The Marginal Returns of Political Blogging

As readers know, I've been recently studying political demonization in the blogosphere.

In fact, I've developed something of a theory of secular demonology (by no means original), that hypothesizes a particular psychology of hatred that drives the leftosphere, which I've applied, for example, to "The Commentocracy of Hate." To be clear, I do not claim that conservatives are angels (there's a lot of right-wing extremism online, frequently defended by reference to strained notions of free political speech). Recent empirical history, however, demonstrates a powerful propensity among those on the left to mercilessly attack conservative partisans in government and online, going so far as mounting a political psychology of revenge.

I'm returning to this topic again after reading Jason Steck's outstanding essay on group think in the blogosphere.

Steck argues that blogging as a political medium has reached the point of diminishing marginal returns. Online partisans on both the left and right have no inclination toward objective critical analysis, and their respective commentocracies reward those blogs best able to demonize the other. Consequently, insightful, intellectual nuance and persusion get completely marginalized in the flaming haze of political battle:

Take a step back and review any political blog you like and you will immediately be struck by the sameness of the posts. They take the story of the day — invariably some substance-free “gaffe”, photo op, or partisan charge of corruption — and attach a laundry list of catastrophic impacts foretelling the end of the world if that candidate would be elected. Any reference to actual policy issues will be brief, insubstantial, and driven entirely by stereotypes. Comments threads will be infested by cut-and-paste repetitions of well-worn slogans and talking points, bereft of any engagement with the issues of the real world or any recognition that disagreement could indicate anything other than demonic possession. The scripts rule the day without any tolerance for deviation or criticism of any kind:

Mandatory Script #1: Obama is a “socialist” who is simultaneously too intellectually lightweight to be President yet a Machiavellian genius enough to be bamboozling everyone

Mandatory Script #2a: McCain is “McSame” seeking a third BushHilter term so that he can sell Social Security to Halliburton and bomb every country where brown people live in order to establish an American Empire that will revoke the Bill of Rights in order to establish a theocracy.

I'm getting a kick out of both of these "scripts," although if parsimony adds power, the brevity of Obama's script might provide a little value-added as the campaign moves forward.

Seriously though, Steck's onto something, although I don't think his resigned conclusion is completely warranted:

I care deeply about this election, but I find that writing about it publicly is pointless. Welcome to the brave new world of politics, where morons rule by rote.

I've been blogging for about a two-and-a-half years. Recently, when logging-on in the mornings, and especially when I check Memeorandum, I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. The most important stories on politics and public policy are often pushed to the side. Controversies serving as fodder for scandal rise to the top. The major bloggers weigh in with venomous attacks and snarky dismissals. One or two of these get picked up by the MSM, and then become "news" themselves. The White House or the major campaigns make a statement, and then it all starts over again in the morning.

I think there's more to it than that, however. I was introduced to the blogosphere by reading academic, high-brow blogs. I liked reading, for example, Daniel Drezner and Virginia Postrel. Folks like this are successful in their professions, and they've generated much of their readership trough their working reputations. Ann Althouse is a fabulous blogger as well (she also teaches law), and she's become something of a media sensation with her serious but stylistic online presence.

There are more examples like this, but what's happened with the partisan blogs is that they've become of the footsoldiers of the revolution, especially on the left. There's simply not going to be compromise when partisan bloggers and their communities see themselves in battle. It can get disgusting, as Steck notes in the comments:

Whenever ... a blog emerges that actually does attempt to provide balanced and/or mixed perspectives, they get shunned. To say that such blogs get "blacklisted" is not an exaggeration. They disappear from Memeorandum, are systematically denied links by the partisan blogs as punishment for their heresies, and are sometimes even subjected to campaigns designed to encourage other blogs to blacklist them. (For example, one blog owner I know of often disseminates orders to his co-bloggers instructing them not to link to other bloggers he doesn’t like or agree with and extends requests to the same effect to his other friends in the blogosphere, yet he claims publicly to welcome equally views from "left, right, and center".) There are more than a few commenters who do the exact same thing — trying to harass and defame any blog or writer who commits an act of heresy against their particular Mandatory Script....

For example, Newshoggers is an example of a blog that often [finds] stories that no one else is talking about at all. But they cancel out much of the value of that positive contribution by their relentless and abusive approach to blogs that they disagree with, usually ignoring contrary perspectives entirely but, when they do acknowledge them, often personally attacking the authors of those dissenting blogs or just lying about what those dissenters said in order to force-fit them into the pre-existing, demonized scripts. Glenn Greenwald is another exemplar of this tendency who has been rewarded massively for his hateful efforts as is FireDogLake. And those examples are in addition to the blog that I know for certain does outright blacklisting behind the scenes while publicly claiming to represent “left, right, and center”.

I'm betting that this "certain" blog is "The Moderate Voice" (aka "The Partisan Voice"), and I'd also note, interestingly, that the three blogs Steck mentions above are among the most prominent demonologists in the leftosphere.

Still, I too think folks should step back a bit, but my suggestion is for people to ask themselves what they hope to achieve by blogging? In my case, I visited many blogs years ago, and my comments at various sites became essay-length, so I thought I'd better get in the game.

It takes a while to find a niche. I started with a lot of cerebral posts, often unrelated to the headlines of the day, with very little partisan bite. I talked to more experienced bloggers who said they liked what they say, but recommended taking the gloves off. I have done that, while trying not to lose my academic side, with my style of lengthy, substantive posts of ranging ideas.

In any case, the blogging medium should be here to stay, or, at least until another platform comes along to replace the immediacy and potential impact of citizens' journalism. Most bloggers will not have a huge readership, but I'm confident that insight and intelligence are rewarded, and I'm frankly blown away sometimes at how awesome the blogosphere works as an alternative and competitor to traditional media.

All is not lost, for the moment at least. The returns of excellence in political blogging may have diminished some, but the ultimate output still carries substantial utility for politics.

Antiwar 2.0

Now that victory in Iraq has reached near-consensus, the antiwar press and netroots masses have turned their attention to the next stage of anti-Bush opposition.

The New York Times is leading the way, for example, with its editorial today mocking Salim Ahmed Hamdan's Guantanamo conviction as "Guilty as Ordered."

Andy McCarthy exposes the Times' allegations as tiresome liberal "bombast."

But that's not all. Today's paper includes a weepy front-pager attacking the administration's "good war": "500: Deadly U.S. Milestone in Afghan War"

Abe Greenwald notes the coming of Antiwar 2.0:

The New York Times, at a loss for bad news from Iraq, is mining Afghanistan for tragedy and defeat. Today’s front page bears the headline, “500: Deadly U.S. Milestone in Afghan War.” The piece, by Kirk Semple and Andrew W. Lehren, contains heart-wrenching stories of young life cut short, and the online edition contains interactive features with graphs showing casualty breakdowns and mini-bios of lost troops. With this bit of morbidity, the Times has sent out a signal to left-wing media outlets, progressive bloggers, and activists looking for a march: It’s time to switch from death in Iraq to death in Afghanistan.

Running tallies of American causalities in Afghanistan can now go up on websites; Digital collages of Americans killed by the Taliban arranged to form George W. Bush’s face are sure to follow.

The thing about the Times’ milestone is — it’s completely artificial. The casualty count for Americans in Afghanistan passed 500 months ago. The number now stands at 563. The “milestone” framework is just a pretense for the paper to shift its gruesome focus onto a new front.

The antiwar focus is also shifting to the end of the administration, and potential war crimes trials against President Bush and top officials alleged to have violated international law and "shredded the Geneva Conventions."

No doubt the Times will be leading that effort as well.

Reversing the Great Reversal in the South

This morning's Wall Street Journal, in "The New Southern Strategy,"reports that for the first time in decades, the Democratic Party stands a good chance of reversing the long-term trend in GOP electoral dominance across the South. The case of Democrat Bobby Bright, running for Congress in the rural 2nd Congressional District of Alabama, provides a glimpse of a potential voting realigment in the region:

Spurred by the souring economy and a newfound willingness to embrace conservative candidates, the Democratic Party is running its most competitive campaign across the South in 40 years, fielding potential winners along a rib of states stretching from Louisiana to Virginia, the heart of the Old Confederacy. Sen. Barack Obama's ability to excite African-American voters in certain Southern races could provide an additional boost, too.

The party's rising prospects point toward a once unthinkable goal: a reversal of the "Great Reversal," the switch in political loyalties in the 1960s that made the South a Republican stronghold for a generation. If the current picture holds, Democrats could use the Southern strength to help craft a workable Senate majority and expand their majority in the House of Representatives. At the very least, it widens the field of competitive seats, forcing Republicans to fight fires in once-reliably solid areas.

Bright's appeal lies is his roots of Southern populism, and his intuition is that the GOP-brand is fatally tarnished in 2008, even in the super-conservative Deep South. Other candidates are actually coopting traditional Republican strengths, for example, in supporting more religion in the public sphere, gun rights, or in promoting pro-military credentials.

But not all is well down Dixie way. It turns out that perhaps the new Democratic appeal will be to exploit racial grievance politics, in an effort to parlay the combination of black blood-of-martyrs politics and progressive white guilt into a winning strategy that paints moderates as the new Southern Night Riders.

The test case of this new Southern Strategy is Nikki Tinker, who's campaigning for the Democratic primary in Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District, the former Memphis seat of Harold Ford, Jr.

Tinker is coming under fire for accusing her opponent, Representative Steve Cohen, as a neo-Klansman:

The campaign of Democratic attorney Nikki Tinker is increasingly using issues of race and religion to attack freshman Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a white Jewish congressman representing a majority-black Memphis district.

Just days after airing a racially charged ad connecting Cohen with the Ku Klux Klan, the Tinker campaign is up with a new ad not-too-subtly questioning his religious convictions.“

Who is the real Steve Cohen, anyway?” a narrator says as a child is heard praying in the background . “While he’s in our churches clapping his hands and tapping his feet, he’s the only senator who thought our kids shouldn’t be allowed to pray in school. Congressman, sometimes apologies just aren’t enough.”

The apology line appears to be a veiled reference to Cohen’s just-passed legislation in Congress that apologizes to African-Americans for the “fundamental injustice” of slavery and racial segregation."

He’s never voted against prayer in school. It’s an out-and-out lie. This is desperation upon desperation," said Cohen campaign manager Jerry Austin. Cohen planned to hold a press conference Wednesday morning to respond to the new ad.

Cohen already has been the target of an anti-Semitic mailer was distributed earlier this year in the district. The flier said that "Cohen and the Jews HATE Jesus" and called upon "Black Christians" to support one "Black Christian" and oppose "this opponent of Christ and Christianity."

Here's the flyer:

Meanwhile, liberal interest groups and top netroots blogging outfits are shocked - shocked! - that a Democratic would make such allegations.

What's shocking is that anyone on the Democratic side is actually upset that one of their own in the primary would turn the party's New Southern Strategy on an intra-party opponent.

As the Wall Street Journal story indicates, Democrats look competitive in at least a half dozen congressional districts below the Mason-Dixon Line. In the Senate at least two-GOP held seats in the Old South are toss-ups.

The reversal that we're seeing in Southern congressional elections is that the GOP - which has been slandered as the party of craven racial pandering since Richard Nixon's infamous "Sourthern Strategy" helped create a Solid Republican South - will now be attacked as reborn Klansmen hell-bent on restoring an anti-Semitic racist white man's hegemony across Dixie.

Democrats, benefitting already from GOP voter fatigue, can clinch the deal by raising the spector of Old Nathan Bedford.

The future is here, and it's not pretty.

Nikki Tinker Race Baits Steve Cohen. @ Yahoo! Video

“Who is the real Steve Cohen, anyway?”

“While he’s in our churches clapping his hands and tapping his feet, he’s the only senator who thought our kids shouldn’t be allowed to pray in school. Congressman, sometimes apologies just aren’t enough.”

Eh, the Left Wants Nuremberg-Style Prosecutions?

Byron York needs to spend a little more time reading the lefty blogs. He says, you know, these people are actually serious about mounting Nuremberg-style war crimes prosecutions for outgoing Bush-administration officials:

One thing that hasn't received much attention in conservative and Republicans circles is the ongoing conversation on the left about the possibility of Nuremberg-style war-crimes trials for members of the Bush administration should a Democratic president take office. I'm not exaggerating or introducing the Nazi analogy myself; they actually use the phrase "Nuremberg-style" when they discuss "war-crimes tribunals." And they are quite serious (although the more moderate of them prefer a "truth commission.") ...

I think the thing to emphasize here is that this is a serious conversation going on among people who might have influential voices or play influential roles in an Obama administration. Many of them want to put John Yoo — a special favorite of theirs — on trial, whether before a Nuremberg-style tribunal, a criminal court, or a truth commission with as-yet unspecified powers. And, of course, they wouldn't stop with Yoo; if they had their way, they would likely have a long list of former Bush administration officials to put in the dock. They are serious.

Ya think?

Ah, yeah, they're serious. Note what I said yesterday, with reference to Spencer Ackerman's claims of genocide in Iraq and the need for Balkans-style war crimes tribunals:

This all ties into the big push on the left for "accountability" of the Bush administration foreign policy decisions, such as the treatment of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, as well as the domestic surveillance operations and the question of telecom immunity.

Ideally, for war opponents, Bush administration "criminals" would be prosecuted for war crimes under a Barack Obama administration come January 2009. What's most likely to happen, in the advent of an Obama regimes, is that Congress would establish a "commission on torture" to investigate alleged wrong-doing under the Bush-Cheney years. Yet, the recent hard-left uproar over Obama-advisor Cass Sunstein's recent dismissal of war crimes prosecutions indicates that the antiwar forces want a bit more than "truth and reconcilliation."

Thus, today's uproar over the Biddle, O'Hanlon, and Pollack essay can be seen as building more war crimes charges against the administration.

The whole thing may well end up being a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing, especially as Barack Obama's been dropping in the polls like an anchor.

On the other hand, the war crimes push is an international movement, and U.S. bloggers like Ackerman, Ezra Klein, and the crew at Newshoggers - with no substantive loyalty to the principle of American sovereignty - would like nothing more than the establishment of a universal jurisdiction of vengeance and star chamber prosecutions of Bush's neo-imperialist cabal next year.

See also, Veracifier, The Sundries Shack, Talking Points Memo and Whiskey Fire.

Hamdan and Respect for the Geneva Conventions

Wordsmith at Flopping Aces offers a penetrating analysis of anti-Bush hypocrisy, terror trials, and the Geneva Conventions. The prompt is Salim Ahmed Hamdan's conviction today in his military commissions proceedings:

Why is it, that the impression the media leaves me with, is that Hamdan is “just a driver” and a victim of circumstances? Just another tragic pawn and casualty in the illegal and immoral war instigated by the imperialistic, oil-grubbing, human-rights/U.S. Constitution-violating Bush regime?

Well, he’s been found guilty of supporting terrorism, but acquitted on charges of conspiracy to commit acts of terror.

Anyway…

Jonathan Mahler writing last Sunday for the NYTimes Magazine:

The men in the dock might very well be war criminals, the argument goes, but what about the policy makers and interrogators who violated their rights under the Geneva Conventions?

The perception pushed by so many on the anti-Bush side of the argument, is that the detainees held at Guantanamo deserve protection under the provisions provided by the Geneva Convention; and that subsequently, because the Administration had long argued against classifying enemy combatants captured on the Afghanistan battlefield- al Qaeda and Taliban fighters- as having “prisoner of war” status, protected by the 1949 codification of the laws of war (until July 7, 2006, after a Supreme Court ruling), that Bush & Co somehow do not respect the Geneva Convention. The reality, however, is just the opposite. It’s for the same reason that President Reagan decided not to ratify Protocol I, declaring that it, “would undermine humanitarian law and endanger civilians in war.”

Douglas Feith, called the Geneva Conventions “a high-water mark of civilization”. He absolutely supports it, even as he denies its provisions to be extended to non-uniformed combatants who endanger civilians by blending in, and being indistinguishable from civilians, putting innocent lives at risk. To grant them the same legal rights as prisoners of war, grants terrorism legitimacy.

From Douglas Feith’s War and Decision, pg 163,

It would be “highly dangerous if countries make application of Convention hinge on subjective or moral judgments as to the quality or decency of the enemy’s government”- and it would be dangerous, therefore, to claim that the Convention does not apply because the Taliban are “the illegitimate government of a ‘failed state.’ ” Countries typically view their enemies as gangs of criminals. If officials had to certify an enemy as a “legitimate government” to apply the Convention, few countries would ever do so.

“I contended that a “pro-Convention” position, on the other hand, would reinforce U.S. moral arguments in the war on terrorism:

• The essence of the Convention is the distinction between soldiers and civilians (i.e., between combatants and noncombatants).
• Terrorists are reprehensible precisely because they negate that distinction, by purposefully targeting civilians.
• The Convention aims to protect civilians by requiring soldiers to wear uniforms and otherwise distinguish themselves from civilians.
• The Convention creates an incentive system for good behavior. The key incentive is that soldiers who play by the rules get POW status if they are captured.

I've actually been critical of Feith, after first reading stories of his reportedly scored-settling blame-all memoirs from the Bush years, cited above.

Yet, Wordsmith made think more about the issue, and his analysis here, referencing Feith's inside account of Bush administration deliberations, offers a powerful antitode to the left-wing push for war crimes prosecutions against "BushCo criminals."

There's more at the link.

See also, "Bush War Crimes and the Fog of History," which also cites Jonathan Mehlman's shallow grasp of America's legal history of national crises and constitutional accountability.

Cartoon Source: Flopping Aces

Stressing the Obama "Blackening Campaign"

John McCain's recent advertising buy is being referred to as the "Celeb/Blackening campaign" by Josh Marshall at TPM.

The reference, of course, is to McCain's hard-hitting campaign spot that compares Barack Obama to a media celebrity, which includes quick images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

The media controversy's been the rage this week, with Paris Hilton jumping into the fray as a "hot" third-party alternative.

But I'm particular intrigued by the mind-bending contortions among Obama supporters. Marshall discusses the Obama's Celeb fallout as if it's McCain who's been damaged, which is not how most observers have evaluated recent changes in the campaign. Here's Marshall's stressful contortions:

On the subject of this new McCain ad sleazing Obama, in our editorial meeting this morning I told Greg that I was interested in what more we could find out about the disjuncture, if there is one, between the public reception of this stuff and the media reception. My sense is that over the last 48 hours or so, McCain's Celeb/Blackening campaign has been turning against him among pundits. But that doesn't mean the ads aren't resonating with voters, at least the class of voters McCain's campaign is trying to pull back into their column.

Actually, as the recent Pew study on media coverage reported, many in the press responded by reevaluating how they covered the candidates, and Obama's effort at playing the "race card" is seen as a major faux pas.

But check out Jennifer Rubin, who offers her usual cool analysis of the Obama post-Berlin fallout:

In the aftermath of Barack Obama’s overseas trip, the liberal punditocracy has begun to fret. Certainly there is reason for concern. Obama’s poll numbers are within the margin of error in a year in which a generic Democrat would be beating a generic Republican by double digits. And the storylines which dominated the news since the trip have been ones unfavorable to their chosen candidate: his ego, the snub of wounded U.S. soldiers in Germany, a potential flip-flop on offshore drilling and a poorly received attempt to play the race card.

Rubin follows this with a number of examples (and here's another), and then lays down the basic facts:

The bottom line: liberal pundits — following months of analysis by their conservative counterparts — had figured out that despite the best possible terrain for the Democrats to recapture the White House, the Democrats (with a whole lot of cheerleading from the mainstream media) have chosen a thinly experienced, irresolute, underachieving and obnoxious standard bearer. And his excuse-mongering just makes it all the more irritating.

It is not clear what provoked the soul-searching or why reality didn’t dawn on the pundits sooner. After all, they knew all along that he had virtually no experience and that he often sounded bizarrely confident about his nonexistent credentials.

Some might conclude that they were so blinded by their bias against Hillary Clinton and eagerness to shove the Clintons off the national stage that they ignored any signs that The Chosen One was deeply flawed. And, indeed, many of the faults that are potentially so dangerous in Obama — his predilection to lie when the heat is on and his lack of core principles — were even greater liabilities for Clinton in the media’s eyes.

It is also true that the McCain camp has shamed the media into recognizing their infatuation with Obama. By mocking the press, the McCain camp has made the argument in convincing fashion that the mainstream media has been in the tank for Obama. The McCain camp’s message: “Your boosterism has become painfully obvious.” So it’s not surprising that there might be some course correction and recognition that they’ve gone too far in building up The Ego and concealing his flaws.

But Obama has done his share to lift the veil from the pundits’ eyes. Sometimes the accumulated evidence is too much even for the mainstream media to ignore. And it is ironic (but not altogether surprising) that the tipping point may have been the Berlin rally — an explosion of ego and meaningless rhetoric which attained the level of self-parody.

So returning to Marshall's "Celeb/Blackening" meme, the folks on the left must cognitively spin and deny their own candidate's preponderant liabilities, while simultaneously alleging the emergence of the most heinous racist GOP smear campaign in the history of presidential elections.

To do so, the left has defined racism down to the point that any criticism Obama is attacked as a hegemonic manifestation of American's fundamentally iredeemable racist affliction.

Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima

DBKP has the reminder that today's the 63rd anniversary of the dawn of the nuclear age. The United States launched history first's nuclear attack on August 6, 1945, at Hiroshima, Japan:

The attack on Japan has become the basis for one of the leading claims by antiwar activists that the U.S. is the imperial-racist abomination of the world.

DBKP rebuts this meme:

To all those who sit in comfort in [2008] and render judgment on those who lived and made decisions sixty-three years ago, a few reminders.

1 - Those in [2008] do not have husbands, brothers and sons who would have faced certain death in an invasion of Japan in 1945.

2 - Did not have to live through the preceding four years of nearly total war.

3 - The U.S. was finishing a war which began on December 7, 1941, when it was attacked, without warning, by Japan.

Unfortunatly, the further that memory of World War II fades into history, the more likely is the second-guessing of the antiwar crowd to become the dominant narrative.

In 2005, on the 60th anniversay of Hiroshima, Richard Frank addressed the historical record:

What if the United States had chosen not to use atomic weapons against Japan in 1945? ...

An impressive list of American naval and air officers said after the war that the conflict could have been ended without the use of atomic bombs. They believed bombardment and blockade would have forced Japan to surrender. We know now they probably were correct.

Had the war continued for two weeks or perhaps only a few days, the destruction of the rail system would have brought about the mass famine that probably would have prompted the Japanese to capitulate. But this also means that Japanese would have died by the millions.

What history without Hiroshima illustrates is that there was no alternative happy ending to the Pacific War. When realistic consideration is given to the alternatives, atomic bombs stand as the worst way to have ended the war - except all the others.

That won't go over too well with the left's antiwar establishment, who throughout the Iraq war called on movement activists to "support the resistance."

That's an interesting concept in the context of America and World War II. Were human shields on the scene in 1945?

Photo Credit: Seattle Times

**********

UPDATE: I just finished reading Hideko Tamura's, "The Challenge of Hiroshima," at the Japan Times.

Tamura's a Hiroshima survivor and her essay is a moving testament to the quest for humanitarian peace.

I'm deeply sorry for the loss of her mother in the bombing, yet, observe: She describes the United States as the "country that took away my mother," but not once in her essay does she mention the Imperial Japanese Government that took her country to war as part of it's plan for establishing a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. She does not discuss the atrocites committed by Her Majesty's Government nearly fifteen years prior to 1945 at Nanking (the "Forgotten Holocaust of World War II"), nor does she discuss her government's refusal to surrender, despite the knowledge of an impending total, unconditional defeat that awaited it after four years of Kamikaze warfare.

Most of all, Tamura does not explain why she moved to the U.S.

We might surmise that she embodies an existential personal paradox, in that for her to achieve her mission of achieving international disarmament and world peace, she would find the ultimate freedom to do so in the very country that occassioned her quest.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan Convicted at Military Tribunal

In a victory for the Bush administration, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the driver and bodyguard to terrorist-mastermind Osama bin Laden, has been convicted in a military commission trial at Guantanamo Bay. The New York Times has the story:

A panel of six military officers convicted a former driver for Osama bin Laden of a war crime Tuesday, completing the first military commission trial here and the first conducted by the United States since the end of World War II.

But the commission acquitted the former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, of a conspiracy charge, arguably the more serious of two charges he faced. His conviction came on a separate but lesser charge of providing material support for terrorism.

The conviction of Mr. Hamdan, a Yemeni who was part of a select group of drivers and bodyguards for Mr. bin Laden until 2001, was a long-sought, if some what qualified, victory for the Bush administration, which has been working to begin military commission trials at the isolated naval base here for nearly seven years.

Mr. Hamdan was convicted by a panel of six senior military officers who, according to an order of the military judge, could not be publicly identified. As permitted under the law Congress passed for trials here in 2006, the trial included secret evidence and testimony in a closed courtroom.

Mr. Hamdan, who has said he is about 40, faces a possible life term. The sentence is to be set in a separate proceeding before the same panel that is to begin this afternoon.

The article goes on to discuss the controversy surrounding the questions of constitutional due process at off-shore military tribunals.

I'll have more later (when some of the blogging controversy kicks up), but for now see, "Folly and Injustice: Salim Hamdan's Guantanamo Trial."

See also the Los Angeles Times, "Bin Laden Driver Convicted at Guantanamo of Aiding Terror."

Defining Racism Down

I can't remember another time in my life when there's been as many allegations of racism in American politics.

In the case of Barack Obama, it's now the case that any criticism of the black Illinois Sentator is considered racist.

It's true. On Monday, in response to Amy Chozick's Wall Street Journal article on the potential electoral drawbacks of Obama's skinniness, Slate's Timothy Noah attacked the piece as appealing to racial biases with a subliminally oppressive racial subtext:

In the Aug. 1 Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick asked, "[C]ould Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability?" Most Americans, Chozick points out, aren't skinny. Fully 66 percent of all citizens who've reached voting age are overweight, and 32 percent are obese. To be thin is to be different physically. Not that there's anything wrong, mind you, with being a skinny person. But would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want a whole family of skinny people to move in next-door? "I won't vote for any beanpole guy," an "unnamed Clinton supporter" wrote on a Yahoo politics message board. My point is that any discussion of Obama's "skinniness" and its impact on the typical American voter can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.

Now, we've had a lot of misunderstood satire this season, so perhaps Noah was poking around for fun.

Except he wasn't:

It might be argued that body weight differs from certain other physical characteristics (apart from skin color) in that it has never been associated with racial caricature. Chozick wasn't asking (and, I feel sure, would never ask) whether Americans might think Obama's hair was too kinky or his nose too broad. But it doesn't matter. The sad fact is that any discussion of Obama's physical appearance is going to remind white people of the physical characteristic that's most on their minds ... In the future, the press would be wise to avoid discussing how ordinary Americans will respond to the size of Obama's ears, the thickness of Obama's eyebrows, and so on.

That's pretty unreal, no?

Peter Kirsanow, at the National Review, rightly criticizes this hyper-sensitivity as absurd:

The tendency of Obama supporters to see racist impulses behind every criticism of their candidate has evolved into absurdity.

Kirsanow enumerates "twenty-five reasons why you may be racist," which includes:

If you wonder why Obama was hanging around William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn you ... may be a racist.

But see the whole list.

The real racist attacks we've seen so far have been among Obama's Democratic primary opponents (like Bill Clinton who suggested Obama's was a candidate of exclusive appeal to blacks) and Obama supporters, like Jesse Jackson (who used lynching terminology to criticize Obama's talk of personal responsibility in the black community).

And believe me, I know a racist attack when I see one. If critics of Obama were attacking him with Jim Crow-era racial slurs, for example, by threatening him and ordering him to "go sit in the corner and lick your nuts boy" or by slurring him as a "mongrel, mixed-breed mutt," well, that would be correctly identified as retrograde bigotry of the worst sort, Klan-style extremist intimidation and white supremacy.

But the left's beyond that. Any single criticsm of Obama will trigger allegations of racism. It's like Juan Williams said in his recent essay: "The race issue is clearly not going away."

Obama's Energy Plan

This week's energy debate has shifted into Hollywood high-gear with Paris Hilton's profferring of a "hybrid" energy plan the McCain campaign says is "more substantive" than Barack Obama's.

One major advantage in Hilton's plan is that she doesn't propose tax increases on big oil, unlike Obama, who released a campaign ad this week calling for a "windfall profits tax"on corporate oil giants.

Best of all, there's no way Obama can smear Hilton as one of "those guys" who takes pride in being ignorant."

Cartoon Credit: Michael Ramirez

The Charge of Ethnic Cleansing in Iraq

This entry updates my morning post on Stephen Biddle, Michael O'Hanlon, and Kenneth Pollack's new article at Foreign Affairs, "Standing Down as Iraq Stands Up."

As noted, the piece isn't all that impressive. Most of the analysis seems somewhat behind the curve of events, and the conclusion's basically the authors' attempt to curry favor within the Democratic foreign policy establishment by re-floating the "Bush lied" meme on the origins of the deployment.

Well, the antiwar bloggers aren't too happy no matter what the motives. Indeed, this liberal warhawk-neocon triumvirate is being attacked just like the old days, although not just as war cheerleaders for the GOP's "imperialist project," but as enablers of American war crimes in Iraq to boot!

The meme's getting a lot of play, but Spencer Ackerman's attack is the most vociferous:

Matt Yglesias is on vacation until his new ThinkProgress blog launches August 11. But he IMs to ensure I don't miss this argument in the new Steve Biddle/Mike O'Hanlon/Ken Pollack Iraq piece in Foreign Affairs:

It is worth noting that separation resulting from sectarian cleansing was not the chief cause of the reduction in violence, as some have claimed. Much of Iraq remains intermingled but increasingly peaceful. And whereas a cleansing argument implies that casualties should have gone down in Baghdad, for example, as mixed neighborhoods were cleansed, casualties actually went up consistently during the sectarian warfare of 2006. Cleansing may have reduced the violence somewhat in some places, but it was not the main cause.

I had to reread this to make sure I didn't misunderstand. Ethnic cleansing is a violent process of extirpating members of a rival ethnicity or sect. If the ethnic cleansing occurred in 2006, of course casualties went up consistently. This argument makes no sense.

But there's actually a broader point to make. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. The U.S. quite rightly intervened in the Balkans in the 1990s to stop it. The horrors of ethnic cleansing are unfathomable to those who haven't experienced them. What you really, really shouldn't do is treat other people's ethnic cleansing as a debaters' point. It's perverse, isn't it, the way that ethnic cleansing that occurred during a U.S. occupation can be treated so nonchalantly by Washington polemicists.

I'd be remiss not to send a quick message to Yglesias: Dude, take some time off. You're going to be swamped with that new, nasty gig at Think Progress. (a move which may "raise the IQ at the Atlantic").

But back to the debate at hand!

Actually, it's not illogical for deaths from sectarian violence to have dropped if the term "cleansing" is recognized in its very common usage as a broad shorthand for the consolidation of ethnic neighborhoods and the internal displacement of populations from their homes. Iraq's ethnic cleansing has not generally been seen as genocidal. Indeed, surge proponents using this shorthand terminology have been savagely attacked for allegedly seeking to minimize the refugee tragedy of "millions of Iraqis" being "robbed" of their homes.

The fact is that the antiwar hordes have never accepted the COIN strategy of President George Bush and General David Petraeus. The victory of the beefed-up troop contingents along with the tactical adjustments on the ground have long been slandered as an alleged "false narrative" of success. Just over a week ago some of the most implacable Bush-bashers on the left smeared success under the surge as a myth, while others have said that it's "worked tactically, but hasn't succeeded strategically, at least not yet."

Yet now, with all the mainstream political actors accepting the new realities of Iraq - including both John McCain and Barack Obama - most of the antiwar contingents are seeking to push the war debate past the question of victory to that of culpability in alleged American atrocities.

This all ties into the big push on the left for "accountability" of the Bush administration foreign policy decisions, such as the treatment of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, as well as the domestic surveillance operations and the question of telecom immunity.

Ideally, for war opponents, Bush administration "criminals" would be prosecuted for war crimes under a Barack Obama administration come January 2009. What's most likely to happen, in the advent of an Obama regimes, is that Congress would establish a "commission on torture" to investigate alleged wrong-doing under the Bush-Cheney years. Yet, the recent hard-left uproar over Obama-advisor Cass Sunstein's recent dismissal of war crimes prosecutions indicates that the antiwar forces want a bit more than "truth and reconcilliation."

Thus, today's uproar over the Biddle, O'Hanlon, and Pollack essay can be seen as building more war crimes charges against the administration.

The whole thing may well end up being a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing, especially as Barack Obama's been dropping in the polls like an anchor.

On the other hand, the war crimes push is an international movement, and U.S. bloggers like Ackerman, Ezra Klein, and the crew at Newshoggers - with no substantive loyalty to the principle of American sovereignty - would like nothing more than the establishment of a universal jurisdiction of vengeance and star chamber prosecutions of Bush's neo-imperialist cabal next year.

Spears and Hilton Boost McCain Media Attention

John McCain's recent ad buy highlighting Barack Obama's celebrity has helped shift some media attention back to the GOP side. The Pew Research Organization has the report, "Spears and Hilton Raise McCain Coverage Even With Obama":

For the first time since this general election campaign began in early June, Republican John McCain attracted virtually as much media attention as his Democratic rival last week.

Barack Obama was a significant or dominant factor in 81% of the campaign stories compared with 78% for McCain, according to PEJ's Campaign Coverage Index for July 28-Aug. 3. That was a high water mark for McCain in the general election season (his previous best was 62% from June 30-July 6) . And the virtual dead heat in the race for exposure between the two candidates also marked the first time his weekly coverage had even been within 10 percentage points of Obama's total. Indeed, in the eight weeks since early June when the general election contest began, 79% of the stories have significantly featured Obama, compared with 55% for his Republican rival.

The spike in press attention to the McCain campaign came a week after Obama's tour of the Middle East and Europe commandeered the headlines, accounting for half the election coverage for July 21-27. It also came a week after the media engaged in a spasm of introspection, amid a wave of accusations that the media was being unfair to the GOP standard bearer. The third biggest campaign storyline for July 21-27 was the issue of whether the press was biased toward and lavishing too much attention on Obama.

Last week, the McCain campaign also drove the narrative by directly tackling that perception in a controversial ad. It described Obama as "the biggest celebrity in the world" and featured images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton - two tabloid favorites known more for hard-partying lifestyles than any other achievements. (It was a relatively big week for Spears, too. First, she was featured in the ad. Then an Obama spokesman responded to that spot by accusing McCain of another negative attack, saying "Oops! He did it again" -- which is a play on the title of her hit single.)

The "celebrity" spot also helped push campaign advertising to a more prominent place in the coverage. Advertising was the second-biggest campaign story line last week, filling 10% of the campaign newshole. The ripple effects were felt throughout the week as the ad itself generated another narrative - whether the McCain campaign was too negative - that filled 6% of the newshole. The tone of the campaign, and the new McCain ad, then triggered a third major story line. When Obama accused Republicans of trying to frighten Americans because he "doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills," the McCain team responded by accusing Obama of playing the "race card." And that controversy, at 15%, became the biggest campaign narrative of all.

There's more at the link:

Note a couple of points: This reseach presents a solid content analysis of the distribution of news coverage. As such, it should help put to rest some of the debate over media bias toward Barack Obama.

Moreover, the report should validate the McCain campaign's shift to a more in-your-face style of political combat. As I've noted, Obama has lost ground in recent polling trends.

And as Pew indicates:

McCain's attack advertising strategy, which played off the notion that the press was infatuated with Obama, blended with the McCain theme that Obama offered less than meets the eye, drove the media narrative last week.

Still, the GOP should hammer Obama and the Democrats on their policy weaknesses, while McCain build his own message into a compelling theme. See also, Allahpundit, "McCain Finally Getting Almost as Much Media Coverage as Obama."

Message to Maverick: Forget Reformism, Build Contrasts

John McCain's launching a limited ad buy, "The Original Maverick":

I think this is a good ad - for the GOP primaries.

Jonathan Martin suggests McCain's basically running a two-track media message (pushing the fighting reformist message on the one hand, and attacking the opponent on the other), but ultimately this ad's a glossy blurb in search of a theme.

Message to the McCain folks: Forget the squishy reform mantra, build-up contrasts on Democratic Party weaknesses (think drilling), and redouble the focus on Obama's experience as a postmodernist who has disingenously played to the middle for years.

See also, "John McCain: 'The original maverick'."

Iraq Experts Jockeying for Post-Election Influence

The new Iraq piece at Foreign Affairs, by Stephen Biddle, Michael E. O'Hanlon, and Kenneth M. Pollack, isn't particularly earth-shattering in its analysis and overview of the future of Iraq (see the New York Times as well)

The surge has worked, al Qaeda's been decimated, and Iraqi domestic politics is the hottest game in town.

What caught my attention, though, after all of the article's considerable surprise at the Bush administration's temerity to see the deployment through to victory, is this nugget from the conclusion:

The American people - to say nothing of the servicemen and servicewomen who are fighting - have every right to be tired of this war and to question whether it should have ever been fought. But understandable frustration with past mistakes, sorrow over lives lost, anger at resources wasted, and fatigue with a war that has at times seemed endless must not blind Americans to the major change of the last 18 months. The developments of 2007 and 2008 have created new possibilities. If the United States is willing to seize them, it could yet emerge from Mesopotamia with something that may still fall well short of Eden on the Euphrates but that prevents the horrors of all-out civil war, avoids the danger of a wider war, and yields a stability that endures as Americans come home.

This kind of triangulation is to be expected from O'Hanlon and Pollock.

These two were a couple of the greatest "liberal hawks" during the run-up to the war. Yet, they've been scourged as the most demonic enablers of the vile BushCo imperialist project. Perhaps with this Foreign Affairs piece, and a few other well-placed articles in the antiwar press, these guys might see enough of a rehabilitation to be considered for defense posts in a potential Barack Obama administration.

Biddle's the riddle, however.

Biddle's an expert in strategic studies and an Iraq advisor to the General David Petraeus. He's been hammered as a hated neocon by the antiwar left, and he's not one to rehearse "Bush lied, people died" antiwar propaganda.

Now that Iraq's turning out to be a spectacular success - after years of doom-and-gloom defeatism - perhaps Biddle's hoping to establish some good graces with the Democratic Party's foreign policy community: He too may be getting better positioned for an advisory role in a possible Obama administration.

These guys should be careful. Obama's not doing so great in public opinion, and at some point-flip-flopping policy advocacy gets one labelled a mountebank in policy circles.

Indeed, we might see unreconstructed neoconservatives landing all the hot gigs in a John McCain administration's national security directorate.

Losing Ground? Obama's Polling Collapse

One of the most astounding facts of this election season is that for all of the presumed demands for change in American politics, the candidate of "hope" and "transcendence" has failed to gain a lead in public opinion polls.

Commenting on new data showing John McCain pulling ahead of Barack Obama in Rasmussen, USA Today, and Zogby surveys, the Hedgehog Report notes:

Now I rarely post national polls at this point since they really don’t mean anything when it comes to the Electoral College. But John McCain went nearly three months without leading in any national poll and now within a week, he has been ahead now in three national polls (USAT/Gallup. Rasmussen, and Zogby).

As the old cliche goes - Once is an anomaly, twice is a coincidence, three times is a trend...

The focus this morning is not just that Obama's stagnating, but that he's losing ground with key constituencies:

Barack Obama has lost ground among some of his strongest bases of support, including young people, women, Democrats and independents, according to a new ATV/Zogby poll.

The Illinois Democrat has also lost some support among African-Americans and Hispanics, where his lead over Republican John McCain has shrunk, and among Catholics, where he's lost his lead.

While I agree with Hedgehog that today's polls are just a snapshot, it is nevertheless significant that in over a month of campaigning Obama's never really broken out into as sustained double-digit lead.

Some on the left are perplexed, retreating into standard denials of the statistical significance of polling, media fairness, or even outright rage at the alleged GOP slime machine:

Rasmussen's poll today sends one message to John McCain. His disgusting, sleazy, personal attacks on Obama are working. We can now expect a lot more, and there's little reason to think that they won't be just as effective next time.

You see, with John McCain's new agressiveness, the lefties are shocked - shocked! - that this year's electoral politics would go negative.

Captain Ed adds a nice summary:

This, of course, is August, and the general election is a long way off. However, these trends look very troubling not just for Obama but for the entire Democratic Party.

I'm loving it!

Obama's Postmodern World

Jonah Goldberg argues that Barack Obama resides in a world where words have no fixed meaning:

Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is "being out of alignment with my values." Statements such as this have caused many people to wonder whether Obama has a God complex or is hopelessly arrogant. For the record, sin isn't being out of alignment with your own values (if it were, Hannibal Lecter wouldn't be a sinner because his values hold that it's OK to eat people) nor is it being out of alignment with Obama's — unless he really is our Savior.

There is, however, a third possibility. Obama is a postmodernist.

An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.

"PoMos" hold that there is no such thing as capital-T "Truth." There are only lower-case "truths." Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo's telling, reality is "socially constructed." And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that "privileges" the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.

Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism. It claims to liberate society from fixed meanings and rigid categories, but it is invariably used to impose new ones, usually in the form of political correctness. We've all seen how adept the PC brigades are celebrating free speech, when it's for speech they like.

Obama gives every indication of having evolved from this intellectual soup. As a student and, later, a law school instructor, Obama was sympathetic to Critical Race Theory, a wholly owned franchise of postmodernism. At Harvard, Obama revered Derrick Bell, a controversial black law professor who preferred personally defined literary truths over old-fashioned literal truth. Words are power, Bell and Co. argued, and your so-called facts are merely myths of the white power structure....

The Obama campaign has a postmodern feel to it because more than anything else, it seems to be about itself. Its relationship to reality is almost theoretical. Sure, the campaign has policy proposals, but they are props to advance the narrative of a grand movement existing in order to be a movement galvanized around the singular ideal of movement-ness. Obama's followers are, to borrow from David Hasselhoff — another American hugely popular in Germany — hooked on a feeling. "We are the ones we have been waiting for!" Well, of course you are.

In Berlin two weeks ago, Obama's speech was justified solely by the fact that he was giving it. He offered no policy and — not being a president — really had no reason to be there other than to tell people, essentially, "now is the moment." He informed the throbbing masses, bathing in his charisma the way hippies wallowed in the mud at Woodstock, that the greatest threat facing the world is the possibility we might allow "new walls to divide us from one another." Nuclear war? Feh. No, walls, walls are the danger. Of course, these new walls aren't real. Some might even say they're just words.

But not Barack Obama.

That reminds me of Alice in Wonderland:

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - that's all.'

See also, Victor Davis Hanson, "An Elegant Farce: Obama’s ‘Conversation’ About Moral Equivalence."

Image Credit: The People's Cube