1. Obama naming Hilary Secretary of State would be a disaster for us:
“What we’ll have, in effect, is a co-presidency, with Obama taking the lead on domestic matters, selling Congress and the nation on the broad outlines of a “New” New Deal. The Clintons, on the other hand, will be put in charge of shoring up the Empire and reassuring our allies that the only “change” will be a regression: don’t worry, we’re just going back to the 1990s.
…
The neoconservative publicists Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan famously described the goal of U.S. foreign policy in the post Soviet era as the imposition of a “benevolent global hegemony,” and the liberal interventionists would agree, with the added proviso that it must be truly benevolent. It is imperialism with a politically correct face, moral uplift married to unmitigated militarism – a deadly combination under any circumstances, and positively lethal in the present atmosphere.
Yet there are worse aspects of a Clintonian foreign policy, aside from its Slavophobia and its shrill, neo-Wilsonian self-righteousness. Hillary at the helm of the State Department means no significant change in our Middle Eastern policy, or, at least, a huge obstacle placed in the way of such. In her speech on the Senate floor in favor of going to war with Iraq, she scored partisan points by reminding her audience that the president’s father had “assembled a global coalition, including many Arab states, and threw Saddam out after 43 days of bombing and a hundred hours of ground operations. The U.S.-led coalition then withdrew, leaving the Kurds and the Shi’ites, who had risen against Saddam Hussein at our urging, to Saddam’s revenge.”
If only Hillary and Bill had been in the drivers’ seat back in the winter of 1991, when Bush the Father decided against marching on Baghdad – why, we’d soon be “celebrating” the 18th anniversary of the occupation. History cheated the Clintons, in that respect, but I’m sure Hillary’s appointment as de facto co-president in charge of foreign affairs will provide ample opportunity to rectify that great injustice.
…
If there is a single foreign policy issue on which Hillary takes a pro-peace, anti-interventionist, mind-our-own-business position, I can’t think of it. From Iraq to Iran to the renewed threat of a cold war with Russia, she’s on the wrong side of the barricades every time.
Putin’s Russia is fast becoming the favorite bogeyman of the interventionist Left, with left-neocons like Anne Applebaum, an Obama supporter, heading up the posse. Russophobia has been all the rage for quite a while in the odd precincts of right-wing social democracy, an ideological current that manages to combine all the worst aspects of the socialist and the neoconservative in one supremely unappealing package, and in Putin they have a Saddam Hussein all their own. The Left in power needs an enemy too, a foreign “threat” to justify huge overseas expenditures and increasing military budgets, and Putin fits the bill to a tee. When it comes to the Russian question, Hillary is worse than Obama, who is quite bad.”
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13774
2. Obama needs tp prosecute torture enablers:
“A common view among those involved with the talks is that any early effort to prosecute Bush administration officials would likely devolve quickly into ugly and fruitless partisan warfare. Second is that even if Obama decided he had the appetite for it, prosecutions in this arena are problematic at best: A series of memos from the Bush Justice Department approved the harsh tactics, and Congress changed the War Crimes Act in 2006, making prosecutions of individuals involved in interrogations more difficult.
Instead, a commission empowered by Congress would have the authority to compel witnesses to testify and even to grant immunity in exchange for information. Should a particularly ugly picture emerge, the option of prosecutions would still theoretically be on the table later, however unlikely.
In Obama’s camp, there is a sense among some that such a commission would essentially mean letting Bush get away with crimes. “People have called for criminal investigations,” one person familiar with the talks told me this summer as plans got under way. On Wednesday, a person participating in the talks confirmed that some people involved in the planning felt strongly that the commission would amount to “bullshit” and that Bush officials should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
But few think prosecutions are realistic, given the formidable legal hurdles and the huge policy problems competing for Obama’s attention. Among them is the complicated task of closing down the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, which Obama advisors say is a priority. Some observers outside the Obama camp are also questioning how much Democrats really want exposed with regard to interrogation, since top Democrats in Congress were briefed in secret on some of the harshest tactics used by the CIA and appear to have done little, or perhaps nothing, to stop them.
…
Constitutional scholars say a pardon of this kind would be an unprecedented move — the prospective pardon of not just individuals but entire categories of people, perhaps numbering in the thousands, for carrying out the president’s orders , which the White House has argued all along were legal.
…
“The classic pardon is an identifiable individual; here you are talking about potentially thousands of people involved in illegal activities,” explained Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington Law School. A blanket pardon of this variety, Turley said, “would allow a president to engage in massive illegality and generally pardon the world for any involvement in unlawful activity.”
…
The politics of it would be fraught with danger, however, and could so blemish Bush’s legacy that some doubt he would go so far. “A pardon is an admission of guilt,” noted Donald Kettl, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Bush has argued for years that his interrogation program was perfectly legal. With a pardon, Kettl said, Bush is essentially saying, “Gee, maybe we did not do the right thing.”
It is not entirely unprecedented for a president to grant a pardon based on a category of behavior, rather than pardoning an individual by name. The day after his inauguration, President Carter pardoned all those who avoided the Vietnam draft by failing to register or by fleeing to Canada. George Washington pardoned participants in the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. Andrew Johnson pardoned Confederate soldiers in 1865.
But these were pardons designed to foster reconciliation, handed out to categories of individuals who acted on their own conscience, rather than the president’s own allegedly illegal orders. “This would be a different deal completely,” explained Kettl. “It would be anticipating that people thought the official policy of the administration was wrong.”
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/11/13/torture_commission/
3. “Obama Should Swear Off Executive Privilege
Keeping his staff transparent and accountable would send a strong message about open government.
…
One way Obama could send a clear message about the type of service he’ll expect from the people who will staff his administration is to make an early vow forbidding any of his staff from claiming executive privilege should they later be asked to testify before Congress, in a deposition, or in any other legal setting. The one obvious exception would be if someone were asked to testify about matters classified for national security purposes.
Executive privilege is the idea that a president should be able to shield his staff from congressional or legal inquiries because staffers who know they could potentially be subpoenaed may not feel as free and open to give the president candid advice. This is nonsense.
The president’s political appointees are public servants. Their salaries are paid by taxpayers. What they do and say on the public payroll should be accessible to the public, to the courts, and to congressional oversight. If a presidential aide fears that advice he gives the president could subject him to legal action or congressional subpoena down the road, he shouldn’t give advice that’s of questionable legality or that’s ethically dubious in the first place. It really is that simple. If the president wants to hire a personal attorney who can give him personal legal advice that’s protected by attorney-client privilege, that’s fine. He should pay that attorney out of his own pocket, or out of campaign funds.
…
What we see, over and over, is that the executive privilege doctrine is most often invoked to prevent congressional committees, independent counsel, and other oversight bodies from investigating possible legal and ethical breaches by members of the executive branch. It’s not being used to promote candor and open dialogue among presidential advisers, but to prevent the public from learning about possible abuses of power by members of the administration, and from holding those members accountable.
If Obama were to peremptorily swear off executive privilege early on in his administration, and vow that his staff and advisers will not have his permission to invoke it at a later date, it would not only send a clear and important message to the country that he plans to keep his vow to run a transparent and accountable government, it would also send a message to everyone working in his administration that what they say and do will be on the record, and that they should behave accordingly.”
http://www.reason.com/news/show/130094.html
4. ‘Holocaust’ in Hebrew is ‘Shoah’:
“Regardless of whether the question at hand is of the future relations between Israel and our Palestinian neighbors in specific and the Arab world in general, or of the Iranian atomic threat and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it always comes down to the same conversation. Every threat or grievance of major or minor importance is dealt with automatically by raising the biggest argument of them all — the Shoah — and from that moment onward, every discussion is disrupted.
The constant presence of the Shoah is like a buzz in my ear. In Israel, children are always, it seems, preparing for their rite-of-passage “Auschwitz trip” to Poland. Not a day passes without a mention of the Holocaust in the only newspaper I read, Haaretz. The Shoah is like a hole in the ozone layer: unseen yet present, abstract yet powerful. It’s more present in our lives than God.
…
The Shoah is so pervasive that a study conducted a few years ago in a Tel Aviv school for teachers found that more than 90% of those questioned view it as the most important experience of Jewish history. That means it is more important than the creation of the world, the exodus from Egypt, the delivering of the Torah on Mt. Sinai, the ruin of both Holy Temples, the exile, the birth of Zionism, the founding of the state or the 1967 Six-Day War.
The Shoah is woven, to varying degrees, into almost all of Israel’s political arguments; over time, we have taken the Shoah from its position of sanctity and turned it into an instrument of common and even trite politics. It represents a past that is present, maintained, monitored, heard and represented. Our dead do not rest in peace. They are busy, active, always a part of our sad lives.
Of course, memory is essential to any nation’s mental health. The Shoah must always have an important place in the nation’s memorial mosaic. But the way things are done today — the absolute monopoly and the dominance of the Shoah on every aspect of our lives — transforms this holy memory into a ridiculous sacrilege and converts piercing pain into hollowness and kitsch. As time passes, the deeper we are stuck in our Auschwitz past, the more difficult it becomes to be free of it.
What does the primacy of the Shoah mean in terms of our politics and policy? For one thing, it becomes virtually impossible to find a conversation carried out with reason, patience, self-control or restraint. Take Iran as an example. With regard to Iran, as with any other security matter that has potentially existential consequences, we have no thoughts at all — only instincts and trauma-driven impulses. Who has ever heard of alternative approaches to the Iranian issue, of strategic arguments underlying the passionate emotions, the old fears and violent rhetoric? “
http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/itsonlyfair/latimes0545.html
5. One of the many problems with the Democrats:
“This little vignette provides a very vivid and crystallizing illustration of how Congressional Democratic leaders think and behave. They consider it a good thing — not a bad thing — when they anger their own base. They’re thrilled when they get accused — accurately — of acting like Republicans and supporting right-wing measures, particularly on national security and “terrorism” issues. They consider it a benefit — an incentive — when they are attacked for embracing Republican political policies and violating the principals of their own base.
This is undoubtedly the rationale which, at least in part, led to Obama’s own reversal on FISA: namely, it was considered a good thing that he infuriated his core supporters and was accused of supporting definitively Bush/Cheney terrorism policies because — in the words of his new Chief of Staff — “it makes you look bipartisan.” See here for the fruits of this thinking. “
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
6. Yet another example of mass murder by our military, covered up, and thus lost to history:
“ In late 1969 Seymour Hersh broke the story of the 1968 My Lai massacre, during which US troops slaughtered more than 500 civilians in Quang Ngai Province, far north of the Delta. Some months later, in May 1970, a self-described “grunt” who participated in Speedy Express wrote a confidential letter to William Westmoreland, then Army chief of staff, saying that the Ninth Division’s atrocities amounted to “a My Lay each month for over a year.” In his 1976 memoir A Soldier Reports, Westmoreland insisted, “The Army investigated every case [of possible war crimes], no matter who made the allegation,” and claimed that “none of the crimes even remotely approached the magnitude and horror of My Lai.” Yet he personally took action to quash an investigation into the large-scale atrocities described in the soldier’s letter.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21242.htm
7. Many Republicans show the traits of being abusers and molesters in their personal lives:
“Five years after World War II ended, a group of scholars published a landmark analysis under the title The Authoritarian Personality. These scholars, who included Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Nevitt Stanford, Daniel Levinson, and Theodor Adorno, wanted to know how a progressive nation like Germany could be taken over by the barbarous Nazi Party. It was obvious that a small group of psychopaths could not have subverted established institutions unless their propaganda resonated deeply with a large sector of the German population. Further research laid bare the psychodynamics involved.
According to this research, people who favor authoritarian politics and succumb to reactionary rhetoric exhibit a consistent personality pattern of “antidemocratic tendencies and fascist potential.” In other words, they tend to share common psychological characteristics, including some or all of the following:
- An entrenched obsession with safety, security, and order.
- Rigidly absolutist “black-and-white” thinking (e.g., us against them).
- An overemphasis on “strength,” power, and control; a “might makes right” orientation.
- Authoritarian submission: a willingness to blindly obey the rules of authorities.
- Authoritarian aggression: an aggressive attitude towards individuals or groups disliked by the authorities; bullying individuals or groups perceived to threaten traditional values.
- A belief that negotiation, understanding, empathy, and compromise are weak.
- A belief in the need to punish those who do not follow rules to the letter.
- Scornful rejection of the subjective, imaginative, and aesthetic dimensions of life.
- Superstition, cliché-mongering, stereotyping, and fatalism.
- A belief in fixed, unalterable, and traditional roles for women.
- Secret insecurity when unable to live up to high standards imposed publicly on others.
- Identification with those in power, with excessive emphasis on posturing toughness.
- Destructiveness, cynicism, general hostility, and a habit of putting down perceived opponents.
- Projection: the tendency to see evil, exploitativeness, and danger in others instead of in oneself.
- An exaggerated concern with other people’s sexual activity.
The authors also found a very high correlation between possessing a number of these traits and demonstrating a consistent and malignant prejudice against out-groups.
I know these characteristics, having seen them up close throughout eighteen years of child abuse that left me scarred and my sister quasi-psychotic.
…
We know from studies of abusive families that abusers use terror to control family members. The scare tactics of the second Bush Administration are familiar to me from my upbringing and from six years of counseling work with male and female perpetrators of domestic violence. A primary goal of domestic terrorism is to implant in the victim a sense of utter helplessness in order to increase the victim’s psychological dependency on the perpetrator. In our home this included a level of constant fear so intense that I could hear my dad’s car from several blocks away as he drove home from work in the evening. I suffered from an ulcer at age 12; my sister was prone to dissociative episodes that made her speech and behavior erratic. My mom worked during the evenings we were maltreated and exercised the conservative prerogative of pretending that nothing was wrong even after she was beaten up on the weekends.
Perpetrators also paint the world in frightening colors and present themselves as strongman saviors who will “protect” the people they terrorize. As I write this, the tactic has passed over into extortion: a bail-out of banks presented as a necessity to prevent the economic collapse already apparent in the news.
Another tactic is to convince the victim that the terror and violence is for their own good. In my men’s groups, traditionally raised fathers often talked about instilling “respect” in their frightened children, but what they really meant was “fear.” They too had been terrorized as boys, and this time (so went their unconscious logic) they would sit in the driver’s seat. They would be the object of fear instead of its sad victim. The extreme of this dynamic is the sadomasochistic reality of torture: the externalized recreation of the unresolved pain of interior injury.
Hypocrisy is necessary to prolong abuse and fear. The “family values” I saw up close included being spit on and backhanded, watching my mother and sister being slapped around, having my hair pulled, being bounced off walls, and of course an unremitting stream of verbal abuse of a level of filth I won’t repeat here. My dad was careful to leave no visible marks, but on one occasion, when he drank too much beer and forgot to stand on my feet to keep me from running away, he chased me through our yard with a knife until I got safely away in the streets. The police were called but did not arrest him (they are better trained nowadays); as a result, I was pummeled and spat on for a week.
My sister was similarly mistreated, but in her case the relief she sought in religion led her into the arms of a church counselor who molested her throughout her childhood. The church elders ignored the evidence of this until several more girls came forward, at which time the pastor was defrocked for failing to report evidence of child abuse. The molester got off on a technicality. My sister grew up to be a crazy mother and chronic liar who has been vomiting herself to death for years despite decades of therapy—this time with a Christian counselor. When confronted my parents accepted no responsibility for any of this.
Are all conservatives abusers? No. But many who supported the prior administration’s psychopathic war on human and environmental rights demonstrate the red warning signs of the Authoritarian Personality. This makes them extremely dangerous, the more so when their rhetoric of patriotic fervor and Christian decency goes unchallenged. We Americans ought to have learned by now that the politician who hides behind such masks while pointing the finger and crying, “Associates with terrorists!” or “Extremist!” is merely projecting his own potential to terrorize and giving us a look at his own threatening extremism. Nor should any ecocidal candidate with a vested “religious” stake in the end of the world be allowed anywhere near a position of political power. Ever.
When the Bush regime came to power, I was the only liberal I knew who felt no surprise whatsoever. The mass surveillance, the concentration camps, the endless war, the sacking of the national treasury, the destruction of the biosphere, the branding of opponents as unpatriotic: these onslaughts make perfect sense when viewed as outcomes of a perpetrator mentality. They are the historically expectable moves of authoritarians who view the world through the dark lenses of deep paranoia and unacknowledged rage. They give frantic speeches about protecting the family against gays and secularists; but who will protect our families from these architects of fear, whose real god is not gentle Jesus but impulsive, bloodthirsty Mars?
Given the level of my personal and professional education, I know that the “good father figure” of a newly elected president, although a welcome development for many reasons, will not usher in a brave bright day of protection and sanity, especially once all the savior projections wear off. The architects of fear will not hand President Obama the keys to the Oval Office and quietly disappear. I know how they think, and I know they will continue to scheme and deceive, smear and manipulate, fulminate and terrorize until they either take total control of what’s left of the Republic or end up behind bars.
Terrorizers, bullies, and perpetrators must be openly discredited and held firmly accountable for their actions; for once they are pardoned and appeased by those who are too fearful—or too implicated—to stand up to them, they will seize their advantage and strengthen their systems of stalking and intimidation until every last vestige of personal freedom disappears into the maw of their insatiable craving for power.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21235.htm
8. “The other reason to shun Lieberman, and to cast him into the legislative purgatory he so richly deserves, is that it would be an object lesson to other potential Iagos in the party’s legislative ranks that such treachery will not be tolerated. What, after all, is the point of having a party at all, if its members can be as back-stabbing as Lieberman and get away with it?
It would be a good lesson to the Democrats of the state of Connecticut, too, who voted in a Democratic primary two years ago to oust Lieberman as their candidate for re-election, but who then turned around and joined Republicans in re-electing him when he ran as an independent against a Republican challenger and against Ned Lamont, the Democrat who had bested him in the primary. This was treachery by a class of Democrats in the state of Connecticut that should also not go unpunished. Connecticut voters should no longer have the benefit of a powerful senator with seniority when that senator has so betrayed his party.
Let Lieberman go over to the Republicans hat in hand. Let him squirm as the Christian fundamentalists among them talk in tongues and as others of them mutter their anti-semitic obscenities behind his back. Let this one-time self-described advocate of civil rights blush in shame as his new colleagues crack their racist jokes about the new president in the lilly-white Republican caucus room.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21236.htm
hasEML = false;
