I’m actually sympathetic to the wingnuts who are angry about the national GOP “clearing the field” for Charlie Crist for the senate seat from Florida. I think people have a right to run in primaries and the political establishment should be more respectful of democracy. The grassroots of both parties are growing increasingly resistant to their party establishmenst steamrolling them into accepting politicians who don’t reflect their values and philosophy and it’s going to be a challenge for some time to come.
Having said that, I have to admit that the way the movement conservatives are going about this is so puerile and stupid that you can’t really blame the establishment for stepping in. Ed Kilgore reports:
The “Not One Red Cent” webpage is quite a piece of work. It features a sort of manifesto with the shouting headline: NOT ONE RED CENT FOR RINO SELLOUTS! (the exclamation point is a bit redundant, but I guess that’s a stylistic decision). Yesterday the site included a post by Richard McEnroe, entitled “A Florida Parable!” and with a subtitle that I cannot reprint in a family-friendly blog, that played off a bizarre news story about two Russian tourists who got caught in Florida having sex with a porcupiine. McEnroe “revealed” the identity of the tourists by displaying photos of Michael Steele and Charlie Crist. Nice, eh? Now as it happens, Mr. McEnroe describes himself on his own blog site, Three Beers Later, as a “South Park Conservative” who believes in “Loose Women and Tight Borders,” so perhaps his particularly sophomoric contributions to the revolt against the RINO SELLOUTS shouldn’t be held against angry conservative activists generally.
I know this will shock you, but it turns out that torture does have lasting consequences even if it doesn’t leave scars. Not that we care because everyone the Americans capture are evil aliens from outer space who are more powerful than any human, but still:
The psychological effects of torture can often be worse than the physical effects, said Ellen Gerrity, assistant professor of psychiatry at Duke University and co-editor of “The Mental Health Consequences of Torture.” Watch a former Abu Ghraib detainee describe his experience »“The psychological symptoms can often be worse in the sense that person can never recover from that, and may in the end, be in such despair and pain that they take their own lives, especially if they don’t have treatment or support around them,” she said.Experts say torture victims can develop post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and symptoms such as social withdrawal, confusion and sleep problems.They may also show an impaired immune system and have a higher incidence of cancer, said Rosa Garcia-Peltoniemi, senior consulting clinician at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Clients at the Center for Victims of Torture show a high rate of head injury, which can lead to neurological symptoms and other dysfunction, she said.Other physical symptoms include headaches, dizziness, faintness, weakness, chest pain, tachycardia (racing heart), trembling, joint and soft tissue damage, stomach problems and digestive problems, Garcia-Peltoniemi said.The mistrust survivors feel may even carry over to the next generation, with children observing their parents keeping secrets and feeling shame, Gerrity said.”It’s very hard to regain a sense of trust in the world, and in the environment, even [in] themselves if forced to participate in actions that they are ashamed of and would never have done,” she said.
But if we don’t call it torture, none of these things will happen. You’ve gotta know how to work the system. .
Here’s some good news for President Obama. The villagers have decided that he’s getting terrorist policy juuuuust right. Dick Cheney and his pals on the right believe in torture and no due process at all while the “far left” believes that torture is immoral and everyone is entitled to basic human rights, so the proper course is to split the difference and only rip up half the constitution instead of the whole thing.
DAVID BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times: [M]y main point is that the policy that George Bush had in the second term is very, very, very close to the policy Barack Obama has right now. We have a bipartisan policy on terror these days.
If you look at the individual issues of rendition, habeas corpus, the secret prisons, Obama has taken the Bush policy, made some adjustments, mostly minor, and then co-opted it. We have a bipartisan policy. My problem is nobody could admit that fact.
Barack Obama can’t admit to the Democratic Party that he took George Bush’s policy, and Dick Cheney wants to pretend that Barack Obama has made this vast departure so he can pretend that somehow we’re less safe.
[…]
DAVID BROOKS: But we stopped torturing people — we stopped waterboarding people in — I think it’s March or certainly winter 2003. That’s a long time ago.
What happened was, in the first years of the Bush administration, right after 9/11, they did a lot of stuff, but those policies were morally offensive and unsustainable. And people like Steve Hadley and Condoleezza Rice reined them in.
And you had an evolution over 2003, ’04, ’05, ’06, ’07, and ’08 moving away from the policies that Dick Cheney now celebrates to a whole set of different policies, which are close to what Obama celebrates.
And I talked to some Bush people yesterday, and they said that the Cheney speech was very familiar to them. He’s been making all those arguments within the Bush White House, while he was losing the arguments, and now he made them publicly.
And so I do think what Obama did — very politically astutely, I guess, though not quite honestly — was to pretend 2002, 2003, the Bush-Cheney era, was the entire Bush era, and it wasn’t. And so he sort of had a little political sleight of hand.
But the good news is — and this is Obama’s major accomplishment — and Mark did mention this — is that, first of all, he took some sensible policies the professionals in the field really believe in. And he did something George Bush would never do, which is, A, to build a framework around them so they’re sustainable and coherent and then, most importantly, to explain them to people.
The Bush had this vast evolution in policy, but Bush didn’t care what people thought so he never explained them to people, would never admit he was changing course. Obama explained them and made them credible, and that’s a big improvement.
Apparently, the change people voted for in 2008 for wasn’t change from Republican policies per se, but rather change from Dick Cheney’s policies of 2001 to 2004.
Let the rehabilitation of Bush begin:
MARK SHIELDS: … Now, the president has also said — and I think with some validity — that Vice President Cheney was driven to speak — and I think David’s right, he’s not speaking for the Republicans — he was speaking as much against the policies that changed in the Bush administration in the second — in defense of those that he had argued and for which he ultimately paid a certain price socially and powerfully in the administration itself.
In the spirit of post-partisan comity, maybe Bush and Obama can build a joint presidential library.
Shields went on to call the democrats the “bedwetter caucus” on this issue and praised Obama for assuring them that he would protect the constitution because he had his speech at the National Archives. Brooks was equally fulsome in his praise of Obama’s willingness to “make the hard call” to continue renditions and preventive detention, which is a very adult thing to do.
This idea that Obama is continuing the second Bush term is something Democrats should be very wary about signing on to:
Now for some reason it’s become fashionable to say that the last election wasn’t about national Security, which is complete nonsense. Economics was barely on the radar until the summer, when gas prices soared, and aside from health care, the bigger economic issues weren’t even discussed until October. Obama won the nomination largely on the basis of his Iraq war stance in 2004; foreign policy and national security issues were the focus of virtually all the debates in both parties. The idea that the people didn’t really know what they were voting for is a complete redrawing of history.
According to the villagers, the people voted for a third Bush term on national security when, in fact, they resoundingly rejected that. But the Goldilocks beltway mentality requires that successful Democratic politicians must represent “the middle,” which in this case means being equidistant from Cheney and the civil libertarians on policy. It doesn’t matter what the outcome is, as long as it isn’t “left.”
But remember, when Bush and Cheney were running the show, they were considered “the middle” too, the leaders of the allegedly vast swathe of Real flag waving Americans who were in favor of invading Iraq and wanted the government to “take the gloves off.” In the minds of villagers, “the middle” always dresses right, history, polling, election results be damned.
Update:
Hmmm. Apparently, President Obama really doesn’t like this Bush comparison.
I don’t blame him for not liking this comparison. He’s smart enough to know that only villagers could ever think that the second Bush term was a thorough repudiation of the first. He remembers who he ran against.
Apparently Dick Cheney is out hawking a book, which hopefully will include his younger years in the proto-punk scene at CBGB (look very closely at the bassist for Blondie and you’ll see). This may lead some to believe that the media spectacle of Cheney popping up from the undisclosed location every five minutes into TV studios far and wide was a kind of pre-emptive book tour designed to raise his advance price. But actually, it seems that daughter Liz, who has been just as ubiquitous, let slip what perhaps could be the real reason for the press junket:
L. CHENEY: I don’t think he planned to be doing this, you know, when they left office in January. But I think, as it became clear that President Obama was not only going to be stopping some of these policies, that he was going to be doing things like releasing the — the techniques themselves, so that the terrorists could now train to them, that he was suggesting that perhaps we would even be prosecuting former members of the Bush administration.
Now, contrary to daughter Liz, the President has never suggested prosecution, in fact going out of his way to suggest the opposite on numerous occasions. So ol’ Dick probably doesn’t have much to worry about on that score. But he certainly did notice the growing outcry around these issues as the months went on, and knew somebody had to throw the media off the trail before all H-E-double hockey sticks broke loose and people started seeking the dreaded accountability. Fear has always been a powerful motivator for Cheney, and if there was a 1% chance of him going to jail for war crimes, he had to treat it like an inevitability, and waterboard the truth until it gave up.
In case anyone’s wondering what a legal rationale behind an Obama preventive detention scheme might be, here’s Senator Sheldon Whitehouse in an FDL live blog earlier today:
To argue by analogy, one can go to court and to a civil standard of proof show that someone is a danger to themselves or others, and obtain a civil commitment restricting their freedom. If we can do this with Americans, it seems logical that we could also do it with foreign terrorists. The question is, what checks and balances should surround the initial determination of danger, and what safeguards should stay with the person through the period of confinement? I look forward to hearing more from the Obama Administration about what schedule of rule of law safeguards they intend to apply, but I think that the example of civil commitment shows that it is not categorically forbidden to restrict someone’s freedom based on a finding of danger.
I think that may be even scarier than Gitmo. It implies use of psychiatric hospitals for political prisoners, a la the Soviet Union. It’s a terrible analogy.
Whitehouse is a good guy and I don’t mean to pick on him, but this just won’t do, even to make a point. Involuntary committment cannot be used for criminals, who everyone knows may very well re-offend when they are released, so it certainly cannot be used for terrorist suspects who are accused of being at war with America. (Unless, of course, you think it is insane to be at war with America.) The history of involuntary commitment is hideous throughout world history and it remains controversial to this day, even when it is used for people who are truly mentally ill. To even think of it as a way to argue that such policies are analogous to the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects is really dangerous.
I shudder to think what nations around the world would think of such an analogy. Indeed, I shudder to think what our own armed forces would think of this, considering that they are liable to have the same rationale used against them if they get captured.
Following up on dday’s earlier post about Elizabeth Bumiller’s sleight of hand, I happened to catch John Harwood and Norah O’Donnell chat with the former Bush Head Cheerleader in a different segment about the political dimensions of the Guantanamo debate. Harwood, one of the dullest, robotic villagers out there, actually makes Bumiller look reasonable by comparison when he reflexively defines Obama’s political challenges in terms of punching the hippies:
Harwood: Elizabeth, this is going to be a huge problem when he tries to site these prisoners. Does that mean that the president didn’t make progress yesterday, politically speaking, in terms of laying out this case? Is it simply too early to judge that?
Bumiller: I think he’s getting a lot of push back, from, not only from, well he’s getting hit from both sides, from the left and from the right. He’s getting hit from the right, of course, from people like Cheney and from the congressional districts, and from the left because he’s now saying that there are some of these detainees who cannot be tried because of lack of evidence or because of tainted evidence.
Harwood: I suspect he doesn’t mind getting hit from the left as much as he does from the right.
Of course not. Getting hit from people who have a 20% approval rating and who have absolutely no credibility with the American people is far more frightening than getting hit for continuing the policies of that 20%. That’s not even a question. It’s political suicide for any Democrat to fight Republicans when it comes to a male appendage measuring contest, everybody know that.
Harwood is one of the worst and his automatic assumption that Obama would far rather battle those who actually believe the nice words that Obama himself speaks about American values than to battle those who think everything he says is silly and naive says it all. That’s your village — cynical, twisted and incoherent as usual.
The good news is that the other side is actually being heard, which is a bit of a surprise and does signal that somebody, whether it’s ACLU press releases or the conduit of Greenwald to Maddow, is getting through to a few people in the MSM:
Bumiller: But, the ACLU, the civil liberties groups and human rights groups are frankly, appalled,that they’re hearing this from this president who they thought was just going to turn around on these Bush Cheney policies.
O’Donnell: Well this idea, which I think many people noticed it on the left, this preventative detention, that Obama has come to accept, which is this argument made by the Bush administration, embraced by Cheney, that some people you might not be able to set them free and you might not be able to try them because of national security reasons. And now, president Obama seems to acknowledge that there might be this preventative detention, which I know some people have made fun of as some sort of like the “Minority Report” sort of like that movie with Tom Cruise, that you would keep people, trying to prevent …
Bumiller: Yeah, yeah… without charges. And you know the left is saying that this is a repackaging of Guantanamo. Now what Obama is saying, we don’t have any details yet, he is trying to come up with a legal framework to make this part of our law. As you know, what Bush did was just declare these people were enemy combatants, and that’s, of course, being challenged in the courts right now. And I am certain that whatever Obama comes up with in terms of a legal framework will also be challenged so this will be in the courts for a long time.
If we can get the quivering, pantswetting congress to pass a law to make indefinite detention legal, I guess that makes all the difference. The fact that it goes against both the letter and the spirit of the constitution will work itself out eventually. (Or not — remember what kind of majority we have on the supreme court these days.)
The Minority Report allusion is a good one except that as far as I know, the government isn’t even close to having a super-duper computer system that can see into the future to find out who might be a danger. We don’t even know if these people we’ve locked up for years and years already in our GWOT gulag did something in the past. In fact, our civilian justice system often convicts innocent people even with all the safeguards we have in place. The idea that the government just “knows” who’s dangerous and who isn’t is absurd. That’s why we have a judicial system in the first place.
Update: The village weighs in on Goldilocks, flip flopping and campaign promises:
MSNBC:
Helene Cooper, Washington Post: I think Vice President Cheney did president Obama a great favor yesterday by allowing him to take a middle ground. You have people on the left, you know the ACLU, saying that Obama hasn’t hasn’t been going far enough and you have Cheney on the right saying this, and Obama is able to appear that he’s rising above all of this. And he’s sounding the voice of reason.
[later in the show]
Harwood: how big a problem do you think the flip-flop issue is for Obama?
Cooper: I think it’s always an issue. The reality is that you say a lot of things when you’re running for president and then you become elected and you start to see the intelligence. This has long been the Republican argument. You start to see the intelligence and things look a lot different when you’re getting that …
CNN:
Carville: I think he’s starting to make some changes and just because President Bush did it, doesn’t mean everything he did had to be necessarily wrong and you have to evaluate each thing on its merits.
John Roberts: But is it true or untrue that during the campaign, the president spoke out quite strongly against these military tribunals and then has said in the last 24 hours, where prudent, he will try people through a military commission system.
Carville: Right. I also think that what he said was that he wanted to have more safeguards in there. But you know, a campaign promise is one thing.
But he said he wanted to close Guantanamo and he’s going to do that. And we’ve got people there, obviously the president was saying when he was with Steve Scully [on C-Span] we’ve got people there who probably never should have been there in the first place who may not have liked us when they got there but they sure in the heck don’t like us now and I don’t have a good answer for what to do with those people. That’s why opening the thing in the first place was not the smartest idea ever.
Bill Bennett: Yeah, it wasn’t the smartest idea I ever heard of to make this promise when he can’t keep it and James is one of the best campaign strategists around and this tells you why the American people are cynical about the campaign business. As you say it’s only a campaign promise.
Well fine. But the president does seem to be learning on the job. The critical question about the Obama presidency is the education of the president. He is figuring out some things on the job and that’s a good thing because he’s getting a recognition of reality. Those daily briefings are a lot different that what he was given on the campaign bus every morning.
What in the world can these briefings possibly be telling him about prisoners we have locked up for six years? In fact, if the intelligence is so shocking that the mere idea of putting a suspected terrorist on trial puts the whole country in danger, I think we all have a right to know what it is.
This is utter nonsense. Obama’s problem is political, pure and simple. They are afraid of the shitstorm the Republicans are stirring up. There are many dangerous terrorists or would-be terrorists running around free today, including one by the name of Osama bin Laden. Showing the world that we believe in the rule of law will go a lot farther to make this country safe than any other thing he does. He knows it, he’s just made a political calculation that it will be too distracting or politically risky to do the right thing. Fine. But let’s not kid ourselves.
Charlie Savage, who has been a great reporter on these issues, said this on MSNBC:
Charlie Savage: Don’t believe the hype. There is very little daylight between what the Obama administration is doing and what the Bush administration is doing, especially in its last four years in power. Both Obama and Cheney seem to be setting up situations that there’s this vast gulf between them and it’s just not true. On military commissions, on indefinite detentions without trial, on predator drone strikes, on CIAs extraordinary rendition program, on warrantless wiretapping, the key elements of the Bush counter terrorism policy have now been embraced, with some tweaks, by the Obama administration.
The exceptions are, the Obama administration has shut down CIA prisons where the red cross was not allowed to visit and he has said we are not going to have this regime of coercive interrogations, which seems to be the thing which vice president Cheney is most upset about. But really .
Harwood: but Charlie, you are saying that 130 million voters were fooled by our choice last November?
Savage: Well, to finish the thought on the interrogations, the Bush administration dropped the coercive interrogation program around 2004, 2005. They didn’t waterboard anyone after March of ’03, so the sense that now Obama has changed something that put us at risk makes little sense in light of that history.
But that doesn’t mean that there is not a big difference between Obama and Cheney. It’s just not the one that they’re talking about. The big difference is that Vice President Cheney has a big investment in a vast conception of the president’s theoretical power as commander in chief to bypass laws and treaties at his discretion to protect national security. And Obama does not seem to have that ideological stake. Obama thinks the congress can pass laws that the president has to obey. But once congress has done that, Obama seems perfectly willing to exercise these same sorts of programs with these same powers.
The interesting thing about that is that the Bush OLC believed that the congress had granted the president the power to do anything he felt he needed to with the AUMF, but that he didn’t really need that under the powers of the Commander in Chief. They always had a fallback.
This just amounts to changing process and getting cover on specificity. As we’ve seen just this week, when it comes to national security all the hawks have to do is look sideways and the Democrats will crawl all over each other to see who can look the “toughest.” Obama’s position is better, obviously, because a president seizing dictatorial powers is outrageous unto itself. But as far as national security policy, it’s a difference without a distinction.
But then, we’re told by villager after villager that it’s totally naive to ever think a politician will uphold his campaign promises, so the whole thing is silly. And I agree. Campaign promises are often worthless because the media takes this attitude whenever it suits them. But projections of a candidate’s “intent” based upon wishful thinking is even less than worthless. The only thing to do is get very explicit promises and show that you will hold politicians to them.
And as to the torture regime and whether or not Cheney is correct in saying that Obama has “reserved for himself” the right to torture despite his promises, you be the judge:
Note: I transcribed these excerpts. And as a general rule, if there is no link, that will be the case.
I’m sure full transcripts will be available at the web sites for CNN and MSNBC in due course.
While I do think that eaters desperately need representation of their interests in DC – much of the food Americans eat really isn’t food but elaborately perfumed chemical goo; a lot of the industrially-grown real food truly tastes like cardboard; the food system is not sustainable; etc, etc – I’m not sure I completely agree with my bloggy colleagues Jill Richardson and Ezra Klein that Mark Bittman is the person to do it. As far as I can tell, from reading his wonderful blog, his brilliant columns, his great cookbooks, his pretty-good manifesto Food Matters, and watching his videos, Bittman’s truly deep interest lies in preparing and eating food not in the details of food/agriculture policy. His expertise is not in doubt, but it’s not really the relevant expertise. Yes, he’s knowledgeable about food policies, but from what I can tell, he has not done the kind of in-depth research that others, such as Marion Nestle or Michael Pollan, have done. In fact, Food Matters illustrates that perfectly. The first half is just a decent rehash of Pollan, et al – Bittman’s heart doesn’t seem in it. But the second half is wonderful, all these quirky, delicious recipes and meals. So, when Bittman says,
I’m qualified to speculate about policy but I’m not really qualified, in Washington, to talk about policy. The soda tax is an interesting proposal. Ending some of the subsidies that have proven so destructive over the years would be a good thing. But I’m not going to be part of those discussion. I’m — and I’m not being modest here — not qualified to be part of them.
I believe him. Ezra says,
Bittman doesn’t have to lead the discussion. But he shouldn’t walk away from it.
Which strikes me as unfair. Bittman has often spoken out, and written passionately about, how awful the food industry is. He is planning to write even more. More importantly, Bittman has demonstrated by example and through his writings the positive importance of home cooking and sensible eating. If Bittman believes that the way he practices his cooking and eating – informally, un-systematically, and with both humor and skill – don’t scale well to the klieg lights and rigid Kabuki of Congressional hearings – and I don’t think they do – that is hardly walking away. Rather, that is embodying the very values – local, small, personal, intimate, and cheerful – he espouses.
Bittman is leading by example, but we need a very different voice in DC. Oh, yes, and like Jill says, sin taxes aren’t the greatest thing, but if a tax on soda and beer is the way we’re gonna get decent healthcare in this country, then yeah, it’s definitely worth serious consideration.
The California Supreme Court will deliver its verdict on Tuesday morning at 10am PT on whether or not to throw out Prop. 8, a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in the state. Brian Devine has the best legal description of this anywhere, which you can read here. The Court isn’t really looking at the law itself, but whether a change of this type violates the limited ability of the people to amend the Constitution through an initiative; in other words, whether Prop. 8 was an amendment, which is legal through the initiative process that was used, or a revision, which requires a more deliberative process.
Based on the oral arguments, most people believe that the Court will not overturn Prop. 8, but may allow the 18,000 marriages that were consummated when same-sex marriage in the state was legal to remain that way. But the Court could surprise.
The initiative battle and particularly the aftermath of Prop. 8 have sparked a tremendous amount of activism in the state and nationally. Regardless of the outcome, the group at Day of Decision will hold nationwide events praising or protesting the Court ruling. On Saturday, 70 civil rights and progressive groups are sponsoring Meet In The Middle For Equality, a large gathering in Fresno, CA.
All of which adds up to yes, Prop 8 has proven to be one of the best organizing points in recent decades for the state of California. It’s been a perfect storm of tactical and technological innovation from facebook and text messaging plus orgs like Courage Campaign and CREDO meeting resurgent activist energy and experience coming from the issue and the ’08 presidential campaign legacy.
Like with the Dallas Principles, those battling for equality have devised new outlets for activism which have amped up the pressure for action at every level. 300,000 people have signed the pledge to repeal Prop. 8. Grassroots groups have sprung up out of nowhere, with more coming on line every day. There is no equal to the activism and organizing this has set off.
If I have any faith left in the ability for California to manage its seemingly intractable governmental problems, it’s because I see this effort that has been launched in the name of rights and equality, and dream that it can be scaled up into a larger progressive movement that expands the fight for justice. Such an organizing effort has never even really been tried in the nation’s largest state, and if successful could spread like wildfire across the country.
Many are justifiably angry at the Democrats for enabling the stupid Republican bedwetting about real live terrorists coming to American maximum security prisons. But the media plays right along with this fearmongering and enables it to a frightening degree.
The front page headline in yesterday’s New York Times blared: 1 in 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds. Disturbing! Although how this would reflect on the Obama Administration and not the one who released all these “jihadists” is an open question.
Problem is, the Times and other outlets have run this story before. And scratching just an inch beneath the surface always reveals there’s no actual evidence for the claim. The last time such a report was released, back in January, the Pentagon got caught including among those who had “returned to the fight” former detainees who wrote editorials criticizing US policy.
Meanwhile, the writer herself is disavowing the story in an interesting way.
New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller is now casting doubt on the claim in her front page story today, pounced on by the right and quickly picked up on cable, that one in seven detainees released from Guantanamo “returned to terrorism or militant activity.”
Appearing on MSNBC today, Bumiller said “there is some debate about whether you should say ‘returned’ because some of them were perhaps not engaged in terrorism, as we know — some of them are being held there on vague charges.”
Aside from the fact that the Pentagon has no real statistics on this (they don’t tag the detainees they release), there’s what Bumiller alludes to here, which is that seven years unjustly detained in a confined cell probably makes you at least open to hating the United States, whether you were a “terrorist” beforehand or not.
The Times actually changed their lede in online editions, but of course not in the paper – and cable news ran with their headline yesterday. The Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet has no problem with this:
I think Elisabeth answered it properly in this interview. Reading some of the criticism it seems that people are saying it undercut the story. It did not. The story was about the estimate of the number of people who ended up, by DOD”s account, as being engaged in terrorism or militant activity after leaving Gitmo. That still stands. The change was an acknowledgment that some assert that not everyone in Gitmo is truly a terrorist. Some critics have said that Gitmo is also filled with people who aren’t truly terrorists.
Anyone who is reading a significant retreat in the story, or as us somehow saying the story is wrong is looking for politics where it ain’t.
The point is this: traditional media outlets have abetted the blatantly false argument that the “worst of the worst” sit in cells at Gitmo and must never be set free. This not only serves Republican ends as they cling to an issue to get a victory for themselves, but serves the White House, as they try and make this distinction of suspects who can neither be tried or released. Once again, the forces of the status quo and the media megaphone are uniquely aligned.
American history scholars are asking President Obama to end the practice of sending a wreath to the confederate memorial this Memorial Day. (It used to be sent on or around Jefferson Davis’ birthday, but Daddy Bush changed the practice to Memorial Day, presumably so that the confederate soldiers would be honored alongside other soldiers who had fought for America . Except, you know, they fought against America, but whatever.)
I was going to write about this before, because the whole confederate wreath thing had been a bit of a flap back when Bush was first in office and we all got tweaked for jumping on an erroneous Time report that said Bush had reinstated the practice after his father had discontinued it. But then I thought about it and realized there there was almost zero chance that Obama would discontinue this practice. In fact, it will be a total shock if he does it, even though it would probably be very meaningful to a lot of his African American supporters.
Aside from his promise to mediate rather than confront culture war issues, it is also the kind of thing that will probably only end with a “Nixon Goes To China” moment. I would guess that if the Southern Republicans ever wise up and realize that they need to represent more than the confederate states and their conservative myths and folkways if they want to be a national party again, they will have one of their own heal this wound. Maybe Haley Barbour could do it if his rumored presidential bid takes off.
Not that I think there’s anything wrong with asking. It’s nuts for the president to honor confederate war dead on Memorial Day, and the confederate memorial itself is a monument to Lost Cause Mythology, which is simply not a healthy thing for anyone. At some point, that must be reckoned with. But Obama is not going to be the guy to do it.
I think that may be even scarier than Gitmo. It implies use of psychiatric hospitals for political prisoners, a la the Soviet Union. It’s a terrible analogy.
Whitehouse is a good guy and I don’t mean to pick on him, but this just won’t do, even to make a point. Involuntary committment cannot be used for criminals, who everyone knows may very well re-offend when they are released, so it certainly cannot be used for terrorist suspects who are accused of being at war with America. (Unless, of course, you think it is insane to be at war with America.) The history of involuntary commitment is hideous throughout world history and it remains controversial to this day, even when it is used for people who are truly mentally ill. To even think of it as a way to argue that such policies are analogous to the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects is really dangerous.
I shudder to think what nations around the world would think of such an analogy. Indeed, I shudder to think what our own armed forces would think of this, considering that they are liable to have the same rationale used against them if they get captured.