Month: May 2010

Goldblog and Beinart go another round. Peter defends HRW:

I recognize that Human Rights Watch may make mistakes. But it has done reports on Palestinian human rights abuses and lots of them (many more than on Israel) on human rights issues in the Arab world. Groups like AIPAC, which ONLY criticize Israel's neighbors and never criticize Israel, are in a particularly bad position to charge one-sidedness, it seems to me. And the argument that Human Rights Watch should not investigate Israel because it is a democracy doesn't make sense. I have no problem with them investigating torture in the United States–I'm glad they did. What's more, and this is so obvious that it's often ignored, Israel is NOT a democracy in the West Bank, which is where a lot of the abuses occur.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, while not perfect, are the most reputable human rights organizations in the world precisely because they piss off so many governments of all ideological stripes. They're in that business. People who try to discredit them in what they believe is Israel's interest do two very damaging things. First, they undermine the other work they do. If Human Rights Watch gives an exception to Israel, it will be much more likely to fold on say, Kashmir, another territory occupied by a democracy where there are big human rights problems. Second, as I said in the piece, if you convince Human Rights Watch to stop criticizing Israel you dramatically undermine Israeli human rights organizations that often do parallel work, which, of course, is exactly what Netanyahu wants. His vice-prime minister is on record, after all, as calling Peace Now a "virus."

Will Ferrell (Abe Lincoln), Don Cheadle (Frederick Douglass), and Zooey Deschanel (Mary Todd Lincoln) lip dub a history lesson by someone pretty shitfaced:

Earlier episode here. When do we get our first talk show in which everyone is stoned? What else is the Internet for?

A reader writes:

You wrote, "What I like about Paul – his artless honesty – is unlikely to survive the media churn."  Forgive me for invoking Orwell, but I think you are failing to see what is in front of your nose. What is going unseen by many is that the Maddow interview and Paul's desperate lurches since have exposed him as an evasive, dishonest prevaricator who either doesn't have a coherent philosophy, or wants to obscure the philosophy because he knows articulating and defending that philosophy would make his path to office more difficult. He's "artless" only in the sense of being unprepared and inarticulate, neither of which are virtues.

Crisis, the saying goes, doesn't build character; it reveals it. This revealed a lot about Rand Paul.

Another writes:

Artless honesty?!? That's a great euphemism for ignorance. Or maybe for zealotry. Two things you deplore in Sarah Palin. But you accept them in any American political figure with the last name of Paul.

To compare Paul's clumsy intellectual libertarianism with Palin's proud ignorance seems unfair. Another:

I understand and respect why, at least in theory, you support Rand Paul's candidacy. But despite his libertarian rhetoric and intellectual intrigue, he's still very much at home within the Republican Party. So I have to ask you: Will you condemn Paul the way you condemn others like Sarah Palin who call the president "un-American?"  Because that's precisely what he did, saying, "What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.' I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business."

If you want to champion his economic platform, that's fine. But please don't let him get away with the same kind of shit for which you criticize Palin just because Paul is more of an intellectual. He still succumbs to the same kind of rhetoric that is damning the majority of the Republican Party.

Agreed. And I will. I just felt the pile-on was already pretty thick. And look: all I hope is that no one among those now tarring and feathering Paul at some point expresses disappointment with the way all politicians follow talking points, we never have nuanced or interesting political conversations on cable, we need to elevate the discourse, etc. etc. However flawed, Paul has strayed outside the media and political comfort zone into sincerely held, if complicated and controversial, beliefs. And he has now been pummeled for it.

You get what you ask for in the end.

Joel Wing updates us:

The next Iraqi government is…going to look a lot like the old one. After a long drawn out process the two main Shiite lists, State of Law and the Iraqi National Alliance merged together in May 2010. That was done to keep them in the leadership of the new government, and prevent Allawi from becoming prime minister again. They are expected to join with the Kurds, and eventually Allawi’s Iraqi National Movement to form another national unity government, made up of almost the exact same groups that took power in 2005. The Shiite parties will still hold onto the premiership, a Kurd will end up president, and the Sunnis and secular nationalists will be playing third fiddle.

What do you do when as a new government, you inherit a security service with a plausible record of torture and abuse? Do you pull an Obama and whistle onward? Or do you do the right thing?

A judge will investigate claims that British intelligence agencies were complicit in the torture of terror suspects, William Hague, the foreign secretary, said tonight. The move was welcomed by civil liberties campaigners and may put pressure on the Labour leadership candidate and former foreign secretary David Miliband, who was accused by Hague, while in opposition, of having something to hide. Miliband has repeatedly rejected the accusation and broadly indicated that he or his officials may have been misled by foreign intelligence agencies about the degree of British complicity…

Hague will come under pressure to ensure the inquiry is public and comprehensive. He first called last year for an independent judicial inquiry into claims that British officials had colluded in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, the former Guantánamo detainee and a UK resident. Mohamed claimed that he was tortured by US forces in Pakistan and Morocco, and that MI5 fed the CIA questions that were used by US forces.

Yes, a conservative against torture. Because he is a conservative and believes in the long tradition of decency in Anglo-Saxon treatment of prisoners in wartime. Scott Horton comments here.

A reader writes:

A few years ago, I went on a little weekend trip with my Dad, his wife and my husband. My dad's wife had arranged for us to get lavish accommodation at a beautiful luxury resort, because she is a conference organiser. The only caveat was that for the duration of the weekend I had to pretend that I was a client of hers. In practice that meant that I had to pretend not to be related to my Dad. (I'm not proud of this, by the way…)
 
For the first couple of hours, it was fun. We got a tour of the facilities and I got to play the part of temperamental client. But amazingly soon it started to get really, really hard. I had to call my Dad by his first name, which I kept forgetting to do. So I wound up hardly speaking to him at all, and whenever I did I would blush. When I was asked any questions about my life, I would pause for ages before answering – thinking "if I say this, will it give me away?" Not being able to be open about such a basic family relationship made it impossible for me to ever relax, and the tension kept building hour by hour so that despite the 3 star meals, spa treatments and wall to wall luxury, I hated every minute of it and couldn't wait to leave. 

I can't imagine doing that every day. Yeesh.

It did already. More comment on it this weekend, but the piece is really another nasty attack on former colleagues, this time Peter Beinart and James Wood. Notice a pattern here?

Greenwald praises the new government:

Can anyone even imagine for one second Barack Obama standing up and saying:  "My administration believes that the American state has become too authoritarian"?  Even if he were willing to utter those words — and he wouldn't be — his doing so would trigger a massive laughing fit in light of his actions.  While Nick Clegg says this week that his civil liberties commitments are "so important that he was taking personal responsibility for implementing them, and promised that the new government would not be 'insecure about relinquishing control'," our Government moves inexorably in the other direction. 

I don't want to idealize what's taking place in Britain:  it still remains to be seen how serious these commitments are and how genuine of an investigation into the torture regime will be conducted.  But clearly, what was once a fringe position there has now become the mainstream platform of their new Government:  that it's imperative to ensure that their country is not "a place where our children grow up so used to their liberty being infringed that they accept it without question." 

My similar thoughts here.