Category: Politics

I like astute observers like James Wolcott who have the knack of capturing an idea that has been hovering on the edge of my consciousness and hauling it out into the spotlight. Case in point, apropos of the US coverage on London in the aftermath of Thursday’s terrorist attack:

“The curious thing is that so many of the rightward bloggers and Fox Newswers who are hailing the Brits for their quiet stoicism and pluck don’t seem to realize they’re issuing an implicit rebuke to themselves and their fellow Americans. They’re saying, in effect, ‘You’ve got to admire the Brits for showing calm and quiet perserverence after these explosions–they don’t get all hysterical, overdramatic, and overreactive the way we Americans do.’ They don’t seem to realize the example shown by Londoners might be a lesson to them, a model they might follow instead of playing laptop Pattons at full volume every time they feel a rousing post coming on.”

My reactions on hearing about today’s bombings in London:

• “Oh, no – not again.”

• An almost visceral sensation of being transported back to 1976, to Platform 3 at Baker Street Station, waiting for a Metropolitan Line train, seeing a momentarily unattended bag, and being convinced that it was another IRA bomb. (It wasn’t. But to this day I scan for unattended packages or bags in trains, buses, and public spaces, as a matter of deep habit.)

• Are my colleagues at SunUK all right? (So far the answer seems to be yes.)

• Thinking how stupid Bush’s “We’ll fight them in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them at home” sounds now.

• A deep satisfaction that the cricket match between England and Australia went on without a hiccup. And England won by nine wickets: Australia 219-7, England 220-1 in 46 overs.

• A strong impulse to jump on a plane to Heathrow. (I guess that removes any doubt about where I think of as home.)

• Hollow laughter at hearing a survivor explain that “nobody in my carriage panicked when we heard the explosion and saw the smoke, because we assumed that it was just another technical malfunction.”

• Reading Tim Bray’s piece (linked from Chris’s), and remembering a group counselling session after 9/11 when I was shouted down for saying that I thought we needed to understand why people do these things better than we do. We still need to.

• Trying to imagine what it would be like to pack your briefcase (removing any unnecessary weight), get an extra bottle of water from the vending machine, and prepare to leave work in the City and walk five, eight, or ten miles home. And just doing it, without any fuss.

Here in Massachusetts the debate about gay marriage is proceeding in a remarkably restrained, civil, and thoughtful manner, in spite of the posturing of Mitt Romney. (He has no credibility, in part because everyone knows he’s just pandering to the various groups that he needs to make a run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008.) But as Gene Stone writes at The Huffington Post, that doesn’t stop people from trying to stir the pot: “the right-wing British newsweekly, The Economist, is running a piece this week called ‘The Slippery Slope to Bestiality.’ (Now there’s a headline designed to placate all sides…)” Stone is right; it’s a pretty disgusting piece. I’ve subscribed to the Economist for most of the last 30 years, and I can remember when they were a respectable, fairly non-partisan journal of economic record. They used to be the scourge of dissembling politicians of all stripes, and no-one would have described them as “right-wing”. But as I noted early last year, those days are gone: the Economist may still have the best writers, but it has lost its soul.

As Stone suggested, I just sent a letter to the editor of the Economist. (If you’re a subscriber, I urge you to do the same.) Since I have no confidence that they’ll publish it, I reproduce it here:

Subject: Romney, bestiality, and bartenders.
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 12:22:50 -0400
To: letters@economist.com

Your story on Mitt Romney’s exploitation of the gay marriage issue was shameful. From the extravagant title to the closing sentence, you seemed determined to use extreme viewpoints to leave the impression that Romney is a moderate on this issue. By quoting those who “claim that it could open the door to legalised unions with horses” and Bob Pitko’s paean to rampant promiscuity, you ignore the majority of Massachusetts’ residents who are wrestling with this question. Why would you seek to trivialise their thoughtful debate?

Your correspondent missed the point that on this subject Romney is widely seen as irrelevant, because of his blatant pandering in advance of his run for the Republican nomination. Remember that Massachusetts is fundamentally a Democrat state; we elect Republican governors simply to keep the legislature in check, not because we like them.

This was well below the standard I’ve come to expect of the Economist over the 30 years I’ve been reading it.

Geoff Arnold
[address deleted]
[expat Brit, resident in the USA since 1981]

By “interesting” I don’t mean “reasonable”, “rational”, “fair”, “representative”, “democratic”, or (heaven forbid) “intellectually rigorous”. No, I mean, where do political rubber-neckers go to gawk, as they might at a train wreck or a runaway moose? Time and again it seems to come back to one place: Texas. Check out Seriously Kinky from the Dallas Observer: “This Texas Jewboy wants to be the next governor of Texas, and if you think he’s kidding, the joke may be on you.” You couldn’t make this stuff up. Screaming Lord Sutch, move over. (OK, he’s dead, I know.)

(Via GeneBob.)

On a mailing list to which I subscribe*, an argument debate was developing about possible Supreme Court nominees. Nothing unusual about that; it happens everywhere. As on many other lists, the views of most of the participants were fairly predictable and a couple of the more vocal members were staking out their positions. Suddenly another occasional contributor to these food-fights chimed in with the immortal words, “Actually, I see you 2 as opposites sides of the same coin called ‘political extremism'”.

Now this pushed one of my buttons: the sloppy assumption that the right answer to any question must lie in the middle. Historically it’s a really dubious stance – how would one apply it to slavery, for instance, or voting rights? Intellectually it’s just plain lazy: a way of positioning oneself as moderate, and therefore right, without actually having to do any of the heavy lifting of working out a real argument.

Slacktivist wrote about this back in 2002 (and again recently):

The middle-path-between-extremes-must-be-right rationale is enormously appealing. But it’s helpful to state it more plainly as a logical argument:
1. Everyone thinks I’m wrong.
therefore
2. I am right.
It’s possible, of course, that statements 1 and 2 are both true, but the “therefore” does not follow. Let’s try a more charitable form of the argument:
1. People who are wrong think I’m wrong,
therefore
2. I am right.
Again, it could be true, but it doesn’t necessarily follow (and you haven’t, in fact, proven that the others are wrong). That magical “therefore” can be a convenient way of justifying your position without any sort of principled rationale.

Staking out a coherent, principled position is a lot of hard work. So is trying to understand and respond to the principles and arguments of your opponents. So why bother with all that?

Instead, just find someone seated to your right and label them “thesis.” Then turn to someone seated to your left and label them “antithesis.” Bingo! That makes you “synthesis” – the inevitable and uncontestable culmination of all right-thinking on the subject. Anyone who disagrees with you now is swept into the dustbin of history as a misguided extremist. All done simply without all that belabored appeal to argument, principle or fact.

I call this maneuver “Hegel’s bluff.”

The astute observer will spot this manoeuvre at work all over the place.

—
* Names withheld, since nobody’s given me permission to drag this private debate into the blogosphere, and it would be unfair to assume that any statements were intended as carefully considered and defensible positions.

Daily Kos on Karl Rove on Plame….

The latest posting to Baghdad Burning about Bush’s recent speech is essential reading. Money quote – first Bush, then Riverbend:

“We continued our efforts to help them rebuild their country. Rebuilding a country after three decades of tyranny is hard and rebuilding while a country is at war is even harder.”

Three decades of tyranny isn’t what bombed and burned buildings to the ground. It isn’t three decades of tyranny that destroyed the infrastructure with such things as “Shock and Awe” and various other tactics. Though he fails to mention it, prior to the war, we didn’t have sewage overflowing in the streets like we do now, and water cut off for days and days at a time. We certainly had more than the 8 hours of electricity daily. In several areas they aren’t even getting that much.

Remember what Tip O’Neill said: All politics is local. Bush can blather on about 9/11 and freedom and terrorists and 9/11 and democracy and 9/11 and Bin Laden all he wants; to people in Iraq that don’t have fresh water or electricity to run the air conditioners when the temperature goes over 100F, it’s simple: “Fix this stuff or get the fuck out of our country and let us fix it!”.

Pressure of work meant that I missed Bush’s televised speech on Iraq, so I was forced to rely on the transcript and the pronouncements of the pundits to determine what he said. And that’s a pity, because I’m sure I missed something – a subtitle, or an ad-lib that wasn’t captured in the transcript. How else can one explain the following juxtaposition?

First, Bush promised that “If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job.” So the troop levels are a matter of military judgment, right? And since quite a few officers have been saying that they don’t have enough troops….

But wait. The President then said “Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever – when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave.” Huh? So now we can’t send more troops because that would undermine the strategy and send the wrong message? So it’s a political decision then.

Well, no. Maybe Bush realized that he was speaking in front of a military audience, because he later said, “As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters – the sober judgment of our military leaders.”

So which is it? Did they explain in the subtitles that I wasn’t there to see? Or did the President manage to flip and then flop in the course of a single speech? Inquiring minds, etcetera…

According to today’s Guardian:

Channel 4 has teamed up with the award-winning film director Michael Winterbottom to make a docu-drama about three British Muslims who were incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay as “enemy combatants”. The Road to Guantánamo will tell the story of the so-called “Tipton Three”, who were released without charge from the US government’s Camp X-Ray prison last spring after two years in captivity.

(I wonder if it will be shown on US TV? PBS seems increasingly unlikely; maybe HBO.)

Over at Balkinization, Jack Balkin discusses Scalia’s uncompromising dissent in McCreary County v. ACLU, the courtroom 10 commandments case:

Scalia forthrightly explains that the Establishment Clause is not about preserving neutrality between religion and non-religion. It is not even about neutrality among religions. Rather, it requires neutrality among monotheistic religions that believe in a personal God who cares about and who intervenes in the affairs of humankind, and in particular, among Christianity (and its various sects), Judaism, and Islam.

Quite apart from its viciously divisive tone, Scalia’s argument displays remarkable ignorance. For example, he asserts that “With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our Nation’s historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists”. Yet the phrase “believers in unconcerned deities” clearly describes deists, a category that included many of the framers of the Constitution.

Balkin’s analysis is much more detailed than my brief note. Among other things, he dissects the curious pretzel logic that Scalia employs in including Jews and Moslems. The (scathing) bottom line: “Justice Scalia’s tradition of establishment of monotheism is, like so many other traditions, an invented tradition which he has made up to produce an outcome that he politically prefers.”

Highly recommended.