“Hillary Clinton’s not going anywhere,” Mr. McAuliffe said. “Hillary’s going to one place. She’s going to Denver as the Democratic Party nominee.”
From the Times on Friday.
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Linda Chavez wrote in an article that originally appeared in the New York Post about “Liberal patriotism” that real patriotism understands these simple facts:
Our elected officials don’t make America great, nor do temporal policies. America is great because of its people, its defining institutions and its freedoms.
As a liberal and a patriot, I agree with Ms. Chavez. At least in this instance. But somehow, Ms. Chavez manages to praise America’s “defining institutions and its freedoms” ((Which must obviously include the Congress, the courts, the laws of the land, and the Bill of Rights.)) while endorsing the power of the executive branch to break the law, violate the freedoms of its citizens without due process, violate the Bill of Rights, and even torture. Ms. Chavez’s understanding of patriotism itself is so tortured that she manages to decry – at a full column’s length – a candidate’s spouse’s off-the-cuff remark as demonstrating a nefarious anti-freedom-ism while applauding that the Attorney General, in his considered testimony, refused to reject “cruel and inhuman treatment” of prisoners as is Constitutionally required of him.
Somehow, “freedom” – in the sense Ms. Chavez uses the term – has nothing to do with violating civil liberties. And upholding the “defining institutions” of America sometimes requires breaking the law. Those who seek to uphold the law – or who are embarrassed by the blatant lawlessness – are not considered patriots. Instead, they “put politics before the national interest” and give “aid and comfort to the enemy” while trying to “hamper the military’s ability to fight…effectively.” There is a more sympathetic way to view Ms. Chavez’s inflammatory and extreme rhetoric but she certainly doesn’t encourage anyone who disagrees with her in the slightest to attempt to find it.
To some extent, I ask myself: why do I even care about what this woman is writing? She may be wrong; she may be using her position as a syndicated columnist to promote lies and unfairly attack good people. Isn’t it a standard “conservative” line that liberals are in fact traitors by their very nature? ((See anything Ann Coulter has said in the past decade, and much of what Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity have said.)) But at this point, is it even newsworthy that a “conservative” political commenter regularly calls the majority of Americans “America-haters” – and worse?
Maybe not. But it is worth pointing out again – and again – that as these hacks drape themselves with the Stars and Stripes, they undermine the very freedoms and attack the very people they claim to admire.
There is a reasonable argument to be made in favor of torture, law-breaking, and freedom-impingement. But it involves compromises our core values in the face of enemy aggression. That’s an argument no hack wants to make.
The debate over torture and the many other instances of law-breaking that have become the modus operandi of the Bush administration’s War on Terrorism has been distorted from the start. The liberals and libertarians who opposed warrantless wiretapping, torture, extraordinary rendition, and other legal, but questionable, tactics used by the Bush administration were – from the start – painted as giving “aid and comfort to the enemy.” The Republicans continue to say: “We just want to make America safe.” This is usually paired with an explicit or implicit message that, “Those who oppose us are weak.”
Liberals and libertarians have yet to find an effective way to respond to this argument – at least on a national level. I think the best approach is to point out that the Republican “strategy” is to preemptively surrender American liberties and the primacy of the rule of law out of fear. Acting out of fear is weak. This line of attack puts us back on the path to the argument we should be having – about the balance that needs to be struck between liberty and security.
It has become an aphorism that in order for a government to succeed in the fight against terrorism, it must win 100% of the time; but for a terrorist to succeed, they only need a single victory. Any counter-terrorism expert will concede that it is impossible to prevent terrorism 100% of the time. In trying to determine the balance we need between liberty and security, this must be a factor. For if we decide to give up certain rights temporarily to prevent terrorism – when there is another attack, it will be presumed that the government will need to go yet another step in taking rights to prevent the next attack. It is a cycle that leads – inevitably – to totalitarian government.
This is why for the good of the American experiment, for our way of life, we need to ensure that arguments over national security do not devolve into questions of “Who is passively supporting terrorism?” The Republicans – by launching this line of attack – are paving the road to serfdom in a way that any true conservative knows we must avoid. By framing the issue in this way – presumably merely for temporary political gain – they are preparing the American people to accept further deteriorations of liberties.
If one is to view the Republican’s position without context – as they defend the near indefensible – you can see how it is effective. By focusing on our worst fears, morality becomes skewed. But the Republican line of attack – even without proper context – inevitably raises tough questions: Would torture be moral if it was done to prevent a nuclear disaster? Would assassination? Would murdering an infant? If the stakes are so high – morality and legality become irrelevant.
By applying the “one percent doctrine” of acting as if one’s worst fears were imminent when there is an infinitesimal chance of these fears being realized, the Bush administration has taken the most extreme circumstances that might justify an exception and made them into normal policy. The Bush administration’s policy reflects fear rather than due consideration.
Republican commenters always bring up the “ticking time-bomb scenario” to justify torture. They say: under these circumstances, if your family and tens of thousands of others would die if you didn’t torture this man, wouldn’t you torture him? ((I am trying here to view the argument in favor of torture as sympathetically as possible. I know – and have written before – about how torture has generally been used to get confessions rather than to ascertain the truth. I doubt the efficacy of torture; psychologically, it makes little sense that it would cause individuals to “tell the truth”. I have yet to see any significant studies of the effects of torture to wring the truth out of individuals – although I can see how it would be a difficult field to study. You can’t very well torture people in a scientific study.))
I would.
And if the President of the United States believes that tens of thousands would die if he or she did not order the torture of an individual, would you expect the president to follow the law and refrain from torturing?
No – I would expect the president to order the person to be tortured.
But though Republicans make this argument to show that torture should be legal, it proves no such thing. Under either of the two above circumstances, the individual who made the decision to break the law should be held accountable to the law. If the president has ordered that a man be tortured because he thought it was necessary, he should go before the American people – and a duly constituted court of law – and explain what he did, and why he did it. If he does not do so, then until this is corrected, we cannot be considered a constitutional democracy – a nation where laws are above all individuals, no matter their position.
The biggest problem with the Republican arguments is that they are trying to make the exceptional circumstances the policy of the American government. What we must strive for instead is a balance between liberty and security.
This duet is the musical equivalent of Leonardo DaVinci and Rembrandt painting together (while Thomas Kinkade cries silently in the corner as the effects of cyanide make his life slowly ebb away)…This is the song that’s beaming through space and will get intercepted by aliens who’ll decide not to invade us because even a planet as fucked up as ours is worth saving if it can produce beauty such as this.
-Robert Berry
Jeffrey Rosen, writing in The New York Times today, compares Ms. Clinton’s commitment to civil liberties and privacy to Mr. Obama’s:
[Ms. Clinton’s] speeches about privacy suggest that she has boundless faith in the power of experts, judges and ultimately herself to strike the correct balance between privacy and security.
Moreover, the core constituency that cares intensely about civil liberties is a distinct minority — some polls estimate it as around 20 percent of the electorate. A polarizing president, who played primarily to the Democratic base and refused to reach out to conservative libertarians, would have no hope of striking a sensible balance between privacy and security.
Mr. Obama, by contrast, is not a knee-jerk believer in the old-fashioned liberal view that courts should unilaterally impose civil liberties protections on unwilling majorities. His formative experiences have involved arguing for civil liberties in the legislatures rather than courts, and winning over skeptics on both sides of the political spectrum, as he won over the police and prosecutors in Chicago.
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Soft on crime
From the Associated Press:
“What’s lost by embracing a tyrant who puts his people in prison because of their political beliefs?” Bush asked rhetorically. “What’s lost is it’ll send the wrong message. It’ll send a discouraging message to those who wonder whether America will continue to work for the freedom of prisoners. It’ll give great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity.”
A U.S. president’s decision to talk with certain international figures can be counterproductive, Bush said.
“It can send chilling signals and messages to our allies,” he said. “It can send confusion about our foreign policy. It discourages reformers inside their own country.”
Sometimes, it is astounding how obtuse Mr. Bush can be.
The idea that Bush — who regularly hangs out with, and thus “lends the status of the office and the status of our country” to the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Russia, China, and Egypt — would ever try and take a strong, principled stand against meeting with, much less supporting, repressive autocrats…well, it’s what my grandmother would call chutzpah, and what the rest of us would call “nonsense on stilts.”
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The Jihad Bunny
It might be funny if it weren’t so disturbing.
(h/t Sullivan)
Michelle Cottle of The New Republic writes in this week’s issue about how Ms. Clinton’s think tank went for Senator Barack Obama:
Still, it’s hard not to see Hillary’s loss of the unofficial CAP primary as a microcosm of her surprisingly tenuous claim on the party establishment. Maybe it loved her in the beginning, or at least felt loyalty to her. Yet the relationship was always a bit codependent for some people’s taste, and, along the way, more and more Dems came to see it as unwholesome and costly. Obama may have been an attractive suitor. But he swept into the midst of a marriage that was probably shakier than most people realized.
The National Review continues to push the long-discredited understanding of the Iraqi insurgency with this article in the current magazine describing:
a realistic and detailed picture of the enemy … in Fallujah… — “an insurgent global all-star team” that included “Chechen snipers, Filipino machine gunners, Pakistani mortar men, and Saudi suicide bombers.” The insurgents were not ordinary Iraqis fighting for their freedom against an invading power — but international Islamic militants supported by al-Qaeda.
The U.S. government estimates [pdf] that the insurgency in Iraq is made up of approximately 4% to 10% foreign fighters. This was widely reported in 2005 and 2006.
Keeping with the “fair and balanced” approach to news that let’s “you decide!” ((Aren’t FoxNews and the National Review basically the same thing?)) , the article concludes:
I’ll leave it to you to decide where passive support for al-Qaeda still persists.