Wednesday, April 22, 2009
The Republican Party: Defenders of Torture
Because the Republicans are now explicitly defending torture under Bush and Cheney (while using the euphemism, "enhanced interrogation techniques"), since it allegedly succeeded in getting information useful in stopping terrorist attacks (which of course cannot be disclosed), they are implicitly asserting that the ends justify the means. But if the same people who choose the means also define the ultimate ends (i.e. win a nebulous and perpetual "war on terror"), then how does even that justification become an enforceable standard? It's just another way of saying that if they have power, the Republicans will do anything to achieve what they have decided is in the national interest. This is a road to the same authoritarianism that they accuse, rightly or wrongly, Iran and Venezuela of practicing. So, they abandon morality in public life even as they demand that we practice their version of it in our private lives (e.g. stop being gay, practice abstinence), and they commit the rankest hypocrisy by asking for state power to torture you if you're suspected of being a terrorist, even as, ridiculously, they accuse President Obama --- who refuses to torture -- of being a dictator. This is a political party in an advanced stage of serious alienation from any rational standards of consistency, logic or public ethics. It has also abandoned respect for the rule of law and rendered itself unfit for national power so long as its present leaders and thinkers would set the agenda.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Cheney is contemptible
Comment on "Cheney Slams Obama Again, Calls Overseas Trips 'Disturing'", on The Huffington Post - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/20/cheney-slams-obama-again_n_189268.html
Watch him on television and the first thing you notice about Dick Cheney is his corporate slickness, oozing a calm and reasonable manner, as if he were still CEO of Halliburton. But that masks a deep-seated, unreconstructed reactionary temperament. What first marked him out as someone who was willing to subordinate globally accepted standards of decency and human rights to his insistence on American hostility to perceived enemies everywhere was his vote in 1986 as a member of Congress against a resolution calling for the release from prison of Nelson Mandela, the leader then of the movement that eventually liberated South Africa from the racist, fascist grip of the apartheid regime, which had subordinated and brutalized its black population for a century. At the time, the Reagan Administration believed that Mandela’s movement was dominated by communists, a line of propaganda peddled by the Administration’s white friends in Pretoria. So it is no surprise now that Cheney is savaging Barack Obama, another man with an African name who, like Mandela, understands the real meaning of human rights and, unlike Cheney, comprehends the higher aspirations of the world's peoples. Dick Cheney helped plunge America into infamy with his advocacy of torture and helped persuade George W. Bush to waste $2 trillion on an unnecessary war in Iraq that killed or injured over 31,000 Americans and killed over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians. He is beneath political contempt. He is not fit to shine Barack Obama's shoes.
Watch him on television and the first thing you notice about Dick Cheney is his corporate slickness, oozing a calm and reasonable manner, as if he were still CEO of Halliburton. But that masks a deep-seated, unreconstructed reactionary temperament. What first marked him out as someone who was willing to subordinate globally accepted standards of decency and human rights to his insistence on American hostility to perceived enemies everywhere was his vote in 1986 as a member of Congress against a resolution calling for the release from prison of Nelson Mandela, the leader then of the movement that eventually liberated South Africa from the racist, fascist grip of the apartheid regime, which had subordinated and brutalized its black population for a century. At the time, the Reagan Administration believed that Mandela’s movement was dominated by communists, a line of propaganda peddled by the Administration’s white friends in Pretoria. So it is no surprise now that Cheney is savaging Barack Obama, another man with an African name who, like Mandela, understands the real meaning of human rights and, unlike Cheney, comprehends the higher aspirations of the world's peoples. Dick Cheney helped plunge America into infamy with his advocacy of torture and helped persuade George W. Bush to waste $2 trillion on an unnecessary war in Iraq that killed or injured over 31,000 Americans and killed over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians. He is beneath political contempt. He is not fit to shine Barack Obama's shoes.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Why Republicans Still Oppose Seating Al Franken
On his blog on the Think Progress web site yesterday, Matt Yglesias was trying to understand how and why the Republican Party is still pouring energy into former Senator Norm Coleman's futile litigation to prevent his Democratic opponent Al Franken from being seated in the U.S. Senate, in the wake of a Minnesota court's declaration that Franken won the election. Yglesias marveled at “the level of party discipline that the Republicans have been able to muster in 2009″ which he calls “really impressive.”
But that praise is misplaced, when you consider two underlying facts. First, there is no coherent substantive vision of what the Republican Party stands for, in the wake of their removal from national power last November. In the absence of substance, disputing process (e.g. a close election) is a substitute for thinking. It’s also an unconscious way of refighting 2008 and trying to get a different result. Second, the extremist sloganeering by broadcast bullies like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck has frightened into silence virtually all rational thinkers in the Republican elite, so the only outlet for the party's energy is trying to obstruct Democrats’ consolidation of power and their recasting of the purposes of government, through legislative or legal stunts as in Minnesota or absurdly ascribing socialist motives to a president whose ideology is quite unfrightening. Meanwhile puerile projects like the Fox News-promoted "tea-bagging" protests further define the president's opponents as grasping at straws while pleading for the world to please stop believing him.
It is one thing to muster party unity in the cause of constructive change. It is quite another to apply it to obstruction. The latter is only going to deepen the Republican Party’s association with negative, disruptive news. Until rational thinkers and speakers who have constructive ideas related to real public needs emerge among Republicans, they and their antics will be merely sound and fury, transfixing broadcast reporters and bloggers but very few other Americans outside their dogmatic base.
But that praise is misplaced, when you consider two underlying facts. First, there is no coherent substantive vision of what the Republican Party stands for, in the wake of their removal from national power last November. In the absence of substance, disputing process (e.g. a close election) is a substitute for thinking. It’s also an unconscious way of refighting 2008 and trying to get a different result. Second, the extremist sloganeering by broadcast bullies like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck has frightened into silence virtually all rational thinkers in the Republican elite, so the only outlet for the party's energy is trying to obstruct Democrats’ consolidation of power and their recasting of the purposes of government, through legislative or legal stunts as in Minnesota or absurdly ascribing socialist motives to a president whose ideology is quite unfrightening. Meanwhile puerile projects like the Fox News-promoted "tea-bagging" protests further define the president's opponents as grasping at straws while pleading for the world to please stop believing him.
It is one thing to muster party unity in the cause of constructive change. It is quite another to apply it to obstruction. The latter is only going to deepen the Republican Party’s association with negative, disruptive news. Until rational thinkers and speakers who have constructive ideas related to real public needs emerge among Republicans, they and their antics will be merely sound and fury, transfixing broadcast reporters and bloggers but very few other Americans outside their dogmatic base.
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