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."
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.
As Amy points out, however, more than three out of four Americans identify themselves as either Catholic or one of the major Protestant denominations.
President Bush's record unpopularity is playing an unprecedented role in the 2008 campaign, complicating John McCain's task among key constituencies.While some Democrats see an opening, it's uncertain how significant the effect of Bush's approval ratings will be:
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.
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.Ultimately, I think that last point will be a deciding factor in the race - McCain truly a leader who'll put country first, .
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."
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.My thoughts and prayers go out to the Burner family.
"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."
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.I cannot imagine anyone doing such at terrible thing, although I know such evil exists.
We need to start a reward fund that leads to putting the right wing prick in jail.
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.Read the whole thing, at the link.
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.
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.Notice how the Times identifies these people as "liberal" and "voters," when they might be better characterized as radical netroots ayatollahs.
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.”
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.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
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.
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.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."
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.
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.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.
He will ensure that the war against terrorists is fought intelligently, with patience and resolve, using all instruments of national power.
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:
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?"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.
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.
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....Be sure to read the whole thing.
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.
**********
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.
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."
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.
He didn't bomb the Capitol or rob banks like his contemporaries in the Weather Underground.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?
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.
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."
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
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.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.
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?
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....There's more at the link.
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.
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.”Read the whole thing, at the link.
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.
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?
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.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.
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.
