Search Results for: Fierce Urgency Of Whenever

I lived through eight years of the Clintons and then eight years of Bush. Through it all, gay people were treated at the federal level like embarrassments or impediments. With Clinton, we were the means to raise money. With Bush, we were the means to leverage votes by exploiting bigotry. Obama seemed in the campaign to promise something else. I listened to him in the early days and found him sincere about ending discrimination by the government; and I came to respect, while vehemently disagreeing with, his position on federal civil unions. He seemed genuinely distressed that gay servicemembers should be treated with contempt and persecution by their commander-in-chief, that gay couples should have to fight for basic human treatment – like entry to hospital rooms, or being able to stay in the same apartment as their late spouse, or forced into cruel separation by immigration laws that treat gay couples as threats, rather than assets, or if you had the temerity to survive HIV, being treated at the US border the way Jesse Helms always wanted people with HIV to be treated – like perverts and pariahs and threats.

It is quite something to have a government stamp in your passport, as I do, that will tell any immigration or police officer with a connection to a government database that I have HIV, that I am therefore a threat and can be arrested and detained and deported at the border if necessary. I'm a big boy with money and a robust self-esteem as an HIV-positive survivor, but I think of thousands of others far less powerful and wealthy than I am who are afraid to enter or leave the US because their HIV status renders them criminals. I think of how the US is the only developed country – and one of only a handful of undeveloped countries – that still tells the world that people with HIV are dangerous pariahs, who need policing at borders and deporting if discovered. And yet this is the current policy of the Obama administration on global HIV and AIDS.

And it's tedious to whine and jump up and down and complain when a wand isn't waved and everything is made right by the first candidate who really seemed to get it, who was even able to address black church congregations about homophobia. And obviously patience is necessary; and legislative work takes time; and there are real challenges on so many fronts, especially the economy and the legacy of war crimes and the permanently restive Iraqi and Afghan regions we are constantly in the process of liberating from themselves. No one expects a president to be grappling with all this early on, or, God help us, actually leading on civil rights. That's our job, not his.

But I have a sickeningly familiar feeling in my stomach, and the feeling deepens with every interaction with the Obama team on these issues. They want them to go away. They want us to go away.

A reader writes:

All my problems with Obama's handling of the financial crisis, the details about Gitmo, footdragging on DADT, etc. or any other details since he took office fade away when I read the speech. He is absolutely the right man for the job.

There is no other candidate that ran for President that could deliver this speech. They couldn't write it, they couldn't deliver it with any sort of credibility, and in all likelihood wouldn't even want to try.

Another writes:

I think it was yet another very good speech but one at some times frustrating for its ostensible audience (I've lived in Cairo, I thought the speech very good, but also one that served at times as introduction and promise to an audience that is justifiably already frustrated. Once again he asks for patience. The small 'c' conservatism is beginning to wear on me: as you put it, the fierce urgency of whenever.

But, I begin to once again accept, the fierce urgency of slowly persuading others that we should act when we can actually get things done. That too takes courage, and discipline. The speech was very intelligent, very well directed, and will have an impact, IF followed by action. I just don't know how much time he has to follow through before the patience wears out. He's probably extended it with this speech, but the Arab world is very young, and in this case he may have pitched the speech too old. Worked for me, but the average age on the street is about half yours and mine.)

Marc reports on Obama's LGBT priorities. Obama's view on protecting gay servicemembers from harrassment and random firing is best summed up by the phrase "the fierce urgency of whenever":

The preferred route, I am told, is to build consensus. Obama would appoint a panel to study the issue and then wait until after the 2010 elections when there would (could) be more Democratic Senators.

I wonder how Obama would have felt if Truman had followed the same path of cowardice and convenience in 1948, when racial integration was far more contentious in the military than gay integration is today. Or whether he would have applauded if the NAACP had decided that inter-racial marriage was too big a step for them in 1967 and they'd be content with calling it a "civil union." On the matter of civil rights in his own time, alas, the first black president has so far demonstrated the courage of a Clinton.

Ross sharpens his point:

Fallows makes the point, correctly, that most liberals haven’t suddenly fallen in love with the anti-terrorism measures — wiretapping and Guantanamo, drone attacks and assassinations — that Barack Obama has either accepted or expanded. (“I don’t know of any cases of Democrats who complained about these abuses before and now positively defend them as good parts of Obama’s policy,” he writes, “as opposed to inherited disasters he has not gone far enough to undo and eliminate.”) But what they’ve done instead — which many honorable exceptions, obviously — is downgraded the importance of those issues, in much the same way that conservatives downgraded the importance of being against “big government” when a big-government Republican occupied the Oval Office.

It wasn’t that most right-wingers explicitly changed their opinions on the wisdom of, say, expanding Medicare just because George W. Bush was championing a new prescription drug benefit: Conservative journals still editorialized against Medicare Part D, and conservative activists stored away the issue as an example of why Bush fell short of the Reaganite ideal. But if you followed the national political conversation from 2000 through roughly 2006, it was clear that most Republican partisans learned to live with spending and deficits that would have inspired, well, Tea Party-style activism if they had been the work of a Democratic administration. And the same thing has happened with many, many Democrats today: They aren’t happy, exactly, that Obama has expanded drone attacks (which are arguably more morally troubling than many “enhanced interrogation” procedures) along the AfPak frontier, but they seem to have downgraded these kind of policies from “grave threat to the very foundation of the republic” to “unfortunate failure that we have to learn to live with, because the Republicans are worse.”

On the last point, I don't believe drone attacks are morally more troubling than torture (if Ross reads his catechism, he'll come to the same conclusion) – and dismayed that Ross would use the Orwellian term, "enhanced interrogation" to justify what the church would describe as an absolute evil. The acquiescence of a movement premised in indivual liberty to the right of the executive to torture anyone he wants is of a different magnitude of betrayal and cynicism than anything we have seen on the left with respect to Obama and the war in Afghanistan (which, obviously, he promised in the campaign to wage aggressively).

Even so, this blog, for example, has clearly opposed the ramping up of the war in Af-Pak, and raised questions about the morality of drone attacks. And, frankly, the reaction of the left-wing blogosphere to Obama's centrism has been highly critical – light years more impressive than the supine silence of the intellectual right as Bush eviscerated every principle conservatives were supposed to uphold. Ah, yes, as Ross says, they "stored away" the criticism until later. Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know about the Washington right's utter lack of intellectual or moral integrity?

Ask yourself: what was the equivalent of the Huffington Post under Bush? Who served the equivalent role of, say, Glenn Greenwald in lacerating the president's policies?

Like most intelligent human beings, the more I look at Waxman-Markey the more dismayed I am. If you thought Obama could actually stop lobbyists writing legislation, you missed the audacity of whatever gets past Pelosi and Reid. I take Gerson’s view that it’s a start. But after so much procrastination, we’re really back to the … Continue reading Maybe The Feds Aren’t So Useless After All

"I have learned many lessons in the ten years since I first raised my right hand at the United States Military Academy at West Point and committed to fighting for my country. The lessons of courage, integrity, honesty and selfless service are some of the most important. At West Point, I recited the Cadet Prayer … Continue reading Quote For The Day