Pundit Country

I don’t venture too much into foreign policy on this blog, but this piece Gary Will caught my eye. In it, he counters the over-stated opinion that leaving Afghanistan will besmirch the memories of those who have fallen by asking what is it worth to stay in an unwinnable war and how many lives is the President willing to sacrifice for it.

It’s an apt question and one that I haven’t heard asked before by anyone who is not only opposed to our continued presence there, but definitely opposed to escalating it further by placing more boots on the ground. Willis put it well:

One of the strongest arguments for continued firing up of these wars is that none of these presidents wanted to serve only one term (even Lyndon Johnson, who chose not to run for a second full term). But what justification is there for buying a second presidential term with the lives of hundreds or thousands of young American men and women in the military?

…

It is unlikely that we will soon have another president with the moral and rhetorical force to talk us out of a foolish commitment that cannot be sustained without shame and defeat. If it costs him his presidency, what other achievement can match it?

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he would rather be a one-term president than give up on his goals. Here is a goal no other president we can imagine would have a possibility of reaching. Presidents who just kick the can down the road are easy to come by. Lost lives and limbs are not.

While I didn’t list his piece as a Must Read, it’s worth your time if you are having rising doubts about “the good war”, but especially if you don’t. He may give you some food for thought.

Related articles

• MSNBC: Official: Obama Rejects War Options. “President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any o… (pajamasmedia.com)
• John Conyers Tells Obama: ‘Start Knocking Heads’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• Obama’s Partisan Balancing Act on Afghanistan (usnews.com)

Blogger Martin Bosworth writes on one of the more crucial points of the healthcare debate; morality and language. I’ve dedicated at least one post on liberal-progressive’s use of language during the debate, but not so much as it concerns morality and persuasive language, as this seems to be where the debate has landed for better or for worse.

With the rise of groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity filling the town halls (and now the airwaves) with repulsive vitriol, the need for reasoned argument now needs to be augmented with an emotional one. It’s not the appeal I would imagine the President would want, having heard his repeated calls for calm and for a more civil discussion of the issue, but now I think we’ve passed the tipping point at which the average person can distinguish between the misinformation and the truth. Bosworth makes the point with a bit more passion:

Goldhill’s essay about his father’s death and his quest for reform is so completely bloodless you’d think he was talking about filing TPS reports. (If my father or mother died because of neglect in a hospital–God forbid–I’d be taking the scalps of those responsible, Inglourious Basterds-style.) He makes the same facile assumptions that people of a certain level of success make (and that both Mackey and Obama made)–that everyone can handle things the same way he can, that every decision is weighed on the scale of cost and benefit, and that turning health care into a “front-facing” “consumer-driven” enterprise will magically reform a broken system into a perfectly functioning engine of commerce. That’s the same kind of corporatized, free-market-uber-alles thinking that has plagued our discourse for generations now, and it’s contributed to the ruin of our financial system through the idea that things which should have moral values attached to them–home ownership, health care, education, environmental protection–are instead discussed in the utterly soulless terms of the banker, the market, and the financial guru.

His entire excellent read is here.

Related articles

• Corp Astroturf Memo: Disrupt Town Hall Meetings (seeingtheforest.com)
• The Corporate Funders Behind Patients United Now (bravenewfilms.org)
• Timothy Karr: Unmasking Astroturf (huffingtonpost.com)

Michael Hayden, former CIA Director under Bush (43). spoke on Fox news today about the Obama administration’s release of redacted memos discussing torture within the administration and the Office of Legal Council (OLC). This one quote really infuriated me:

“I think the really dangerous effect of this… is that you have agency officers stepping back from the kinds of things that the nation expects them to do,” said Hayden. “I mean, if you were to go to an agency officer today and say ‘go do this’ and [they'd respond] ‘why am I authorized to do this?’ I say it’s authorized by the president, the attorney general said it’s lawful and it’s been briefed to congress. That agency officer is gonna say ‘yeah I know… but have you run it by the ACLU. What about the New York Times editorial board? Have you discussed this with any potential presidential candidates?’ You’re going to have this agency on the front line of this current war playing back from the line.”

via Hayden: We’ll Have To Clear Interrogation Practices With ACLU, New York Times VIDEO.

And after all this time I thought the Nuremburg Court has settled this issue. One cannot follow an illegal order. No one is above the law. It’s one of the the simplest and damning things to come out of the court. It doesn’t matter that one’s government has asked their soldiers and doctors and prison guards to do something in the “nation’s best interest”. Anyone who orders a subordinate to break the law is a bureaucrat who does not belong in a position of authority.

And the crack about the ACLU? Their job is to look at the Bill of Rights and protect those who would be abused by authority figures who either ignore or obfuscate it. My question is why the federal government under Bush seemed so willing to do just that? Hayden’s insipid, slavish devotion to the cult of authoritarianism is sadly revealed in this statement. It also appears to reveal the official administration position on the handling of enemy combatants. There is no law they weren’t willing to break, no treaty they weren’t willing to ignore, no decency they weren’t willing to deny. It’s a deep stain on the reputation of the U.S. and one that will follow us over time unless it is confronted head on; sadly a position that is increasingly unlikely to occur given White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuael’s statement earlier today. It’s a mistake that I fear will come back to haunt us.

And for all you late-night readers, this one is fairly short. You’re welcome.

Open Left:: Right-Wing Authoritarianism: Gay Marriage & the Selective Indictment of Democratic Institutions.

With the choice quote being:

If Obama, for some reason, decides to prevent us from seeing exactly what was done then he will achieve only one thing: he will tell the world that the US has indeed authorized and practised war crimes while simultaneously telling the world that America will not be accountable for it.

He will betray all of us who supported him to restore the rule of law. He will, in fact, merely confirm the worst fears of what was actually done while making himself an accomplice to protecting the war criminals who did it.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.

I fear that many of the people who could be liable for prosecution if these memos are released are still in positions of influence or power. Tough. If we really are going to heal and change our policy on detainees, then people are going to have to be informed about what was done in our name. If prosecutions are off the table, then a South African-style truth commission is necessary. Avoiding both is unacceptable.