Month: April 2009

Greenwald responds to my post:

Andrew Sullivan says that Obama, by not prosecuting Bush officials, is playing “a long game” which will eventually result in accountability for the war criminals, whereby Obama “hangs back a little, allows the evidence to slowly filter out, releases memos that help prove to Americans that what was done was unequivocally torture and indisputably illegal.” 

It’s going to be quite some time before one can definitively prove or disprove that theory, but if, on Thursday, Obama does anything other than release the three OLC torture memos more or less in fully unredacted form, that will be rather compelling evidence negating Sullivan’s speculation.  Conversely, as I said earlier this week, if those memos are released essentially in full over the vehement objections of key intelligence officials, Obama will deserve some substantial credit for doing that.

Agreed on both counts. We’ll see, won’t we?

Tony Woodlief remembers Columbine:

There’s little left to say about evil, in a secularized culture with a Christianesque patina, once the tired whipping boys of culture and video games and bullying are laid aside. They weren’t gamers? Weren’t bullied? Weren’t molested or obsessed or wrongly medicated? Well then. Could have happened to anyone.

Matt Taibbi tackles Glenn Beck:

It requires serious mental gymnastics to describe the Obama adminstration — particularly the Obama administration of recent weeks, which has given away billions to Wall Street and bent over backwards to avoid nationalization and pursue a policy that  preserves the private for-profit status of the bailed-out banks — as a militaristic dictatorship of anti-wealth, anti-private property forces. You have to somehow explain the Geithner/Paulson decisions to hand over trillions of taxpayer dollars to the rich bankers as the formal policy expression of progressive rage against the rich. Not easy.

Effect Measure looks at the latest CDC health care numbers:

The simple truth is that one of the major reasons we have such a lousy health care system and receive such bad value for our money in the US is that we placed health care financing into the hands of the same folks who helped make our economic system such a disaster: private insurance companies, who are little more than disguised investment banks with the added incentive not to pay back their depositors (the premium payers).

We don't need health care reform with a public option. We need one with public financing by default, perhaps with a private option for those who wish to and can pay extra for it.

The Obama administration is considering letting Iran continue to enrich uranium during negotiations about its nuclear program. Joe Klein could live with a nuclear Iran:

The question is, how dire a threat do you think this is? The Israelis, and some of their American right-wing allies, believe it is mortal. I don't. I think it is a consequence of Iranian pride and a rational desire for deterrence. As long as the Israelis and Pakistanis have the bomb, the Iranians will want one. After all, no sane mullah–and they have proven themselves to be quite sane, if often noxious, when it comes to foreign policy–could have watched the events of the last decade and not drawn the conclusion that having a bomb enhances Iran's national security. The other two members of the "Axis of Evil" offer a dramatic narrative: North Korea developed a bomb and hasn't been attacked; Saddam Hussein didn't, and he is gone.

Crowley also reacts.

Matt Steinglass argues that conservative disdain for cosmopolitan elites is global.

"Susan is a reminder that it's time we all looked a little deeper. She has lived an obscure but important life. She has been a companionable and caring daughter. It's people like her who are the unseen glue in society; the ones who day in and day out put themselves last. They make this country civilised and they deserve acknowledgement and respect. Susan has been forgiven her looks and been given respect because of her talent. She should always have received it because of the calibre of her character," – Colette Douglas Home.

At several points in the last few years, as I gamely tried to convince conservatives that they should be concerned about the scale and scope of the Bush-Cheney surveillance state, the torture program, the claimed presidential right to seize, detain and torture anyone deemed an "enemy combatant", the avoidance of the FISA law, the suspension of habeas corpus, I was ridiculed as an hysteric. When forced to defend basic civil liberties against a presidency claiming unprecedented war powers within the boundaries of the US and potentially against American citizens, I found only one argument got through. What if Hillary Clinton got this kind of power? And the pathological partisanship of the right briefly faltered for just a little before the full-bore Bush-backing denialism kicked back in.

I am reminded of this today by the fooferaw on the bloggy right about a DHS study of potential far right domestic terrorism that also includes other completely legitimate forms of protest and dissent on the far right. I understand the need to keep an eye on potential violence after Oklahoma City and the rhetoric now out there. But I share the general unease about this kind of surveillance. Sadly, this belated concern on the right is the problem with a polity as deeply polarized as ours. Greenwald sums it up:

When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you. If you create a massive and wildly empowered domestic surveillance apparatus, it's going to monitor and investigate domestic political activity. That's its nature.

But, hey. No hard feelings. Glad to have you back on the side of liberty.

One small question, though: Where the fuck have you been these past seven years?

More sanity from the right: Adler, Kmiec and Reynolds all support Obama's nominee to head the OLC.