The Blue Voice

How quickly they change

2009-11-23T04:00:00.001-05:00

Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich in their Sunday New York Times columns give two excellent examples of how smug dismissal of Sarah Palin can quickly turn into admiration. The Beltway Village during 2008 and mostly up until now was more concerned with Tina Fey's imitation of Palin than with what Palin and her supporters were about. Especially as that might be indicated by Palin's own neo-Confederate and theocratic ties.

Maureen Dowd is in her more liberal mode lately. Which is kind of hard to distinguish between her Bush-friendly mode. But her latest, Visceral Has Its Value New York Times 11/21/09, shows how the Village script of Palin as a ridiculous dummy can easily morph into appreciating her as the voice of Real Americans. And the Villagers all fancy themselves as in tune with Real Americans. You know, the ones for whom the federal budget deficit is the biggest problem the country has. (Yes, Village thinking is often quite bizarre and contradictory measured against normal standards of reality. But since they think the deficit is critical, they assume as always that the Little People think the same.)

MoDo, who likes to remind us that Obama is a girl (not a compliment in MoDo's gender obsessions), now admires Palin for "her visceral power," the inner energy she radiates (MoDo used a quotation to say that - I guess it sounded too New Agey to put in her own voice), her dynamism, her close contact with the grass roots, her exuberance, and "the good looks, the tabloid-perfect family, the Alaska quirkiness, the kids with the weird names." With a mixture of admiration and snotty condescension - who says in print that other people children have "weird names"? - MoDo manages to both pump up Palin's image and give cred to her the-elites-look-down-on-us-Real-Amurcans" schtick. Palin's neo-Confederate ties? Her theocratic, superstitious, extremist brand of Pentecostal Christianity? I suppose MoDo would find that sooo booo-oooring to write about. So instead she insults Palin's children's names.

Did I mention that MoDo is one of the star opinion "journalists" in what is still considered the leading "quality" paper in the United States?

She actually spends most of the column trashing Obama in various ways. Then at the end she kinda-sorta defends him. But does it in such a pitiful way all that she just reinforces the Republican and Broderian criticism of Obama being supposedly "indecisive".

Frank Rich, who often writes some atrocious stuff, too, and has been recently taking the Republicans' bait to ridicule the Party base and their heroes, in The Pit Bull in the China Shop 11/21/09 actually manages to criticize other Villagers for delivering their authoritative opinions on Palin's book without actually having read it! Criticizing fellow Villagers is so rare that he at least deserves one hand clapping for that. (I would just note, without detracting from his unconventional stance, that one can certainly form a reasonable opinion about well-reported portions of a book without having read it cover to cover.)

Rich claims to have actually read her book. And coming from a guy who just a few columns ago was chortling over how the Tea Partiers (aka, Palin fans) were leading the Republican Party to a new 1964 landslide defeat, statements like this are another wonderful illustration how sanctimonious Village ridicule can quickly become star-struck admiration: "Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves."

Rich goes on to focus on what are the important issues - in the eyes of our Village Pod Pundits. Palin's show-business acquaintances. Levi Johnston.

Neo-Confederate ties? Theocratic Christianism? Rich doesn't get into those, either. The Village script still calls for leaving those out. Even though they are highly relevant to understanding her politics and what the Republican Party has become. And it's understandable. Facing up to what today's Republican Party is would make the practice of High Broderism, with his idolatry of bipartisanship (on the part of Democrats) nearly impossible to practice. Later on, he cities some polls showing that Palin is a Republican favorite in the polls for the 2012 Presidential nomination just behind Mike Huckabee, he doesn't cite any polling data to support his assertion that Palin "the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama." If the polls he's using show Huckabee leading Palin among Republicans, wouldn't that make the Huck a more important brand at the moment?

Rich devotes a paragraph to pointless ridicule of a pious letter Palin wrote for her baby Trig that is reproduced in the book. He is ruffled that she worded the letter as a letter from God. Pop psychology, yes. Actual analysis of her theocratic religious ties? Not so much. The only exception is a really vague and speculative reference to Palin's "'rapture' theology" - to which Palin may or may not subscribe from anything we see in Rich's column.

Rich's utter helplessness is trying to actually analyze her appeal is illustrated by the following comment, which is correct: "The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause." But without understanding that in the context of the dominant Christian Right culture in the Republican Party, it tells us nothing. Except that Frank Rich is disturbed at the dumb masses he takes the Real Americans to be.

With all that fluff in his column, I do give Rich credit for at least mentioning the anti-gay position of the far-rightist Lynn Vincent who Palin chose for her ghost-writer.

And to top it all off, Rich manages to sing the praises of that greatest of all Mavericks, St. John McCain. Yes, that would be the St. McCain who made Sarah Palin a national figure by choosing her as his Vice Presidential nominee in 2008. Our pundits' love for the mavericky Maverick McCain is even greater than their love for Monica Lewinsky.

Maybe I'm getting a bit too deep into the weeds on this, too deep at least for my own comfort. But this David Sirota column that provides a refreshing trashing of Dean Broder and our Pod Pundits generally over the Afghanistan War, Intelligentsia against intelligence Salon, even he manages to embrace the notion that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are somehow harmless entertainment on the fringes of the Republican Party:

The trend is deeply disturbing. It's one thing for talk-show-host wannabe Sarah Palin or carnival-barking provocateur Glenn Beck to glamorize willful ignorance -- that's been the narcissistic act of celebrity court jesters since the dawn of history. But it's an entirely different thing when hostility to intelligence and to the basic process of thinking itself emanates from the very professional thinkers who lead the nation's intelligentsia. [my emphasis]

Our pundits, even supposedly solidly liberal ones like Frank Rich and David Sirota, are just having a hard time facing up to what the Republican Party has become.

Tags: frank rich, maureen dowd, sarah palin

Vietnam and Afghanistan

2009-11-23T03:04:00.001-05:00

Reasoning by historical analogy is dangerous. But the American approach to counterinsurgency wars didn't spring full-grown from the brow of David Petraeus. It is heavily conditioned, if not completely dominated, by the experience of the Vietnam War.

I've seen a couple of good analyses lately of the Vietnam War that provide useful critical perspective on Obama's current decision on how much to escalate the Afghanistan War. One is Bill Moyers Journal of 11/20/09, this past Friday, which looks at Lyndon Johnson's decision-making process from November 1963 when he assumed the Presidency to the decision to Americanize the war in 1965 by committing to a direct US ground combat role. Some of the background assumptions and habits of the military establishment from those pre-Internet days sound awfully familiar today.

The other is The Fifty-Year War by Jonathan Schell The Nation 11/11/09 (11/30/09 edition). Schell looks at the decision-making on the Vietnam War against the background of the Cold War that after the fall of the Soviet Union morphed into the Long War. He calls special attention to the effect of McCarthyism and the Republican hysteria after 1949 over "who lost China", the "lost" referring to the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949 in mainland China.

He writes:

In short, in strictly political terms, the Vietnam dilemma has been handed down to Obama virtually intact. Now as then, the issue politically is whether the United States is able to fail in a war without coming unhinged. Does the American body politic have a reverse gear? Does it know how to cut losses? Is it capable of learning from experience? Or must it plunge unchecked over every cliff it approaches? And at the heart of these questions is another: must liberals and moderates always bow down before the crazy right when it comes to war and peace? Must presidents behave like Johnson, of whom his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, later said, "It would not have made any difference what anybody advised him--he would have done what he did [in Vietnam].... It was fear of the right wing." What is the source of this raw power, this right-wing veto over presidents, Congresses and public opinion? The person who can answer these questions will have discovered one of the keys to a half-century of American history--and the forces that, even now, bear down on Obama as he considers what to do in Afghanistan. [my emphasis]

And because of that "right-wing veto", it appears that actually withdrawing from Afghanistan isn't even an option the White House is seriously considering.

William Polk in Let America be America, and Depart Afghanistan Informed Comment 11/22/09 writes about a different and more recent historical experience of counterinsurgency that is also worth considering around the American role in Afghanistan now. He's talking in particular about the historical role of village, tribal and national assemblies called jirga, or loya jirga at the national level:

The Russians were, obviously, opposed to the very concept of the loya jirga and managed to by-pass or suppress it. They did so, however, at great cost because without such a legitimating authority, they could not find an Afghan counterpart with which to negotiate an end to their occupation. The puppet government they set up lacked the imprimatur of the loya jirga and was not regarded by the people as legitimate. So the Russians left with their tail between their legs.

As the current Russian ambassador and long-time KBG expert on Afghan affairs, Zamir N. Kabulov, has commented, there is no mistake the Russians made that has not been copied by the Americans. He was right about the way we approached the jirga. In 2002, nearly 2/3rds of the delegates to a loya jirga signed a petition to make the exiled king, Zahir Shah, president of an interim government to give time for the Afghanis to work out their future. An interim government might have avoided the worst of the problems we have faced in the last seven years. But we had already decided that Hamid Kara was “our man in Kabul” and did not want the Afghanis [sic] to interfere with our choice. So, as Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason reported, “massive US interference behind the scenes in the form of bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting got the US-backed candidate for the job, Hamid Kara [Karzai], installed instead. [They] then rode shotgun over a constitutional process that eliminated the monarchy entirely. This was the Afghan equivalent to the 1964 Diem Coup in Vietnam; afterward, there was no possibility of creating a stable secular government.” While an Afghan king could have conferred legitimacy on an elected leader in Afghanistan; without one, as they put it, “an elected president is a on a one-legged stool.” Then, as Selig Harrison wrote in the New York Times, our proconsul, Zalmay Khalilzad, “had a bitter 40-minute showdown with the king, who then withdrew his candidacy.” [my emphasis]

Tags: afghanistan war, vietnam war

Who you callin' a socialist?

2009-11-22T17:00:00.000-05:00

Claude Henri de Rouvroy Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825)

I must admit, even having as low a general opinion of the Republican Party as I do, that even I'm surprised at the popularity among the Republicans on the Know-Nothing usage that has become as common as dirt in which socialist, liberal, communist, fascist, and Nazi are used as interchangeable concept. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to it, members of Congress do it, "movement conservatives" with intellectual pretensions do it, and rank-and-file Republicans do it. I really wonder what they mean, what image in their minds those interchangeable words call up, other than something like "bad". And I know for the Christian Right they all mean something like "atheist", too.

But how crack-brained is that? Jon Stewart did a brilliant skit that was less a satire than just an imitation of Glenn Beck in which he said that Beck had had apendicitis. And he explained the significance of that: "Youre appendix is connected to your large intestine which is connected to your small intestine which is something that Karl Marx had." That kind of arbitrary association is what passes for thinking among many Republicans today.

How can someone even have a simple-minded understanding of the most basic events of the 20th century without having an elementary notion of the differences between those concepts? It would be pointless for anyone with that concept to try to understand the political process by which Adolf Hitler came to power, for instance, to take one of the more consequential events of the last century. Because, trust me: none of it will make jack for sense to you. Even though the Beckians love to compare Obama to Hitler.

Without knowing some basic facts about the split between the Social Democrats and Communists around the German Revolution of 1918-19, without knowing something about why the Nazis were fighting the Social Democrats and the Communists in street battles as well as in elections during the 1920s up until 1933, without understanding something about how the Nazis fit into the German rightwing and how their position meshed with the position of wealthy and powerful Germans opposed to the democracy of the Weimar Republic: forget it. Just memorize the fact that Hitler came to power in 1933 and don't give yourself a headache even trying to understand any of it.

What's even worse for our xenophobic Republicans, they would also have to understand the difference between what "liberal" means in most of the world and what it has meant in the US since 1920 or so. It was around that time that pro-labor activists who had called themselves progressive appropriated the word liberal to differentiate themselves from the dying Progressive movement as well as from, yes, communists and socialists.

As far as what "liberal" means in the rest of the world, I strongly advise that you not go look at the Web site of the Liberal International (LI), the Federation of European and other parties in the world that self-identify as liberal. If you go there and start reading, your head may explode. Or not, because it has nothing to do with whatever it may be that the Beckians and Limbaugh dittoheads, i.e., most Republicans, mean when they use the term "liberal". The affiliate of the LI in Germany is the Free Democratic Party (FDP). They are part of the current "center-right" coalition in Germany. The "center" part of that name refers to the conservative party, Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU); the FDP is the "right" portion. The FDP is anti-union. The CDU has a union "wing".

If you should stumble across their Liberal Thinkers section. You will find people listed there like Friedrich von Hayek, a hero of American economic "libertarians", i.e., advocates of de-regulated Killer Capitalism. And also (gulp!) Ayn Rand. Yes, the John Galt and Fountainhead Ayn Rand, guru of Alan Greenspan. And Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute.

Carl Grünberg (1861–1940)

Anyway, I thought this post would be a good place to mention the real historical origin of the word socialism, based on a couple of articles from what is known as the Grünberg Archiv, after its editor Carl Grünberg (1861–1940). The publication was actually called Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers Movement). Grünberg later became director of the Institut für Sozialforschung, better known as the Frankfurt School. These two articles from the Archiv deal with the origins of the words "socialism" and "socialist": Carl Grünberg, Der Ursprung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ 2/1912 and Ernst Czóbel, Zur Verbreitung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ in Deutschland and in Ungarn 3/1913.

The earliest usage of the words Grünberg found was from an Italian cleric in 1803, where it was used to refer broadly to the opposite of individualistic philosophies, which Grünberg describes as "a thoroughly different" meaning that the one it was to later acquire. He finds a French usage from 1831 of "socialisme" where it referred to ... the Catholic Church! In the sense of the Universal Church: Catholic theology emphasized the importance of community in contrast to the more individual-oriented Protestant theology.

The first use of "socialist" he identifies is in 1827 from the English Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald, a paper of Robert Owens' reform movement to describe the Owenites. This is essentially the first usage he finds of the word in the sense it came to be generally used in the 19th century. Although he notes the word didn't catch on for a while in England.

In 1831, he finds "socialisme" used in a French paper, Le Globe, where it is used to describe the Saint-Simonist reform doctrine in contrast to individualism. This is a very similar usage to that of the English Owenite paper in 1927.

So, in other words, the term socialist came into usage as a reference to the reformist doctrines that later came to be known as utopian socialist, particularly those associated with Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Claude Henri Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825).

Grünberg and Czóbel find the first usages of the adjective form "sozialist" in German in 1840, though it's not clear which among them was the earliest, Fr. J. Buss in a speech of July 1840 or August Ludwig Churoa, writing under the pen name of Rochau, in the book Kritische Darstellung der Sozialtheorie Fouriers. Grünberg finds the first use of the noun form in German in an 1842 book by Lorenz von Stein (1815-1890), Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Czóbel finds the earliest incidence of the word in Hungary in 1842.

In short, the use of "socialist" and "socialism" in the sense to which the world became accustomed in the 19th century began around 1830 and by the 1840s was beginning to come into general usage to describe utopian reform schemes like those of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon.

Tags: socialism, radical right, republican party

Glenn Beck Has a Dream

2009-11-22T15:36:00.000-05:00

So it's a crappy video -- mostly with the view of the back of someone's head, but Glenn Beck talks about "The Plan," his 100 year crusade to take back the country from...well, whoever. This is all about Beck's new book, which seems to be just a continuation of all his other books. On his website, he's asking everyone "to join me at the feet of Abraham Lincoln on the National Mall for the unveiling of The Plan and the birthday of a new national movement to restore our great country." The date of the big meetup is August 28, 2010, the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

Another Hurdle Crossed

2009-11-21T23:56:00.000-05:00

On Saturday night, health care reform cleared a major preliminary hurdle as the Senate voted 60-39 to end a Republican filibuster and begin debate on the bill. Two Democratic holdouts, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, were finally convinced to join the party. Debate is expected to begin after the Thanksgiving recess on November 30 and to continue for many, many weeks.

"My vote should in no way be construed by the supporters of this current framework as an indication of how I might vote on the final bill," said Landrieu, adding that she also will seek more generous tax credits for small-business health care.

Republicans are portraying the bill as the end of the Republic. In an email newsletter from Johnny Isakson, one of my two senators, the Georgia Republican promised to vote against moving forward on the bill..

"because, among other things, it will raise taxes, cut Medicare services to seniors and force billions of dollars in massive unfunded mandates on states.

The unintended consequences of this legislation are disastrous to small businesses, and will drive people to a public option where there is no option at all. This is not a public option; this is a public ultimatum.

Saudia Arabia, Yemen and Shi'a-Sunni tensions

2009-11-21T20:20:00.001-05:00

The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly Online reports in Sectarian rifts appear by Omayma Abdel-Latif (11/19-25/09 edition) that Saudi Arabia's military campaign against Shi'a rebels in Yemen is really ticking off Iran and Saudi Shiites, the latter composing 1/3 or so of the Saudi population. It also says Al Qa'ida implicitly supported the Saudi attacks by issuing a statement condemning the Shi'a Al-Houthi group the Saudis are targeting.

Gee, hyper-Sunni cult Al Qa'ida hates Iranian-backed Shi'a group? Who could have guessed? (Yes, that's meant to be sarcastic.)

The Al-Houthis "are Zaidis, a branch of Shiism closest to Sunni doctrine". Like the other Shi'a, the Zaidis (also Zaidiya, Zaydīyah, Zaidīs, Zaydis) recognize the primacy of the fourth caliph ‛Alī ibn abī Tālib to follow the Prophet Muhammad as the leader of the Muslim community. But unlike most Shi'a, the Zaidis do not regard the first three caliphs, Abū Bakr, ‛Umar and ‛Uthmān, as usurpers.

The name of the sect comes from Zayd ibn ʿAlī (d. 740), the grandson of Shi'a martyr Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (626-680), the son of the fourth caliph. The Zaidis are commonly known as the Fiver Shi'a because they recognize Zayd as the fifth Imam, which other Shi'a do not. Their interpretations of Islāmic law have often been close to those of Sunni jurists.

Oxford Islamic Studies Online gives this discription of Zaidi distinctiveness:

Although they have their own school of law based on the legal interpretations of Zayd and his successors, the Yemeni Zaydīs are otherwise the closest of all Shīʿī factions to the Sunnīs (and most particularly to the Ḥanafī school of Sunnī jurisprudence); this has often been interpreted by Western scholars to mean that they are “moderate” or practical. The Zaydīs differ from other Shīʿī denominations in that they accept the legitimacy of the caliphates of Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and, at least partially, ʿUthmān. Moreover, in contrast to certain other Shīʿī groups, the Zaydīs do not view the imam as infallible, nor as a quasi-divine, inspired, or supernaturally endowed person representing God on earth, and, again unlike other factions, they do not require that he be divinely designated in any way. In Zaydī belief, the qualifications for the imamate include: descent from ʿAlī and Fāṭimah (though they do not require that it pass from father to son), absence of physical imperfections, and personal piety. The imam must be able to take up the sword, either offensively or in defense, which rules out infants as well as “hidden imams” of the type acknowledged by the Ismāʿīlīyah and the Twelvers. [my emphasis]

That latter point indicates that they also lack the messianic/apocalyptic element that characterizes Twelver Shiism. The Zaidis generally reject mystical approaches to the faith.

The article quotes the head of the Lebanese Hizbullah party on the sectarian implications:

Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah called for rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Nasrallah said there is a tendency today to put a gloss of sectarianism on every conflict in the region, and that this was meant to break up Muslim nations into small entities. This, he said serves Israel.

"Every conflict in our region is being interpreted only from the perspective of the Sunni-Shia divide," he said in his latest speeches commemorating the Day of the Martyr. "It is being said that Turkey, the Sunni state, is engaging in the Middle East to take the role of Iran, the Shia state." Nasrallah called on Iran to make a rapprochement towards Saudi Arabia and vice versa. "There should be an initiative from any Arab or Muslim nation to bring those two big and important nations together to dialogue in order to put out the sectarian fire."

The fighting has spilled over into Saudi Arabia, as reported in Saudi villages evacuated due to violence in Yemen, UNICEF says Today's Zaman (Turkey) 11/14/09.

Tags: iran,
islam, saudi arabia

The audacity of timidity

2009-11-20T16:46:00.000-05:00

Paul Krugman assesses the consequences of having done too little in the spring to combat the economic crisis in The Big Squander New York Times 11/19/09:

Earlier this week, the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a k a, the bank bailout fund, released his report on the 2008 rescue of the American International Group, the insurer. The gist of the report is that government officials made no serious attempt to extract concessions from bankers, even though these bankers received huge benefits from the rescue. And more than money was lost. By making what was in effect a multibillion-dollar gift to Wall Street, policy makers undermined their own credibility — and put the broader economy at risk.

For the A.I.G. rescue was part of a pattern: Throughout the financial crisis key officials — most notably Timothy Geithner, who was president of the New York Fed in 2008 and is now Treasury secretary — have shied away from doing anything that might rattle Wall Street. And the bitter paradox is that this play-it-safe approach has ended up undermining prospects for economic recovery. For the job of fixing the broken economy is far from done — yet finishing the job has become nearly impossible now that the public has lost faith in the government’s efforts, viewing them as little more than handouts to the people who got us into this mess. [my emphasis]

It's part of the Republicans' Predator State approach to government, in this case with the pattern on handling Wall Street bailouts continuing into the Obama administration: the bankrupt financial institutions get bailed out and their executives get paid billions in bonuses after bankrupting or near-bankrupting their companies, while most people see unemployment and mortgage payments both rising. And the Republicans have honed their methods over the decades for blaming the results on the Democratic Party and "gubment" in general. Unless the Obama administration starts trying to please those facing unemployment and reduced salaries instead of Wall Strett bankers and billionaires who want to abolish Social Security using the federal deficit as an excuse, the Republicans could be successful with those methods in 2010 and 2012. And the fact that Frank Rich thinks that Sarah Palin is an exotic extremist (which she is!) won't make any difference, except to encourage the Democrats in their foolish complacency.

Meanwhile, David "Bobo" Brooks, neocon warmonger and reliable belweather of "respectable" Republican opinion, thinks the Obama administration has done just fine on the economic bailout. Bobo is impressed with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's moderation: "prudence was the key to his effectiveness. In interviews and testimony, Geithner uses the word 'balance' a lot." This is the greatest compliment that the devotees of High Broderism can bestoy on a political figure, especially a Democrat. This gives Bobo hope for the future. Because the Obama administration confronts more economic problems. And which is foremost in Bobo's mind? Yes, it's a rhetorical question: "First, the need to reduce the deficits ..."

Tags: obama administration, us economy

Jerry Brown 1.0

2009-11-20T11:21:00.001-05:00

"First, think clearly; then ask a lot of questions." - CA Gov. Jerry Brown, 1975

This seems like a good time to make use of one of the better brief descriptions I've seen of Jerry Brown's first Governorship of 1975-83. It comes from Neal Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom, The Book of America: Inside 50 States Today (1983). Jerry's second term ended in early 1983, so they were reviewing his whole governorship. He had run for the US Senate in 1982 on an assertively liberal program against Pete Wilson, who would later go on to brand the California Republican Party as the anti-Latino Party.

As they explain, Jerry was a leader in creating a post-Sixties version of progressive politics and programs. And, amazing as it seems now that California has turned into a model of dysfunctional state government, he was able to achieve some important innovations in environmental protection, supporting the farm workers' right to organize and bringing much greater diversity into state government. How some Democratic progressives today can look back at this record and see something other than a liberal Democrat, I'm not really sure:

Like his father, Jerry Brown was elected as a Democrat, but there the similarities stopped. The young bachelor Brown (he was born in 1938) refused to move into the huge governor's mansion Reagan had built, rode in a Plymouth instead of a chauffeured limousine, and occasionally retreated to a Zen Buddhist monastery to meditate (he had studied in a Jesuit seminary before entering Yale Law School). But despite this seemingly ascetic lifestyle, he also broke with politicians' conventional discretion to travel to Africa with his companion, rock singer Linda Ronstadt. Intellectually, Brown symbolized his generation's dissatisfaction with big institutions and megasolutions. He set up the nation's first Office of Appropriate Technology to explore and test such concepts as environmental and climatically designed buildings, including wind power and solar heating, bioconversion (using waste to produce energy) and home organic farming to increase people's self-sufficiency. He launched California onto an energy conservation path unequalled by any other state, consistently opposed nuclear power, maintained the nation's toughest air and water pollution standards and laws against toxic wastes, and created the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which leaned to the left in its regulation of farm-labor relations. He made precedent-shattering appointments of women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, who received 50 percent of his 6,000-plus executive appointments and 40 percent of those he made to the courts. [my emphasis]

On Tuesday of this week, Attorney General Brown moved to take toys that could poison children out of stores as the holiday buying season descends upon us, as Mark Glover reports in Stores must remove lead-laced toys, says Attorney General Brown Sacramento Bee 11/19/09. He was aggressively pro-consumer as Governor, as well, as Peirce and Hagstrom describe:

The "old boy networks" of white males were closed out. Hundreds of laypersons were placed on California's 41 consumer boards, breaking the monopoly control of groups—from doctors to engineers—who've often used the state's regulatory boards for their professions' interests rather than the public interest. Brown ended up with five women in his ten-member cabinet — not to mention his highly controversial appointment of a liberal female lawyer, Rose Elizabeth Bird, as California's chief justice. In the last weeks of Brown's governorship, we asked him the rationale of his appointments approach. His reply: "to make government a mirror image of what society is" in a state with millions of working women and fast-rising numbers of minorities and the foreign born. His appointees' skills, Brown admitted, often weren't the highest. But the alternative was to leave a "dying" white male coalition in power. "I came down on the side of opening a window to the future." [my emphasis]

Rose Bird, California's first female chief justice, became a special target of Republicans because she led the State Supreme Court to hold that the death penalty violated the California state constitution and ended it. A ballot initiative later restored it, a measure that Jerry opposed despite its high popularity. Rose Bird later wound up being rejected for re-election to the Court in 1986. The Republicans led a high-visibility campaign against her, focusing on their objections to her decisions and her death penalty ruling, in particular. This San Francisco Examiner obituary for her gives more background: Ex-Chief Justice Rose Bird dies by Larry Hatfield 12/05/1999. The following year, conservatives whined mightily that the Democratic Senate rejected President Ronald Reagan's nomination of rightwing ideologue Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. After the right's aggressive pursuit of Rose Bird, I didn't feel the least sorry for them. Actually, the Republicans are still whining about Bork's rejection.

Rose Bird, California's first female chief justice, appointed by Jerry Brown

Ah, the memories: in those days, the Democratic Party was actually able to reject a poor Republican nominee to the Supreme Court. Hard to imagine, I know, but it actually happened! And even more amazing, six Republican Senators voted against St. Reagan's nominee! We've gone through the looking glass since then.

Jerry also made other reforms, including an effort to control rising medical costs:

Brown authored a state urban policy to revitalize inner cities and discourage wasteful sprawl — a first in any Sunbelt state. He inaugurated an energy and resources fund, financed from tidelands oil revenues, to foster California fisheries, reforestation, soil conservation, wetlands, and coastal protection. He cajoled government pension funds to invest mote (up to $900 million a year) in California housing and economic enterprises, rather than distant investments irrelevant to the state's economic future. Enamored of high technology, which he believed must be a linchpin of both California and national economic growth strategies, he created an industrial innovation commission (including many successful high-tech entrepreneurs), which recommended "a new governing coalition between business, labor, academia and government" to foster growth industries and dominate international markets in such cutting-edge areas as semiconductors, computers, telecommunications, robotics, and biotechnology. Brown argued that radically improved scientific education in schools and colleges, combined with ambitious workers retraining, was imperative for state and national economic survival. He gave energy and direction to a highly innovative California Conservation Corps for young people. Belatedly, he tried to tame soaring health costs through a "czar" to prenegotiate economical doctor and hospital rates, on a competitive basis, for patients of the state-subsidized "MediCal" system. [my emphasis]

Tags: jerry brown

Fort Hood and Complacency

2009-11-20T10:09:00.002-05:00

We all remember how a former President failed to respond to the threat of terrorism until after 9/11. Although George Tenet's hair was famous for being on fire the summer of 2001, he failed to gain the attention of either Bush or Condi. There was a complacent attitude then that could not be shaken, even by intelligence briefings warning that bin Laden planned to strike us here, at home.

In some ways, the story of Major Hasan is a very similar example of complacency and inaction -- there were many warning signs of the man's instability, and he himself warned that Muslim soldiers might react violently to the internal conflicts improsed on them by America's wars in Muslim countries. Nobody took any of it seriously.

It is curious, in an America that often demonizes Islam as a religion of hate and violence, that we have been so persistently complacent about the problems that gave rise to Major Hasan's actions. Putting aside the obvious and appropriate questions about his mental health, Hasan's case should raise questions in our minds about the impact of the "long war" on American Muslims.

In our habitual complacency, we assume the mythic benefits of our great melting pot and liberal traditions of tolerance and freedom will ensure that American Muslims could never feel as conflicted about their loyalties as was clearly the case in Hasan's tragic and criminal act.

At the same time, we regularly engage in a public dialogue about Islam that is ignorant, hostile and ultimately alienating to anyone in this country belonging to that faith. "Muslim = Terrorist" is the equation that underlies much of our pop culture -- from right-wing thriller novels to video games to Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

We hold quite contradictory views: on the one hand, that Islam justifies and motivates and approves the murderous acts of terrorists; and also that American Muslims, who are well aware of the first view, are nonetheless successfully assimilated, loyal, and extremely unlikely to ever engage in violence against their neighbors. Holding both thoughts at once, we are overwhelmed, and do nothing.

Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson have written a thoughtful piece in Foreign Policy that calls for an end to our complacency and mindless passivity. Maybe Fort Hood will cause some of us to refelct on how hard it might be to be a Muslim in America, and to take action to improve the situation, and to react to the risks it presents.

Probably, and most unfortunately, not. Some lessons of 9/11 have yet to be learned.

Jerry Brown, presumed Democratic nominee for CA Governor in 2010

2009-11-19T14:21:00.003-05:00

In addition to focusing more on comprehensive immigration reform, I also want to start paying closer attention to Jerry Brown's (officially undeclared) 2010 gubernatorial race. With his main presumed Democratic opponent for the Party nomination, Gavin ~~Stevens~~ Newsom, out of the running, Brown is the presumptive nominee.

I certainly haven't been making a secret of my general admiration for Jerry Brown, though I also generally think it's at least as important to be critical-minded about politicians you support as those you don't. And, yes, the rumors are true. I was once caught hanging out at his old commune in Oakland with Jerry, homeschoolers and Berkeley nudists. I can't deny it.

From following his career and from the limited in-person contact I've had with him, I would say that he's basically a pro-labor, pro-immigrant Democrat. He spent four years in a Jesuit seminary as a novitiate (studying for the priesthood), and the Jesuit approach to Catholic Christianity is a major influence in his thinking. I've sometimes said that one way to understand Jerry's sometimes challenging approaches is that he's a Jesuit who went into politics. That influence shows up in his work with Mother Teresa in India and in his friendship and intellectual engagement with the late Austrian Christian theologian-philosopher Ivan Illich (1926-2002). (Illich is commonly described as an anarchist but that's a very inadequate description.)

Jerry has also seriously studied Zen Buddhism, which emphasizes concepts such as living in the moment and playing the role appropriate to your life and your situation in the moment. He's also very ecologically minded, and his aggressive approach to environmental protection is the most important of his legacies from his first stint as California Governor in 1975-83. Along with more traditional influences like being part of a major political dynasty and his training in law, all this gives him a complex set of lenses through which to view politics. The results are sometimes surprising and even contradictory, though rarely if ever incoherent.

Jerry is currently viewed with suspicion by many Democratic activists who perceive him as insufficiently liberal, or not liberal at all. I can't say this is entirely surprising to me, but I also can't say I really understand why that is. Digby, one of my favorite bloggers, just posted a spirited defense of Jerry against some airhead Beltway Village idiocy (Moonbeams and Starshine Hullabaloo 11/18/09). But she also writes, "There are plenty of criticisms to be made about Brown, who in many respects is no longer even close to being a liberal."

That perception does puzzle me. I would say that Jerry in general is much more of a solid liberal/progressive than Barack Obama. As Attorney General, he's been aggressive in pursuing corporate misdeeds, companies who scammed consumers and investment frauds, a solid pro-consumer record. Brown has been articulating as much of a full-throated criticism of the arrogant financial elite as any Democrat I can think of. Just this week, he announced a $1.4 billion settlement against Wells Fargo: Wells Fargo to Pay $1.4 Billion in Auction-Rate Securities Settlement by Cheryl Miller The Recorder 11/19/09. Aren't these kinds of aggressive, pro-consumer actions what liberal Democratic activists would want a Democratic Attorney General to pursue?

Part of the concern may be more factional, i.e., Gavin Stevens until recently was expected to be Jerry's opponent in the 2010 Democratic primary. Gavin won the admiration of liberal activists by his aggressive stand on same-sex marriage. He also had made an effort to cultivate the netroots in a way that Brown seems not to have done. Gavin was a featured speaker at the 2008 Netroots Nation convention in Austin, for example.

But Jerry has a decent record on same-sex marriage, as well. As Attorney General, he took the very unusual step of opposing the state law against same-sex marriage established by Proposition 8 (aka, Proposition Hate). He was unsuccessful in his challenge to the law. But in making the case, he even relied on an unconventional Constitutional theory arguing that same-sex marriage should be considered a right guaranteed by the US Constitution that no state had the right to deny. That's a more pro-same-sex marriage position than any President Obama has taken.

This article gives a good overview of Jerry's current political situation: Why It’s Nuts for Dems to Want a Primary Fight Calbuzz 11/09/09.

I had a dialogue with David Dayen in the comments to his Roundup post of 10/30/09 FDL News Desk post, over Jerry's progressive politics or lack thereof. The folks at the Calitics blog, which included David until a couple of months ago, have been very skeptical of Jerry's candidacy for Governor.

Steven Harmon of the Contra Costa Times gives his take on why Liberals worry about Brown's move to 'center' 11/18/2009. This report by Martin Wisckol of the Orange County Register provides some items for concern, Jerry Brown shows O.C. his moderate, populist side 10/30/09. The article also uses the term "moderate populist", which I'm not sure I've ever seen before. It's a reflection of how near-meaningless the word "populist" has become in the American usage. (In Europe, it is used to mean rightwing demagogue, which is also a corruption of its meaning for the original Populist Party in the US.)

Reading the Brown Transcripts by Joe Mathews of the New America Foundation Fox & Hounds 11/11/09 provides a more nuanced view of Jerry than the Contra Costa Times and Orange County Register pieces might suggest. Matthews is also the author of the recent American Prospect's skeptical cover story on Jerry, See Jerry Run. Again. 09/24/09. That one is not a very good analysis of Jerry's career. Matthews almost seems to think that he was responsible for the property-tax-cutting initiate Proposition 13, writing, "As it happens, the only thing worse than Prop. 13 itself was its implementation." He doesn't even mention that Brown had earlier proposed a much more sensible property tax reform that the legislature foolishly rejected. Or that he very actively supported a competing and also sensible tax reform intiative in 1978 that unfortunately was defeating by Prop 13.

Yes, he had to implement it as Governor. And he did a good job of minimizing the damage. In fact, it was Prop 13 that created the situation that we still have today, in which the state government is forced to run chronically on the verge of bankruptcy. That's the conservative and Republican vision of government. And that's not the view of government that Jerry Brown represents. He does take government efficiency seriously, as distinct from Republicans for whom "eliminating waste, fraud and inefficiency" is nothing but a magical incantation. As Jerry once famously said before Prop 13, "I'm not conservative, I'm just cheap."

Jerry recently fired his spokesperson, who was revealed to have secretly taped interviews reporters had with Jerry. Secret taping of that kind is illegal in California. But it has produced this compilation of documents, most of which are transcripts from those interviews. This report describes them: Secrets of Secret Jerry Brown Tapes Revealed Calbuzz 11/10/09. Here is the 93-page PDF of the document itself, which give the reader an unusual chance to look at how Jerry processes information in that context. On page 5 of the PDF, he puts environmental concerns front and center when AP reporter Beth Fouhy asks him why he wants to run for Governor again:

That's the question. That is the question. I would say in response, that the state has lurched from crisis to crisis. The creativity that I saw in state government 25 years ago is not there and I do believe that I have the experience and the ability to attract very skilled and creative people that could make a major contribution both in education and renewable energy, prison reform and in dealing with the water crisis. These key challenges that the state has been facing since the time that I was governor are still continuing. For example, they haven't built a water project since my father was governor. [Pat Brown was Governor from 1959-1967.] The only one that's ever been proposed was blocked in a referendum. The high speed rail authority? I signed it 1982. The bonds were just passed in the last election and they're talking another 10 years. There are a lot of things I did as governor. For example, California introduced to [sic] the state energy commission which I started. It didn't have one employee when I was governor and we built it up to the major state energy authority of the country. California became the world leader in wind and other renewable energy sources. By the way, California now uses less electricity per person than the other states. We haven't even grown. Not only because of the renewable energy but the efficiency, the building codes, the appliances. I'm continuing that as attorney general[.] I'm pushing each of the local governments, of which they're hundreds, to adopt land use plans to reduce vehicles miles traveled and require energy efficient building materials. [my emphasis]

Tags: jerry brown

Around the bend on Palin

2009-11-18T20:01:00.001-05:00

Maureen Dowd provides an example of why Sarah Palin is not only a star within the Republican Party. She also has the potential for a wider appeal.

MoDo's Palin piece is Rogue American Woman New York Times 11/17/09. There are two basic problems with MoDo's article. It treats Palin as a pop-culture celebrity, not as a politician with a potentially huge effect on public policy.

And in treating Palin's ghost-written memoir as something to be ridiculed, MoDo neglects to mention that the ghost-writer, Lynn Vincent, is a white supremacist - at a minimum she co-authored a book with one (Robert Stacy McCain) - a fact which might have alerted her readers to the genuinely ugly side of Palin's appeal. Vincent also ghost-wrote the memoir of Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the theocrat who assured his Christian Right finds that he knew his God was bigger than the Muslims' God. She's also known for her hostility to gays and argues that Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War (and by extension the US) was "a hapless puppet" of Joe Stalin. (Palin - or one of her speechwriters - has also shown questionable judgment in choosing a source for a cutesy quote.)

MoDo actually spends more of her column looking for cutesy commonalities with Palin. Her column comes off like a Republican parody of a sneering poo-bah of the Liberal Press Conspiracy. MoDo apparently intended the following to be obvious mockery of Palin/Vincent:

Here is what the former Alaska governor censoriously writes about “shenanigans” in two capital cities: “Politically, Juneau always had a reputation for being a lot like Animal House: drinking and bowling, drunken brawls, countless affairs, and garden variety lunchtime trysts. It’s been known at times to be like a frat house filled with freshmen away from their parents for the very first time. At other times, the capital city’s underside was even darker: clandestine political liaisons and secret meetings, unethical deeds and downright illegal acts.”

She concludes: “In short, it was a lot like Washington, D.C.”

Sure, it's a stereotypical rube's description of the sinful Big City. But that's the Republicans' general posture, not just Palin's: they aren't the servants of greedy CEOs, they're the champions of the regular folks against the swells and scary minorities in the big cities and dirty ghettoes.

Is Washington "like a frat house filled with freshmen away from their parents for the very first time"? I don't have that particular impression myself. But that is the kind of impression I get of MoDo and her fellow celebrity pundits when I watch them on the Sunday morining talk shows, or on the 24/7 cable channels. MoDo has so little self-reflection on own conduct and her pundit cohort's that she seems unaware of how credible a description that might seem to a lot of people. And because of that, she provides a half-plausible illustration of Palin's far-right posturing against the dreaded Liberal Elite.

Here's more information on Lynn Vincent you won't get from MoDo's column:

Palin co-author Lynn Vincent's inflammatory record Media Matters 11/13/09

Charles Johnson (a recovering Islamophobe), Sarah Palin's Book Ghostwritten by Associate of White Supremacist [Robert Stacy] McCain Little Green Footballs 09/29/09

John Cook, Sarah Palin's Ghostwriter Pals Around With Racists and Wackos Gawker 09/30/09

David Weigel, Robert Stacy McCain Responds to Gawker, Defends Palin Collaborator Lynn Vincent Washington Independent 9/30/09

Tags: maureen dowd, radical right,sarah palin

Tea party is over

2009-11-18T14:57:00.001-05:00

I know that's kind of a groaner of a headline. What it means is that the hoopla from the Radical Right/Republicans over health care reform is likely to seem like a lower-case tea parties compared to the s**tstorm they are likely to kick up over immigration reform.

Pro-immigrant activists from Reform Immigration for America are sponsoring house parties for comprehensive immigration reform.

The xenophobic Tea Partiers are also gearing up for an anti-immigrant hate campaign, as Dave Neiwert reports in Teabaggers punk'd by anti-racists who get them to cheer rant against European-American immigrants Crooks and Liars 11/16/09.

Tags: immigration reform, radical right

Amazing Grace: Generosity in Hard Times

2009-11-17T13:58:00.009-05:00

We often seem to be a cranky lot, here at The Blue Voice, in our thinking and our posting. So, today I'd like to post something in a vein that is anything but cranky. This one is about the feelings of amazement and gratitude I experienced toward my fellow human beings last Saturday. It was the fall Postal Carriers' Food Drive here in Albuquerque, and maybe all over the country. You know, it's that day that you clean out your cupboards and pantry and put all the canned/packaged/dry foods that you know you'll never eat into a grocery bag and leave it out by the mailbox for your postal carrier to pick up. Or at least that's kind of how I've always looked at it. I look at it quite differently now, after the experience Gail and I had late Saturday afternoon. As we are donors to Roadrunner Foodbank, our local supplier of food to those in need, we receive their newsletter. The most recent letter had a request for volunteers to help out at all our postal stations unloading the trucks as carriers came in from their mornings and afternoons of loading them full of bags of food.

So, we volunteered. The substation to which we were assigned is out behind the airport, in an area we are completely unfamiliar with. But after Saturday, I feel like I know at least some of the people who live in that neighborhood. I must add the caveat that this is far from being a wealthy residential area, quite the opposite in fact. We suited up for the cold weather, climbed up on the loading dock, and started unloading bins containing the bags of food. Then we sorted them into three categories and tossed them into huge cardboard bins: cans, glass jars, and dry packages or boxes. There were some subsets, like bags of chips, and loaves of bread, that had their own boxes on the sides so they wouldn't get crushed by heavier boxes or bags of stuff.

The big surprise to us was both the quality and the quantity of food in those bags coming off the postal trucks. These people hadn't just cleaned out their cupboards and gotten rid of the old boring stuff that had been there for a year: they had gone to the regular chain groceries for sure, but they had also gone to CostCo and Whole Foods, Sunflower Market and Keller's, places where they purchased organic peanut butter and pasta sauce, cartons of vegetable juice, Amy's soups, giant bags of organic pastas. There were bags of organic lentils and other legumes, boxes or organic cereals hot and cold, baby food of all kinds.

In short, the world has changed a lot more than I had any idea. More places are carrying organic foods of all sorts, and more people are buying them when they shop. The truly astounding thing is that they are buying them, not just for themselves, but for unknown strangers who can't afford to feed their families organic pasta with organic tomato sauce or make their kids organic peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches. And that this is happening in a time of economic hardship unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. I've worried that my bags with cans of organic navy beans, pumpkin, lentil soup and so forth would be simply ignored or cast aside by putative recipients. How wrong I have been. We were so cheered up by the people we were working with, many of whom brought their young adolescent kids, people of all ethnicities and ages, and by the amount of food we all unpacked and sorted - I've looked at the entire city with new, and completely uncranky, eyes for the past week.(Crossposted from Quid Nunc, my personal blog.)

Going Rogue; Like the Yankees

2009-11-17T12:52:00.006-05:00

Photo lifted from Onion Sports

I've been slow to catch on to the excitement about Sarah Palin's new book, "Going Rogue", in which the former governor and VP candidate tells her side of the story of her recent 15 minutes of fame. The book has been the butt of jokes -- David Letterman called it "the book to nowhere" -- but I think Palin may have hit a home run.

For the title of the book, Palin chose an expression used by John McCain's advisors to express their disapproval of her penchant for doing whatever the hell she wanted during the presidential campaign last year, turning their intended insults into a major money-maker.

I think it's a smart strategy. Apparently, my beloved New York Yankees have been very successful in taking a similar marketing strategy over the past 13 years...

War on Moral Clarity

2009-11-17T11:39:00.004-05:00

Christopher Hitchens starts an essay at Slate as follows:

The admonition not to rush to judgment or jump to conclusions might sound fair and prudent enough, perhaps even statesmanlike when uttered by the president, as long it's borne in mind that such advice is itself a judgment that is more than halfway to a conclusion. What it plainly implies in the present case is that the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan should not be assumed in any meaningful way to be related to his Muslim faith.

Thus defined, the debate about whether Major Hasan is a terrorist in formal alliance with bin Laden (and merely one player on a vast team of Qaeda agents in America) is transformed into a debate about whether Hasan's actions are likely to be completely unrelated to the fact that he is a Muslim. I often agree with Hitchens, although I find his arrogant manner irksome, and what I generally find admirable in his writing is that his rhetoric is usually supported by clear thinking, though not always. This is one such exception.

Some people jumped to label Hasan a terrorist and with the use of that term they meant to suggest that he is in league with Al Qaeda. This is what most Americans mean when they speak the T-word. Indeed, many of these people pointed out that Hasan attended a Virginia mosque that some 9/11 hijackers also attended. Hawks in the "war on terror" need occasional terrorist acts, or at least thwarted plots, to support their proposed policies in defense, immigration, intelligence, domestic surveillance, and homeland security. Islamophobia serves their purposes; they do not hesitate to play that card beacause they know it gets our attention. Hasan couldn't just be a Muslim; he had to be part of the global jihad.

On the other side, some of us doubt the wisdom of policies created during the Bush years to deal with the terrorist threat, and generally resist the assumption that Islam is identical with that threat. We don't deny the connection between Islamic fundamentalism as a primary driver of terrorism -- or even that Hasan's religion influenced his actions, as Hitchens suggests we would -- we just aren't disposed to label, as terrorism, every murder of an American committed by a Muslim. And we aren't in a hurry to place such a powerful label on events we are still trying to understand.

Whether Hitchens deliberately framed the issue in such a dishonest fashion, or cannot see that he had, is an interesting question. It seems to me that he is suffering from what George W. Bush, our least clear-thinking ex-president, called "moral clarity" and which often appeared to the rest of us as muddled madness. Is it possible that even the smartest commentators on the events of the day are so overwhelmed by their biases and convictions that they are no longer capable of thinking critically?

If I've been mistaken about anything, it's often been something I'd previously been completely certain of. That was true of Bush and it is equally true of Hitchens. That comparison should make him uncomfortable...

An idea whose time has come

2009-11-16T00:33:00.001-05:00

Abolishing the filibuster in the Senate, that is.

Chris Hayes writes about the basic problem with the filibuster rule in What Ails the Senate The Nation 11/04/09 (11/03/09).

The filibuster has become a cancer growing inside the world's greatest deliberative body. What was once a rarely invoked procedural mechanism has metastasized and turned into a de facto supermajority requirement for any legislation. In the 103rd Congress (1993-94) there were forty-six votes on "cloture," the motion to override a filibuster and allow something to be considered on the floor. In the last Congress, the 110th, the first one in which Republicans were in the minority, there were a record 112. Even without the filibuster, our system already has more choke points where legislation can die than almost any other liberal democracy. It's rare for one party to control both houses of Congress and the White House, and to have as solid a majority as the Democrats currently do. But the filibuster confers such power on an obstinate minority that it distorts the relationship between elections and governance in a way that dangerously attenuates democracy itself. [my emphasis]

Also from The Nation on this topic: William Greider, Stop Senator No 12/10/08 (12/29/08 issue); Thomas Geoghegan, The Case for Busting the Filibuster 08/12/09 (08/31/09 issue)

Tags: filibuster

Obama and restoring the rule of law

2009-11-15T14:31:00.001-05:00

There's a German concept called Lebenslüge, which literally means life-lies, or "lies we live by". If we put in American self-help language, we could call it "lies to live by".

We're into the 20th-anniversary period of the fall of the Communist Eastern bloc which was followed by the fall of the Soviet Union. Basically no one outside say those developments coming. Nor inside those countries for that matter. Certainly not Michael Gorbachev, a committed Communist who was drawing on his understanding of the West, the radical-democratic aspects of Marxist theory and his recognition of the chronic economic problems of the Soviet Union to try to establish a successful socialist society and government based more on a classical social-democratic model than on Marxism-Leninism as the Soviets had previously understood it.

Certainly not the democratic opposition in East Germany, for whom the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was as complete a surprise as it was to everyone else. Probably more so. The leaders of the opposition were largely committed socialists and Greens who were also looking to create a democratic East Germany not based on West German style capitalism.

At the time, for a brief time, it almost seemed like a pacifists' dream of even 10 years earlier coming true. The great Enemy of the Cold War had literally ceased to exist. A Republican administration, with Old Man Bush as President and Dick Cheney (!?!) as Secretary of Defense was shutting down military bases and putting in place new arms agreement to radically roll back the nuclear threat, even to help the former Soviet Republics decommission and destroy many of their nuclear weapons.

That period didn't last much longer than the Gulf War of 1991. In the years following the United States continued to see it as our mission to run the world, more or less. Instead of a period of peace, a new period of military interventions came. I want to be clear here: it's possible and necessary to differentiate between Bill Clinton's more careful and limited interventions in places like Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo from the historical disaster we know as the Iraq War. But the Cold War turned out to be the Long War. Along with the downsides of being a garrison state.

I remember hearing Jerry Brown in the 1990s talk about the fact that the Revolutions of 1989 in Europe hadn't yet had a counterpart in the West. I'm starting to wonder if the counterpart hasn't already come with Ken Starr, Dick Cheney and Judith Miller among its creators.

Because its hard to see how you can try to be a responsible citizen attempting to understand basic things about public affairs and not wonder on a regular basis if the substance of American democracy hasn't been effectively reduced to show business, a spectacle, as the Situationists in the 1960s conceived it. Bill Moyers a few weeks ago talked about how our public affairs had become "the greatest show on earth" - meaning literally a spectacular show at which we have to marvel at its elaborate strangeness. This is where the "lies to live by" concept comes in. In substantial ways, our political elite go through the motions and rituals of democracy while increasingly seeming no to even notice how far the reality departs from the pretence.

In other words, I wonder if the American counterpart to the Revolutions of 1989 hasn't been to entrench a form of Potemkin democracy that's even less responsive to the public's needs than before.

I usually force myself to watch the Political Wrap feature of the PBS Newshour every Friday, the weekly clown show whose regular clown stars are David Brooks for the conservative Republican side and Mark Shields, ostensibly and sometimes actually for the liberal Democratic side. I usually hate myself afterwards. It's kind of like looking at porn and feeling guilty about it afterwards. Actually, it would probably be much better for me to just look at dirty pichers for 15 minutes instead of the Political Wrap. But I'm addicted to the bad stuff, I'm afraid.

I plan to post two or three times about this past Friday's segment, which stood out for how well it displayed the bankruptcy of Beltway Village attitudes toward politics and the collapse, and I mean walls of Jericho tumbling down collapse, of the quality of American journalism, especially on TV. And this is quality TV, PBS, the bogeyman of the Republicans for being "liberal media" funded in part by tax dollars.

Friday's clown show can be found at Shields and Brooks Gauge 9/11 Trials, Afghan Troop Decision 11/13/09. The first topic they took up was Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement that the 9/11 suspects would be tried in civilian court for the attack. Clown Brooks raved about the whole notion of a civilian trial was hideously bad and a surrender to The Terrorists. Clown Shields sadly grumped that Holder should have consulted the President before finalizing the decision, but that the Supreme Court had forced him into it, and mumbled something about how there would probably be a hung jury. Clown Brooks mentioned in passing that other accused terrorist would be tried before military commissions.

Neither Clown Shields nor moderating Clown Jim Lehrer seemed to be fazed in the slightest at "conservative" Clown Brooks basically dismissing the whole concept of civilian trials as being awful. Or even to notice how radical his formulation was. None of the clown show cast seemed to think the more serious and very far-reaching implications of the Obama administration's decision to use the sham military commission system to try some of the long-time prisoners from Guantanamo and elsewhere outside the civilian system.

Up until now, I have managed to hold on to the hope that the Obama administration had simply foolishly passed up the opportunity to dump the responsibility for the entire legal mess that the Cheney-Bush administration created back onto them. He started off by announcing that he would close the Guantanamo gulag by this coming January, a pledge now completely abandoned. The established legal mechanisms for dealing with both terrorists and prisoners of war were there in 2001 and were still there in January 2009. Obama could have insisted on putting all those incarcerated back into the normal military and civilian justice systems where they have always belonged. And he could have effectively said to clowns like David Brooks, "if you think this won't provide a satisfactory outcome, then complain to your old heroes Bush and Cheney and Rummy, because they are the ones that created this mess because they wanted to torture people."

And he could have pushed Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the torture crimes, or even to hold via regular Justice Department channels the legal investigations that American law and the treaty obligations under the Torture Convention of 1984 require.

In other words, Obama the constitutional scholar and now President could have taken a straightforward stance in defense of the rule of law. That is not the course he chose.

The effects of his current approach are huge. He may favor less vicious, sadistic and unjust treatment of prisoners than his predecessor. But his actions are creating precedent-setting, political and even legal validation for the radical Cheneyist claims of the "Unitary Executive", which holds that the President can simply disobey the law and the Constitution and permit anyone else to do so as long as he claims it's for national security, a claim that is the President's to make without review. And as we've seen, in the Long War, everything has to do with national security, at least according to the claims of the Cheneys of the world.

Obama's position may have had to do with the need to arrange his Presidential relations with the military establishment, as John Dean argued in The Politics of Excusing Torture In The Name of National Security Findlaw 05/15/09, a grim enough possibility in itself. But as we've seen in the health care reform battle, Obama's basic political instincts are pragmatic and, yes, even conservative. He's not going to reverse himself on his acceptance of Bush's national security crimes unless forced to by the courts, the Congress and the Democratic base. Again, just to be clear, pragmatic and sometimes conservative is a radical improvement over the Cheney-Bush years.

But the rule of law issue has to be addressed. The torture issue isn't going away. Ask the people in Argentina still being brought to justice for their crimes during El Proceso, the military dictatorship of 1976-83. Torture isn't the only serious legal issue left over from the Cheney-Bush years. But it's the one that goes to the very existence of the rule of law. Torture is the necessary tool of the Unitary Executive.

I'm going to return in another post to Friday's Brooks-Shields-Lehrer Clown Show. But for now, here are some of the pieces I've seen recently addressing how serious the current legal issues around accused terrorist suspects are:

Glenn Greenwald in Salon: The Right's textbook "surrender to terrorists" 11/14/09, on the contempt conservatives show for the American legal system and the perpetual climate of fear which they seek to reproduce; The new WH counsel and "Scooter Libby justice" 11/14/09, on the extent to which the notion that the national security elite should be above the law is endemic even in liberal Beltway circles, in which Glenn reminds us, "A restoration of the rule of law -- meaning an end to immunity for high-level political officials who commit crimes -- was a central prong of the Obama campaign"; Detainees to get the "state-always-wins" system of "justice" 11/13/09. He notes in the last one a paradox of this situation. Rule-of-law advocates who are the most critical of Obama's use of military commissions are going to be the most vocal defenders of his use of civilian justice to try the 9/11 suspects. As Clown Shields showed on Friday, not much is to be expected on that score from our liberal Pod Pundits.

Marcy Wheeler, Emptywheel: The 9/11 Trials: The Torture Question 11/13/09; Defense Lawyer Comments on Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Rahim al-Nashiri 11/13/09.

Deborah Pearlstein, Holder Speaks Opinio Juris 11/13/09 discusses the shakiness of the military commission concept in these terrorism cases.

Brad Knickerbocker, Holder in the dock as critics focus on New York 9/11 terror trial Christian Science Monitor 11/14/09.

Gerald Posner, Left Off Holder's List The Daily Beast 11/13/09

Tags: obama administration, rule of law

Imagining the Enemy Within

2009-11-12T17:49:00.001-05:00

Do Republicans really wet their pants every time they hear bad news? Or do they just act that way when they are trying to drum up a hate campaign against some group or the other?

Human Events is one of the long-time favorite organs for rightwing Republicans. The lead story at their Web site as of this writing is Hasan's Personal Jihad by Clare Lopez 11/12/09:

A week after a Muslim jihadi gunned down more than 40 fellow citizens at Ft. Hood, Texas, America’s national security leadership still won’t admit that the attack had anything to do with Islam. By failing to acknowledge that connection, those with a constitutional duty to defend this nation “against all enemies foreign and domestic” consistently substitute a policy of political correctness at the expense of military readiness. The fact is that the 5 November 2009 attack that took the lives of thirteen American patriots was not just an act of terrorism: it was an act of war. When a gunman from the ranks of Islamic Jihad mounts an armed assault against a military target in complete consistency with the enemy doctrine of war, it is time to recognize that the U.S. actually is at war -- not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but with all those who follow the call of Jihad. These are the Jihad Wars and the stakes are clear: shall Americans live in security under the Constitution or shall the enemy within and without compel us to submit to Shari’a (Islamic law)?

There is no evidence at this point that the accused shooter, who has just been formally charged by the military with 13 counts of premeditated murder, is a "Muslim jihadi". We know he's Muslim. But what role if any his religion may have played in his actions isn't known, based on what's in the public record (although it's likely that it played some role).

I've yet to see that there's any evidence of the Army having promoted "political correctness at the expense of military readiness", although since rightwingers mean politically INcorrect when they say "politically correct" and they aren't always referring to politics, it's hard to know what the writer is actually trying to say. As I suggested in an earlier post, I can speculate that the desire to turn a blind eye to excessive Christian proselytizing in the military and the need to retain people fluent in Arabic could have played a role in ignoring danger signs.

But what were the supposed danger signs? Marcy Wheeler in Nidal Hasan’s Dots Emptywheel 11/10/09 gives a roundup of what we know that may be relevant to the actions of which Hasan is accused. Her discussion focuses on data sharing among federal agencies. But her reality-based list of focal points in analyzing Hasan's background is telling. Taken together, they give us a strong circumstantial reason to believe that some ideological motive (religious and/or political) was at work in his planning for the shooting. But the only one of the types of evidence she lists looks to me like an obvious red flag in itself: his purchase of a so-called "cop-killer" gun with several 20-round magazines of ammunition on August 1 of this year. But conservatives have committed themselves to such an expansive reading of the Second Amendment that they will presumably be hesitant to jump up and down over that as a sign of anything other than good citizenship by a citizen diligent to protect his Second Amendment rights. Although I would guess the gun purchase is going to be part of the prosecution's case for premeditation.

Is Hasan "from the ranks of" some group called "Islamic Jihad"? No evidence that I know of. Who are "all those who follow the call of Jihad"? Since "jihad" (struggle) is a concept with multiples meanings in Islam - Islamic tradition says that the Prophet Muhammad called the struggle to live in accord with God's laws was the "greater jihad" as distinct from the "lesser jihad" of war - American (non-Muslim) rightwingers typically apply such accusations to Muslims generally.

And it has to be clear to anyone whose brain is not pickling in ideological OxyContin that Christian theocracy is a greater threat to American freedoms that Muslim religious law (Sharia).

The Lopez article is useless as an analysis of the Fort Hood shooting. But it illustrates how conservatives use the image of an infinitely threatening, horrible Muslim enemy in pretty much exactly the same way they used the Communist menace during the Cold War. In fact, some of the polemics could be boilerplate, with words like "Muslims" and "Sharia" substituted for "Communist" and "Communism".

The Pentagon is largely echoing that aspect of this argument. This is a case that has the hard right accusing the Pentagon of being soft on ~~Communism~~ Islamic extremism. Which brings to mind that it was Joe McCarthy's reckless investigation of the Army that wrecked his credibility and brought him an official Senate censure.

The politics of this are already complicated. Liberals and progressives generally wouldn't want to enable a new round of paranoid fear-mongering about The Terrorists. Remember Attorney General John Ashcroft's warning after the 9/11 attacks that there could be thousands of Al Qa'ida sleeper agents in the US, a claim that had no basis in fact?

But there is a real problem also with the fact that the Army's tendency in these things is to keep as much secret from the public as possible. It's not only a deeply ingrained habit. But more than one senior Army officer at Fort Hood must fear for their careers right now after such a disaster occurred on their watch. We've already seen what looks like a very clumsy attempt to spin the capture of Hasan in a way that didn't align with the facts. (See Greg Mitchell Massive Media 'Fail' on Fort Hood Pressing Issues 11/12/09; James McKinley, Jr., Second Officer Gives an Account of the Shooting at Ft. Hood New York Times 11/12/09)

One of my big concerns here is that with the Republicans obviously trying hard to spin this as evidence of a Terrorist Conspiracy So Vast, the Army's reflexive secrecy and tendency to creative embellish their stories released to the public could wind up feeding paranoid conspiracy theories. When your framework is that the Army is being "politically correct" in covering up a known Terrorist Conspiracy in their ranks, any false information they release on the case will then become evidence of the dark conspiracy. The Army can't stop political paranoids from being what they are. But it doesn't have to facilitate their propaganda by sloppy public relations nonsense, either.

Tags: fort hood massacre, paranoid style

Lou Dobbs

2009-11-12T08:58:00.003-05:00

I never understood how CNN could allow this guy to indulge his weirdo ideas and prejudices while presenting himself as a news anchor. He had a big following, but his show was poison to CNN's respectability as a news source.

An Old Right isolationist take on the Fort Hood massacre

2009-11-11T21:00:00.001-05:00

It's not surprising to me that Pat Robertson is banging the Islamophobia drums.

I'm not surprised, either, that Antiwar.com's editorial director Justin Raimondo is also jumping to rightwing conclusions over the Fort Hood shooting untethered from any factual basis. But I thought I would link to his post The War at Home: Jihad at Ft. Hood 11/09/09 for a couple of reasons. One is that it shows how on this particular subject, he's willing to leap to conclusions based on scarce evidence. It's also an example of his Old Right isolationism, in which he simultaneously sounds like he's trying to give an empathetic explanation of why an American Muslim would think himself justified in killing American soldiers and also promote a paranoid rightwing notion of a super-efficient Al Qa'ida having deadly sleeper agents prowling among us here in the Homeland. In his opening paragraphs, he could be mistaken for Michelle Malkin:

It’s been grimly amusing to watch the liberal mainstream media spin the murder spree at Ft. Hood. They are trying mightily to pretend it was all about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s inner psychological turmoil, given his job as an Army psychiatrist whose task it was to counsel troubled veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars. He is depicted as a victim of post-traumatic stress syndrome, even though he was never in combat. His identification with his clients’ suffering, his poor job evaluations, even his lack of a wife are all blamed for his rampage, which killed 13 (so far) and wounded dozens of others.

In order to give this narrative of victimization credibility, the touchy-feely school of thought has to ignore the mountains of evidence that – given his premises – Hasan acted rationally and there was nothing inexplicable about his deadly spasm of violence.

Raimondo has already decided that Maj. Hasan is guilty of the shootings (a reasonable enough conclusion at this point) but also that he did so for jihadist religious-political reasons:

In 2001, before his transfer to Ft. Hood, Hasan attended the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., where Anwar al-Awlaki – recently banned from Britain due to his open advocacy of attacks on British troops in Afghanistan and his support for organizations deemed terrorist – preached and held sway. Two of Hasan’s fellow congregants were Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour, both among the 9/11 hijackers. A third hijacker attended the radical imam’s services in California.

These might be potentially interesting connections, if we knew a lot more than we do about the shooter's motivation than we actually do. Until then, it's speculation. Raimondo proceeds immediately to wilder speculation:

It is perfectly possible Hasan met the two and was recruited into al-Qaeda, a "sleeper" to be awakened at the right moment. The nut-job known as "Azzam the American," a Muslim convert from a Southern California Jewish family, issued a statement not long ago calling on Muslim Americans – specifically Muslim members of the armed services, of which there are thousands – to rise up and strike the infidels on the home front.

It's also "perfectly possible" that most of our TV pundits are space alien Pod People, too. But I would actually say we have more evidence for the Pod Pundit idea than we have for the idea that Hasan was an Al Qa'ida sleeper agent recruited by 9/11 hijackers.

He continues, sounding even more like Michelle Malkin:

The American-born Hasan, son of Palestinian parents who emigrated to the U.S. sometime in the 1960s, joined the military against the wishes of his family. Here is someone who was brought up in this country, presumably immersed in the culture of the West, and yet still responded to the call of al-Qaeda to make war on his homeland. With millions of native-born Muslims in this country, how many are similarly susceptible to Osama bin Laden’s appeal to strike at the "far enemy" – who is, for them, quite near?

This, of course, is just the question the neoconservatives have been asking ever since the Twin Towers were downed, and their answer is, oddly, the same as al-Qaeda’s. Both, for different reasons, are hoping for a crackdown by the U.S. government, starting with the banning of Muslims from our military. If we are indeed embarked on a religious war against Islam – and it sure seems like it – who can argue against this? The wet dream of the neocons and their ostensible opposite numbers in bin Laden’s cave is that the authorities will one day carry out Michelle Malkin’s vision of a repeat of FDR’s wartime internment camps, albeit this time filled with American Muslims instead of Japanese-Americans. That would certainly make both the editors of Commentary magazine and al-Qaeda’s top commanders quite happy. [my emphasis]

Was Hasan responding "to the call of al-Qaeda to make war on his homeland"? We don't know that, and neither does Raimondo. But it didn't stop him from embracing Malkin's suggestion about rounding up potentially disloyal Americans and putting them in preventive detention. It wouldn't at all surprise me for neocons to defend such an action. But it's certainly a broad generalization he makes to say it's their "wet dream".

And Raimondo gives us an example of how an antiwar postion can simultaneously be a xenophobic, rightwing conspiracy theory.

Our wars abroad are a diversion away from the main front in the effort to defeat al-Qaeda, which is right here at home. There is no doubt in my mind that bin Laden’s legions have planted their agents on our soil, and these murderous Myrmidons will spring forth fully armed when the time is ripe. Our borders, our security measures around such facilities as nuclear plants, and our intelligence-gathering methods are the weak links in our defense, made all the more so by the massive diversion of resources to a series of futile, draining, and unwinnable overseas conflicts. [my emphasis]

Antiwar.com is nominally a "libertarian"-type forum featuring antiwar writing from a variety of poltical positions from left to right. The Antiwar Radio feature frequently has sensible commentators associated more with the left side of the political spectrum, including human rights attorney Scott Horton, historian Gareth Porter, Glenn Greenwald and Tom Hayden.

Raimondo is also an "adjunct scholar" of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Ludwig von Mises was a hardline rightwing economist who was also an editor of the John Birch Society's American Opinion magazine. The founder and chairman of the Institute is neo-Confederate Lew Rockwell, whose articles can be found in abundance at his LewRockwell.com site. The site also features neo-Confederate Abraham Lincoln revisionism in its King Lincoln Archives.

Chip Berlet writes about the Mises Institute in Into the Mainstream Intelligence Report Summer 2003. "Around the country, ideas that originated on the hard right or in the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists are finding their way into the mainstream," he writes. And he identifies the Mises Institute as one of the groups performing that service for the extreme right.

Antiwar.com identifies itself as a project of our parent foundation, the Randolph Bourne Institute," whose main reason for existence appears to be funding Antiwar.com. Antiwar.com's mission statement also declares, "Our dedication to libertarian principles, inspired in large part by the works and example of the late Murray N. Rothbard, is reflected on this site." Justin Raimondo is the author of an admiring Rothbard biography, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (2000). Berlet describes Rothbard's "libertarian" approach as follows:

A key player in the [Ludwig von Mises] institute for years was the late Murray Rothbard, who worked with [Lew] Rockwell closely and co-edited a journal with him. The institute's Web site includes a cybershrine to Rothbard, a man who complained that the "Officially Oppressed" of American society (read, blacks, women and so on) were a "parasitic burden," forcing their "hapless Oppressors" to provide "an endless flow of benefits."

"The call of 'equality,'" he wrote, "is a siren song that can only mean the destruction of all that we cherish as being human." Rothbard blamed much of what he disliked on meddling women. In the mid-1800s, a "legion of Yankee women" who were "not fettered by the responsibilities" of household work "imposed" voting rights for women on the nation. Later, Jewish women, after raising funds from "top Jewish financiers," agitated for child labor laws, Rothbard adds with evident disgust. The "dominant tradition" of all these activist women, he suggests, is lesbianism.

Other sources of Old Right isolationist commentary include Taki's Magazine, The American Conservative (which like Antiwar.com also publishes liberal and left war criticism) and Chronicles Magazine (not to be confused with The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Antiwar.com's mission statement claims that while acknowledging their Rothbardian point of view, they take their journalistic role seriously. Having the editorial director publish a paranoid, evidence-free claim about a sophisticated network of Al Qa'ida sleeper agents in the United States does anything but enhance their reputation for journalistic seriousness.

Tags: isolationism, justin raimondo, old right

Parsing the available information on the Fort Hood massacre

2009-11-11T16:37:00.001-05:00

"Updates to the investigation surrounding Thursday's shooting were scarce Monday," writes Amanda Kim Stairrett speaking of last week's horrific shootings at Fort Hood, in FBI, CID continuing investigation Killeen Daily Herald 11/10/09.

But that hasn't stopped people from speculating freely. Joe Lieberman, honorary Democrat for reasons that apparently only his colleagues in the Senate can fathom, was on FOX News Sunday talking about having an investigation of "the worst terrorist attack since 9/11." Holy Joe is chairman of the Senate Internal Security Committee and his fellow Democratic members apparently can't say no to him over anything. So he can probably have his hearing if he really wants.

But the publicly available facts about the case are still sparse. And what is being confidently reported is often contradictory and confusing. Did the shooter have one pistol or two? Was Officer Kimberley Munley shot three times or five? Did Munley take down the shooter herself or did her partner Mark Todd deliver the shot that brought him down?

The body count seems to be stable in the reporting at 13. The Army has publicly released the names of the dead after the required notice to their families (presumably). Amanda Kim Stairrett's report linked above says that 15 injured in the attack were still in the hospital Monday afternoon and 27 had been discharged. She doesn't mention how many injured may have been treated on the spot and not taken to the hospital, if any.

Since the Republicans and others clearly want to use this case to promote Islamophobia, the details of the attack could turn out to be important beyond the legal case against the shooter. If we assume that there was at least one bullet per injury, that means at least 55 rounds were fired. Depending on the time frame and the weapon(s) used, that's possible. There was some early speculation about the possibility of "friendly fire" injuries being involved, i.e., victims wounded by accident by people firing at the shooter. But if Munley was the only responder, or she and her partner the only ones, that seems less likely. Kate Harding writes about some of the reporting problems in Was Kimberly Munley the real Fort Hood hero? Salon 11/09/09, although she almost gets lost in speculating about what various narrative frames might imply about larger cultural issues.

Dana Priest, who's one of the Washington Post's best reporters, has a strange story on the suspect, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan: Fort Hood suspect warned of threats within the ranks 11/10/09. As Taylor Marsh's reaction shows, it's easy to read Priest's article as virtually a warning that he might take violent action. But what the article says is that Hasan gave a presentation in his role as an Army psychiatrist about factors that might cause US Muslim troops to turn against their own forces. As far as those present who heard it, it's not at all clear to me that they had reason to take it as other than face value. Shouldn't Army psychiatrists be talking about such possibilities? In an online chat, Priest confirms that she does think that his listeners should have seen that as a warning of trouble. but then later she concedes that they may have seen no reason to take it as such a warning sign. The slide show Hasan used in that presentation seems long on Qu'rānic verses for a medical presentation. But I don't see any obvious flags that he was somehow trying to validate fratricide (killing other soldiers in your own army) or acts of violence.

This is kind of sad to see, though, from the online chat:

Washington, D.C.: Did the Post ever point out that Timothy McVeigh was Christian? Should we be kicking out all the Christians from the military? All white males?

Dana Priest: I don't remember McVeigh's actions being motivated by his faith. He hated the government. As I recall.

[Sigh!] Actually, there is evidence that McVeigh was influenced by the white supremacist Christian Identity movement, which is very influential in the white supremacist gutter. See Elohim City Anti-Defamation League n/d (2001 or later). But Beltway Village pundits know not to look for religious motivations among non-Muslim domestic far-right terrorists; the default assumption is that they are the proverbial "lone nuts".

In a later story, Post reporter Ann Scott Tyson quotes an anonymous Army source claiming that Hasan did not formally seek to leave military, Army official says 11/11/09.

Here are some of the key factual questions in my mind:

What actually happened at the shooting? Were the victims all hit by bullets from the perpetrator or was "friendly fire" involved?

What was the shooter's motivation? To what extent was this a consciously political or religious act?

Did he have actual accomplices of some sort? By actual accomplices, I mean people that actively enabled him to commit that specific crime. Having heard some radical Islamic preacher may be a clue to his motivations. But that's not the same as an accomplice to crime. Moral responsibility is another question, though it's pure speculation at this point.

How did security at the base fail? If a bunch of people got killed because of preventable failures or shirking of responsibility on the part of base security, that's something that should be addressed. Kimberly Munley is being understandably praised for her heroism. But the current story is that she happened to be in the area having her car repaired and she and her partner heard shots and went to investigate. Munley and Todd may have performed well. But was base security working properly if the first responders were a couple of officers who just happened to be in the area picking up their car?

In connection with that last point, I hope the Army in this case holds those theoretically responsible for security actually responsible, though that doesn't always seem to be our military's approach.

John Nichols in The Nation suggests, Call Joe Lieberman's Bluff; Have a Real Inquiry 11/10/2009. He's referring to HoJo's seeming desire to investigate Muslims in the military. Nichols' point is that an investigation of how the military treats Muslim soldiers and the various factors including multiple deployments that may contribute to acts like the Fort Hood massacre might actually be a positive thing, though not exactly what Lieberman is picturing.

I think Nichols is half-right. We not only need to know the actual circumstances around this killing. The military needs to take a new attitude toward religious extremism in the military, especially among the officer corps. One of the questions that needs to be officially asked in some is whether the extensive Christian fundamentalist proselytizing that the military allows in its ranks led the military to look the other way at signs of religious/political extremism among officers in general?

Conservatives are grousing that "political correctness" - which to them apparently means "white people having to get along with non-whites" - is the reason that the military isn't exercising more diligence over Muslim soldiers and officers. But if it is the case that the military has been carelessly overlooking signs of Islamic extremism, my guess is that the desire to look the other way at Christianist political extremism among officers is likely to have more to do with it than the "political correctness" bogeyman.

One of the legitimate criticisms made of the military is that even now, nearly 19 years after Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait and the US military buildup in the Middle East for the Gulf War started, the Army still has a limited number of fluent Arabic speakers in its ranks. It's conceivable - though this is pure speculation - that the need for Arabic speakers could contribute to overly-accommodating attitudes toward danger signs in some cases.

The US military is experienced at trying to cover up its own mistakes. If lax base security was involved in the Fort Hood shootings, or friendly fire deaths, or bad responses to danger signals about the shooting suspect Hasan, or general failures in the military being alert to religious extremism among the officer core, the Army's instinct is going to be to cover that up as much as possible. Doing so may serve Army officers' careerist goals. But cover-ups will also feed conspiracy theories about deadly networks or super-efficient Al Qa'ida sleeper cells hiding behind every corner.

Tags: fort hood massacre

The Hard Choice

2009-11-11T08:23:00.006-05:00

We hear today that the President's advisors may be leaning towards sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, a conclusion we have been prepared for by the news coverage of the past few weeks. After eight years, mostly marked by the neglect of the past administration, we are faced with a decision: commit additional forces and funds for as long as it takes to ensure that terrorists cannot set up shop in Afghanistan, or reduce our mission there significantly (counter-terrorism, but not counter-insurgency).

I think we have to recognize that a decision not to commit additional resources may well be an acceptance of failure in Afghanistan. What would that mean for our security? Worst case would be a successful Taliban/Al Qaeda insurgency in Afghanistan, Waziristan, and in Pakistan. That could be very bad, but it is not clear that anything short of a large, permanent and costly American military presence will be sufficient to ensure that the worst case never comes to pass, especially when one considers the implications of the corruption and incompetence of the Karzai regime.

At home, the cost of the war is not irrelevant. The President's agenda includes some expensive undertakings, and he came into office saddled with a deep recession and a mountain of debt, the legacy of the previous administration and its GOP allies in Congress. As we have seen with health care, the same GOP legislators who added trillions to the national debt under George Bush now object to any spending bill or social program on the basis of a newfound commitment to fiscal responsibility.

So it must be recognized that an investment in security in Afghanistan and Pakistan may make it very hard to achieve other important goals. "Yes, we can" was a very compelling message, but clearly it was not meant to suggest there would not be some hard choices.

The first responsibility of government is to ensure our security, but this mandate does not mean that we should engage in wasteful and non-productive allocations of scarce resources. General McChrystal wants a lot of troops for as long as they're needed, with no real promise of success.

It's time to get serious, and make the right choices. Our resources have to go where results can be obtained, not to foolish and endless misadventures. It is time to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Major Hasan: Terrorist?

2009-11-10T17:20:00.008-05:00

I've been reading some of the buzz and furor over the use of the term "terrorist" to describe the Fort Hood shooter. Before any investigation had even started, the term was used as loosely as the color-coded terror alerts of the Bush administration. Some of us thought that maybe we should get some facts before we decided that Major Hasan was part of some Al Qaeda conspiracy to attack Americans on military bases. You know, like maybe he's just a nutter?

So how odd is it now to read David Brooks, in the NY Times today, complaining that we liberals were all in a rush to declare Hasan was NOT a terrorist. Brooks shakes his head and wonders at our misplaced political correctness. Why couldn't we just wait and see what we learned from the investigation?

Here's good old David:

It’s important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage. Worse, it absolved Hasan — before the real evidence was in — of his responsibility.

Jeez, Mr Brooks. Seems to me that we all wondered about the shooter at Virginia Tech, and the shooters at Columbine and in other cases of similar violence. Hasan may be a Muslim, but he is also an American. Is it so wrong to suspect that the causes of his actions may be more complex than the instant branding as a terrorist implies?

What Brooks misses in this story is obvious -- liberals have reacted to this story with grief and with open minds, wanting to understand the causes, however bizarre or straightforward they may turn out to be; conservatives got the grief part too but came to the story with conclusions in their pockets, and minds that are closed tight. To Brooks, it is so clear the guy is a terrorist, that any attempt to weigh other possibilities is seen as "absolution."

Look, Hassan is a traitor and a murdering coward. He may have been influenced by his religion, and may even have connections to Al Qaeda. As we learn more, it appears very possible that we will all agree he is a terorist. Till then, Joe Lieberman and FOX News will be certain he is, and I will still be waiting for the investigation to provide the facts. If Brooks is serious, he is preaching to the wrong side of the church.

It was 20 years ago today

2009-11-09T00:55:00.000-05:00

The fall of the Berlin Wall

Tags: berlin+wall, berliner+mauer

Hope but verify: Health care reform, historic moments and the Democratic Party

2009-11-09T00:33:00.001-05:00

The passage of the health care reform by the House of Representatives is an historic and important moment. Josh Marshall gives the safe and convention take on it in One Vote on Health Care Reform TPM 11/08/09. But the Stupak Amendment taking another step toward banning women's right to decide on abortion is a reminder that it's not done until it's done. Tbogg calls the Stupak Amendment the Vagina Added Tax. So my new personal slogan for health care, Obama and the Democrats generally is "hope but verify".

Health care has to pass the Senate and be signed by the President. Obama's leadership in those last crucial days before the House vote was aimed, so far as we know from the news reporting, at pushing the liberal Democrats to still make concessions to the corporate Blue Dogs, even on something so essential as the public option, without which the bill would be a corporate gift that wouldn't provide adequate coverage and would actually be an unpopular program for consumers. And on the Stupak Amendment, the White House apparently cared not the least if women's rights had to be sacrificed to make a last-minute concession to Christian Rightists who will never support Obama anyway.

To be respectable in the Beltway Village, Democrats always have to slap a hippie (i.e., vote for something conservative even though they'll never get conservative votes for doing so)

Digby in The Lesson Hullabaloo 11/08/09 anaylzes the Stepak Amendment as reflecting the leaden insistence of the Beltway Village consensus that progressive political ideas cannot be validated as such. We call call the mainstream left-of-center position "liberal" in the United States in a usage going back to the post-First World War era that would be eccentric is pretty much the whole rest of the world. In the new "center-right" coalition in Germany, the conservative part is "center" and the liberal party (that is actually one of the parties in the Liberal International) is the "right" part of the coalition.

But in the US, it's perfectly acceptable thinking within the Republican Party to conflate left and liberal and communist and fascist and socialist and Nazi into one undifferentiated image of evil. So the best improvement in generic political labeling we can probably hope for in the US right now is to have more Democrats and progressive activists legitimize the basic concepts we call progressive or liberal in the US, such as defending the people against anti-social exercises of corporate power like the current insurance industry attempt to block health care reform.

Digby in her piece is addressing one of the peculiarities of the current political moment. The need for New Deal, Great Society, "liberal" types programs and political leadership is more clear and urgent and potentially very popular now than at any time at least since 1964 and possibly since 1932. We're in the middle of what Jerry Brown might call a "democratic moment", in which popular pressure is focused on having government respond realistically to real needs. These moment can last for months or years. But they don't last forever.

So in the abstract, it seems that raw ambition and opportunism would be inspiring Democratic politicians to sound like latter-day Franklin Roosevelts and Bob La Follettes. Instead, we've got the Democratic Party having to be pulled kicking and screaming into health care reform, which is not only popular and necessary but has the obvious potential to provide the basis of Democratic Party political dominance for decades.

Obviously, the dependence of our political system on huge amounts of corporate money is part of the explanation. But there is also a psychological-ideological aspect of the dilemma that can't just be explained by cynically assuming that big money dominates politics and always will, a favorite position of "concern troll" commenters at leftie blogs. The collapse in quality of our national press is a huge factor in this, as well. The fact that Rupert Murdoch has such an enormous presence in news media in the Anglo-Saxon world is no small matter when it comes to having a corporate-friendly spin on the news. But again, the dysfunction of our star journalists can't be explained by some rational corporate lobbying function. Their groupthink is just too bizarrely weird to be fully explained that way.

Digby gives a good description of how the current political environment in Congress, despite the national popular mood, is heavily weighted toward shafting the "liberal" position in exactly the way we say play out with the Stupak Amendment:

Universal health care is something any decent, wealthy society shouldn't even have to think twice about. It's a global embarrassment that the United States, the chest thumping superpower, is even having this debate at this late date. It's equally embarrassing that we have put together a Frankenstein of a system [for health care reform] because our democratic government is in league with wealthy interests which are exploiting its people. It's hard to believe that anyone would call that system liberal, much less socialist, but as you can see every day on Fox news, it's set off a tantrum among a vocal minority that would hardly be less hysterical if aliens from a foreign planet landed in Washington. (And that hysteria is also a tool of the permanent establishment, funded by big money, and used as a way of keeping the debate focused on the right, even if it's taking on an absurdist quality.)

Any legislation such as health care reform must therefore be tempered by a liberal sacrifice, something real, a principle that will make them hate themselves and loathe each other for having done it. It cannot be a clean victory, lest they come to believe they can do more. In the end, the "moral" must always be that you cannot go too far left. [my emphasis]

"The one consistent characteristic" of policy victories for liberal/progressive Democrats over the past 20 years, she writes, "is that they are never unambiguously positive for the left."

Ann Friedman at Tapped talks about the implications of the Sestak Amendment vote in Whose Health Care Victory? 11/08/09.

For Obama's next "historic achievement", can we not make reducing women's rights part of it?

Tags: abortion, democratic party, health care reform, obama administration