Hillary Clinton has not, in fact, survived the worst that the Republican attack machine (and its pilotless drones online and on talk radio) can dish out. We will learn what the worst really means if she is nominated. The Commie law firm will be only the beginning. Many tempting targets—from Bill’s little-examined fund-raising and business activities during the past seven years to the prospect of his hanging around the White House in some as yet undefined role for another four or eight years to whatever leftovers from the Clinton “scandals” of the nineteen-nineties can be retrieved from the dumpster and reheated—remain to be machine-gunned. The whole Clinton marital soap opera, obviously off limits within the Democratic fold, will offer ample material for what Obama calls “distractions.” To take the most obvious example, the former President’s social life since leaving the White House will become, if not “fair game,” big game—and some of these right-wing dirtbags are already hiring bearers and trying on pith helmets for the safari. Is this a “there” where the Democratic Party really wants to go?
Kenneth Roth makes the case against preventative detention:
The most common argument against criminal prosecutions is that they examine crimes that were already committed, whereas the threat of terrorism is said to be so dangerous that it requires preventing acts before they occur. But the crime of conspiracy is sufficient to address today's terrorist threat because it is both backward and forward looking.
Those who don't avail themselves of subcutaneous microchips and other implanted technology, [Professor Kevin Warwick] predicts, will be at a serious disadvantage in tomorrow's world, because they won't be able to communicate with the "superintelligent machines" sure to be occupying the highest rungs of society, as he explains in a 2003 documentary, Building Gods, which is circulating online.
From Margaret Talbot's 2002 piece against tinkering with sex selection:
The real trouble with sex selection goes beyond sex discrimination. The real trouble is that it allows us, for the first time, to use a medical procedure to select or reject a child on the basis of a characteristic that has nothing to do with life and death, that is not in any sense of the word pathological, that cannot possibly be construed as sparing a child any pain and suffering. It might sound harmless enough, maybe even kind of cute—this impulse to pick and choose, pink or blue. But if we allow people to select a child's sex, then there really is no barrier to picking embryos—or, ultimately, genetically programming children—based on any whim, any faddish notion of what constitutes superior stock. This time the old and overused accusation would actually be true: we would be playing God—and none too well, in all likelihood, given how little we really know about what makes individual human beings the way they are. A world in which people (wealthy people, anyway) can custom-design human beings unhampered by law or social sanction is not a dystopian sci-fi fantasy any longer but a realistic scenario. It is not a world most of us would want to live in.
It's certainly not a world I'd want to live in. But I do, don't I?
The truth is Obama has no secret plan for Iraq. Interviews with nearly two dozen foreign policy and military experts, as well as Obama's campaign advisers, and a close review of Obama's own statements on Iraq, suggest something more nuanced. What he is offering is a basic vision of withdrawal with muddy particulars, one his advisers are still formulating and one that, if he is elected, is destined to meet an even muddier reality on the ground. Obama has set a clear direction for U.S. policy in Iraq: He wants us out of Iraq; but he's not willing to do it at any cost--even if it means dashing the hopes of some of his more fervent and naïve supporters. And, when it comes to Iraq, whatever the merits of Obama's withdrawal plan may be, "Yes, We Can" might ultimately yield to "No, we can't."
How can you claim that McCain, in stating a truthful quote made by a member of Hamas regarding how he would prefer Obama to win the election, is somehow the same as associating Obama with Wright?
The successful prosecution of Islamic extremists around the world is, for many people in this country, a very important issue.
...the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby's definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a "famous" poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, "only poets read poetry" was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.
"On many issues, Conservatives have more in common with ideological
liberals than we do with the business interests that come to Washington
looking for a handout. Our goal should be to persuade the Left — to use
clear failures we agree on, like ethanol — to demonstrate that Big
Business will always come to Washington for handouts until
Washington stops giving them altogether. Each new handout is the next
ethanol, the next sugar — and once you've started giving a handout, it
never ends," - David Freddoso, NRO.
I don't know what's causing you to abandon your conservatism of doubt, but
there's no doubt that's what you're doing. Take, for instance, this
unilluminating piece of credulity:
He obviously does care about
working class voters, white and black. Why else would an Ivy League
educated lawyer return to Chicago to work as a community organizer for
the urban poor?
As
an earlier, less starstruck, Andrew might have said, "please." This is
a classic case of theoretical under-determination. Why might Obama have
returned to work as an organizer in a community that became his earliest constituency? Sure, it could bebecause he "cares about working class voters, white and black." But it also could be because
the precinct in which he worked was optimally suited to elect him, a
left-wing black, to political office.
If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges - mixed blessings, in fact - has the power to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical faculties, religion has a feature of that none of them can boast: it doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.
The problem is that scientists now too frequently believe we have the answers to these questions, and hence the mysteries of life. But, oddly, the more we use science to explore nature, the more we find things we do not understand and cannot explain. In reality, both religion and science are expressions of man's uncertainty. Perhaps the paradox is that certainty, whether it be in science or religion, is dangerous. The danger of Dennett's relatively gentle brand of certainty is that it increases polarisation in our society. With inflexible positions on both sides, certainty surely is the biggest threat to rationality, and to science.
“This was not an accidental omission,” is a slippery phrase. Does Sullivan mean to imply the pope tacitly approves of U.S. torture? He should use plain language.
“His own priests” is also delightfully non-specific. Is Sullivan saying something about the pontiff’s time as Bishop of Munich (in the 70s), when he would have been in charge of priestly formation in his diocese? If it refers to the recent scandals, when he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, this is equivalent to pretending the secretary of health and human services should have devised an exit-strategy for Iraq. There are plenty of people to blame in the Church for what is euphemistically called the "abuse-scandal" - Benedict is not one of them.
“In return, the president refused” is even stranger, as if to say that Bush thought, “Hey Benny, thanks for not taking me out to the woodshed over that torture thing. I’ll do you a solid and not accuse you of covering up child-rape.”
One of Mark Shea's readers remarks on the same post:
The funniest part is that those who fear theocracy are the same people who are bashing the Pope for not smacking down Bush. If the Pope gets involved in American politics, it's theocracy. If he doesn't, he gets blasted for not condemning torture. B16 cannot win. Thankfully he does what he does regardless.
Two responses: anyone who believes that Benedict has no responsibility for the crimes the Church enabled while he was the very apex of ecclesiastical power is in willful denial. Yes, Benedict was the protector and ally of Bernard Law, the man who delayed holding Maciel to account for years, and the careful architect of the strategy to displace blame by holding celibate gay seminarians responsible. He is a man who even now argues that the broader culture is really responsible for the criminal cover-ups in the church he helped run for decades. As for Mark Shea's reader, torture is not a political intervention. It is a profound, universal moral issue that the whole world knows is at the core of what is rotten in the Bush administration. Benedict punted in speaking truth to power. He is as much a politician in this respect as Bush.
(Photo: Benedict XVI and his inseparable aide, Georg Ganschwein, by Franco Origilia/Getty.)
Vladimir Nabokov may have had a touch of clairvoyance. His novel Pale Fire's entire
structure is the posthumous publishing of a character's (believed to be
unfinished) poem and the self-appointed editor's extensive commentary
about said poem. The commentary has little to do with the poem
itself, but rather focuses on the editor's quest to find himself in the
lines of a poem that is clearly not about him. It's Nabokov, so
naturally it's more complicated then that, but there is a definite
sense that Nabokov considers one man's interpretation of another man's
work to be more about the interpreter then the interpreted.
Presumably, Dimitri Nabokov, who is also a writer as well as a translator of his father's work, will provide commentary since The Original of Laura
was never finished. While I'm sure that Dimitri will serve his
father's memory far better then Charles Kinbote served John Shade in Pale Fire,
I couldn't help but think about that novel and think that Dimitri
publishing his father's work is much more about him then it is about
Vladimir.
That being said, as a person who just adores Vladimir Nabokov's work, I
would have had a very hard time destroying his words. I do feel for
Dimitri, although I would hope that I would have followed my father's
wishes.
... when Bill Clinton was a less impressive version of Barack Obama. Via Drudge, this is a classic NYT piece from 1992:
Eventually, most of the superdelegates are likely to back Mr. Clinton, if only because there is no place else for them to go. But they will do so "with extreme reluctance," one said, and the delay and the grudging spirit makes it harder for Mr. Clinton to move his campaign onto a higher plateau, free of character issues.
It's a useful reminder that many people saw the moral deficiencies of Bill Clinton long before Ken Starr poisoned the wells. And that young and new candidates will always - and not unreasonably - prompt bouts of buyers' remorse, skepticism and scrutiny.
I just read your blog posting on Limbaugh's view that he is
responsible for Hillary's win in PA. I am one of the individuals that
changed his/her party registration from Republican to Democrat. I did
this because the Republican ideals of rational government,
fiscal responsibility, and states' rights over federal rights have been
thrown out for religious fanaticism, federal control over every action,
and spending out of control. I changed my registration to vote for
change...to vote for Obama.
It is cute that Limbaugh saw that the
electorate is upset with the Republicans and made up this Operation
Chaos as a means of attempting to jump on the band wagon, but the
underlying effect is clear. People are not changing from Republican to
Democrat to assist the Republican Party in the fall. They are changing
their party registrations because they lost faith in the Republicans to
lead. If Limbaugh and others do not wake up to this fact, they will be
given another great election result such as 2006.
Operation Chaos should be called Operation Smoke Screen.
That's what the Hannitys and Buchanans and Kristols don't get: the next generation just isn't trapped in the 1970s:
"Harold and Kumar’s attitude toward racism is more frustration at having
to deal with idiocy than moral outrage. We try to create a world where
racism is stupid."
The graphic on the costs of Obama's and Clinton's proposals from the WaPo editorial page is a useful and sobering one. The bottom line:
While both Democratic candidates would spend far more on new programs than Mr. McCain would, the Republican's proposals for new tax cuts dwarf the Democrats' plans. The Democrats are clearer than Mr. McCain -- though that's a relative term -- about how they would foot the bill. Still, no one's winning any awards this campaign season for fiscal responsibility.
The lack of courage on both sides is pretty dispiriting. Meanwhile, the debt mounts ...
Now that I am recovering from
the Pennsylvania Hangover, I thought I would share how I have resolved
myself to this continued drama, as one of your typical readers.
Since it is painfully obvious that She Who Must Not Be Named is going
to take this battle into Denver (if not into November, as Jon Stewart
"joked"), I that it is not the cowardice of the superdelegates to put an end to this, but
the nearly unspoken necessity of sitting back and allowing the Clinton Campaign to play
it out to its tragic conclusion. To allow that campaign to hang itself.
Otherwise, Clinton will be a "victim". Again. This time it would not be
the Great Right Wing Conspiracy, but their own party that has denied
them. By allowing her to undeniably LOSE this nomination, with as
little manipulative involvement possible, she will be forced to accept
the truth of the matter, without relying on conspiracy excuses. She and her supporters can not be allowed to lose this with the slightest possibility of feeling robbed.
There is the possibility that she will irreversibly bloody Obama up
before the end, and that would be part of the Greek tragedy of the
Clinton legacy. However, as much of a shame it might be to sacrifice a
"new voice" in politics, at least a destructive voice in present day
politics might finally be silenced.
The key truth about the Clintons is that they are strongest when being attacked. It was Gingrich that gave Clinton purpose and direction in the mid-1990s; and it was Ken Starr who gave them a life-line in thr late 1990s. They are geniuses at pivoting off those who attack them. So the real answer to the Clintons is to let them collapse on their own terms, to watch them fail to get the necessary votes and delegates to win and desperately try to leverage the constructive forces of their opponent to gain back the White House.
Every push against them only strengthens them more. Obama needs to restate his core positive message, reach out to independents, Republicans, Hispanics, blacks and the young, and get out of the Clintons' sociopathic path. You only get bloodied if you fight them. And watching them self-destruct, slowly and by their own efforts, is the only way they will not turn defeat into some kind of Pyrrhic victory.
And when they finally go down under the weight of their own cynicism, what a joyous day that will be. That day is coming. And a new hope lies beyond it.
Gates starts out miles ahead simply by not being the man he replaced at the Pentagon, the odious Donald Rumsfeld. And even though Gates has implemented essentially the same Administration policy and administered the same gigantic budget that Rumsfeld left him, he has defended and explained his policies in ways suggesting that he has noticed, thought about, and attempted to address opposing views. This is in contrast to the haughty sneering-away of opposition so familiar from the Rumsfeld days.
"Who would I be a good vice presidential pick for? I don't know if the Libertarian Party has had, since its foundation—and I say this most modestly—a bigger fish. They'd had Ron Paul and Bob Barr: Two congressmen. Two congressmen do not make a senator. Four congressman, maybe, make a senator, but not two congressmen." - Mike Gravel, in an interview with Dave Weigel.
A woman cries after the reading of the not guilty verdict in the Sean Bell shooting trial outside of the State Supreme Court April 25, 2008 in Queens borough of New York City. Bell died during the firing of 50 police bullets outside a club in Jamaica, Queens on November 25, 2006. The three detectives were found not guilty on all charges in the shooting death of Bell. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images.
All I can tell you, Jennifer, is that I think it's very clear who Hamas
wants to be the next president of the United States. So apparently has
Danny Ortega and several others. I think that people should understand
that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare....If senator Obama is favored
by Hamas I think people can make judgments accordingly.
Ugh. It's not fair to tarnish Obama by associating him with a soundbite from Jeremiah Wright; but it is fine to associate him with Hamas.
In February I was a 55 year old white woman trying to choose a candidate, feeling drawn to Hillary. Then I listened to Obama speak and I was inspired. I felt as I had not felt since March 16, 1968 (my 16th birthday) when Bobby Kennedy announced he was running for president. So I chose Obama and volunteered to help his campaign.
I canvassed in my local area, Dresher. As I spoke to my neighbors, my heart sank. Several people told me the country wasn't ready for a black president. One person right out said he would never vote for a black person for president. (Stunned, I stammered that he was only half black.) One person said "the blacks get everything already." Three of my Jewish neighbors (and friends) said that they believed Obama either was a Muslim or had Muslim ties.
"I voted for Hillary," said the first person I ran into, Shelley Goodman, a 53-year-old psychologist walking her coonhound, Blue. "I don't think this country is ready for a black president." This again.
Goodman has adopted or fostered a household of mixed-race children, and so she is speaking from a giant heart. "In this country, you are not half-black," she went on. "If you are any black, you are all black. We have a very skewed view in the East Coast. We think everyone thinks as open-mindedly as we do."
And so the "open-minded" reward the closed-minded. Go figure.
I know that it's possible to infer cynicism on the part of McCain and the GOP with respect to the North Carolina race-baiting ad. But I don't share that cynicism and believe McCain is sincere in not liking or appreciating this kind of politics. With a couple of exceptions (the South Carolina moment that McCain himself has regretted), McCain just isn't a Rove-style sleazebag. That's why his candidacy remains one that many of us alienated from the GOP in recent years still take seriously. Money quote:
"They're not listening to me because they're out of touch with
reality and the Republican Party. We are the party of Abraham Lincoln,
Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and this kind of campaigning is
unacceptable... I've done everything that I can to repudiate and to see that this kind of campaigning does not continue."
Good for him. If Republicans cannot win on the merits of their own policies and are reduced to the guilt-by-association racist smears on Obama, they deserve to lose.
An orthodox view. From the perspective of Catholic moral teaching, it seems to me that a government that allows abortion to take place is less morally culpable than a government that itself practises and defends a grave moral evil. The silence of the Bush-theocons on this is staggering, but to long-term observers of their political agenda, unsurprising.
I haven't been able to reach your site for about a week now. I can get
to it using a proxy server, but either you or The Atlantic said
something that the CCP didn't find appealing.
Yes, others have told me as much as well. I blame Fallows.
I was appalled by Wieseltier's suggestion that you were an
anti-Semite -- anyone who has followed your work closely would cringe
at the idea -- and am now pleased that he did the right thing to
clarify his knee-jerk comment. And your response this morning furthers
the debate, a good thing. I'd like to take that argument a step
further, though.
When you offer a detailed critique of evangelical
Protestantism in America, I may agree with the vast majority of your
points (and I do), but I know you're writing about that culture with no
lived-in knowledge of the
complexities and nuances of why evangelical Protestants think and
behave in the ways they do. That's why some of the Obama smears in
Pennsylvania shocked you but didn't surprise me in the least -- I could
see them coming from miles away. Similarly, I could offer my own
opinions on the narcissistic impulses of certain strains of Catholicism
or the Kristol/Lieberman faction of American Jews who conflate this
country's interests with Israel's, but those opinions, informed or not,
would lack a deeper ring of truth because I haven't lived the experience. That's
why a writer like Reza Aslan is so important -- he can describe and
interpret the dangers of militant Islam and the larger internal
conflict within Islam in far more illuminating ways than, say,
Wieseltier or Peretz.
Benedict will be pissed: masturbation keeps men healthier - and certainly at lower risk for prostate cancer. But it's been a long time since the Catholic church's claims about "natural law" were actually reflected in what we empirically know about nature. About 700 years, actually.
"One in ten voters say they changed party registration to vote in this
year's Pennsylvania primary. Ten percent of the vote is huge. That
would be five times the past high for a crossover vote with a closed
primary. That's an absolutely huge number -- and once again, ladies
and gentlemen, that is Operation Chaos," – Rush Limbaugh, one of the Clinton campaign's most important supporters.
Leave aside the actual merits of the current neocon-Clinton-Limbaugh campaign against Obama - that he's linked to the Weather Underground, that his pastor is a "racist", that he cannot appeal to Reagan Democrats, that he's another McGovern, that he's a closet Communist, etc. etc. What strikes me is the energy with which these pundits actually derive from these associations and debates. It's quite clear that they really anger up the blood of a certain class of people. And yet they don't me, particularly. They seem pretty irrelevant to me, in the context of an election about a major war, a teetering economy, a weakened constitution, a mounting level of debt, a plummeting dollar, and a warming planet. I understand that this is politics, that these are vulnerabilities of associations, that these issues have some traction and a sliver of justification, but I still can't get that worked up about them. Why, I wonder?
When you think about these controversies, you being to realize just how generationally-focused they are. For a lot of people under 40, the Weather Underground sound like an Austin Powers out-take or a rock band. Even if you come to the conclusion (as I do) that William Ayers is a scumbag, the issue is not a dispositive one. Ditto the obvious racial panic around Obama - about Wright, about Farrakhan, about affirmative action. This was Pat Buchanan's view:
In some ways, that's the electoral question for Democratic super-delegates. The Clintons have managed to create something like the dynamic of previous red-blue general elections within the Democratic base itself. But that makes the base of their support white working class ethnics - the Reagan Democrats. But how would those voters lean if asked to pick between McCain and Clinton? Surely a Scots-Irish veteran hero is more competitive with them than Ms Wellesley. But in the other key swing group - independents - Obama and McCain are much more evenly matched. Moreover, Obama brings a massive advantage among the young and African-Americans and among Republican-leaning well-off independents. Hard to dispute this:
The congressional Democratic leaders don't draw the same conclusion from Pennsylvania and earlier contests that many observers think they do: that Obama's candidacy is fatally flawed because he has as yet been largely unable to win the votes of working class whites.
They point out something that has been largely overlooked in all the talk: The Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries were closed primaries. One key congressional Democrat says, "Yes, he doesn't do really well with a big part of the Democratic base, but she doesn't do well with independents, who will be critical to success in November."
Minnesota, Virginia, Colorado: these states may be where the real battle will lie.
"It's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense. I don't have anything additional to say. It's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense, I don't have anything more to say ... it's nonsense. I reject it categorically," - John McCain referring to his endorser, John Hagee's view that Katrina was payback for gays and sins in New Orleans.
Abercrombie & Fitch denies credit for the Obama speech trio:
Tom Lennox, VP-corporate communications for A&F, said the company doesn't "seek product placement at all." He went on: "We appreciate the exposure, but can not take credit for it. So, thanks to the Obama campaign for this great product placement. We wish we had thought of it."
"I finally understand the party nostalgia for Reagan.
Everyone speaks of him now, but it wasn't that way in 2000, or 1992, or
1996, or even '04. I think it is a manifestation of dislike for and
disappointment in Mr. Bush. It is a turning away that is a turning
back. It is a looking back to conservatism when conservatism was clear,
knew what it was, was grounded in the facts of the world," - Peggy Noonan, WSJ.
April 20, 2008 - April 26, 2008
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