Life And Death

by Patrick Appel

James Poulos joins a conversation sparked a few days ago by Ezra saying that Lieberman was “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” Poulos responds to Douthat's comments:

Ross is too kind in allowing Ezra’s original language — Lieberman will cause people to die — to translate freely with the more accurate language of letting people die. This isn’t simply a matter of grammar or style.

Ezra did not attack Lieberman for supporting a bill which would merely get out of the way while some significant number of Americans happened to die. He attacked him for seeming “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” Anyone who doesn’t support the right bill, you see, is killing Americans. And since this is obvious, you see, anyone who doesn’t support the right bill wants to kill those Americans, and wants them to die.

This is more than moral grandstanding or shirt-waving. It’s an intentional distortion of an ethical precept at the very foundation of our philosophy of law. It’s a lie mobilized to discredit one’s political opponents, not just politically but morally. In truth, of course, to kill a bill that would prevent people from dying is not to kill those people — just as refraining from saving a person in mortal peril is not causing them to die.

Ideological Faultlines

by Patrick Appel

Ed Kilgore stands on them:

To put it more bluntly, on a widening range of issues, Obama's critics to the right say he's engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can't both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.

Unambiguously Pro-Torture, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

After watching that video, I actually feel sorry for Mr. Schock.  He is clearly so over his head in that segment.  This again goes to show a major problem with our politicians is that they are so painfully unself-aware.  At some point, someone close to him needs to pull him aside and say "keep your head down, learn the issues before you go on television and start spewing things that can't be unsaid."   The fact that he hasn't even toured the prison in his own district is pathetic.

Another writes:

At least he has the guts to admit what he's defending and advocating. And is not trying to deceive the American people into supporting something abhorrent. He's proposing it flat out, and woe doubly be unto us if we follow his proposals: we won't be able to hide behind our feigned ignorance of what torture is.

Neglect, not malfeasance

by Andrew Sprung

A reader writes:

The charge that the civil war in Afghanistan after 1988 was fomented by the US, and that Sec. Gates has elided this in order to defend a faulty prediction about Najibullah, is absurd. The story is much, much more complex. Najibullah was very nearly overthrown in early 1990; Bhutto's government next door fell a few months later; Hekmatyar switched sides many times; and a hundred other things make the story of a stable or stabilizing postwar regime undercut by revenge-seeking outsiders preposterous. I'm not saying there weren't plenty of support networks still in operation in the shadows during this period. But they hardly disprove Gates' point. Afghanistan was no longer a priority.

The US was a strong supporter of the Geneva accords but after 1989 its focus had shifted to many other areas besides Afghanistan. We neglected the country badly, and it was neglect, in my opinion, rather than malfeasance, which fomented the civil war that began in earnest soon after the Soviet left, however long Najibullah remained nominally in power.

Life As Part Of Sully’s Brain, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

News Busters has a field day with my last post. Lachlan Markay pretends that my doing research for Andrew is the same as Lynn Vincent writing Sarah Palin's book. I wish I'd the talent to ghostblog for Andrew. As I've written numerous times, basically everything I write under Andrew's name is a naked link or excerpt.

What I am very good at is finding and organizing information online in real time. I'm not nearly as talented a writer as Andrew is, a fact readers ceaseless remind me of whenever I guest-blog for the Dish. Andrew has an inhuman ability to write a well-reasoned and beautifully-crafted 700-word blog post in about fifteen minutes. If Lachlan looks at the Dish this week and doesn't notice a difference, then his reading comprehension is pitiful.

In The End

by Patrick Appel

James Joyner makes a prediction:

My guess is that far left Democrats will vent a little while longer and ultimately support whatever compromise deal they can get.

That's my guess too. A reader writes:

As an old school lefty I'm not sure which disgusts me more: the Democrats' failure to get a decent health care bill passed or this internecine bickering that's going on between moderates in the party and the Net Roots progressives. Making things even worse is that there's an approach that could satisfy both sides if they weren't too blinded by their own ideologies and egos to see it. That is, pass the health care bill without the public option or the medicare buy-in. Then, after Congress returns in January, pass the medicare buy-in via reconciliation. Sure, extending medicare to those aged 55 – 64 will eventually come up for renewal, possibly when the Republicans control the Senate again. But will Republicans really want to strip medicare away from millions of their constituents in five or ten years? Not likely.

Ezra Klein said this repeatedly over the last few days:

[If] you think we can get these pieces in reconciliation, why not pass the bill and then go back and get these pieces in reconciliation? If reconciliation is a good strategy, it's a good "and" strategy, not a good "or" strategy.

You can't propose this "compromise" openly because those who don't want the public option or Medicare buy-in would probably filibuster the unobjectionable parts of your bill in protest. But this is why I don't understand the reaction of the net roots given their priorities.