Orderly or Precipitous? A Plan to Exit Iraq

Anthony Cordesman makes the case that the U.S. should downsize the Iraq mission from 15 brigades scheduled for this summer to 5 brigades by 2010, which will be midterm during the next presidential administration:

IF the United States is to succeed in Iraq, if the Bush administration is to manage a credible transition to the next president and if there is to be any hope of a bipartisan approach to the war there, we need a clear plan to move forward. Good plans cannot guarantee the future, but they can provide good options.

Over the next few years, the United States should seek to decrease its forces from the 15 combat brigades planned for July to no more than five, and reduce their role to a largely advisory one. This would largely eliminate the heavy loss in lives and reduce the cost of the war from $12 billion a month during the peak of the surge in 2007 to about $12 billion a year.

We should also phase out most aid to Iraq by the middle of the next presidency. The United States has already disbursed most of the $20.9 billion it has appropriated for the Iraqi Reconstruction and Relief Fund. And the State Department’s request for economic and security aid has dropped from $2.1 billion in 2007 to $960 million this year and $397 million for 2009. The United States should also give Iraq the military equipment that is already there and too expensive to bring back.

During this process, the United States needs to encourage the various Iraqi factions to reach a political compromise....

Well-timed troop withdrawals and a reduction in war costs, along with credible Iraqi elections, would move the United States down a path that most Americans and Congress would support — one the next president would have a reason to take.

Five brigades would be roughly 20,000 troops, if we count brigade size at the higher end of about 4,000 soldiers.

That sounds a little low to me, given that some analysts have suggested a residual force continent of 70,000 to 80,000 troops in Iraq for a decade or more.

The Cordesman plan is driven by domestic political realities, rather than short-term military or long-term strategic needs.

(Extra: Cordesman's plan, which GOES TOO FAR toward the precipitous side, in my view, is apparently rejected by antiwar surrender hawks Spencer Ackerman, Tristero, and Matthew Yglesias, who are unhappy with the New York Times' exclusion of genuine far left-wing antiwar fanatics from Sunday's Iraq symposium. )

Malicious Anonymity vs. Online Free Speech

We all get them: The nasty, hate-filled drive-by attacks that make many bloggers screen their threads through comment moderation. The worst of these are usually anonymous, which makes dealing with the issue even more frustrating.

I've had a couple of death threats, so legal recourse isn't out of the realm of contemplation.

Anyway, I'm just reflecting on this stuff as a blogger (see my recent post, "Neo-Confederate Hate Comments), but in the online world of social networking, things may be coming to a head.

It turns out that the issues of online anonymity are attracting the attention of regulators, according to this piece over at Business Week:

Melissa heard the gossip about her Princeton University classmates on JuicyCampus.com even before she saw the Web site.

She's anorexic.

He's a closeted homosexual.

She's spreading sexual diseases.

Since it was set up last year, JuicyCampus has become a popular place for college kids around the country to share such gossip. Melissa ultimately found her own name connected with the malicious rumors. But the Princeton junior couldn't do anything about it. All the comments were anonymous and JuicyCampus won't remove posts based on students' objections. "The second someone's name appears on the site, it's a death sentence," she says.

She's not the only one who feels that way. Complaints about the site have poured into the office of New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram, and Milgram has opened an investigation into JuicyCampus. She wants the site to provide a way to remove defamatory posts, but the problems go beyond slander. Milgram worries the Web site's guarantee of anonymity could lead to harassment, assault, or worse. One young woman said strange men started knocking on her door at night after comments were posted on the site detailing her alleged sexual activities and giving her home address. "There are public safety issues," says Milgram. Her effort has generated support among legal authorities from Connecticut to California.

JuicyCampus denies any wrongdoing. Founder and Chief Executive Matt Ivester says the site has no legal responsibility to police or remove comments based on claims of defamation. "We are confident that we haven't violated any laws," he says, "and we're disappointed that this is where [the attorney general] is focusing her time." The Web site doesn't charge its users any fees, instead generating revenue from advertising.

Ivester has plenty of support. Many tech executives and legal experts argue that anonymous, unfettered speech is essential on the Internet. It's not just the principle; it's the business. Web sites such as Amazon.com, YouTube, and MySpace depend on user participation to generate content. Monitoring or screening users could prove costly or impossible for some sites. "To shift the burden [of screening content] to Web site operators is precisely the opposite of what has led to a well-developed Internet," says Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil liberties advocate.

Adeo Ressi has seen the controversy at first hand. He founded a Web site called TheFunded, which allows entrepreneurs to anonymously rate venture capital firms and provide comments on firm employees. He says cloaking participants' identities is essential to elicit candid assessments, and allows the Web site to provide valuable information about the venture industry. "Anonymity is necessary in order to get to the truth," he says.

The proliferation of such interactive Internet sites is what's given rise to the current debate. In the past, there were a relatively small number of sites that allowed user comments, players such as Yahoo! and America Online. If needed, prosecutors like Milgram could subpoena a site's host to discover a user's identity. But now there are thousands of Web sites that allow comments, and many wipe out or fail to store the records necessary to track down visitors to the site. "It used to be that if someone slammed you anonymously, you subpoenaed AOL and they got his home address and his full name," says Michael Fertik, chief executive of ReputationDefender, which tracks commentary for clients online. "But that's no longer the case."

Melissa understands the issues only too well. The confident 20-year-old welcomes a reporter to her dorm room dressed for the gym. She talks about JuicyCampus dismissively. She doesn't believe the site deserves any attention and is annoyed that it has gotten so much of hers. "It is just a mean concept and no one uses it for anything more than reporting mean things," she says.

The posts about her, with her full name, include attacks on her integrity, accusing her of backstabbing friends and social climbing. Normally, she would have shrugged it off. But because the posts could stay online for years, she frets about their effect on her reputation, perhaps even as she interviews for jobs. "It's not funny," she says. "I don't know if an employer would consider this a reliable source of anything, but if they went on and found a prospective employee's name, it's worrisome." She asked that her last name not be used for this story to avoid calling more attention to the posts.

Milgram believes JuicyCampus' own terms of service could require it to remove such material. The site asks users not to post content that is abusive, defamatory, or invasive of privacy, among other things. Not upholding those terms could violate New Jersey's Consumer Fraud Act, Milgram says.

There are few legal means to compel Web sites to police message boards. For more than a decade, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 has protected sites from suits concerning user comments, defining such sites as akin to public parks rather than publications. Now some lawmakers are saying those protections are too broad. One member of California's state assembly has called for suggestions to change state law to address the problem.

The growing dangers of online speech have been illustrated by tragic cases, such as the suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier in October. The young teen hanged herself a day after being insulted online by a person she believed to be Josh Evans, a 16-year-old boy with whom she had formed a friendship on MySpace. Evans didn't exist. He was later revealed to be a false profile allegedly created by a neighbor.

As the legal debate rages, Princeton students are trying another tactic to shut down anonymous gossip online: attacking the sites' business model. They're organizing boycotts of JuicyCampus and similar ventures, to cut off traffic and, by extension, ad revenue.

Behind the movement at Princeton is Connor Diemand-Yauman, 20-year-old president of the 2010 class. He created a new Web site, OwnWhatYouThink.com, that asks students to pledge not to visit anonymous gossip sites and to stand behind their online statements. "This is about changing the way our generation and our culture look at the way we communicate with one another," he says.Since the campaign's launch on Apr. 1, nearly 1,000 students have signed the pledge. Ivester says the boycott won't have any damaging effect on the site.

One warm afternoon, Diemand-Yauman and dozens of other students held a rally to promote their cause. As an antidote to abusive content online, hundreds of positive statements about students from their classmates were projected onto a massive screen.

She gives the best hugs.

He is sweet and smart.

She is always around when I need a friend.

Some wore shirts, emblazoned with a retort to JuicyCampus and sites like it: "Anonymity = Cowardice."

I have a few libertarian readers, and I'd be interested in some thoughts on this.

I'm not against some degree of governmental intervention to regulate some of this, at the least to make the laws more serious for cases like Megan Meier's, where her parents had no legal recourse after hate-filled social networking attacks drove her to suicide (see, "Anguish ForMother of Suicide Girl as 'Cyber-Trmentor' Ecapes the Law").

Of course, in the absence of legislation, online users, and especially parents, simply need to be more vigilant. It's a jungle online sometimes, and a nightmare.

Israel's Political Crisis

When you hear the phrase, "Israeli political crisis," does the larger military/strategic problem of Israel's ongoing Palestinian conflict come to mind?

Or would your first thought be that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's close be being indicted on some major corruption charges, or something of that sort, since the premiere's under investigation, and it's all hush-hush?

I naturally think of the long-simmering challenge to the Israeli state, but as today's New York Times reports, an internal crisis in the prime minister's office has hampered hopes for a peace breakthrough amid U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent shuttle diplomacy to the Middle East: "Israeli Political Crisis Overshadows Rice’s Trip":

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a series of talks on Israeli-Palestinian peace here on Sunday, saying she believed an accord was attainable by year’s end. But the process was overshadowed by an intensifying police investigation of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel....

The nature of the accusation against Mr. Olmert is under a strict court-imposed gag order, so Israeli commentators, some of whom have received leaks of key details, have been talking around it. “The issue under investigation is serious, of that there can be no doubt,” wrote Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the newspaper Yediot Aharonot. “If it turns out that the allegations against Olmert are well founded, he will have to resign his post if not more than that.”

Mr. Barnea hinted that the core of the issue seemed to be bribery. “Sometimes affairs of this sort end with nothing,” he wrote. “Other times they become bogged down in an argument over interpretation: an act that one jurist interprets as bribe-taking is interpreted by another as entirely legitimate and by a third as a technical mishap.”

Because Mr. Olmert is under investigation in several other cases, and because he has many political enemies, some in the Israeli news media have urged caution, arguing that the inquiry could be just another attempt to bring him down.

But others argued that the sheer quantity of the investigations was one reason he would not survive.

Channel 2 News said Sunday night that Mr. Olmert’s long-time close aide, Shula Zaken, had been questioned under caution for the third time and had maintained her right to remain silent all three times. It also quoted “senior sources” as saying that the case was moving quickly toward an indictment.

Mr. Olmert addressed the investigation at Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting, trying to dispel rumors of its gravity but without making a specific claim of innocence.

According to his spokesman, he told his cabinet: “To my regret, for reasons that do not depend on me, the country has been swept with a wave of rumors regarding the investigation. I am certain that when matters are made clear, with the permission of the proper authorities, matters will be presented in the correct proportion, in their right and exact context, and that this will put an end to the rumors.”

Olmert's political crisis sounds potentially devastating, but should his government fall, perhaps Israel can embark on a different track toward the state's relationship to Palestine and terrorism.

The political-strategic situation, after all, hasn't been going all that well, under both the Bush administration's belated diplomatic push, or under the attempted good offices of Jimmy Carter.

Caroline Glick offers a penetrating and sober assessment of the way forward:

Another ordinary week has come and gone in southern Israel. Bombarded by rockets from Hamastan in Gaza, residents of Sderot, Ashkelon and nearby towns watched as their national leaders conducted negotiations by proxy with Hamas to release hundreds of terrorists in Israeli jails and consolidate Hamas's weapons supply lines by suspending Israeli counter-terror operations during a "cease-fire." Between trips to the local bomb shelter, they watched Israeli trucks deliver fuel and supplies to Hamas in Gaza in the morning and they watched Hamas store the fuel and supplies in depots near the border in the afternoon. In the evening they watched news reports echoing Hamas's claims that Israel is depriving Gazan hospitals of fuel and Gazan civilians of basic foodstuffs.

Wednesday night they tried having a Yom Hashoah ceremony in Sderot but it was interrupted by incoming rockets. For its part, Hamas marked the Holocaust with a documentary series claiming that the genocide of European Jewry was a satanic Jewish plot to cull the Jewish population of its handicapped and to manipulate the world media.

Hamas captured headlines this week with its allegation that Israel was responsible for the death of a Palestinian woman and four of her children in an explosion in Bet Hanoun in Gaza as the IDF targeted Hamas terrorists from the air. The IDF conducted two investigations showing that the woman and her children were killed by something else: a secondary explosion caused by bombs the Hamas terrorists - one of whom was her husband - were carrying at the time the IDF targeted them.

Hamas's allegations that the IDF killed four children and their mother were reported by both the international and Israeli media as facts. Those "facts" were only questioned when the IDF began its probes. Neither the local media nor the international media thought the fact that the source of their accounts was Hamas should make them question the veracity of the initial reports.

When its spokesmen are not busy accusing Jews of planning genocide and Israel of killing mothers and children, Hamas devotes its efforts to accusing Israel of killing sick Palestinians by refusing to let them into Israel for free medical care. As no good deed by Jews goes unpunished by the UN, early last month the World Health Organization punished Israel for admitting more than 7,000 Palestinians from Gaza for free medical care during 2007. Echoing Hamas propaganda, the WHO accused Israel of causing the deaths of 33 sick Palestinians between October 2007 and March 2008. They died, the WHO claimed, due to the Jewish state's heartless refusal to allow them into its hospitals.

The WHO report made no mention of the fact that Hamas now controls the hospitals and clinics in Gaza. No mention was made of the fact that Israel bears no responsibility for providing health care to non-citizens from enemy territories, or of the fact that there is no place in the world where such care is provided other than Israel. No mention was made of Hamas intercepting and hoarding hospital supplies for propaganda purposes. No responsibility was assigned to Egypt - the other country bordering Gaza - which does not admit any Palestinian patients. The report never questioned the credibility of its Gazan sources.

As Andrea Levin, the executive director for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) noted this week in The Jerusalem Post, it was only due to the quick and detailed response of Israeli officials refuting Hamas's allegations that Israel wasn't widely condemned for murdering sick people....

BUT THEN, the media can perhaps be forgiven for their refusal to admit that their reports from Gaza are generally nothing more than terrorist propaganda for they are far from alone in their refusal to acknowledge the significance of Hamas's regime. From Jimmy Carter to the Bush administration to the Olmert-Livni-Barak government, denial is the order of the day.

Carter defends his decision to meet with Hamas's leaders in Syria and Judea by noting that the jihadist, genocidal, Iranian-sponsored terror group won the Palestinian elections. Since a majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas and still support it, the jihadist, genocidal, Iranian-sponsored terror group is legitimate, Carter argues. Certainly no peace agreement can be reached without it.

But then as Hamas clarified just after its leaders met with Carter, any deal it may reach with Israel is merely a tactic in its ongoing war to destroy Israel. So while it may be true that no Palestinian-Israeli peace is possible without Hamas, it is absolutely true that no Palestinian-Israeli peace is possible with Hamas.

Far from demonstrating the necessity of negotiating with Hamas, Hamas's popularity shows the futility of attempting to coax peaceful coexistence out of a Palestinian society committed to its neighbor's destruction. Yet just as the media and Carter refuse to acknowledge the significance of Hamas's terror regime, so the Bush administration refuses to acknowledge the significance of its broad-based popular support among Palestinians.

In her remarks Tuesday before the American Jewish Committee, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that Palestinian society today overwhelmingly supports Israel's annihilation through terrorism when she said: "Increasingly, Palestinians who talk about a two-state solution are my age. And I'm not that old, but I'm a lot older than most of the Palestinian population."

But then, after acknowledging that most Palestinians do not support peaceful coexistence with Israel, Rice argued that Israel must give them more land, more guns and more money because as she sees it, now is the time for a Palestinian state and leaders need to "make hard decisions confidently for the sake of peace and for the sake of their people."

Rice went on to explain that this appeasement must be done while enabling the Hamas regime in Gaza to remain in place. As she put it, "The only responsible policy is to isolate Hamas and defend against its threats, until Hamas makes the choice that supports peace."

So from Rice's perspective, not only must Hamas not be defeated, it would be irresponsible to even try to defeat it. The only "responsible" policy for Israel is to allow Hamas to continue stockpiling arms and building its army while trying to reach a cease-fire with it. Then too, as far as Rice is concerned, Israel must curb its counterterrorist operations in Judea and Samaria, dry out Israeli communities there and in post-1967 Jerusalem neighborhoods and allow US-trained and armed Fatah militias (who are also terror-supporting) to deploy in Palestinian towns and cities by the thousands. This, she believes, is the best way to make Hamas transform itself into a peaceful political party willing to live at peace with Jews.

Read the whole thing.

Glick says forget political compromise with Hamas, which is the representative of a large Palestinian majority that wants nothing but the compete and utter annihilation of the Israeli state.

No, Glick argues that the only solution is for "Israel to lay waste to Hamas's terror army in Gaza and overthrow its regime."

That doesn't sound so politically correct, given Glick preceding analysis of the U.N. et al., not to mention the delegitimate status of preventive war doctrine among left-wing appeasement circles in the U.S.

I'm sure Olmert would rather get over his personal political crisis than have the weight of the U.S. and Third World community denouncing the Israeli "genocide" of the "peaceful" Palestinians.

Photo Credit: "Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, right, leaving his office in Jerusalem on Sunday. Mr. Olmert is under police investigation but the accusations are covered by a strict court-imposed gag order. Some commentators in the Israeli news media have received leaks about the accusations," New York Times

John McCain: Unite Us, Ignite the Economy

For all the far right attacks during the primaries about how John McCain was just another "liberal Democrat," as we get closer to the general election, the differences between McCain's philosophy and the Democrats' on individual choice, opportunity, and the role of the economy's coming into greater relief.

This new McCain campaign spot captures the campaign's thrust: John McCain: Unite Us, Ignite the Economy (vie YouTube):

Also, the Los Angeles Times has a interesting piece on party differences over health care this year:

If John McCain becomes president, Americans would be steered toward buying individual health insurance policies, and job-related coverage eventually could decline. If Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton wins, more people would get their insurance from the government -- with many workers offered the equivalent of Medicare and employers facing new coverage mandates.

In the past, voters sometimes have complained that there was little difference between Republicans and Democrats. That's far from true in the 2008 campaign, at least where healthcare is concerned. On this issue, which many voters rank near the top of their concerns, the two parties offer clear choices.

The Democratic and Republican candidates espouse similar goals: making medical insurance more available and more affordable for more Americans. But their strategies for achieving those goals are fundamentally different. So are the ways in which, over time, the nation's healthcare system would change.

McCain, for example, says he would give individuals more freedom of choice; critics say he could destabilize the employer-based system that the middle class has relied on for more than half a century.

Clinton and Obama, meanwhile, say their fairly similar strategies would give better and more affordable coverage to more -- eventually all -- people; critics say they would march the country toward socialized medicine.

For the approximately 60% of Americans covered by employer-provided health insurance, none of the plans would bring dramatic changes overnight. But over a period of years, employer-based coverage could decline.

McCain's way is to de-emphasize job-based insurance and encourage people to choose their own coverage in a yet-to-be-created national marketplace; he would offer tax credits to help them pay for such coverage.

The Democrats' approach is to shore up the kinds of large pools that traditional insurance programs rely on -- using the premiums of the many who don't file claims in any given period to pay the claims of the relatively few who do.

They would also put the insurance industry on a tighter regulatory leash.

"The specifics can be sort of mind-bending, but on the very broad choices, McCain emphasizes a vision where individuals get more choices in the marketplace and are less reliant on employers and government," said Robert Blendon of the Harvard School of Public Health, an expert on public attitudes about healthcare reform.

"The Democrats are emphasizing that people need employers and government to create large pools so that they can get group rates for much less than as individuals."

He added: "There's a big debate about which way would you do better."

On the problem of the 47 million uninsured, Clinton's plan would have the most dramatic effect, all but eliminating it, said John Sheils, vice president of the Lewin Group, a prominent consulting firm. McCain's plan would probably cover 20 million or so of the uninsured, he estimated, whereas Obama's would be somewhere in the middle.

"Clinton's plan would cover the most people because it's a mandate," Sheils said.

She is the only candidate who would require all people to get coverage, through an employer or government plan or on their own.

Ideology is not the only thing that divides the candidates. In a practical sense, they view the problem differently.

For McCain, the main problem is cost: Bring healthcare costs under control, and more people will get coverage. For the Democrats, the main problem is lack of coverage: Unless everybody is in the risk pool, spending can never be brought under control because different players will try to shift the costs of caring for the uninsured to one another.

Some economists think that one of the main reasons U.S. healthcare costs have grown so rapidly is that Americans are not aware of what they spend on healthcare. That insight is the starting point for McCain's plan.

Since many people get healthcare as a tax-free fringe benefit, relatively few are aware of what it actually costs -- about $12,000 a year, on average, for family coverage and $4,500 annually for an individual plan.

Yep, there's a pretty big ideological gap in these differences, and the election this fall's going to clarify some big questions on where this country wants to go on the balance beween private interest and public purpose. We could be in for a classic partisan realignment toward the later, and I wouldn't be surprised if we end up headed toward market socialism under a Democratic administration next January.

The wild card is Barack Obama, who is proving himself untested for the national stage, and radically out of touch with Middle America (especially in his political associations).

McCain by far exceeds Obama on leadership qualities, and McCain remains ahead of the shady Chicago socialist in trial heat polling matchups, so a savvy GOP campaign may save the country from confiscatory oblivlion after all.

In any case, I wrote about McCain's healthcare plan in an earlier article, which is crossposted at Heidi's blog.

I'll have more later.

Left-Wing Smears Heat Up as Obama Falters in the Polls

In the comments to my post yesterday, on Barack Obama's weaknesses in public opinion, I cited Victor David Hanson's explanation as to how the Wright controversy could prove fatal to the Democrat in the fall (the white working-class vote's not in the tank).

TBogg, an attack-master at Firedoglake, drove by here to leave this slur against Hanson's working class thesis:

Yes. Because if there is anyone who understands "white working-class" voters it is a classics professor who collects wingnut welfare from the Hoover Institution and who has staked his somewhat minimal reputation on having others fight his Thermopylae wetdream.

"Wingnut welfare"? I haven't heard that one before, but the "Thermopylae wetdream" is a classic in the "chicken hawk" genre.

Well there's more of this anti-neoconism from "Attaturk" at FDL, who tries to take down William Kristol's commentary this morning (Kristol suggested Obama's "vulnerability" has been exposed in recent polling trends).

Attaturk takes issue with this paragraph from Kristol:

In a New York Times/CBS News poll in late February, Obama was defeating John McCain 50 to 38. Two months later, the Times/CBS poll had McCain and Obama tied. The poll that came out yesterday showed Obama reopening a lead over McCain — but clearly over this period a vulnerability for Obama was exposed.

Here's Attaturk's comeback:

The latest CBS poll, that shows this awesome damage to Obama?

Obama (D) 51%
McCain (R) 40%

Wow, that's really, um, not at all devastating. No matter how much the chattering classes -- the wealthy, white, actually elitist chattering classes -- cannot grasp it. Sadly, for Kristol and the rest of the fans of things like Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos", Clinton kicks McCain's ass by a similar margin.

And unnoticed by the nation's editorial writers and gasbags of cable news, especially by the Kristols and the Stephanopouli, the public seems to have determined the real culprit in the Jeremiah Wright matter:

Concerning Rev. Wright's coverage in the media the new poll sites that according to registered voters polled the attention paid has been:

Too Much.....56%
Too Little.......5%
About Right...34%

Not that this fact will stop a talking head from trying.

The problem here?

Kristol never discounts Obama's floated back up a bit in the polling data. He's suggesting Obama's got potentially fatal liabilities. He also provides polling data (from Fox) outside of CBS's survey that shows McCain running very strong against Clinton, and beating Obama outright (see also Gallup's findings from May 1, "Clinton’s vs. Obama’s Strengths in the General Election").

Note too USA Today's survey out this morning, which reveals more weaknesses in the Obama camp:

Barack Obama's national standing has been significantly damaged by the controversy over his former pastor, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, raising questions for some voters about the Illinois senator's values, credibility and electability.

The erosion of support among Democrats and independents raises the stakes in Tuesday's Indiana and North Carolina primaries, which represent a chance for Obama to reassert his claim to a Democratic nomination that seems nearly in his grasp. A defeat in Indiana and a close finish in North Carolina, where he's favored, could fuel unease about his ability to win in November. Such results also could help propel Hillary Rodham Clinton's uphill campaign all the way to the Democratic convention in August.

In the USA TODAY survey, taken Thursday through Saturday, Clinton leads Obama among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents by 7 percentage points, the first time in three months she has been ahead. Two weeks ago, before the controversy over comments by Jeremiah Wright reignited, Obama led by 10 points.

In February, Democrats and Democratic leaners by 33 points said Obama had a better shot at beating Republican John McCain in November. Clinton is now seen as the stronger candidate by 5 points.

Obama led Clinton by 10 points?

Hey Attaturk! No damage to Obama, eh? No siree, bob!

USA Today says otherwise:

The Wright controversy has been especially problematic for Obama's campaign because it has helped shape Americans' emerging assessments of the candidate. In the USA TODAY survey:

• Obama's unfavorable rating climbs to a new high, 37%. His negative rating among independents, usually the swing voters in national elections, jumped from 27% in February to 36% now.

Even so, Obama's favorable-unfavorable rating of 58%-37% remains more positive than Clinton's 52%-45%. McCain's standing is the strongest of all: 62% favorable-30% unfavorable.

• One in four Americans who are following the controversy say their "best guess" is that Obama agrees with Wright's views, even though the senator has said repeatedly he finds them offensive and wrong.

• Obama has lost the 8-point advantage he held over Clinton in February as someone who "shares your values." Clinton has a 5-point edge among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

Now, folks can debate the validity of various polls, but the trend in the data - as measured by a range of surveys - has been a significant drop in Obama's favorables.

But looking at the range of data is not the point for Attaturk, or TBogg. Nope, it's all about slamming those evil neocons, living high off the hog at NYT and the Hoover Institution.

We can't let a little disconfirming data get in the way of a good smear!

Raising the Standard of Moral Clarity

Readers may notice how I occassionally suggest that the United States represents "the good" in the world. I mean this in the sense of the universal concept of good in the universe, of a moral being, either Platonic or Christian, and I'm convinced that America's history bears it out, that we have indeed embodied the notion of the "City on a Hill."

I'm routinely attacked by lefties who say "Are you kidding? This country's going to hell."

I don't have much to say in response, because for all the ups and downs of politics, and for all the injustices that mar our history, no other nation has made as many strides toward providing equality and opportunity for more people in history, and our foreign policy has been the savior of the world for more than a half century. Who're ya gonna call? You know?

In any case, it turns out Susan Neiman's got a new book, Moral Clarity, that puts these things in perspective. In Gary Rosen's review, at the Wall Street Journal, he suggests Neiman's work is "A Reading List For Democrats":

The seemingly endless contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is, among other things, a referendum on that perennial question: What ails the American left? Is the problem a failure to offer clear alternatives to the corporate coziness of the Republicans, or is it a lack of cultural and religious sympathy with the heartland? Is it a matter of substance or style, of insufficiently "progressive" policies or bicoastal swagger? To this stale discussion Susan Neiman brings a new thought: The problem with our liberal elites, she insists, is lame metaphysics – a lack of philosophical nerve. What they need is a bracing dose of the Great Books.

An American philosophy professor who directs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, Ms. Neiman is a subtle and energetic guide to the unjustly maligned Western "canon." But she is not some kind of scold or stodgy traditionalist, wagging a disapproving finger at our fall from a golden age. She is, in fact, a self-conscious woman of the left. She knows that our own debates over political and economic fundamentals have intellectual pedigrees worth learning, even at the cost of long hours spent among the most formidable of dead white European males. Her interest in the Bible and Plato, Hobbes and Burke, Hume and Rousseau springs not from nostalgia or an itch to debunk but from a need to think well in the present.

The task that Ms. Neiman sets for herself in "Moral Clarity" is to rescue today's political left from its own philosophical handicaps. How can it be, she wonders, that "moral clarity" has come to be a catchphrase of conservatives while eliciting the knowing sneers of liberals? Why are irony, detachment and pessimism the favored modes of supposed sophisticates? Why is there such a fear of being "judgmental"? What has made firmly asserted ideals seem naïve if not dangerous?

Ms. Neiman points to many factors in the left's retreat from universal principles. The demise of socialism has played a role, as has despair over the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. But the real source, she suggests, is a "conceptual collapse," a self-destructive descent into identity politics, postmodern theory and victimology. Her peers have become paralyzed, she writes, by the view that moral judgments are, ultimately, little more than "a hypocritical attempt to assert arbitrary power over those with whom you disagree."

I can hear the criticism of this thesis now: It's all a bunch of "dead white males," that this is Straussian totalitarianism, or that conservative academics are nothing more than classicist chicken hawks.

What I don't see among hard-left partisans in a grounding in universal values and conceptions of the ultimate good of the cosmos, secular or spirtual.

So, yes, there's a need for more reflection, for a weighing of costs and sacrifices for the purpose of a larger vision of the trajectory of human morality.

I don't think the Democrats embody that drive to deeper reflection.

Poll Shows Wright Controversy Could Affect November Voting

The New York Times reports on a new survey showing that the Jeremiah Wright controversy has not affected opinions on Barack Obama overall, although many respondents say the issue could affect their November vote decisions:

A majority of American voters say the furor over the relationship between Senator Barack Obama and his former pastor has not affected their opinion of Mr. Obama, but a substantial number say it could influence voters this fall should he be the Democratic presidential nominee, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll....

The survey, conducted after Mr. Obama held a news conference on Tuesday forcefully renouncing Mr. Wright for making incendiary comments, found most Americans said they approved of the way Mr. Obama had responded to the episode and considered his criticism of Mr. Wright appropriate.

But nearly half of the voters surveyed, and a substantial portion of the Democrats, said Mr. Obama had acted mainly because he thought it would help him politically, rather than because he had serious disagreements with his former pastor. The broader effect of the controversy on Mr. Obama’s candidacy among Democratic primary voters was less clear-cut in the poll, but enough of them expressed some qualms about Mr. Obama’s relationship with the former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., to suggest it could sway a relatively small but potentially important group of voters in the remaining primaries.

The survey was taken in the days leading up to the primaries on Tuesday in North Carolina and Indiana.

The relatively small number of Democrats surveyed limits the conclusions that can be drawn about its findings regarding sentiment within the party. Moreover, as a national poll, it does not necessarily reflect the sentiments of voters in either Indiana or North Carolina.

The issue of Mr. Wright continues to shadow Mr. Obama — he spent the first 18 minutes of his appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” answering questions about it — and thus could be continuing to mold the public’s views of him. And questions involving racially charged episodes have historically proved difficult to poll, particularly when it comes to asking white voters about black candidates.

Still, the survey suggested that Mr. Obama had lost much or all of the once-commanding lead he had over Mrs. Clinton among Democratic voters on the question of which of them would be the strongest candidate against Mr. McCain, the likely Republican nominee.

That's putting it mildly, I would argue.

Obama's going to be "Hortonized" in the fall, by outside 527s, and fairly too. The Wright relationship's raised deep questions of character and judgment surrounding Obama, particulary on issues of courage, integrity, and veracity under fire.

Why, though, are voters giving Obama a pass? Victor David Hanson nails the answer:

I think we have sort of reached an impasse on Rev. Wright. Most Americans, I think, accept the following realties. Obama, by what he wrote in his memoirs, by what he said when he spoke in his early campaign speeches, by his frequent praise of Wright, and by his 20-year presence in front of, and subsidies to, Wright knew exactly the racist and anti-American nature of his odious pastor.

But many also seem to accept that they have invested too much in Obama and have come too far to accept anything that might end his candidacy. (Hence their hysteria over the Wright “smear”.)

In other words, privately they acknowledge:

—that their candidate made a devil’s bargain with a racist to create an authentic black persona in order to jump start a political career in Chicago;

—that their candidate was so inured to de rigueur anti-American speech from his church days, black-liberationist friends, assorted reverends, and former radicals like Ayers, that he never really thought things that Wright said were all that big a deal — hence his deer-in-the-headlights approach to the initial scandal and serial hedging. After all, in Obama’s adopted world, his church really isn’t “particularly controversial;”

—that their Obama messiah is hardly a new politician, but instead a very gifted and charismatic actor, who, in skillful fashion, can talk about utopian politics but then backstep, hedge, and get away with more than anyone since Bill Clinton in his prime in 1992 (one of the reasons that those two dislike each other so is that they are so much alike) — and that is not such a bad thing after all.

So while Obama is hurt in the primaries, and perhaps mortally so in the general election (the white working classes have a long memory), he will probably get the nomination, because his base will overlook all the above: they despise George Bush, will do anything to prevent another Republican in the White House, are tired of the Clintons, and feel Obama offers them symbolic capital, making them liked abroad and free of guilt at home.

That really says it.

For Democratic voters - particulary the virulent Bush-haters in the base of the party - Obama is the complete antithesis of the Bush/Cheney cabal: a non-white, far-left candidate, likely to recoil from the deployment of millitary force, and certainly geared by upbringing to implement orthodox hard-left policies on race, rights, taxes, and social policy.

I just hope Hanson's white working-class voters stick to their guns, handing an Obama candidacy a defeat of Dukakis-sized proportions.

President Bush: A Global Struggle Against Thugs and Killers

I'm with Dr. Sanity in my respect for President Bush:

Watch the video ... and you will see why I remain a fan of George W. Bush and will continue to like him and stand behind him as President despite flaws and missteps...

Dr. Sanity continues:

The last time I felt this way about a US President was Ronald Reagan, who also managed to evoke a visceral hatred from many of my peers and colleagues for the same sort of moral clarity. History has since vindicated Mr. Reagan, and I believe it will do the same with Mr. Bush, who--whatever his failings--has, IMHO, got the one thing that is most important in our generation absolutely correct. And he has unflinchingly faced its reality with a clarity that is stunning for any politician, despite the unpopularity it has brought him, and despite all the anger, rage and hate that has been directed at him for it.

I switched to the Republican Party because of George W. Bush.

I admire the president mostly on national security issues, but the administration's ideas behind the No Child Behind Act - that all children can learn and be held accountable - constitute one of the most important directions in civil rights policy since the 1960s.

On Iraq and the GWOT, I'll always be grateful for Bush's leadership.

Has he been right all the time? Of course not, but he's been right on the big issues, and if he didn't start out on the right foot, as in Iraq, he's kept at it.

The president's resolve is America's resolve. If the administration would have paid undue attention to public opinion polls in 2004 we would likely have turned tail rather than stand and fight.

Look again here, as Bush says:

I know full well that we're facing a determined enemy. I know it's in our interests to defeat that enemy. So yeah, we're making progress. But it's also a tough battle! We're facing people who're willing to strap bombs on themselves and walk into a place where the innocents dwell, and where the innocent shop, and kill 'em ... we are in a global struggle against thugs and killers! And the United States of America's got to continue to take the lead; so in Afghanistan, yeah, we're making progress....

Is it tough? Yeah. Difficult? Absolutely. It is worth the fight? In my judgment yes it is...

I stand with the president. Our fight is long and hard, but it's in our interest, and it's an ideological struggle, indeed.

It's politically incorrect to say such things (look at how the president's being questioned on national security like a common dime-store thief), and this administration - like Reagan's before it - has been demonized endlessly for standing up for what's right in the world, and being willing to use force when most nations cringe at the thought.

I agree, too, with Dr. Sanity, in that the administration will be looked upon favorably by history.

For more information, see the White House press release.

"Iron Man": Unleashing America's Inner Survival Instinct

I'm taking my youngest son to see "Iron Man" this afternoon.

My boy loves superheroes, and he's been ready for "Iron Man" for some time.

I haven't paid much attention to the film, frankly. I saw previews over the Christmas holidays - when we see a lot of movies - and with the movie's pending release it's been hard not to miss it, with, what, all the Burger King promotional tie-ins: "Daddy, can we go to Burger King for dinner?"

So, I was pleased to see Sonny Bunch's review of "Iron Man" over at the Weekly Standard.

Bunch suggests the Robert Downey's "Tony Stark" character from the film reveals "America's inner id," which is of course our Freudian subliminal drive for the survival of human pleasure (or just survival, for that matter):

SUMMER IS FINALLY here, arriving with a bang in the guise of Iron Man. The latest hero from Marvel comics to get the big screen treatment, Iron Man is brought to life with vigor by the newly rehabbed Robert Downey Jr.

With the possible exception of Christian Bale in Batman Begins (and this summer's The Dark Knight Returns), I can't think of a better actor to don a comic-inspired costume. The subtlety Downey brings to the role, and his interplay with costars Jeff Bridges (Obadiah Stane), Gwyneth Paltrow (Pepper Potts), and Terrence Howard (Jim Rhodes), are fantastic.

Downey portrays Tony Stark, a playboy billionaire arms dealer. His father worked on the Manhattan Project and his company, Stark Enterprises, arms the Pentagon. Stark couldn't be prouder of the work he does: When an obnoxious reporter criticizes him for being a merchant of death, he gives as good as he gets, noting that whoever has the biggest stick dictates the terms of peace. A genius at weapons development, Downey's Stark is clearly someone who takes great pride in his country--and himself.
That all changes when, in the midst of a missile demonstration in the mountains of Afghanistan, Stark is captured by terrorists. Director Jon Favreau goes to great lengths to portray them as an odd international band--one of the terrorists speaks Hungarian, for example--but they're a clear stand-in for al Qaeda and the Taliban. Determined to make Stark build a weapons system capable of leveling an entire city, the terrorists treat him roughly--submerging his head in water, slapping him around--but Stark resists. Until, that is, he discovers that the terrorists already have their hands on some of Stark Enterprise's finest hardware.

Enraged, he sets to work, creating not a missile phalanx but a suit of armor. Powered by an electromagnetic pacemaker, Stark emerges from his prison-cave determined to right the wrongs his company has committed. (This pacemaker is a fine example of comic-book medicine: Implanted in Stark's chest, it somehow keeps his heart pumping while using magnets to repel shrapnel from its valves.) Having seen American troops killed by weapons he designed to protect them, Stark understands the stakes: Nothing less than total annihilation will suffice. A flamethrower and a handy missile do the trick, destroying the terrorist forces--and, of course, relieving them of their weapons....

Iron Man is the American id unleashed. Before his encounter with terrorists, Stark lived a life of hedonism as only a billionaire can, taking his private jet (complete with stripper pole and compliant flight attendants) to Las Vegas, zipping around Malibu in his $120,000 Audi R8, and drinking the finest scotch. After his own personal 9/11 he reacts as most Americans wish they could have reacted on 9/12: By flying to the Middle East and personally stomping out a vicious terrorist cell that had been wreaking havoc on a civilian population.

This is not a "conservative" movie, per se, but it is the film equivalent of a Rorschach test. If you go into Iron Man seeking right-wing imagery, you'll find it: Tony Stark is a patriot, pro-military, and likes unilateral intervention. If you go into Iron Man looking for left-wing imagery, you'll find that, too: The true villain here is Stane, representing an out-of-control military-industrial complex. Still, it's refreshing to go to the multiplex and find a universe where terrorists are despicable and Americans are heroic.

This is refreshing.

As Ross Douthat noted recently, the movie industry's lost the tradition of silver-screen trumpeting of our glorious American cowboy interventionism.

I'm just up for a good movie experience with my kid, and without a bunch of moral relativism.

Tony Stark to the rescue!

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times

Neo-Confederate Hate Comments

I've mentioned to a couple of close-contact blogging buddies - Big Girls Pants and GSGF, for example - that I get the most hate-filled anti-Semitic attack comments from time to time.

Of course, they're always pseudonymous, with no blog URL or e-mail address attached. The absence of these reveals pure, abject cowardice, but I always delete them anyway, because I will not host such vile intolerance in my comment threads.

But this morning's attack needs to be shared, so I can at least make reference to the kind of neo-confederate isolationist hatred that's common on the extreme right-wing of the political spectrum.

In response to my post on Corrente's "Contemporary Left-Wing Manifesto," check out this, from "Warrior":

And you, jew, are not any less fake as them.

Just what does a neocon provide for the American people? Protection against camel jockeys and their camel launchers 7000 miles away?

The American people are rejecting the Americanist MLK imperial narrative and becoming more isolationist and ethnocentrist, principles that are applied between "Little Liberia", "Little China", and "Little Italy" in our very own cities. We are getting nothing out of the empty multicultural "American dream" nonsense peddled by both parties, except cake nonintellectual professorships, of which there was never a need.

So, the slur starts out with an attack on me as a "Jew"?

I'm not Jewish, but I am neoconservative, and I've been a supporter of the Jewish state my entire life (I've written in defense of Israel of late, as well, in "Israel at 60: Can the Jewish State Survive?").

Plus, "Warrior" closes with this part about unneeded "nonintellectual professorships."

"Warrior" 's ignorant attacks themselves rebut the case on unneeded professors!

Still, if you're getting attacks like these, your message must be hitting home.

Cinnamon Stillwell, who broke onto the national scene with her must-read essay on post-9/11 conservativism, "The Making Of A 9/11 Republican," routinely posts on the extremist attacks she's subject to as a columnist.

Here's Stillwell's blog post from last November, "Lefty Hatemailer Promises Reeducation Camps for Conservatives":

In a revealing, and nasty, example of the sort of hatemail conservative columnists like myself receive on a regular basis (further examples here and here), I thought I'd share the following missive. It seems that "liberal" tolerance, diversity, and protection of free speech stops at the ideological border, and those of us unlucky enough to fall on the other side had better start packing for the reeducation camps. Something tells me this guy has a future as a speechwriter for the Democrat Party...

I hope you rot with your friends Bush and Cheney. Get out of San Francisco you do not belong here you fascist. Your "conservative"voice will hopefully be classified as hate speech in a new America that will be ushered in with a Democratic president and veto proof Democrat congress in 2008. They will appoint the judges to the supreme court that will redefine free speech. Your time is coming. Free speech will remain protected but conservative positions such as your amount to hate speech that WILL BE OUTLAWED. I hope to help ensure you end up in jail to be reeducated with your friends Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Leave San Francisco now or you will be rounded up with your filthy hater conservative friends. Go to hell monster.

Can't you just feel the love?

Yep, I feel it!

Note how the far left and the far right converge in their mutual hatred for the evil neocons.

This is the ideological nexus where the paleocon neo-confederates and neo-Marxists meet.

Note: Warrior's comments have been deleted, and his weren't the nastiest I've received.

Starbucks Needs a Fresh Jolt!

I'm not that hard on Starbucks.

I'll stop in for a latte now and then, hanging out with a copy of the New York Times, or doing some grading while I'm there. I appreciate the bookish ambiance, which was not a streetcorner phenomenon back in the '80s. I try not to pay attention to the left-wing, socially conscious politics of the place, although it's undeniable.

Thus, I'm getting a kick from Right Wing Professor's great post on Starbucks, a company that's maxed-out its market saturation, and has suffered a sharp drop-off in business of late:

I don’t know if you’ve been following this, but here’s a quick run down.

Starbucks is started to cater to the chi-chi latte liberal crowd. Starbucks adds wi-fi.

Starbucks almost immediately has problems. The group they cater to also hates capitalists. Starbucks does everything they can to be ultra-green, socially conscious, and offers everything they can to make the latte liberals feel good about themselves if they buy Starbucks coffee.

Starbucks adds catered bakery items and sandwiches, and begins to compete with Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, Burger King, you name it — but only barely (keep reading).

In the meantime, every business on the block starts putting in wi-fi, removing that niche for Starbucks.

Starbucks adds drive-through windows, and revenues skyrocket (and are you surprised, given that with a drive-through, you don’t have to put up with all of the dolphins and rainbows and “fair-trade” nonsense?) Starbucks builds more and more stores, over-saturating the market.

With me so far? Geese and ganders and all that, so since Starbucks had decided to play with the big boys, they decided to play back, starting with Dunkin’ Donuts, when they started offering espresso-derived coffee drinks. Dunkin’ Donuts was boosted by several loudly touted consumer surveys, which found that people preferred Dunkin’ Donuts’ coffees to those at Starbucks. Dunkin’ Donuts then begins a very savvy ad campaign, which mocks Starbucks chi-chi-ness.

Starbucks, with an over-saturated market (there are blocks in Midtown that have three Starbucks), and (shudder!) competition from Dunkin’ Donuts begins to lose market share (read: customers). And revenue.

Then the really big boy on the block decided to start playing: McDonald’s.

This fall, a McDonald’s here added a position to its crew: barista.

McDonald’s is setting out to poach Starbucks customers with the biggest addition to its menu in 30 years. Starting this year, the company’s nearly 14,000 U.S. locations will install coffee bars with “baristas” serving cappuccinos, lattes, mochas and the Frappe, similar to Starbucks’ ice-blended Frappuccino...

And McDonald’s sales revenues for their espresso-line in test markets are through the roof. Of course, like Dunkin’ Donuts, you don’t get the squishy, gooey, organic, free-range, warm fuzzies you do from Starbucks, and they’re not catering to the real fussy idiots who have to have exactly this particular kind of fake milk and that particular esoteric flavoring flown in from Italy, but run the numbers (which I don’t have in front of me). Just in terms of customers, how many thousands more people go to McDonald’s as opposed to Starbucks?

Read the whole thing.

It looks like Starbucks needs a "fresh jolt."

A Contemporary Left-Wing Manifesto

What's the hardline ideological agenda of the "progressive" left, the type of radical manifesto on the issues we'd likely see under a left-wing administration next year.

Sarah at Corrente lays it out for us, "So Who DO We, The Democrats, Stand For? ":

Do we stand for working Americans? I do. I think Hillary Clinton does. I know John Edwards does.

Do we stand for universal health care — including for adults? I do. I know John Edwards does.

Do we stand for Social Security? I do. I know John Edwards does and Hillary does. I don’t know about Obama.

Do we stand for ending the US’ invasions/occupations in the Middle East? Yes.

Do we stand for shutting down Gitmo? I do.

Do we stand for stopping torture? I do.

Do we stand for a sane policy on drugs, and an end to imprisonment of 6 out of every 10 young non-Anglo men? Yes.

Do we stand for equal rights for women? I do. I think women ought to make the same money for the same work as men; I think they ought to be able to work, vote, own property, run for President, wear comfortable clothes, and pursue happiness — whether or not that means carrying any particular pregnancy to term — the same as any man.

Do we stand for equal treatment under the law for every person? I do.

Do we stand for a sane immigration policy? Yes.

Do we stand for enforcing the laws protecting laborers and the environment? Yes.

Do we stand for humane treatment for POWs (recognition of their status as POWs regardless of their ’uniform’, too!)?

Do we stand for alternative energy, so the whims of ExxonMobil need not rule our worlds? I do.

What do YOU stand for?

Now, which Presidential candidate do you think stands for the same ideals? Why?

Well, good question: What do you stand for?

Personally, I'm standing for whatever'll keep these nuts - represented especially by the Carter-esque appeasing, political identity-touting, tree-hugging, Exxon-bashing Democrat who's about to win the nomination - as far from the Oval Office as possible.

There are some contradictions in this wish list, you might have noticed.

For example, why would one be worried about the "sane" treatment of (non-uniformed POW!) enemy combatants when we're going to end "the US’ invasions/occupations in the Middle East"?

I'd bet that should an administration come to power that yanks American forces from our deployments in the Midde East, it'll also release prisoners held at Guantanamo, either sending them back to Afghanistan and Iraq (to prepare new attacks against the United States) or it'll grant them full domestic due process rights, with judical trials in the American courts, affording them publically-financed legal representation.

Nothing to worry about, right? Nope, not at all. We'll just grant these folks domestic trials, release them on their own "personal recognizance," and they'll be back on the next flight to Damacus in no time, care of the kindest "immigrants' rights" group of the day!

But you've got to love the "whims of ExxonMobil"slur!

I'd be happy to give far-left advocates some respect, but the thinking of these folks makes so little sense in the context of real word political and market realities that it's practially futile.

I spoke previously of Barack Obama's proposal to levy a $15 windfall profits tax on big oil, but make sure you see the Wall Street Journal's editorial, which came out subsequently: "Windfall Profits for Dummies."

The Dignity of Plants?

Do plants have rights?

The powers that be in Switzerland think so, via Weekly Standard:

You just knew it was coming: At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the "dignity" of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called "plant rights" is being seriously debated.

A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring "account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms." No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, "The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants," is enough to short circuit the brain.

A "clear majority" of the panel adopted what it called a "biocentric" moral view, meaning that "living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive." Thus, the panel determined that we cannot claim "absolute ownership" over plants and, moreover, that "individual plants have an inherent worth." This means that "we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community is not in danger, or if our actions do not endanger the species, or if we are not acting arbitrarily."

But behold the explanation for this enumeration of plant rights, which is right on:

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

The intellectual elites were the first to accept the notion of "species-ism," which condemns as invidious discrimination treating people differently from animals simply because they are human beings. Then ethical criteria were needed for assigning moral worth to individuals, be they human, animal, or now vegetable.

Rising to the task, leading bioethicists argue that for a human, value comes from possessing sufficient cognitive abilities to be deemed a "person." This excludes the unborn, the newborn, and those with significant cognitive impairments, who, personhood theorists believe, do not possess the right to life or bodily integrity. This thinking has led to the advocacy in prestigious medical and bioethical journals of using profoundly brain impaired patients in medical experimentation or as sources of organs.

The animal rights movement grew out of the same poisonous soil. Animal rights ideology holds that moral worth comes with sentience or the ability to suffer. Thus, since both animals and humans feel pain, animal rights advocates believe that what is done to an animal should be judged morally as if it were done to a human being. Some ideologues even compare the Nazi death camps to normal practices of animal husbandry. For example, Charles Patterson wrote in Eternal Treblinka--a book specifically endorsed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals--that "the road to Auschwitz begins at the slaughterhouse."

Eschewing humans as the pinnacle of "creation" (to borrow the term used in the Swiss constitution) has caused environmentalism to mutate from conservationism--a concern to properly steward resources and protect pristine environs and endangered species--into a willingness to thwart human flourishing to "save the planet." Indeed, the most radical "deep ecologists" have grown so virulently misanthropic that Paul Watson, the head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, called humans "the AIDS of the earth," requiring "radical invasive therapy" in order to reduce the population of the earth to under a billion.

As for "plant rights," if the Swiss model spreads, it may hobble biotechnology and experimentation to improve crop yields. As an editorial in Nature News put it:

The [Swiss] committee has .  .  . come up with few concrete examples of what type of experiment might be considered an unacceptable insult to plant dignity. The committee does not consider that genetic engineering of plants automatically falls into this category, but its majority view holds that it would if the genetic modification caused plants to "lose their independence"--for example by interfering with their capacity to reproduce.

One Swiss scientist quoted in the editorial worried that "plant dignity" provides "another tool for opponents to argue against any form of plant biotechnology" despite the hope it offers to improve crop yields and plant nutrition.

What folly. We live in a time of cornucopian abundance and plenty, yet countless human beings are malnourished, even starving. In the face of this cruel paradox, worry about the purported rights of plants is the true immorality.

What folly, indeed.

Arianna Huffington's Right Wing Fringe

Glenn Greenwald has a brief review, at Firedoglake (where else?), of Arianna Huffington's new book, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe.

I've written on Greenwald quite a bit, but ever since Megan McArdle smacked him down mercilessly, I can't resist quoting her line hammering him as a preface:

Mr Greenwald's anger at the establishment power structure seems to be rapidly transmuting into anger at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure...

The anger's showing again in Greenwald's introduction to Huffington's book:

Arianna Huffington's latest book -- Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe -- thoroughly documents the most influential fact in our political life: namely, that the right-wing faction which has taken over the Republican Party is radical, deeply hostile to America's core political traditions and values, and incomparably destructive. As she puts it: "they don't believe in evolution but believe in torture."

But the real value of this book is its examination of the two key culprits in the ascension of this right-wing fringe: the establishment media and the Beltway leaders of the Democratic Party. Huffington's insights are most piercing and innovative when her targets are the bloated, empty-headed media stars who have done more than anyone else to allow this fringe group to masquerade as part of the mainstream. And she pinpoints the dual afflictions which have rendered the media totally supine, when they aren't actively complicit, in the face of this falsehood-spewing, extremist movement -- the twisted notion of journalistic "balance" which means that they present every claim no matter how objectively false, along with the "self-hating" mentality of "liberal" journalists who have internalized right-wing smears and thus repeat them and seek to accommodate them...

I'm always amazed at this theme of the compliant, enabling, and slacking journalistic establishment. If these guys are so bad - "the two key culprits," the second being the Democrats - Greenwald and Huffington should just quit writing about the GOP and direct their anger at the real enemy!

Not only that, the media-enabler is a fiction of the left's mind. Both left and right take sides, as we have in many respects a partisan press, with CNN on the left and Fox on the right in television journalism, and with the New York Times on the left and the Wall Street Journal on the right in print journalism. Most of the other political news outlets follow along down partisan lines from there.

Gross generalizations are the key logical fallacy at the heart of Greenwald's work, but to Huffington's as well, if this review has any merit to it at all.

But what's really good here is Huffington's language itself, which obviously gets Greenwald aroused:

The other not-so-innocent bystanders to the Right’s takeover are the Democrats who have continued to tread far too lightly when it comes to holding the GOP’s fanatical core accountable. Time and time again, the Democratic leadership has allowed itself to get played, run over, or distracted.

The "right's takeover" and the "GOP's fanatical core"?

What is Huffington taking about?

Oh sure, we'd need to see text from the full book itself for context, but the theme of a Republican takeover's clear enough, and wrong.

President Bush won a clear majority in 2004, and he's been battling the Supreme Court on constitutional issues like habeas corpus for enemy combatants, especially on Guantanamo Bay military commissions and detainees' rights, throughout his administration.

But note too: Arianna Huffington always been one of our current era's least effective critics of the Republican Party.

She was formerly married to Michael Huffington, a Republican big-money oil heir and carpetbagger who won a seat to Congress from Santa Barbara, California, in 1992. He immediately filed to challenge Dianne Feinstein in her reelection to the U.S. Senate for the next election in 2004. He spent over $30 million in a losing bid and Arianna divorced him in 1997.

My long-running counterfactual hypothesis on Huffington holds that she'd still be married had Michael won a seat to the Senate, and he'd likely have run for the GOP presidential nomination at least once. The lesson for young senatorial aspirants with hot, power-hungry wives is to know that your sweetcakes will show you the door shortly after losing the election. Hopefully those prenups are in order!

Arianna's a Greek-born and Cambridge-educated socialite, who parlayed her broken marriage into a career as an opportunistic far left-wing columnist.

When Mayhill Fowler got in trouble for outing Barack Obama's "bitter" comments at Huffington Post last month, Arianna had okay'd the publication of the breaking story while vacationing on David Geffen's 454 foot yacht in the Bahamas.

There's more of that worker solidarity for you!

This is not a criticism of her analysis (I'll likely read the book), only some background analysis to put things in perspective.

Greenwald doesn't care - anything's gold that take a good shot at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure!

Photo Credit: "Becoming more publisher than columnist, Arianna Huffington calls Huffington Post an “Internet newspaper,” New York Times

But I Have No Fear...

My commenter Winfred suggested I might like the Rolling Stones', "'Shine a Light' in IMAX" (in response to my recent post, "More Light ... Sun, Sun, Sun, Here it Comes!").

I haven't checked out a Stones' IMAX, although I searched around for a good rendition of "Angie" with which to put up a post.

I'm holding off on "Angie" for now, but in the meantime please enjoy The Clash, "London Calling":

I mentioned in my first "lightening up" post that I was a big skateboarder in my late-teens and early-twenties, and also that I spent a lot of time up in L.A. hitting the rock concert circuit.

I'll comment more about that history in upcoming posts, although I can say now that over a period of about three years I saw literally hundreds of live gigs, including bands from the Damned to the Dead Kennedys, the Exploited to the English Beat, the Ramones to Roxy Music, and from Stevie Nicks to the Stray Cats.

I never did make it to a live show with The Clash, and although they toured in L.A. during this time, something else was going simultaneously (another concert, I think), competing for my attention.

In later years, I regretted missing the band more acutely when I learned of Joe Strummer's death in 2002. He passed before his time, though he'll be remembered as one of the greats.

Lyrics are here, and in part below:

London calling to the faraway towns
Now war is declared - and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard,you boys and girls
London calling, now don't look at us
All that phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain't got no swing
'Cept for the REIGN of that truncheon thing

CHORUS
The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
Cause London is drowning - I, I live by the river

London calling to the imitation zone
Forget it, brother, you can go at it alone
London calling upon the zombies of death
Quit holding out - and draw another breath
London calling - and I don't wanna shout
But while we were talking I saw you running out
London calling, see we ain't got no HIGH
Except for that one with the yellowy eyes

CHORUS x2
The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in
Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear ERROR, but I have no fear
Cause London is drowning - I, I live by the river

More later dear readers! Keep it light!!