Like, socialism
By Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, November 3, 2008
Back when the polls were nip and tuck and the leaves had not yet begun to turn, Barack Obama had already been accused of betraying the troops, wanting to teach kindergartners all about sex, favoring infanticide, and being a friend of terrorists and terrorism. What was left? The anticlimactic answer came as the long Presidential march of 2008 staggered toward its final week: Senator Obama is a socialist.
“This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing,” Todd Akin, a Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally outside St. Louis. “It’s a referendum on socialism.” “With all due respect,” Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, “the man is a socialist.” At an airport rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a well-known landing spot for space aliens, Governor Palin warned against Obama’s tax proposals. “Friends,” she said, “now is no time to experiment with socialism.” And McCain, discussing those proposals, agreed that they sounded “a lot like socialism.” There hasn’t been so much talk of socialism in an American election since 1920, when Eugene Victor Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party, made his fifth run for President from a cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for opposing the First World War. (Debs got a million votes and was freed the following year by the new Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who immediately invited him to the White House for a friendly visit.)
As a buzzword, “socialism” had mostly good connotations in most of the world for most of the twentieth century. That’s why the Nazis called themselves national socialists. That’s why the Bolsheviks called their regime the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, obliging the socialist and social democratic parties of Europe (and America, for what it was worth) to make rescuing the “good name” of socialism one of their central missions. Socialists—one thinks of men like George Orwell, Willy Brandt, and Aneurin Bevan—were among Communism’s most passionate and effective enemies.
The United States is a special case. [continued…]
— In America, even though socialism is afforded about as much respect as cannibalism, it’s not quite as damaged a brand as the Right would have us believe.
Secretly, everyone knows that there are limits to how hard socialism can be knocked. For good reason, there is not and never will be an anti-socialist movement. Anyone dumb enough to call themselves an anti-socialist might as well just declare that they are in their heart of hearts a mean, selfish bastard.
We do in fact all subscribe to some form of socialism even if it’s a word that some find strangely unpalatable.
No one in their right mind would want a road system that exists and is maintained on the basis of charitable donations. No one in their right mind would want an exclusively private education system that would result in large sections of society receiving no education whatsoever — a modern economy with a mass of minimum-wage workers who were illiterate would struggle to survive. No one in their right mind would prefer to have private security services replace publicly employed police forces — unless of course they think it’s preferable to be living somewhere like Beirut.
To serve common needs we need common wealth — we need to spread the wealth around. Our social needs have to be addressed collectively because we live in a society whose collective strength demands a broader perspective than individual profit and loss.
To say, “I am an American,” is to say, “I am not one — I am many.” And that’s why we are now participating in the grandest of collectivist enterprises of all: a democratic election.
Why Obama has to stay above 50 percent
By Bill Greener, Salon, October 27, 2008
As his campaign manager has described it, John McCain is now looking at a “narrow-victory scenario.” “The fact that we’re in the race at all,” added Steve Schmidt, “is a miracle. Because the environment is so bad and the head wind is so strong.”
But talk of miracles and head winds aside, I think John McCain really does have a decent shot at winning, and that’s not just because I’m a longtime Republican political operative. Despite what the polls seem to be saying, a closer look at the numbers shows that a Democratic victory is not a foregone conclusion. Why? Because if history is any guide, Barack Obama, as an African-American candidate for political office, needs to be polling consistently above 50 percent to win. And in crucial battleground states, he isn’t. [continued…]
Call it ‘The Obama Effect’
By Arnon A. Mishkin, The Weekly Standard, October 27, 2008
As Election Day draws near, people are wondering if the presidential race will tighten. Will the undecideds swing to McCain, or will Obama continue to maintain his 4 to 11 point lead?
Some point to a “Bradley effect” suggesting that voters are hiding their true feelings from pollsters because of Obama’s race, while others say the Bradley effect either never existed or no longer exists. People who think there is a Bradley effect believe that the substantial majority of undecideds are likely to vote for McCain, enabling him to close some of the gap.
McCain should win a larger share of undecided voters than Obama, but it has little to do with race.
With Obama outspending McCain by upwards of 4 to 1, getting enormous traction with newspaper editorial boards, generating the enthusiasm to bring out crowds measured in the tens of thousands, and with Palin treated as more of a punch line than a candidate by the press–it seems likely that if voters are not ready to tell a pollster that they are with Obama, they are unlikely to get there. [continued…]
Fourteen Words that spell racism
By James Ridgeway, The Guardian, October 28, 2008
Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman, the two Tennessee neo-Nazis arrested for plotting to kill 102 African-American schoolchildren and then assassinate Barack Obama, clearly drew inspiration from a violent white nationalist group called the Order. In the 1980s, members of the Order carried out a crime spree that included several high-profile murders.
The connection to the Order is evident in the numbers the two men scrawled on their car on Saturday shortly before they were arrested: 14 and 88. The so-called Fourteen Words is a slogan – “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” – coined by Order member David Lane, who also wrote an essay called 88 Precepts. In white supremacist circles, 14-88 is a shorthand expression of allegiance to the beliefs put forth by Lane and the Order, who wanted to found a white homeland where they could preserve the “Aryan race” from being polluted by non-whites and enslaved by the “Zionist-occupied government” of the US. Lane also advocated polygamy and a kind of European paganism he called Wotanism.
The plot by the two Tennessee men, grotesque as it may be, seems not to have got beyond the half-baked stage. But in the early 1980s, the Order – also known as the Brüder Schweigen or Silent Brotherhood – was active, violent, and deadly. [continued…]
The Jewish extremists behind “Obsession”
By Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, October 27, 2008
I‘ve only watched the 12-minute version of “Obsession,” the film sent to more than 28 million people in various swing states, apparently by associates and partisans of the Jewish movement known as Aish HaTorah, or “Fire of the Torah,” but it was enough for to understand that it is the work of hysterics. One of my favorite hysterics, the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick, is featured prominently, pieces of the sky falling about her head as she rants about the End of Days.
Aish HaTorah denies any direct connection to the film, which is designed to make naive Americans believe that B-52s filled with radical jihadists are about to carpet-bomb their churches, and are only awaiting Barack Obama’s ascension to launch the attack. But the manifold connections, as laid out in this article, among others, make it clear that high-level officials of Aish are up to their chins in this project. The most disreputable flack in New York, Ronn Torossian, who represents Aish, makes an appearance in this story, which was to be expected: Torossian last made the news when he employed sock-puppetry in defense of one of his many indefensible clients, Agriprocessors, Inc., the Luvavitch-owned kosher slaughterhouse that treats its employees nearly as badly as it treats its animals, which is saying something, because Agriprocessor slaughterers have been filmed ripping out the tracheas of living cattle. [continued…]
An Israeli looks at Obama
By Gershom Gorenberg, The American Prospect, October 24, 2008
A neighbor in Jerusalem asked me to write to his American father-in-law, who has been showering him with emails attacking Barack Obama. At a local bakery, the owner suggested in a whisper that I might talk sense to the tourist proclaiming in a New York accent, between sips of strong Israeli latte, that she was voting for John McCain. Old friends in California worry to me that elderly Jews in Miami think that McCain is better for Israel. “Remember 2000,” they tell me darkly. Every vote counts.
I suspect that something even more emotionally powerful than electoral math is at stake. My friends are frightened of the shame of a mother or uncle staining the family, or the tribe, with the wrong vote — a vote purportedly cast out of concern for Israel. From where I sit, this would be a shame, because the reasons Obama is better for Israel’s security are the same reasons he is better for American security.
Start with McCain’s claim to greater foreign-policy experience. Despite that experience, he supported invading Iraq. Obama, of course, opposed it. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, the war has had strongly negative consequences for Israel. [continued…]
Sarah Palin’s war on science
By Christopher Hitchens, Slate, October 27, 2008
In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn’t seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”
It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully “cultured” in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature “issue” of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It’s especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research. [continued…]
— I don’t know whether Christopher Hitchens is someone who is more pro-science than interested in science, but he should have mentioned that beyond its reproductive virtues, the main reason why the fruit fly is so useful for research is that we and this humble organism have so much in common.
Perhaps the most glaring contradiction between the articles of faith subscribed to by the science skeptics and the worldview that seemingly everyone in this country accepts is that virtually no one is a DNA skeptic. In other words, there’s no anti-DNA movement. It’s use in criminal proceedings is universally accepted. You hear people say that God created the world in six days, that humans have a divine origin and that evolution is an unproven theory, but you don’t hear people say there’s no such thing as DNA.
But since the science skeptics seem to accept the reality of DNA more than that of the causes of global warming, the issue they need to address is to explain what DNA is. Understand what DNA is and the stack of creationist cards comes tumbling down. If you say you don’t understand what DNA is, then instead of posturing as a science skeptic you should have the humility to acknowledge your ignorance. It’s not a sin and there is a remedy.
The next New Deal
ByJohn Heilemann, New York Magazine, October 26, 2008
On a bright, brisk, fat-pumpkin morning in mid-October—the kind of morning you would call glorious were the economy not cratering, the financial system not imploding, the Dow not tumbling at this very moment to its lowest depths in more than five years—Barack Obama is on the courthouse steps in Chillicothe, Ohio, calmly and coolly enlisting the past in the service of claiming the future. “The American story has never been about things coming easy,” Obama declares. “It’s been about rising to the moment when the moment is hard … about rejecting panicked division for purposeful unity; about seeing a mountaintop from the deepest valley. That’s why we remember that some of the most famous words ever spoken by an American came from a president who took office in a time of turmoil: ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ ”
Obama had been toying with vague FDR allusions for the past three days, but now he’s decided to lay his cards on the table and seize the mantle explicitly. With the specter of a full-blown depression looming, the Age of Roosevelt—the campaign he ran in 1932, the challenges he faced upon assuming office, the “bold, persistent experimentation” he called for and the New Deal edifice he erected in response—is much on the minds of the nominee and his inner circle. “A lot of people around Barack are reading books about FDR’s first hundred days,” says a member of Obama’s kitchen cabinet. “It’s a sign of the shift that’s going on emotionally: from being on this improbable mission to believing, Hey, we’re going to win.”
Until recently, talk like that would have brought forth invocations of unhatched chickens from countless Democrats. From the moment it became clear last spring that Obama would be the party’s standard-bearer, the excitement over what he represented has been twinned with a gnawing dread that his astonishing ride would somehow come to a crashing end a few yards short of the White House. That America would prove unready to elect a black president. That the Republicans would once again work their voodoo on the electorate. Or that Obama would choke in the clutch—that, far from being the next FDR or JFK, he would turn out to be the reincarnation of George McGovern or Mike Dukakis or John Kerry.
But as the outcome of the race has begun to seem more certain with each passing day—with Obama’s lead in the polls healthy and showing few signs of diminishing, with John McCain’s campaign listing aimlessly and lapsing into rank self-parody, with Sarah Palin devolving into a human punch line—Democrats are slowly, haltingly allowing themselves to believe that victory is truly within their grasp, and hence to contemplate what comes next. [continued…]
The Age of Triumphalism is over
By Andrew J. Bacevich, Los Angeles Times, October 26, 2008
All but lost amid the hullabaloo of the presidential campaign, the State Department recently dropped North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Kim Jong Il pocketed a concession that even a year ago would have seemed unimaginable. The American people — feeling more threatened by Wall Street than by Pyongyang — managed barely a shrug.
Seldom has a historic turning point received such little notice. By cutting a deal with a charter member of the “axis of evil,” President Bush has definitively abandoned the principles that he staked out in the wake of 9/11. The president who once defined America’s purpose as “ending tyranny” is now accommodating the world’s last authentically Stalinist regime. Although Bush still inhabits the White House, the Bush era has effectively ended.
Of greater significance, so too has the latest in a series of American psychodramas. In the last year or so, the nation’s collective mind-set has shifted, and with that shift have come dramatic changes in the way we see ourselves and the world beyond our borders.
The American preference for packaging history as a sequence of great events directed by great men tends to overlook the role played by mass psychology and by the powerful impulses contained within what we commonly call public opinion. The reality is that when it comes to statecraft, policies devised in Washington frequently express not so much the carefully calculated intentions of the nation’s leaders as the people’s frame of mind. [continued…]
We should talk to our enemies
By Nicholas Burns, Newsweek, October 25, 2008
One of the sharpest and most telling differences on foreign policy between Barack Obama and John McCain is whether the United States should talk to difficult and disreputable leaders like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. In each of the three presidential debates, McCain belittled Obama as naive for arguing that America should be willing to negotiate with such adversaries. In the vice presidential debate, Sarah Palin went even further, accusing Obama of “bad judgment … that is dangerous,” an ironic charge given her own very modest foreign-policy credentials.
Are McCain and Palin correct that America should stonewall its foes? I lived this issue for 27 years as a career diplomat, serving both Republican and Democratic administrations. Maybe that’s why I’ve been struggling to find the real wisdom and logic in this Republican assault against Obama. I’ll bet that a poll of senior diplomats who have served presidents from Carter to Bush would reveal an overwhelming majority who agree with the following position: of course we should talk to difficult adversaries—when it is in our interest and at a time of our choosing.
The more challenging and pertinent question, especially for the McCain-Palin ticket, is the reverse: Is it really smart to declare we will never talk to such leaders? Is it really in our long-term national interest to shut ourselves off from one of the most important and powerful states in the Middle East—Iran—or one of our major suppliers of oil, Venezuela? [continued…]
Are theological tensions distancing Taliban from Al-Qaeda?
By Jeffrey Donovan, RFE/RL, October 26, 2008
The Taliban and Al-Qaeda have enjoyed a long alliance in Afghanistan. Their relationship, based on a seemingly shared brand of severe and militant Islam, even survived the U.S.-led toppling of the Taliban in 2001, which came after leader Mullah Omar famously refused to turn over to the Americans his Al-Qaeda ally, Osama bin Laden.
To this day, that relationship endures. But will it last? Rifts and tensions between the Taliban and Arab Al-Qaeda, as well as vastly different Islamic traditions, suggest that a basis for separation exists. Whether it occurs could determine whether peace negotiations between the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Taliban foes ever get off the ground.
Afghan Muslim traditions, including the Taliban, are culturally and historically distinct from Al-Qaeda’s Saudi-rooted Salafist Islam, says Francesco Zannini, an expert on modern Islam. In that sense, the two Sunni movements have always been awkward bedfellows. [continued…]
Tea with the Taliban?
By David Ignatius, Washington Post, October 26, 2008
As U.S. and European officials ponder what to do about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, they are coming to a perhaps surprising conclusion: The simplest way to stabilize the country may be to negotiate a truce with the Taliban fundamentalists who were driven from power by the United States in 2001.
The question policymakers are pondering, in fact, isn’t whether to negotiate with the Taliban but when. There’s a widespread view among Bush administration officials and U.S. military commanders that it’s too soon for serious talks, because any negotiation now would be from a position of weakness. Some argue for a U.S. troop buildup and an aggressive military campaign next year to secure Afghan population centers, followed by negotiations. [continued…]
The endorsement from hell
By Nicholas D Kristof, New York Times, October 26, 2008
During the cold war, the American ideological fear of communism led us to mistake every muddle-headed leftist for a Soviet pawn. Our myopia helped lead to catastrophe in Vietnam.
In the same way today, an exaggerated fear of “Islamofascism” elides a complex reality and leads us to overreact and damage our own interests. Perhaps the best example is one of the least-known failures in Bush administration foreign policy: Somalia.
Today, Somalia is the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster, worse even than Darfur or Congo. The crisis has complex roots, and Somali warlords bear primary blame. But Bush administration paranoia about Islamic radicals contributed to the disaster. [continued…]
CIA led mystery Syria raid that killed terrorist leader
By Jonathan S. Landay and Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy, October 27, 2008
A CIA-led raid on a compound in eastern Syria killed an al Qaida in Iraq commander who oversaw the smuggling into Iraq of foreign fighters whose attacks claimed thousands of Iraqi and American lives, three U.S. officials said Monday.
The body of Badran Turki Hishan al Mazidih, an Iraqi national who used the nom de guerre Abu Ghadiya, was flown out of Syria on a U.S. helicopter at the end of the operation Sunday by CIA paramilitary officers and special forces, one U.S. official said.
“It was a successful operation,” a second U.S. official told McClatchy. “The bottom line: This was a significant blow to the foreign fighter pipeline between Syria and Iraq.”
A senior U.S. military officer said the raid was launched after human and technical intelligence confirmed that al Mazidih was present at the compound close to Syria’s border with Iraq. “The situation finally presented itself,” he said….
It wasn’t immediately clear whether an order that President Bush signed in July allowing U.S. commandos from Afghanistan to attack a suspected terrorist base in Pakistan also authorized cross-border operations in other countries. [continued…]
he economy has become the priority issue for voters. But my principal reason for refusing to vote for John McCain has nothing to do with his admitted lack of knowledge of economics, although I did not realize the extent of his ignorance prior to his comments regarding the re-distribution of income. Since presidents encounter considerable constraints on their freedom to control economic programs and policies, this shortcoming is not critical.
aybe John McCain should fire the advisers who won’t let Sarah Palin do more interviews. The Alaska Governor has faced two major campaign challenges — her acceptance speech and last night’s debate — and each time she’s shown herself worthy of the national stage. Let Mrs. Palin be herself, and then when she makes a mistake, as every candidate does, it won’t be treated like some epic judgment on her fitness to be Vice President. [