This week’s Dispatches is on the Senate race and the impact that corruption probes might have on the narrative. I still plan to vote for Sen. Bob Menendez (it’s aboaut the war, stupid), but I can’t say I’m all that excited by the choice.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Steve Adubato has a good column on the proposed needle exchange programs. Long time coming, as they say.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
“The centre cannot hold” — W.B. Yeats
Someone needs to tell that to David Broder, whose pining today for a political realignment that creates a new centrist party that would include Joe Lieberman, Michael Bloomberg, John McCain and Mike DeWine, was somewhat unseemly. It is an odd mix of so-called independents who are independent only in their willingness to occasionally buck their parties.
Independence in a political sense, though, has to run deeper than that. Independent thought requires more than a tilting against Washington, but a willingness to go against the generally accepted wisdom. Broder, for instance, touts DeWine at the expense of Sherrod Brown, a Congressman highly critical of neoliberal economics — i.e., the current status quo — and Bush’s war. DeWine? Let’s just say he’s taking different positions than Brown.
Broder is not touting mavericks so much as he is bemoaning the disappearance of a moderate center probably best represented by Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee and Vermont’s Jim Jeffords.
In reality, the centrists he bows to — McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Warner — are nothing more than hard-conservatives who disagree with the president on narrow issues. Lieberman is a mixed-bad Democrat — liberal on some economic issues and abortion, conservative on the war and some other social issues (Hollywood and television, the Clinton impeachment).
I would love to see a third party form, but not on Broder’s grounds. What we don’t need is another corporate-friendly party whose sole objective would be to defend the status quo.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The national press corps has always been a little too ready to accept the Bush administration’s “call to democracy” as its raison d’etre in Iraq. Spreading democracy always has been more of a contrivance than a real rationale — as the president’s reaction to this week’s coup in Thailand (and his administration’s reaction to the Venezuelan coup earlier in his administration) show.
Bush made no mention of the dramatic events on Tuesday and left New York yesterday without ever seeing the deposed prime minister, much less offering any public support for a onetime strong ally of the United States. The president’s spokesman later provided a strikingly mild response only after being asked by a reporter, pronouncing the White House “disappointed” by the coup.
The timing of Bush’s address on democracy to the U.N. General Assembly and the overthrow of a democratically elected government underlined the complexities and contradictions in his “freedom agenda.” With the president’s attention focused on the Middle East, the state of democracy elsewhere in the world does not rate as high on his priority list. In the case of Thailand, the situation is complicated by growing U.S. unease with the ousted prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.
“The president’s freedom agenda is inherently selective,” said Thomas Carothers, head of the democracy project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We care very much about democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, but . . . Thailand’s just not part of the story, so this falls off the map a bit.”
Admittedly, the Thai government was not a good one — nor is Hugo Chavez’ in Venezuela, though many of my progressive friends might disagree. But democracy does not make distinctions between good leaders and bad leaders, even here in the United States.
Admittedly, I’m not that familiar with the Thai government. From what I’ve read so far, it was rife with corruption.
But replacing it via a military coup fails the democratic test.
The issue in Thailand, as far as the notion of spreading democracy, is that the corrupt Shinawatra regime was elected and should have been removed via the ballot box or a constitutional mechanism like impeachment. Public pressure could have forced him to resign, with a constitutionally defined replacement taking over.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post is fast becoming one of my favorite columnists. He is insightful, readable and usually right. Today’s missive on the torture debate is a case in point (my own torture column will run early next month in the Progressive Populist).
It’s past time to stop mincing words. The Decider, or maybe we should now call him the Inquisitor, sticks to anodyne euphemisms. He speaks of “alternative” questioning techniques, and his umbrella term for the whole shop of horrors is “the program.” Of course, he won’t fully detail the methods that were used in the secret CIA prisons — and who knows where else? — but various sources have said they have included not just the infamous “waterboarding,” which the administration apparently will reluctantly forswear, but also sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, bombardment with ear-splitting noise and other assaults that cause not just mental duress but physical agony. That is torture, and to call it anything else is a lie.
That kind of sharpness is lacking in too many writers in the mainstream press, who seem only to want to discuss the political implications of everything — as if “waterboarding” is the same thing as the hit and run. Please.
The thing about politics that is important is not the horserace, but the impact — it’s not whether George W. Bush is popular, has “political capital” or what-have-you, but what he does, to whom and why.
In the end, the torture question is a moral question and the questions it raises beyond the single immoral act are the keys to understanding where we are going with President Bush at the helm: “What kind of nation are we? What kind of people are we?”
To think we can torture, to think we can create a separate class under the law, that we can get away with a separate tiers of justice, that the threshold of humane behavior is different for different people — well, that does not bode well for anyone.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 