Fora TV discussion of "the Daily show"

"Journalists Rachel Davis Mersey and Ted Anthony defend "The Daily Show" from NPR's Ira Glass, who argues that the program, while good satire, is a poor substitute for actual, in-depth news coverage."

the complete video is here.

Robert Greenwald vs. the History Channel

www.stopkennedysmears.com -A petition telling the History Channel that until they stop running politically motivated fiction as historical "fact," you will refuse to watch their programming.

Robert Greenwald: "Joel Surnow, a hard-right activist and former Fox News producer who supported Rick Santorum and is close friends with Rush Limbaugh, is the executive producer of an upcoming mini-series on the Kennedys that is character assassination of the most disgusting kind.

Unfortunately, in its desperate quest for ratings, The History Channel has decided to let fiction pass for historical scholarship. The History Channel has decided to push Surnows sleaze, degrading the accomplishments and trashing the memory of one of our nations most beloved families."

Astroturfing 1a

Media Matters: "How To Fake A Protest: Right-Wing LIBERTARIAN Media + Corporate Lobbyists Pretend To Be Grassroots"

via Irish Shannon Tomato(!?)

Af-Pak, pt 2

photo: Getty images/BBC

Jeremy Hammond, Foreign Policy Journal, "Ex-ISI Chief Says Purpose of New Afghan Intelligence Agency RAMA Is ‘to destabilize Pakistan’"Aug. 12th

Carlotta Gall, New York Times, "Peace Talks with Taliban top issue in Afghan Vote", Aug 17th,
Anne Applebaum,Slate, "It Doesn't Matter Who Wins the Afghan Election" Aug. 18th,
Stephen Walt, Foreign Policy, 'The "safe haven" myth', Aug 18th,
Peter Bergen, Foreign Policy, "How realistic is Walt's Realism?", Aug 19th
Christopher Allbritton, Insurgency Watch, "Why Pakistan's Delaying its Waziristan Push" August 19, 2009
Juan Cole, Salon, "As Afghans Vote, American Support for Afghan War Collapses" Aug 20th,
Helena Cobban, Just World News"Does Afghanistan's election matter? How, exactly?" Aug 21st.
Chris Floyd, "Af-Pak Masquerade", Aug 21st,
CNN:"Taliban cut off fingers of Afghan voters" Aug 22nd.
Christian Science Monitor, "More US troops to Afghanistan? Why Mullen won't answer", Aug 23rd

(and "Af-Pak pt 1" is here.)



Starting with the most recent item and moving backwards, Mark Sappenfield in the Christian Science Monitor writes:

America has never before had a plan – or the resources – to do what must be done. Mullen put it this way: "This is the first time we've really resourced a strategy on both the civilian and military side."
The reason, of course, is Iraq. Almost all the Pentagon's top minds and money went to Baghdad. This was particularly true in the surge, and that helped turn the tide of the war. In Afghanistan, that process truly just began this spring, when President Obama for the first time announced a clear strategy for American forces in Afghanistan.

To do what must be done. Sounds ominous to me, especially since it suggests that "what must be done" is so undeniable, has already been agreed upon, a fait accompli-- and it doesn't sound like the negotiating of peace that the New York Times' Carlotta Gall suggests is primary in the mind of Afghan voters. Politicians in the US don't always listen to what American voters want, but this is never referred to in our press as corruption or in any way an issue of the government's legitimacy, but American politicians and journalists seem very worried that this week's Afghan election be perceived as legit in the eyes of Afghan voters, as well as elsewhere, like across the border in Pakistan.

Was the election legitimate? Who knows? The Taliban actively discouraged people from participating, decrying the whole process as illegitimate. Sociologists study the often illogical factors that people weigh when making their decisions, such as when American liberals weigh a candidate's "electability" versus her stands on issues. I wonder if any voters in Afghanistan, viewing incumbent Karzai as a US puppet, considered their options, then, deciding that the election is a sham anyway, said maybe if they re-elect the candidate the US wants, the soldiers will go home?

Helena Cobban seems to think that as long as the winner is seen as acceptable to the Afghan public, proves "manageable", and the no. 2 candidate doesn't put up too much of a fuss, the US and NATO are unlikely to care very much who wins. I imagine she's right. It also occurs to me that both the Taliban and the Pentagon benefit from low turnout. Since low turnout suggests the result was not legitimate-- good for the Taliban, as well as proving that US forces are needed to stay (for years on end?) because the security situation clearly isn't good-- good for Pentagon appropriations. But that's just silly, right?

Jeremy Hammond talked to Hamid Gul(above), a retired Pakistani general and former head of their intelligence. Gul says that the US, India and Israel are all involved in assisting the TPP(the fundamentalist group fighting the Pakistani government) because one of the purposes of the Af-Pak war is to destabilze Pakistan. Naturally I hope Gul is wrong, but he lays out a compelling case. Hammond also notes that the US government has accused Gul of aiding the Taliban in the past, which he denies.

Both Gul and Chris Floyd discuss Unocal's refusal to ink a deal with Taliban for a pipeline in 2001, and Gul reminds the reader of Taliban leader Mullah Omar's offer to send Bin Laden to a third country, not the US, where he would receive a trial according to Sharia law, which George W. Bush refused.

People in the west, or at least here, often forget this detail.

The problem with accommodating such a face-saving request would have been that Bush Jnr would essentially have conceded that the US way of doing things isn't always the best way.Critics on his right flank, and maybe even on his left, would have become livid that the ragheads were telling us how to do things. All "they" understand is force, American force.

In "Obama's magnificent opportunity", although he doesn't say so directly, Rob Payne suggests that Obama has a real chance to halt America's slide into the post-imperial ditch we've been digging for the past 30 or 40 or so years. Of course Rob seems to be making his point in a roundabout, playful way-- being the wiseacre that he is-- and recognizing the narrowness of Obama's careerist vision for what it is, knows this is just the kind of dream you have when you had too much spicy cheese before you went to bed, or something like that .

Some two years ago Arthur Silber observed:

...in terms of fundamentals, there is no difference at all between Republicans and Democrats in the realm of foreign policy. Both parties, our governing elites, and most bloggers all hold the same unchallengeable axiom: that the United States is and should be the unequaled, supreme power in the world, with the capability of directing events across the globe and intervening wherever and whenever we deem it necessary for our "national interests." As [Christopher] Layne notes, all our prominent national voices are united in their conviction that no other state "entertain the 'hope of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.'" Military power on a scale never before seen in world history is the most certain means of ensuring that goal.[...]

I will be blunt: I submit that, considering these facts and the staggering reach of our global military power, any relatively sane person ought to be aghast that our governing class, together with almost every pundit and blogger, will look at these same facts and say only: "More, please!" But this is the inevitable result for a people who are entirely comfortable with the fact that their nation dominates the world, and of their belief that it does so by right.
[...]
Occasionally, I have referred to the phenomenon of pathology as foreign policy. When one contemplates these facts, it is very hard to conclude that anything other than pathology is involved. Our strategy is indefensible, irrational and immensely destructive, and yet almost no one questions it. But this particular pathology is so inextricably woven into our myths about the United States and about ourselves as Americans, that we believe this is simply "the way things are," and the way things ought to be.

Arthur is rarely accused of having a light touch-- but he doesn't mince words to avoid uncomfortable conclusions.

Although I'm not convinced that Silber is entirely correct about the attitudes of ordinary Americans, ultimately we do give our consent, in terms of our passivity if nothing else. But what else can regular people do? Students who riot will have their loans revoked, workers who protest will be fired. But we're free. The nice man and nice woman on the television tell us this, and they wouldn't be on TV if they didn't know. Supposedly we're also bringing freedom to Afghanistan, even if it appears we're not doing a very good job, otherwise we'd be done freeing them after 7 years and counting. You'd think.

Ann Applebaum, who also writes for the Washington Post, writes in Slate:

The Taliban is sometimes described as an ideological force, sometimes as a loose ethnic coalition, sometimes as a band of mercenaries, men who fight because they don't have anything else to do. But perhaps with this election, we can now start to use a narrower definition: The Taliban are the people who want to blow up polling stations.The threat is also useful in another sense: It reminds us of what we are fighting for—by which I don't mean "democracy" as such. After all, we are not trying to create some kind of Jeffersonian idyll in the rugged heart of Central Asia, but merely an Afghan government that is recognized as legitimate by the majority of Afghans—a government that can therefore prevent the country from turning back into a haven for terrorist training camps. If there were someone acceptable to all factions, we might presumably consider helping the Afghans restore the monarchy. For that matter, if the Afghans were willing to accept an appointed American puppet, we might, I'm guessing, consider that, too, at this point. But there isn't, and they won't.

I'm guessing, if you met Anne Applebaum, she would seem like a nice person. She probably is a nice person, in the interpersonal sphere, just as nasty commenters in cyberspace are probably mostly nice in person, just like the guy from the Christian Science Monitor is probably a nice person, as , I imagine, even General McMullen is, and so forth. Anne Applebaum's Wikipedia bio mentions that she won the Pulitzer prize a few years ago, that that she went to Yale and the LSE, and that she's an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Her Slate byline just says that she also writes for the Post. Maybe they left the other stuff out because of reactive modesty, going on the theory that Anne probably wouldn't want them to brag about her accomplishments, making her seem all stuffy and pompous. On the other hand, maybe it wasn't very cricket of them to leave out her association with the neocon AEI. I'm guessing they felt that was OK because she isn't writing an editorial, but reporting about the election. Or maybe because she's not a real AEI fellow, just an adjunct.

More likely the former, at least in the eyes of the Slate/WaPo folks, which illustrates Arthur Silber's point about how

'we believe this is simply "the way things are," and the way things ought to be.'

Otherwise, how can you make any sense whatsoever of what Anne Applebaum says, that

if the Afghans were willing to accept an appointed American puppet, we might, I'm guessing, consider that, too, at this point. But there isn't, and they won't.

Does she really believe that? She went to Yale and won the Pulitzer, so she's supposed to be smart, right?

Afghan villager: Excuse me, mister American soldier. This one you chose for us, we don't like him.

American General: Yeah, what was I thinking. Sorry about that. OK, I'll kill him.

Afghan villager: No, no, please! No more killing.

American General: What do you mean, no more killing? Are you Taliban, trying to mess with my head? Do I need to send a pilotless drone to buzz your village?

Afghan villager: No, no! He's OK! He's great!

An airstrike here, an airstrike there. Oops, a wedding. Oops, farmers, not terrorists. You can't just keep killing people in a country you've invaded, for years on end, and keep telling them, "don't look at my actions. My intentions! Jeez, what's wrong with you? My own people back home believe I mean nothing but the best for you, so why don't you?"

Anne: "After all, we are not trying to create some kind of Jeffersonian idyll in the rugged heart of Central Asia..."

No, of course not. She's not saying they're a bunch of savages or anything, just that they need a...more rudimentary government, one that

"merely... is recognized as legitimate by the majority of Afghans—a government that can therefore prevent the country from turning back into a haven for terrorist training camps."

I'm guessing however, that Anne, though she may be a wonderful person in many respects, doesn't really care if the Afghans see their government as legitimate or not, just that they don't cause that government terribly much grief and that said government is also well-behaved and kowtows to the US and NATO, possibly handing over the occasional troublemaker to the west for extraordinary rendition to Jordan or Croatia or God knows where.

Maybe I'm a horrible person for thinking that's what Anne is really saying. But if you stop and think about it, apart from rendition overseas, isn't that what American elites expect from Americans as well?

Meanwhile the establishment press marches in lock-step, parroting the safe-havens bit. For my part I fail to see what so-called terrorist training camps do. If the 9-11 attacks are the reason for all this subsequent bloodshed, how are terrorist training camps, whether in Afghanistan or anywhere else, relevant? Didn't all the fateful connecting flights the 9-11 attackers took originate here? Maybe we need to get some special ops to attack various US airports and shut them down, so they never board another terrorist? Ridiculous? Sure, but how is it more ridiculous than what we're doing in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are terrorists because

1.They used to run the country(after being elected)

2.We invaded and deposed them, and

3. They're fighting to reclaim their country?

Don't get me wrong. I don't think the Taliban will create "some kind of Jeffersonian idyll" either, and I am aware of their less than salutary track record with respect to women's rights. But apparently the voters in Afghanistan want peace negotiations, and facile protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, it doesn't look like the US does. I'm guessing, in fact, that when the US does finally leave, it will turn out that the longer we stayed, the more likely that the government and the society left in the detritus of our occupation will be a harsh and fundamentalist one, and the sooner we leave and allow the presently standing government the breathing space and political leeway to negotiate for peace, the more likely a stable and heterogeneous society, "Jeffersonian" or otherwise, will take root. And it will largely be in spite of, and not because we were there.

Chris Floyd quoted the NYT's Carlotta Gall. I also think this is apt:

Abdul Wahid Baghrani, an important tribal leader from Helmand Province who went over to the government in 2005 under its reconciliation program, negotiated the surrender of the Taliban in 2001 with Mr. Karzai. Now he lives in a house in western Kabul but is largely ignored by the government, despite the enormous influence he could exercise.

Three months ago his eldest son, Zia ul-Haq, 32, was killed, along with his wife and driver, when British helicopters swooped in on their car as they were traveling in Helmand. Two Western officials confirmed the shooting but said it was a mistake. The forces were trying to apprehend a high-level Taliban target, they said.

"My son was not an armed Talib, he was a religious Talib," he said. The word Talib means religious student. "From any legal standpoint it is not permitted to fire on a civilian car.

"This is not just about my son," he said. "Every day we are losing hundreds of people, and I care about them as much as I care for my son."

Despite the deaths, he has remained in Kabul and still advocates peace negotiations. He said it was wrong to consider the Taliban leadership, or the leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, as irreconcilable. "It is not the opinion of people who know him and work with him," he said. "Of course it is possible to make peace with the Taliban — they are Afghans," he said. "The reason they are fighting is because they are not getting the opportunity to make peace."

We pay a high price for our delusional, imperial self-image. Of course others pay for it too.



see also,

Ramzy Baroud, "Drones and Democracy in Afghanistan", Aug 24th,

BBC[video link]:"Afghans talk about their daily struggles"

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Af-Pak, pt 1

Peter Bergen, "Winning the Good War: Why Afghanistan is not Obama’s Vietnam"

Rahul Mahajan, Empire Notes, "Weekly Commentary-- the Good War" July 20th,


On several recent occasions Rob has already discussed the situation in Afghanistan;

"Escalating in Afghanistan",Aug 1st

"Under a Darkling Sky: Waging War in Order to Wage More War", Aug 9th

As I've said elsewhere, the mainstream left's failure to take Obama to task for escalating the Af-Pak war is to me the most disgusting aspect(of many) to the left's timidity and fear of rocking the corporate democratic boat the in which party leadership is blissfully sailing, under the supposition that the rest of us at least get a berth in steerage. I doubt ordinary people get even that, except in some isolated instances, but that's a discussion for another day.

As you probably know more and more people are calling it the Af-Pak war, partly because many of the fighters battling US forces in Afghanistan are believed to have bases along the Af-Pak(Pakistan) border, often on both sides, and to be receiving aid from persons in Pakistan-- but also because the US forces have increasingly started to make incursions past that border, and of course when they've killed people in airstrikes, noncombatants usually end up among the dead-- some believe they are the majority, and US airstrikes are no more than collective punishment.

It's also called the Af-Pak war because many experts feel that it is serving to destabilize Pakistan, the world's only predominantly Muslim country with nuclear weapons, and already a place with a tenuous political fabric. I'm really curious about any recent polling regarding America's involvement in Af-Pak mayhem, since the mainstream press seems mostly silent about this, as if people can only have opinions about one big issue at a time, or as if Af-Pak warring isn't in fact a big issue. (To give some credit where it's due, Lara Logan on CBS News had a report on the conflict last night when they noted that US casualties were up substantially, both compared to earlier this spring and summer '08. It would be nice if they also talked about the civilian toll, which would at the very least make people over here question why we're even over there and if they even want us over there, but something is better than nothing.)

I'll admit I haven't followed the Af-Pak conflict particularly closely, certainly not as closely as Rob and some other bloggers have, but I was surprised when I saw this article at Rahul Mahajan's Empire Notes recently:

In discussing Peter Bergen's essay "Winning the Good War" in the Washington Monthly, Mahajan writes,

Most of his facts are accurate and some of the arguments he tries to refute are really silly -- if only I had a dime for every idiot column claiming that Afghanistan has been the graveyard of empires for 2500 years and that it will wreck the United States too.It's also true that poll results show a significant majority of Afghans in support of the presence of U.S. and NATO forces. And that Afghanistan is nothing like Vietnam. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see that Bergen is caught up in the same blindness as say Thomas Friedman in 2005 regarding Iraq -- and untold liberal intellectuals in every counterinsurgency since the beginning of recorded history.

Here's a different reading of some of the same facts. The fact that in a recent ABC poll, 63% of Afghan respondents supported the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan while only 8% supported that of the neo-Taliban is a welcome indication that the 8-year occupation has not yet done irreparable damage -- and indicates an opportunity to move the policy in a very different direction than that of counterinsurgency. That lack of irreparable damage does not mean that the United States has done much good -- indeed, 63% thought the US had done a "fair" or "poor" job and a slight majority has an unfavorable opinion of the US.

Furthermore, 18% favored escalation with 44% opposing, and an overwhelming 77% said the use of air strikes was "unacceptable." Hamid Karzai has also repeatedly gone on record opposing U.S. escalation and favoring attempts at a negotiated settlement.

I don't understand Mahajan's assertion that if only he had a dime for "every idiot column" claiming that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires and will the wreck the US too. Maybe he looks at the recent uptick in the stock market and has concluded that our long-term economic prospects are good, case closed. The "graveyard of empires" truism may be just that, a truism, but that doesn't mean it isn't applicable to the US, as one straw of many on the camel's back, even if it isn't necessarily the definitive straw-- at least not yet.

As far as his assertion that we haven't yet done "irreparable damage", that seems like just one person's opinion, even if it's that of a highly educated fellow(Mahajan is an NYU prof.). Speaking of truisms, the enemy of my enemy might be my friend in an Erroll Flynn movie, but just because the Afghans don't necessarily care for the Taliban doesn't mean they also want the US there. Even if they do, clearly they just want the US to keep the peace, without the airstrikes. But seven years' worth of airstrikes is a lot of civilian killings, and it seems awfully unlikely that ordinary Afghans brush off periodic news of deaths of relatives and neighbors as just some bothersome annoyance. I also would want to know more about the methodology of the ABC poll, and whether the respondents may have felt that they needed to fear reprisals from US forces. I'm not saying they had reason to, but I imagine if you lived for seven years in a war zone you'd be skeptical of somebody purporting to be a pollster and prefer to err on the side of excess caution.

Finally, regarding the Vietnam analogy:

(1) Peter Bergen notes that from 2002 to 2009 US public disapproval of the Afghanistan war has gone from 6 percent to 42 percent(earlier this spring), which suggests that given enough time, Afghanistan could well become Obama's Vietnam.

(2) While Mahajan acknowledges that any US military strategy going forward in Afghanistan is likely to involve substantial reliance on continued airstrikes, he closes-- apparently without irony-- with a variation on the classic excuse people made for the Vietnam debacle- instead of "the US could win, but we lack the will to see it through", it's we could secure a lasting peace, but lack the will to seek a political solution.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Why I mistrust Obamacare, pt 2

A reminder(above). This is from a speech Obama gave in Chicago in 2003. I guess that was then.

See also:

San Francisco Chronicle/AP, July 3rd:
"Under Senate health care plan, either way you pay"



John Dickerson, Slate, Tuesday, July 7, 2009:
"Going Public, Quietly: Why Obama wants to be as vague as possible about health care reform"



Michael Lind, Salon, July 21st: "Healthcare reform: More raw deal than New Deal"
We need universal, citizen-based healthcare. It doesn't look like Obama and Congress are ready to give it to us



Bruce A. Dixon, Black Agenda Report,Weds, 07/22/2009:
"Is the Obama Health Care Plan Really Better Than Nothing?"

(via Skookum)


Lambert at Corrente, 7/21:
'How the Dems and "progressives" are selling you the "bait and switch" of public option'



and finally, Wikepedia's US healthcare reform article, which keeps growing. More later.


cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Torture, secret memos and piracy(continued)

1.Last week in the comments for Rob's discussion of the Somali piracy incident, I noted that earlier this year Avedon Carol in The Sideshow discussed the Somali piracy phenomenon, and suggested that it was viewed very differently by the locals--

here's the quote, from Johann Hari, (from January '09):
http://sideshow.me.uk/sjan09.htm#01112352

Johann Hari : "You are being lied to about pirates: "In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas. Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. [...] At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. [...] This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent 'strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence'."

2. Last week I intended, initially, to write about the recent court ruling in favor of Minnesota's Al Franken(a mere five months after the election!), and the thick-headed participants in the so-called tea party tax protests, discussing the tribalism of the right, while also touching upon the tribalism of the left.

A few months ago I started an essay I never published in which I proposed a unified field theory of the right and the left in American Politics, in which I pictured the graph of the differences between the two as resembling a bowling pin, in which at the top of the pin, the elite left and the right are actually very close to each other in their views, with the richest and most powerful converging at the top of the pin. Then, as we go farther down, in connectedness, general awareness, and power, the body of the pin representing the middle-class starts to widen(appropriately enough, at the point at which the pin is actually struck by the ball), then when we get to the lower blue-collar depths we have another convergence, albeit one that is often obscured by the bar of the automatic pin re-setter. (By the way, did you know the very top of the bowling pin is called the crown? Strangely appropriate, I'd say.)

I'm reminded of this because when I reflect on the rescue of the American captain, the pirates, and the torture memos against the backdrop of the struggle over the Senate seat in Minnesota and the ludicrous tea party rallies, I'm struck by how the the meaningful differences between the left and the right seem to be lessening precisely as the symbolic(and mostly meaningless) differences between the two are becoming more heated and difficult to bridge.

Of course when I say the meaningful differences I'm talking strictly about those among elected democrats and republicans, not about theories of government. It's as if the mainstream US media, and not just Fox News, is conspiring to make people even stupider, as if the powers that be actually want heightened social conflict, and not just an unsuccessful Obama presidency(which of course is pretty ironic if they do want that, insofar as Obama is essentially a latter-day Rockefeller Republican.)

I say this because even though I don't think most Americans are as dim as the "tea-baggers". I suspect if the release of the torture memos was properly explained to people by the major news outlets, a lot more people would realize the degree to which Obama represents a nearly seamless continuation of US foreign policy from the Bush II administration, that his hand was forced by the ACLU, and finally the ridiculousness of the argument that acknowledging torture, as opposed to the torturing itself, hurts the US. To buy that it helps if you believe that people in other countries have just as doggedly naive and blinkered a view of the US government as most Americans do, and I guess large numbers of Americans DO believe that.

Initially, when I meant to discuss just the Minnesota Senate race and the Fox News Tea Parties, my working title was "Al Franken and the Myth of Bipartisanship". I reflected on the so-called Brooks Brothers riot in Florida in November of 2000 when republican activists intimidated a group of poll workers into stopping a recount and had to be extricated from the midst of the preppie rioters by local police. As far as I know, we saw no remotely comparable phenomenon on the democratic side, either in Florida in 2000 or in Minnesota in 2008-2009. Democratic tribalism tends to involve more bourgeois pissiness than threats of violence, even though democrats' same yearning for respectability is part the problem when it comes to the mostly exhausted left's squeamishness about resisting empire, especially now that Our President Jesus has the launch codes.


Whether you want to attribute it to republican tendencies towards authoritarianism or the comparative sheepishness of rank and file democrats, or both, or yet other factors, there are still areas in which the differences between the two parties matter, even if they're fewer than one might like. Of course a lot of that sheepishness comes from rank and file democrats being told to be sheepish by part leaders, as well as by the nice people on television who tell us what to think. One of the things that is rarely remarked upon in this context is the influence that democratic capitulation has not just on voters on the left but so-called independents and even conservative voters: every time a big name democratic politician is seen to agree with criticisms from the right it drives the right rightward, and makes potentially reachable independents less reachable.

OK, to some extent I am tripping myself up with my choice of words:they imply that the democratic party leadership are doing this reluctantly. In fact I no longer think this is the case, and they've actually chosen this path and continue to push faux liberalism rightward, a deliberate choice for at least the past 12 to 14 years. It's tempting to blame Bill "the era of big government is over" Clinton for this, but to recall a cliché, nobody held a gun to John Kerry or Harry Reed, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary, Obama, et al.


Back to the events of last week, and how the simple-minded identities the political leaders and media foist on us make it difficult for people to see them clearly.

(parenthetically, I would urge you to read Arthur Silber's four part series on tribalism(Part I is here.), if you haven't done so already. I don't know precisely how to measure how his arguments have influenced the present discussion, but I don't doubt they have.)

Anyway-- look at these four different things: the trials of Al Franken, the "Tea parties", the rescue of the American captain and the release of the Torture memos. In a way, all four of these events from last week collapse into each other and are about one another, illustrating how prefabricated media-provided identities help us figure out "where to stand" on these as items to fight over rather than as events to understand.

The supposedly liberal New York Times described it as "another setback" for Norm Coleman, when in fact every count and every judicial ruling thus far has gone against him and you don't have to be a democrat or a Franken supporter to see that Coleman never had a case to stay in the race. I say this without any opinion about whether or not Franken will prove to be a good senator and without having read any of his books.

I saw two brief news stories(video, here and here) about the Tea Parties from April 15th. They didn't talk to anyone who wasn't white, and nobody mentioned being out of work or fear of impending job loss, just fear of paying taxes. I note that conservative media darling "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher was at an event in Lansing, Michigan.(Who pays this guy to run around the country? I'm guessing he has an agent.) The story in the Detroit Free Press(here) says the protesters were concerned about high taxes and mounting national debt, but makes no mention of any concern for the fate of auto workers at Chrysler and GM. This suggests to me that not only are they mean, but almost poignantly stupid, as all of Michigan will suffer if one or both of these companies go under.


I'm also guessing none of the tea part protesters complained when George W. Bush decided to squander the budget surplus he inherited from Bill Clinton by slashing taxes on the wealthy and starting two wars. One of the persons in the 2nd video(above, by the UPI) actually said she wanted to see more money spent to fight terrorism and on defense, although it also sounded like she wanted the troops brought home as well.

But there's the rub-- the tea partiers are right to be angered by the bailouts of the major banks, as well as being right to be concerned about a runaway deficit, even if the lightbulbs only come on when the bad, other guys occupy the throne, and their brains are often filled with a lot of other, screwier thoughts as well, like their hatred of Mexicans, and their fondness for creationism and the womb police. Of course the left will in all likelihood give Obama a pass on the Af-Pak war and torture, even among those cleverer lefties who understand the concept of blowback.

That's another way in which the media fails the citizens-- apart from an intuitive understanding some already have, I'm guessing your average tv news viewer has never seen a robust discussion of the concept, one that has to grow increasingly relevant to an empire in its waning days. You could try to explain that to people, and some of them would get it, and would understand why torture matters and how dehumanizing the Somali kidnappers and being indifferent to their deaths is not necessary in order to be glad the captain wasn't killed as well, and to understand why the whole phenomenon of Somali piracy is itself a kind of blowback.


Of course Dubya also got a pass-- on reckless deregulation and spending, because it was defense spending, the kind we can't question, just as nobody on your television-- not the politicians of either stripe, nor the million dollar reporters-- wonder if curbing the empire might help the US get out of the horrible financial shithole we're in. But what do they care, the people at the top of the bowling pin will stay above the sewage the rest of us will soak in.

see also-

: Bernard Chazelle
They've Always Tortured. The Difference Is Now They Write Memos

Nell Lancaster, Torture: It's not about "intelligence gathering"
(Cross-posted at A Tiny Revolution)

BBC: US boycotts UN racism conference

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

ex-Innocents Abroad

from Helena Cobban, earlier today:

He[Avigdor Lieberman, who was recently appointed foreign minister-JV] also told Haaretz's Barak Ravid, "You won't get any 'Israbluff' with me."

He said he considered Israel was still bound by the Road Map provisions from 2003-- but stated very clearly that the Palestinians must fulfill their side of the Road Map before Israel needed to do anything.

Regarding Syria, he told Ravid: "we have already said that we will not agree to withdraw from the Golan Heights. Peace will only be in exchange for peace."

The positions articulated by Lieberman are very familiar-- they are in line not only with his own previous rhetoric but also with the positions articulated and pursued by B. Netanyahu's earlier government in Israel, 1996-99. No-one should be surprised, therefore, that Netanyahu has done nothing so far to disavow Lieberman's most recent statements.

The foreign ministry statements were made at a ceremony in which Lieberman took over power from Tzipi Livni, who as head of Kadima will now be in opposition to the Netanyahu government. Many senior members of Israel's diplomatic corps were there. Some were reported as visibly shaken when they heard the new line they will have to go out to the world to sell.

I have to say it does clarify matters to have Lieberman speaking with such apparent frankness about what Israel's real policy towards it neighbors will be. In one of the news reports--I forget which-- he was quoted as saying that actually his policy will be the same as that followed on the ground by the preceding government, despite its formal adherence to Annapolis. "How many settlements did they dismantle? How many roadblocks?" he asked.

Very good questions.

So now, what he is promising is a change from the policy of "pursue the colonization and control project on the ground while hiding it by participating in all kinds of meaningless negotiations", by ripping off all the camouflage of the 'negotiations'.

"No more 'Israbluff'", indeed

But on TV it's all Obama and the Missus wowing them at the G20 in Europe, the (chintzy) gift of an Ipod to the Queen, and how Obama supposedly took Hu and Sarkozy aside and made them "listen to reason". On the CBS news Bob Simon and Katie Couric described the G20 as world leaders "setting aside their personal differences"(!?!) and coming together, as if serious policy disputes are just a cover for those churlish Europeans and their unwillingness to quit their fussin' n' feudin'. During a speech Obama compared the G20 meeting of 20 nations to the days of FDR and Churchill getting together and hashing things out, suggesting that it was a lot simpler then, which of course it was, if you look back with US-patented pretendo-vision® and Stalin wasn't part of the picture.

All the same, I couldn't help but think that with his odd metaphor Obama stumbled on another, unintentional meaning-- that when Roosevelt and Churchill met it was the meeting of the superpower on the wane with the new, emerging superpower, and that even though Obama strains mightily to persuade people to compare him to FDR, in this case he's playing, well...let's just say you know Hu's playing him.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

They were shining there for you and me

or perhaps, "The Name of the Game" would have been more appropriate. I dunno, I like this one better.

BBC: Sweden approves wiretapping law

Sweden's parliament has approved controversial new laws allowing authorities to spy on cross-border e-mail and telephone traffic.

Glenn Greenwald:
Time Magazine uncritically prints Nancy Pelosi's "justifications" for the FISA "compromise":

The Congressional Democratic leadership explains that sacrificing the Fourth Amendment and the rule of law is necessary to win some more swing seats...

Nicole Belle, at Crooks n' Liars(via IOZ):

"Good God, is this why we elected a Democratic majority in 2006? So they can continue to enable the Bush administration as more and more independent sources have verified the criminality that we’ve claimed correctly all along? "

IOZ-

Yes.

In the above referenced post,Belle also writes:

John[Amato] mentioned our new coalition, Strange Bedfellows, earlier and I can’t reiterate more strongly the need to fight Blue Dogs like Steny Hoyer, so if you can donate, please do so. Think of the message it sends to Congress that we are willing to fight our own if they don’t represent us and our Democratic values the way they should.

I don't know about the details, but I wonder if that's true, because "Act Blue" sounds like an organization whose approach, starting with its very name, may antagonize voters in so-called "Blue-dog" districts, when outreach is needed. (I also think the views of those voters are often stereotyped, and therefore misunderstood, by people in the lefty blogosphere. Not everybody in the hinterlands is unreachable, any more than are all San Fransicans and Bostonians disappointed that Nader isn't running.) Then again that begs the question of whether abandonment of the democratic party altogether makes more sense that yet another attempt to fix it.

Torture, inc and other items

Jonathan Schwarz calls attention to a FAIR fundraiser; I visited, and saw this:
TV’s Low-Cal Campaign Coverage: How 385 stories can tell you next to nothing about whom to vote for"
By Jon Whiten (May/June 2008)

as you may know, FAIR stands for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. I think they shouldn't change their name, but maybe change their acronym to FEAR, as in FairnEss and Accuracy in Reporting, even if that doesn't make a lot of sense. Because maybe then more people would tune in, and give them lots of money as Jon Schwarz advises. Besides, we seem to live in an age in which fear is the key.


Mister Schwarz also has a post by Nell Lancaster of A Lovely Promise, "No Torture. No Exceptions. Just a Few Qualms."

When I saw this the first thing, greedily, that I thought was, "Oh, great. Now Nell Lancaster is going to be a big shot, and won't want to join my new group blog." (more about this later.)
Lancaster criticizes the group she discusses, RejectTorture.org, for making a primarily utilitarian argument against torture, and not discussing the humanitarian aspect. She does this within an otherwise approving context, although she also notes their tangentially humanitarian argument, that torture "betrays our values", and seems to dismiss that as an appeal to American exceptionalism*.

I wonder if the Reject Torture people are right to de-emphasize the humanitarian aspect, not because it isn't valid but because of how aggressive the right-wing noise machine in (seemingly) discrediting arguments against torture, and if as a consequence people are less likely to be reached by such an argument because it's tied in with the conditioned response of liberals and liberalism being self-indulgent exercises in feel-goodism.(I sound like Ned Flanders all of a sudden!)

But it also occurs to me that part of the problem is that Americans don't know too much about the robust street-fighting tradition of liberalism, denatured as it has become by corporate media insistence that Martin Luther King was just a guy who wanted to hug everybody and Malcolm X is just a movie you can order through Netflix. And then there's the tradition, well before the days of Jerry Falwell and the Left Behind series, of American religious figures fighting the good fight for abolition.

(Whistler Blue in ATR's comments mentions the National Religious Coalition Against Torture)


Elsewhere, Rob Payne in
"Indoctrination Nation" says
"We believe ourselves to be more civilized because we have car keys and unmanned drones."

And Chris Floyd has an excellent piece, referenced by Rob,"Outer Darkness: The Gulag Cancer Grows, State Terror Intensifies"


*which inevitably reminds me of Rob Payne, as well as why I wanted to ask her and Rob and 1-3 others to try a group blog I've been mulling over.

NOW can we call her a monster?

I don't have a book of quotations handy, but I imagine somebody both cleverer and famouser than me has already observed that the things left undiscussed in a narrative are usually far more telling than the things spoken about.
Off the top of my head, the best I can do is Gershwin's line from Porgy and Bess:

The things you're liable
to read in the Bible,
They ain't necessarily so.

American politics is arguably like that. For example, I think about the controversy about Samantha Power calling Hillary Clinton a monster back around five or six weeks ago. Even though it was undoubtedly a spontaneous event(as you probably recall, Power tried to qualify it as off-the-record), but the various players in the Obama and Clinton camps and the media immediately knew how to respond to this, as if a script was ready, questioning Obama's judgment in selecting Power as an adviser, insisting Power apologize or resign, Obama dutifully apologizing for her remarks, etc.

I wondered how many people out there in Real-People-Land even paid any attention to the whole dustup. Not terribly many, I'm guessing. I also wondered, why precisely does Power feel Hillary is a monster? Should I automatically assume it's for reason x or y, and weren't other people curious about Power's reason(s)? I realize this is one of those mutually and tacitly agreed upon things, the rolling out of a familiar script by which to deflect the impertinent questions of people like me, as per the nonplussed onlookers at the parade when the naked emperor goes by.

I'm guessing the answer to my question wasn't necessarily that interesting, that it had to do with Clintonian campaign tactics, but that's not really my point. When the Clintons and Obamas and the TV press and the Powers respond in the preordained, scripted ways, it seems designed to avoid the question, because once you have Sam Power's answer, inevitably other persons with other reasons for regarding Hillary as monstrous might gain some scrutiny, and the next thing you know some of those brains out there in Real-People-Land might start ruminating, and that would be-- I don't know, monstrous.

Likewise, this afternoon I watched the nightly news, and it seemed as if people just stopped dying in Iraq and Afghanistan(just like Somalia), nobody objected to China hosting the Olympics, nobody lost their house, nobody was kidnapped in Colombia, and nobody was waterboarded or forced to evade questions about torture. The only thing worth discussing was the Pennsylvania democratic primary, the most important primary, the most important event ever, since Reagan freed the hostages or Grant surrendered to Lee at Appomattox. The world dutifully stood still. (And yes, this kind of sarcastic trope about a single event being made to dominate the news isn't original either-- just hard to resist.)

There was a sound bite of Hillary Clinton telling a crowd that with her 10 point win, she'd pulled ahead in the popular vote viz-a-viz Obama, and a chart graphic saying that Obama was ahead of her by 600,000 votes, but that Hillary was counting the disputed primary votes from Michigan and Florida, which Obama hadn't contested. The Penn primary, and various prognostications about which states Obama could win in the general election versus ones Clinton could win, was of course pretty much the whole news show. (I watched CBS, but I imagine the others were pretty much the same.)

I saw nothing about the ABC interview HRC gave (admittedly on Monday morning) with Chris Cuomo on Good Morning America-- I heard about that through Raw Story. (But if you knew about it, how could you not wonder about its impact?)

“I want the Iranians to know, if I am president, we will attack Iran,”( if they launch nukes against Israel), Clinton said. “I want them to understand that. … We would be able to totally obliterate them. That’s a terrible thing to say, but those people who run Iran need to understand that.”

Clinton said she hoped her stern warning would serve as a deterrent from Iran doing anything “foolish and tragic.”

The quote in the Reuters article is somewhat misleading, suggesting in parentheses that she immediately added "if they attack Israel."(But to be honest, in referencing the video above, it looks as if it's been edited to take some pauses out.)

Again I find myself wondering about the people out there in Real-People-Land. Does the sickness of this register with them? You wonder how many people are even aware and paying attention to this, trying to be good citizens and keeping up with the news while they drown in the soporific horse-race minutiae of who would be more likely to beat McCain in Colorado or Tennessee, eventually giving up on the sucker's game of trying to stay informed.

Some of the articles about this have titles that say Hillary says she will obliterate Iran, while others note the "would be able" and reproduce the quote more accurately. I can't help but be reminded of Kerry's "for then against" position and Bill Clinton's tortuous question about what the word "is" means. If you look at the real-life pacing of her words and her body language, she has unamiguously threatened to attack Iran if she's elected. I think that's a violation of international law, and I'm sure that Mrs it takes-a-village has frightened a lot of ordinary people in Iran, including kids, who are now aware that one of the leading candidates of the opposition party is just as demented as George W. Bush.

In one way, however, the follow up by Cuomo and Clinton was even more disgusting:

Cuomo: Is it difficult to reconcile the logic of a statement like that, with the realities of what it would be like to make that desicion?

HRC: It is. It's very hard. And that's why you hope to deter such behavior.

Boo hoo. Isn't it horrible, when you have to kill thousands of people cause their gummint don't act right, the toll it takes on you? Years ago whenever the Labour party in Israel capitulated to demands from the right that they start yet another offensive against the Palistineans, somebody once referred to the rationalizing speeches offered in the Knesset as "shooting and crying." Only Mrs Clinton seems more gleeful than a good liberal should be about it.

The things you're liable
to read in the Bible,
They ain't necessarily so.

Simon Jenkins:Despite Iraq, America's love affair with war runs deep

Independent(UK): Tough-talking Clinton vows to 'obliterate' Iran if it ever dares to attack US ally Israel

CNN's political blog: "Clinton: Iran would pay a 'very high price' for nuclear attack"

El Baradei interview(from 2007)regarding Iran's nuclear program[video]

Marketwatch: "Has Hillary's tough talk increased pain at the pump?"

Clark(Montana)Chronicle:Ron Paul: Clinton 'doesn't understand the presidency'

Dennis Trainor, Jr: "Hillary: I can do war bigger and better than Bush"

ABC News:"Pennsylvania's Six Week Primary Ends Tonight"
[original title of this ABC article on Tuesday:
Clinton on Iran Attack: 'Obliterate Them']

Talaam Acey: "True Lies"

Apropos of April being national poetry month, here's that Talaam Acey feller.

BBC- re the image of the US

I think it's interesting that the people they talked to in the middle east seem to have a more sanguine, no-BS view of the American presidential candidates than many people do over here. But then again they don't have to deal with Frank Luntz.

a postscript, 16 April: Reuters notes this fairly comprehensive poll by Zogby and the University of Maryland of middle eastern countries, which was released Monday: "Arab world sees U.S. in poor light"

The April fool is you

ok, in a nod towards thoroughness, the above links are here:

"Clinton n' Obama shake their fingers at oil guys"

• Oil executives defend soaring profits
• CNNMoney: Congress lays into oil execs
• CNNMoney: Issue #1: America's Money
• iReport.com: What would you ask Big Oil?

Senators Clinton and Obama care(a lot), and they're angry, and they're not afraid who knows it. When HRC voted for the Iraq war resolution in 2002, undoubtedly it had nothing to do with oil, any more than her subsequent unwillingness to defund the war or commit to ending the war in the next four years. Of course Obama has also demonstrated an unwillingness to defund the war or commit to getting out by 2012, but that's different-- he had the guts to oppose the war as a state legislator. Then, when he was running for the US Senate in 2004 and was invited to speak to the democratic convention that summer, he had a chance to reiterate his stance on the war before a national audience-- but he recognized that might embarrass the headliner, old for-it-before-he-was agin' it John Kerry, and decided not to. (I guess that's different too.)

But with the "off the books" financing of the Iraq debacle-- and the utter unwillingness of Obama and Hillary Clinton to publicly draw the connection between the war,the weakening dollar, and the ever-upward spiraling of dollar-denominated oil prices, I question whether the democrats represent a substantially more sober answer.(yeah, you care-- but who cares?)

I'm sure John McCain cares a lot too, but his nomination is nicely sewn up, so it's not so pressing for him to be so demonstrative this early.

I don't know when I first watched a tv report about congress calling executives in front of them to scold them and beat their chests in righteously populist fashion for the cameras. When I was 11? 12? I used to love watching the news when I was a kid, and although I don't remember for certain, I imagine I took these sorts of dog-and-pony shows at face value when I was a kid and I watched the CBS morning news with Hughes Rudd before going to school.

That was such a long time ago, and although I remember the news in the late 70s being less mediocre, journalistically speaking, than today's focus-grouped soft-edge presentations, I also wonder if that's just the natural consequence of a middle-aged man romanticizing something from his youth at the expense of the present. I DO remember that news about celebrities wasn't a big deal in those days, as well as Rudd's wizened, subtly sarcastic manner. CNN's Jack Cafferty is the closest thing on TV news to a similar sensibility, and he seems like something of an artifact, what with CNN having gone (fairly precipitously) downhill in the past eight to ten years, especially after Lynn Russell left(I often think that maybe she saw the writing on the wall and decided she didn't want to be part of the crappy new order.).


Was the news coverage better? In spite of today's 24 hour news channels, I'm inclined to think so. Does that mean that better news coverage makes for more sensible, skeptical citizens-- in other words, were people smarter back then? Well, they did foist Ronald Reagan on us in November of 1980, the start of our modern age of the unraveling social compact, but the Ayatollah had our hostages, and there was that botched rescue mission, etc. Besides, how were they to know Reaganism would have such far-reaching effects?

When I watch the news, especially when the reporter cherry picks one or two presumptively representative man in the street interviews, I wonder about whether or not people are dumber as a consequence of post-deregulation Potemkin village news. And of course, there's also the pressure of Reagan-style federal tax cuts, shifting spending to the states, which consequently spent less on education. I don't know how you'd objectively factor in the effect of the more extreme religious fundamentalists, who insist that science may not offend when kids come home with tales of degenerate relativism, etc.

(The fact that, in spite of how outrageously the domestic media has sucked up to Junior and protected him from our knowing more about the conduct of the war, the war and the president are still as unpopular as they are, suggests holding out some modest hope that our collective intellect still has some functioning grey matter.)

What I do know is, selective man in the street interviews and stories asking "what would you ask Big Oil" notwithstanding, certain questions wont get asked, on tv, or even in print(and in print online) . How about a story asking

"are the congressmen just covering for their own failures in trotting out the oil executives?" or
"When congress scolds big business on tv, does anything get done as a consequence?"

(The silence is part of the disinformation-- so when you have such thoughts, if you do, you are more likely to dismiss them, maybe out fear that you might be a crank, or seem like one to others.)

Or, "should we spend more on public transportation?"

Or, "do you think we should bring back the 55 mph speed limit to reduce oil consumption?"

Of course, the lawmakers could just do that without putting on a show. I'd favor a 100 kph(@61 mph) national speed limit, and maybe by getting people to learn the conversion they'd start using their noggins too.

Now, I don't believe the lawmakers mean to do any of those things-- they're boring and don't involve an immediate or certain political reward. So I'm inclined to think today's event on capitol hill may have been scheduled for April first by persons with a sense of humor, albeit humor that involves laughing at you and me.


see also, Christian Science Monitor: "With gas costly, drivers finally cut back:
A decline in miles driven is the first since 1980"

[922]

Mike Gravel leaves the democrats

On Wednesday Mike Gravel announced that he was leaving the Democratic party and joining the Libertarian Party, with the intent of securing their nomination for president. While I don't think Gravel is a real libertarian(and that's mostly a good thing), I can easily understand his sentiment when he says "I didn't leave the democratic party, the democratic party left me." (see video, above)

Although I don't entirely agree with his platform, to me the fact that he's nearly 78 is the only shortcoming Gravel presents as a viable candidate. Yes, he's an unpolished debater and very few people take him seriously, but those are separate matters.(I also like his sense of humor, as evinced by the rock-in-the-lake video.)

If you live in a solidly red state like I do, it makes very little sense to vote for the democrat when the GOP will win all your state's electors, but a vote for Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party, or Gravel should he secure the Libertarian nomination, is a meaningful way to vote against the war, and doesn't strike me as any more of a "wasted vote" here than voting for the democratic nominee, especially one who's already hemmed and hawed about withdrawing from Iraq by 2012, as both HRC and Obama have.

Perhaps even less of a "wasted vote," if you think about it. In the past the Libertarian Party has always made the ballot here in Texas in presidential years, but the Greens weren't on the ballot here in 2004. The dynamic is substantially different in a place like, say, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.


Given Gravel's historically important role in defending an open society[video], you'd think the mainstream press would have told you about Gravel's announcement. I didn't see anything about it on TV, but both the Washington Post and New York Times dealt with it using the new 21st century style of burying news on the back pages: by only discussing the news in their blogs.

WaPo, here, and NYT, here.

Matthews vs Kirk Watson re Obama

Whether you see it as unseemly or reasonable, this is the video clip that apparently has the blogosphere all atwitter today. I think it's reasonable, but I'm concerned that McCain's water carriers may not get the same, and will get a pass instead.

An afterthought, 2.21: It occurs to me that when they booked Watson they may have indicated a specific set of topics, then switched up on him on purpose, to make him and Obama look foolish. Do the network news shows do things like that? I don't know.

Methylsulfonylmethane(MSM)

New Hampshire horse race 2: the wall holds

a brief additional quote from Greenwald's essay that I excerpted yesterday:

As Kevin Drum says, there are all kinds of reasons why a rational person might consider the defeat of Hillary Clinton to be a good thing. The fact that it's being caused, in part, by snide, catty sniping over petty matters from reporters who hate the Clintons isn't one of them.

Greenwald's comment above is of course apropo of Obama's somewhat surprising win in the Iowa caucus, but his point is still worth discussing in the context of HRC winning in New Hampshire. Many people in Big Media and the lefty blogosphere have been spinning Senator Clinton's victory as a repudiation of the pollsters, or a repudiation of Obama's messianic affect, or even a repudiation of the people who like to dump on the Clintons. While I imagine all these may have an element of truth to them, I'm a little surprised that I've heard no one say that(see below*) maybe, just maybe, the kindly, well-meaning and mostly caucasian democrats of New Hampshire may have simply freaked out and contemplated the suddenly very real possibility that their party might go to bat against the GOP in November with a black guy.

Apparently this is something we're not allowed to discuss. Not only is racism bad-- and yes, its badness is a good thing-- but suggesting that somebody, or a group of people, are acting according to racially tinged motives is just not done.

We've all agreed not to talk about it, and that's how we know it doesn't exist, and the people who bring it up are a bunch of troublemakers anyway, so we try to ignore them.

Many years ago my friend "Tracy", a nice white girl from the suburbs, told me that her mother said that she shouldn't date outside her race because society will make life harder on her. I imagine her mother was partly right, that her daughter would experience social pressure in some quarters, but this just begs the question of how much power you want to give to people who want you to behave according to their vision of a society where people know their place and "stick with their kind."

Now I won't for a moment claim to have George Bush Junior's ability to look into someone's soul, Russian or otherwise, and assess the contents. So I won't say that I know that New Hampshire's democrats are prejudiced against Obama because of his race, or even his funny name. For one thing, I happen to think there is a wide assortment of reasons to not vote for Obama that have nothing to do with race(or even a funny name), although to my mind I fail to see how they'd subsequently lead you to Hillary's arms-- but that's another post.

However-- just like Tracy's mother, maybe some of New Hampshire's democrats decided that while they don't have a problem with a black guy as the party's standard bearer, maybe other voters who might otherwise consider a democrat for president nevertheless wouldn't go for a black democrat.

("I'M not prejudiced, but I know that a lot of other people are. What?")

I've heard of the South Carolina GOP primary referred to as the "firewall" designed to protect establishment republicans from insurgents and supposed insurgents, such as when Bush beat McCain there in 2000. But nobody talks about Iowa and New Hampshire as firewalls against the same for the democrats, perhaps because democrats are less comfortable discussing these things-- but given Iowa's 92% and New Hampshire's 96% white populations, maybe they are, or at least they're supposed to be. And whatever you think of Obama, maybe it is in fact a testament to Iowa's young people that they weren't white in quite the way the big time party strategists thought they'd be.

Needless to say, political reasoning isn't the same as choosing a lover, or at least it isn't supposed to be. Voting against Obama because you think he'd have a hard time in the general isn't the same thing as shunning your black neighbors, or your black co-workers, or your daughter's boyfriend.

But it's not that different either. If you hold electability as the greatest good beyond practically everything else, you are empowering the troglodyte Big Media types that Greenwald rails against, as well as prejudiced voters, in the same way that Tracy's mother encouraged her to live according to dictates of the most hateful members of her community.


Now, I happen to think that Obama and Hillary Clinton are both unsatisfactory choices, but the idea of voting for or against either one based on (TV news dictated perceptions of)"electability" strikes me as exceptionally cowardly and vacuous, and even a threat to democracy.

Because additionally, you are helping to create today's post-liberal democratic party that can't get anything done besides aligning itself with big business and traditional republican interests, apart from on a few token identity politics issues-- the same post-liberal democratic party that lefty bloggers and the democratic rank-and-file are so fond of decrying.

One of the reasons I've never understood this is because it's precisely the same idiots who hold "electability" up as the greatest good who are the most susceptible to groupthink and to conning themselves into believing that whoever the party chooses for them really is as blitheringly awesome as the pundits and other clever types say, and will vote for whoever they're told to at the end of the day anyway.

They're the same people who in 2004 rejected Howard Dean in favor of the phlegmatic patrician John Kerry, because the media doctored the sound on a poorly-shot video and told them that Dean was Crazy Shouting Guy. Although most democrats were already against the war by then, they sucked it up and told themselves that Kerry's weasley "I voted against it before I voted for it" actually meant something, and that when Kerry saluted the nice safe audience at the democratic convention in the summer of '04, while he steadfastly ran away from the fight with the Swift Boat smearers, that he was somehow "inspirational."

One of the problems with the democrats rejecting Dean in 2004 was they also ran away from the fight. Dean opposed the war from the get-go, without Kerry's rhetorical hem-hawing baggage, so because the dems ran with Kerry they ran with a candidate who wouldn't allow a real debate to occur about the war. I'm not saying that Dean should be regarded as the second coming of Thomas Jefferson or anything like that, but in rejecting Dean democratic voters, at the behest of their leadership and the people on the teevee, effectively took the debate about the war "off the table", just as Nancy Pelosi did with impeachment two years later.

That's the funny thing about obsessing about "electability." Voters don't exactly have a lot of power to start with, but when they give up what little they have because millionaire pundits and news readers tell them they have to, that's how "you get the politicians you deserve" instead of the ones you need. And simply telling pollsters that you care more about the issues doesn't absolve you of the mundane work of sifting through the muck to actually find out about the candidates and issues rather than worrying about whether they "look presidential", have a pricey haircut, a spouse with a tongue-stud or sundry other brain-clutter foisted on you by Chris Matthews and company.

*An update, and an apparently needed clarification:

Others have in fact discussed the possibility that Obama's support melted because of race. I think my argument is somewhat different from the one that Digby cites, wherein Chris Matthews suggests that Americans are too racist to elect a black person president. Some are, clearly, but that's not what I'm saying.

My argument is that over the past few years democratic voters have become conditioned, to be so readily cowed by their hidebound leadership and the pundit class, that if some jerk with a TV show tells them they need to worry about Obama not being electable, or that they don't dare run a real antiwar candidate if they want to win, or what have you... they chicken out and buckle, empowering their opponents, as well as childish pseudo-journalists who aren't necessarily their opponents but clearly don't give a damn about democratic hopes and aspirations.

Chomsky on The Real News regarding Iran

I've discussed IWT news before-- they've since changed their name to "The Real News" and they now have a Youtube channel.

more e-voting follies(perhaps shockingly, from Ohio)

from one of my newsletters:

E-voting predicament: Not-so-secret ballots
By Declan McCullagh, News.com
Published on ZDNet News: Aug 20, 2007 4:00:00 AM

Ohio's method of conducting elections with electronic voting machines appears to have created a true privacy nightmare for state residents: revealing who voted for which candidates.

Two Ohio activists have discovered that e-voting machines made by Election Systems and Software and used across the country produce time-stamped paper trails that permit the reconstruction of an election's results--including allowing voter names to be matched to their actual votes.

Making a secret ballot less secret, of course, could permit vote selling and allow interest groups or family members to exert undue pressure on Ohio residents to vote a certain way. It's an especially pointed concern in Ohio, a traditional swing state in presidential elections that awarded George Bush a narrow victory over John Kerry three years ago.

Ohio law permits anyone to walk into a county election office and obtain two crucial documents: a list of voters in the order they voted, and a time-stamped list of the actual votes. "We simply take the two pieces of paper together, merge them, and then we have which voter voted and in which way," said James Moyer, a longtime privacy activist and poll worker who lives in Columbus, Ohio...

this, of course, is only the beginning of the article. the rest is here...

N.B.: As I said, the article snippet above is from one of my e-mail newletters. This one's from ZD Net News. Incidentally, if you read blogs and have an interest in technology-related policy issues, not just e-voting varmintry but DRM(digital rights management) legislation, and wireless and cable TV related legislation, etc then I strongly recommend you subscribe to one of the tech newsletters, whether with ZD Net, or C-Net, or Wired News. I think PC World has a good newsletter too.

A lot of times, technology related politics that seems to slip through the "MSM" cracks sometimes manages to make it into the tech news sites. Why this happens, naturally I don't have the foggiest. I am reminded, nevertheless, of how in the past Skimble has often commented about how a lot of the perfidity of the business world gets fleshed out better in the business pages of newspapers, even when it also has a lot of relevance in section A.





(and yes, I know "polling" is also a word for voting. it's just that I really, really like tag words.-JV)