Nige suggests:
I must draw your attention to the fact that today is not only International Talk Like a Pirate Day (Why are we talking like pirates? Because we aaar), but also the 139th birthday of Ben Turpin. They don’t make entertainers like that these days (which is probably just as well)…
McCain smacks Biden for his taxes are "patriotic" remark. Notice the subtle conflation of past votes with Obama’s actual economic plan where he pledges to cut middle class taxes. Not a direct lie, but a direct attempt to mislead and distort:
Larison has a sharp post on McCain’s political style:
Contrary to the conventional pundit interpretation that McCain has “sold his soul” and abandoned his once-honorable former self, the thing to understand about McCain’s lies in this campaign is that he invests these misrepresentations with his utter contempt for his opponents. From McCain’s perspective, this infusion of contempt seems to transform shoddy, baseless attacks that disgrace him into indictments of the other politicians (e.g., Romney wants to surrender in Iraq, Obama would rather lose a war than lose an election).
If McCain thinks he is always honorable, resistance to him and his ideas must ultimately be villainous and vicious, and we have seen him deploy his perverse, solipsistic ends-justify-the-means concept of honor against Romney and now against Obama. McCain’s admirers have largely missed this either because they happened to agree with McCain on policy or because they have mistaken his language of honor and principle to refer to the meanings that they attach to these terms.
Just read this paragraph:
But [Bush] alluded also to some of the measures he had undertaken, including "listening in on the enemy" and "asking hardened killers about their plans." The CIA has already told us that interrogation of high-value terrorists such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed yielded more valuable intelligence than any other source. In talking about these measures, the president mentioned neither this testimony as to their efficacy nor the campaign of vilification against him that they occasioned. More equanimity still.
Equanimity as human beings are routinely tortured by his order. That’s the leadership Krauthammer admires.
Notice what Charles cannot say: that torture is what Bush (bizarrely) believed kept us safe. In fact, Krauthammer even dials back his own previous defense of torture and support for a US torture squad. He even dials back from "enhanced interrogation," the usual eupehmism many neocons use to defend their support for Gestapo methods once used in Europe. No the absurd euphemism for violating the Geneva Conventions must now be phrased merely as
"asking hardened killers about their plans."
If all the president had ever done was ask hardened killers about their plans, there would be no debate and no controversy. What Bush did in plain English was torture terror suspects, many of whom had no solid evidence of any sort against them.
Well we now know what Krauthammer believes the role of a journalist is: speaking power to truth. And we know what he believes the role of a democratic leader is: showing equanimity as he enables war crimes.
Obama goes after McCain’s economic advisers:
While McCain does the same to Obama:
Steven Landsburg looks over McCain’s economic policies and mostly likes what he sees. He also criticizes Obama:
Like Bush (only far more so), Obama is fine with tariffs and subsidies. Like Bush, he wants to send jackbooted thugs into every meatpacking plant in America to rid the American workplace of anyone who happens to have been born on the wrong side of an imaginary line.
Like Bush, he wants a more progressive tax code. (It is one of the great myths of 21st century that the Bush tax cuts made the tax code less progressive; the opposite is true. If you are in the bottom 38% of taxpayers, you now pay zero income tax—and therefore have an incentive to support any spending bill that comes down the pike.) Like Bush, he wants more regulation, not less.
They know – as we all know – that if McCain gets a chance to demonize an otherwise perfectly innocent figure in order to demonstrate his own unique integrity, he will.
Karen Tumulty accuses McCain of playing the race card with this new ad:
This is hardly subtle: Sinister images of two black men, followed by one of a vulnerable-looking elderly white woman.
For once, I agree with Goldfarb.
After an admirable 1999 Supreme Court attempt to stop it, the Israeli intelligentsia moves toward the Bush-Cheney model of torture for terror suspects. On this issue, Israel is a saint compared with its neighbors in the region, of course. But when you see more than one democracy jettisoning a core foundation for a free and moral society, you realize how far we’ve come, and how strong an influence the most powerful torture-nation, America, now has. When the country that led the global campaign against torture is now in the vanguard of legitimizing it, it is unsurprising that global standards of human rights collapse.
What amazing success Osama bin Laden has had in destroying the integrity, freedom and morality of the West. It is his greatest victory – and he could not have done it without Cheney.
Joe Klein defends Biden for saying this:
The truth of the matter is that we are in trouble. And the people who do not need a new tax cut should be willing, as patriotic Americans, to understand the way to get this economy back up on their feet is to give middle class taxpayers a break. We take the tax cut they’re getting and we give it to the middle class.
Ramesh Ponnuru counters:
The invocation of patriotism does no analytical work here. You could just as well say "good people should support tax increases." You would merely be dumbing down the debate in a way liberals usually find objectionable.
I’ve long been a conservative opponent of progressive taxation in principle.
But what Obama and Biden are saying is that we are in an emergency and the collapse of middle-class security may make a pragmatic violation of such a principle defensible. I have to say I’m open to that idea – as a pragmatic move. No conservative should be indifferent to the collapse of the middle class. No stable constitutional democracy survives without one.
The mark of conservatism, to my mind, is not an absolute adherence to eternal principles, but a grasp of both the principles learned from history and experience and an openness to the moments when they may need to be pragmatically and temporarily suspended. I’m not convinced we’re there yet. But I’m much more open to the idea than I was a year ago.
The Dish 