Month: July 2008

David Brody comments:

I think the ad is EXTREMELY strong. It stays away from public policy and really focuses in his personal commitment to Christ. That is a type of message that Evangelicals will want to hear.

The flip side here is that another group may start running radio spots on Christian radio detailing Obama’s liberal positions on issues which may conflict with some Evangelicals. But look, you have to give this group credit for believing that they have a faithful message with Obama and they are not shy about promoting it. Plus, you won’t find any John McCain radio spots on Christian radio right now.

Man, how the tables have turned.

According to Hewitt, Obama’s general election campaign has been filled with "lurches left." Heh.

Obama national security advisor Richard Danzig wants to keep Bob Gates as Secretary of Defense, an idea the Dish has long favored. 

A video. It’s torture. Always was. He now has nightmares. It last a few seconds. His account here. Money quote:

When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

No-one is saying that George W. Bush is the moral equivalent of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. What we are saying is that torture is torture is torture. Hitchens’ distinction between torture and "actual torture" is not one of kind but of degree, with degree being measured in levels of sadism. The point is that torture is always evil, whatever its motives, that it leads to false information, whoever implements it, that it is illegal, in America and by Americans, and no one in a constitutional republic has the right to violate the law indefinitely with impunity. There is nothing "diseased" or "lame" about this position.

Kos has refused to donate to Obama’s campaign because of Obama’s recent actions:

…there is a line between "moving to the center" and stabbing your allies in the back out of fear of being criticized. And, of late, he’s been doing a lot of unnecessary stabbing, betraying his claims of being a new kind of politician. Not that I ever bought it, but Obama is now clearly not looking much different than every other Democratic politician who has ever turned his or her back on the base in order to prove centrist bona fides. That’s not an indictment, just an observation…Ultimately, he’s currently saying that he doesn’t need people like me to win this thing, and he’s right. He doesn’t. If they’ve got polling or whatnot that says that this is his best path to victory, so much the better. I want him to win big. But when the Obama campaign makes those calculations, they have to realize that they’re going to necessarily lose some intensity of support. It’s not all upside. And for me, that is reflected in a lack of interest in making that contribution.

Did Kos really want Obama to run as the MoveOn candidate? He never has been.

Swift Creek Reservoir, Washington, 10.11 am.

Pete Wehner is offended that his view that his relationship should be worth more than mine under the law because he’s heterosexual can be described as "discriminatory." How can it not be discriminatory? You may want to describe your view as merely wanting "to preserve the traditional meaning of marriage," but when that preservation is entirely limited to keeping gays out, and you want the law to enforce such a distinction, then it is simply a fact that discrimination is your policy. You think it’s good discrimination, but it’s still discrimination unrelated to any civil marital responsibility a gay couple is prepared to fulfill.

This remains true however such a policy is maintained or arrived at – by courts or legislatures or, as is usually the case in the US, some combination thereof. What neither Wehner nor Obama have fully grappled with is that there are really only two coherent positions: civil equality or civil discrimination. Obama wants to end discrimination but not embrace equality; Wehner wants discrimination but not the moral taint of being a bigot. These straddling positions are not unusual in the midst of social change. But we have reached a point at which the useful fictions on which they rest are crumbling.

Bush tries out the terrorist fist-jab:

A conservative reader writes:

Note Obama’s recent embrace of Israel’s attack on Syria’s nuclear facility (an instance of pure Bush preemption doctrine); and his strong insinuation that he might do the same to Iran. Note his support for the FISA reform bill that will pass the Senate on July 8: Although he criticizes immunity, he supports the warrantless surveillance mechanism that is the essence both of the new bill and of the president’s old supersecret Terrorist Surveillance Program, which this bill would prospectively and perhaps permanently legitimize. (Incidentally, if the TSP was unconstitutional as Obama once argued, the procedure cannot be saved by legislation: Feingold is right about that). 

Note also Obama’s promise to Iraq’s foreign minister not to do anything that would jeopardize current gains or Iraqi security;

taken together with his commitment to withdrawing as fast as such circumstances permit, there is now no practical difference between Obama’s prospective Iraq policy and the Petraeus plan embraced by the President. In essence, there is now little practical difference between the candidates on national security issues — but that still leaves a lot of room to create the appearance of difference in the arena of rhetoric and political fantasy.

Another way of looking at it, of course, is that Obama is simply responding to events on the ground, has never been a pacifist or non-interventionist, and has to operate within the empirical boundaries of the legacy he’s responding to. In office, the kind of pragmatism Obama represents will chart a gradual, not radical, course away from the current impasse. That’s why I’m increasingly interested in how Obama describes the ultimate goals of his Iraq strategy. There is a real difference between an attempt to retain control over an Arab Muslim state in the Middle East, and finding a way to leave it without fomenting a hotter stage in its civil war.

Go to Memeorandum and check out the blogs commenting on the NYT exclusive on the undisputed fact that the Bush administration knowingly used Communist torture techniques against prisoners in wartime. You will find no right-of-center blogs commenting. It’s an astonishing story – especially for any anti-Communist conservative who fought the good fight during the Cold War. But they won’t mention it. I guess when a Republican administration copies communists, conservative writers need to copy Stalinists.