Torture And The Republicans

Huckabee, Paul and McCain are now on the right side of this profound divide. Romney and Giuliani on the other. I don’t have a great deal of hope that this will be a dispositive issue (in the good sense), but I do know and hope that there are plenty of old-style Republicans out there who are horrified by torture, who uphold America’s traditional intolerance of it, and who want to end it. If they still feel at home in the GOP, their choice for president is now clearer.

(By the way, can the Washington Post get its act together and realize that Ron Paul is running for president and has a record on this issue going back just as far as McCain? Jeez: the blindness of the Washington press with respect to Paul is still staggering.)

The Deep Vulnerability Of Clinton

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Democrats don’t really want or trust her. If Obama can defuse his electability problems, she could be wiped out. From one focus group in Al Hunt’s new column:

Obama, they worried, can’t win the nomination; voters aren’t ready for an African-American president (a point expressed most directly by the two black women participants), and he may not be sufficiently experienced.

A couple of victories in Iowa and New Hampshire would cure most of those problems.

The concerns about Clinton, 60, a New York senator, are that she is devious, calculating and, fairly or not, a divisive figure in American politics. Those are a lot tougher to overcome.

It was revealing, too, when Hart pushed them to envision these senators as leaders of the country or, as he put it, their “boss.” Obama, they say, would be inspirational, motivating, charismatic and compassionate. After praising Clinton’s experience and intelligence, they say she would be demanding, difficult, maybe even a little scary.

The Democrats are picking between hope and fear, between the future and the past.

(Photo: Mario Tama/Getty.)

In Defense Of Fallujah

"Most Americans think Fallujah is such a bad place. They’ve been hearing about it from Day One. It’s a holy city. I don’t know how many people know that it’s a holy city. The extremists, since it is a holy city, were hiding behind it, were using it for the cause…

I don’t think people really know what to expect from any of this. It’s like people say: you only get the bad news on TV. They don’t get to hear about how Fallujah is doing good now. I’m sure they’d hear about it if something bad happened. But these people are doing better, the schools are open, businesses are open, people are cleaning up their own city. They’re starting their own neighborhood watch. They have their own police force now, their own government. People don’t get to hear about that. I think that’s important for people to know. You shouldn’t focus so much on people who mess up. I mean, people have messed up. Bad stuff has happened. But you should focus on the percentage of people who are doing good as opposed to the percentage who are doing bad. There’s a lot of good going on over here. And there’s a lot of good people in this city," – corporal Brandon Koch, of the 3rd Battalion 5th Regiment’s India Company, in Fallujah, talking with Michel Totten, in a new dispatch from the city.

Quote For The Day

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security," – Milton Mayer, "They Thought They Were Free".

In Defense Of Ron Paul

Larison counters Brink Lindsey’s dismissal of the broader implications of Ron Paul’s candidacy:

A coalition that argues in defense of civil liberties, national sovereignty, and border security and calls for an end to empire at the same time without succumbing to any strains of cultural radicalism could have very broad appeal.  It would essentially be campaigning on all those important matters that the established parties have badly neglected and campaigning against the ruinous policies that the parties have embraced.

At this point, you’d think people would stop under-estimating Ron Paul, wouldn’t you?