Progressives and Patriotism

Peter Beinart offers a powerful (and balanced) analysis of America's ideological polarization over patriotism, "The War Over Patriotism."

Beinart looks carefully at the strengths and weakness of both left- and right-wing patriotism. One of his main arugment is that leftists praise America for what it stands for but not what it is, a stance that reveals a fundamental element of anti-Americanism:

Liberals may love America in part because it aspires to certain ideals, but if they love it only because it aspires to those ideals, then what they really love is the ideals, not America. Conservatives are right. To some degree, patriotism must mean loving your country for the same reason you love your family: simply because it is yours.

See also, "Obama Should Stress Patriotism, Poll Finds."

Image Credit: The People's Cube

Jesse Helms, 1921-2008

I wasn't planning on a post memorializing Jesse Helms, who died today at the age of 86, but I thought better of it after seeing the left's hatred of late North Carolina Senator.

At the "mainstream" Daily Kos, we see this:

Rather than a moment of silence in respect of the memory of Jesse Helms it is more appropriate to bellow a jingoistic, racist, msogynistic, homophobic inconmprehensible diatribe that pushes all the wrong buttons and increases the forces of intolerance because Jesse would have wanted it that way.

Also, from the comments to that post:

* There are some dead of whom nothing positive can be said. I suspect this diary won't get near the attention is should...

* Hey Helms, I will pour a beer over your grave but not before it has been filtered through my kidneys!

Here's a sample at Lawyer, Guns and Money:

* All I can say it's a good day for America. Happy fourth!

* R.I.P my ass. Helms was an evil racist and homophobe who contributed to the deaths of many ... My only regret here is that his doctor said he died 'comfortably.'

But see also, Think Progress, which takes Helms' passing as a chance to recount Helms' politics of race, allowing a few choice words in the comments:

* SO? Am I supposed to be sad about this?

* Ding dong the witch is dead.

Note, significantly that Huffington Post took preventive action against the evil, closing their obituary to comments.

I think any self-respecting person would cringe at this kind of hate.

I wrote recently about Helms' political legacy, "Jesse Helms, the Far-Right, and the GOP." The truth is that for all of Helms' racial politics, many unbigoted Americans were moved by the late Senator's willingness to tap into genuine grievances on issues such busing and affirmative action.

Helms' style of political conservatism left a lasting mark on American politics. It was a style that many denounced, but the issues Helms raised are no less important today.

May he rest in peace. My best wishes go out to the Helms family.

See also my earlier entry, "On Death and Decency: The Absence of Divine Soul on the Contemporary Left."

Photo Credit: New York Times

*******

UPDATE: See also, "The Official Grave Dancing Thread for Jesse Helms":

There’s little that a good, progressive thinking person on the Internet likes more than the death of a conservative.

UPDATE II: For more examples of the grave dancing, see:

* AmericaBlog, "Racist, Homophobe Jesse Helms is Dead."
* Carpetbagger Report, "Former Sen. Jesse Helms Dies at Age 86" (the comments in particular).
* Comments From Left Field, "Jesse Helms Departs (Finally)."
* Down With Tyranny, "Happy Fourth of July."
* The Impolitic, "Jesse Helms: Dead at Last."
* Martini Revolution, "Jesse Helms Dead" (which included the lead, "Good f**king riddance").
* Matthew Yglesias, "The Dead."
* Orcinus, "Goodbye, and Good Riddance."
* TBogg, "Hell Gets a Little More Crowded.
* Whiskey Fire, "Bastard of an Ex-Warhorse Kicks."

These are the most disrespectful posts at Memeorandum.

Yglesias begins his entry stating, "I've never been 100 percent clear on why you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead..."

I think common decency might provide a clue.

At least Pam Spaulding gets it.

Obama Tax Pledge, Largest in History, Threatens Liberty

When Thomas Jefferson and his founding allies set forth the Declaration of Independence, they decried the authoritarianism of King George III, for "imposing Taxes on us without our Consent."

Since 1776, questions of individual liberty have always surrounded proposals to increase taxes on Americans.

So far this election season, the question of taxes has held a backseat to foreign policy and social issues, but with Barack Obama pledging to increase Social Security taxes by $1.3 trillion over the next decade, perhaps the country should start having a larger debate on freedom and the scope of governmental power.

Investor's Business Daily points to the importance of this debate, in its editorial, "Obama's Social Insecurity Plan":

We suspected that the No. 1 liberal in the U.S. Senate would get around to playing the granny card as he shook Hillary off and focused on John McCain. That moment came in Gresham, Ore., on Sunday when he promised to protect "the promise that FDR made" and "preserve the Social Security Trust Fund." He warned that McCain would raise the retirement age and privatize Social Security a la President Bush.

How does he demagogue the issue?

[...]

Obama would save grandma and grandpa by bankrupting their grandchildren. He has proposed lifting the tax cap on earnings subject to the 12.4% Social Security tax, which now covers only the first $102,000.

As George Will points out, a "Chicago police officer married to a Chicago public-school teacher, each with 20 years on the job, have a household income of $147,501, so you (Obama) would take another $5,642 from them."

As Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute points out, eliminating the cap would be the largest tax increase in American history — some $1.3 trillion over the first 10 years.

"It would give the United States," Tanner says, "one of the highest marginal tax rates in the industrialized world, with the potential for seriously disrupting economic growth."

The Heritage Foundation analyzed the effect of eliminating the earnings cap. Heritage found that the take-home pay of 10.3 million workers would be reduced by an average of $5,650 in the first year alone. Taxes would be raised on four million workers over the age of 50.

Taxes would also be raised on 3 million small-business owners who file their taxes as individuals. By fiscal 2015, the number of job opportunities lost would exceed 865,000 and personal savings would decline by more than $55 billion.

And if you think this would raise taxes only on the "rich," think again. According to Heritage, taxes would be raised for 97,065 carpenters, 110,908 police officers, 254,992 nurses, 208,562 postsecondary teachers and 237,000 dentists. That would make a lot of people bitter.

Eliminating the earnings cap as Obama wants would raise taxes for many middle-class families, impose a huge burden on small business, slow the economy and cost jobs. You don't help the people riding the wagon by punishing the people pulling it. But Obama would.

See also, "Obama: Raise Social Security Taxes."

Image Credit: Michael Ramirez

Obama Should Stress Patriotism, Poll Finds

Gallup finds a large majority of Americans valuing traditional conceptions of patriotism, including service in the military. The findings imply that Barack Obama should work harder in stressing bedrock notions of love of country:

Nearly two-thirds of Americans (62%) say serving in the U.S. military reveals "a great deal" about one's patriotism, ranking it second only to voting in elections among six items rated in a recent USA Today/Gallup poll. More than half of Americans (53%) say the same about reciting the pledge of allegiance, and far fewer about wearing an American flag pin.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama spent much of this Independence Day week trying to assure voters of his patriotism, having been faulted during the Democratic primary season for at times not wearing an American flag pin, and for not placing his hand over his heart during the national anthem on at least one occasion. Obama's speech on Monday, entitled "The America We Love," included praise for Republican rival John McCain's service to his country in Vietnam, in response to retired Gen. Wesley Clark's statement that McCain's experience as a Navy pilot and prisoner of war does not necessarily qualify him to be commander in chief.

McCain's service in Vietnam is generally considered an advantage in this wartime election against Obama, who has never served in the military, and a key reason 80% of Americans see McCain as capable of handling the responsibilities of commander in chief. The Gallup data reveal that Americans do in fact consider military service in general to be a sign of patriotism. While Republicans are among the most likely of all groups to say serving in the military reveals a great deal about one's patriotism, more than half of both Democrats and independents agree. Republicans also tend to place more value on saying the pledge of allegiance and wearing an American flag pin, while independents align more closely with Democrats, who are generally less likely to place a high value on each action.

It's interesting that few Democrats - less than 50 percent - favor the idea of pledging allegiance to the flag is an important statement of patiotism.

Gallup's conclusions are important in this regard:

The fact that Americans do consider serving in the U.S. military highly patriotic makes it difficult for the Obama campaign to criticize McCain on that score. Americans' views on patriotism suggest that it would be of greater benefit for Obama to reinforce his own patriotism through other acts Americans value. While it is clear that a small symbolic act like wearing a flag pin is not nearly as significant a sign of patriotism as acts such as voting and serving in the military, the fact that about 6 in 10 Americans say wearing such a pin is at least a moderate sign of patriotism suggests it certainly can't hurt.

See also, Rightwing Nuthouse, "Do Liberals Love America Too?"

A Most Fortunate People

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of our great bounty as Americans on this Independence Day:

On this Fourth of July of our discontent — with spiraling fuel prices, a sluggish economy, a weak dollar, mounting foreign and domestic debt, continuing costs in Iraq, a falling stock market, and a mortgage crisis — we should remember two truths about America. First, the United States remains the most free and affluent country in the history of civilization. Second, almost all our problems are lapses of complacency, remain relatively easily correctable, and pale in comparison to past crises.

By almost any barometer, the United States remains the most fortunate country in the world. We continue to be the primary destination of immigrants, who risk their lives to have a chance at what we take for granted. Few in contrast are flocking to China, Russia, or India. The catalyst for immigration is primarily a phenomenon of word of mouth, of comparative talking among friends and families about the reality of modern-day living, not of scholarly perusal of social or economic statistics.

When one compares any yardstick of material wealth — the number of cars, the square footage of living space, the number of consumer appurtenances — Americans are the wealthiest people in the history of civilization. Why so? Others have more iron ore, as much farmland, greater populations, and far more oil reserves. But uniquely in America there remains a system of merit, under which we prosper or fail to a greater extent on the basis of talent, not tribal affiliations, petty bribes, or institutionalized insider help. More importantly still, we are impressed by those who advance rather than envious of their success. The lobster-barrel mentality is a human trait, but in the United States uniquely there is a culture of emulation rather than of resentment, which explains why neither Marxism nor aristocratic pretension ever became fully entrenched in America.

Our system of government remains the most stable and free.

There's more at the link, but the conclusion's excellent:

Given the strength of our system and culture and our inherited values and wealth, as long as we don’t tamper with our Constitution, a uniquely American entrepreneurial culture, and the melting-pot notion of shared values rather than balkanized tribes, races, and religions, we can easily rectify our present mistakes without much reduction in our soaring standard of living. In America alone — for all our periodic hysterical self-recrimination — there is still comparatively little danger of coups, nationalization of foreign assets, crippling national strikes, sectarian violence, terrorism, suppression of free speech, or rampant government and judicial corruption that elsewhere lead to endemic violence and economic stagnation.

On this troubled Fourth we still should remember this is not 1776 when New York was in British hands and Americans in retreat across the state. It is not 1814 when the British burned Washington and the entire system of national credit collapsed — or July 4, 1864 when Americans awoke to news that 8,000 Americans had just been killed at Gettysburg.

We are not in 1932 when unemployment was still over 20 percent of the work force, and industrial production was less than half of what it had been just three years earlier, or July, 1942, when tens of thousands of American were dying in convoys and B-17s, and on islands of the Pacific in an existential war against Germany, Japan, and Italy.

Thank God it is not mid-summer 1950, when Seoul was overrun and arriving American troops were overwhelmed by Communist forces as they rushed in to save a crumbling South Korea. We are not in 1968 when the country was torn apart by the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago. And we are not even in the waning days of 1979, a year in which the American embassy was seized in Tehran and hostages taken, the Soviets were invading Afghanistan, thousands were still being murdered in Cambodia, Communism was on the march in Central America, and our president was blaming our near 6-percent unemployment, 8-percent inflation, 15-percent interest rates, and weakening international profile on our own collective “malaise.”

We live in the most prosperous and most free years of a wonderful republic, and can easily rectify our present crises that are largely of our own making and a result of the stupefying effects of our unprecedented wealth and leisure. Instead of endless recriminations and self-pity — of anger that our past was merely good rather than perfect as we now demand — we need to give thanks this Fourth of July to our ancestors who created our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and suffered miseries beyond our comprehension as they bequeathed to us most of the present wealth, leisure, and freedom we take for granted.

That's a great message.

Happy Fourth of July!!

Big American Flags

One of my best memories of attending a John McCain campaign rally in 2000 was the massive American flag that hung at the back of the basketball auditorium, behind the candidate's platform.

I just loved it: The vivid power of big, American pride, out loud and in your face. There's just nothing else like those huge flags that capture what we are as a people, expansive and unlimited.

The New York Times writes about the increasing prevalence of large flags at sporting events:

On the field before the All-Star Game, Major League Baseball plans to assemble the largest gathering of Hall of Fame players in baseball history. And as fans salute their heroes, the former players will join the crowd in saluting the American flag — one that is roughly 75 feet by 150 feet, as long as a 15-story building is tall, spread horizontally over the Yankee Stadium turf.

That is a relatively small flag by big-event standards in American sports these days. But it will signal the latest can’t-miss blend of sports and patriotism, a combination increasingly presenting itself through gigantic American flags, unfurled by dozens or hundreds of people in an attempt to elicit a sense of awe and nationalism in the surrounding crowd.

Once the gaudy lure of attention-seeking car dealerships or other roadside attractions, big flags have found a comfortable home inside the ballparks, arenas and raceways of American sporting events.

“It is an American phenomenon, no doubt about it,” said Frank Supovitz, the N.F.L.’s senior vice president for events, who oversees such spectacles as the Super Bowl and has helped stage events around the world.

A small industry has formed to supply the flags, usually at a cost of a few thousand dollars an appearance. Some colleges and bowl games, tired of renting them frequently, have bought their own field-sized flags.

“People are getting more on the bandwagon,” said Doug Green, who has long rented giant flags to teams and leagues, and recently supplied one for the Indianapolis 500. “Nascar’s doing it more and more, the N.F.L. is doing it more and more”....

“For big, spectacular events, big just happens because it paints a more vibrant picture,” said Tim Brosnan, the executive vice president for business at Major League Baseball. “I don’t think bigger is necessarily better, but it is a celebration.”

These can be touchy times for interpreting the use of the flag as a symbol of patriotism. A tiny flag on a lapel, or the absence of one, fueled debate in the presidential campaign. And the Olympics will provide plenty of chances for medal-winning Americans, handed flags as celebratory props, to create a stir with their reaction. Some past Olympians were accused of disrespecting the flag by wrapping themselves in it or wearing it like a cape.

But there is little debate over the use of field-size or court-size flags during the national anthem or other sporting rituals. They have received the tacit approval of the military, which often supplies the people to present the flags, and are routinely greeted with wide-eyed cheers.

“People go ape when they see it,” said Jim Alexander, a retired Coast Guard commander who runs Superflag, the company that basically invented the industry and once held the world record for the largest flag, which temporarily hung on the Hoover Dam. It was 255 by 505 feet and has been surpassed by a flag in Israel that measures 2,165 by 330 feet. “It’s a feeling. It’s a feeling that takes over a whole stadium. If anyone in the stands opened their mouth and objected, there would be hell to pay.”

See also, JammieWearingFool and Protein Wisdom.

Assisted Suicide of Healthy 79-Year-Old Raises Right to Die Issues

The story, out of Germany, on the assisted suicide of Bettina Schardt is deeply sad. Schardt was 79 years-old, but not sick, when Roger Kusch helped her die:

When Roger Kusch helped Bettina Schardt kill herself at home on Saturday, the grim, carefully choreographed ritual was like that in many cases of assisted suicide, with one exception.

Ms. Schardt, 79, a retired X-ray technician from the Bavarian city of Würzburg, was neither sick nor dying. She simply did not want to move into a nursing home, and rather than face that prospect, she asked Mr. Kusch, a prominent German campaigner for assisted suicide, for a way out.

Her last words, after swallowing a deadly cocktail of the antimalaria drug chloroquine and the sedative diazepam, were “auf Wiedersehen,” Mr. Kusch recounted at a news conference on Monday.

It was hardly the last word on her case, however. Ms. Schardt’s suicide — and Mr. Kusch’s energetic publicizing of it — have set off a national furor over the limits on the right to die, in a country that has struggled with this issue more than most because of the Nazi’s euthanizing of at least 100,000 mentally disabled and incurably ill people.

“What Mr. Kusch did was particularly awful,” Beate Merk, the justice minister of Bavaria, said in an interview. “This woman had nothing wrong other than her fear. He didn’t offer her any other options.”

Germany’s conservative chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared on a German news channel on Wednesday, “I am absolutely against any form of assisted suicide, in whatever guise it comes.”

Read the whole thing, at the link.

Related: It turns out that Switzerland has liberalized laws on euthanasia, and demand for assisted suicides has taken off in that country.

Question for Readers: Is the European model of assisted suicides appropriate for the United States (recall that the Supreme Court upheld Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, "which allows terminally-ill Oregonians to end their lives through the voluntary self-administration of lethal medications")?

Photo Credit: New York Times

The Erosion of American National Identity?

Are we seeing the erosion of American national identity? David Broder looks at the question:

Just in time for Independence Day, a conservative think tank has delivered a controversial report asking whether America's national identity is eroding under the pressure of population diversity and educational slackness.

The threat outlined by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in its report, "E Pluribus Unum," strikes me as a bit exaggerated. But with Barack Obama and John McCain debating the "patriotism issue," having a coherent discussion of this matter -- and this short pamphlet is admirably written and well-researched -- is a useful contribution.

The takeoff point for the argument is an observation about the uniqueness of America that was made by Thomas Jefferson -- and by myriad other worthies in the centuries since. They all have drawn attention to the fact that the national identity of America, unlike that of other countries, rests "not on a common ethnicity, but on a set of ideas."

And so, the Bradley scholars say, "knowing what America stands for is not a genetic inheritance. It must be learned, both by the next generation and by those who come to this country. In this way, a nation founded on an idea is inherently fragile."

The ideas that define this country are found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as amplified by Supreme Court decisions and statutes in subsequent years. Those ideas have been tested in crisis and in war, and the leaders who steered the nation through those testing times are the heroes whose legacy we celebrate -- Washington, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts.

What disturbs the Bradley scholars is evidence that our generation is failing to educate the next one on the essentials of the American experiment. "On the 2006 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Civics Test," the report notes, "the majority of eighth graders could not explain the purpose of the Declaration of Independence. Only 5 percent of seniors could accurately describe the way presidential power can be checked by Congress and the Supreme Court." The authors also decry the fact that most colleges and universities allow students to graduate without ever taking a comprehensive course in American history and government.

On this point, I think they have plenty of company -- all across the political spectrum. But they have many other criticisms and a variety of suggestions. Some are trivial, such as scrapping Presidents' Day and bringing back Washington's and Lincoln's birthday holidays. Others are far-reaching and controversial, such as telling all colleges and universities to open their campuses to the ROTC.

When it comes to the treatment of immigrants, the Bradley team sees a real threat in such things as multilingual ballots and bilingual classes. Such accommodations to the growing diversity of the population could lead to "many Americas, or even no America at all," they maintain. "Historical ignorance, civic neglect and social fragmentation might achieve what a foreign invader could not."

Well, put me down on the side of weakening identity. I'd need to read the report, but it's certainly a plausible thesis, and the multifaceted nature of the trend - from anti-military ideology to multilingualism to historical neglect - is hard to dismiss as aberent.

I don't thing the dominant culture is in immediate danger of collapsing right away, but the direction of change is troublesome for the maintainence of the country's historic model of democratic legitimacy.

Obama Facing Online Backlash

There's more buzz in the news on Barack Obama's perceived apostasies among the hard-left netroots contingents. USA Today reports that Obama's move to the center may so alienate radical leftists that he'll wind up losing significant support among those in the Democratic Party base.

One of the more interesting articles today is at Raw Story, on the "community bloggers" at Obama's official campaign page: "Group Urging FISA 'No' Vote is Largest on Obama's Social Site":

Barack Obama supporters urging the Illinois senator to vote against a pending surveillance law have formed the largest group on the Democratic presidential candidate's social networking Web site, my.barackobama.com.

The group, "Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right," had more than 14,500 members as of Thursday morning. The group formed last Wednesday, June 25, making it perhaps the fastest growing user-generated group on the page. Sometime around 8 p.m. Wednesday, the group became No. 1 in overall membership, surpassing "Action Wire," the campaign-created group that is designed to fight smears and rumors hurled at Obama.

The "Get FISA Right" group formed in response to Obama's indication that he would support an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that is to be voted on in the Senate next week. Critics say the bill would essentially legalize the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, which President Bush authorized, while eliminating pending civil lawsuits aimed at the telecommunications companies that allegedly handed over reams of private customer data to the government.

The group's founder, blogger Mike Stark, tells RAW STORY he is talking to others who have been active on FISA to determine how best to use the group to pressure Obama and other senators who seem likely to vote for the bill, which is scheduled for a vote on Tuesday. The group nearly doubled in size over the last two days as it started to receive more attention from progressive bloggers and even garnered a few mentions in more traditional news outlets.

On Thursday, the group released an open letter to Obama asking that the campaign share its phone banking tools so group members can call voters and urge them to pressure their senators to vote against immunity. The letter also asks Obama to speak out on the Senate floor when the bill is voted on next week. (The full letter is reproduced below.)

I'm getting a kick out of these "community bloggers."

I'm not going to be surprised if Obama shuts down the social networking component at the official page. While the FISA lobbying may be legitimate, the calls for revolution coming from the "Marxists for Obama" can't be good for campaign image-building.

Image Credit: The People's Cube

Obama Marxists Urge Revolution Against "Oppressive" U.S. Regime

Just in time for the 4th of July, the Barack Obama "community bloggers" are urging a revolution against the "oppressive" U.S. regime:

Marxists, socialists and communists have created a safe space online to congregate, exchange ideas – including a stated revolution against the U.S. "oppressive" regime – and support their favored presidential candidate.

Their meeting spot? Sen. Barack Obama's official campaign website, which allows registered users to form groups and post content in online "community" blogs.

One popular community group on the Illinois senator's official MyObama website calls itself "Marxists/Socialists/Communists for Obama."

"This group is for self-proclaimed Marxists/Communists/Socialists for the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency. By no means is he a true Marxist, but under Karl Marx's writings we are to support the party with the best interests of the mobilization of the proletariat," states the groups charter.

"We support Barack Obama because he knows what is best for the people!" exclaims the group's online creed.

And on Obama's site, the declared Marxist, communist and socialist bloggers rant against such varied targets as Republicans, capitalism and the Fox News Channel. According to author profiles, the bloggers range from registered voters to underage high school students who state they are looking to foment revolt.

Read the whole thing.

The "Marxists/Socialists/Communists for Obama" blog is here.

However, the group's post, "The Nature of the Proletariat" (urging "revolution against the oppressive U.S. regime"), has been removed.

For more on "progressives" (i.e., radicals), see here and here.

Hat Tip: Highly Opinionated

Fading Generation? '60s-Era Professors Reach Retirement

College professors of the Vietnam-era generation are reaching retirement, according to today's New York Times. Their exodus from academe could have a significant impact on the ideological locus on today's college campuses:

Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.

“There’s definitely something happening,” said Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counter attacks on Western culture and values. “I hear from quite a few faculty members and graduate students from around the country. They are not really interested in fighting the battles that have been fought over the last 20 years.”

Individual colleges and organizations like the American Association of University Professors are already bracing for what has been labeled the graying of the faculty. More than 54 percent of full-time faculty members in the United States were older than 50 in 2005, compared with 22.5 percent in 1969. How many will actually retire in the next decade or so depends on personal preferences and health, as well as how their pensions fare in the financial markets.

Yet already there are signs that the intense passions and polemics that roiled campuses during the past couple of decades have begun to fade. At Stanford a divided anthropology department reunited last year after a bitter split in 1998 broke it into two entities, one focusing on culture, the other on biology. At Amherst, where military recruiters were kicked out in 1987, students crammed into a lecture hall this year to listen as alumni who served in Iraq urged them to join the military.

In general, information on professors’ political and ideological leanings tends to be scarce. But a new study of the social and political views of American professors by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons at George Mason University found that the notion of a generational divide is more than a glancing impression. “Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third.

When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger.

“These findings with regard to age provide further support for the idea that, in recent years, the trend has been toward increasing moderatism,” the study says.

The authors are not talking about a political realignment. Democrats continue to overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans among faculty, young and old. But as educators have noted, the generation coming up appears less interested in ideological confrontations, summoning Barack Obama’s statement about the elections of 2000 and 2004: “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

I'm somewhat skeptical that the retirement of '60s-era activist professors will change the current institutional culture in American academe all that much.

I'd have to review the research cited in this article, but it seems to me that multicultural ideology is thoroughly embedded in the curriculum of the most influential universities and colleges, and a tradition of radicalism remains a powerful force with enough of the professoriate that we may still be figthing campus culture wars for some time.

That's not to say we're breaking out into Berkeley's free-speech movement or Kent State, but if one follows top-level battles like Harvard's controversy over Larry Summers, or more recently the faculty-governance conflicts at Dartmouth, we can see that deep, divisive issues may hold tremendous influence on the way schools are run and how kids are taught.

The jury's still out on this, I would argue. But see Paul Mirengoff's essay on Dartmouth's institutional culture for more of this theme, "A Hostile Environment - For Learning How to Write Well."

Firedoglake Cheers Hezbollah's Military Power

I've recently blogged a bit about Jewish hatred on the radical left, but this post from Firedoglake ranks at the heights of Israeli-bashing anti-Semitism: "The Hidden Army: Hezbollah Teaches the World How to Fight":

Hezbollah has created the new model army, and a new model state. Call it the Hidden Army. An army that blends in with the population, that moves only when it cannot be seen, that sets up in the expectation of surveillance. An army that knows all the high tech games, and spent the time to figure out how to nullify them. It sounds like a guerilla army, and it is, but it's also much more: it's an army capable of engaging in strategic warfare and an army capable of engaging in full on attrition defense warfare against Israeli main battle forces. It's hard to overstate how impressive this is.

It's an unrecognized State with a hidden army. Oh, the UN says there's a Lebanese government with authority over Hezbollah. But everyone knows that the real government in southern Lebanon is Hezbollah. They pick up the garbage, they give out the pensions, heck, they have their own phone network. Crazy. When the Lebanese "government" picks a fight with Hezbollah, Hezbollah wins.

We are going to see many more of these unrecognized governments, with their hidden armies. Why? Because they work, and they work very well, both at providing government services to a population, and at frustrating much larger, more powerful and expensive conventional armies. As official governments fail, less recognized ones will pick up the pieces. And they will look to Lebanon to see how to do it, survive, and even win.

And whose more powerful and conventional armies might be under consideration here?

The American and the Israeli, of course.

It would be one thing if we were reading about improvements in the operational tactics or strategic doctrines of our enemies, in an effort to better prepare against imminent threats (in some obscure journal of strategic studies, perhaps), but Firedoglake - a "mainstream" leftist blog - applauds Hezbollah as a combined welfare-delivery and anti-Western terrorist fighting organization. This essay is cheering for the enemies of the West.

Blogs like Firedoglake are at the forefront of left-wing backing of antiwar candidates like Darcy Burner and Barack Obama.

Read the post in full, and think about how American foreign policy may indeed change after the election. This is change we can believe in?

Shocker! July 4th Anti-Americanism on the Left

I thought I was through for the night, but I had to share with my readers a couple of great posts on far left-wing anti-Americanism.

Here's this, from Sister Toldjah's entry, "An America-Hating far Leftie Weighs in on Independence Day:

Further proof that the self-loathing that comprises the far left doesn’t take breaks, even for a holiday. The Philly Inquirer’s Chris Satullo scribbles:

Put the fireworks in storage.

Cancel the parade.

Tuck the soaring speeches in a drawer for another time.

This year, America doesn’t deserve to celebrate its birthday. This Fourth of July should be a day of quiet and atonement.

For we have sinned.

We have failed to pay attention. We’ve settled for lame excuses. We’ve spit on the memory of those who did that brave, brave thing in Philadelphia 232 years ago.

The America those men founded should never torture a prisoner.

The America they founded should never imprison people for years without charge or hearing.

The America they founded should never ship prisoners to foreign lands, knowing their new jailers might torture them.

Such abuses once were committed by the arrogant crowns of Europe, spawning rebellion.

Today, our nation does such things in the name of our safety. Petrified, unwilling to take the risks that love of liberty demands, we close our eyes.

We have done such things, on orders from the Oval Office. We have done them, without general outrage or shame.

Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. CIA secret prisons. “Rendition” of prisoners to foreign torture chambers ...

We have betrayed the July 4 creed. We trample the vows we make, hand to heart...

Things like this just don’t compute with me. Even when I was a leftie, I was never ashamed to fly my flag on any day, especially on days like Independence Day, nor was I hestitant to say how much I loved this country, even during the times when I felt it was veering off course. That continued even through the Clinton years after I saw the light and became a conservative. There were many, many things Bill Clinton did during his tenure that made me ashamed of him, but I sure as hell was never ashamed of my country.

Also, from American Sentinel, "Why Progressives Aren’t Patriotic":

In fact, this comes from the great source, itself, The Progressive:

“It’s July 4th again, a day of near-compulsory flag-waving and nation-worshipping. Count me out. Spare me the puerile parades. Don’t play that martial music, white boy. And don’t befoul nature’s sky with your F-16s. You see, I don’t believe in patriotism.”

I was going to comment on this, but this article is one of those rare pieces that speaks for itself–yet says the opposite of what the author intends. Matthew Rothschild manages to fit so much prototypical liberal garbage into a single page that it almost seems like parody.

I guess this demonstrates the old cliche of the glass half empty/half full. Progressives are always unhappy, unpatriotic, un-whatever. They are against oil. They are against tax cuts. They are against personal responsibility. They are against God. They are against carbon. They are against the military. They are against liberty, wanting more government instead. Everything they are for is misanthropic. They favor legislated equality. They favor equal rights for terrorists. They favor trees over people. They favor endangered insects over people. They live in a world of constant anger. Everything is wrong. Everything needs change. America, the awful.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are believers in the idea of liberty and, therefore, believers in people. We believe that people are the products of their choices, not the byproducts of a deck stacked against them. When they go down, we offer them a helping hand–not because the government makes us, but because we want to. We believe America is good enough to defend. We don’t weep when the terrorist dies, but hunt his buddies down wherever we can find them. We’ll chop down a thousand trees and stomp the spotted owl out of existence to save the life of one innocent child.

Our forefathers gave their lives to found a country in which liberty could endure. In their day, they were the progressives. How far that notion has fallen. Progressive now means nothing better than moving farther and farther from the liberty we began with. And, hell no, they aren’t patriotic. That would be too damn much to ask, wouldn’t it?

Read both posts in full, here and here.

And just think: I've been working on getting some patriotic material ready for Friday ... they'll be time, but the work deflecting the left is never done!!

Don't Try This at Home

Christopher Hitchens agreed to undergo waterboarding to determine "whether it was torture?"

Here's the best thing I've seen written all day on this undignified publicity stunt:

Torture is any experience so horrible that no-one would consider trying it out simply for the purpose of writing a Vanity Fair article about what it’s like.

If I might add my first thoughts: A man of Hitchens' apparent physical condition has no business volunteering for something of this nature, a wartime coercion instrument:

See also, Allahpundit, "Video: The Obligatory “Hitchens Gets Waterboarded” Clip."

Andrew Sullivan Gets it Wrong on Communists and Conservatives

Andrew Sullivan has this to say about conservatives and today's New York Times story on China's '50s-era terror manual:

Go to Memeorandum and check out the blogs commenting on the NYT exclusive on the undisputed fact that the Bush administration knowingly used Communist torture techniques against prisoners in wartime. You will find no right-of-center blogs commenting. It's an astonishing story - especially for any anti-Communist conservative who fought the good fight during the Cold War. But they won't mention it. I guess when a Republican administration copies communists, conservative writers need to copy Stalinists.

For a journalist of Sullivan's caliber, this is sleazy blogging.

First, Sullivan left only the generic Memeorandum link, and not an article-specific Memeorandum citation, like this one.

Further, Memeorandum citations are dynamic. That is, where multiple articles on a topic are in play at any given time, Memeorandum's aggregator-bot will locate different blog posts (which might include a number of germane, interrelated links) to various locations on the main page.

Thus, at the time of this writing, my essay, "What Should Be Done About Torture?", was linked to the Memorandum citation for Christopher Hitchens' Vanity Fair story, "Believe Me, It's Torture."

I wrote my entry this morning, however, and at that time my piece was linked along with Captain Ed's, "ChiCom tactics used at Gitmo?" (the earlier Memeorandum link is here). In that entry, the Captain argues that actual U.S. military trainers "had no awareness of the origin of their material," and the controversy "should be a matter for closed-session investigations by Congress and the DoD."

Now, it's natural that on the most hot-button and politically significant news stories of the day, partisans on the opposite sides of the left-right divide will jump on breaking news articles that bolster their agenda. No harm, no foul...

What's troubling here is how Sullivan desperately strains to paint conservatives as Stalinist propagandists - a move that only ends up being, for Sullivan, a pathetic display of partisanship, a blatantly underhanded and unsustainable attempt to smear the right-wing blogosphere.

Obama Announces America "No Longer a Christian Nation"

Via Amy Proctor, Barack Obama, as seen here, declares the United States is "no longer a Christian nation":

As Amy points out, however, more than three out of four Americans identify themselves as either Catholic or one of the major Protestant denominations.

See, Pew Research, "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey."

For Obama's statement, see "Obama to CBN News: We're no Longer Just a Christian Nation."

Bush Complicates McCain's Presidential Prospects

The Wall Street Journal reports that President Bush's low approval ratings may cause difficulties for John McCain's presidential bid:

President Bush's record unpopularity is playing an unprecedented role in the 2008 campaign, complicating John McCain's task among key constituencies.

Mr. Bush received a 66% disapproval rating in The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll for June, tying his own record for the highest ever for any president in the Journal/NBC poll. The previous highs were a 56% rating for Mr. Bush's father in late 1992, and a 50% score for President Clinton in 1993. In the long-running Gallup Poll, Mr. Bush's disapproval rating reached 69% this spring -- a record going back to the Truman administration.

His disapproval rating in the Journal poll is particularly striking among a number of key voter blocs for Mr. McCain in the November election: older voters (67%), women (71%) and independents (75%).

Mr. Bush's second-term slide in the polls has been especially sharp among independents, a group that Sen. McCain depends on. Now for Mr. McCain to win in November, "at least one-third of McCain's voters will have to be people who disapprove of the job George Bush is doing," most of them independents, says Republican pollster Neil Newhouse. And Sen. McCain must accomplish that feat while continuing to align himself with Mr. Bush on some of the administration's most controversial policies, notably the Iraq war.

While some Democrats see an opening, it's uncertain how significant the effect of Bush's approval ratings will be:

Even in the short run, it's far from clear that Mr. Bush's low standing will drag Sen. McCain down against his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama.

Mr. Bush's impact on the race could depend on whether voters blame the president's policies, or the president himself, for his administration's perceived failings. "The key is whether independent voters and disillusioned Republicans see the failures of the Bush administration as stemming from personal incompetence or conservative ideology," says Larry Bartels, director of Princeton University's Center for the Study of Democratic Politics.

Democrats say no matter how voters see that question, Sen. McCain is trapped in the president's toxic political shadow.

"The American people are desperately looking for a fundamental change from President Bush's management, which is a problem for John McCain considering his desire to stay on the same path," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

Several strategists close to the McCain camp concede that administration policies have created political challenges. "The GOP brand is not good now because of policies," one said. "The good news is that the GOP has nominated the one guy who can redefine the brand."

The McCain campaign has been seeking to distance itself from the Bush White House, and also elevate Sen. McCain above the partisan discord of Washington. It's depicting Sen. McCain as the one candidate who can put the public's interests first -- while casting Sen. Obama as a typical Washington partisan.

"The problem in our view is not a Republican administration that has disappointed many or a Democratic Congress that cannot take action on the challenges facing our nation, it is that too many in Washington are putting politics first and country second," said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers.

"The American people know John McCain - they know he's his own man who has always put his country first. That's what people are looking for today: a leader who will put the country first - above party, politics and self-interest -- to bring us together, take on the tough challenges we face and move America forward."

Ultimately, I think that last point will be a deciding factor in the race - McCain truly a leader who'll put country first, .

On the other hand, Barack Obama's a well-known snob, and significant questions remain as to who's interests Obama will put forward this year, the narrow interests of his radical multiculturalist friends or the general interest of the American people.

Malfunctioning Lamp Blamed for Darcy Burner House Fire

Democratic congressional candidate Darcy Burner, the author of the netroots-backed "Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq," lost her home yesterday to a devastating house-fire.

According to the Issaquah Reporter, the fire was the result of a defective lamp in Burner's son's room:

Investigators said the fire that destroyed the Ames Lake home of Eighth Congressional District candidate Darcy Burner was caused by a malfunctioning electrical device, according to Sgt. John Urquhart of the King County Sheriff's Office.

"It was determined accidental," Urquhart said. "It was not arson. They will do some tests on the device to see exactly what happened."

Burner said it was caused by a "faulty lamp in my son's room."

The fire broke out sometime between 7 and 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 1 while Burner, her husband and their 5-year-old son were asleep. All three were able to escape from the flaming house, which is located on the 3600 block of West Ames Lake Road between Redmond and Carnation.

"Unfortunately, our home and all of the possessions in it are a total loss," Burner said. "But I am so grateful that my family and I escaped safely."

My thoughts and prayers go out to the Burner family.

I first read about the story yesterday, and I wondered about the cause of the fire. It turns out that some on the far left had a theory on the fire's origins:

Which of the right wing f**kheads did this and will there be justice? I knew the righties would resort to this s**t. It’s all they have - it’s all they can do. They can’t win with ideas so they try to win with intimidation! Come to my house bitches and you’ll find it tougher to burn down.

We need to start a reward fund that leads to putting the right wing prick in jail.

I cannot imagine anyone doing such at terrible thing, although I know such evil exists.

What doesn't surprise me is how lefties would use the Burner tragedy to once again score cheap attacks on conservatives.

For more, see "On Death and Decency: The Absence of Divine Soul on the Contemporary Left."

(Note: Burner will continue her congressional campaign: "Malfunctioning Lamp Caused Burner House Fire.")

Iraq Was Inevitable

Arthur Herman offers a must-read analysis of the Bush administration's decision to depose Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.

President Bush didn't originate the policy policy of regime change, and if he hadn't implemented it, the problem would have been left to his successor. The Iraq war was inevitable:

It is too often forgotten, not least by historians, that George W. Bush did not invent the idea of deposing the Iraqi tyrant. For years before he came on the scene, removing Saddam Hussein had been a priority embraced by the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton and by Clinton’s most vocal supporters in the Senate:

Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas, or biological weapons. . . . Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: he has used them. Not once, but repeatedly. . . . I have no doubt today that, left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.

These were the words of President Clinton on the night of December 16, 1998 as he announced a four-day bombing campaign over Iraq. Only six weeks earlier, Clinton had signed the Iraq Liberation Act authorizing Saddam’s overthrow—an initiative supported unanimously in the Senate and by a margin of 360 to 38 in the House. “Iraqis deserve and desire freedom,” Clinton had declared. On the evening the bombs began to drop, Vice President Al Gore told CNN’s Larry King:

You allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons. How many people is he going to kill with such weapons? . . . We are not going to allow him to succeed. [emphasis added]

What these and other such statements remind us is that, by the time George Bush entered the White House in January 2001, the United States was already at war with Iraq, and in fact had been at war for a decade, ever since the first Gulf war in the early 1990’s. (This was literally the case, the end of hostilities in 1991 being merely a cease-fire and not a formal surrender followed by a peace treaty.) Not only that, but the diplomatic and military framework Bush inherited for neutralizing the Middle East’s most fearsome dictator had been approved by the United Nations. It consisted of (a) regular UN inspections to track and dispose of weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s) remaining in Saddam’s arsenal since the first Gulf war; (b) UN-monitored sanctions to prevent Saddam from acquiring the means to make more WMD’s; and (c) the creation of so-called “no-fly zones” over large sections of southern and northern Iraq to deter Saddam from sending the remnants of his air force against resisting Kurds and Shiite Muslims.

The problem, as Bill Clinton discovered at the start of his second term, was that this “containment regime” was collapsing. By this point Saddam was not just the brutal dictator who had killed as many as two million of his own people and used chemical weapons in battle against Iran (and in 1988 against Iraqis themselves). Nor was he just the regional aggressor who had to be driven out of Kuwait in 1991 by an international coalition of armed forces in Operation Desert Storm. As Clinton recognized, Saddam’s WMD programs, in combination with his ties to international terrorists, posed a direct challenge to the United States.

In a February 17, 1998 speech at the Pentagon, Clinton focused on what in his State of the Union address a few weeks earlier he had called an “unholy axis” of rogue states and predatory powers threatening the world’s security. “There is no more clear example of this threat,” he asserted, “than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” and he added that the danger would grow many times worse if Saddam were able to realize his thoroughly documented ambition, going back decades and at one point close to accomplishment, of acquiring an arsenal of nuclear as well as chemical and biological weapons. The United States, Clinton said, “simply cannot allow this to happen.”

Here's more:

Those who condemn Bush’s decision to go to war, bemoan its cost in material and human terms, and deplore the damage it has allegedly done to the American image around the world should consider what would have happened if there had been no war. It is not just that millions of Iraqis would still be in the iron grip of Saddam and his police state. The fact is that, by 2002, no inspection regime and no amount of international pressure, no matter how plumped up by yet another UN resolution, would have kept him contained any longer. The Oil-for-Food corruption would have continued to grow unrestrained, finding reliable co-conspirators in Europe and the Middle East. Rising oil prices over the next half-decade would have kept Saddam awash in cash, allowing him to rebuild his military and cement his connections with powers like Syria and Russia. He had called our bluff before; but this time it was no bluff.

Given the logic of the situation, at what point could Bush have avoided war? To have taken the military option off the table before going to the UN would have undercut everything his analysts and policy advisers, including at the CIA, had been saying since 9/11—and brought howls of protests from leading Democrats in Congress. Doing so after the passage of Resolution 1441 would have made a mockery of the rationale for going to the UN in the first place, and, as Powell explicitly recognized, undermined the resolution itself....

Should we have backed off after the [Hans] Blix report on January 27, 2003, even as the American troop buildup in Kuwait was in full swing? That would have devastated Bush’s reputation as a war leader after his resounding success in Afghanistan, and guaranteed that he would never be more than a one-term President (which may have been the real objective of his critics anyway).

Saddam Hussein had become a virus infecting the international body politic. The leading symptom of that infection was Oil-for-Food—emblematic of a moral anarchy let loose in the world that would prevail as long as Saddam remained in power. That anarchy had destroyed Iraq; eaten away the legitimacy of the United Nations; and almost wrecked NATO. Indeed, it is hard to see how NATO members already embittered by the diplomatic battle in the UN in 2002 could have continued to cooperate militarily in Kosovo or Afghanistan. Nor is it clear that Eastern European nations would want to join a NATO led by a power, the United States, that had displayed such bare-faced unwillingness to stand up to a dangerous dictator.

“My job is to secure America,” George Bush told Bob Woodward in 2004. “I also believe that freedom is something people long for.” Had he wished, he could also have referred back to the words uttered by President Clinton six years earlier, in February 1998:

Let’s imagine the future. What if [Saddam] refuses to comply, and we fail to act, or take some ambiguous third route? . . . Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal.

Whatever one wants to say about the conduct of the Iraq war, going to war to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003 was a necessary act. It should and could have been done earlier, had not the Clinton White House, which understood the need, not wasted the opportunity through timidity and bluster. If, after 9/11, Bush had then blinked in his turn, he might indeed have found himself out of office by January 2005, and someone else would have had to tackle the job under much more disadvantageous conditions.

To judge by his unequivocal pronouncements pre-2003, and as improbable as it sounds now, that someone might well have been Al Gore, the erstwhile hawkish Vice President who had championed the Iraq Liberation Act, or indeed John Kerry, who back in 1998 told Scott Ritter that containment of Saddam was not working and that the time had come to use force. If Bush had failed to act, either one of these two men might have come to office in January 2005 publicly prepared to deal with the “gathering threat” that his predecessor had unaccountably allowed to grow larger and closer and ever more virulent.

Read the whole thing, at the link.

It's a safe bet that war opponents won't take this argument seriously, but the fact remains that Iraq was rightly considered an international menace in 2003, not just by the U.S., but by our allies in Europe as well.

Deposing Saddam was the right and necessary thing to do, and we have a responsibility to maintain the deployment to promote the long-term stability of the region.

On the latter point, see Jean Bethke Elshtain , "The Ethics of Fleeing: What America Still Owes Iraq."

Netroots Angry With Obama's FISA Flip

The New York Times reports that "voters" are deeply upset with Barack Obama's shift to the center, and particularly his refusal to vote against telecom immunity:

Senator Barack Obama’s decision to support legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants has led to an intense backlash among some of his most ardent supporters.

Thousands of them are now using the same grass-roots organizing tools previously mastered by the Obama campaign to organize a protest against his decision.

In recent days, more than 7,000 Obama supporters have organized on a social networking site on Mr. Obama’s own campaign Web site. They are calling on Mr. Obama to reverse his decision to endorse legislation supported by President Bush to expand the government’s domestic spying powers while also providing legal protection to the telecommunication companies that worked with the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

During the Democratic primary campaign, Mr. Obama vowed to fight such legislation to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. But he has switched positions, and now supports a compromise hammered out between the White House and the Democratic Congressional leadership. The bill is expected to come to a vote on the Senate floor next Tuesday. That decision, one of a number made by Mr. Obama in recent weeks intended to position him toward the political center as the general election campaign heats up, has brought him into serious conflict for the first time with liberal bloggers and commentators and his young supporters.

Many of them have seen the issue of granting immunity to the telecommunications companies as a test of principle in their opposition to Mr. Bush’s surveillance program.

“I don’t think there has been another instance where, in meaningful numbers, his supporters have opposed him like this,” said Glenn Greenwald, a Salon.com writer who opposes Mr. Obama’s new position. “For him to suddenly turn around and endorse this proposal is really a betrayal of what so many of his supporters believed he believed in.”

Jane Hamsher, a liberal blogger who also opposes immunity for the phone companies, said she had been flooded with messages from Obama supporters frustrated with his new stance.

“The opposition to Obama’s position among his supporters is very widespread,” said Ms. Hamsher, founder of the Web site firedoglake.com. “His promise to filibuster earlier in the year, and the decision to switch on that is seen as a real character problem. I know people who are really very big Obama supporters are very disillusioned.”

One supporter, Robert Arellano, expressed his anger on the Obama site.

“I have watched your campaign with genuine enthusiasm,” Mr. Arellano wrote, “and I have given you money. For the first time in my life, I have sensed the presence of a presidential candidate who might actually bring some meaningful change to the corrupt cesspool of national politics. But your about-face on the FISA bill genuinely angers and alarms me.”

Notice how the Times identifies these people as "liberal" and "voters," when they might be better characterized as radical netroots ayatollahs.

Markos Moulitsas made a far-left political statement out of the issue, announcing, "I pulled back my credit card last night, making a last minute decision to hold back on a $2,300 contribution to Obama."

Here's more:

Obama will be fine without my contribution, and he may even still get it before this thing is said and done, but it would be at a time when he has done something positive. That's called rewarding good behavior. And if that opportunity fails to arise because Obama goes on a Sister Souljah'ing rampage, then no worries. Chances are good that the DNC would get the money instead. But at this time, I simply have no desire to reward bad behavior. Some of you don't care about his behavior, or don't think it's bad behavior, or whatever. I didn't ask any of you to follow suit, and don't care whether you do or not. I didn't pull him from the Orange to Blue list. I'm not going to start praising Nader or Barr. I'll still vote for him. Yadda, yadda, yadda. At the end of the day, I'm pretty irrelevant in the whole affair. Obama is going to raise a ton of dough and win this thing whether I send him money or not.

Ultimately, he's currently saying that he doesn't need people like me to win this thing, and he's right. He doesn't. If they've got polling or whatnot that says that this is his best path to victory, so much the better. I want him to win big. But when the Obama campaign makes those calculations, they have to realize that they're going to necessarily lose some intensity of support. It's not all upside. And for me, that is reflected in a lack of interest in making that contribution.

That's it. No need to freak out. It is what it is. Others will happily pick up the slack. We're headed toward a massive Democratic wave, and what I decide to do with my money means next to nothing, no matter how much hyperventilating may happen on this site's comments and diaries about it all.

I'm interested to see how well Moulitsas and others take it when Obama throws them all under the bus once and for all. Maybe he'll quit announcing how "mainstream" he is

See also, "'Left' in the Dust: Liberals Livid at Obama's Right Turn," and "Obama Backlash in His Online Backyard."

Plus, "Liberal Bloggers Accuse Obama of Trying to Win Election."