Hamilton and Baker have been in government for as long as I've been alive (and, I suspect, as Greenwald has).

I hate bashing Glenn Greenwald. He is one of the brightest lights of the progressive blogosphere, and I love his work (even this trashing of Baker is well-argued and understandable). But this is one case where I think he is perhaps being a bit overzealous. It's all too easy to look at people who supported a policy that ultimately failed for whatever reasons and say "well, these are unserious people who should be ostracized." But if you do that, if you insist on 100% success as a condition of respecting someone's policy recommendations, you're quickly going to run out of people from whom to get recommendations. Look at the recommendations themselves, and judge those. That's what a Liberal does.

Blaming the victims

2006-10-19T10:25:00.000-05:00

Billmon goes all wobbly and maudlin over our collective lack of cojones, which caused us to permit the unleashing of the horrors of genocide in Iraq:

We were all complicit. I was complicit. Because I was afraid -- afraid to sacrifice my comfortable middle class lifestyle, afraid to lose my job and my house, afraid of the IRS, afraid to go to jail.

Well, sure. I suppose what we should have done, in hindsight, is take to the streets in protest. After all, that's what our parents did in the 60's, right? Burning draft cards, holding mass rallies, Abbie Hoffman speechifying...

Brought that Vietnam War to a swift termination, didn't it? (News flash: it didn't.)

I see more and more of this now. We Americans who oppose the war but don't get out there and march in the streets and lob eggs at City Hall and pelt cops with rocks and garbage are the new "Good Germans." We are as much to blame for the deaths of 660,000 Iraqis and counting as the Sunni death squads and Shia militias who pulled the triggers, swung the swords, and knotted the ropes. All of that blood is directly on our hands.

Bullscheiss. That blood is not on my hands. I didn't vote for these bastards, I didn't formulate the ridiculous plans that ignored the postwar period, I didn't lie to the American people about the danger we were in. The last time I looked, advocating armed insurrection against the United States was the very definition of treason, written in black ink in the Constitution, and the punishment prescribed is death. Surely we know enough by now to realize that mere marching in the streets would not be sufficient to change the President's mind about his Iraq policy. So short of futilely taking up arms against my own country, what do you propose I could have done to avert the catastrophe?

No, I don't accept the responsibility for this. The difference between me and the "Good Germans" is that I am not actively aiding and abetting my government in its lunacy. I am not denouncing my neighbors, I am not keeping silent in my public statements, I am not trying not to know what is going on 10 miles down the road or halfway around the world. That is a critical difference and we must not lose sight of it. If we are responsible for genocide, which I also deny, it was not instigated by me. It was perpetrated by the galactically irrational people we have allowed to be elected to run our country.

660,000 dead Iraqis is indeed a tragedy. And I don't deny that by removing the civil structures (such as they were) that had been in place in Iraq under Saddam and not replacing them with equally strong structures of our own, we left a power vaccuum that could be filled by these bloodthirsty gangs. It is South Central L.A. writ large. But in my opinion it was only a matter of time before this happened anyway. These deaths, this horror, was going to occur without our having to lift a finger. It happened in Rwanda, it happened in Somalia, it happened in Ethiopia, it is happening right now in Sudan. Armed sectarian violence occurs all the time without our involvement, and in every case there are tragedies and noncombantant deaths and stories of atrocities to chill the soul. The only difference, the ONLY difference, is that in Iraq our American troops are stuck in the middle of it. The Iraqi Shia in the south have always wanted to go after the Sunnis in the center and west. The Kurds in the north have always wanted their own autonomous state. These things were GOING TO HAPPEN. All we did with our blundering was move up the timetable a little.

Blame me as a genocide denier if you want. It's a (theoretically) free country. But our troops didn't pull the triggers (not all 660,000 of them), and they aren't swinging the swords. The genocide, if there is one, is on the hands of the Sadrists, Sunnis, and Kurds doing the killing. Not us, and not me. I am a victim of this administration's arrogant incompetence too.

Crikey, Steve Irwin's gone

2006-09-06T08:22:00.000-05:00

Posted on Atrios' blog:

When I was young (in the 1970's) one of my favorite shows was "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" hosted by Marlin Perkins. That show was the ONLY show of its kind on the tube in those pre-cable days. Nowhere else would you see wildlife in their natural environment, or learn about the efforts of naturalists to preserve them in the face of the ever-expanding human encroachment on their habitat. That show, more than any other, made we aware of environmental issues and shaped my views in ways that still affect me today.

After "Wild Kingdom" went off the air and Jacques Cousteau's (the other great 70's TV naturalist) "Undersea World" sank beneath the waves, there were practically NO shows about animals on TV that I was aware of. Even with the coming of cable, and the National Geographic specials and TLC and Discovery, none of the shows really engaged me like "Wild Kingdom" had done.

Then I was flipping channels one day and saw this goofy Australian straight out of central casting talking about crocodiles. I was born and raised in Louisiana so I'm quite aware of their not-quite-cousins (alligators), and he seemed really excited so I stopped to watch. At the end of the show it hit me: this was the first naturalist since Marlin Perkins who really made his work INTERESTING, even fun to watch. Steve Irwin blazed a trail for the resurgence of the TV naturalist. His ability to connect with the audience and make wildlife understandable to people who may not know the first thing about King Brown snakes other than as menaces to be killed was a priceless gift. All of us, especially those of us on the left who are supposed to view the environment as something to be preserved rather than merely as a source of raw materials, have lost one of our most valuable advocates. It's not too much of a stretch to compare his loss to the natural world with JFK's loss to the United States politically, or Princess Diana's to the world, in terms of love and respect for a fundamentally decent person who tried to do their best.

The Scenic Route to 9/11

2006-09-06T00:43:00.000-05:00

ABC is putting out this "docudrama", called "The Path to 9/11." So far everything I've read about it says that it's a Clinton hatchet-job; it's all Clinton's fault, you see, because he didn't kill Osama.

The lefty blogosphere is of course not taking this lying down. I posted my own comment to the official blog of the movie:

I bet moderating the comments here is a fun job.

9/11 is simply too highly charged for a fictionalized "docudrama." How many
"docudramas" were made about Pearl Harbor? "Tora Tora Tora" stuck with the
facts, and was highly acclaimed. "Midway" went for docudrama and invented a
nonexistent story for Charlton Heston's character, and was not nearly as good as
a result. The Kennedy assassination? Oliver Stone's "JFK" forsook accuracy for
"docudrama," and the real-life Jim Garrison disavowed it.

When you deal with historical events, especially those that were traumatic like
Pearl Harbor and 9/11, as filmmakers you have a duty to remain faithful to the
actual history. Any deviations in the name of "drama" are almost inevitably
going to be seen as cheap theatrics and will tarnish your effort.

Tri-weekly open thread

2006-07-27T14:31:00.000-05:00

Anybody reading this? Is this thing on?

Dogged Off

2006-07-07T12:17:00.000-05:00

I got involved in the Roger Ailes/Bob Somerby dustup on FireDogLake over the past couple of days. Ailes posted a snarky screed on Joe Klein and John Harwood's weekend talk show appearances, calling Klein and Cokie Roberts (who is the daughter of Democratic Party legend T. Hale Boggs) "Republican reporters" who were supposed to balance the conservative-leaning reporters they appeared with. Somerby took Ailes to task in July 5th's Daily Howler, saying:

But Klein and Roberts aren’t “Republicans;” that’s a childish way to discuss the enduring problems with their work as pundits (problems we have discussed for years). More specifically, as anyone who watched This Week would know, that post completely misrepresents what actually occurred in Sunday’s roundtable.

I don't read all of FDL every day but I do know that it's a very popular blog on the Progressive "side" of the internets, so I wandered over there to see what the response to this accusation might be. FDL is a high-traffic blog that makes multiple posts during the day, and I figured someone must have seen this post by the time I got to it. If not, I wanted to let them know about it, because an allegation of misleading and misrepresentation shouldn't be allowed to stand on a blog that prides itself on being a leader of the reality-based community. I was a little surprised to see no mention of the Daily Howler post on the day's topics, either as a front-page article or in the comments. So I ventured onto a then-recent post that was more or less an open comments thread and posted a very mild link to the Daily Howler.

Predictably a bunch of white knights sprang up to defend their favorite blog from my perceived attack. It didn't matter that I didn't accuse FDL of anything, just passed along that they had been called to account in public; the very fact that I had posted a link to something critical made me a "concern troll" and a "Somerby shill." It truly was a bizarre mirror image of what I would have gotten had I gone onto Redstate or Free Republic and defended Al Gore or said something positive about his movie. People, if you're reading this, you have to learn how to tolerate differing viewpoints and not knee-jerkingly attack anyone who happens to disagree with you or says something critical. I know it's asking a lot, but please, we should make the effort.

Anyway, as I said it was predictable if a bit disappointing to have it actually happen. I suffered through it and kept cool, and eventually Christy Hardin Smith posted a comment that some sort of response would be forthcoming.

Today, Ailes posted his response to Somerby. And once again, it is a snarky, innuendo-filled "defense" that spends much time condescendingly explaining to Somerby (and us) how things work in the world of Roger Ailes:

Somerby says: It’s bad to characterize Klein as a Republican because he sometimes says things critical of the Republican Party in general or specific Republicans in particular.

I say: When you become a serial purveyor of fraudlent talking points concerning Democrats which are indistingiushable from Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman’s Greatest Fundraising Speeches, you deserve ridicule. And that includes the insult you earn from the content of your running commentary: Republican.

Oh, sure, I could have accused JoeK of having "Millionaire Pundit Values" or of "typing up scripts." I could have called him a "fake," or a "celebrity." Indeed, I could point out that JoeK "want[s] to trash major Democrats only," and then express the most profound bewilderment as to Joe’s possible motive for doing so.

Instead, I called him a Republican. I did it my way.

So now we know: telling the reading public that Joe Klein is a Republican (an utter falsehood) is exactly the same as saying he has Millionaire Pundit Values, or that he is a fake (DINO I assume), or that he is a celebrity (which is somehow a bad thing). Ailes buys into the wingnut strategy of making shit up about the people you disagree with; it works for them, doesn't it? Why not do the same, see how they like it.

The comments below Ailes' piece again ranged on both sides, some defending Somerby and some defending Ailes. Actually very few defended Ailes per se; for the most part the anti-Somerby commenters were more interested in trashing Somerby as a has-been or never-was than in explicitly backing Ailes. One of the early comments mentioned some "Somerby shill":

27. BarbaraB says:
July 7th, 2006 at 1:26 am

Thanks for coming by, Roger. We had a Somerby shill in here on Wednesday who kept insisting that Jane and/or Christy drop everything they were doing in order to justify your piece or refute Somerby’s charges. Various members of the community (including the goddesses themselves) told the shill to take a hike, which eventually he, she or it did. Tiresome while it lasted, though.

That would have been me, BarbaraB. I would challenge little miss perfect to find one single comment where I demanded that the FDL people "drop everything they were doing." I merely suggested that some kind of response, even one from Ailes himself, would probably be a good idea; it's what I would do if it were my blog and someone made me aware of a similar thing. Apparently that's too hard a concept for BarbaraB however. Sorry I was so tiresome to you, perhaps a quick nap would help.

So that's the story so far. We'll see if it goes any further. I just felt that since comments at FDL were turned off before I had a chance to comment, I would do it here. I'm a bit irked by the experience and needed to get this off my chest.

Where's Waldo?

2006-06-30T15:44:00.000-05:00

Yes this blog is languishing. I haven't had much inspiration lately, not sure why; it comes and goes. For the most part I've been commenting on other blogs, mostly David Brin's and Pandagon, but you might find me popping up in lots of different places.

Professional Journalists

2006-05-23T10:47:00.000-05:00

Bob Somerby pointed out yesterday just how professional these highly-paid Washington journalists are:

A CARTOON PRESS CORPS: Only Elisabeth Bumiller could overlook the mordant humor in her presentation. At the start of this morning’s “White House Letter,” she describes the press corps’ conduct during a recent plane ride:
BUMILLER (5/22/06): Reporters en route to Arizona on Air Force One last week opted to watch the movie ''King Kong'' in the press cabin. Not so Tony Snow, the new White House press secretary and former Fox News commentator, who told reporters that he spent the flight in the staff cabin watching Gen. Michael V. Hayden's confirmation hearings to be the new C.I.A. director—on CNN.
Got milk—and cookies? While Snow watches Hayden’s confirmation hearings, the “press corps” chooses King Kong!

Of course, they're not being paid to cover the confirmation hearings; they're being paid to cover the President. But how are they going to know what questions to ask the President if they can't be bothered to keep up with such an important event as a confirmation hearing? And don't tell me that this wasn't an important confirmation hearing; this was a hearing for the man who will be in charge of this nation's premiere civilian intelligence agency, an agency that is under fire all the time now for incompentence and political infighting.

Man, I obviously went into the wrong field. I still haven't seen King Kong. (The Peter Jackson version, that is.) That would be sweet to get paid to watch movies.

The Press Corpse

2006-05-01T17:24:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend Digby put up several excellent posts, including one on the constitutional crisis we find ourselves in due to the President's decision that "in a time of war" he has the ability to interpret the laws as he deems fit. At the end of his piece he reflects on the press corps' apparent eagerness to bash the Clinton administration endlessly on any subject no matter how minor or personal, while they seem unable to bring themselves to similarly attack the current incumbent:

"But you really have to wonder why they were so rabidly and openly anti-Clinton, to the point of trying to affirmatively help the Republicans drive him from office, while this time trying to extract promises that the Democrats won't hold Bush accountable for anything he has done."

Following is my take on this question, which I emailed to him:

Bob Somerby looked at this a while back, discussing Clinton biography "The Survivor" by the Washington Post's John Harris:

"Why did the mainstream press corps show so much disdain for Bill Clinton? He wasn’t ironic enough, Harris says—and they were jaded by Nam, of course, which had happened twenty years in the past! These explanations are amazingly bad—but they’re pretty much par for the course when members of the Washington press corps try to explain their own cohort’s misconduct. Weird explanations inevitably follow when reporters take on this vile task. (Links to examples below.)

Yes, reporters love to give strange “explanations” for their cohort’s misconduct. But there’s something they love even more at such moments—they love to make their group disappear. We weren’t there, they love to say, as they ignore their own cohort’s misconduct. And so it goes as Harris attempts to explain the Whitewater mess."

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh082505.shtml

He never gets around to giving his personal opinion on why the press corps decided to (try to) torpedo the Clinton administration. In light of that, I have to give Harris' explanation (which Somerby considers "bad") credit for at least a little plausibility. I can easily believe that the Washington press corps could have become so insular that when the outsider Clinton arrived, replacing the much-beloved Reagan/Bush team that had governed for 12 years, that they would have felt some petty resentment and allowed that to color their reporting.

But beyond that, we have the Right-Wing Noise Machine constantly hammering away at Clinton's credibility and character; how many members of the mainstream media were regular listeners of Rush Limbaugh, even if only on drive-time radio? How many of them were closet conservatives or simply subscribed to the "where's there's smoke" line of reasoning that all these right-wing radicals couldn't possibly be making EVERYTHING up? And what was the role of the emerging consolidation of media into large conglomerates? Conglomerates run by people who might themselves be right-wing conservatives, or at least people sensitive to the endless and raucous charges of "liberal bias" if they attempted to defend the President? Was there pressure, subtle or otherwise, to emphasize stories critical of the President and downplay stories supportive of him? Was this a sort of "payback" for the destruction of Nixon, the Iran-Contra coverage which tarnished Sainted Reagan, the "Borking" of Bork and the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings?

It's all pieces of the puzzle. They didn't like Clinton the outsider, the uppity, arrogant hayseed from Arkansas. A new generation of reporters were replacing the Watergate era crew as those reporters advanced, retired, or moved on to other projects. They didn't like the fact that he was getting laid by interns and they weren't, or they simply knew that sex sells and lurid, illicit sex sells a lot. Perhaps they felt bad on some level for tarnishing earlier administrations, people they had known and worked with for 12 years. They lost sight of their ethical responsibility to REPORT the news, not CREATE the news (assuming they even knew that they had such a responsibility, and that blowhards like Limbaugh did not and were not in fact journalists). As a group, they simply decided they were going to punish Clinton and they proceeded to do it. And it was so much fun, and they did so much business because of it, that they decided to continue it with Al Gore (and for a short, critical time, Howard Dean).

Not only do we face a constitutional crisis; we face a crisis in the role of the press in society and the concept of jounalism itself. We have arrived at a time where we need to question just what it is that we are working towards as Americans, how our institutions should operate in pursuit of that goal of a more perfect union, and even what those institutions ought to be.

Will Pryor is running for Congress

2006-04-26T21:33:00.000-05:00

...in my district, TX-32. This is a "safe Republican" district created by Tom Delay's gerrymandering scheme a few years ago. Nevertheless, I think that a strong Democratic candidate could win here, especially if incumbent Pete Sessions' involvement in the Jack Abramoff scandal and a shady California defense contracting deal turns out to have been more than just coincidence. At least, I hope that enough Republicans are rational enough to see that Sessions has supported disastrous policies and should be replaced.

But I'm not sure Pryor is that strong Democrat. If you go through his campaign web site, everything you see points to an accomodational, "consensus-building" style. I understand that and it's even admirable- in the right situation. If the political opposition were capable of being persuaded by logical argument, or if they were willing to work with you on some sort of quid-pro-quo basis, then reciprocal flexibility and cooperation is appropriate. But when the opposition is NOT so inclined and instead continually votes against any initiative from your side on strict party-line votes, being flexible and trying to work with them is just being a sap. And when the policies they fight so hard for are in fact counter to the ideals this country was founded on, and harmful to the long-term interests of the United States, then you not only have reason to object strenuously, but you have a duty to fight just as strongly against their misguided positions. So far, Pryor has not expressed a willingness to do this.

I will support Will Pryor, by default if for no other reason; and I will do what I can to help him find the strong voice he will need in order to represent me in the manner in which I would like to be represented. I have already sent him several e-mails pointing out changes I think he should make and positions I think he needs to explain more fully; and he has promised changes to his website soon.

Oh, now I get it

2006-03-09T15:31:00.000-06:00

So THAT's why abortion should be illegal:

Commenting on illegal immigration, [Georgia State Senator Nancy] Schaefer said 50 million abortions have been performed in this country, causing a shortage of cheap American labor. “We could have used those people,” she said.

From Jesus' General. Can't make this stuff up.

Heckuva Plan

2006-02-10T15:53:00.000-06:00

Heckuva Job Brownie testified to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this morning. Watch it here.

I posted this on digby's blog afterwards:

According to their lame-ass, overly complicated National Response Plan, what's supposed to happen is that someone gets named Principal Federal Officer on the scene- in this case, Brown. The PFO is supposed to drop whatever responsibilities he traditionally has (such as being head of FEMA) and take over being in charge of the response effort; he is to establish a command center, gather the requirements of local and state officials, and pass that information up the line to DHS through the Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC). HSOC then passes the information to Secretary Chertoff and coordinates the various federal agencies to respond to the requests.

Instead what happened is that Brown, never a big fan of the NRP in the first place, decided to try to handle everything himself and didn't establish a command center, didn't contact HSOC, and then discovered whenever he went to a federal agency to get some response that they were all waiting to hear from HSOC and didn't want to hear from him. HSOC tried to contact Brown after they started getting reports on Monday that flooding was occurring, but since there was no command center for them to contact and he was still trying to be head of FEMA they couldn't reach him. HSOC instead got some number two guy, who only knew FEMA procedure was to give two daily reports to DHS and refused to do anything else. Rather than try some other means to contact Brown or taking their own initiative to confirm the flooding and getting the response rolling themselves, HSOC decided to follow the plan and wait for Brown to contact them. Meanwhile, Brown contacted the White House several times telling them about the flooding and asking for help; but I bet the White House contacted Chertoff to get confirmation, Chertoff didn't know anything was wrong (since HSOC hadn't contacted him), so the White House decided not to bother the President. And so no one expected the levees to fail.

(end post)

See the oh-so-simple National Response Plan here. Read the 114-page "base plan" for the highlights, or the 426-page "full version" if you're a policy wonk. Then come tell me how you expect a 426-page plan to work smoothly in a stressful and chaotic situation.

Oh my

2006-01-26T13:36:00.000-06:00

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air”

-Thomas Gray

I first heard this one, as probably many of my legion of readers did, in Bull Durham. I think I'll have it written on my tombstone.

We write letters

2006-01-25T16:28:00.000-06:00

Sent to Washington Post editor Jim Brady, who just hosted a blogger ethics panel because of the Deborah Howell affair:

Mr. Brady-

I've watched this tempest rage back and forth for the past few days and I must say I think you've missed the most important lesson to be understood. If you allow public comments on your blog, the public is going to comment.

I was a participant in the online world of USENET back when it was only accessible to university students, professors, researchers, and similar professionals who had access through big institutions. All the newsgroups (well, most of them) were filled with high-value posts and lots of excellent, thought-provoking debate went on. Then in the late 80's/early 90's, large public-access companies such as Compuserve and (most notoriously) AOL began providing their subscribers access to our precious newsgroups. Can you imagine the shock and horror we felt as our clean, erudite, oh-so-high-level discourses were suddenly invaded by uneducated, loutish, often unruly members of the hoi polloi who thumbed their noses at our "netiquette" and flamed away however they felt? I think you can: because I am seeing you make the exact same statements with regard to the recent unpleasantness as we made then. How dare they, these ruffians, come in and slander our highly-regarded, experienced, professional reporters and editors? Didn't they learn any manners, why can't they post in a civil way without resorting to invective and profanity?

No, Mr. Brady, they didn't; or rather, they don't choose to. These are the REAL Americans out there. They watch NASCAR, professional wrestling, and Bill O'Reilly, and in their minds when someone says something disagreeable you don't go online and say "I say, with all due respect, I disagree with you"; no, what they have learned to do is say "you're a complete moron, how could anyone be as stupid as you to say what you did, you should be shot as a favor to future generations" and so forth. The general public are simply not interested (note I don't say they are incapable or uneducated) in playing nice with people they disagree with.

So you and the Post are going to have to decide whether you want to allow public comments and just accept that people are going to say whatever they are going to say, or just leave them turned off and accept that you are publicly declaring that journalism is a one-way conversation just as it always has been. Or you can try to find some middle road. But never forget that your readers are not all debate-club members who follow Robert's Rules of Order. In fact, I think you'll find that few of them are.

One comment on the panel today: it was a missed opportunity. By adopting the format you did, it became not so much a panel discussion as a weird sort of mutant Q & A. It wasn't really a discussion at all, and the questions often didn't seem relevant to the theme you wanted to pursue. It failed as a chat because it wasn't really a chat, and it failed as a Q & A because the panelists didn't all get to answer every question. It also failed a bit because you lost your cool with Jane Hamsher when you apparently couldn't answer her technical questions about the deleted posts; but I'm sure you recognize that.

--
Rob Woodard
Richardson, TX
rwoodard15@comcast.net

What he said

2006-01-24T15:51:00.000-06:00

Glenn Greenwald let us know just what the rules are for having a dignified political discourse.

Guess what? No response to my missive to Sessions. Surprise surprise.

Off the dime at last

2005-12-20T14:33:00.000-06:00

Finally I was moved to write my first-ever correspondence to my Congressman:

Dear Congressman Sessions:

I am dismayed at the continuing revelations of excesses, mistakes, and deceptions of the American people that the Bush Administration has committed in pursuit of its stated goal of keeping us safe from terrorism. My understanding of what the United States is supposed to represent, a free nation of laws and not men, where you are free to associate with others and be secure in your person from government search and seizure, is completely at odds with the actions of this Administration. As my representative to Congress, I urge you to express in the strongest possible terms that such activities and behaviors are not compatible with American ideals. We may disagree on fiscal policies or the appropriateness of legislating morality; but when it comes to the fundamental rights of all Americans as set down by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, there can be no partisan issue. We are talking about the philosophical basis of our nation, truths we hold to be self-evident; and if we do not stand up and defend those ideals when they are injured, regardless of the party affiliation of the infringer or infringed, then we set at nought all our nation represents. And then we are truly lost. Please don't let that happen to this great nation. Speak up for us.

Thank you.

Rob Woodard

Tom Tomorrow On Point As Usual

2005-12-07T13:05:00.000-06:00

(Click the title...)

Exactly right. That's the level of "discourse" we have in this country.

Philosophy: The View from the Right

2005-09-02T18:43:00.000-05:00

So I have this friend who's a diehard Conservative Republican, and he had this to say about me and Liberals:

if a really good guy like you can be taking this stance at a time of national tragedy, then my incredibly negative view of the political left wing is NOT NEGATIVE ENOUGH. Your side of the political spectrum is even less moral, less decent, less rational, less intellectually honest and more sinister than even I previously thought. And I wonder how that can be? I love this country and what it stands for, and I really wonder how it's possible that a large segment of the American population can have such a horribly negative view of their own nation.

That's a pretty sweeping indictment. But I find it all too believable that he would say this; Conservatives look at Liberals like they are some kind of Martians, with strange ideas and viewpoints that Conservatives just can't fathom. We seem to be utterly irrational to them; and I must say, the feeling is mutual. So let's go over these points, and hopefully a Conservative will come along and educate me on what their position is, how it differs from the Liberal one and why their position is better.

1. Liberals are less moral than Conservatives. That implies that there is some standard of morality out there, some objective moral truth we can measure Liberals against and find them wanting in relation to Conservatives. But what is it? Is it compassion for our fellow man? I don't think you can argue that Liberals are not compassionate. Do we have no code of conduct, no standard of behavior in polite society? I think Liberals are as well-behaved as anyone; we don't advocate lighting farts or going around naked everywhere or public drunkeness. Is it really that we have less morality than Conservatives? Or is it rather that we have a different morality? That we don't kowtow to rules laid out in a book written by Jewish shepherds two thousand years ago, that we base our morality on utilitarian reason?

2. Liberals are less decent than Conservatives. Well, I already mentioned compassion. Liberals have no shortage of human decency; in fact, the accusation has long been that we have too much decency. That we're suckers for any cause that claims discrimination, that we'll increase taxes at the drop of a hat if some interest group comes begging. So how are we less decent than Conservatives, who espouse "individual responsibility" above all else? An example: If you lose your job and are unemployed, under Conservative rules you get a certain amount of time with assistance; but after that, you're on your own, and if you weren't able to get a job that's your tough luck. Is that decency?

3. Liberals are less rational than Conservatives. I believe that Liberals invented the "think tank," where experts debate and help develop policy. Most members of these "think tanks" are considered experts in their field; many are university professors. Are they all irrational crackpots? Am I? What irrational ideas am I espousing? And am I so one-sided in my advocacy that I reject all opposing viewpoints out of hand? Are Liberals in general that way? What constitutes "rationality", if not using science and reason to support your positions?

4. Liberals are less intellectually honest than Conservatives. What this seems to imply is that Liberals are hypocritical; we advocate one set of policies in public but in private we enact something else. Or that we are self-delusional, advocating policies that are so utterly opposed to immutable human nature as to be ridiculously impractical. For the first, if we are hypocritical then we have good company. We did not propose Clean Water and Clear Skies and Healthy Forests initiatives that enabled corporations to pollute more and overuse our natural resources. We did not reject all scientific evidence that humans have affected the global climate (and even if not, that the climate is nevertheless changing) and refuse to even try to help slow down this change, with the excuse that it would just be too economically hurtful to the richest nation on the planet. All the while encouraging our citizens to consume more and more fossil fuels in ever more wasteful ways. For the second, we did not advocate codifying into law that the legal benefits and privileges of marriage could not be conferred on same-sex partners in committed relationships. We did not advocate preventing women from having the ultimate say on the uses of their own bodies and reproductive processes. We did not advocate invading foreign lands and forcing our system of government on them. So please educate me on how Liberals are more intellectually dishonest than Conservatives.

5. Liberals are more sinister than Conservatives. One definition of sinister [m-w.com] is "singularly evil or productive of evil." I assume that is what is being referenced ("of, relating to, or situated to the left or on the left side of something" doesn't carry as much weight somehow). The definition of evil [m-w.com] includes: "morally reprehensible"; "causing harm"; and "marked by misfortune". Well, we certainly seem to be marked by misfortune :) but I think the other two are what was meant. So that being the case, the accusation is that Liberalism in and of itself is morally reprehensible and/or causes harm. We talked about morality back in point 1; finding something "morally reprehensible" depends in large part (if not absolutely) on what your concept of morality is. And it's easy to accuse something of "causing harm", but I have to ask just what that harm is? Do we harm the poor by advocating giving them welfare? Do we harm the elderly by advocating giving them Social Security and Medicare? Do we harm national security by insisting on military action only as a last resort after careful examination of the evidence and consultation with our allies? Do we harm the public by advocating that the operations of government be disclosed as fully as possible? Is all of this symptomatic of a philosophy of evil, of a powerful elite trying to impose its will on the general public through unaccountable procedures, obfuscation, corruption and even outright deception?

I don't deny that there are politicians out there who claim to be Liberals and yet pursue these very power games. But the Liberal philosophy does not stand for that, and Conservatives should come up with better arguments than "you Liberals are as corrupt as anyone". Liberals may be corrupt, as they and Conservatives have been shown to be throughout history; but we don't discard Conservatism as a philosophy because it has some corrupt adherents, and the same consideration should be extended to Liberalism.

So, here I stand, mind open, waiting to be educated on the evils of Liberalism. Who will take on the task?

Oh, and on the subject of loving this country and what it stands for, I take a backseat to no one. It has been positively heartbreaking to me to watch the great ideals that this country used to (and should still) stand for corrupted and piddled away in the name of economic development and corporate profits. This country is supposed to be a beacon of freedom and democracy, an example to the world. Instead, we curtail our freedoms in the name of security; we discount international law and cooperation when it doesn't suit our purpose; we selectively apply standards of human rights depending on our enemies of the moment; we allow exploitation of foreign labor for our own economic benefit and to the detriment of our own citizens; we pursue unsustainable fiscal policies and bankrupt our children's future for temporary luxury of the few; and on and on. I don't have a negative view of our nation. I'd rather live here than anywhere else on Earth. I DO have a negative view of our current leadership, which seems bent on destroying what has been built over generations with their dreams of empire and wealth. I DO have a negative view of religious fundamentalism, which is opposed to science and reason and wishes to turn back the clock to the 11th century when their power was absolute. I will fight these hydras rhetorically with all the strength I have to muster, and to the extent that I find them in my own nation, I will fight them with doubled effort. I love my country and see it as a powerful force for good in the world, and I will not allow it to be used to spread darkness and despair. See, I can be just as romantic as they are.

Another New Orleans rant

2005-09-02T14:45:00.000-05:00

You know, I don't blame the President a lot for what he's doing right now. It looked bad when he took two days to decide to cut short his vacation (which he shouldn't have been on anyway) because of the disaster, but he did go back to Washington and presumably started kicking some butts to get things moving. A day late and a dollar short for a lot of people, though. The critical mistakes were made earlier.

Fact: the Clinton Administration doesn't get off scot-free on this. They didn't fight for funding for shoring up the levees in the 90's, though after 1994 it is doubtful they could have gotten anything passed in the Congress anyway. But here's another fact: Clinton's director of FEMA was a professional emergency manager who completely rehabilitated the agency, turning it from a "sorry bunch of bureaucratic jackasses" (to quote Sen. Fritz Hollings) into a streamlined, responsive organization that drew praise from local disaster officials around the nation. Ironically, this appointment occurred after hurricane Andrew devastated south Florida and brought attention to FEMA's shortcomings.

Bush's first director of FEMA was a professional politician, who had worked on the 1984 Reagan-Bush campaign and became W.'s chief of staff in Texas. He ran the 2000 campaign and was rewarded with the FEMA post. He resigned in 2003 when FEMA was put under the Department of Homeland Security. The new FEMA director was a professional lawyer before taking his new job, with limited experience in emergency management.

Some leadership! Leadership includes getting the best-qualified people to run your agencies. We can argue about whether Rumsfeld pursues the right strategies or whether Rice is the best ambassador for our country; but they are undeniably qualified for their positions. The Bush FEMA directors have been political operatives and buddies, not emergency preparedness experts. And to the extent that they are planning for things, their superiors at the Department of Homeland Security are focused on terrorism, not domestic natural disasters. So it's not altogether surprising that FEMA falls flat on its face when a real disaster occurs.

Leadership is also being prepared ahead of time for events. We've had five years of the Bush administration having control of all the levers of power; if they were going to do something for New Orleans, they had ample time. There were several warnings put before them over the last years of what could happen if New Orleans sustained a direct hit; yet they were no more inclined to spend money on the region than the Clinton administration had been. In fact, money was shunted away from the Corps of Engineers to help finance the Iraq quagmire. It might seem like Monday-morning quarterbacking; but the fact is, it is their job to plan for these things and have responses prepared. If there was any such plan, I see little evidence of it. Instead it's all shock and surprise and spur-of-the-moment reaction.

So now supplies and troops are finally starting to show up. But the disaster is still unfolding, and it won't end until order is restored and cleanup begins. Then we will count the cost of our leaders ignoring expert advice and choosing political expediency over the welfare of the people.

Answering the Unanswerable

2005-08-15T14:56:00.000-05:00

Left Blogistan is aflame with Cindy Sheehan and her vigil outside the President's ranch. All she wants is for the President to give her an answer to the question: "what noble cause did my son die for?"

Except that's not really the question, is it?

I mean, come on. We're all adults here, right? There's a thousand answers to that question. Take your pick. Oil. Power. Corruption. Distraction from domestic issues. Some combination of those.

No, the real question here is, "why did we, the American people, elect someone like you who would surround himself with sycophants and ideologues? Men and women who would advise you to embark on this fool's errand and sacrifice my son's (and 2000+ others') life for (as it's becoming more and more apparent) nothing?"

That's the question that Cindy Sheehan is really asking, though even she may not know it. It's not surprising to me that the President refuses to answer it. After all, he's the one who got elected.

It's an obvious non-starter. Whatever answer he gives, it's going to be cast in a bad light. And as prone as he is to public speaking mishaps, I think it's probably best that he not meet with Sheehan. I can just imagine his fumbling reply to her question. For myself, I think he truly believed what his advisers were telling him. I don't know the President well enough to say that he purposely went into a cabinet meeting and on his own initiative said "guys, we're going to get Saddam and I don't care how you do it, make it happen." Without proof, I'm not going to subscribe to the pleasing narrative that the Vice President asked him to do it so he could shuffle some business towards his old company.

No, I don't think we can blame the administration, any more than you can blame the scorpion for doing what's in its nature. We have only ourselves to blame for this. We, the American people, elected these people as our government with full knowledge of their ideologies and at least tacit approval of them. In fact, we approved of them so much that we elected them twice. We returned majorities in Congress in support of their policies, and it's likely that we'll do so again.

So there's my answer to Cindy Sheehan, which she will never get from this President. Your son died because the people we elected believed that invading Iraq and ordering its society as we wished was the right thing to do. In my opinion, we made a mistake. But in the majority of Americans' opinions, we did not.

Unintelligent Design

2005-08-04T13:49:00.000-05:00

I posted this on David Brin's blog earlier today...but since it's been forever since I posted here, I thought I'd just paste it in...

This whole "Intelligent Design" thing is a smokescreen to get Creationism back on the table. Remember that Creationism's full name was "Scientific Creationism" when it first came out. Then it turned out that it wasn't so scientific after all, as scientific inquiry poked hole after hole in it, until finally no one outside of the radical religious community promotes it as science anymore. So Plan B is to redefine science to include being able to do thought experiments on your theory, not just being able to prove things with repeatable evidence. And really, what that means is that Philosophy is science too, so philosophers should be put on the same playing field as scientists: anything a philosopher can prove rhetorically (OK, be charitable, through logic) is just as valid as anything a scientist can prove in a lab. After all, they both get Ph.D.s, right? Heh.

String theorists should be ecstatic; if Intelligent Design is science, then there will no longer be any objections to String Theory as being empirically unprovable. But for those of us who love science, it's hard to swallow. Jacare pointed out his discomfort with the "God of the gaps" theory; well, Jacare, ID is exactly that. ID postulates that once science reaches a point of "irreducible complexity", i.e. something whose complexity cannot be explained by science, that complexity must be attributed to an Intelligent Designer. A.K.A. God, but you might have a hard time pinning ID proponents down on that (Diane Rehm had an ID panel on her show this morning, and it was a laugh riot listening to the ID guy squirm and twist trying to avoid saying that the Intelligent Designer was in fact God; Diane kept after him a couple of times but was too sweet to pin him to the wall). They know that as soon as the Intelligent Designer is named God, they're back to trying to teach God in school and that's not going to fly. So they won't call it God; I was itching to call up and ask if the ID guy felt that perhaps it was space aliens who brought single-celled life to earth. After all, if the Intelligent Designer isn't God, it has to be someone, right? (That's the logical, scientific question to ask!) Maybe Stan Lee was right, and it was the Celestials! ROFL.

No, Intelligent Design serves no purpose. It will waste a lot of time as actual scientists are forced to drop what they are doing and shoot this one down just like they did Scientific Creationism. The theory of evolution will not be enhanced by this, as no new scientific evidence will be revealed. Indeed, I think Evolution is largely complete; once the single-celled life gets there, evolution takes hold. Evolution does not try to explain what happens before then or how the single-celled life comes to be, and trying to stretch it to cover that is a mistake. ID guys seize on that as evidence: "see, evolution can't explain how single-celled life comes to be, and if a theory can be shown false in any respect the entire theory must be wrong, therefore evolution is wrong." That isn't science, it's rhetoric, and it misses the point anyway, but people have to be shown how that argument is misdirected. That takes time, time better spent doing science rather than rhetoric; but now we'll have to do it, because thanks to the Enlightenment the religious nutjobs have to have some sort of scientific basis for their faith nowadays (or something that is accepted as scientific, even if it really isn't). It's just another battle in the war between ignorance and reason.

Desperately Seeking Dean

2005-02-17T11:51:00.000-06:00

As a lifelong Democrat I almost completely disagree with Lee Cullum's analysis this morning of the election of Howard Dean as DNC Chairman. Mrs. Cullum appears to proceed from the misguided (if conventional) idea that the only function of political parties is to get candidates elected, and the only candidates who will get elected must pander to "centrist" values. This unfortunate view leads her to question the election of Dr. Dean, who she characterizes as "comic" and typecast as a hotheaded Northeastern Liberal. I would point out that if anything it was her colleagues in the media who accomplished this typecasting, seizing on one campaign event (which was in itself perfectly innocuous) and endlessly repeating it as though it were an obvious disqualification for office and advocating swinging support towards the establishment candidate John Kerry. Howard Dean single-handedly brought to life a lackluster Democratic field in 2003; his energy and willingness to take controversial public stands against the administration fired a grass-roots movement that swept him from obscurity to within hours of staking his claim on the nomination. His marginalization by an (unspoken) alliance of mainstream media and establishment Democrats stands as a low point in the political history of this nation. I firmly believe that Dr. Dean would have won the election and would now be President if the party leadership had stood by him.

Getting back to her piece, Mrs. Cullum is also misguided in believing that either Martin Frost or Ron Kirk would have made a better chairman than Dr. Dean. I respect Mr. Frost and supported him in his race against Pete Sessions. The fact however is that Mr. Frost did not possess the public speaking skill (I would say "charisma") to energize Dallas Democrats to support him enthusiastically enough to defeat similarly snoozeworthy incumbent Republican Pete Sessions. Yes, the new 32nd Congressional district was gerrymandered in such a way as to make it almost impossible for a Democrat to win, but I believe that a sufficiently compelling candidate could have defeated Sessions. Mr. Frost was not that man; and since the DNC chairman is the public face of the party, and we need an energetic person who is able to convincingly and persuasively articulate what the party represents, Mr. Frost is not the man for that job either. Former mayor Ron Kirk is not nationally well-known enough to have had much chance of being elected to the national chairmanship, though I don't doubt he might have been an effective one (at least as effective as Frost might have been, if not moreso).

The overall tone of the piece is especially troubling to me. Statements such as "Howard Dean's stance as an anti-war activist...is not the answer to winning elections in a country gravely concerned about security" and "It's too late now for Dr. Dean to scamper back to the center, where Democrats must run if they expect to win" indicate her advocating total capitulation to the Neoconservatives. Mrs. Cullum apparently thinks that only a Democratic Party that is perceived as "Republican-Lite" has any chance of national success. While this may be true as far as it goes, it is a sorry commentary on the American civil discourse Mrs. Cullum appears to believe we should be having. Party politics should not be a race to the center; it should be an open and honest discussion of differing approaches to the issues of the day. Cultivating political monoculture is a curious stance for a political commentator to take; if all candidates agreed on the issues, there would be no point in having media commentators like Mrs. Cullum (and no point in having elections). Mrs. Cullum should instead be encouraging the rise to prominence of leaders with strongly-held alternative views; leaders like Dr. Dean.

Finally, I must take issue with Mrs. Cullum's opinion that the election of an opinionated Liberal inevitably consigns the Democratic Party to doom and defeat for as long as Dr. Dean is chairman. Rather than allowing the current success of the Conservative movement to drag the Democratic Party towards the center (thus making it more and more like the Republican Party!), Democrats like Dr. Dean are trying to help the Democratic Party stand up for the the good Liberal ideals it has traditionally stood for. There is endless moaning in the media about how the two parties are becoming indistinguishable from each other, how politicians are (or should be) reluctant to take controversial positions because of the need to curry "swing voters", and how elections are about choosing "the lesser of two evils". Well, here is a DNC chairman who is unafraid to take on the Neo-Conservatives and Republicans; not with partisan acrimony and dirty tricks, but with superior organization and persuasive policy initiatives. I believe that the election of Dr. Dean is exactly what the Democratic Party needs in this time of Republican ascendancy. I will do all I can to help him, here in Texas and throughout the nation, and I believe in the end Mrs. Cullum will be forced to admit that his becoming DNC chairman represented a new beginning for the party, and the end of Democratic soul-searching after the losses of 2000 and 2004.

David Brin on Modernism

2005-02-10T16:12:00.000-06:00

One of my favorite authors, David Brin, has been posting an essay on Modernism over on his blog Contrary Brin. Definitely worth reading. In one section, he castigates the Left (i.e. Liberals) for a multitude of self-defeating elitist actions:

"On the left, dogma-driven romantics warped the natural American suspicion of authority (SOA) into a never-ending list of political axes to grind. The fight for civil rights was such a heady and successful thing - overcoming ages of stereotypes and reflex discrimination - that soon every rock had to be turned over, seeking the next and then the next intolerance to expose, amid a drug-high of indignant fury. [snip]...along the way it became less and less about equalizing basic opportunity and ever-more about creating and stoking a movement."

I don't doubt that this may be true. When you think of Liberalism, the image the Conservatives want you to have is of tree-hugging environmental activists, hippies, draft dodgers, and atheist (or even, gasp, pagan) fanatics who want to go back to living in caves. Certainly they have been successful in pushing this image; it's part of what has made "liberal" such a derisive word and anathema to politicians.

I think it's important to keep in mind that all political movements have their fringe elements. Even Conservatives are afflicted with "neo-cons", the Religious Right, and Rush Limbaugh. Fringe elements represent the energy generated by the core values of the movement; something your movement stands for (or says it stands for) has sufficiently inspired someone that they make it their mission in life to see it come to pass. Thus, I don't consider fringe groups to be in and of themselves a bad thing; they are the almost inevitable consequence of a powerful idea.

The danger comes when the tail starts wagging the dog. If the fringe groups' energy and zeal overwhelm the more rational core of the movement, you've got a problem. And it's all too easy for this to happen; the natural tendency of most of us is tolerance for differing views and reluctance to take action (especially in restraint of someone with whom we actually see ourselves in partial agreement). It's easier to let the more vehement people who have the drive to do that sort of thing run our political organization. We have our own business to attend to.

The challenge (as I see it) facing "mainstream" Liberals today is to take back the image of our movement from the fringe groups who have come to define it. Yes, we opposed the draft; but we are not in favor of abolishing the military, for we recognize that it is still necessary to defend ourselves from others. Yes, we want to protect the environment; but not to the extent of preventing all exploitation of resources. Yes, we want to remove religious dogmatism from our public discourse; but this does not mean abolition of religion. We have to demonstrate to undecided people that Liberalism is the movement of personal freedom and that society should be the engine enabling that freedom; while Conservatism is the movement of paternalistic restriction and curtailment of choice. If we can do that, I think we can salvage Liberalism.

A New Day for Liberalism

2004-09-07T15:26:00.000-05:00

"Liberal". The word has been demonized, co-opted and corrupted by those who equate Liberalism with profligacy, idleness, wimpyness. Politicians bend over backwards to avoid being labeled "Liberal"; others go to great lengths to paint their opponents as "Liberals" and therefore automatically disqualified for high office. You almost can't call yourself a Liberal in public these days, and that's a shame.

Study if you will the definition of the word, "Liberal". Merriam-Webster's Online defines it (among other ways) as:

marked by generosity
not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms
of, favoring, or based upon the principles of liberalism

Merriam-Webster's defines political liberalism as "a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties."

That sounds like something I wouldn't mind being associated with.

So, as one small voice in the blogosphere, I set out to rehabilitate the image of liberalism. This blog will contain my political rants and ruminations, and links to stories I think important from the perspective of advancing and promoting liberalism in America. I am proud to call myself a liberal, and I hope anyone reading this blog will see why I think we need more liberalism, not less.