Month: January 2009

One of the chief intellectual architects of Republican collapse is now claiming that Barack Obama is the natural heir of Dick Cheney. It’s the usual bait, and I hope Obama supporters don’t take it. Take this nugget of agitprop, when Kristol spins Obama’s acknowledgment that until he is fully versed in what the Bush-Cheney administration actually did, he is at the same disadvantage we all are in knowing how to tackle Cheney’s lawlessness:

“I think that was pretty good advice, which is I should know what’s going on before we make judgments and that we shouldn’t be making judgments on the basis of incomplete information or campaign rhetoric. So I’ve got no quibble with that particular quote,” said Obama. Usually, presidents pretend their campaign positions are more than “campaign rhetoric.” Not Obama.

So according to Kristol, Obama campaigned on a platform of reforming interrogation without actually finding out specifically what "the program" was already doing? Please. Of course, there’s a period of fact-finding and judgment-forming that can only be done once you’re in power and can see what has actually been authorized. That’s all Obama concedes in the interview. He leaves open prosecution for law-breaking. He just – understandably – wants to avoid any immediate partisan brawl.

The pushback from the torture advocates has been intense these past few days.

They know their days are numbered and that a real assessment of what they’ve been up to is imminent. I do not favor prosecuting CIA officials who have not been clearly found to have committed war crimes and who were simply following orders they were told by the relevant authorities was legal. I am in favor of exposing the full truth about the last eight years so that the civilians who authorized the US’s transformation into a torturing country can be held to account. If in that process of discovery, evidence of authorization of war crimes emerges, the Justice Department will have no option but to prosecute. As Dahlia puts it:

It’s not a witch hunt simply because political actors are under investigation. The process of investigating and prosecuting crimes makes up the bricks and mortar of our prosecutorial system. We don’t immunize drug dealers, pickpockets or car thieves because holding them to account is uncomfortable, difficult or divisive. We don’t protest that “it’s all behind us now” when a bank robber is brought to trial.

Remember when Bill Kristol was in favor of the rule of law? That was when it could be used to justify impeaching a president for perjury in a civil suit. Now it’s about prosecuting war crimes, he’s for "moving on." There is no principle for this guy. Just party. And whatever works for now.

Goldberg and Totten respond to talk of Israeli war crimes. Neither, of course, can actually rebut the specific allegations. Jeffrey cricizies the latest critic; Michael claims that the US is just as bad in Afghanistan. To the extent that the US has committed acts as bad as the deaths in a UN school – and that’s undeniable – they have put us on a losing strategy in Afghanistan.

A tidbit of Hua Hsu’s article on the end of white America:

The coming white minority does not mean that the racial hierarchy of American culture will suddenly become inverted, as in 1995’s White Man’s Burden, an awful thought experiment of a film, starring John Travolta, that envisions an upside-down world in which whites are subjugated to their high-class black oppressors. There will be dislocations and resentments along the way, but the demographic shifts of the next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone’s lives, producing a culture that’s more likely than any before to treat its inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group.

Ta-Nehisi’s profile is among the best:

Obama’s Princeton thesis on “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” for example, has been interpreted as a budding Garveyite’s call to arms. Exhibit A seems to be her banal citation of Stokely Carmichael to explain black separatism, and her observation that Princeton made her “more aware of [her] ‘Blackness’ than ever before.”

A hostile reading of those words hinges on a misunderstanding of the complexities of segregation. In fact, for the legions of black people who grew up like Michelle Obama—in a functioning, self-contained African American world—racial identity recedes in the consciousness. You know you’re black, but in much the same way that white people know they are white. Since everyone else around you looks like you, you just take it as the norm, the standard, the unremarkable. Objectively, you know you’re in the minority, but that status hits home only when you walk out into the wider world and realize that, out there, you really are different.

Christine Rosen writing in The New Atlantis:

A University of Michigan study published in the Harvard Educational Review in 2008 reported that the Web is now the primary source of reading material for low-income high school students in Detroit. And yet, the study notes, “only reading novels on a regular basis outside of school is shown to have a positive relationship to academic achievement.”

Despite the attention once paid to the so-called digital divide, the real gap isn’t between households with computers and households without them; it is the one developing between, on the one hand, households where parents teach their children the old-fashioned skill of reading and instill in them a love of books, and, on the other hand, households where parents don’t. As Griswold and her colleagues suggested, it remains an open question whether the new “reading class” will “have both power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital,” or whether the pursuit of reading will become merely “an increasingly arcane hobby.”

Today’s the last day of voting for the Weblog Awards. Thanks so much for the support. As I’ve said, none of this means very much in the grand scheme of things – and the main benefit of the awards is to find new blogs worth reading. But it’s always nice to win – and it helps our ad folks to keep he site afloat in tough times. You can vote for any number of blogs here, and the Dish here. If you already voted more than 24 hours ago, you can vote again. Here’s the link.

Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, wrote in the the Vatican newspaper that "We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill." Saletan fisks this quackery:

Perhaps it’s a sign of the modern age that moralists feel obliged to associate their principles with health effects. Abortion isn’t just murder; it causes breast cancer and psychological damage to women. Contraception isn’t just a violation of God’s will; it’s an environmental toxin. But none of these health claims has turned out to be valid. And in this case, the claim is so perfectly consistent with the history of misogyny—blaming men’s fertility problems on women’s sins and fluids—that it risks not just scientific but moral discredit.

My take on the Panetta nomination – and why it is such a huge step forward inn fighting the war. It is vital, in my view, that both parties are equally invested in conducting and winning the war against Jihadist terror; and essential that a clear public standard of decent prisoner treatment is restored. There is much we will never know about intelligence and interrogation – that is the nature of war. But that necessary secrecy makes public trust all the more necessary. In my judgment, president-elect Obama has done all that anyone could currently ask for in restoring it:

Panetta may soon find out more than the rest of us will ever know about the CIA’s activities in the Bush-Cheney years. And nobody doubts he is a centrist and patriot who genuinely wants to ensure the safety of Americans and has no intention of doing anything but bring the best out of a demoralised espionage service. He may make difficult moral decisions in the years ahead and may fail in a difficult job. But what he has that is indispensable right now is an understanding that humane and decent treatment of all prisoners in war-time is critical to winning the intelligence war and winning it the right way.

With him in place and with Obama in the White House, we now have something very, very precious back in the government of America. It’s called trust and lawfulness.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

Damon Linker lays waste to Ross’s glossing of the theoconservative radicalism of Neuhaus:

Therein lies Neuhaus’ greatest ideological innovation. Rather than maintaining that the religious right should replace liberal politics with some other, religiously grounded form of political association, he insisted that, properly understood, liberal politics is (or once was, or should be–on this he was often unclear) a religiously grounded form of political association. Viewed in this way, the Pope, Neuhaus himself, and their Protestant friends (like Pat Robertson, Chuck Colson, James Dobson, Ralph Reed, and Karl Rove) become America’s true liberals, while all those millions of Americans on the right and left who prefer a more mundane form of politics (and who in nearly every other context are considered liberals of the classical or modern variety) become the antagonists the true liberal tradition.

Ross responds here. There is, of course, an enormous distinction between accepting the religious roots of liberalism (Hobbes and Locke are the ur-texts here) and in asserting that fundamentalist Christianity is the founding doctrine of the American polity – and that it can also command political authority in the modern world. And there is an enormous distinction between respecting the role of faith in forming the public views of citizens who nonetheless make public arguments in secular and moral terms – and the kind of crude Christianism that Neuhaus supported. It is the difference between liberalism and illiberalism. Neuhaus was an illiberal – even to the verge of declaring the alleged iniquities of modern American government as a justification for violent resistance.

Eliza Honey reviews Amy Stein’s book Domesticated:

To Stein, who staged the scenes herself, often transporting large and cumbersome taxidermied animals to specific locations, the images are about a kind of tension, the way that the worlds of the deer, bears, turkeys, and wolves brush up against that of the humans nearby. As she explained to me, the pools, homes, greenhouses, and highways are simply structures in the eyes of the animals. That bear on the cover would probably love to hop into that “lake” for a quick dip.

The artist’s statement is here. More images here.