Rule of Man, Not Law

From the WaPo:

As Congress opened hearings yesterday on the treatment of terrorism detainees, the Bush administration's view was neatly summarized by Steven Bradbury, the Justice Department lawyer serving as lead witness. "The president," Bradbury said, "is always right."

...

"Only the president has the decision to introduce legislation," Bradbury reminded Specter. "I cannot commit as I sit here now that the administration will submit a particular bill."

Think about that. Bush does not accept that the Congress has a right to make laws, nor that the Supreme Court has the right to interpret laws. Only he can declare what is law, and that is equivalent to his will.

This is simply, utterly obscene. And the Rethuglicans are sucking up to this petulant, amoral, man-child, enabling him to deconstruct the very core of American government and society. Every "moderate" Republican (I think that's Olympia Snowe and occasionally Chafee) are worse than Bush, because they have demonstrated that they know better. To stay in that party now is to actively support the ruin of your nation.

Three more years of this. Will there be a country left?

Anglachel

An Iraqi's View of Bush's War

Riverbend:

The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It's been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can't bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can't bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can't bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can't bring myself to care because it's difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they'll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?

Why don't the Americans just go home? They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run', but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what's being done about it? Nothing. It's convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape.

Buses, planes and taxis leaving the country for Syria and Jordan are booked solid until the end of the summer. People are picking up and leaving en masse and most of them are planning to remain outside of the country. Life here has become unbearable because it's no longer a 'life' like people live abroad. It's simply a matter of survival, making it from one day to the next in one piece and coping with the loss of loved ones and friends- friends like T.

It's difficult to believe T. is really gone… I was checking my email today and I saw three unopened emails from him in my inbox. For one wild, heart-stopping moment I thought he was alive. T. was alive and it was all some horrific mistake! I let myself ride the wave of giddy disbelief for a few precious seconds before I came crashing down as my eyes caught the date on the emails- he had sent them the night before he was killed. One email was a collection of jokes, the other was an assortment of cat pictures, and the third was a poem in Arabic about Iraq under American occupation. He had highlighted a few lines describing the beauty of Baghdad in spite of the war… And while I always thought Baghdad was one of the more marvelous cities in the world, I'm finding it very difficult this moment to see any beauty in a city stained with the blood of T. and so many other innocents…

Atrocities

Bush has killed so many for so little cause. This was his war of choice. It is not just the murdered and the mutilated. It is the wholesale destruction of normalcy. The eradication of hope. A determination to bring about an end to things because he can. This is Bush's War, and all of humanity needs to hang this around his neck until his dying day.

Anglachel

When There's Real News

Nothing to add in the netroots vs. DLC grudge match in CT until there is a real poll out there to see what the voters are thinking. I've pretty much stopped reading blogs aside from TPM and Political Animal until after the primary as there is nothing new or worthwhile to report. Screaming about the fascistic tendencies of the opposition is unconvincing, particualrly when the real McCoy sits in the White House.

OTOH, it looks like Chafee may be in trouble in Rhode Island.

Anglachel

Al Gore - Apocaplypse Never

Billmon, the best political blogger on the left, talks about Al Gore:

But there is something tragic, even a little pathetic, about Gore's stubborn faith in the ability of facts and reasoned argument to save the world. The scenes of him schlepping through airports – alone, laptop in hand, on his way to yet another city to show his slides to another room full of college students or environmental activists – hit the edge of bathos. They make Al look too much like Willy Loman. "Attention must be paid to this man."

This is the Al Gore the Washington political press corps never seemed to grow tired of mocking: The earnest wonk who takes serious ideas seriously, and assumes his audience does, too. Up on stage, in front of such an audience, Al is clearly in his element. He’s articulate, funny, even endearing – as when he rides an accordion lift to the top of the viewing screen to illustrate the soaring rate of increase in atmospheric CO2. It’s a reminder that Al’s at his best when he’s being himself, instead of imitating Bill Clinton’s folksiness (which only made him look like Salieri next to Clinton's Mozart) or playing the know-it-all bully of his first presidential debate with Bush....

In my darker moments, it sometimes seems as if the entire world is in the middle of a fierce backlash against the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the ideological challenges they posed to the old belief systems. The forces of fundamentalism and obscurantism appear to be on the march everywhere – even as the moral and technological challenges posed by a global industrial civilization grow steadily more complex.

Climate change is only one of those challenges, and maybe not even the most urgent one – at the rate we’re going, civilization could collapse long before the Antarctic ice shelves do. Maybe as a species we really have reached the same evolutionary dead end as Australopithecus robustus – intelligent enough as a species to create problems we're not bright enough, or adaptable enough, to solve. I don’t know. But if extinction, or a return to the dark ages, is indeed our fate – or our grandchildren’s fate, anyway – I think it will be a Hobson’s choice as to which cultural tendency will bear the largest share of the blame: the arrogant empiricism that has made human society into an instrument of technological progress instead of the other way around, the ignorant prejudices of the masses, who are happy to consume the material benefits of the Enlightenment but unwilling to assume intellectual responsibility for them, or the cynical nihilism of corporate and political elites who are willing to play upon the latter in order to perpetuate the former, which is, after all is said and done, their ultimate claim to power.

None of this seems to faze Gore – or if it does, he and his cinema Boswells manage to keep it well hidden in An Inconvenient Truth. I don’t know if that’s because Al simply doesn’t see the situation in the same bleak terms that I do (he seems like a smart guy, but you never know) or whether, like the doctor protagonist in Camus’s The Plague , he’s decided that work – all that schlepping from airport to airport – is the only sane alternative to despair.

I’d hate to think that Gore, who has better contacts and knows more about the science and the politics of climate change than I do, is as pessimistic as I am. But I like the image of him out there on the speaking trail, completely without illusions about the ultimate outcome of the battle, but determined that it won’t be lost because he gave up. It would make Gore a politician, maybe the only establishment politician, that I can relate to – as one Edwardian plant to another.

An Inconvenient Al

As with anything by Billmon, you need to read the whole thing. Yes, it's long. Yes, it's worth it. Billmon has captured what is perhaps the core of Al Gore's appeal - he means what he says. Now, one could argue that Bush also means what he says, but the difference is that Al's statements are said for the sake of the entire world, not for himself and his cronies.

Al's truths, like Al himself, are inconvenient because they are not intended for advantage. He gains nothing by being right, particularly if he is Cassandra, wandering through the corridors of power, speaking what is as plain as the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, but which the various factions of greed and obscuranturism cannot bear to hear.

I click open the home pages of newspapers and see the bodies of the dead - in India, in Gaza, in Iraq - and read the mendacious spin of the Bush White House claiming economic success when it is misery for people outside his case. Employment down, unions being busted, the middle sinking lower. Who can bear this reality? I read this and I understand the appeal of apocalypticism, because at least it promises an end to the madness.

Except that it is the madness. Al offers such a profound and scary hope. If we care for the earth beneath our feet, the air above our heads, the water that moves in our veins, then we will commit to it. He asks us to renounce our fascination with endings and concentrate on being. One stubborn fact at a time. Reality may be the most radical fantasy we can embark upon, after all.

Anglachel

Pressure Cookers

Josh Marshall applies his usual uncommonly good sense to the neocon CYA operation with regards to Iraq:

Put simply, do we not detect a pattern in which the foreign policy neoconservatives strike out boldly on some foreign policy adventure, flop right down on their faces and then present the cause of their undoing as a novel insight wrestled from the maw of history when in fact, to everyone else except for them, this 'insight' was completely obvious and predictable from the start?

Kaplan says that America can't contain the Iraqi's "sectarian rage" nor "reprogram [the Iraqi's] coarsened and brittle cultures." As Louis Menand put it in The New Yorker, quite relatedly, when reviewing Francis Fukuyama's richly articulated discovery that regime change and preemption might not have been such a royal road to peace and democracy, "No duh!"

No duh, indeed. The defining characteristic of neocon policy, be it foreign or domestic, is a breathtaking gap between the facts on the ground and their fantasy of how the world should be. Josh has a sobering follow on observation:

I mean, this was the whole premise of pretty much everyone who said that Iraq might be a hard place to 'democratize' by invading. Non-diversified economy based on natural resource extraction, lethal sectarian divisions in a country bundled together by the British. It was pretty much the conventional wisdom going in that it was only brutal dictatorship that held the place together.

This brings us back to what we can call the Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now tragedy at the center of Bush's War. The operation was not done for the sake of the people who occupied the physical and political landscape of Iraq. It was conducted according to the plan concocted in a capitol far away, and it has foundered precisely because it had nothing solid to offer the people who suffered under its onslaught. It was a pressure cooker, and the Cheneyites turned up the heat. Is it any wonder that it exploded? Is it any surprise that the neocon reaction to the insurgency is "Exterminate the brutes!"?

Josh ends with a tantalizing thought:

Coming later, How is this all different from the Balkans? They don't get along there either, do they?

No, they don't. Szrebrenica. Sarajevo. Kosovo. These were places of atrocities in the same brutal class as what gets reported from Iraq, yet it was kept from spreading beyond the region and it was, eventually, cooled. How and why?

Anglachel

HotK - Ch. 48 Sleight

For my fiction fans, I have posted a new chapter for Hands of the King, Ch. 48, Sleight. The link goes to the overview page. Warnings - grief, blunt talk about sex, violence.

Denethor's joy over Seeing Finduilas is rudely interrupted. Bad things happen to good people. And to bad ones. Denethor goes on a furious search, afraid of what he will find. Lots of introspective Denethor. Scenes with Finduilas, Aiavale, Morwen, Beregar, Thorongil, and three new OCs.

For people who aren't familiar with HotK, it is a fanfiction novel, published a chapter at a time. It chronicles the courtship and marriage of Denethor and Finduilas. There's usually two new chapters per month. If you like sprawling fantsy novels, give it a try.

Anglchel

Framing the Issue - Leaving Iraq

I came across an interesting site - Frameshop - the other day, which does a good job of both identifying and offering frames for current political matters. It is eclectic and fascinating, and I recommend readers here check it out.

One of its framesets falls very close to my Days of Obligation post. If we can agree that "Stay the Course" is simply a fancy way of saying "Sit on the mess until we can dump it on the next president and hightail it for the hills," then the true issue is how should or can the Democrats handle disengagement with Iraq and the overall cleanup of Bush's War? Jeff Feldman presents three strong frames, each with strengths and weaknesses. I'm going to present the synopsis of each, with links to the specifics, and then talk about the frames themselves.

Frame #1: The "War Room" Frame

Major Proponent: Hillary Clinton
Key Points:
- Iraq is a war.
- The war is complicated.
- The goal of the war is a 'Democratic Iraq.'
- For America to win the war, Democrats must first win the 2008 Presidential election.
- Once a Democrat is President, the situation in Iraq will improve.

Frame #2: The "Global Alliance" Frame

Major Proponent: Russ Feingold
Key Points:
- Iraq is an occupation.
- Iraq has created U.S. national security problems that previously did not exist.
- The main problem is isolation from international allies in the global fight against terrorism.
- For America to achieve that goal, Democrats must redeploy troops and recruit allies.
- As long as we are in Iraq, U.S. national security is compromised.

Frame #3: The "Regional Stability" Frame

Major Proponent: Wesley Clark
Key Points:
- Iraq is a regional conflict.
- The U.S. occupation of Iraq has isolated Iraq from regional neighbors.
- Success in Iraq depends on U.S. catalyzing regional cooperation.
- For America to achieve that goal, Democrats must convince regional allies U.S. action is not a threat.
- As long as we refuse to engage in regional diplomacy, Iraq will not be stable.

Feldman offers some very good strength/weakness analysis, and I will be making use of it, so please do read the full frames - they are very short. I am not addressing every aspect of the frames, only the focus on "What should/will the Democrats do with regard to the American military presence in Iraq?"

#1 - War Room: He is harsh on Clinton's frame, far more than it deserves, but he does identify a key weakness where Dems would concede too much ground - it leaves in place the fiction that the Iraq situation is a part of the GWOT, and not simply a badly conceived imperialist adventure by the neocons. Any successful frame for the left must split off Iraq from al Qaeda, positioning Iraq as a distraction from the real threat while creating a breeding ground for more. It also shifts attention from the troops to the decision to send troops in.

What is fundamentally right about this frame is that Democrats are going to handle this situation better than Republicans. This is something that must be repeated over and over. What else is right, as per my earlier post, is that it presumes an American presence in Iraq for some time. While I agree that using the word "war" concedes too much to the right, the use of "win" terminology is, IMO, right on the money. Americans like to be winners and a big rhetorical club of the right is deploying the language of win and loss. There's no way to avoid it, so it's time to recapture it. If the term "war" is used, it must be coupled with "Bush" to emphasize that this is a war of choice, conducted on a whim and due entirely to Bush's petulant and childish desires. The "win" is extracting us from the situation, where we should never have been in the first place.

Militarist language appeals to a broad swath of Americans, and can't be abandoned if only because our military is there, and needs support to be able to survive their exploitation by Rumsfeld, et. al. The specific plan is to stabilize the situation, then draw down and redeploy to "safer" zones, with less exposure as targets. The biggest flaw here is a lack of what would count as stabilization, along with a contingency plan if the Iraqis simply can't get their own security together. It fails to discuss the moral dimension of what has been done, which may help contextualize the decisions.


#2 - Global Alliance: Feingold's frame is the one that appeals most strongly because of its simplicity, but is probably the most wrong-headed. For all the language of globalism, it is fundamentally a "US first" frame, chauvinistic in all the wrong ways. While the "Bring 'em home now" meme resonates strongly, there is no argument about what happens next. It fails to acknowledge the intuition of many Americans that something is owed when a wrong has been committed. It also has nothing to say about the use of the military or its sacrifices.

Its great strength is refocusing the debate onto stopping terrorism, which does require international cooperation and policing, and is probably both an easier and cheaper way to keep alliances going. It provides an opening for bringing up lack of security against real terrorism at home. However, this frame works better an an extension of the other two than on its own, as it is more abstract and policy oriented. It has a large gap in between the one practical and very powerful demand to stop the occupation and the intelligent, long-term but not very tangible need to develop effective anti-terrorism alliances. American concern is with individual soldiers more than anything, and they want the troops out of harm's way, but they also want assurance that the mess in Iraq will not breed more terrorists.

Finally, I think calling the situation an "occupation" is simply stupid. Occupation is what bad guys do. Americans liberate. Americans set free. Americans intervene. While literally true, it is psychologically unacceptable. It also lacks a picture of what success in Iraq would look like, aside from getting US butts out of the way.

#3 - Regional Stability: This frame, as Feldman points out, has the great virtue of being pragmatic, but it also has the virtue of being long-term. It places both the Iraq situation and the fight against terrorism in a larger picture of over-all stability in the middle east. It also, perhaps most importantly, presents a rhetorical hook that avoids the pitfalls of either "war" or "occupation" - "conflict." It ratchets down the emotional quotient without denying the significance of the situation.

Like the Global Alliance frame, there's a good deal of hand-waving at what happens between the short-term and the long-term, though it has the advantage of not presenting a false sense of completion as the War Room frame does. Better than the other two, it talks about the long term interests and obligations of the US in the region, which provides a way of discussing our obligations to other nations in terms of protecting and defending human rights and civil society, but also grounds all of this in an unblinking realistic perspective on the ways states behave.

The War Room frame stresses US self-sufficiency and the Global Alliance emphasizes international cooperation. These both posit the middle east as the problem, something to be defended against. Regional Stability proposes that the middle east is not the problem - the intransigence of the regimes is at issue, and the only way to solve that long-term is diplomacy. It recognizes the autonomy and the responsibility of the regional populations in the way a defensive frame cannot.

In terms of troop withdrawal, it is slightly closer to the GA than the WR stance, emphasizing redeployment in the region over complete departure. It does say unequivocally that we can't have permanent bases in Iraq, something the WR frame implicitly presumes we will have. I disagree that it is any less detailed than either of the other two frames, though I sadly have to say I'm not sure that the US can engage in diplomacy at this date, given the slash and burn behavior of the Cheneyites in the region. On this count, while pragmatic, it may be unrealistic.

Summary: None of these frames is sufficient, though any one of them is miles ahead of the do-nothing, wait-for-the-bottom-to-drop-out stance of the Republicans. What they all share is a commitment to trying to find a real and humane way out of the Iraq conflict that does not immediately create worse problems for the US. RS is the only one of the three that adequately addresses the moral obligations that the US has incurred through Bush's War to the Iraqis.

The US must leave. There is no escaping this fact. The only question is how it will be done. There is no "good" way to do so, but there are better and worse alternatives. The GA alternative is the worst, I think, because it cannot answer the "What next?" question about Iraq. In the end, this will be the de facto resolution simply because the US will have no alternative but to bail in a hurry. The WR solution has merit for wanting to establish conditions rather than timetables, but fails for lack of a contingency plan and for refusing to relinquish the dream of permanent bases. The RS frame is short on details for withdrawing, but has a practical goal to work towards, one which might actually be of interest to the players in the middle east. After all, when the US goes, they get to fight each other.

In the end, the Democrats will need to create a dominant frame that encompasses all three stances - clear conditions for withdrawal and redeployment, a contingency plan (or two) in case of complete Iraqi implosion, and a clear commitment to remaining as a power broker and negotiator in the region.

Anglachel

The Good Guys

A few days ago, Kevin Drum posted about Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain’s MI6, and the Downing Street Memo, citing an Atlantic Monthly blog by James Fallows, reporting on the Aspen Ideas Festival. I encourage you to read Fallows' article - it is short and interesting. What I want to tease out of it, following on my post yesterday about the continuing presence of al Qaeda, is the nature of the conflict the civilized world, and specifically the US portion of it, is engaged in.

Fallows shows Dearlove making a crucial point:

... the Western world, notably the United States, was doomed unless it reclaimed “the moral high ground.” By the end of the Cold War, he said, there was no dispute world wide about which side held the moral high ground. As a professional spy master, he said that reality made it so much easier for him to recruit operatives – they would volunteer to come to him, because they believed in the cause. Therefore, as a matter of pure strategic necessity, the United States needed to behave according to its best traditions, not the exigencies of an open-ended wartime emergency. (I’m paraphrasing a little, but not taking too many liberties.)

This may be the single most important loss of the neocon war - the loss of moral high ground. With the invasion of Iraq, they can't even claim self-defense as Iraq was no threat to us. Invasion of a country for no reason except to demonstrate military might, continual assaults on international conventions to defend human dignity, casual use of methods and practices that were (and are) the favorite tools of dictatorial regimes (kidnapping, torture, surveillance of general populations, use of military for police functions, etc.) ; all of these serve to undermine what may be the most effective weapon in the US arsenal, the knowledge that we are dedicated to doing the right thing. Mistakes can be forgiven. Deliberate policy cannot.

This matters for domestic politics as well. When the grounds for action are the "one-percent" standard and nothing else, then the raw power of the state can be unleashed on any person or group found to fall within that one-percent possibility. When the language of "traitor" is casually used to place valid oversight and opposition into the realm of the criminal, such as the investigative reporting done by the NYT, LA Times, WaPo and other, less dominant news outlets, the foundation of western liberal democracy - the idea of a loyal opposition - is endangered.

Wes Clark in a number of speeches, articles and appearances over the last few years has pointed out something that I think gets to the heart of why it is so hard to hold on to the very real "Good Guy" position. We no longer have a coherent strategy of how to meet this global assault on the existence of western liberal democratic society. In the Cold War, we had containment, deterrence, and a statement of principles. The weapon that worked best was the quality of life, which we could very legitimately say was a result of commitment to our liberal principles. It was this combination that could produce situations like the one cited by Dearlove, the ability to recruit operatives because they believed not only in our might, but even more deeply in our principles. Regardless of the party in power, the US needs to have a strategy to meet the growing threat of anti-modernism, anti-liberal democracy. It is not just al Qaeda who is trying to mobilize these ideas to establish their own power.

What is the price of no strategy and no principles? We're left with might makes right, and whomever has the bigger army makes the rules. We cannot defend the idea of a loyal opposition, and thus of a general commitment to resolve very real conflicts over resources and social goods through political compromise. We are ourselves rudderless, unwilling to rein in the greed-is-good mentality that expands the gaps between the obscenely rich and the rest. We cannot argue convincingly for social justice and the rights of the minority. We lose our distinction from authoritarian regimes, like China, who are very real competitors for resources, markets and hegemony.

The Republican party of Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney, of the royal-wanna-be Bush clan, of the theocrats Dobson and Falwell, and of the profiteers Abramoff and Reed, is explicitly opposed to the principle of a loyal opposition. They will brook no expression of dissent to their desires and wants. This is their core, and the reason why, at heart, they are failing to protect American lives and interests in any substantive way. They don't believe in the foundational principle of our society.

Oddly enough, opposition to them is handicapped by our commitment to our "Good Guy" principle. We cannot demonize. We cannot refuse to at least hear them out. It is the Achilles heel of western liberal democracy, that we will tolerate intolerance. It is not, however, a fatal flaw if we are determined to protect the principle as such.

We are also handicapped by misguided and, in the case of the neocons, deliberately bad faith patriotism. The US, with good reason, is used to thinking of itself as the "Good Guy" in international affairs. The authoritarian right has done what the authoritarian right always does, invert the argument that we become the good guys by doing good into what we do is good because we are the good guys. (Works the same way in religion, of course.) In this reconstruction of a moral principle into a rationalization for power, patriotism is used to transform the good very swiftly into its opposite, an uncaring cruelty.

To reclaim the high ground, which is another way of saying to defend the core organizing principle of our society, we need a strategy that is at once realistic and idealistic - something that deals with the very real physical threat of terrorist movements and also presents to those caught in the middle the reasons why they should choose our side, even when doing so may endanger their lives.

Clark has a short, excellent summation of where the true war on terror occurs: "You see, the problem is that terrorism is spawned by an idea, by a passion, by a commitment. Its mistaken idea but it's an idea. And you don't win it by killing people. You win it by changing people's ideas."

That's how you get to be the Good Guys.

Anglachel

Still Out There

Lest we forget, the Islamic fundamentalist whack-job terrorists are still out there, trying to incite Armegeddon. While the general mendaciousness of the Cheney administration is such that news of getting terrorists usually means something blown out of proportion, like the recent arrests in Miami, the al Qaeda network is real, it is operational, and it is going to keep trying to hit major capitals. Al Qaeda has murdered thousands of people around the globe, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

A year ago today, they struck London. Today, the FBI announced it had, in cooperation with intelligence operations in other countries, broken up a legitimate plot to do suicide bombing on PATH trains below the Hudson River. For those of you not familair with the area, the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) is a lightrail system that connects New York City to New Jersey via rail lines that run in tunnels under the Hudson River. A major PATH station had been located under the WTC complex.

It is worth noting that this interception has probably saved the lives of hundreds if not thousands of communters and forestalled a massive interruption to travel and communications. This was not done with sabre-rattling and military might, but by quiet, stealthy police work, tracking down the leads and cornering the bastards where they live. Thousands of Lebanese did not have to die to apprehend these guys.

There is no debate. We know what works in fighting terrorism and we know what does not. Spies, policing and very targeted, very small military strikes are what work. Full scale invasions do not. The only location where an invasion had any legitimate role was Afghanistan, and that was to secure a territory that was in a condition of chaos and tribal war, providing a perfect location for terrorist base operations.

The Cheneyites have been wrong on terrorism from Day 1 in the White House, when they scoffed and dismissed its threat. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of other nationals perished because of their inaction. Since then, tens of thousands more have died for no good reason.

And Osama bin Laden is still out there.

Anglachel

What (snicker) Kevin Says

TICK TICK TICK....I just realized today that the Connecticut primary isn't until August 8. That means we're in for another full month of 24/7 screeching in the liberal blogosphere about the myriad personal deficiencies of Joe Lieberman, Ned Lamont, and every last one of their friends and supporters.

Just shoot me. Can't President Bush nuke some small third-world country that he's annoyed at so we have something else to talk about? Please?

Over the Edge They Go

I was waiting to see it happen. Who would be the first to make the beginning and the end of a Democratic candidate's worth for office hinge on their support for Joe Lieberman? The winner is Digby, now begging her readers to harass Barbara Boxer for refusing to renege on a long-time promise to stump for Lieberman.

For the love of Pete. This is like "no tolerance" rules at schools that get kids thrown out for giving someone an aspirin, or drug laws locking people up for years for smoking a joint. There is no sense of proportion.

The Kossack left is gearing up to wage national smear campaigns against your elected officials. To hell with whether you like your candidate or think she's doing a good job for your district. If she doesn't pass the netroots litmus test du jour, she's fair game. In their place, we will have bland, millionaire white men from the 'burbs.

If the "netroots" thinks this is the way to capture the party, setting up purity tests and harassing individual politicians with asinine 'fur us or agin us' positions, they're going to have some interesting backlash to deal with.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, good liberal candidates like Francine Busby go begging for spare change and blog time because all resources are being poured into this disingenuous war for control of power broker positions. You know what? I hope Lieberman wins the primary. I don't want the poster boy for these bullies to get anything.

If I wanted to belong to a band of thugs, I'd join the Republicans.

Anglachel

Reimagining the Beloved Community

Kevin Drum and Ed Kilgore both had intelligent posts up today about Sen. Barack Obama's recent speech on the use (and abuse) of faith in politics, and what progresive believers should consider. There is also a pretty shocking article up on Salon (watch the ad, it's worth it) about the Mormon breakaway sect FLDS in Colorado City, Arizona, and their abuse of their own children.

The Salon piece is almost a perfect case study of the instrumental use of religious structures and practices to consolidate and enforce wordly power. It is, without exaggeration, an American Taliban. It has little to do with faith and everything to do with control. I would hope that any person with a scrap of morality, whether believer or secular, would condemn what this cult is doing to its members, especially the children.

Kevin Drum does his usual common-sense job and points out the glaringly obvious - Obama didn't say much that you can really object to, and that (as I said) a few sentences are being pulled out and exagerated to allow bloviation to flow. Kevin ends with his trademark wondering out loud about more of the glaringly obvious:

It's a funny thing. When I post about religion, I usually get two kinds of comments. The first is people telling me that I'm falling into a conservative trap by even entertaining the idea that some liberals are contemptuous toward religion. The second is snarky liberal secularists telling everyone else to take their stupid myths and shove 'em where the sun don't shine. Do you think both sides will show up in this thread as well?

And darn if he wasn't right. Most comments walked right into that one and didn't have enough self-awareness to know they'd just tripped the "doh!" meter. And "some" posters even disparaged religion. Imagine that... NEWS FLASH - The left has a small but vocal minority of anti-religious zealots, committed beyond reason to assaulting not just idiocy like Intelligent Design, but every expression of faith. Major bloggers like PZ Meyers, for example, who enjoy wide readerships. Mind you, some of the take downs can be fun to read, but the "You Are Stupid Bozos" theme gets real old, real fast.

I'm a secular humanist. I also have a truckload of believing friends and family. And I know jerks, and deal with the occasional JW knocking on the door, and think that fundamentalism is a very real threat to human existence. I can also admire the Dalai Lama and get the giggle fits over Rev. Desmond Tutu reminding us that God isn't a Christian. In short, the existence of religion doesn't offend me (though it often confuses me) and that the left is allowing itself to be sidetracked by the god-baiting of the right.

The danger of the rules-bound left is, as I said in an earlier post, that they will not acknowledge that people are divided on progressive issues and consider their religious teachings valid guides for political decisions. I think my father is a great example. I also have friends in a very strict Christian family who are mostly liberal, but who are under enormous social pressure from family and church to conform. Lots and lots of love for toeing the line, lots of ostracism for not. These are people who do require some strong outreach because they will be outcasts.

The anti-religious faction will not or cannot understand the courage it takes to defy the beloved community. Read the Salon article. Understand that this is not religious behavior, per say, but the actions of tradition bound communities for securing order, obdience and stability.

I think Ed Kilgore's post was one of the most interesting I have yet read because he speaks about what the religious message was. Many of the things he says reminds me of Garry Wills' op-ed piece Christ Among the Partisans. I have excerpts of that here. (My father enjoyed the piece quite a bit, I might add.) Kilgore's post is worth an extended quote:

Obama was fighting something of a three-front battle in this speech:

(1) against conservative claims that God's Will is easy to understand, dictates culturally conservative positions, and requires nothing more than obedience;
(2) against Christian Left claims that progressives of faith should simply counter their Law with our Gospel; their sexual moralism with our social-justice moralism; their scriptural authorities with our scriptural authorities;
(3) against secularists of the Left or the Right (encompassing, BTW, most of the political chattering classes) who reduce religious faith to entirely secular political and cultural positions, without having any clue of the ambiguities involved in believing in a transcendent God who reveals Himself in history and human action as well as in scripture.

The political import of Obama's speech is that he is engaging in an intra-Christian debate that is already undermining the Christian Right every day. In essence, the James Dobsons of the religious world have sought to lead their flocks into a prophetic stance that stakes their spiritual lives to a series of specific and highly questionable political commitments. More and more, even the most conservative evangelical Christians are chafing against this bondage, while the less conservative faithful, including the largely apolitical attendees of rapidly growing non-denominational megachurches, never bought into it much to begin with.

This is an enormous potential political constituency that is waiting to hear from Our Side, not with Conservative Lite policy prescriptions; not with Christian Left counter-prophetic-absolutism; but with credible and authentic appeals to the holy fear that the faithful should respect when confronting those who make exclusive claims to represent God's Will on Earth.

Obama, Politics, and Faith

This post took on particular resonance as I was reading it immediately after having read the Salon piece. The point that Kilgore (and Obama) make about the danger of "prophetic" activism is both subtle and unsettling, because it is a two edged sword. It warns against the prophetic mode of rule, which is not always a religious stance. If you are a humanist, you understand that the structures of religion are human patterns of thought and interaction, and that secular instiutions and movements too can be afflicted by this mode of power.

As with the fundamentalists who thunder about the certainty of fire and brimstone for those who stray from the path of righteousness, the message about the dangers of conceptual certainty appear to be going right over the heads of the most agitated critics of Obama's speech.

Anglachel

Senator Clinton Shows How It's Done

Here's a hint to the Democratic leadership. Do the right thing. Hillary shows you how:

ALBANY, N.Y. -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a longtime supporter of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, said Tuesday she will not back the Connecticut Democrat's bid for re-election if he loses their party's primary.

"I've known Joe Lieberman for more than thirty years. I have been pleased to support him in his campaign for re-election, and hope that he is our party's nominee," the former first lady said in a statement issued by aides.

"But I want to be clear that I will support the nominee chosen by Connecticut Democrats in their primary," the New York Democrat added. "I believe in the Democratic Party, and I believe we must honor the decisions made by Democratic primary voters."

Sen. Clinton: Lieberman on own if he loses Dem primary

This is as it should be. State your personal preference, then be clear you support the will of the voters. How hard is that?

Anglachel

Battle for the Entrenched Power Broker Positions

Lieberman commited a serious tactical blunder in trying to cover all bases with his bid to stay on the November ballot at all costs. Check out Josh Marshall for a short and sweet summation of the damage. I said before that the race was Lieberman's to lose, and it looks like he's going to do it.

Now, here is where things get interesting. The MSM is presenting the story as the "anti-war left" is targeting a "pro-war" candidate. This may be the meme, but it is not the reality.

What the "netroots" is (as opposed to the base) is a loosely affiliated group of would-be power brokers who are fighting with the established power brokers for who is going to control selection of bland center-left candidates for national office. No, this is not some diabolical cabal engineered by Markos. Please, don't insult my intelligence. This is a very traditional internal war over who is going to occupy the position currently (and incompletely) held by "the DLC". I put that in quotes because it isn't just the actual organization, but the loose affiliation of groups and businesses that have common interests articulated most consistently by the DLC.

Neither of these power centers have any real interest in "the base", by which I mean the vast majority of voters who choose Democratic candidates more than Republicans ones. The netroots in particular is contemptuous of these citizens, sneering at them as "sheeple" rather than accepting that people simply aren't engaged. The old guard does accept this, and focuses on how to get just enough engagement to garner a vote.

Given that the poster boys for the netroots are Ned Lamont and Mark Warner, candidates so far from radical that they easily mix with the "DLC" crowd, it becomes clear that there really isn't any shift to the left going on here. It is a fight over who controls revenue streams and who gets to be part of the talking heads society.

I know some neo-Naderites are having wet dreams over throwing all the rascals out and having Saint Russ annointed king, but the cold fact is that the "netroots" organizers, for all their guff, have no intention of being daring if they can gain the upper hand. They will run DLC-lite (and plain old DLC) candidates. Why? Because centrist candidates do best with the electorate over all.

Lieberman is a useful target because there is a bland multi-millionaire available to run against someone who has pissed off a strong minority of Democrats in a small state. This is a battle of the power brokers and their ability to raise funds and mobilize partisans. When the dust settles, there really won't be that much of a change. As Kevin Drum has pointed out, there's no deep policy difference, no ideological split worth mentioning. There's just a loud and tiresome cat fight going on about who gets to call shots.

I think you can tell by now that I don't much care for either side. One is bland and cautious. The other is arrogant and irresponsible. Neither are very organized (except as fundraisers) and neither has much to say for itself. Their mutual campaign theme is "We're not him." And, the kicker of them all, they tend to know each other, hang out in the same conferences, beg for money from the same people, and (GASP!) often support the same candidates.

Which is why I'm not particularly excited by the Ned Lamont campaign. He stands for nothing new.

Anglachel

Mahmudiyah Update - Stay This Course?

This information is gleaned from two sources:

• NYT - Ex-GI Accused in Slaying of 4 and Rape
• WaPo - Details Emerge in Alleged Army Rape, Killings

A man already in the US has been arrested and charged with the murders. Dead are a man, his wife, and their two duaghters, one 15, one 5 or 7. The elder daughter was raped, as has been confirmed by a medical evaluation. Charged in that rape are the man also charged with murder of the four family members, and three or four other men. The accounts do not give names of additional people, and they are equivocal as to whether they will also be charged with murder. These four or five soldiers have committed a heinous crime. There are confessions and corroborating testimony.

The most horrifying detail is this one from the NYT:

The affidavit, by an F.B.I. special agent, Gregor J. Ahlers, said details of the crime emerged during a "combat stress debriefing" on June 20. Private Green and at least three others planned the rape and told another soldier to monitor the radio while they went to the house near Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, according to the affidavit. Some of the participants changed out of their uniforms before going to the house and had blood on their clothes when they returned, the affidavit said.

After the murder-and-rape rampage, the affidavit states, the soldiers burned their clothes and told the comrade who had been left to monitor the radio that "this is never to be discussed again."

The F.B.I. affidavit portrays a crime at once chilling and calculated. Before raping one woman, Private Green confined her relatives to a bedroom, the document states. Shots were heard inside, after which Private Green came to the door and said, "I just killed them, all are dead," the affidavit goes on. Then Private Green and another "known participant" were seen raping the woman before Private Green shot her in the head "two to three times," the document states.

This was premeditated. They murdered the family members, including a child, first, then raped the teenager, then murdered her. There is no room for accident.

I'm not sure what to make of this, from the WaPo:

Janabi [a neighbor of the murdered family] said U.S. soldiers controlled the scene of the killings for several hours on March 11, telling neighbors that insurgents were responsible. The bodies of the victims were taken to Mahmudiyah hospital by March 12, according to Janabi and an official at the hospital, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

On March 13, a man identifying himself as a relative claimed the bodies for burial, the hospital official said. An hour after the man left with the bodies, U.S. soldiers came to the hospital and asked about the bodies, the hospital official said.

The next day, the hospital official said, soldiers scoured the area, trying to find the funeral for the family.

Who were these soldiers? Were they they ones who committed the crime? or were these other soldiers who knew the real story behind the crime?

George Bush and his enablers sent these men into a needless and unsupportable war. They have destroyed the effectiveness and the honor of our military for nothing. Bush's War, the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history, has enraged populations against us and increased the ability of terrorist groups like al Quaeda to recruit and operate because they have sympathy from people who ordinarily would shun them.

Anglachel