I've been overwhelmed by lots of thoughtful emails on the racial question in this campaign. Here's one particularly concrete and honest one about unconscious attitudes among liberals:
I'm white, and I live in Ann
Arbor, Michigan, where I've been for all but a few of the
past twenty-five years. In the last few years, I've been heavily
involved in a youth basketball program that my twelve year-old son
participates in. The teams in the program are overwhelmingly
African-American, and they play in leagues and tournaments throughout
southeastern Michigan and in some neighboring states. Many of the teams
they play are predominantly or exclusively African-American, many are
all white. In watching these teams compete, as both a spectator and
coach, I've had a revelation about how many white people have
reflexively suspicious, if not antagonistic, attitudes about
African-Americans.
For example, consider the differing reactions to games where one
team blows out another. Competition levels are often uneven in youth
leagues, and scores of 45-10 are common. In a Detroit league, when one
African-American team dominates another by that kind of score, no-one
objects. It's another day in the gym. In a league in almost-all-white
Livingston County, a white-on-white blowout elicits the same reaction.
But how do the losing parents and coaches react when an
African-American team blows out a white team? There's a palpable sense
of anger and resentment. The winning team is accused of playing dirty
or "too physical" or of running up the score, or of having ringers who
are really older than the maximum age, or (most revealingly) of being
"thugs."
These prejudiced responses come from whites in places like Howell,
a town with a long and storied tradition of KKK activity, or Livonia, a
quintessential enclave of middle-class Reagan Democrats. But white
left wingers from Ann Arbor react the same way. Exactly.
There is little the U.S. government can do to make gasoline less expensive and nothing it can do about the weather in Australia. The production of ethanol, on the other hand, is directly related to government policies that subsidize it and require its use in gasoline. Absent government intervention, there would be little demand for ethanol. It has a lower energy content than gasoline, it is not significantly cheaper, and it is more difficult to transport to points of sale.
I have to say that the impact on carbon emissions of ethanol has changed my mind about this. This subsidized fuel is actually hurting the climate. That wasn't the intention, of course. But it has become the result. And it has also helped tip millions of the poor across the planet into a bare-knuckled fight for affordable food.
Isn’t it crazy how all the hope you’ve had for
your country your whole life can be drained out of you in one primary election
cycle? I’m 26 and if this thing takes the turn it looks like it’s
going to take, this will be the very last time I submit myself to this. I’m
not built for this sort of disappointment. After the last 8 years, I can’t
believe we are still trapped in the same gutter of fear and deception.
Maybe
everyone was right about Obama. Maybe I have
been naïve. The Clintons
knew all along it would come to this. Maybe they didn’t expect it now,
but they knew they’d have to get the White House this way. They’re
just breaking out their General Election game early. And it’s genius. They
ARE monsters.
But they are also wrong and it really is time to chill about the Clintons (memo to self: take your own advice).
Robert Kaplan explains the significance of Petraeus's promotion:
...the personnel changes indicate that the administration is desperate to show enough improvement in Iraq by the end of the year that an incoming Democratic president wouldn't dare reduce troop levels precipitously and risk being blamed for a dramatic security meltdown. To wit, these appointments demonstrate that, irrespective of who will be the next president, the presidential transition has already begun -- on this administration's terms.
The New York Times reports this afternoon that the mother of all political deals may be coming together in Baghdad, one that would bring Iraq's largest Sunni political bloc back into the Shiite-led government.This is potentially huge news. If this grand bargain goes through (and there is some reason for worry), it would represent a substantial step toward rapprochement between the Sunnis and the Maliki government and toward the formation of a viable, lasting national government. It could also boost the prospects for provincial elections in the fall.
About one thing I wish to be piercingly clear: I do not believe that
Andrew Sullivan is an anti-Semite. No, it is more than a matter of my
own belief. I know as an incontrovertible fact, based on my long
acquaintance with him and his writings, that he is not an anti-Semite. Of course he is not an anti-Semite. I should have said so before I pounced.
The valid question at issue is the following:
Why a Catholic cannot call a Muslim a fraud or a Jew call a Protestant
a liar or an agnostic call a believer a cynic, or why one's identity
should have any bearing upon the truth or falsity of anything one says.
I take that point. Yes, in some respects, anyone is at liberty to call anyone else a fraud and their own identity can be irrelevant to that judgment. What I was trying to get at - not so artfully - is the following point. When a Catholic calls another Catholic a bad Catholic or a phony Catholic, it is evident that he is fighting over what both acknowledge is the same corpus of belief. They are both trying to get at the truth they should share. There is an understandable inference of sincerity and good faith. But if, say, a Muslim were to call a Catholic a fraud, it is not so clear that he is arguing out of sympathy for the common belief. And if he also has a political advantage in playing up divisions within another faith community, one's suspicion of cynicism and opportunism on his part should ratchet up a notch. That was my point. In retrospect, I think I over-stated it. But I don't think it's without merit either.
Dropping out now nearly guarantees that he’ll be elected president in 2012. Here’s the roadmap:
Obama drops out next week, stating that although
he could almost certainly win the nomination by fighting it out until
the convention in August, he is simply not willing to drag the party
through a battle that will cripple its chances against John McCain. He
then pledges to help support Sen. Clinton in her bid—with full
knowledge that she will not take him up on the offer.
In one stroke, Obama will regain his messiah creds
by making the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the party. His
followers will be furious. The mere mention of Clinton’s name will
provoke unspeakable acts. They will abandon Clinton in numbers
sufficient to hand McCain the election in November.
The trouble is: it would be a betrayal of his supporters and his message. And there is a golden rule in politics: never give the Clintons a life-line. They will use it to strangle you the minute they have the opportunity.
"No matter how many kicks the rest of us find in such famously fun primary states as Indiana and South Dakota, it's going to be McCain versus Obama in 2008. I believe the cement set around the Clinton coffin last Friday. The Obama campaign announced it had received the support of former Sens. Sam Nunn of Georgia and David Boren of Oklahoma," - Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal.
As an amateur observer of human social behavior, I am quite impressed by the steel wall of aversion that some Obama supporters put up whenever they're confronted by something that does not fit with their established perception of Hillary Clinton -- namely that there is just NO way that Hillary can raise that much money in such a short period of time...because she is, well, Hillary. The fundamental attribution error is at work: it must be a lie because Hillary is a liar; the situation -- a 9 point victory in Pennsylvania, or the roughly half of the Democratic electorate who supporters her -- well, it matters much less.
In general with the Clintons, however, it is safe to assume that what they say is a lie until proven otherwise.
Vladimir Nabokov's son allows the publication of something his father never wanted to see the light of day. It's hard to control what people make of or do with your work after you're dead. But the important thing is: we know the author's intention. And readers can weigh that in the balance.
I've been following your debate with McArdle and Larison about war
crimes and total war with interest. I think it's misguided to conflate
things like Night Area Bombing of Nazi Germany, or even the use of the
Atomic Bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with things like torture camps.
They're just entirely different in kind. Strategic bombing in World
War II fulfilled clear strategic objectives in fighting very powerful
industrialized nations: it weakened the will of the people to fight; it
destroyed industrial capacity and killed factory workers; and it
demonstrated the severe consequences of starting wars. I put things
like this on par with General Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea
during the Civil War, in which he burnt down houses and destroyed
essential infrastructure. His professed aim was to: "make war so
terrible that they will be ready to exhaust all peaceful remedies
before taking up arms." These aims--a speedy end to war and the
prevention of future war--are legitimate and real: the south has not
fought again, nor (yet) have Germany and Japan.
Torture and torture camps are an entirely different aspect of war,
and in my view they are unjustifiable. The difference is that
torture's aim is as much humiliation and dehumanization as it is
to obtain information.
A personal anecdote: I went to a Quaker High
School, and when we attacked Afghanistan, many people at the school
expressed disapproval at our Meeting for Worship (the Quaker religious
service). I stood to defend the war. I'm still proud I did that.
What I'm not proud of was the words I used. I called the men we were
fighting "animals, who deserved to be treated like animals." This is
the mentality that not only justifies torture but makes it appealing:
to reduce your enemies to pathetic creatures; to at once demonstrate
your superiority and to make someone--anyone will do--the vessel for
your own pain and your own humiliation. It's a psychological form of
warfare all the way down, and it dehumanizes all parties.
So it confuses the issue to talk about strategic bombing as being
comparable to the torture regime. Strategic bombing and the like aims
to end war and prevent war. The torture regime is a war on persons and
an exercise in power and domination for its own sake. If we can't make
this distinction, it's difficult to see where the Allies and the Nazis
would part ways in our moral calculus.
The candidate the Clintons and Rove say is weak has a 52 - 38 percent lead over McCain. Clinton's lead is 5 percent. There's a reason the GOP establishment wants Clinton. And the "he's a commie leftist God-Hating racist" line of attack hasn't worked too well:
Sixty percent (60%) of Minnesota voters have a favorable opinion of
Obama, up from 57% a month ago. McCain’s favorables are at 56%,
Clinton’s at 51%.
I'm currently reading this collection of the correspondence between two
of my favorite writers, "Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas
Merton and Czeslaw Milosz," that spans the last 10 years of Merton's
life. It's a fascinating read that for some reason is not currently in
print (though used copies can be found quite easily online). When I
read the following from Merton I had to chuckle. I guess people are
people, whether it's 1960 (when this letter was written) or today:
"It is quite true that I ought to speak more with the accents of my
time. They are serious, they are not just a pose, the bitterness of
people is not just something to be dismissed. I detest the fake
optimism that is current in America, including in American religion. I
shall continue to think about these things."
I'm surprised that, so far, no one's had the temerity to point out that compared to his CENTCOM predecessors, Gen. Petraeus' credentials are underwhelming for such a strategically vital regional command. Admiral Fallon's prior regional command experience was too deep to count. Gen. Abizaid did prior staff tours in the Office of the Army Chief of Staff, the Southern European Task Force, and the U.S. Army Europe HQ. Gen. Franks commanded the 3rd Army for three years prior to taking over CENTCOM, and Gen. Zinni was CENTCOM Deputy C-i-C for nine months before assuming the top spot.
The bulk of Petraeus' experience, meanwhile, has been in operations and training (which is what you'd expect for someone who has demonstrated such tactical brilliance). Challenging as it is, Commander MNF-I is his broadest command to date. Now it could be that Petraeus is, in addition to being a tactical genius, a strategic genius as well. But a case could be made for the argument that, in leapfrogging Adm. Fallon through his personal relationship with President Bush, Petraeus has essentially served as de facto Commander of CENTCOM for the past year and a half. And in that time he has put the Iraq theater ahead of our broader regional interests, and according to many, ahead of the health of the Army.
Contrary to the idea that the F and C words have lost their impact, they seem to me to still have the power not necessarily to shock, but to render the atmosphere charged and discomfiting. Couple them with an insult, and the point becomes even clearer. Far from believing that 21st century swearing is all but meaningless, I'd wager that we all know this: to swear is still to ramp up the force of what's said, and its potential to offend. In short, in the right (or, rather, wrong) context, swearing can still be brutal and non-empathetic - verbal violence, if you will,...
Apply that to the ever-increasing flood of swearing on post-watershed TV, or the ubiquity of the words in your average town and city, and you might arrive at the following conclusion: to take umbrage at all that profanity isn't to ally oneself with the Daily Mail and the successors to Mary Whitehouse, but to understand that vocabulary speaks volumes about prevailing social conditions, and that all our swearing says something very powerful about what a mutually contemptuous, atomised, inarticulate society we're becoming.
For all of Hillary's brand recognition,
institutional advantages (including the ferocious support of a former
president), fund-raising head start and inherent appeal to the party's core
constituency (working class white women), she finds herself on the ropes, in
debt and having to go hugely negative just to stay alive. Does any sane Democrat
really think that this is a viable alternative to Obama?
If this contest were still at the point where momentum, symbolism, and reading tea leaves mattered, Clinton would be in pretty good shape. Everything she has needed to happen is happening now. Obama is getting tougher press coverage and critical examination. He’s also getting rattled a bit, and he didn’t perform well in the recent debate in Philadelphia. Clinton is winning in big, important places, but it’s happening about three months too late.[...]
As long as Clinton is winning, she can’t quit. But even in victory, she isn’t getting any closer to securing the nomination. This political purgatory will continue if she manages to win Indiana but loses North Carolina—hard to drop out but harder to see winning the nomination. If she loses in both states, then her campaign’s donors and creditors, as well as superdelegates and party leaders, are likely to intervene. But that can’t happen as long as she continues to win.
Increasingly, I think this is going to the convention. The Clintons will use Michigan and Florida to argue that they have won the popular vote, that Obama cannot win the general, and that if he is the nominee, they will switch their support (unofficially, of course) to McCain and prepare for 2012. That's who they are. They will never willingly relinquish their power.
A Turkish soldier salutes under a Union Jack during the 93nd anniversary of the World War I campaign of Gallipoli in the Turkish memorial, April 24, 2008 in Gallipoli, Turkey. Some 4,000 Australian and New Zealand soldiers struggled ashore to Gallipoli's narrow beach 93 years ago in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign that would claim more than 130,000 lives, at the edge of this remote peninsula in western Turkey. By Burak Kara/Getty Images.
Four random observations to counter the gloom that many of us are now feeling.
1) Even though we are witnessing a historically bitter and nasty and divisive fight for the Democratic nomination, both Clinton and Obama are currently competitive with McCain nationally. That has got to worry the GOP.
2) One explanation for the Clintons' suicidal behavior (apart from the fact that we have two sociopaths on our hands) is that they believe that the real struggle for the White House is now. They believe that the GOP is doomed this fall and so the prize really is worth risking the implosion of the Democratic party, and alienating an entire generation and most African-Americans for the foreseeable future.
3) I wonder if many in the Rove wing of the GOP (those who supported Romney and Giuliani earlier in this cycle and who want a kind of authoritarian, Christianist conservative politics that McCain actually resists) wouldn't actually prefer a Clinton presidency to a McCain White House. I mean: consider the two likeliest major legislative initiatives of McCain's first year: immigration reform on the Bush model and climate change legislation. Both will drive the Limbaugh-Hewitt base nuts. But a Clinton presidency allows the GOP to regroup around Clinton hatred (they'll get over their temporary love-affair once Obama is destroyed and she's back in power), and unify around an even more extremist platform.
4) It's still very hard to see how Obama loses the nomination. In the end, the Clintons, with any luck, will both expose themselves for what they really are and thereby self-destruct. Know hope.
I did not say that what the Bush administration has done is no different from what any other president has done. I said that what the Bush administration has done was not the result of choosing what Glenn Greenwald called an "aggressive" war in Iraq. (To be distinguished, presumably, from the peaceful, passive sorts of wars that other countries have.)
What the Bush administration has done has been a choice of the Bush administration. They did not have to make it, even after they had gone to Iraq. They could (and did) make those choices even before we went to war in Iraq; they didn't stem from the fact this is a special, bad kind of war that requires torture in a way that other wars don't. Torture is a tactic that works just as well (or as badly) in defensive wars as in other kinds. The decision to do it is not an inevitable outgrowth of invasion. Lots of defending peoples have committed atrocities against their invaders.
I am arguing that it is dangerous to attribute war crimes to the type of war you are waging, because the implication is that when you fight a "good" war, you won't have war crimes. That tilts the calculus too heavily in favor of future wars.
I am not arguing that what the Bush administration did was inevitable, only that at the point when you decide to commit atrocities, the nation is almost never thinking of how the war started, but of the suffering that has come since. We did not firebomb Germany because "they started it"; we firebombed them because they'd killed a lot of people since then.
Larison responds here, while John Schwenkler outlines some of the passages open to misinterpretation.
As a rule, the quality of a movie is inversely correlated with how long it takes to explain the entire plot. That’s why I stay away from movies with titles like Volcano, Inferno, Titanic, and Snakes on a Plane. I feel I have a sense of where those plots are heading.
The award-winning film I just watched could be described as “A bad guy chases another bad guy and kills him.” There were other elements of the movie, but I’m pretty sure they were irrelevant. Admittedly, there was great artistry in this movie, on many levels. But I don’t think it is fair that no one warned me how it would make me feel.
He recommends adding a few elements to reviews. I still like an idea Mike Kinsley once had. Instead of the star system, or the thumb system, reviewers should simply calculate whether it was worth the price of the ticket. So a decent $9 movie would get a $9.50 rating. A fantastic movie would get a $20 rating. And some movies would be so bad you would actually have to be paid to watch them: - $6.
I'm not the only one to have been somewhat taken aback by the onslaught of the last few weeks, and trying to make sense of it. A reader writes:
When people tell me horror stories about American racism, I usually
dismiss them as the product of the actions of a very small minority.
See, I moved to Massachusetts from Latin America 8 years ago. I'm 30,
married to a white woman who doesn't think twice about my and my
family's race, and I've been able to work and study and make a good
living in this country with exactly zero opposition or discrimination
from any American of any race I've come across. For me, my ethnic
background has been about as much of an issue as my shoe size in living
a full and productive life in this country.
Then all the attacks on Obama's religion, his pastor, his skin color,
his culture, et cetera started coming out.
It does help explain why the biggest brand name in Democratic politics has never been able to close the deal in this primary season, and why a freshman senator will win the majority of pledged delegates:
My wife and I are what you would call Obama's core demographic. I'm 27, she's 28; we are both working toward earning our doctorates; and we've both lived through, but didn't really experience, Bill Clinton's presidency. I think we have both developed a well-nurtured sense of doom about the future, driven perhaps by predictions of global warming and the seemingly unending War on Terror that President Bush has promised will be the defining struggle of our generation. I know we're going to be taxed to the hilt at some point to pay for that enormous national debt, and I know that our own finances have probably relied a little too much on the credit card and student loan.
It's difficult and often hyperbolic to define a generation's attitudes toward anything, let alone something as complex as voting behavior. But, I do believe this election is being driven by an Obama voting bloc that, to a certain extent, blames the anxieties that I mentioned above on our parent's generation.
Thomas Banchoff considers the Pope's and Bush's relationship. The president is keen to advance certain factions in a religious faith he does not share - for his own political purposes. That instrumental use of religion is at the core of today's "conservatism". But Banchoff notes that Benedict doesn't share Bush's political theology in all respects:
[For Benedict], political freedom is not God’s gift; it is a practical task, a way to
protect and promote the inherent dignity and equality of human beings.
Its advancement is a joint challenge to believers and non-believers
alike, to be addressed through patient diplomacy and dialogue, not
through the application of force.
It was striking to me that the Pope refused to address the president's authorization of inhumane treatment and torture of prisoners. This was not an accidental omission. In return, the president refused to engage the Pope on his own complicity in the systematic cover-up of child rape and teen abuse by his own priests. I have a feeling that history will not be as reticent.
The fusion of the Clinton machine with the Fox network and the Rove axis deepens. McAuliffe praised Fox so shamelessly they used his comments in a promo:
...as President Bush recently acknowledged, the US needs Iran to leave Iraq in a long-term stable condition. It is currently Iran that is not turning up to the offer of meetings. One scenario I’ve heard about is the Finnish solution. At the end of WWII, the US and USSR agreed that while Finland would be a democracy based on liberal capitalism, it would not join NATO and major decisions would be subject to Soviet veto. Although the prospect seems unlikely, Iran is terrified of a revival of Sunni dominance and a renewal of the war which cost a million Iranian dead in the 1980s. The US is also adamant that Iraq’s oil will not fall under Iranian suasion. One solution is therefore for Iraq to become a latterday Finland. Independent, but incapable of menacing its neighbours. That would also assuage Saudi fears about a Shia dominated northern neighbour.
Something like this will be inevitable, if only because, like Finland and the USSR, the geographical proximity and regional pull of Iran on Shia-run Iraq is irresistible - and certainly more powerful than any distant hyper-power's influence. A more normal Iraq in a few years' time - and that's the best possible scenario right now - will be a major advance for Shia Iran. We will have succeeded in moving the faultline between Shia and Sunni a few hundred miles West. In the end, that's what 4,000 military deaths, probably close to 200,000 civilian deaths, and $3 trillion will have accomplished. If we're lucky.
Rove let the cat out of the bag: it's Michigan, stupid:
While all eyes were locked on Pennsylvania for the last six weeks, Clinton was quietly amassing delegates in the Wolverine State. And she was rewarded this past weekend with a significant victory at the district conventions...
Buoyed by party elder support, Clinton seems likely to capture more than 60 percent of the state's 128 pledged delegates, according to an analysis by the Michigan Information & Research Service. Including the 28 superdelegates, which lean heavily in the New York senator's favor, she could win upward of 70 percent of delegates, provided that they're seated with full voting power...
It's becoming apparent that Obama should have consented to a revote here. He certainly wouldn't have lost by 15 percentage points or more; polls have pegged the pair in a dead heat. But Obama seemed spooked that Clintonites put forth the plan and the money, so he quashed the do-over last month.
Now Obama is paying the price in delegates, starting with the Michigan Democratic Party's 15 district conventions on Saturday. The Clinton battle plan was flawlessly executed with an eye toward a contested convention. Their delegate roster is crammed with big names like former Gov. Jim Blanchard and Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero.
Jason is surely right: the only rationale for the GOP to run their race-based ad against Obama in North Carolina now rather than later is to help Clinton. Yes, it's officially directed against locals. But that's obviously a fig-leaf. What we're currently seeing is a strong and building alliance between the Republican party and the Clinton machine to prevent Obama from becoming president.
In fact, on Tuesday night she actually grabbed the
popular vote lead: If you include the Michigan and Florida primary
results, Mrs. Clinton now leads the popular vote by a slim 113,000
votes out of 29,914,356 cast.
Mr. Obama will argue he wasn't on the ballot in
Michigan and didn't campaign in Florida. But don't Democrats want to
count all the votes in all the contests? After all, Mr. Obama took his
name off the Michigan ballot; it isn't something he was forced to do.
And while he didn't campaign in Florida, neither did she.
My italics. The Michigan angle is now the core element of the Clinton struggle - which is why Rove endorsed it this morning.
The great clarifier of this primary season has been the in-gathering of most of the most toxic, cynical forces in American politics - Democrat and Republican - to extinguish the Obama campaign. In the end, Rove and Clinton are in the same party (Washington, Inc.) and play by the same rules (whatever they can say they are at any given moment). But they're losing. And this head-game is pretty much their last gambit.
I don't know how you know that Bill Kristol doesn't really believe Obama is a commie since you
have to take Bill's word for it just as you take Barack's word that he is a
Christian. I firmly believe that Obama is a typical Ivy League atheist who
plays at Christianity in a cynical way to get elected to public office. I
don't believe he is a communist - I suspect he is - but it has not formed into a
full belief yet. Let him speak extemporaneously for the next two weeks
leading up to my neighboring state, Indiana, and things may crystallize.
Go Hillary!
The merging of the memes of the far right and the Clinton campaign is one of the most remarkable aspects of this campaign. I can actually envisage Pat Buchanan endorsing Clinton against McCain this fall. Anything to stop the black commie elitist. And it turns out that many Clinton Democrats now echo Buchanan! If you live long enough ...
A spiritually numbing and uplifting series of portraits taken of the terminally ill in the days before and just after their deaths. This photograph is a posthumous one of Roswitha Pacholleck, 47. Money quote:
“It’s absurd really. It’s only now that I have cancer that, for the first time ever, I really want to live,” Roswitha told me on one of my visits, a few weeks after she had been admitted to the hospice. “They’re really good people here,” she said. “I enjoy every day that I’m still here. Before this my life wasn’t a happy one.”
This is the latest from Michael Savage whom Hugh Hewitt believes is to the right what Chris Matthews is to the left:
"Look who we inherited in this country,
from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Hussein Obama, in one generation. A war
hero to -- a war hero who
commanded the Allied
operations against Nazi Germany was running for the presidency then. Now we
have an unknown stealth candidate who went to a madrassas in Indonesia and, in fact, was a
Muslim despite what Straw Hair will tell you on "Softball." Yes, check it out."
Is Obama a Muslim? Does it matter any more? We are in world of McTruthyism. In that world, Obama is an atheist, a Muslim, a black liberation theologian and a Marxist. Since the truth is irrelevant, they can all be true!
This morning I saw an excerpt from Obama's concession speech in Indiana where he said the following:
"Or this time, we can build on the movement we've started in this
campaign – a movement that's united Democrats, Independents, and
Republicans; a movement of young and old, rich and poor; white, black,
Hispanic, Asian, and Native American, gay and straight."
I have two comments about this:
First,
I cannot recall a politician ever speaking after a loss, proclaiming
that he wants to bring together gays and straights. That is amazing. Can you imagine Hillary ever saying anything like that to a national
audience, especially after a defeat?
Second, the "gay and straight" portion is not included in the text
of the speech on Obama's website. This means either 1) the campaign
removed those words from the edited transcript or 2) (more likely)
Obama's inclusion of "gay and straight" was impromptu. It wasn't
included by the speech writers, but he included it at the spur of the
moment. If this is true, how amazing it is that there is a politician
who is willing to stand up for us gay Americans who have been ignored
for so long. I hope Obama knows how much those three small words that
he included in his speech mean to us.
I noticed it too. Unimaginable coming from a Clinton. And it will, of course, be regarded by the Steyn-Hewitt types as more evidence that Obama is an extreme communist terrorist. But it will be regarded by the next generation as more evidence that Obama is the candidate of the future. He is. Quite how far into the future is what we are finding out.
Of course, it is true when you opt to bomb civilian centers, especially in an indiscriminate, fire-bombing way, that you have at that time chosen to commit war crimes, and it is also true that people who have reconciled themselves to the mass slaughter of civilians have chosen to justify pretty much anything in the name of fighting the enemy. It does not follow that because you have gone to war against another state that you have therefore necessarily embarked on a course that requires you to engage in those war crimes. The choice to commit those crimes comes later, and that choice becomes inevitable only if those crimes are absolutely necessary to achieve victory. In fact, such crimes tend to stand out for just how utterly unnecessary and excessive they are. If you accept the inhuman calculations of total war and unconditional surrender, you might say that war crimes are inevitable, but if you really accept the logic of total war you don’t believe that there is anything done in war that violates morality or law, because total war is the practical negation of both.
And in this war, the president decided to commit war crimes in advance. In fact, torture was, we now know, one of the central strategies of the war. Its rapid spread across every theater of war - and its emergence into the daylight - was not part of the original plan. But once you have sanctioned something at the very top, the limits on those at the bottom, always vulnerable, are just blown away.
Almost all working class folks have about the same knowledge of
politics as you and I have about cars. Which is to say, on one level,
quite a lot, but it's not what they devote their lives to
understanding. So, as we do in the case of cars, they turn to other
mechanisms, such as brand loyalty, to make their decisions.
What they know about Clinton is that she was a part of the
Administration that spent eight years talking about issues that were
important to them and presiding over an era of peace and prosperity.
So what they are going on here is familiarity and positive experiences,
the same thing that I do when I buy only Japanese cars. This is a
perfectly reasonable way of going about doing things even if I might
make a mistake and select a very high quality Japanese car (Hillary in
this analogy) instead of a surprisingly better this year in spite of
lack of experience American car (Obama). They are not are suckers who
are fooled by Hillary's Crown Royal shot (perhaps if it had been JD) or
whether Obama's "bitter" comment represents the totality of his views
any more than I am a sucker who is fooled (or influenced at all) by
television advertisements for cars.
I found out that a friend supported Clinton last night. I was stunned. I asked him why. He said he liked the 1990s, they were good times, he'd like them back. That was it. He had no real feelings about Obama, but he knew the Clinton name and associated it with good times. I pushed further. That was it. He's a man who isn't too interested in politics but knew enough to back the familiar. It may be that simple.
As with other public polemicists, arguments for or against any issue become arguments for or against him. His starting point is always confrontation, his procedure to wrestle out contradiction, his endpoint a position of certainty. It's that preternatural capacity for certainty, carried through the velocity and elegance of his writing, which has made him the most scintillating and disturbing British journalist of the '68 generation. He is not exaggerating much when he says: "The world I live in is one where I have five quarrels a day, each with someone who really takes me on over something; and if I can't get into an argument, I go looking for one, to make sure I trust my own arguments, to hone them."
I realize that my major difference with Hitch is less ideological or political - we have both mutated over the years in response to a changing world - than temperamental. I love arguing and I'm resigned to the fact that war is sometimes a necessary evil. But in the end, I like calm in my private life and would be only too happy to live in a world where conflict were less constant and in which the peaceful activities overtake the martial ones. I loved the 1990s. I didn't see them as decadent or somehow amoral. Deep down, I'm anti-war. Deep down, I suspect Hitch isn't. And that's why neoconservatism, while analytically perceptive in the past, does not ultimately appeal to me. You have to love war to be a real neocon.
"Make no mistake, there are people in the United States who despise
America... hate America... and hate our way of life. Barack Hussein
Obama is THEIR CANDIDATE and they will do everything in their power to
make sure that patriotic Americans do not understand exactly how
dangerous Barack Hussein Obama really is. They'll hide his record and
his past and they'll tar-and-feather his opposition," - Floyd Brown, creator of the Willie Horton ads, asking fro money from the Hewitt-Newsmax-WND right.
April 20, 2008 - April 26, 2008
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