Month: September 2010

"Essentially China paid for the [Iraq] war, and our children and grandchildren are on the hook to pay it back," – Tom Ricks.

Copyranter has a conniption:

Dying polar bear travels thousands of miles to thank man for buying an electric Nissan. What an absolutely outrageously manipulative insensitive hubristic piece of Green advertising bullshit. From a fucking car company! A car company who's (non-electric) cars are helping to destroy the bear's ice pack!

Gerald still wants one.

Earlier this week, Weigel suggested that the press ignore Pastor Terry Jones' Quran burning stunt. Justin Elliott explains why this wasn't possible:

[O]ne has to understand the context in which Petraeus decided to weigh in: At that time, the Quran burning had already been treated as a major story in the media in the Muslim world for several weeks. In other words, since at least late July, when it started to get attention in some Muslim-majority countries, the story has been doing untold damage to America's reputation.

Adam Serwer tries to strike an optimistic note:

While the Obama administration's embrace of the Imperial Presidency in terms of actual policy has been near total, there are important legal technicalities that leave the whole construction vulnerable. Namely, that the Obama administration has said that these powers stem from Congress, they're not inherent to the executive branch. They come from Congress passing legislation like the Authorization to Use Military Force. 

That seems like a pointless distinction at the moment. But I don't think it will be ultimately. Impunity for lawlessness in matters of national security won't end through popular means, because scaring people is easy and policies that project "toughness" against a mysterious and frightening ethnic other are politically effective. But eventually the executive branch will do something to infringe on the priorities or prerogatives of one of the other co-equal branches in a manner that provokes a confrontation.

I think that's fair. Panetta is not Addington. The Straussian worship of the dictator concealed within democracy is not part of Obama's mindset. And there is obviously a pragmatic defense of not launching war crime investigations at a time when the administration is already beset with overwhelming problems at home and abroad. Torture, moreover, is no more.

And yet. Aggressively trying to prevent torture victims from having their day in court merely using unclassified evidence is active complicity in the war crimes of the past. And such complicity is itself a war crime. Either we live under the rule of law and the Geneva Conventions, or we don't. And when Obama says we don't – as he unmistakably is – the precedent he is setting all but ensures that torture will come again, that there will never be consequences for it, and that the national security state can cloak itself in such a way that the citizenry has no way of penetrating its power. Bush and Cheney remain the real culprits here; but watching Obama essentially surrendering to their trap is a betrayal of a core rationale for his candidacy.

The institution of torture as a legitimate government tool was a deeper attack on the America idea than 9/11. The legitimation of it by a successor president compounds this in a way that is now, one fears, irreversible. We have tested the rule of law in this country and it has failed.

With great courage and clarity, the Obamaites could have cut this Gordian knot; instead they tightened it. And torturers across the world – far, far worse than Bush or Cheney – are now smiling. See? They will say. They got America to endorse their methods. They even got Obama's America to protect torturers. And so the light of human freedom that once shone from here across the globe and penetrated even the darkest cell of the worst tyranny has been close to snuffed out. Some dissident somewhere in the world now knows that there is no place on earth where this cannot happen. Some victim now understands that even America can do this and will make sure it gets away with it.

How do you put a pragmatic price on that?

And a deeply serious one:

[T]his past Tuesday, the FBI arrested 26-year old Christian radical Justin Carl Moose in Concord, NC for “providing information to create explosives” to “blow up a North Carolina abortion clinic.” Through his conversations with an FBI informant and his Facebook page, Moose expressed virulent “anger at abortion doctors, President Barack Obama’s health care plan, and plans to build a mosque near ground zero in New York city.” He goes on to describe himself as “the Christian counterpart to Osama bin Laden” who “has learned a lot from the muslim terrorists and have no problem using their tactics."

I think the demagoguing of Park51 is a direct result of the GOP's turn toward Christianism. It's a tipping point where mainstream American Muslims become indistinguishable from the mass murderers of 9/11 in the psyches of those too poorly educated to know the difference. Religious warfare, once begun, is hard to stop; and when it is tacitly endorsed by a political party many of whose members believe that the president is a Muslim and no one in the GOP directly attacks, rebuts and discredits this nonsense, we are in very dangerous territory. The disturbing fusion of nationalist Christianity and loathing of Obama in the Beck-Palin movement – crystallized by the Park51/Cordoba contretemps and the August Mall rally – wittingly or unwittingly gives these violent fringes a coherence and legitimacy. Because it's not just hatred of Obama at stake any more; it's a conflation of Obama with Islam and then a conflation of Islam with Jihadist terror. If that's in your mind, it takes very little to set off a chain of inflammatory acts that build on one another.

No, the GOP elites have not done this explicitly; but they have allowed these connections to be drawn in the minds of many of their followers, and in a time of economic depression, and easy Internet demagoguery, this simply must not stand. We need more Republicans like Colin Powell to stand up for the New York mosque and for American Muslims, whose admirable conduct these past nine years has been in stark contrast to much of the extremism in Europe. We need Republican leaders aggressively to counter these myths about the president, to say what McCain was forced to say in the campaign. We also desperately need them to reiterate that being a Muslim and being an American is no contradiction and no conflict; and that our war is absolutely not with Islam, but with those who pervert it and take it to violent extremes. I reiterate my request that former president Bush come out on this, to pierce the noise on the far right and defuse it as much as possible.

We are in a religious war; but it is not one religion against another. It is for freedom of religion against those who would destroy it by violence and tyranny.

We are losing this distinction. If we lose it, we are lost ourselves in a war that will forever provide its own fuel for continuation.

A neologism for Pastor Jones and his ilk.

Jim Burroway lectures the Senate.

Wickford, Rhode Island, 6 pm

A reader retrieves it from her in-tray of April 11, 2008:

Thank you for advising me of your concern about the Bush Administration's use of Executive power. I share your frustration that Congress has acquiesced too much in the President's use of his Executive authority and agree this must change if we are going to get the country back on the right track …

The Log Cabin Republicans score a major victory against DADT:

U.S. district judge Virginia A. Phillips wrote in the 85-page opinion handed down late Thursday that the DADT statute violates the Fifth and First amendments. Log Cabin Republicans are entitled to a "permanent injunction barring its enforcement," Phillips wrote. "The evidence at trial demonstrated that [DADT] does not further significantly the Government's important interests in military readiness or unit cohesion, nor is it necessary to further those interests," Phillips wrote.  

The Justice Department has until a September 23 deadline to submit objections to the court regarding Phillips's permanent injunction, which it is likely to do. Justice Department attorneys have argued that Phillips does not have the authority to issue an injunction against the ban on openly gay service members. DOJ officials have not yet issued a statement on the decision and whether the department intends to appeal.

And so we have the Obama administration now actually battling Republicans to prevent gay servicemembers from serving openly. Ruling here (pdf). How the Obama administration has found itself to the right of even many conservatives on marriage equality and now military service is one of the more spectacular backfires of political expediency in our time.

I have no sympathy for them. End the ban now.