What Should Be Done About Torture?

The left blogosphere has erupted in anger this morning upon news that U.S. government interrogations at Guantanamo Bay may have been modeled on Chinese Communist techniques from the 1950s.

Eric Martin's indignation is classic:

Shame. Profound and bitter shame. I want more from my country than for our top government officials to go diving in the dumpsters of Communist regimes in order to recycle discarded manuals on torture. And for all you apologists and semantic hair splitters that insist on dancing the torture/not torture two step: you've been had. Not that you'd know it or admit it.

Anyway, there's a presidential election this November. One of the candidates, John McCain, wants to continue to permit our government to engage in a policy of torture gleaned from observing the methods employed by brutal Communist regimes. The other candidate, Barack Obama, doesn't.

Tough choice.

Martin's profound simplicity is mirrored by many other anti-administration bloggers. One lefty commentator notes that this story "captures the moral failings of Bush’s war on terror."

But does it? Is the application of torture as state policy so easily reduced to knee-jerk moral condemnation?

I don't think so.

John McCain's campaign website includes this statement on fighting the war on terror:

As President, John McCain will ensure that America has the quality intelligence necessary to uncover plots before they take root, the resources to protect critical infrastructure and our borders against attack, and the capability to respond and recover from a terrorist incident swiftly.

He will ensure that the war against terrorists is fought intelligently, with patience and resolve, using all instruments of national power.

Note that last line: "all instruments of national power." The use of coercive interrogation techniques can be categorized as such, and while McCain is on record as opposing torture, he supported the Bush administration's veto of legislation banning harsh interrogation techniques, saying that there should be some exceptions for U.S. intelligence officials to employ coercive methods.

This stance is what has lefties up in arms.

But note how political scientist Jerome Slater has discussed the problem of torture in U.S. policy:

What should be done about the problem of torture in the war on terrorism? Which is better—or worse: the continuation of a principled but ineffective “ban” on torture, or an effort to seriously regulate and control torture, at the price of its partial legitimization?

Until 11 September 2001, the issue scarcely arose. Since the end of the eighteenth century, nearly every civilized society and moral system, certainly including the Judeo-Christian, or Western, moral system, in principle (although not always in practice) has regarded torture as an unmitigated evil, the moral prohibition against which was to be regarded as absolute. Since September 11, however, many Americans—not just government officials, but a number of moral and legal philosophers, as well as media commentators—are far from sure that torture must be excluded from our defenses against truly catastrophic terrorism. In any case, there no longer can be any question that since September 11, agencies of the American government, particularly the armed forces and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), have systematically used various forms of physical and psychological coercion, beatings, or even outright torture (especially “waterboarding,” or near-drowning) on suspected terrorists, both directly, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, or indi-rectly, by turning over suspected terrorists to allied states that are known to torture.

To be sure, in some cases, lower-level soldiers have apparently gone beyond what was authorized, or at least tacitly condoned. However, various reports and nvestigations have left no serious doubt that the overall use of methods that have long been considered to amount to torture, or something close to it, have been either authorized, defended as legal, or, at a minimum, condoned at the highest levels of the American government, apparently including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, if not beyond him.

Assuming that this assessment is accurate, what can be done about it? Even more pointedly, what should be done about it? I will address these issues in the framework of traditional just-war analysis, a very useful perspective that often has been neglected in the recent discussions about torture. My premise is that the war on Islamic terrorism is indeed legitimately regarded as a war, however nontraditional; if so, I will argue, the issues raised by torture should be regarded as simply a special case of the issues raised by any normally unjust means that may or may not be employed in a just war.

Slater's argument is carefully drawn, but he concludes torture's sometimes necessary:

Put differently, so long as the threat of large-scale terrorist attacks against innocents is taken seriously, as it must be, it is neither practicable nor morally persuasive to absolutely prohibit the physical coercion or even outright torture of captured terrorist plotters—undoubtedly evils, but lesser evils than preventable mass murder. In any case, although the torture issue is still debatable today, assuredly the next major attack on the United States—or perhaps Europe—will make it moot. At that point, the only room for practical choice will be between controlled and uncontrolled torture—if we are lucky. Far better, then, to avoid easy rhetoric and think through the issue while we still have the luxury of doing so.

See also, Daily Pundit, "You Morons, We Are Not Engaged In A Game of Patty-Cake Here," and Captain Ed, "ChiCom tactics used at Gitmo?"

Barack Obama's Radical Friends

Here's a follow-up to my post last night on '60-era radical Carl Davidson's (un) endorsement of Barack Obama.

It turns out TigerHawk's got a short video clip asking, will Obama's radical friends "be welcomed in an Obama White House":

TigerHawk adds this:

There are those who argue that it is unfair to attack Obama for these friendships; Dohrn and Ayers are dug into the bourgeoisie now, and all sorts of respectable people -- big firm Chicago lawyers, well-known professors, and Hyde Park soccer moms -- are also friends with them. Supposedly reformed radicals from the 1960s, even the violent ones, are chic now among people who think it is cute that their children wear "Che" t-shirts. But most Americans -- those who are not members of the academic left or their hangers-on -- are not so willing to forgive the radicals who tore up our country between 1967 and 1975 or so. It is more than legitimate to ask somebody who wants to lead our nation why he is not only willing to forgive such people, but befriend them and enlist them in his political career.

Click here for additional commentary.

Barack Obama and the Jewish Vote

Jennifer Rubin, at the Jerusalem Post, explains "Why More Jews Won't Be Voting Democrat This Year":

Defenders of Barack Obama, and sometimes Obama himself, seem frustrated that some American Jews refuse to assume their traditional role of support for the Democratic presidential nominee. The Obama defenders are irked that not all Jews accept at face value Obama's expressions of devotion to Israel and commitment to her security....

In every significant interaction in Obama's adult life with those who distain and vilify Israel - from Rashid Khalidi to Reverend Jeremiah Wright to Louis Farrakhan - Obama has demonstrated passive resignation and indifference.

He did not stand up to his friend Khalidi, the Palestinian activist, professor and former Palestinian spokesman whom Obama honored at a farewell dinner, and object to Palestinian invectives that Israel was an apartheid state. He did not recoil, until Wright insulted him at the National Press Club, from Wright when he learned that Wright considered Israel a "dirty word" and postulated that Israel had invented an "ethnic bomb."

He did not heed (or was oblivious to) public pleas from Jewish organizations to avoid the Million Man March that Farrakhan organized; nor did he years later leave his church when it honored Farrakhan. It took a hateful rant from another wide-eyed preacher against Hillary Clinton, just when Obama needed to cool intra-party animosities, to do that.

AND IF any further proof were needed, Obama's actions with regard to the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, the measure to classify the Iranian National Guard as a terrorist organization, should settle the question of Obama's intestinal fortitude when it comes to Israel. An issue presented itself: a choice between, on the one hand, taking a stance against Israel's most vile enemy, Iran, and, on the other, appeasing the far Left of his own party.

Obama chose to satisfy the MoveOn.org crowd and opposed the amendment. The amendment would have been "saber rattling" and unduly provocative, Obama argued at the time. Senators Dick Durbin, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton and three quarters of the US Senate voted for the amendment.

Once his nomination was secured, Obama told those assembled at the AIPAC convention that he supported classification of the Iranian National Guard as a terrorist organization, a move he well understood was important to Israel's security and to AIPAC's members. Yet under just a smidgen of political pressure during the primary race, he had not been able to muster the will to support a modest measure which inured to Israel's benefit.

IS THERE anything in all this to suggest that in a potential crisis, when much of the world would be pressuring him to let Israel die, Obama would push all the naysayers aside and demand to "send them everything that can fly"? There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that he would be beyond persuasion when it came down to Israel's survival. In fact, all the available evidence indicates that the opposite is true.

That does not mean Obama will not carry the majority of the Jewish vote. Jews are overwhelmingly Democratic, and it is certainly the case that for many American Jews the secular liberal agenda takes precedence over everything else in presidential politics.

For these voters... [their] devotion to liberalism is controlling, and for their own peace of mind they are willing to accept Obama's generic expressions of warm feelings toward Israel.

Indeed the temptation to believe in Obama's bland promises of support for Israel is a tempting one for liberal Jews. If they can convince themselves that he will be "fine on Israel," no conflict arises between their liberal impulses and their concern for Israel. The urge to believe is a powerful thing, especially when the alternative is an intellectual or moral quandary....

BUT SOME Jews are incapable of deluding themselves that Obama would be the most resolute candidate in defending Israel. In quiet moments of contemplation and in noisy debates with family members and friends, they worry about the tenuous nature of Israel's existence and the dangers which lurk from within and outside Israel's borders. These Jews cannot imagine a world without Israel and could not countenance election of a president who, in Israel's moment of peril, could well falter.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

**********

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald accuses Rubin of attacking the "divided loyaties" of American Jews, the same attack that last week got Joe Klein in hot water:

"Anti-semitism" accusations have been cynically exploited for so long by right-wing advocates as a bludgeon to silence debates over Middle East policy and for cheap political gain that the accusation has become trivialized to the point of irrelevance. Most ironically of all, the ADL -- whose ostensible central mission is to battle the trivialization of anti-Semitism and Nazism -- has played a leading role in this degradation, constantly exploiting its once-credible imprimatur in highly politicized ways which have nothing to do with real anti-semitism (such as Klein's perfectly legitimate commentary) and everything to do with promoting a hard-line policy in the Middle East and against Iran which is now one of the ADL's top priorities.

Smearing people as anti-Semites for cheap political gain is repellent in its own right and merits a response. But this tactic is particularly dangerous now, as the pressure is obviously being ratcheted up in numerous circles to pursue a far more bellicose policy towards Iran. Responding to the types of disgusting smears that are in Rubin's column and many other places, Obama not only appeared before AIPAC last month and vowed that "the danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat"; that Iran's "Quds force has rightly been labeled a terrorist organization"; and "I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon," but also, when asked last week by a Fox News host to play a "word association game" whereby he should say the first word that comes into his mind, Obama -- when the word was "Iran" -- responded as follows: "threat."

As one who's followed that debate fairly closely, I think Klein's critics handled themselves gracefully. The truth is that Joe Klein's in a moral ditch on the Iraq war, and he was rightly taken down for disparaging the Jewish community for alleged "divided loyalties" on the American invasion.

What's interesting here is how Glenn Greenwald, who's been characterized as a "frenzied conspiracy" theorist, is at it again with his unhinged attacks on anyone who has the nerve to support a firm stand agianst the forces arrayed against the Jewish state.

Carl Davidson, 60s-Era Radical, Denies Obama Endorsement

Why would any left-wing activist - especially a founding executive of the '60s-era radical group, Students for a Democratic Society - go to all the trouble of launching a "Progressives for Obama" movement, and then turn around and declaim any formal endorsement of the Democratic presidential nominee?

It doesn't make much sense, but that's exacty what '60s-radical Carl Davidson did yesterday in a comment at Goat's Barnyard, "All That Is Old Is New Again":

Today I run 'Progressives for Obama', a web site completely independent of him. We distance ourselves from him, and he can do likewise. Technically, we don't even endorse him; we simply say he's our 'best option.' So there's no need for him to reject what's not there. We do want people to vote for him, mainly as a way to end this horrible, unjust and stupid war.

Goat's Barnyard had posted on Daniel Flynn's penetrating essay at City Journal, "Obama’s Boys of Summer: A Who’s Who of 1968 Radicals Supports the Candidate."

While Davidson denies endorsing Obama, his website, "Progressives for Obama," prominently displays this statement:

All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama. We descend from the proud tradition of independent social movements that have made America a more just and democratic country. We believe that the movement today supporting Barack Obama continues this great tradition of grass-roots participation drawing millions of people out of apathy and into participation in the decisions that affect all our lives...

There's more at the link (and here and here) - and if that's not an endorsement, maybe I need to go back to school for some postmodern (re)education.

But check out a recent article on Davidson's support for Obama, "Radical from '60s Stoked by Barack: Students for a Democratic Society Leader Now Webmaster for Progressives for Obama":

He didn't bomb the Capitol or rob banks like his contemporaries in the Weather Underground.

But Carl Davidson, a former vice president of the Students for a Democratic Society who traveled to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro and still praises the dictator today, is another proud radical for Barack Obama, serving faithfully as webmaster for "Progressives for Obama."

He joins his old SDS collaborator, Tom Hayden, who traveled with Jane Fonda to meet with Vietnamese communist leaders during the height of the Vietnam war. In fact, Fonda, too, Hayden's ex-wife, is part of Progressives for Obama.

Obama recently came under scrutiny for his relationship with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, two leaders of the communist revolutionary Weather Underground responsible for bombing the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, police stations and other targets in the 1970s.

Ayers and Dohrn, now married, went underground after she was charged with instigating riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 and after several of their fellow SDS Weatherman associates were killed when bombs they were building blew up in a Greenwich Village townhouse. One of those killed was Ayers girlfriend at the time, Diana Oughton. The group was planning to bomb Fort Dix Army Base in New Jersey.

Dohrn publicly celebrated the group's maiming of Chicago prosecutor Richard Elrod in the Chicago riots. In 1970, rich kid Ayers, son of the chairman of Commonwealth Edison, explained what the Weather Underground was all about: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at."

Following the mass murders of actress Sharon Tate and others by disciples of Charles Manson, Dohrn had this to say: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" Dohrn went on to suggest adopting a "fork" salute might be appropriate for her fellow homicidal maniacs.

Perhaps Davidson's ashamed of his past leadership in an organization pledged to the overthrow of the United States? Perhaps he's realized that his support for Obama might ultimately be a liability for Democratic Party hopes in November?

Indeed, the history of America's domestic enemies on the left llustrates how agressively these radicals have sought an "image makeover." At one time, folks like Davidson proclaimed themselves the "new left," only to discard that label when it became synonymous with bomb-throwing nihilists.

Today's "progressives" are simply unreconstructed revolutionaries who have jettisoned the in-your-face nomenclature of earlier days as too provocative for the mainstream:

By the '70s, many '60s veterans had concluded that working 'within the system' had become a viable option. As a result, many leftists stopped using rhetoric and slogans that had marginalized them from the political mainstream. Labels like 'radical', 'leftist', and 'revolutionary' sounded stale and gratuitously provocative. And so, gradually, activists began to use the much less threatening 'progressive.' Today, 'progressive' is the term of choice for practically everyone who has a politics that used to be called 'radical.'

It's no surprise that leftists are embarrassed by their own history of extremism. They seek not only to divorce themselves from their predecessors, but to cleanse themselves of the slimy ignominy of revolutionary agitation. This cleansing effort is so schizophrenically hypocritical that we see the same types of people who decry the label "radical" turning around simultaneously to demonize the right as "pseudo-fascist."

And in the case of Carl Davidson - who's a perfect specimen of this shameful history - he'll declaim endorsing Barack Obama's presidential campaign while simultaneously championing it.

This is fundamentally dishonest, but that's a key characteristic of a great many on the far-left.

Left-Wing Hypocrisy and the McCain Smear

Jacob Laskin illustrates the left's abject hypocrisy in this week's attacks on John McCain's fitness to serve as commander-in-chief:

DURING THE 2004 ELECTION, Democrats and their allies on the activist Left were adamant that a candidate’s military record was strictly off-limits to criticism. John Kerry was a war hero, and to suggest different was, as columnist David Ignatius averred, defamation. It turns out these partisans meant to exempt themselves from the rule.

As an example, observe the nascent smear campaign against John McCain’s military service. This past weekend, retired general and declared Barack Obama backer Wesley Clark went on CBS’s Face the Nation, where he proceeded to dismiss the import of McCain’s military background in the current race. “I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president,” Clark sniffed. The real issue, according to Clark, was that McCain was “untested and untried.”

McCain’s campaign was quick to condemn Clark’s comments. Secretly, though, it must have been pleased. With his surrogates blasting away at McCain’s war record, Obama was left exposed on several flanks. If McCain, with his 22-year career in the Navy and his 26-years in Congress, is “untested and untried,” what then is one to make of Obama, whose single term in the senate is most notable for its pious adherence to liberal orthodoxy? Meanwhile, to discount McCain’s distinguished military career – his honors include the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, the Purple Heart, and the Distinguished Flying Cross – as nothing more than “getting into a fighter plane and getting shut down” is to traffic in precisely the kind of sleazy politics that Obama, once upon a time, professed to reject. Of all the fights one could pick with McCain, the battle over his war service surely is the most ill-advised. Recognizing the fact, Obama later rejected Clark’s statement through a spokesman.

But according to Obama’s supporters on the Left, he was wrong to do so. On liberal blogs, it’s de rigueur to sneer that McCain’s naval service is actually a sham, his accomplishments falsely inflated to sell the senator as a war hero. In this account, McCain is a serial incompetent who “lost” five planes as a pilot. As a writer on the Huffington Post recently put it, “From day one in the Navy, McCain screwed-up again and again, only to be forgiven because his father and grandfather were four-star admirals.”

That is one way to look at it. Another is that McCain’s critics are shamefully ignorant of the war record they disparage.

Take the planes that McCain lost, allegedly through his bungling. Even a brief review of the record indicates otherwise. Twice, McCain’s planes experienced engine failure, forcing him to eject. In both cases, McCain biographer Paul Alexander observes, McCain survived a crash “that occurred through no fault of his own.” On another occasion, in July of 1967, McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk, then aboard the USS Forrestal air craft carrier, was destroyed when a missile accidentally fired from another plane struck its fuel tank. McCain barely survived the blast, and 134 soldiers were killed in the ensuing blaze. Most famously, in October of 1967, McCain was shot down over North Vietnam by a surface-to-air missile. Ejecting from the plane, McCain broke both his arms upon landing and was captured by the Vietnamese; he would spend the next six brutal years as a prisoner of war.

None McCain’s fault, these crashes would seem merely to affirm his dedication to his country in the face of life-threatening trials and tribulations. And while it is true that McCain could have benefitted from the prestige of his admiral father, he specifically declined to do so, refusing his Vietnamese captors’ offer to be released so that comrades who had been imprisoned longer could be set free. In the face of this evidence, to portray McCain as a screw-up son of privilege is to invert the truth.

And that's not the end of the left's hypocritical ignorance - there's more at the link.

See also, James Kirchick, "Who's Smearing Whom?", and Domenico Montanaro, " McCain Camp: Obama's 'Wink and Nod'."

Photo Credit: FrontPageMag

The Ideological Foundations of the Obama Phenomenon

There is great concern among many that the Barack Obama phenomenon represents some type of crypto-religious millenarian movement. More often than not, the phenomenon is characterized as proto-fascist.

An excellent general example along these lines is found in Arthur Silber's post, "It's the 1930s, and You Are There," which includes this:

People had better wake the hell up, and they had better study some history very damned fast. I have sometimes remarked, and I repeat the warning here, that the twentieth century was a nonstop train of horrors -- yet in one sense, the most terrible and horrifying aspect of the twentieth century is that we learned absolutely nothing from it.

Among the horrors of the twentieth century were several notable leaders who initiated events that led to slaughter and destruction on an ungraspably monumental scale. These charismatic leaders evoked a response from their followers almost identical to that called forth by Obama. These leaders specialized in "personal stories of political conversion." Doesn't anyone see the connection? Doesn't anyone remember any of this?

Silber's post is illustrated with fabulous personal stories of conversion among Obama's growing following, but what's noteworthy is that he doesn't suggest that Obama represents a fascist movement - only that similar national phenomena toward millenarian totatitarianism marked the interwar years.

Of course, there are only two alternative choices: Nazism (fascism) and Marxism-Leninism.

Probably because of the Jewish Holocaust, Nazism generates the most powerful recoil as a political epithet, but in terms of sheer numbers, more people died under Joseph Stalin's Soviet totalitarianism in the 1930s, and the scale of evil in Stalin's personality cult was a culmination of long process of growing annihilationist ideological development starting in the late 19th century. The classic work on this is Hannah Arendt's, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which combines an analysis of extreme ideology on both the left and right into a single unifying theme explaining the conditions and growth of the totalitarian state.

I'll have more on this, but I'll say right now that I don't see Obama's movement as fascist. As I've written before ("Should Revolutionaries Feel Good About Obama?"), I see Obama as more in the Leninist mode of a "vanguard" leader, who has the charismatic oratorical power to shape the emergence of a new ideological regime; and that program is decidedly Marxist-Leninist in its essential foundations.

Jesse Taylor at Pandagon's got no time to work through some of these details: He just erupts in frustration to denounce claims that "Barack Obama is leading a crypto-messianic, quasi-fascist movement." Taylor piles on the anger by denouncing Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism, as "a complete f**king idiot."

I haven't read Goldberg's book, but it's on my list. I am reading two works of great relevance currently, Saul Friedlander's, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, and Robert Paxton's, The Anatomy of Fascism.

Suffice to say, that the origins of Barack Obama's great successes, as well as the nature of his crypto-religious phenomenology, are not in the same league as the crises that swept the states of Europe following World War I. These for a most part included the breakdown of the old regime and the emergence of mass political demands before the consolidation of democratic constitutionalism. In this environment, authoritarian, paternalist, racist and anti-Semitic, and anti-rational ideologies were allowed to foment and coalesce under strong personalist leadership.

The circumstances are greatly different in the United States today, with the most important factor being the deep system of constitutional order that is the basis for legitimate power in the U.S.

President George Bush is no more fascist than is Barack Obama or a potential Obama adminstration. Further, an Obama administration will hardly resemble Joseph Stalin's totalitarian regime.

We are seeing something wierdly ethereal in Barack Obama's groundswell of support. People have seen some kind of messianism in this, and that's to be understood in the combination of Obama's great skills and in his fundamental difference from what's come before him in our national leaders.

I can speak with more authority on this after I've read Goldberg's book, but one of Paxton's main points is that the emergence of fascism is fundamentally un-ideological. There's little record of written doctrinal statements in the history of fascist movements, particularly in Italy. These groups just adapt opportunistically, grasping on to the will of the people, often with militaristic and anti-industrial appeals.

More on this later. I think Arthur Silber's right to note similarities between the current election and trends in the 1930s. It's the exact shape of those trends that are at issue, and understanding them will take a lot more work than Jesse Taylor's unhinged rants at Jonah Goldberg.

No Aberration: Neoconservatism and U.S. Foreign Policy

World Affairs has published a stimulating debate on Robert Kagan's recent article, "Neocon Nation: Neoconservatism, c. 1776." The participants include David Rieff, George Packer, and Ronald Steel, and Kagan responds to his critics.

The most powerful essay is Rieff's, who is one of the great liberal internationalist thinkers on the left of the foreign policy spectrum. Rieff is critical of Kagan's "binary" thinking, and he suggests Kagan dismisses too easily "the anti-interventionist, anti-millennarian tradition on liberal internationalism." But, for the most part, Rieff agrees with Kagan's argument on the essential neoconservatism of America's foreign policy tradition:

Doubtless, neoconservatism is only one modern iteration of America’s special mission to bring democracy to the world, at the point of a gun if necessary. But the liberal internationalist tradition is a distinct reality as well, and Kagan goes too far in trying to marginalize it in his otherwise useful and bracing piece....

Having said that, it seems to me Kagan is absolutely right to insist that what we now call neoconservatism is “no aberration” within the American foreign policy tradition, and to mock the idea that, as he puts it, American imperialism was “some deviation from tradition foisted on an unsuspecting nation by clever ideologues”—the view that does indeed dominate the current thinking of liberals and the Democratic Party, which is awfully convenient given that it allows them to blame everything on the Bush administration, and somehow find it coherent to oppose the war in Iraq but back regime change in Khartoum in order to “save” the people of Darfur (regime change being the inevitable consequence, indeed a sine qua non, of any serious effort to intervene in that region, whether activists wish to admit this fact or not). Kagan is also correct, it seems to me, in pointing out how widespread support for the war in Iraq was among liberal Democrats and born-again realists when it still looked like things would go well and when the Bush administration was riding high. An argument about first principles between the American mainstream and the neoconservatives? Give me a break.

There is something absurdly smug and legalistic about the liberal view. Take, for example, the celebrated phrase widely attributed to Richard Holbrooke—our perennially self-anointed secretary of state in whatever Democratic administration that comes along—that the United Nations works best when there is “real” U.S. leadership. That may be literally true (though I think all it really means is that, structured as it is, the UN can do nothing serious that America opposes). But Holbrooke was almost certainly trying to make the larger point that the context of multilateralism, if respected by the U.S., both legitimated U.S. power and somehow transformed that power into the power of what we absurdly continue to call the “international community.” To this one could add the effort by the Princeton Project on National Security, led by Anne-Marie Slaughter and John Ikenberry, to wrap American hegemony in the sanitizing cloak of a concert of (world) democracies. No doubt the fifth-century B.C. Athenians, too, preferred the term Delian League, which after all was the correct name for the alliance of 150 city-states of which Athens was far and away the most powerful, to the Athenian empire. Empires claiming to be democracies always have this problem, and the U.S. is hardly the first empire to claim to be a democracy.

In short, if the distinction between liberal internationalists and so-called neoconservatives can be boiled down to the fact that liberals seek an America that is hegemonic, is the last best hope of mankind, is entitled to establish international rule sets (after consultation, to be sure), but one that acts, in Jefferson’s celebrated phrase, with “respect for the decent opinions of mankind” and emphasizes so-called soft power, while neoconservatives largely seek the same hegemony—but believe that because the U.S. is the last best hope on earth, has the most military power, and the will to use it, then when in doubt its views should prevail—frankly what we are looking at here is the perfect illustration of Freud’s “narcissism of small differences,” not two fundamentally different approaches to the conduct of American foreign policy.

There's more at the link.

I would just add that when Rieff - not to mention Kagan - suggests that liberal internationalists are closely aligned to neoconservatives in basic orientation, they automatically exclude from the analysis those on the far left of the spectrum, antiwar types who have argued against the Iraq war root and branch, and who have mercilessly criticized "liberal war hawks" for their initial support of the invasion.

This leftist antiwar school can be labelled "radical pacifism," and it might best be seen in Matthew Yglesias' recent writings on Iraq, and U.S. foreign policy more generally.

Yglesias is now considered a "foreign policy god" by Josh Marsall, and additional radical pacifists include, among others, Spencer Ackerman, TBogg, Digby, the Newshoggers crew, and to a lesser extent, Andrew Sullivan (a former neocon doing his best to get in on the good graces of the nihilist left).

The radical pacifists might claim the label "liberal internationalists" (that's Yglesias' game), but they are generally quite distinct from genuine institutionalists in their orientation toward the use of force, which - so far in my readings of these people - has yet to be considered a legitimate alternative in debates on current U.S. foreign policy (on cases like Iranian nukes or outside intervention in Burma).

Revolutionary Roster: 1968 Radicals for Obama

Daniel Flynn, over at City Journal, offers a "who's who" of '60s-era radicals who are backing Barack Obama's presidential campaign, starting with Maoist Communist Mike Klonsky:

Michael Klonsky is hardly the only ’68 radical supporting Obama this year. In 1968, when Mark Rudd organized the student strike that shut down Columbia University, the SDS chapter that he chaired ridiculed Kennedy and McCarthy as “McKennedy,” claimed that “neither peace candidate offers an alternative to the war policies of Lyndon Johnson,” and suggested “sabotage” as an alternative to voting. Rudd succeeded Klonsky as national SDS leader, presiding over the organization’s metamorphosis into Weatherman and performing “a liaison function” for the plot to bomb a Fort Dix soldiers’ dance that instead killed three Weathermen, including two of Rudd’s Columbia SDS colleagues. Today, Rudd renounces bombs, embraces ballots—and supports Obama. “Probably the biggest difference between Columbia SDS people in 1968 and in 2008 is forty years,” Rudd explained in an e-mail. “Most of us have lived with compromise our whole lives. As kids we were raving idealists who thought that ‘The elections don’t mean shit’ was a slogan that meant something to somebody. It didn’t.”

Then there’s Carl Davidson, who was one of SDS’s three elected national officers in 1968, when the organization first urged young people to refrain from voting. His disillusionment with traditional politics became so pronounced that, in the post-sixties hangover that followed, Davidson joined Klonsky in rejecting traditional politics for fringe Marxist movements. More recently, he helped organize the 2002 rally in which Obama first spoke out against the Iraq War and now serves as the webmaster of Progressives for Obama. “The last thing we need is a simple repeat of 1968, which saw Nixon and the new Right as an outcome, as well as the defeat of [Humphrey],” Davidson contends. “One thing I’ve learned. Social change is not made by elections, but it certainly proceeds through them, not by ignoring them or chasing the illusion of end runs around them.”

Former SDS president Tom Hayden is also in the Obama camp. Hayden organized the made-for-TV protest outside the 1968 Chicago convention. But the catharsis of throwing debris at the Chicago police, the purer-than-thou sanctimony that tolerated no distinction between Lyndon Johnson and Eugene McCarthy, and the exhilaration of “voting in the streets” instead of in election booths combined to ensure liberal defeats. Hayden’s orchestrated anarchy proved more damaging to Humphrey’s presidential aspirations than any dirty trick Nixon’s henchmen could have dreamed up. Klonsky remembers Hayden plotting to spread nails on a highway; another SDS leader recalls Hayden encouraging activists to firebomb police cars. If the Democrats couldn’t run a convention, many Americans wondered, how could they run the country? “Did the radicalism of Chicago elect Richard Nixon?” Hayden asked, clearly pained, in his 1988 memoir. “Having struggled with that question for twenty years, I find there is no ‘neat’ answer.”

Now Hayden is one of the organizers of Progressives for Obama. “The difference is that back then the Democratic Party was directly carrying out the Vietnam War, which meant there was no anti-war critic to vote for after Kennedy was assassinated and McCarthy defeated by the establishment,” he offered in an e-mail last month. “Today the Republican Party is directly carrying out the war, which obviously will make a lot of people favor changing the presidency despite the uncertainty of what the Democratic candidate will do when in office.”

Progressives for Obama resembles a Who’s Who of SDS luminaries. In addition to Hayden, Rudd, and Davidson, the group includes Bob Pardun, SDS’s education secretary during the 1966–67 school year; Paul Buhle, a radical professor who has recently attempted to revive SDS; Mickey and Dick Flacks, red-diaper babies who helped craft 1962’s Port Huron Statement, a seminal New Left document; and SDS’s third president, Todd Gitlin. Age and experience have mellowed some of the SDSers in Obama’s camp. Gitlin, for instance, has evolved into a respected Ivy League professor and milquetoast liberal. But others still glory in a past that can only damage Obama’s future. The aging New Left still practices a therapeutic politics that places a higher value on feelings of personal liberation than on restrained pursuit of political aims.

Read the whole thing, at the link.

I've previously chronicled extreme left-wing support for the Obama campaign.

See, for example, "No Enemies on the Left? Progressives for Barack Obama," where I discuss Tom Hayden's recent mobilization in "progressive" electoral radicalism.

Obama to Speak on Patriotism

I haven't gotten the opposition's political intelligence reports, but I suspect operatives in the Obama camp might just be taking some cues from American Power

Readers will recall, I asked, in an earlier post:

Can Obama make clear that his patriotism's not just a snooty love of his successes, but of a genuine pride in nation that harks to the most traditional notions of conservative nationalism?

It turns out Obama does want to clarify this issue, according to CNN, "Obama to Deliver 'Major Speech' on Patriotism":

Presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama plans to deliver what his campaign is calling a "major speech" Monday, centering around an issue he's been trying to highlight for months now: his patriotism.

The remarks come in Harry Truman's hometown of Independence, Missouri, just days before the Fourth of July.

"Sen. Obama will discuss what patriotism means to him and what it requires of all Americans who love this country and want to see it do better," Obama spokesman Bill Burton wrote in a morning email to reporters.

The Illinois senator has been defending his patriotism ever since the days of Iowa when he was first criticized for not wearing a flag pin — which he now does much more frequently — and when false rumors began circulating that he did not say the Pledge of Allegiance.

He was also seen without his hand over his heart during a rendition of the National Anthem.

Obama's wife, Michelle, has been on the receiving end of attacks over her patriotism, after telling an audience at a campaign event, "For the first time in my adult lifetime I'm really proud of my country."

Senator Obama will follow up Monday's speech on patriotism with a Tuesday address focused on faith, and remarks on service Wednesday and Thursday. He will spend Friday, July 4 in Butte, Montana — with the whole Obama family out on the trail.

Obama needs this patriotism speech to go over a little better than his disastrous address on race at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center." For even if Obama hits a home run, the left's patriotism gap's going to linger well into the fall campaign and beyond.

See also, Gateway Pundit, "Ruh-Roh... Another "Major Speech" By Obama - This Time On Patriotism."

(Plus, the prepared text of Obama's speech is available online.)

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UPDATE: Obama has now delivered the speech. See, "Obama Tries to Answer Questions of Patriotism," and "Obama Criticizes MoveOn.org in Patriotism Speech ."

Israel Prisoner Swap Extracts Emotional Toll

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agreed to a prisoner swap with the terrorist organization Hezbollah, the Los Angeles Times reports:

The Israeli Cabinet's approval Sunday of a prisoner swap with the militant group Hezbollah touched off cries of victory in Lebanon and sparked fresh debate within the Jewish state over the price of its determination to retrieve missing soldiers.

After weeks of emotional public speculation and a six-hour Cabinet debate, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government voted 22 to 3 in favor of a deal that would return two captured Israeli soldiers. Olmert acknowledged Sunday that they were probably dead.

In return for the men or their bodies, Hezbollah would receive several imprisoned Lebanese militants, the bodies of about a dozen other fighters and the release of a still-unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners.

Hezbollah's leadership still has to approve the deal, but the Shiite Muslim group on Sunday hailed it as a victory for the strategy of armed resistance....

The deal touches deep and controversial emotional chords that resonate through Israel's national psyche. The retrieval of captured soldiers is a core national value in a country where military service is mandatory for most.

"The state has an essential commitment to its citizens," said Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz. "We must convey this moral message so that every citizen, every soldier and every parent knows the country will do everything to bring its soldiers back."

But that national priority is offset by fear that a dangerous precedent would be set.

Yossi Beilin, a member of Israel's parliament, or Knesset, criticized the terms of the deal, saying: "The principle must be live prisoners for living soldiers, bodies for the dead."

If groups such as Hezbollah or Hamas "understand that Israel is willing to pay the same price for its captive whether dead or alive, then they will make no effort to keep them alive," Beilin said. "This is a difficult thing to say, but it is in Israel's national and security interest to maintain the principle."

This is a very difficult issue, and I fear that for Israel to complete the prisoner swap will indeed embolden the terrorists and result in additional abductions. On the other hand, the emotional costs of doing nothing - for a country that fights the forces of evil like no other - might have been even more unbearable than the risks of further conflict.

I can when remember President Ronald Reagan, who was so firm in his public statements that the United States would not negotiate for the release of hostages, ultimately took full responsiblility - during the Iran-Contra Affair - for the arms-for-hostage exchanges the resulted in the release of captive Americans in the 1980s.

I'll have updates later.

Photo Credit: "Demonstrators in Jerusalem hold posters of captured Israeli soldiers Gilad Shalit, left, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. Israel worked out an exchange with Hezbollah for the latter two, who were seized in 2006 and are now thought to be dead," Los Angeles Times.

Democrats Challenge McCain's Presidential Qualifications

The news this morning, on cable and on the web, is the statement from Wesley Clark that John McCain's military service is not qualification for the Oval Office. Here's the key quote, from the transcript:

Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be President.

This isn't the brightest line of attack against McCain, but such slurs aren't new: Gloria Steinem and Wesley Clark attacked McCain's military service during the primaries.

What's interesting is how eveyone's touting 2008 as the big Democratic year, but if things are going so well - if the Dems have such a slam dunk - why must leftist partisans resort to the most rank personal attacks to make the sale?

Indeed, John Aravosis sinks to allegations of treason against McCain:

Yes, we all know that John McCain was captured and tortured in Vietnam (McCain won't let you forget). A lot of people don't know, however, that McCain made a propaganda video for the enemy while he was in captivity. Putting that bit of disloyalty aside, what exactly is McCain's military experience that prepares him for being commander in chief?

I'm most of the way through John McCain's family memoir, Faith of My Fathers. Reading that book ought to be answer enough, for any fair-minded person, as to McCain's background experience and fitness to serve as the nation's chief executive. Add McCain's Senate career in foreign relations, and his judgment and leadership on national security, and there's really no comparison between McCain and Barack Obama (whose leadership experience includes a legacy of dilapidated public housing in Chicago).

Strata-Sphere's got a theory of the left's attacks on McCain's record, "Ugly Liberals: Only Care If Terrorists Are Tortured, Not If Americans Are":

The “Ugly Liberal” is coming out in the Democrat Party. A close cousin to the Ugly American - who would go to Europe and other places and display such arrogance and snobbery that it gave all America a bad reputation - this is the election for the Ugly Liberal. It is their hate of Americans, conservatives, life, etc that drives them. They are a constant insult machine, tearing down others to prop up their insecurity. They run their little fantasies about how only they can save humanity from itself.

I doubt this is a winning angle for the lefties, but let's see how it plays out. In the meanwhile, here's a YouTube of Clark making an attack on McCain's experience earlier in June:

See also, Ben Smith, "Some on Left Target McCain's War Record."

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UPDATE: As a response to the moral equivalence in my comments, let me refer readers to Rick Moran's breathtaking analysis, "Honestly, Is John Aravosis a Piece of Excrement or What?"

It turns out that Aravosis led a "peeping Tom" expedition to catch GOP operatives engaged in homosexual intercourse, events which ultimately led to an unauthorized "outing" campaign against the targets in a public relations smear attack.

Just add Aravosis to the type of usual suspects I discussed last night in my post, "Think Progress Lies About McCain - Again!"

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UPDATE II: From NBC's Andrea Mitchell, the Obama campaign, has rejected Wesley Clark's comments on John McCain's fitness to serve as commander-in-chief.

See also, Lawhawk, "Bus and Driver: Wesley Clark Edition" (Clark's the latest to be thrown under the bus...).

Poll: Democrats Favored for House Majority in November

Gallup reports that the Democrats are expected to retain majority control of the House of Representatives in the November elections:

The Democratic Party is in a good position to retain its majority status in Congress this November. Democrats lead the Republicans by 51% to 40% in the party preferences for Congress among all registered voters, and by 52% to 42% among likely voters.

This is according to Gallup's "generic ballot" question, asking Americans which party's candidate they would vote for in their congressional district if the election were held today. The USA Today/Gallup survey was conducted June 15-19, 2008.

The Democrats' 11-point advantage among registered voters is slightly less than what Gallup found in mid-February -- at that time, the Democrats led by 55% to 40% -- however, it still puts them in a comfortable position heading into the fall.

The current registered-voter results are identical to those from Gallup's final pre-election survey in 2006. In that election, the Democrats wrested majority control of Congress from the Republicans, winning 53% of all votes cast nationally for congressional candidates, to the Republicans' 45%. The implication of this, of course, is that the Democrats are on track to hold on to their U.S. House seat majority in the 2008 elections.

The question this year's not whether Democrats will retain majority control of Congress, but how large the majority will be.

For Republicans, the key is retaining at least 41 seats in the Senate, where the party's use of minority rule protections can slow down Democratic legislative programs.

Think Progress Lies About McCain - Again!

I've become increasingly convinced of the left's fundamental dishonesty - that is, it appears untruthfulness is a core component of radical left-wing ideology.

I frequently expose the left's anti-intellectualism in my writing (see, for example, "Barack Obama, the Netroots, and the "Vital Center" of American Politics"), but extreme mendacity is also a common characteristic of many of those in the left blogosphere.

The proposition is illustrated with reference to Think Progress, the left-wing blogging project editied by Faiz Shakir. Earlier this year Think Progress falsely accused John McCain of plagairism, and was forced to issue an apology.

Also, in April, Gateway Pundit called out Think Progress for its scurrilous Iraq reporting, " 'Think Progress' Publishes Misleading Troop Withdrawal Post."

So it's no surprise that Think Progress is at it again, with a post attacking John McCain as out of touch on gasoline prices.

Patterico has a nice takedown of the accusations:

Think Progress has a post titled McCain: I ‘Don’t See How It Matters’ That I Don’t Know The Price Of Gas. Wow, that sounds pretty bad. Let’s take a look:

In a telephone interview with the Orange County Register earlier this week, John McCain acknowledged he was unaware of the price of gas.

Jeez. That’s really awful. But let’s take a look at the actual exchange that Think Progress is citing:

WICKSOL: When was the last time you pumped your own gas and how much did it cost?

MCCAIN: Oh, I don’t remember. Now there’s Secret Service protection. But I’ve done it for many, many years. I don’t recall and frankly, I don’t see how it matters.

Later in the interview, McCain says:

I’ve been on the campaign trail for so long I don’t remember when I last filled up my own gas tank, but I certainly did for many, many, many years and I understand the difficulties and challenges that it poses for the people of California and my home state of Arizona.

Think Progess cites this as evidence of “McCain’s cluelessness about gas prices.”

But McCain isn’t saying he doesn’t know the price of gas. He is saying that he doesn’t remember the last time he pumped his own gas, and how much it cost then.

So, does John McCain know the cost of a gallon of gas in America? Yes, he does. Here’s a news story from June 18:

“The price of a gallon of gas in America stands at more than four dollars. Yesterday, a barrel of oil cost about 134 dollarsm” said McCain.

Again, that McCain quote is from June 18 — six days before the O.C. Register interview that Think Progress uses to claim McCain doesn’t know the price of gas.

This Think Progress post is a lie. At best, the story is that McCain doesn’t remember the last time he pumped his own gas. Even that is a non-story, since nobody pumps their own gas while on the campaign trail. Someone ask Obama when he last pumped his own gas.

Of course, not all lefty bloggers spread crude falsehoods to advance their political agenda. Still, the leftist project is so intellectually and morally bankrupt that even the mainstream media has made bashing liberals a regular pastime.

Related: Don't miss the comments at the Think Progress post, where one of the readers writes:

Did he really pump his own gas for many, many years? I highly doubt it since self service pumps weren’t around until the late 70’s early 80’s. By that time he was married to Cindy and I’m sure the servants filled the cars in that household. If McCain pumped his own gas it would have been for just a couple of years and then it was still possible to go into service stations that offered either self serve or full service options. I truly doubt he has ever gotten out of a limo or car and pumped his own gas.

The "early 1970s" would be more accurate, but who cares about accuracy when you can smear Cindy McCain as "First Junkie."

Barack Obama, the Netroots, and the "Vital Center" of American Politics

One of the hallmarks of netroots politics is for radical partisans to announce their movement represents the mainstream of the mass electorate.

By continually arguing that "progressives" control the "political center," hardline leftists can disguise their extremist agenda as reflecting the political preferences of a majority of Americans.

I've noted regularly the left's tendency to claim the mainstream, but there's some recent radical outrage over the media's declaration that Barack Obama - after wrapping up his nomination - has moved to the political middle. There are differences, naturally, among lefty bloggers as to Obama's correct location on the spectrum, but what's not at issue is that for many Obama has violated the progressive creed, which the leftists see as the majoritarian core of the American political universe.

The least compelling argument of this sort comes from Matt Stoller, who simply denounces Barack Obama's move to the center as a corrupt bargain - a political sellout to the corporate power elite of the Washington establishment. After highlighting the media coverage of Obama's moderation, Stoller attacks the lobbying practices of Tom Daschle, the former Senate minority leader, who's mentioned in the Washington Post's article, "In Campaign, One Man's Pragmatism Is Another's Flip-Flopping":

In this article, it's Tom Daschle who puts out the moderate credentialing argument.

"Those who accomplish the most are those who don't make the perfect the enemy of the good," said former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle, a key Obama supporter. "Barack is a pragmatist. In that sense, he has a larger vision but oftentimes knows that we can't get there with one legislative effort. When these occasions arise, he is willing to accept progress, even marginal gain, as a step toward that vision."

Tom Daschle, a former Senate Majority leader, is widely liked in DC. He's considered a lovely man, wise and with a wide network of supporters and loyalists that were fighting the Clinton wing of the party in the 1990s through Congress. Of course, Daschle is also known as a key supporter of the Iraq war, co-sponsoring and jamming through the Iraq War resolution, undercutting Joe Biden's attempt to push a different resolution requiring UN authorization before the President was authorized to use force. It's possible to see this as just a bad political decision, but there's more behind the scenes.

His wife, Linda Daschle is a lobbyist for pharmaceutical industries, aerospace, and defense contractors. During her husband's time as a key political leader within the Democratic Party, she pledged to remain independent of her husband's work, but that kind of conflict of interest, with a Senate Majority leader married to a defense contracting lobbyist is pretty severe.

The problem for Stoller is that Daschle's work for a Washington law firm reflects a routine career move for a former congressional insider - it's the way of power in Washington, and if leftists think money and progressivism are mutually exclusive, they're in the wrong profession. Some of the Democratic Party's most vociferous surrender hawks in Congress are also the most instituationally corrupt, as measured by Stoller's notions of "excessive moderation" (see, for example, "MURTHA INC.: How Lawmaker RebuiltHometown on Earmarks").

But note, further, Taylor Marsh, who also decries the Obama-as-centrist meme:

In other news, from yesterday, the winner of the most hilarious headline is "Obama shifting to the center". Shifting to the center? He never left. It's just flat out stunning that the media now trumpets a story like this, which is meant to signify some regression by Senator Obama. It's a lie. Why? Because Obama never pretended to be a progressive politician. His fans presented him this way, but it was a myth....

Anyone suckered into thinking that Barack Obama is a "progressive" wasn't paying attention. John Edwards was the guy who fit that bill, but it sure wasn't Barack Obama. Hillary is also more progressive than Senator Obama, though I realize many won't ever give her credit for it.

Now, Marsh is one of the leftosphere's most vociferous Clinton-backers, but it's clear that her thinking's a far cry from any supposed left-wing "reality-based community." For example, the National Journal reported in January that Barack Obama was the U.S. Senate's most liberal member in 2007, with a record of voting that's further to the ideological left than Senator Hillary Clinton's:

Obama's voting placed him even further to the left than Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-identified "independent democratic socialist" who caucuses with the Democrats in the upper chamber.

While Marsh or others might quibble with National Journal's methodology, it's very telling that congressional actors in the political arena - like Senator Sanders - are genuine in placing their politics at the appropiate position along the left-right ideological continuum.

Now, I've saved Glenn Greenwald for last. As always, Greenwald's raging mad and not going to take it anymore, for example, in his post, "The Baseless, and Failed, 'Move to the Center' Cliche."

It's a long, windy post, but it's a classic piece of loony-left postmodern political sculpturing and ideological legerdemain. To summarize, Greenwald not only attacks Obama as a faux progressive, but in the process he molds and redefines the meaning of survey findings as though they indicate the majority of Americans are proto-Marxists:

So what ... is the basis for the almost-unanimously held Beltway conventional view that Democrats generally, and Barack Obama particularly, will be politically endangered unless they adopt the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism and National Security, which - for some reason - is called "moving to the Center"? There doesn't appear to be any basis for that view. It's just an unexamined relic from past times, the immovable, uncritical assumption of Beltway strategists and pundits who can't accept that it isn't 1972 anymore - or even 2002.

Beyond its obsolescence, this "move-to-the-center" cliché ignores the extraordinary political climate prevailing in this country, in which more than 8 out of 10 Americans believe the Government is fundamentally on the wrong track and the current President is one of the most unpopular in American history, if not the most unpopular. The very idea that Bush/Cheney policies are the "center," or that one must move towards their approach in order to succeed, ignores the extreme shifts in public opinion generally regarding how our country has been governed over the last seven years.

One of Greenwald's main problems is that he's got no sensibility of moderation or nuance.

His propensity, for example, for capitalizing terms like "Beltway," "Terrorism," and "National Security" reflects some odd need to inflate regular words of political terminology to a kind of leprous category of extreme political opprobrium - indeed, in this style of writing we see that for a Democrat to even be identified as concerned about traditional foreign policy is essentially to be branded a likely war criminal.

But note further: Greenwald evinces a disastrous under-appreciation of actual question wording in public opinion survey data. For example, if polls indicate by an 8 out 10 ratio that the country's "on the wrong track," it doesn't automatically follow that Americans are ready for the proletarian revolution. Data like these genuinely tap things such as public impatience with policy gridlock or worries over economic uncertainty, like that seen currently with high gasoline prices.

It is simply dishonest - or unhinged, actually, in Greenwald's case - to present statistics like these as representing some overwhelming public demand for a radical ideological shift in the electorate.

Studying these issues is complicated, and different policy-areas might see different degrees of public support for a more leftward public policy response. Note significantly, however, that just this last Friday Gallup reported that the public overwhelming rejects quasi-socialist policies to correct current market dislocations: "Americans Oppose Income Redistribution to Fix Economy."

Indeed, as Greenwald has taken his arguments to increasingly extreme levels, some have sugggested that he "ranges into the kind of frenzied conspiracy-theorizing that I generally associate with Ron Paul's more wild-eyed supporters."

In closing, Barack Obama's doing what any major-party presidential nominee does after securing the nomination: bolstering his centrist credentials in order to appeal to the mass middle of American voters who are not deeply attached to extreme ideological principles. Over the last week or so, on gun rights, campaign finance, and the death penalty for child rapists, Obama's moderated some of his statements to hue closer to what's long been considered the "vital center" of the American political system.

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UPDATE: This entry is cross-posted at NeoConstant: Journal of Politics and Global Affairs.