Obama, drone-strikes and human rights

What’s worse than Obama doing this stuff is the fact that you can bet your bottom dollar that the vast majority of voters are more than fine with it. There is a societal / political ratchet going on that is way bigger and stronger than one president or administration. It generates pressure of a kind that few imaginable presidents would be able to resist for long.

I never wanted to know what living amid the death throes of an empire is like, but I guess I’m finding out whether I like it or not.

The image of the President sitting down for “Terror Tuesday” and deciding who to murder in Yemen is pretty vivid. This is a man, who has lost his moral compass, leading a country, which has lost its moral compass.

I won’t vote for him, today or in November, but I doubt I represent more than a tiny, tiny sliver of the electorate.

what living amid the death throes of an empire is like

I don’t think so, although pretty obviously the end of a Republic. Every Empire is a perfect snowflake, butthe US and its oligarchic elite allies have much more control over the internal governance and foreign policy of Poland and Iraq than they had fifty years ago. It’s the beginning.

Among Empires by Charles Maier is recommended.

Firedoglake has been screaming bloody murder about this, so has Emptywheel (Marci Wheeler.) Even the relatively conservative John Cole at Balloon Juice has raised objections. And then, of course, there is Tom Tomorrow.

For myself, I live in a relatively safe blue state, and plan a protest vote in the Presidential election, probably for the Green candidate. I simply cannot stomach the administration’s policies. I suspect that his administration has in fact been corrupted by the political environment it is operating in, and any administration would face similar pressures, but too much wrong has been done to too many people, and I have no heart for a vote for that administration’s leader.

I have no heart to work for, nor fund, the national Democratic Party.

This is a very limited protest, however: we have a stealth Tea Party Republican candidate for Governor, so I’m definitely voting Democratic in that election, and I will likewise vote Democratic for Congress–I have a great liberal Representative–and in the state and local elections.

Romney is clearly remarkably close in political belief to Obama

By what measure?

I’m totally on board the sense that there’s not enough separation between the two political parties. But in the context of actual, real-world American politics, there’s plenty of distance between Obama and Romney.

That’s not at all to undo the moral challenge you pose to potential Obama voters. But you cannot blunt that challenge by pretending that Romney is in any sense a moderate. He isn’t.

Count me among BW’s Tiny Sliverites. Not voting for a murderer will allow a potential murderer to replace him, you say? You want to wash your hands of complicity at our expense, you say? Bugger off, I say. I didn’t cater this party — in fact, I was only invited by default.

People who would rather not get blood on their hands when they go in the voting booth might reflect that there is not the slightest chance that their single vote will affect the outcome of a large election, and vote for their dog, or whomever. However ineffective, though, to cast a vote for Mr. O is to become an accomplice to murder after the fact; and his opponent is probably not much different in views and intent, even if he has less blood on his boots. Your dog is going to look pretty good by comparison.

As to affecting the politics of the country, I mostly do mouse- and rat-level activism, but I did give some money to the Green Party, not because I agree with everything they say and do, but to enable them to make a little more noise. Noise can work. OWS probably saved Social Security and Medicare for a year or two.

It is appalling though I’m not yet as worked up over it as I was with the torture issue (which I’m not entirely convinced has ended) but I’m getting there. Was it Chomsky who pointed out that there hasn’t been a single modern president who wasn’t guilty of committing war crimes. Obama does not disappoint.

BTW, Scott Horton at Harper’s is also good on this.

Bruce Wilder,

I won’t vote for him, either. I think Romney is worse, and the Republicans, dominated as they are by the tea party, aren’t that far away from being outright neo-fascists. But the Dems are also a right-wing party today, and Obama seems intent on winning over the right, even though it despises him.

. . . .

He has, in fact, governed as a good conservative, but doesn’t seem to realize that ship has sailed. He’s about a decade behind — the Overton Window has moved much further to the right. Ironically, he helps move it whenever he embraces Republican positions. They then feel the need to keep moving further away from him. A sick combination of Lucy and the football and massive pandering to the reactionary Americans.

America gets to choose between a center-right party and a hard-right party. As in, we have no choices.

Another aspect to this. The right set up Obama brilliantly, on this issue, the economy and so on. They kept attacking him for being too weak, an appeaser, an apologist, a socialist, not even an American, etc . . . thus goading him into being even more of a right-wing zealot than they would have been, at times. He keeps trying to prove them wrong, while they laugh behind closed doors.

. . . .

But perhaps the key to all of this is the surreal power of the office in general. It seems to turn everyone who takes it into a warmonger. Something about the sudden encounter with massive military power seems to turn the heads of every American president. When was the last time one of them didn’t use the military, covertly, overtly?

And then there’s the pressure from the military industrial complex. They want at least enough strife in the world to keep them fat and happy, and I have no doubt that they do what they can to arrange for that strife.

It’s no job for an insecure man or woman. It’s no job for anyone who feels the need to “prove” anything, especially their “mettle.” Unfortunately, they’re are probably very few humans and even fewer politicians up to the task.

To my mind, the central issue here — aside from the Admin’s murderousness — is in the fetish of the ballot box, whose genius is that it functions as the primary instrument of depoliticization (and demobilization of grassroots, democratic organizing) in the nation.

Liberals are like political hippies, whose sentimentality and and high-minded idealism justify all manner of viciousness and stupidity. A more materialist assessment of the nature of the US State — a notion of “political economy” — goes a long way.

And right on cue, along comes the typical liberal-hawk murder apologist.

It’s far easier, Mr. LaBonne, to call me names than to address the evidence about what the US is actually doing..

Only someone starting from a pretty privileged position could really think that there would be no difference between a Romney and Obama Presidency, for reasons mentioned by alkali @ 5 (I would add healthcare and presume that “not” isn’t meant to be there?)
No Bush in 2001 then probably no tax cuts and possibly no Iraq. By all means don’t vote, but please don’t moralise when you do it.

I’m not sure that The Raven‘s argument doesn’t work just as well for anyone who lives in a “safe red state.” If you’re already confident that you know how your state’s electoral votes are going to go, then it seems to me that voting outside the dominant party lines costs little. Me? I live in a purple state. To be honest, I’m not all that convinced that my vote matters any more than The Raven‘s. But, even if it does, I’m still not voting for Obama. I can’t be complicit in the execution of current US foreign policy. I may have some ideas about what Romney will do, but I know what Obama has done.

It would be a good idea if you did that, yes. But you’d rather mouth propaganda.

You must be reading the wrong comment–that multi-paragraph discussion of Greenwald’s evidence is from me.

I think that I remembering a very good criticism of the use of drones by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker? Also there was a good piece by Stanford historian Priya Satia.

Democracy Now 3/28/12

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to President Obama defending the use of drones. During a so-called virtual interview that was conducted online in January, he also acknowledged the U.S. was carrying out drone strikes inside Pakistan. Obama made the comment after he was asked how he feels about the large number of civilians killed by drones since he took office.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I want to make sure that people understand, actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part, they have been very precise precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates. And we are very careful in terms of how it’s been applied. So, I think that there’s this perception somehow that we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly. This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases, and so on. It is important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s President Obama. Ahmed Rashid, veteran Pakistani journalist?

AHMED RASHID: Well, you know, the drones have antagonized Pakistan enormously, and the Afghans also. And in fact, one of the very difficult things in this new dialogue between Pakistan and the Americans is going to be the issue of drones. Pakistan will say, “No more drones.” The Americans will say, “I’m sorry. We’re going to continue doing it.” And this tension is probably going to remain, for the time being.

The problem with the drones and the way that Obama has used them, as compared to the Bush administrations, has been that Obama has literally turned the drones into a strategy. The drones were always a tactic. They were a tactic which was to be matched by a political strategy of how to deal with—and a military strategy, of how to deal with the Taliban, how to deal with Pakistan. Now, by turning the drones into the only, basically, strategy to deal with the Taliban living in Pakistan, having this deadlock with the Pakistani authorities about a political strategy of how to deal with them, obviously the drones have intensified. They’re much more. They’re being used much more.

And now, you know, we have the CIA using these drones to carry out what are called signature strikes, which are the killing of large numbers of fighters, and it’s a hit-or-miss operation. You don’t really know if those fighters are, all of them, fighters. Some of them might be kids hanging around, you know. And any gathering of tribals in the tribal areas on the Pakistani side of the border is deemed the—to receive a signature strike, which could kill 20, 30, 40 people. And not all of them—some of them may be fighters, but not all of them usually are. A lot of civilians are killed that way.

Two words: Supreme Court.

This isn’t murder.

Yes, it is. Unless you re-define the word. Shall we henceforth call it murder (D), and agree that it’s something else entirely? Not bloody likely.

Okay, this is murder, but we got health care.

Did we?

Well, yes, it’s murder, but no President could have avoided committing murder given the fact that at this point in time, any President would be constrained by a) public opinion, and b) the military-industrial complex.

We’re the artists of the possible. Spare us your moralizing.

We’re are the nattering nabobs of negativism, the rootless cosmopolitans, the folks who demand to see the omelette for which so many eggs have been broken. Put your fingers in you ears if you don’t want to hear us.

That didn’t work. http://www.thenation.com/article/168229/assassin-chief-oval-office

rea @23
From what I’ve read and as the OP suggests (and I haven’t read Greenwald on this), there may be some official wordplay going on re all males of military age killed in a drone strike being presumptively counted as combatants, absent evidence to the contrary. But for me the really important question is not whether the strikes violate the laws of war but whether their effectiveness against legitimate targets (Al Qaeda and Taliban and Haqqani network, etc fighters) is not outweighed by their costs in terms of both (unintended) civilian casualties and damage to views of the US among, e.g., Pakistanis and Yemenis generally. I think this is a question on which reasonable people can disagree. A careful, discriminating use of drones in particular situations may be justified, but the current approach seems to me to go beyond that.

I’ve also been monitoring various liberal sites and blogs for signs of a reaction and not seeing much (please correct that impression in comments).

Atrios has been critical of the flying robots for a long time, and Stephen Colbert was good on the “combatant” redefinition a few days ago: http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/thu-may-31-2012-jack-hitt

Chris, if you identify a legitimate military target in the vicinity of Sederot, then I will concede that targeted attacks against that facility with the side effect of shelling civilians are legitimate acts of war. Of course, so will the resultant leveling of the vicinity of the rocket launcher. As several commentators have noted above holding that civilian deaths in war, whether by mistaken targeting or deliberate assessment of the value of the target (16 Swedish civilians were killed to prevent Hitler from getting the nuclear bomb) are universally unacceptable amounts to permitting insurgent forces mixed with civilians to carry out attacks unmolested. Perhaps we should simply execute a prisoner at Guantanamo every time the Taliban attack a civilian hospital or school. This would be well within the laws of war, but somehow I doubt most of the commentators would be okay with it.

“But I expect he would also govern as a moderate conservative domestically and an American nationalist externally. ”

I really don’t see why. Romney’s supposed moderation in Massachusetts should be even more alarming as it shows he’s willing to govern as his base demands. Look at his base now. Do you really think that, at the very least, health care reform won’t be stopped dead for another generation? That means a lot to the people affected.
And have you seen his foreign policy advisers?

Maybe a political philosopher could help me with this but are people who don’t vote for the ruling party really not complicit in their governments actions? After all they are still materially supporting these actions through the taxes.

In that lens It really pushes for lots of participation in primaries and elections themselves because there is no easy way out of your ethical obligations.

There is talk on another thread about Nazi versus Stalinist murder of non-combatants. One link to a NYRB article indicates that total murders were roughly equal between the two regimes. Which led me to think about something missing from that conversation, nationally:

For just two American wars, Korea and Vietnam, non-combatant (Korean and Vietnamese) deaths are estimated at between 6 and 7 million. That is roughly half the number now attributed to either the Nazis or Stalin. Yes, there are differing circumstances, motivations and intent for each murderous state. And, obviously, one death is one too many. So it isn’t about numbers per se . . . .

But to the dead, there is no difference. It doesn’t matter if the supposed “good guys” did the killing or not. The result is the absolute end of life for that one and the many.

Should we not face the fact of our own murderous ways? And, of course, the above is just for two wars. We can and should also look at the genocide of Native tribes. We can and should look at the enslavement, lynchings, torture and murder of African-Americans.

Bring all of this up to date and include the drone strikes. Isn’t it about time we face up to our own bloody history and present? Isn’t it about time we stop believing in the myth of our innocence and righteousness?

“you will always kill more civilians if that’s your raison d’etre than if it’s incidental”

I will leave aside the tendentious characterization of Palestinian and Israeli motives (well, not entirely — it’s crap), and just say no, you’re wrong about the outcomes.

You will always kill more civilians if you have the preponderance of force and power.

That’s why one side has in fact killed far more civilians than the other.

I’m not focusing on Presidential politics; quite the opposite, in fact. Let someone else win the raffle to have dinner with Barack and Michelle. Let someone else conduct our sophist symphonies on the Laws of War. Let someone else explain the relativity of evils. They don’t need either my permission or my collusion. I’ve got other fish to fry.

rea- can you support your claim that Greenwald said Al-Awlaki’s son was with an al-Qaeda group? It’s not in his original article

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/20/the_killing_of_awlakis_16_year_old_son/

and I haven’t seen it since. Nor has there been, AFAIK, any such claim made by “US officials” . Of course, such a claim would be off-the-record and uncheckable in any case.

Keep in mind that we have no more assurance that Willard will do what he says he will do than we had that Barack would actually do what he said he would do. The sad fact is, these folks are all pathological liars. To vote for Obama, whom we know doesn’t mind killing people because some shadowy bunch of spooks tells him they are bad, rather than Romney, who presumably is just as lacking in basic intuitive skills, is to make a choice based on the leaves at the bottom of a teacup or on the fall of the tarot cards. The fact is, the empire is about to fall. All the signs are there: The adoption of Christianity as the national religion, the hiring of mercenaries to fight the empire’s wars, and the refusal of the rich to pay their fair share of taxes. It’s all there in Gibbon.

For just two American wars, Korea and Vietnam, non-combatant (Korean and Vietnamese) deaths are estimated at between 6 and 7 million.

You’ve overstated those casualties rather significantly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio), and attributing all those civilian casualties to US action seems a bit . . . unwarranted.

steve @2
I agree that the majority of Americans are ok (partial confirmation – Obama’s people wouldn’t have cooperated if they thought it was a negative)
which makes the depressing echo chamber only writing of Greenwald, and the dozens of other liberal bloggers, so depressing: they make no effort what soever to reach out beyond people who already agree with them.
I’m not sure what that reach would look like, but it would include acknowledgements that there are evil people who want to kill my family; Obama has a sworn duty to stop this; here are some alternate measures; what we have done is not an excuse (2 wrongs don’t make a right)
What is also depressing is the illustration of what a net neg the liberal blogosphere is; one NYT article does more then 1,000 bloggers, cause the nyt people go out and do something; if 999 of the liberal bloggers all sent $5 to greenwald, he could hire someoone and do some real reporting

Plume @ 56
For just two American wars, Korea and Vietnam, non-combatant (Korean and Vietnamese) deaths are estimated at between 6 and 7 million. That is roughly half the number now attributed to either the Nazis or Stalin

No, it isn’t. The accounts in the other thread, particularly the LRB blog post, were for deliberate killings of civilians, and excluded all “normal” civilian war casualties from WW2. (Total civilian deaths during WW2 are in the range of 40-50 million.)

From the WP article Greenwald linked to:

“Yemeni officials said the dead from the strike included Ibrahim al-Banna, the Egyptian media chief for al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, and also a brother of Fahd al-Quso, a senior al-Qaeda operative who was indicted in New York in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden.”

Steve LaBonne @ 64

Ah…. I guess I’ve been guilty (once again) of being cryptic on the Internet. The So…. was intended to mean only this: If being President means that you can’t act in any meaningful way against the constraints of jingoistic popular opinion and war-mongering institutions, if, in fact, you must adopt them as your own, and if you must tell everyone moreover that you take genuine pride in having made the murderous even more cost-effective without reducing in any way its murderousness, then we don’t really need to talk about this any more. Vote or don’t vote, you’re gonna get the same shit anyway.

Read Obama’s Cairo speech, and then his speech to AIPAC. Hell, put them on facing pages and flip back and forth. Now tell me truly, is this the art of the possible, schizophrenia, or moral bankruptcy? Damned if I can tell, but I’m not going there any more.

“Romney is clearly remarkably close in political belief to Obama”

Romney does not seem to have political beliefs other than power and wealth, and perhaps a desire to redeem or even avenge his moderate Republican father, who was frozen out by the radicalization of the Republican leadership. Obama does seem to have political beliefs but, for whatever reasons, chooses to govern in all respects as a “centrist.” However, the prospect of a Republican President aligned with the radical-right Republicans in the House is frightening.

All of which probably means more food for us corvids, whoever is elected.

In general military operations, Western thought has long been governed by the double effect principle: civilian deaths or injuries as an unfortunate consequence of an otherwise legitimate act (killing enemy soldiers) is permissible, provided that the civilian casualties are not disproportionate or directly intended. So Western countries are prepared to defend actions like bombing from the air against strategic targets (civilians unfortunate casualties) and condemn direct strikes against civilians by groups labeled as terrorists.

I am firmly persuaded that a Romney administration would impose fewer checks than a second Obama administration, but the Obama administration has very few claims to moral leadership in this respect. The idea that Romney would govern as a moderate Conservative strikes me as bonkers. His party has moved several steps to the Right since 2008, and victory in 2012 won’t be followed by a dash back towards the center.

I think, like John Quiggin @59, we’re genuinely in a lesser-evil situation. I’ve been immensely disappointed by Obama’s performance on the economy, on housing, financial reform and on matters like the use of drones (plus Guantanamo, civilian trials…). Obama has governed as a pretty conservative Democrat. I still honestly think his election in November would be preferable to a Republican sweep. A 47 member Democratic Senate caucus would likely get a thorough working over for using the filibuster to block legislation that would “hasten recovery,” if it wasn’t all rammed through by Reconciliation.

Notice the wording in the Wikipedia entry:

“The median total estimated Korean civilian deaths in the Korean War is 1,547,000″

That means there are lower and higher estimates. It doesn’t mean that the correct total is 1,547,000. I’ve seen them listed between 2-4 million, which is what I used.

They also use the word “median” when they give the totals for Vietnam. The number I’ve seen with the most consensus is 3 million. Hence the 6-7 million figure.

The basic problem is that the opposition party is pressuring the president to be even worse on human rights than he already is, e.g. by trying to broaden government detainment powers in the 2012 NDAA despite Obama’s objections and forbidding the closure of the Guantanamo detention center. Until the GOP and its supporters can get some sense knocked back in human rights are going to be a real uphill battle.

The use of the technology of “flying killer robots” strikes me as mostly irrelevant. It wouldn’t be any improvement to have human death squads running around instead.

Data Tutashkhia @ 41
“Is it because they asked for evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in response to the demand to extradite him 10 years ago, but instead got bombed, invaded, and occupied for 10 years? ”

Since bin Laden at the time already had two outstanding warrants for terrorism I suspect the Taliban’s refusal to extradict him was not entirely in good faith.

rea @39:
“The Wikipedia article on Operation Overlord estimates that 13,632–19,890 French civilians were killed or injured by Allied operations in the battle. Was that an Allied war crime?”

In the specific case of the bombing of Caen it was at the least a really, really bad idea. That leveled the city and killed hundreds of civilians while barely touching the Germans outside. The cost/benefit analysis of the current US drone campaign strikes me as closer to Caen than Overlord generally.

Chris Bertram @ 42
“Look, I know they talk different talks, but in office Romney pushed essentially the same healthcare plan as Obama. Obama has governed as a moderate conservative; Romney governed Massachusetts as a moderate conservative.”

Romney is also trying to pretend his health plan never happened, which is not normal given how it’s his signature accomplishment in office[1]. Hell, Obama’s plan is basically what the Heritage Foundation proposed two decades ago, but because it passed as Obama’s plan it suddenly became a horrible unconstitutional power-grab. The current Republican party is insane, and a President Romney would unfortunately be compelled to appoint other Republicans into his administration and the judiciary. Hoping that the GOP might stop trying to destroy the country if they get back into power strikes as less than compelling to me on multiple levels.

[1] Romney has also attacked Obama for “spending too much time” at Harvard. This is really weird since not only was Romney the governor of the state Harvard is in, he also has a JD and MBA from there himself. These sort of contortions don’t inspire my confidence.

Since some above are now enganging in “death math”, counting and comparing the number of civilians killed in various ways in different wars, keep in mind that the most lethal aspect of wars lies in their opportunity costs. The massive resources wasted on the Iraq war could alternatively have saved many millions worldwide from easily preventable lethal risks e.g. malaria.

Another consequence of the over-reliance on drone strikes in addition to being a great inducement to recruitment is wiping out the moderates (Al-Qa’ida has moderates you say?All things are relative, but yes, yes they do). And they are being replaced by younger more reckless and more extremist members.

http://allthingscounterterrorism.com/2012/06/06/some-quick-thoughts-on-reports-abu-yahya-al-libi-has-been-killed/

Chris, how about raw fatigue?

In relation to deaths in Vietnam and Korea, John Tirman wrote a decent book called The Deaths of Others, and came up with figures (I think, I dont have it here but its on the below clip) of 3 million died in Korea, 2-4 in Vietnam and 1 million in Iraq

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=1254

John, I’m relying on the article to which Glenn Greenwald referred us.

I’m pretty much with LaBonne here. Now, I’m not unconditionally against drones, with enough care and discretion the occasional strike might pass the ratio of innocents to dangerous badguys that I would deem reasonable. Its just that we’ve slipped quite a ways down the slippery slope. But the attitudes of most of the public are even further down that slope, and loud protests are likely to simply marginalize the left, and anyone who can be branded with the label. So I don’t know how to start making a difference.

About the Romney/Obama diffs. Character-wise I think they are very similar, they are political opportunists, and going along with what the power structure (and public opinion) wants takes precendence over principles. The problem is Romney will be trying to please a very hardline constituency. Also he will appoint more corporatists to the supreme court -but maybe there are already so many that it is a hopeless case.

A few on the left have been complaining. I read them and agree, but I don’t know how to move public opinion, which seems pretty bloody minded. Its almost as if collateral civilian casualties are a feature, not a bug (i.e. too many have absorbed the idea, that they are ALL bad guys).

I’m torn. I have no desire to vote for Obama given his record on human rights. But two points can be made:

1) If Obama loses, it won’t register in the public mind as a loss for conservative war-mongering. Instead conservatives will crow about their victory over an “appeaser,” and take their victory as permission to invade anywhere for any reason. That means Iran.

2) The last time there was a protest vote by the left against the mainstream candidate, the result was George W. Bush, easily the worst president in history. . . orders of magnitude worse than Obama on any issue you care to name. People on the leftdidn;t get behind Gore thinking “how bad could it be?” The answer turned out to be “As bad as it gets.”

I probably won’t vote for Obama in November. . . but these two factors keep me up at night.

Platonist @87:

Is there an important difference between standard utilitarianism cases (pick your favorite trolley argument) and voting for the lesser evil? Do a significant number of people accept the former but reject the latter? Is that consistent—or is it a case of being a Kantian when it’s convenient or feels good?

It’s interesting that you bring this up. In my opinion, it is a very confused person that thinks these two things are the same, but maybe some people will argue that they are similar. I reject utilitarianism but I absolutely support voting for the lesser evil. If you want to talk about Kant, how can voting for the lesser evil possibly involve the exploitation of people? The voting process is not a person. My take on Kant would be that it is perfectly acceptable to use non-human objects and processes as a means to obtain an end in a way that would be unacceptable with an actual human. This is why all the moralizing about casting votes is so strange to me.

Okay, assuming that drone warfare and illegal, unwarranted wars are both very bad things (and they are, of course):

1. Isn’t conventional warfare much, much worse? (under 1000 civilians killed by drones, Iraq war: hundreds of thousands killed, upward of a million related deaths)

2. Isn’t it true that refusing both conventional warfare and drone strikes is not a practically live option for the administration, making the drone escalation the only alternative to expanded conventional warfare?

3. Even if it is more of a political expediency than a necessity (Obama does seem to be a true believer in moderate hawk policy), isn’t his decision to, for standard utilitarian reasons, sacrifice hundreds of innocents for the (mis)perceived greater good immeasurably better than the alternative policy of the conservatives to sacrifice hundreds of thousands for the sake or a misperceived greater good?

4. Are you really not going to pull that trolley switch?

The following are logically consistent:

1. Obama has been terrible on many issues.
2. Overall, Romney will be incomparably worse.

Both of these premises ought to be obvious to anyone with both a progressive prospective and the slightest acquaintance with American politics. (For example, anyone who knows the age of Ruth Bader Ginsborg and the recent history of Supreme Court decisions. Or, for that matter, anyone familiar with the economic views of the current Republican party.)

Many progressives who have had the truth of 1. impressed upon them repeatedly by Glenn Greenwald posts seem unable to grasp the truth of 2., or to think through what it implies about how they ought to vote. I’m not sure why this is. But I suspect part of the explanation is that those of us born and raised into the unprecedented peace and prosperity enjoyed (until relatively recently) by the postwar American and western Europe middle class have trouble really feeling in their bones the truth of another observation that ought to be obvious: that no matter how bad things are, they can always get much, much worse.

And so progressives, stoked by (legitimate) outrage, can get into a frame of mind where they seriously ask themselves, “How could things be much worse than Obama?” When really this question is laughable.

The real issue for me is not whether drone strikes are counterproductive in that they generate more recruits for the terrorists than they kill genuine terrorists. It’s that this counterproductivity is the point. The goal is to have an endless supply of enemies to keep the millitary industrial complex going.

One addendum:

Romney is clearly remarkably close in political belief to Obama, but will be beholden to the crazy Republican right, as Obama is not.

I believe this is clearly wrong. It’s certainly a mistake to point to Romney’s record in Massachusetts as better evidence of his “political belief” than what he now campaigns on.

But what he believes is not even the important question. The important question is what he will do. It is a dead certainty that one thing he will not do is make a radical break to the left from the actions and agenda of recent Republican office holders and big-ticket political donors.

No Jason, the problem is quite the opposite: that liberals refuse to challenge in any meaningful way the terrible things being done because they are paralyzed by the fear that it will be worse. We are never talking about the mere act of voting – it’s always about the question if we as leftists should subordinate our politics to the electoral purposes of the Democratic party.

Whether we are talking about the demobilization of the huge immigration rights movement that sprung up some years ago by Democratic-allied organizations endorsing half-assed “immigration reform”, or about the way major progressive and liberal groups related to the anti-war movement (not saying they destroyed it, we did that job ourselves quite well) – it’s not about who an individual votes for. It’s about political structures, about self-censorship in election years (ie, all the time), about the channelling of real political activism into the replacement activities called elections (look at Wisconsin – in the best case, a Republican union buster will be replaced by a Democratic union buster – that’s what the union leaderships demobilized the movement for).

“Dresden, hiroshima and nagasaki had the aim of ending the war.”

You have answered my question about hair-splitting in the affirmative.

Not one of the Obama apologists have made any sort of desperate argument that voting for Obama will improve anything, domestically or internationally.

Probably a second-term Obama presidency won’t “improve” anything. I’m saying that it should be obvious that a Romney presidency will be much worse than an Obama presidency. This can be true even if an Obama presidency is bad.

That is the sum total of my “desperate argument” for voting for Obama, which you don’t think has been made. Admittedly, there is an unstated premise, which is that which outcomes are better or worse is a factor relevant to decisions. Perhaps you do not accept this.

The idea that anything in this vicinity amounts to “apologism” for Obama does suggest you are thinking about voting differently, as a referendum on Obama’s moral goodness. Personally, I don’t know the guy, and I don’t believe virtue is remotely the best determinant about how political actors behave. So I don’t give a damn. I care about what happens next being less horrible overall.

No Jason, the problem is quite the opposite: that liberals refuse to challenge in any meaningful way the terrible things being done because they are paralyzed by the fear that it will be worse. We are never talking about the mere act of voting – it’s always about the question if we as leftists should subordinate our politics to the electoral purposes of the Democratic party.

In this post and thread it has been claimed that it is a hard choice for a progressive whether to vote for Obama over Romney. This is self-evidently a claim about the “mere act of voting”. It is the claim I was addressing.

I agree that how you vote does not exhaust your options as a citizen in the political sphere. Of course. Protest, organize. Don’t subordinate.

rea, the article to which Glenn Greenwald referred quote unnamed “Yemeni officials” who claim one member of AQ and the brother of another were killed. There are also lots of quotes from unnamed US sources with various descriptions, all of whom dance around the issue, and from the relatives of the only undisputed fatalities who deny AQ presence. The article *does not* state that AQ members were killed, it quotes some unnamed notoriously unreliable sources saying so.

It is not possible to win a war using the standards of zero innocent lives lost suggested by the original posts and comments. Morally speaking, that is a good standard to aspire too. Practically speaking, the drones seem to be working. The public (rightly or wrongly) feels that they are at war. This is why the complaints are not getting wider attention.

Yes, that’s why in the OP, I wrote “but will be beholden to the crazy Republican right, as Obama is not.”

Sure, but that stands against the thrust of point two in the comment I quoted. I don’t think “Romney needs to make immoderate noises” is to be compared to signing horrible things into law. Some Yeats about the center not holding comes to mind.

We are surely at the beginning of an empire as Bob McManus wrote in #6 above. We are going to have robot killers like the Terminator (the first one, not the liquid guy) making ground invasions possible without any human citizens back in the homeland even knowing about it. And if we report now that the drones killed “terrorists”, then you will have no way to evaluate whether that is true or not. But the empire is not going to look anything like before, and not like anything George Lucas cooked-up either, and we have several phases to go through yet. In the meantime Romney will be worse than Obama, taking us on a shorter, rockier road to perdition. Because he will continue this “War on Terror” in the same way, plus he will capitulate, for political gain, to Tea Party economics. So anybody who might protest the road to ruin is going to have even less means than before.

I might add, the notion that the US would deliberately target this 16-year old with a drone strike is on its face implausible–not because the US or the individuals making up its government are particularly virtuous, but because it would be purposeless, and bad publicity.

“And you know, if you won’t accept the statements of the Yemeni officials, there isn’t any evidence that anyone was killed at all.”

WTF? You just quoted a named source for this fact, certainly much closer to the event than “Yemeni officials”.

But, just to be clear, you’re OK with the US assassinating children, as long as unnamed “Yemeni officials” say they were hanging around with bad guys. You don’t even need an anonymous US source?

As for the claim that this just wouldn’t be sensible and would be bad publicity, your own reaction proves the opposite.

And there are other cases where it is even clearer, such as that of 16yo Tariq Khan, killed, with a 12yo cousin, returning from a press conference where he protested against drone strikes, almost certainly as retaliation for his actions. This actually made it onto network news, but hasn’t really caused the Admin any PR problems.

Would this make a difference?…

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150962340141252&set=a.10150442734531252.402605.18753646251&type=1&theater

Depends if it’s an insincerely stated aim or not, I suppose.

Also;

I might add, the notion that the US would deliberately target this 16-year old with a drone strike is on its face implausible—not because the US or the individuals making up its government are particularly virtuous, but because it would be purposeless, and bad publicity.

Using such strikes to make more enemies to maintain your profit margins is not purposeless. In this sense, it doesn’t matter if actual terrorists are killed, or even targeted. It only matters that more enemies are produced than are consumed.

“so you have to figure out who he’s going to pander to

Yes, that’s why in the OP, I wrote “but will be beholden to the crazy Republican right, as Obama is not.””

You don’t think Obama has pandered to the crazy republican right with his continuation of Bush policies??? Obama looks like a guy who came into office and was sat down by the CIA and military, the pharmaceutical, oil and insurance lobbies and the defense industry and was briefed on how they were going to run the country. Eventually he accepted his role and now kind of gets off on being a warmaker.

On the bright side, I think I found the Higgs Boson in Substance’s mouseover text.

You don’t think Obama has pandered to the crazy republican right with his continuation of Bush policies?

Yes I do, but I also think being able to do things the crazy Republican right would never ever want done – Ledbetter and health and birth control coverage for instance – pretty obviously makes the case that he’s Better Than The Average Republican. Presidential candidates deserve jail pretty soon after election and sometimes before, but they’re still the people on the ballot.

Make that 2012, please. Otherwise our UK colleagues might find themselves debating whether or not to warn their children about the upcoming Battle of Hastings.

just to be clear, you’re OK with the US assassinating children, as long as unnamed “Yemeni officials” say they were hanging around with bad guys. You don’t even need an anonymous US source?

Goodness, John, of course, I’m not okay with that, and I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of what I’ve said here. It’s horrible that he was killed, but there is no evidence whatever that he was targeted, and no reason that he would be targeted.

Similarly, the death of Tariq Khan is horrible. I had not heard of the case before, but I’ve spent a few minutes reading articles. As far as I can tell, nobody in the world other than you in your comment above has suggested that he was targeted due to his paticipation in an antidrone meeting. None of the several hundred other Pakistanis who participated in the meeting have been killed by drones. It makes no sense from the standpoint of the interests of the United States to target 16-year olds for drone strikes.

As I said above, acquitting Obama of war crimes and concluding that the drone program is legal is not the same as saying that the people running the program never blunder.

To add, the fact that we are now told that not voting for Obama will kill poor Americans proves my point. Chris or Jason may think that what they are talking about is the act of voting in isolation, but they are not. They are precisely elevating Democratic electoral success to the one and only issue of importance. If getting Obama re-elected is of such importance, then subordinating every other progressive politics to that goal is what they should be advocating – and for all intents and purposes, they are.

I don’t think we should be putting this all on Obama. ISI won’t let go of its geopolitical leverage, the Taliban which has killed many innocent civilians–Pakistanis, Afghanis, Indians, foreign aid workers and diplomats. Ahmed Rashid believes Obama administration has put pressure on the Pakistani government and military to pursue a political solution to the problems created by the Taliban. Also appears the ISI will not accept a political compromise in Afghanistan in which its well-supported and thoroughly retrograde and horrific proxies would be marginalized. The situation is quite complicated. It seems that the Pakistani people are as fed up with imperialist drone strikes as they are with the proxy wars conducted by their secret security services and the domestic instability to which they give rise. I suspect that the full complexity of the situation lies beyond the accounts of US-sympathetic Ahmed Rashid and anti-imperialist ideologue Tariq Ali.

I cannot believe that rea is really arguing that “not targeting” a victim of an attack means that attack does not violate any laws of war, and that the mere professed belief on the part of the person designating someone for elimination that the target is a terrorist means the attack is legally justified. That is so utterly ludicrous, so completely outside any interpretation of the laws of war that not even the administration would claim this – which is why they go to such lengths to invent “terrorists” they supposedly killed. This is the logic of the “legitimate target”, a logic so obviously flawed it fatally undermined the IRA armed struggle and cost it community support.

Let’s keep in mind that the Pakistani government is complicit in the drone attacks. (They could easily shoot down the drones with their F-16s, not to mention ground-to-air missiles.) Many innocent Pakistanis have been killed in bombings by the Taliban. IOW, the issue involves a lot more parties than the few hundred dead civilians killed in drone strikes–there are thousands of other dead Pakistani non-combatants. (over 35,000 by some counts–see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Pakistan) Whether the Pakistani or US military goes into the tribal areas to root out the Taliban, or whether the Taliban is left unmolested to continue its bombing campaign in Afghanistan and urban Pakistan, these deaths are also worth paying attention to. There is a plausible case to be made that abandoning the drone campaign leads to a lot more death and destruction.

Rea, but that is precisely your argument in 142. You assert that because (according to you) targeting kids would be dumb, they weren’t targeted – and conclude that Obama should therefore be acquitted of war crimes. I particularly like how you demand we give Obama the benefit of the doubt – something his victims obviously are not afforded.

Well rea, maybe you could restate your position as it applies to the assassination of Tariq Khan. It’s conceded, by the usual anonymous officials, that he was targeted (ABC link doesn’t work for me any more, but the relevant quote is in this story)

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30496

We are surely at the beginning of an empire as Bob McManus wrote in #6 above.

I’m curious what this means. In at least one obvious sense, the US has been pretty empire-like at least since the end of WWII. And it’s had imperial ambitions, and some notable imperial “successes” long before then. Presumably, the sense in which we’re “becoming” an empire is the “death of the republic” model. So there’s going to be no way to protest state power. But as long as we’re talking about foreign policy and in particular military actions, I don’t see what mechanisms of accountability there were earlier. Voting for “the other party”, for any value of “other”, wasn’t one, isn’t now, and likely won’t be in the near future.

Part of my more general point is that most people on here seem to be treating like this is some sort of giant anomaly, death of the Democratic party as we know, etc. But why? All that’s new is a further mechanization in the means of warfare. Right? I mean, it’s not like Obama is the first Democratic “war president”. Oh, and treating all males (or some such) as automatically combatants. As someone else said, things that have long been accepted practice tend to become explicitly articulated at some point.

So the choice between Obama and Romney is the choice between a slow and uncertain economic recovery in the US and thousands of illegal killings overseas, on the one hand, and a massive and irreversible economic catastrophe in the US and millions dead in disasterous wars overseas.

But Bloix, as Bob McManus and others have cogently argued above, to think about the actual consequences of the two alternatives that are actually before you in the voting booth this November is to have no moral limits/debase yourself before your Democratic ballot-box overlords/wet [yourself?] submissively.

Does the fierce urgency of arguing projectively and imaginatively the greater evil of Romney, really relieve one of responsibility for assessing realistically the actual evil Obama has been?

And, if this Hobson’s Choice reflects a dysfunctional American politics, do we just ignore Obama’s role in creating the dysfunction?

Would Democrats, be worse, without Obama in the White House? Would the Democratic minority in Congress oppose Romney? (I know the filibuster doesn’t apply when Republicans lead the Senate.) Would Democrats criticize Romney abuses of power? Would Democrats oppose Romney’s efforts to screw the poor and middle class, or his efforts to despoil the environment, or to carry out lawless attacks in foreign countries? Because Democrats surely won’t oppose Obama’s efforts to screw the poor or despoil the environment or attack people in foreign countries!

It’s interesting how this thread proves the point: that liberals are actually defending the murderer president to the hilt. As I said, it’s not about voting. It’s about the kind of attempts to get critics to shut up we witness in 160. It’s about the desperate making of excuses like “well he’s killing fewer people than Bush did”, and the utter nonsense about public employee unions – that (a) mostly have no connection with the federal government and (b) are already under nationwide attack – by the Democrats, with Obama doing his small part (cf., “race to the top”).

hartal @ 162
Why would Romney (or any American) want to “counterweigh” Indian influence??

Probably only those in the American military tied up with the ISI over many years would want to counter India’s influence and still see in the ISI a more reliable ally.

An American liberal is someone who nods approvingly, and maybe feels a gush of sanctimony, when Obama refers to Trayvon Martin as a son he might have had, but stays silent when Obama declares that brown-skinned Muslim boys of Martin’s age are good kills.

An American liberal is a Lieberman Democrat. Cater to a screeching social agenda and kill brown people elsewhere. The successful eradication of the Left from the Democratic Party makes for a winning formula.

I doubt that foreign policy will differ under Romney. Iran can’t be invaded by ground — it is four times the area of Iraq and mountainous. Bombing missions are unlikely to subdue the Iranians — Pentagon war games reportedly always end in the same results for U.S. bombing missions: no way to declare victory, world opprobrium for the U.S., and reduced influence in the area. The Iranians supposedly possess augmented Chinese missiles on mobile launchers all along the gulf that fly close to the water so they cannot be hit by antiballistic missiles and can hit an oil tanker with 90% accuracy. So the world price of oil will double or triple overnight. Basically, Iran can’t be attacked at all, except by secret units or cyberwar. (This may be why Israeli security and military people have started to call Netanyahu crazy: they agree with the U.S. military, they know that Iran really can’t be attacked, and they thought Netanyahu knew it too, and that he was only whooping-it-up to get voters.) Iran is going to remain a standoff. That doesn’t mean Rmoney won’t use it to whoop-up his own idiots.

>>Iran can’t be invaded by ground—it is four times the area of Iraq and mountainous.

I am *strongly* opposed to a US (or Israeli) attack on Iran, for any number of reasons, but that comment is breathtakingly naive. Iran’s military is a paper tiger–what is with the weird attempt to build them up? Their coastal missiles would be taken out within hours, and they barely have an air force.

Center-right reader here:

“@159: We have people, in this thread, seriously arguing that Bush was better than Obama. If you count only drone strikes and ignore the “starting unprovoked wars” thing, and the “killing numerous civilians in conventional air strikes” thing, you might have a point. But you don’t, and if you read a propagandist like Greenwald you would not even know that fewer civilians are being killed.”

I don’t think one can really make a proper comparison between Bush and Obama right now. I would not say Obama has governed better than Bush though, as I don’t think we have enough information to really make judgements about either presidency right now. I also wouldn’t say Bush started an “unprovoked war.” They were provoked, albeit for what turned out to be faulty reasons.

“Yes, you’re wrong. Spectacularly, completely, utterly fucking wrong. Romney has guaranteed that he will extend tax cuts on the rich, raise military spending, eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood. His advisors are the same crew that started the Iraq War, and they are aggressively lobbying for a hot war with Iran. The drone program will be expanded, not reduced, in a Romney administration. We have a radical Supreme Court with some aging and ill moderates who will be replaced by the next president. We have radical assaults on voting rights (the Obama administration has blocked these); gerrymandering; environmental regulations; scientific research; all clearly on the chopping block. (Look up the Ryan plan.) A nationwide attack on public employee unions is almost certain.”

1) Why is extending the tax cuts on the high earners wrong? (everyone got a tax cut under Bush, it wasn’t just the high-earners)

2) Raising military spending I doubt will happen, although it is needed in order to re-build the military after these last two wars. Cutting it as the Obama administration is seeking to do is a bad idea however. It doesn’t make up a large enough portion of the budget and is crucial to the national security.

3) Why does Planned Parenthood need any federal funding? It isn’t a branch of the government, it’s a private organization. Why can’t it rely on private donations? Should the National Rifle Association, an organization devoted to protecting what is an explicit right in the Constitution, also receive federal funding? (it doesn’t right now).

4) How is the Supreme Court radical? Because it voted to uphold the Second Amendment? Or how it voted to uphold free speech? (corporations are people when they are civil rights organizations that are structured as corporations—you can’t be allow to censor such organizations during political campaigns). Because it may strike down the government claiming the commerce clause allows them to mandate people engage in a contract?

5) I agree cutting scientific research and environmental regulations is bad, however how are cutting public employee unions bad? The only reason public employee unions even exist is to increase the power base of unions and the Democratic party. Public sector workers have never needed unions. The entire idea of allowing public-sector workers to unionize was considered ludicrous even by the unions prior to it actually being started. It’s also dangerous, because if the public-sector workers strike, then they can put the security of the general public at risk. Public-sector unions are government lobbying itself to increase it’s size. It also creates a conflict of interest, because no politician put into office by the public unions can simultaneously do the bidding of the unions and also work for the people.

@169 Just because starting a war with Iran is an utterly stupid idea is no reason to suppose a Romney administration won’t do it. See: 2003. In my view, the difference between Obama and American wingers, who are as crazy as Netanyahu, isn’t primarily moral: he’s less likely to catastrophically screw things up.

Sigh.

Obama “leaves” Iraq on the terms and schedule set by Bush, with the same Secretary of Defense leading the policy execution, and this makes Obama different from Bush in what way?

There’s plenty of reaction to Obama’s drone murders at liberal sites. The people on those sites scream “purist” and “lunatic” and “crazy person” and “firebagger” and “nut job” and “troll” at anyone who points out that Obama’s drone murders are unconstitutional war crimes.

If you cite the fifth and sixth and eighth and fourteenth amendments, the people on liberal cites all you a “member of the purity patrol” and laugh.

@ 170 Lee Arnold,
>> then after all of that, you have to manage the occupation and get a new government going.

You make some good points, but I don’t think a (hypothetical) US attack on Iran is going to lead to an occupation — been there, done that, failed. Instead, it would just be a “smash” operation. But claiming the Iranians have some sort of geographical defense is crazy–they would get chewed up real fast.
Yeah, with bad consequences, but that’s what’s going to happen if it cooks off. Let’s hope it doesn’t.

i too have been reading glen and increasingly grossed out by obama’s policies – so i wrote something too, a bit of satire on the matter: http://bigdeadbat.tumblr.com/post/24513790507/wiphdt-what-if-pakistan-had-drones-too

I have no doubt there would be differences between the Obama and Romney foreign policies. Romney would be less inclined to rein in defense spending, even modestly. Romney would be more inclined to keep a large US mil. presence in Afghanistan indefinitely (though Obama will no doubt keep a substantial presence under the label of advisers, etc.). Relations with Russia and China will probably deteriorate with a Romney admin (or deteriorate further than they already have, in the case of Russia). Obama made an inspired choice in nominating J. Kim to head the World Bank. Neoliberals and orthodox economists screamed about it. Romney would not have made that choice. (Etc.)

One of my favorite, dearest plumbing customers is a survivor of Bergen-Belsen. He was taken there as a boy a few weeks before allied liberation. He tells me the German soldiers at the camp just put on civilian clothes, and slipped into the towns… He went and slept in a barn, then somebody gave him some food.

Then bring it back to the main point. Obama cannot be a human rights champion, unless it is under the doctrine that the “War on Terror” is an attempt to preserve human rights by stopping religious fundamentalists who demonstrated the willingness to kill lots and lots of innocent people who supposedly deserved their deaths simply because they were citizens of an aggressor state, although stopping those fundamentalists also kills more innocent people and commits other sorts of war crimes. I doubt that it makes him a human rights champion. The more interesting question for me is whether people think this “War on Terrorism” should continue to be prosecuted, and if so, then how it should be done, in a militarily plausible way.

Voting for the lesser of two evils is of course voting for evil.

I should be sending Obama some bucks. Romney would be worse. But in 2008 I thought I was voting FOR someone, not just against someone. Color me naive.

Marc:

We have the public statements of Romney, urging aggression; the public statements of his advisors; and the fact of the war on Iraq.

Look, I’m not one of the Obama is even worse, etc., people. Like I said above, I vote on domestic policies, because despite Bob Rubin and his teeming protégés, I think there are significant differences in domestic policy and the Dems are still better. (And I live in a non-safe state.) Foreign policy though is a different matter (yes, different levels of competence, etc., but over time [decades, like] don’t think it breaks down according to parties).

But mostly, your argument won’t hold. Remember when Obama in his campaign promised to shut down this “prison” in Cuba, etc.? (And yes, I know it was all the fault of the 41st Republican in the Senate, but there’ll be a 41st Democrat in the Senate come Jan. 2013, so why worry? Etc.) Point is, this cuts both ways. Remember that famous campaign promise Bush pere made? I think it was used in attack ads by the Clinton campaign? (This last is not rhetorical; maybe it was a primary campaign that used that against Bush?) And for fuck’s sake, Bush fils ran as some kind of isolationist.

And on Iran, Lee @170 seems pretty dead on to me.

Rea: “Context, context.”

Well, yes . But the broadest context here, as several people have alluded to, is that the vast preponderance of destructive actions that the U.S. does overseas (and much of what is destructive within our own borders) is done in direct support of the American Empire. As an admirerer of Thomas Paine and, being an Irish-American, Daniel O’Connell and Michael Collins, I would contend that almost anything, but ESPECIALLY any taking of life, in promotion or defense of empire is, ipso facto, immoral and most of the time downright evil. Unless, of course, you believe with intellectual quacks like Niall Ferguson that empires are often benign (at least Anglo-Saxon-related ones). So, for example, the discussion here of the war deaths in Korea , Vietnam, and Iraq strikes me as analogous to a discussion of how many lives were lost by the direct military actions of the British military in its colonial wars while ignoring other effects of the British Empire that undoubtedly took many more lives collectively–e.g., the Great Famine in Ireland, during which great quantities of meat and grain continued to be exported from Ireland to England and elsewhere, and which wouldn’t have ever happened if most Irish landowners hadn’t been dispossessed during the previous centuries, leading to the adoption of the subsistence potato monoculture. Analogies with this Irish-British example would be all the lives lost in Latin America, the Mideast, and Africa in coups, dictatorships, oligarghic regimes, and just plain politicals chaos precipitated by American extractive corporations (e.g., United Fruit and it’s successors and, especially, our oil companies). When the millions of lives lost and destroyed in these ways are included, the number of lives destroyed by the American Empire undoubtedly outnumber the combined totals of Hitler and Stalin, who, by the way, committed all those murders in the hope of establishing control over competing empires. Hell, how many million “Communists” were killed just in the great Sukarno purge in Indonesia? Multiply that total many, many times.

This thread and its discussion of the ethics of the drone strikes reminds me of the discussion in England of what was justifiable in England’s attempt to put down the 1916-1922 rebellion by the “terrorists” of the IRA — from the hanging of the leaders of the Easter Rising to the use of torture to the loosing of England’s own “Special Forces”‘on Ireland: the Black-and-Tans. Of course, from the point of view of an Irish nationalist–i.e. a native of a previously free nation that had been conquered, exploited, and, like the American colonies of the 18th century, disenfranchised–NONE of those things were ethically justifiable. The only ethically justifiable thing for England to have done at the time would have been to gave gotten the hell out ASAP.

Of course, if you try to tell Americans that they have adopted the role of the so many King Georges, they look at you like you have three eyes and horns, even ones for whom this really should be intuitively obvious, given their education and experience. But no people ever believed the effects of its great empire were nefarious or gave it up voluntarily. Hence, every President since at least McKinley (and many before that–e.g., Jefferson, Jackson, Polk) have been reflexive imperialists (not to mention eager tools of the corporatist class, with the ambiguously possible exception of FDR). This doesn’t mean that some weren’t worse than others or that Romney wouldn’t be worse than Obama, which I think he would–Shrub Redux, in fact, without the faux “regular guy” schtick (to say the least). But I’ll be damned if I’ll vote for either of them.

Like a previous poster, I worked in the anti-war and civil rights movements in the ’60’s. When I was fighting the draft, repeatedly refusing induction, people would ask me why, instead of rising prison, I didn’t just do what my best friend did, which was to join the reserves as a medic. My answer was that I just couldn’t bring myself to put on the uniform, given what we were doing in Vietnam. (This from someone who only four years before would’ve signed on the dotted line for a ROTC scholarship if my parents hadn’t refused their permission.) I feel the same way about voting now. Back in the ’60’s I was full of hope for this country. Now, if it weren’t for my kids, I’d leave.

@js 193:

“I vote on domestic policies…”

Thus: “In order to have the Great Society, I had to give them Vietnam”.

Well, no. The concessions that Obama makes to the right, i.e. all the things that he has done to alienate the left, must be for some reason. Of course, all the domestic issues that liberals love are part and parcel of the leftist position, too. However, the left has been driven out of the Democratic Party, or at least marginalized to the point of simply being, what was it?, a veal pen?

Glenn Greenwald, Marcy Wheeler et al. have systematically documented the right-cringing policies of the Obama administration. There is no place for the left in the Democratic Party. Time to look elsewhere.

Kyle Blank #174: “1) Why is extending the tax cuts on the high earners wrong? (everyone got a tax cut under Bush, it wasn’t just the high-earners)”

The Bush tax cuts as a whole need to be revoked someday after the recession ends, since government spending is going to increase with the rate of medical spending in general Everybody got a tax cut under Bush, but the rich made so much more money that the burden of total taxation shifted downward onto the middle classes: in other words, the rich are taking a higher percentage share of total after-tax income than before. Despite this largesse however, the Bush tax cuts did not increase revenues enough to pay for themselves, as was advertised!, and they did not increase economic growth nor productivity growth commensurately, as was advertised, and as is obvious.

The argument for revoking the tax cuts on the high earners at the present moment goes this way. It will reduce the deficits a little, and at the same time, it won’t do any damage to economic growth, because we are not in a supply-side recession: business investment is not the problem; companies are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash that they are not spending. We are in a demand-side recession of a rare type, a balance-sheet recession, and the basic problem is pumping-up consumer demand to get people back to work. But high earners do not have a higher marginal propensity to consume than lower earners; the rich save the money, and it is languishing as bank reserves. So the idea is to revoke the high-earner cuts now, and revoke the low-earner cuts in addition, AFTER the recession is over and the economy comes back. Of course revoking the high-earner cuts is a political plus for the Dems, and reducing the deficits removes the public debt as a viable political issue for the Repubs, and so that is where Wash D.C. is stuck.

There is no place for the left in the Democratic Party. Time to look elsewhere.

Sorry, but where? Ok, first, the left hasn’t been driven out of the Democratic party. The Left was never in the Democratic party. We don’t have the advantage of having a proper Left party, and worse, we’ve never had one. The last matters.

Coming back to the original point though, where am I supposed to go? Because on women’s rights, e.g., the current Republican party is a modern supersized version of The Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation rolled into one. On economic policy, they make Milton fucking Friedman look like Karl Marx (only slight exaggeration). I entirely agree with christian_h’s point that it’s not all about voting, except that on foreign policy I think it has zero traction. But come this November, where do you want me to go?

In every American community, there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals:

So here then is a lesson in safe logic…

The time to vote against Obama was in the primaries, when there was a chance to get a more left wing, less hawkish and authoritarian candidate onto the ticket.

Y’all did vote in the Democratic primaries, yes?

The time to vote against Obama was in the primaries

Um.

(1) He ran unopposed in the vast majority of states, and sewed up the nomination (as if there were any doubt) in April.
(2) I am not a registered Democrat, nor am I a resident of any state, so I cannot vote in party primaries.
(3) In any event, why would I want to vote for a Democrat or a Republican? Why would anybody? They are the problem, not the solution.

leederick 06.05.12 at 9:11 pm

” How are you so sure? George W. Bush was a great deal better than Obama on drone strikes. That’s a campaign which has Obama’s signature all over it and which he has personally stepped up. I do think personnel makes a difference, and Romney might be an improvement.”

‘on drone strikes’

Leaving out 99.9% of the carnage he caused.

Even though it’s early in the morning, I’ll go ahead and award the prize of ‘BS of the day’ right now.

You wrote: “I’ve also been monitoring various liberal sites and blogs for signs of a reaction and not seeing much (please correct that impression in comments).” Please see Obama’s Assassinations, and Some Costs of Partisanship – http://equalityanddemocracy.org/2012/05/31/451/

It may not be a “liberal” site, but it is certainly not “conservative.”

The funny thing about this whole kill list thing is that it isn’t actually a finite list. It’s not like Obama is going to come out one day and say “well, we got everyone on the list so we’re just going to pack the drones up and focus on domestic issues now”.

None of the comments I’ve read considers the question of why there are people who would be on this list in the first place. The answer, of course, is the sense of injustice that obnoxious American foreign policies engender throughout the world.

A Pakistani whose family members have been killed by an American flying killer robot sure as hell can’t take a political stance by registering a protest vote in the next US election. Kill an actual militant and you convert his friend into a militant. Kill a 10 year old girl attending a funeral and 20 of her brothers and cousins become militant. How is that a ‘surgical strike’ when you’ve just increased the length of your kill list?!

There will always be ‘militants’. How insecure has the US become that it now feels the need to eradicate every person on the planet who objects to its policies? What happens when all the militants have been eradicated? Go after the effigy burners? Then the placard bearers?

The US is not at ‘war’, but whatever it is, it certainly is endless. You may as well just cast your votes based on domestic issues only…

The fact that people are more worried about poor chances at future health care reform, or who’s on the Supreme Court, or even access to abortion, then the mass murder of innocents via drone strikes is simply appalling to me. To me, this is the essence of everything that’s wrong with America: I don’t care how many people you kill, as long as I still get my (SUV, health care, social security, etc.)

No wonder most of the rest of the world hates us.

Donald: Of course, whenever a “centrist” Democrat loses, the party authorities all say that this proves they have to get even more “centrist”. It’s not like there’s anything we can do by voting to indicate “more left now, please” – they won’t hear it.

@215: It’s difficult to have a discussion when people in the room can’t even agree on basic facts. Talking to regular readers of Greenwald reminds me a great deal of talking to regular Fox News viewers. In both cases they are subject to a continuous stream of anti-Obama propaganda. Greenwald has a different angle, but in the end it’s the same outcome.

Obama confronted Romney and the Republicans on war with Iran, and this became transmuted into “I can parse Obama’s words so that he moved us closer to war with Iran.” Obama drastically curtailed bombing raids in Afghanistan and escalated drone attacks; Greenwald ignores one (it’s inconvenient for him) and promotes the other. He ended the Iraq war. Crickets. As a result you have people who think that it makes no difference *for civilian death tolls in the Middle East* whether Romney or Obama is elected, or that there has been no policy change under Obama. Greenwald is always very, very careful to insert the appropriate weasel words – he implies a lot without directly saying it. That ensures that he and his supporters can always wiggle out via technicalities. But if you go over there and read him, you get a clear impression: Obama is a vicious war criminal; there is no difference between the political parties in the US; anyone who disagrees loves torture and killing brown babies.

Step away from the particulars. Let’s say that you’re reading opinion pieces. You find out that the author ignores information that contradicts his thesis; misrepresents his opponents views; always casts opposing views in the most negative light; and personally attacks anyone who disagrees with him. Why would you trust that person as a source of information? And yet they do, and the outcome is precisely what we see in this thread.

The idea that Obama has been chasing the Republicans to the right: on precisely what? He flatly reversed a lot of Bush programs and priorities. He passed health care reform, at great cost; and many of his domestic policies are to the left of those in the Clinton administration. We can’t have that discussion, however, if people can’t even talk rationally about what the man has actually done (as opposed to the demon he represents to a faction of the online left.)

chris (211.); Yes of course we should work to overthrow the government, but that’s a long-term project. I’m certainly not advocating a futile attempt at an armed uprising now. So does this mean I’ll shut up about the murderer in the White House? No. And it’s the attempt you and your political friends make to get us to shut up that are the problem, not that you’re voting for Obama on election day (as I would if I had a vote). They prove my point, that if you say “it’s about who to vote for” you really mean much more than just the act of voting itself.

If a Republican president had a secret kill list, you’d be up in arms about it (not literally in arms, figuratively). Now you’re inventing excuses for it or at best ignoring the issue, b/c you have decided re-electing the person keeping that kill list is so important you shouldn’t rock the boat. I’m not (no matter what you may think) making a “moral” point here – I’m making a practical political point: the fact that liberals are not up in arms about this means it is now widely accepted as a legitimate power of the president; and all because so many of you have this purely electoral perspective.

I

The lesser of two evils is still evil.

“The idea that Obama has been chasing the Republicans to the right: on precisely what? ”

Listing things at random–

The health care proposal was Romneycare. The truly liberal options were never on the table with Obama. Of course the Republicans turned against their own ideas and went further to the right because that’s what they do and it works for them.

Obama embraced the basic ideas of Simpson-Bowles.

Obama decided that Bush human rights violations were not things that should be investigated and that we should move on. He takes a rather different view towards leakers (unless they make his Administration look good).

On Israel/Palestine, he condemns rockets aimed at Sderot. But his UN representative Susan Rice said there was no evidence of Israeli war crimes in the Gaza War and the Administration helped make sure the Goldstone Report went nowhere. Which makes sense–the Obama Administration’s view that any military-age male in the vicinity of one of its drone strikes is guilty until proven innocent would make it hard for them to criticize anything Israel does.

But yes, I do think he’s better than Romney. I also think Rob in CT has identified a big part of the problem–the majority of the electorate is easily persuaded to accept anything we do overseas, so long as Americans don’t get hurt.

Rob in CT 06.06.12 at 2:48 pm:
“The key thing I think a lot of people are still missing is the general moral depravity of your average American voter (indeed, I’d expand that to “average human being” since I actually don’t think we’re particularly exceptional).”

Absolutely. This is why the language-game of evil is unfruitful. There’s a perfectly meaningful usage, but one which is a scale that includes us all to a significant degree, so it defeats the Holy Rolling (Phony) Left’s moralistic, self-righteous purpose.

(Incidentally, this is why–in response to Chris–I’m a “platonist.” Platonism is a holy lie, the Forms are simply language. The true, the wise, and the good are fictions intentionally created to be inaccessible by definition, so that no existing person can claim the mantle. Platonism is a form of idealism that is optimistic, since it insists we must strive to be wiser and better, but anti-moralistic, since no one is in a position to moralize. It is all of the advantages of Christianity–and the American phony left–without their vindictiveness, arrogance, contempt, and hatefulness.)

“Those of us who are generally upset about how the US government uses its military power regardless of who is in the White House are a small minority of voters. I don’t know how to change that. I’ve argued these points with people and have made little headway. ”

Hear, hear. A real left–which the American one is not–would be materialist, would recognize that the only way to change this is to change the conditions that produce the subjects and their ideologies. Moralistic indignation and sermonizing and self-annointed sainthood (at increased numbers of brown peoples’ expense elsewhere) won’t do it.

Of course the old left, a real but naively dialectical one, thought that making everything worse would eventually make it better. There’s no historical evidence that this has ever been the case: that increasing the amount of suck turns people into good hearted saints demanding social justice. No, it makes them uglier. The only states and societies that even remotely approximate “decent” or “just” or “good” ones are (focusing on bits and pieces of policy) a handful of European socialist-capitalist amalgums, products of compromised increasingly improved half-measures, not saintly progressive superman, and none of which are the product of revolution or government overthrows.

There is another worrisome issue this raises, that is rarely addressed. Many on the left complain our democracy is a sham or disfunctional, but there is the real possibility that the problem is precisely that our democracy is functional: we are getting candidates and policies we deserve, that are as “evil” as we are.

Donald Johnson 06.06.12 at 2:15 pm,

I never said I was a “he.” You could avoid presumptuousness by addressing me rather than talking around me. To clarify: I don’t think those who disagree about the calculus are childish. I think those who justify their positions by grading souls’ degrees of evil are childish. I’d love to see a serious debate about consequentialist calculations, but I mostly see arguments that amount to: “a is evil, b is evil, c is evil. Therefore, asparagus.”

“there are tradeoffs when one votes for Obama. If I do so then I am encouraging Democratic politicians to believe that they can continue drifting to the right”

Yes, this is a serious risk, but it’s not clear the alternative avoids it. So it becomes a tricky question of asking which is the greater risk. I don’t think the Nader vote effectively slowing the Democrats’ drift to the right. Why would it now?

The next time there is a “vote for the lessor of the two evils” debate on Crooked Timber, I promise to repost this link much further up the thread:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_presidential_election,_1932

Though I have to admit that the argument made by chris in the previous comment, that its either Obama or revolution, is both novel and amazing. It may have been worth wading through the other 210 comments to see that.

“Blogs that take attitudes to historic human rights violations as a litmus-test of political acceptability, have nothing to say as a liberal American President bombs civilians on the territory of nominally friendly states.”

What I heard when I read the above:

Yeah, yeah, we know it’s an election year. Billions of dollars, pr firms, ad campaigns, the ghost of edward bernays….every joule and calorie expended is of the utmost importance to move the electoral needle, district by district, state by state.

But, what happened in 2011? And, if our darling O-man prevails, what about 2013? Aren’t little Yemeni and Pakistani children still going to be walking around with “Don’t Drone Me Bro!” T-shirts? What then?

Will your voice mean anything more than your vote captured on that fateful November 2012 day?

EVEN IF we agree that your joules and calories will be burned into obscurity by majoritarian “depravity,” will you expend any effort to oppose the campaign? Or maybe just to get the Barron/Lederman memo green-lighting the campaign released? Oh, and btw, IF you don’t oppose the campaign, this message isn’t for you.

Obama and Romney are the same: professional politicians.

The Democratic and Republican parties have different but overlapping constituencies (I’m talking about their real constituencies, business elites), and they overlap more and more. They also appeal to voters in different ways. With that in mind, it might very well be the case that a Republican president is better, because if the sponsors decide that they’ve gone too far, only a Republican president could easily pull the ‘Nixon goes to China’ trick off. Like Bush passing the Medicare prescription drugs plan. Democratic president, to avoid hurting the party, has to appear sufficiently bloodthirsty and committed to cutthroat capitalism.

The Democratic and Republican parties have different but overlapping constituencies (I’m talking about their real constituencies, business elites)

The US Chamber of Commerce – the lobbying group for the US business elite – has been one of Obama’s loudest opponents. But indeed this is central to your point!

Marc @220. Word.

Ed @230. Goodwin! Yahtzee! Only 230 posts…

In regards to pragmatism we were given Ron Paul, the fiscally conservative socially liberal candidate. Just sayin

Just by the by, when Obama had a chance to really do something for ending the Iraq war – as opposed to wrapping it up and sending the troops to kill more people in Afghanistan as planned by Bush – did he? How many war appropriations did he vote against? Or is this one of those “tricky” cases where words speak louder than actions?

If it makes you feel better to imagine that you are preventing some great evil, while blindly giving political support to the commission of great evil, I cannot save you.

I don’t think there’s much blindness in the thread about Obama doing bad stuff. He has done bad stuff, he is doing so, he will. I haven’t noticed any full-throated support for him in the thread.

In any case a vote is happening. I have a lot of sympathy for people who don’t want to vote for Obama: as Christian says at some point you won’t vote for a guy if he does X. That’s politics. I hope the people who can’t vote for Obama do their best to dissuade someone else from voting for Romney. A Coalition of Disgust swapping non-voting pledges – it’s not like Romney is beloved or trusted – would be an interesting thing.

Is the “lesser evil” question really so difficult? Doesn’t the Electoral College — abominable travesty though it is — make the solution obvious? In a safe state, red or blue — ie, all but a handful of states — vote for your preferred third-party candidate (mine is Jill Stein of the Green Party). Millions of people doing this will not throw the election to the Republicans (I agree that would be horrible) but will, or should, get the attention of the Democrats and — more important — of the rest of the citizenry.

Yes, executioner judge is an escalation. Killing someone who is related by marriage to a known terrorist is escalation too. Doing this with a drone strike outside of a combat zone is, –well, consistent. This escalation is the stock the trade of the movement. Escalation is the measure of every civilized society. If you don’t support drone strikes you are supporting terrorism is a logical escalation at home. There is a connection between escalation abroad and at home. They move in lock-step. Time cleans and polishes and then visits a likeness of them on us.

@195
“You may choose between: a) an exquisitely prepared gourmet meal, b) a hot dog, or c) a shit sandwich. Currently popular opinion is split between the three choices as follows: a) 4% b) 48% and c) 48%. What do you choose?”

Does the “exquisitely prepared gourmet meal” = Nader again? Ron Paul? Anarcho/ Green candidate from nowhere?

Does the “hot dog” = Obama?

Can it be a Nathan’s with mustard, ketchup, and (only a little) relish?

Then, I’ll have a hot dog, thanx.

And to those who choose the “exquisitely prepared gourmet meal”: Enjoy your “shit sandwich”.

Also this:

Probably not a bad thing that Obama and NATO are seen as making the strikes against strongholds of the Taliban…

Post facto redefining someone’s home as a ‘stronghold of the taliban’ is just the same as redefining their corpse as a terrorist.

The only thing that will get the attention of Democrats is to have a safe fall on them—and by safe I don’t mean losing the Presidency and both houses of Congress.

Nope, not even that, if history is any guide at all. They’ll just redouble their efforts to whore after corporate cash.

IMHO the only thing that can possibly work is to take over the party one county committeeperson at a time the way the wingnuts took over the Republican party. Third parties and protest votes- and street protests, which will simply be crushed the way OWS eventually was- are just diversions from that job. But those things are much more effective at inducing a self-righteous glow, which is all the left in this country has been good for since, well, forever.

My point is not that the taliban are not vicious monsters. They are. But they are no worse than the americans, and nato. Us taking sides on purely racist terms is wrong.

“Kyle Blank #174: “1) Why is extending the tax cuts on the high earners wrong? (everyone got a tax cut under Bush, it wasn’t just the high-earners)”

The Bush tax cuts as a whole need to be revoked someday after the recession ends, since government spending is going to increase with the rate of medical spending in general Everybody got a tax cut under Bush, but the rich made so much more money that the burden of total taxation shifted downward onto the middle classes: in other words, the rich are taking a higher percentage share of total after-tax income than before.”

How would the rich making more money shift the burden downward? From what I have seen, 50% of Americans ultimately pay no federal income tax now because of things like the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit (which was doubled under Bush from $500 to $1000 per child), along with various other tax credits and deductions people can get. It seems the burden remains, at least in terms of federal income tax, primarily shouldered by the highest earners, but they pay less absolute money then before because of the tax cuts.

“Despite this largesse however, the Bush tax cuts did not increase revenues enough to pay for themselves, as was advertised!, and they did not increase economic growth nor productivity growth commensurately, as was advertised, and as is obvious.”

This is true, as the taxes weren’t high enough to disrupt economic growth and the Bush administration also was not exactly fiscally conservative.

“The argument for revoking the tax cuts on the high earners at the present moment goes this way. It will reduce the deficits a little, and at the same time, it won’t do any damage to economic growth, because we are not in a supply-side recession: business investment is not the problem; companies are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash that they are not spending. We are in a demand-side recession of a rare type, a balance-sheet recession, and the basic problem is pumping-up consumer demand to get people back to work. But high earners do not have a higher marginal propensity to consume than lower earners; the rich save the money, and it is languishing as bank reserves. So the idea is to revoke the high-earner cuts now, and revoke the low-earner cuts in addition, AFTER the recession is over and the economy comes back. Of course revoking the high-earner cuts is a political plus for the Dems, and reducing the deficits removes the public debt as a viable political issue for the Repubs, and so that is where Wash D.C. is stuck.”

Wouldn’t the cash the businesses are sitting on constitute money they should be using for investment though, like expanding, hiring new people, etc…? A business “investing” in additional trucks is engaging in demand-side activity by purchasing new trucks as far as the truck dealer is concerned, for example. So it could be a form of supply-side recession. My fear is that raising the taxes now will not do much because the government will likely just continue spending like crazy. I understand the government cannot just “cut spending” as most of the spending is from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and defense, but at least addressing the issue of the debt and deficit and trying to work out a serious long-term plan (where gradual spending cuts or controls would really occur if the Republicans would agree to some tax increases) would be nice.

Historically what seems to happen though is that the government will increase taxes, but keep spending, or even increase spending. This makes Republicans very reluctant to agree to any tax increases. Some Republicans also (even if wrongly) believe such increases right now will hamstring the economy. Reducing the deficit a little isn’t worth much if the central problem of spending growth isn’t addressed somehow. I am not sure if I agree that letting the tax cuts on the higher earners expire would remove the issue of the deficit for the Republicans, as it would still be a big issue.

Shorter version: the Marx brothers (Karl and Groucho) aren’t going to do for us what the Koch brothers did for the Tea Party.

Historically what seems to happen though is that the government will increase taxes, but keep spending, or even increase spending. This makes Republicans very reluctant to agree to any tax increases.

No it doesn’t. It has nothing to do with worries over government spending. Republicans have historically been the biggest spenders. Their principles consist of winning votes and funnelling money to rich people.

Rest assured, not only do I think it would be very, very difficult, I’m not at all sure it’s even possible. But I literally don’t see ANY other path. (As for my view of the likelyfuture, though, let just say I’m glad I’m pushing 60…)

A vote of thanks to William for his thankless efforts to bring enlightenment to Arizona. But I agree with Steve @255 that taking over the Democratic Party is a plausible strategy, probably wiser on balance than trying to found and fund a third party, though there should be a lot more discussion. But of course there won’t be any discussion until it’s unmistakably clear that there’s widespread discontent with the Democratic Party from the left. That’s the point of the safeprotest (nice term, Platonist) vote for president. After all, you can still vote for local and state Democratic candidates.

A vote of thanks to William for his thankless efforts to bring enlightenment to Arizona.

Heartily seconded!

I don’t think there is much of a dilemma about whether to vote for Obama, unless you are a consequentialist. Speaking for myself, as I would not deliberately kill an innocent person in order to prevent a murderer from killing twenty innocents, so I will not, by voting for him, endorse Obama’s murders (and other crimes against human rights and the rule of law), solely in order to prevent Romney from murdering many more.

One might think there is no voting dilemma here even if you are a consequentialist: in that case you should vote for Obama. But that isn’t clear if you take into account the long-term consequences. There has been a trend in this country for the past thirty years or so in which both parties move steadily to the right, as the Democrats increasingly beg for corporate cash to counter the Republicans’ advantage in this area. This emboldens the GOP, who move further to the right, which means the Democrats’ corporate paymasters are in a position to extract more right-wing policies from them in exchange for their donations, and so on. The result is that working people are ignored by the Democrats, and the situation gets worse every election cycle. Unless this dynamic is stopped, it’s terrifying to think what this country will look like in twenty years. An enabling condition of the trend is the votes of working people and their fellow-travelers, who continue to vote Democratic because they are always the lesser evil, even though they become more evil with every election. The only chance of stopping the dynamic is for working people to punish Democrats for ignoring them by not voting for them. There are additional non-consequentialist reasons not to vote Democratic here as well, such as basic self-respect.

geo @ 267

I’d be more comfortable accepting thanks if I’d accomplished anything, and I probably should say also that I’d still be trying if it weren’t for the fact that I’m a rotten politician, and I’m 68. It’s time for younger folks to have a bash, and for me to try something I’m better at, like the local radio show I’m helping some friends with. The idea is to try to broaden the base of opinion in the state, to make it easier for Democrats to run on something like a decent agenda. And yes, although I’m gagging on Obama, I’m still going to vote for down-ticket Democrats. (Whatever their failings in my estimation, none of those failings measure up –or down — to those of our Warlord and Banker-In-Chief.)

If there really were widespread discontent with the Democratic Party from the Left, and if we had a Left as solidly-grounded, well-organized and numerous as the Left in the Thirties, then we might be able to make some headway in turning the party to better purposes. Unless and until we do, we’ll be doing the nattering, and the likes of Rahm Emanuel, Terry Mcauliffe and David Axelrod will be doing the deciding.

Obama opposed the Iraq War. He campaigned on leaving Iraq, and he ended the Iraq War. One would think that this might just enter into the moral calculus.

Obama didn’t end the Iraq War; he just turned it over to the contractors, on Bush’s timeline. We haven’t left Iraq.

But there is a competing story: Obama claimed to want to leave Iraq, but was planning on betraying his supporters.

That’s really asinine. We can be better than this to each other.

He was forced to leave by the Iraqis, however, and thus deserves no credit.

Let me be the first on this thread to say this explicitly and completely sincerely: no current President ever deserves any credit, whatsoever, for anything, ever. Full stop. No current President ever deserves accolades, praise, . Ever. For anything. At most, in response to a completely positive outcome, a passive-aggressive acknowledgement that ‘the right thing’ happened. For anything less than a completely positive outcome, any acknowledgement of the accomplishment should be paired with an acknowledgement of its insufficiency.

No one should praise or honor any current President until they have resigned or left office. The same rule holds for current Senators, Representatives, and office-holders of note, right down to county board and mayoral positions. It is a simple rule. It is what brings normalization of one’s agenda and continued success. Never celebrate. Never congratulate. Never compromise without gritted teeth and cold eyes.

Why? When you intimidate someone into doing something for you, and they do it, you don’t respond by praising them or honoring them, unless you’re both very cruel and very stupid. What you do is step back and stand down for a while, maintain watchfulness. At most, declare publicly that the right outcome happened — and be sure to mention expectations for the future.

And to be clear, any time a President or elected office-holder does anything you have demanded of them, it’s because you have managed to intimidate them into doing it. There is no other reason for them to do what you want them to do, instead of what others want them to do. (Occasionally the office-holder actually does want you to . In this case, they will welcome your intimidation. Forgive me for boring you with the obvious “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it” FDR quote that illustrates this principle — rarely is anyone in office so plainly honest.)

This is what I meant – the antipathy towards him is so profound that his opponents can’t give him any credit even for things that you’d think they would support.

Again. Nobody gets credit until they’ve left office. Credit, honors, and congratulations given midway through only serve to weaken their recipient and compromise the already faint amount of pressure at our disposal.

If you want to say something productive midway through the politician’s career, (1) articulate what your relevant expectations are, (2) identify opponents to that politician who are or will be working against those expectations most explicitly and fervently, and (3) articulate the damage they would do.

Always play a strong offense. Never celebrate at halftime.

Nobody “independent” on the sidelines watches a celebration–especially a lukewarm one–and feels inspired to join you or encourage you. At best they feel put off and vaguely bothered at the showmanship; at worst they feel inspired to crush you and wipe the smiles off your smug faces.

When you praise an outcome or a politician unconditionally, you get nothing, and they get nothing.

(This doesn’t apply if you’re getting nearly everything you could possibly want from that politician already, of course. The NRA and anti-abortion advocates issue lush praise for various elected officials specifically because they really are getting everything they want from those persons. Even given that, they usually wait until the last moments right before an election to mention their support, once the politician’s opponent is known — and even then, these groups tend to focus their message on the (1)(2)(3) I wrote out above.)

Salient’s 7:28 post nails it.

Bruce @270: Very powerful comment, and all true. Hard times now, and more to come.

Krugman, commenting today on the defeat in Wisconsin, wrote: “Still, my rule for myself is, never give up. All seemed lost politically in 2004; it wasn’t. Then a lot of people, including, I’m sorry to say, Obama, slacked off after 2008, believing that the other side would have to compromise. It’s never over, for good or bad. Keep on plugging.” Being almost as old as William T., I’m about to give up. But good for Krugman, and for Greenwald and Chomsky.

I recently read Jonathan Israel’s splendid history of the Enlightenment. The surrounding darkness was even worse then. I don’t know how they kept plugging. Glad they did, though.

If I had to make the choice, I would most probably have triggered the attack. It is one of many extreme situations in which I suppose I would be murderous. My luck is that in my average life I have been spared such situations. My virtue is that I never seek them out.

It is not that due & fair process has been violated given there was none applicable to the case.

In my view the “take over the Democratic party” approach is probably missing the point – ignoring the structural issues of party organization that likely make it impossible, what is needed is a constituency with a politics to the left of the party that can even try to do so; e.g., a revived labour movement (the typical liberal single issue campaign won’t do the job). But here’s the irony: as long as social movements prioritize not their political demands and strategies of imposing them on the rulers, but the election of politicians they imagine might be sympathetic to their demands, the movements will never achieve the degree of organization and political clarity that is an absolute precondition for moving the Democratic party anywhere. The ACP and the CIO unions may have moved the Democrats through the “popular front” – but first they were built as independent organizations with a clear political line to the left of the Democratic party.

So what I’m trying to say is: if you are serious about moving the Democratic party, you have to be serious about first building independently of it. This does not mean building a third (electoral) party – it does mean understanding elections as the secondary issue they really are.

And there’s no need to give up (although there’s nothing wrong with those having been in the struggle for a long time (semi-) retiring from it) – historical conditions can change awfully quickly.

@275: Now we’re playing the game where it doesn’t matter what Obama actually does. He “turned Iraq over to the contractors.” As opposed to, precisely, what? Would McCain have agreed to leave, ever? Bullshit. If McCain had won we’d be digging in even deeper in Iraq. If the Iraqis didn’t like it they’d have new leaders who did. And we would not be winding down in Afghanistan.

Nice “left on the Bush timetable” too. We can’t actually admit the notion that, maybe, that Obama actually means what he said and is extracting the US from a pointless war as quickly as possible. Why is it so hard for people here to admit that he’s actually done something right, and something clearly different from what his opponent would have done?

And then we have :

“And to be clear, any time a President or elected office-holder does anything you have demanded of them, it’s because you have managed to intimidate them into doing it. There is no other reason for them to do what you want them to do, instead of what others want them to do.”

I guess it isn’t possible that a politician could actually believe in something and want to accomplish it. Nope. They’re always against us and always have to be forced into things. They’re just puppets. That’s why Bush got us into Iraq – he was “forced to”, presumably, as opposed to it being something that he really wanted to do and worked to achieve. I find this as bleak as it is wrong,and this is a clear misreading of what FDR meant.

Marc @285: I guess it isn’t possible that a politician could actually believe in something and want to accomplish it.

The problem with applying this to Obama is that there were a great many things he professed to believe in — card-check elections for unions, a public option, transparent government with support for whistleblowers, limitations on executive power, including accountability for executive-branch wrongdoers, etc. — that he made no effort to accomplish. Logically, then, you have to look for a reason why he (or any similarly lying politician) does something other than his having once professed to believe in it and promised to do it.

#274 – “There’s only one “party”—the plutocratic party—and the Democrats and Republicans are two factions of that one party”

This is absolutely false. There is the Democratic Party, which is committed to a number of classical liberal propositions – free elections and equality before the law, most importantly. On the other side, there is the Republican Party, which is a proto-fascist organization committed to merging government, big business, and the church in a self-perpetuating regime of crony capitalism and permanent war.

You might prefer to have a social-democratic party to vote for. Well, you don’t, and there’s not much that you can do about it. That doesn’t make the liberals equivalent to the fascists.

Do you see anything currently existing (and not limited to a single issue or small range of issues) that might be developed into such an organization?

This is really the key question I think. At least if we interpret “organization” very broadly, I think a lot of people had hoped that the Occupy movement(s) could be or do something like this. But that seems to have petered out. Not that lots of people involved with Occupy aren’t still involved in all sorts of issues and campaigns, but that sense of a unified movement focused on the basic economic injustice that’s probably a defining feature of our society—that’s pretty much gone.

The more traditional labor movement is another obvious candidate, but here again I’d tend to be pessimistic. I think there’s a lot to the criticism that too large parts of the labor movement are too focused on electoral politics. But I think a lot of people active in the movement see it as a life or death situation (as in: crippled, hobbling but still alive vs. totally dead). And it’s not obvious that they’re totally wrong.

And…? Grounds for optimism, anyone?

Bloix @289: Bruce did not say that the Democrats and Republicans are identical, but that they’re both plutocratic, ie, agree on subordinating government and society to business. You’re right that the Republican faction of the Plutocracy Party is worse, but this doesn’t touch Bruce’s point.

“Now we’re playing the game…”

With the confession that what I’m about to say was pre-emptively contradicted by the gameful thing I said about thirty seconds ago… I don’t want to play a game anymore.

I’m not thinking of sparring with you–we’d both just say the same things we said in 2009, or whenever–and at this point I’m not interested in writing what I say carefully enough to evade all possible missteps you can rhetorically exploit in counter-maneuver. Take advantage of that to your heart’s content.

“…where it doesn’t matter what Obama actually does.”

Well, I certainly don’t mean to suggest we ignore what Obama actually does. Attentiveness is important.

At the moment, I’m not going to praise Obama for doing what he has done. That’s true even for times when he made a choice I found preferable to other choices he could have made. I’m not going to commit to never ever praising; I might, whenever it seems strategically convenient for me or for whatever cause I’m trumpeting. Obama certainly doesn’t give a damn whether we praise him for his accomplishments; I’m not sure why you care. In these spar matches, you sound to me like a parent, admonishing some children for being ungrateful. Or at least, you give me the impression that I sound to you like an ungrateful child, pouting and stamping my feet. But we don’t need lessons, from you or anyone, about how to be decent grateful human beings.

We’re fellow victims of the rulers (and we’re also victims by proxy, in that we have a lot of sympathy for people elsewhere who are victims of the rulers). You feel relieved, and somewhat grateful, that we didn’t get the worse master of the two. I feel mostly hateful toward the rulers; some I hate more fervently than others, and a few just scare the living shit out of me, in a way matched only by a few of the Cohen brothers’ characters and the Joker that Heath Ledger played.

“Would McCain have agreed to leave, ever?”

A completely honest answer from me is, I don’t really know, because I’ve never understood what makes McCain tick. Also I still literally don’t understand what “leave Iraq” means — my commonsense definition of ‘leave’ is apparently not operational. But that doesn’t mean I dispute your take on it. So, let’s say I fully and confidently agree with you that the answer to your question is obviously: No, McCain would never have agreed to leave, ever. I can basically agree to that with complete sincerity and with goodwill. … What now? … What happens next? … Is the conversation done? … Now what do you want me to do?

Those questions are sincere, and not meant as rhetorical, and I have to admit I’d welcome and appreciate a long–form response that treats me decently enough to read all the way through. I guess they’re all asking the same thing in different ways, so maybe take your pick. My motive for asking this: at this point, I don’t like discussion frameworks that are severe impediments to expressing one’s emotions and interpretation. I think the way you talk about these things — which I’d summarize, perhaps unfairly, as a duality of the form “X or O: who’s better?” — is such an impediment. But maybe I’m missing something, maybe there’s some productive discussion to be had once I acquiesce. I’m at least willing to hear you out, about what I’m missing. That’d be well worth the price of admission.

“Nice “left on the Bush timetable” too.

Thanks! I picked out the font and everything. :)

“We can’t actually admit the notion that, maybe, that Obama actually means what he said and is extracting the US from a pointless war as quickly as possible.”

Okay. I admit that Obama means what he said, and is extracting the US from a pointless war as quickly as possible. Again… What now?

“Why is it so hard for people here to admit that he’s actually done something right, and something clearly different from what his opponent would have done?”

Why does it matter to you if we do these things or not? Why does our behavior frustrate you? What alternative behavior do you expect from us, and is that expectation a reasonable one to reinforce with derision?

Sometimes it’s reasonable to try to enforce expectations like that, to push people. I don’t mean to oppose that kind of thing categorically.

“I guess it isn’t possible that a politician could actually believe in something and want to accomplish it.”

I assume you mean, something that’s exactly, or mostly, what we’ve wanted. If they do want to accomplish that kind of thing, then they should welcome some social pressure pushing for them to accomplish it.

They’re always against us and always have to be forced into things. They’re just puppets.

No, I really do agree with you that they’re humans who are embedded in an atmosphere almost entirely beyond their control, with severely . So are you and I. Bitching on the Internet is basically all the control I have. That probably amounts to zip zilch, but at least voicing my judgments makes me feel better, and voicing my judgments well and cleverly can make others who agree with me feel a little better, hearing it said.

P.S. The very notion of deserving praise forms an internal contradiction in my mind. How can someone deserve praise? Praise should never be obligatory. I guess “saying so-and-so deserves our praise for X” is a rhetorical way to praise that person for X. I just don’t accept a formulation of that kind of statement in which ‘not praising someone’ is a form of wrongdoing. (More precisely, praise between adults should never be obligatory. I think it’s sometimes reasonable to demand kids show obligatory gratitude/deference/respect/etc even when they don’t “feel” it, because it helps them learn to be more attentive/sympathetic/aware of the people around them/etc.)

I really should just keep my head down, not least as a UK resident who therefore just gets to feel “Oh God we’re doomed” without having to cope with the question of how one then responds to the situation in the voting booth with a shred of integrity and dignity. But I just wanted to say how much I appreciate salient’s comments, simply for their humanity and realism, however much I disagree with, or feel uncomfortable about, some of their implications or overtones.

js @199
Re Russia: For one thing, Romney opposes the START treaty. (A two-second google of “romney start treaty” suffices to show that.)

Though I have to admit that the argument made by chris in the previous comment, that its either Obama or revolution, is both novel and amazing.

Strictly speaking, it’s Obama or Romney or revolution, I just assumed anyone who thinks Obama is too right-wing would have no use for Romney either.

But I don’t see why that would be either novel or surprising.

The misinformation about Iraq in the comments above is almost unbelievable. The withdrawal from Iraq was programmed at around the same time that Petraeus did his surge. It was in the newspapers. Even McCain agreed to the pullout date, as I recall. Obama could campaign to withdraw, because it was going to happen ANYWAY. Doesn’t anybody writing the comments above read the goddamn newspapers? Obama was and is a solid member of the foreign policy establishment.

@Kyle#288 — And no, Obama did not fail to negotiate. He didn’t get a deal with the new Iraqi government because there was NO deal to be had. This is because George W. Bush, by making Iraq into a democracy, therefore turned it over to the 70% Shi’ite majority, whose best friends and blood brothers are Iran and no others, and there may be no stopping it from turning it into a theocracy. And THAT is why Petraeus’ top advisor said in 2007 that the invasion was “The biggest fucking mistake in U.S. foreign policy history.” However, we may see the Kurdish north break away, and become solid U.S. allies.

#304 “then the situation is the reverse.”

The situations are NOT reverses. The income tax burden is not the reverse of the total tax burden.

The Bush tax cuts don’t have a valid logic that can be allowed to ignore the total tax burden. There are at least two good reasons for this. The first reason is that things have to be in the same category, and “part of taxation” and “whole of taxation” are logically different.

And the second reason why the Bush tax cuts don’t have a valid logic that can ignore the total tax burden, is because the Bush tax cuts failed economically, they did not achieve what they were meant to achieve, and so they did not help the middle incomes to pay their increased portion of the total tax burden.

In fact this is an easy example of what is going on economically in the U.S. I will describe it another way, it is easy and quite damning.

Let’s acknowledge the fact that we’ve just been in a 30-year stretch of BOTH payroll-tax and income-tax hikes, but ONLY income-tax cuts. This has immediate class consequences, in fact it further inculcates these classes upon the social tissue. Any shift of the total burden, to payrollers, from incomers, allows incomers to keep more money in any calendar year. Rename that: rich people gain liquidity. The next thing that happens is that they therefore can increase the buying of assets. Now, supply-side economics said that this would give greater economic growth than before. But it did not. It therefore became possible To Own more of the world without providing extra additional economic growth or productivity growth for it.

Not the only way it happens of course.

Now notice something else. This swindle, this shift in resources, would occur REGARDLESS of whether government were growing or shrinking. A shift in tax burden is a simple thing, with its own consequences. But the rhetoric is about something else –it is all about government growth and whom it is spent on. The sentiments are, “I’m not paying for bigger and bigger government, and I’m not paying for stuff I don’t need.”

Now, the first one of these is just ignorance. The current deficits are both logically well-founded and, under current law, they are temporary. The government is projected to go back to primary balance in around ten years after the recession ends. After that time, a stable debt is manageable, (indeed the Treasuries will be necessary for interbanking collateral), and our only real public problem is the growth in private medical spending, which determines the cost of public medicine, and which is handled by policies of another realm.

But the second one of these, the stuff about “who is benefitting from government spending — my taxes shouldn’t go to anything but defense, courts, jails, etc.” is most interesting, coming from an income-tax payer. Because before this, all along the way, the trust fund, i.e. the excess from the payroll tax hikes, was used to help cover the general budget, including those items. So the payrollers already had a burden shifted onto them, before. The Bush tax cuts are the SECOND swindle in this department.

Bloix, 289: There is the Democratic Party, which is committed to a number of classical liberal propositions – free elections and equality before the law, most importantly.

Are they really committed, is this the right word? What about their refusal to prosecute torturers? The indefinite detentions bill last year? The kill list? And, some years ago, I don’t remember them demanding that Ralph Nader is allowed to participate in presidential debates; in fact, I got the impression that they used dirty tricks to suppress his campaign.

The situations are NOT reverses. The income tax burden is not the reverse of the total tax burden.

According to the articles, they are, in that the affluent pay a greater share of the income taxes. But they pay a lesser share of taxes with things like payroll taxes added in (at least according to the articles).

The Bush tax cuts don’t have a valid logic that can be allowed to ignore the total tax burden. There are at least two good reasons for this. The first reason is that things have to be in the same category, and “part of taxation” and “whole of taxation” are logically different.

And the second reason why the Bush tax cuts don’t have a valid logic that can ignore the total tax burden, is because the Bush tax cuts failed economically, they did not achieve what they were meant to achieve, and so they did not help the middle incomes to pay their increased portion of the total tax burden.

Yes I agree here.

In fact this is an easy example of what is going on economically in the U.S. I will describe it another way, it is easy and quite damning.

Let’s acknowledge the fact that we’ve just been in a 30-year stretch of BOTH payroll-tax and income-tax hikes, but ONLY income-tax cuts. This has immediate class consequences, in fact it further inculcates these classes upon the social tissue. Any shift of the total burden, to payrollers, from incomers, allows incomers to keep more money in any calendar year. Rename that: rich people gain liquidity. The next thing that happens is that they therefore can increase the buying of assets. Now, supply-side economics said that this would give greater economic growth than before. But it did not. It therefore became possible To Own more of the world without providing extra additional economic growth or productivity growth for it.

In other words, people are able to purchase more when allowed to keep more of their money. Being able to buy more isn’t really a bad thing, the problem is when it cuts revenue the government needs without corresponding reductions in spending. Two quick things though: Remember that supply-side economics is about investment, not demand. It doesn’t argue that the rich will spend more, but that businesses and the affluent will invest more. Also, we don’t have fixed classes in America, just different income and wealth brackets, which different people move into and out of constantly.

#304 ” the Kurds who won a majority (69%) in the 2010 elections.

Please give a link to this result.

You know what, I made a mistake here. The Kurds didn’t win 69%, but three of the main political blocs consisting of Sunni, Shiite, and Kurds, won a majority of the vote.

Kyle, the Kurds are less than 1/4 of Iraqs population. If they won 69% of the vote it mustn’t have been a particularly large turnout.
If Iraq has been turned into a client state of Iran, and lets not get carried away, then that is Bush’s fault.
As far as I’m aware the SOFA was agreed under Bush

http://www.acq.osd.mil/log/PS/p_vault/SE_SOFA.pdf

Yes, as I wrote, I had made a mistake there. Kurds alone did not get 69% of the vote. I would disagree Iraq having a leadership that is sided with Iran as being Bush’s fault, or solely Bush’s fault anyway. The first SOFA was agreed under Bush, but it was supposed to be renegotiated, which fell to the Obama administration.

What does this even mean?

“considering Iraq was salvageable and Vietnam was a far bigger foreign policy mistake then Iraq ever was or could be.”

Iraq isn’t/wasn’t doomed to chaos, it was salvageable. But also, how can one call Iraq the greatest foreign policy mistake in American history when Iraq did not entail anywhere near the number of lives lost and soldiers wounded that the Vietnam War did? (the U.S. lost about 58,000 in Vietnam in KIAs alone). Also, considering that the Congress at the time cut the funding to South Vietnam which caused it to fall to the North, that I think was a HUGE foreign policy blunder.

This isn’t to say invading Iraq was a good idea, but I just mean I am skeptical about calling it “the” biggest mistake.

“You know what, I made a mistake here. The Kurds didn’t win 69%….”

You call that a mistake?? Are you a former half-term governor of Alaska?

Remember you can tell how big a mistake a war is, only by how many Americans it kills.

More seriously, I was talking with some 20 something earlier today about how ancient people didn’t really distinguish between myth and history, and we’d like to judge, but that isn’t really any different than most modern people’s understanding of the past. Kyle Blank is performing a tour de force of folk history: the events are all there, but none of the facts.

It just can’t be anything else for you.

Plume in #56 – Isn’t it about time we stop believing in the myth of our innocence and righteousness?

It’s interesting. I’ve always assumed that stripped of our myths of being the good guy, we become much more mercenary. Once we realize and accept that our lifestyle has and still requires the blood of others, it’s far easier to dismiss those do-gooders who somehow believe that peace is possible without essentially destroying ourselves.

But then, I’m cynical that way. I’d rather take advantage of people’s myths of goodness to force them, however unwillingly, towards a better course of action.

Tom, what is wrong with retaliation? We could go the Israeli route and wait for a daily stream of terrorist attacks to come from safe havens that we cannot touch, or we can make clear that terrorism will lead to the arrest of members of an organization we can arrest, and the use of military force against those who avoid the long arm of the law. Anyone thinking of waging jihad is probably thinking twice right now, and I don’t see how that is a bad thing.

A return to 1880s levels of labor conflict seems likely.

so, widespread domestic terrorism ? riots ?

Given the current state of US politics, anyone elected President will become a war criminal if s/he isn’t already.

While I respect the notion that one should avoid voting for war criminals (and future war criminals) on principle, the notion that “keeping one’s hands clean” in this way will make things change for the better is ludicrous. If one sees ones vote deontologically or as a matter of virtue ethics, by all means refuse to vote for Obama. But any left(ish) consequentialist in a battleground state who fails to vote for Obama is crazy (in non-competitive states, everyone should vote his/her conscience…this is the silver lining of the electoral college).

This year, there isn’t even a progressive candidate like Nader in 2000 who’s getting enough publicity so that protest votes will be noticed. Nor should we forget the effect of people noticing the importance of Nader’s vote in 2000: fairly or not, Nader was held responsible for Bush’s election. Far from forming the basis of a left electoral success in the future, Nader’s relative success became a mark _against_ the left and contributed to its further electoral marginalization (and I say this as someone who worked hard for Nader in 2000).

Voting for the presidential lesser evil in swing states is important, if only to play defense against the ratchet effect. But what you do for those ten seconds in the voting booth in November ought not to be the sum total (or even a very important part) of your political involvement.

Americans on the left (and even U.S. liberals who have their heads screwed on straight) need to focus on non-electoral forms of politics.

Ben @326: Americans on the left (and even U.S. liberals who have their heads screwed on straight) need to focus on non-electoral forms of politics

Couldn’t agree more. And thanks for working for Nader in 2000.

Excellent piece, with one objection: Voting is a essentially political act, not a moral one. There is effectively zero chance that voting will have an outcome in the real world. Behavior that has no effect in the world cannot be assessed by moral criteria.

Of course morals and values inform our politics, and everything is related. And things fall apart. But it is not helpful to simply equate voting with moral decision-making. Participating in a democracy — which involves tactical and strategic choices about how to spend our time, energy, money, and integrity — should not be primarily or significantly understood as “moral choices”.

When confronting war criminals and a criminal system, to say that VOTING is a moral act vastly underestimates and simplifies the moral obligations of a decent person. Rather, we think in political terms: how can we challenge, change, modify, resist this system. Voting in and of itself is pretty trivial.

Niall, our capacity for retaliation is infinitely superior to al-Queda, so long as they don’t get nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, and probably even then.

This explains the large, glowing crater where Hanoi used to be, and the existence of the Republic of VietNam. Oh, wait …

Data @ 327, have you actually not noticed who is trying to keep voters from voting?

Seriously?

If liberals stay away from the polls this November, will the GOP feel one bit of shame at winning through voter disillusionment?

Watson Ladd #330: “and sadly we’ve already given up on that goal.”

When did that happen?

On my response above, I mis-typed the italics code, I meant it to look like this:

Whoo boy, Kyle produced a lot of material in his first comment. One thing I dont think anyone has commented on so far is this:

Umm the Federal Government has decided to fund family planning and preventative healthcare for low income families. Part of how it does this is through PP. Eliminating Federal funding basically says you don’t care about providing these services to those on low incomes. It will also probably lead to an increase in abortions which is something I hear Repubs don’t want. Evil and Stupid, its a twofer for Mittens.

I am not against funding of Planned Parenthood outright, but I was skeptical, which was why I asked the question. I do support having the option of abortion available to women. I understand the argument that it provides low-cost healthcare services for women, but on the other hand, the NRA provides firearms training and instruction as well, but it relies solely on private donations.

One other thing about the South Vietnamese government I wanted to make but, yes it had a reputation for cronyism and corruption, but the alternative to it was a lot worse. Also, no government is perfect, including our own. The South Korean government wasn’t a model government either during the Korean War. Had it been supported, South Vietnam probably would have developed a much better government. Chile and Taiwan were initially dictatorships as well when they began developing into prosperous free-market-based societies. Today they are liberal democracies.

Mr. Blank,
Strongly suggest you read up on the concept of the sunk cost fallacy.

Cranky

If the enterprise is hopeless, then yes, but I do not believe that South Vietnam was a hopeless cause.

= = = mattski @ 9:52: “Kyle, we intervened in Vietnam to PREVENT a democratic outcome, not to promote one.” = = =

Once one reads the history of US involvement in French Indochina in 1943-1945 and digs up the policy recommendations of the OSS wrt the Nationalists in 1946 the Kyle Blank/hard right wing line of argument becomes not only untenable but grossly immoral.

Cranky

I am not against funding of Planned Parenthood outright, but I was skeptical, which was why I asked the question. I do support having the option of abortion available to women. I understand the argument that it provides low-cost healthcare services for women, but on the other hand, the NRA provides firearms training and instruction as well, but it relies solely on private donations.

1. You do know that Federal funding isn’t going to provide abortion right? So why drag mention it?

2. Providing a social safety net (including healthcare) for its citizens is a key job of government. Healthcare provision is far more important than firearms training (although I’m not opposed to provision of firearms training by the Govt if they’re going to let pretty much anybody run around with a gun).

Lee A. Arnold: Biden is on record as advocating handing Afghanistan back to the Taliban. 2014 marks the end of our substantial presence. Al-Queda may be able to operate with impunity in Yemen, and the desire to intervene more effectively is between zero and negative. Despite the deaths of much of the senior leadership al-Queda’s operational capacity is not gone: homemade PETN is not an easy thing to do. The recent trials show al-Queda is alive: battered, sans much state support, but alive.

Long term Iraq is likely to be a much more stable success then Afghanistan. The Afghani leadership has no faith in its ability to hold down the fort without major American aid, which is unlikely to be forthcoming.

The assumption underlying the Afghan war was that when denied state sponsorship al-Queda would be easy to hunt down and destroy. That proved not to be the case. Instead al-Queda has moved to places where the state neglects governing: the tribal areas of Pakistan, north Yemen, possibly Somalia. Intervening to destroy al-Queda means strengthening fairly nasty governments, sometimes ones (like Pakistan’s) that sponsor terrorist groups themselves. The prospect of further direct US intervention is dead.

js: Care to point out the mistake? MAD and the general idea of disproportionate retribution makes things go better sometimes are fairly standard results in game theory.

I’m skeptical of positions on the ethics of the air strikes in Yemen and Pakistan given how little information we have about them. Obviously, if one believes that any air strikes which will foreseeably cause civilian casualties are unethical, then the information available is sufficient. But application of moderate forms of the principle of proportionality would require, for an evaluation of the overall campaigns, more information.

Regarding Romney, it’s true that he would be closer politically to the far right than Obama; but to some extent the far right takes its cues from GOP elites in power. So while Romney would be more beholden to the far right, he would also have more ability to shape the opinion and policy preferences of the far right.

Plus for what it’s worth , look up Patrick Cockburn on the surge . It’s a myth that the surge is the main reason for the lull in violence in Iraq. Ps the Kurds winning 70% in an Iraqi election!!? I mean dude what exactly is your source of information , Glenn beck? Everyone makes mistakes but that’s such an enormous one that it kinda suggests you havent the first notion what your talking about.

Kyle, how many dead students does it take before the US client regimes turn bad? Would you defend Franco? How about the rise of the far right in Germany against a thoroughly Stalinized KPD. Today, do you think Golden Dawn is someone we can work with? The choice is clear: fascism or communism. The imagination of an expansionist USSR is ridiculous: China fell against the wishes of the Commintern, and Korea was supported by Mao and not Stalin. Furthermore, any discussion of Southeast Asia must include the US-backed Pol Pot regime, and the turning of the plain of jars into a minefield. And all for what? So long as the US had nuclear weapons core NATO countries were safe, and the eventual loss of South Vietnam brought about no dominos.

Andrew, the far right doesn’t trust Romney, or at least the NYTimes doesn’t think so. So any effort to go against them will be viewed as confirmation that he was never a real republican.

Also two other things:

1) Fascism isn’t the far-right, it’s a variation of the far left. You will find racist movements on the far-right as well, but fascism itself is a variant of the extreme left

2) When you say that China fell against the wishes of the Comintern, what are you referring to? The Comintern was dissolved in 1943, before China became communist, unless I am missing something

K. Blank: what you say about Chile and about fascism is really not worth responding to, imo. But I will say that the geopolitical significance of Chile was marginal. So, come to that, was the geopolitical significance of Vietnam.

“the key jobs of government are to promote rule of law, protection of private property, regulation, and so forth”

Under which of these “key jobs of government” did the installation of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile fall? Rule of law? Regulation? Oh I guess it’s the protection of private property aka corporate rule. Isn’t it always gratifying to hear the wing-nut libertarians publicly come out in support of dictatorship.

(Just poking in to see what’s going on. Won’t stay around.)

Under which of these “key jobs of government” did the installation of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile fall? Rule of law? Regulation? Oh I guess it’s the protection of private property aka corporate rule. Isn’t it always gratifying to hear the wing-nut libertarians publicly come out in support of dictatorship.

The world isn’t always black-and-white, good or evil, there’s oftentimes a lot of shades of grey. The alternative to Pinochet was likely a major civil war breaking out in Chile and a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship taking over. Sometimes the only alternative “good” is just a lesser evil, i.e. a dictator friendly to America as opposed to a dictator friendly to the Soviets or Islamic extremism. The other alternative is to do what we’ve been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is unrealistic. Chile today is a prosperous liberal democracy and the most prosperous nation in Latin America. Chiang Kai-Shek was a dictator, but Taiwan eventually became a liberal democracy. Had he been able to hold onto China, China itself might today be a liberal democracy. Imagine what a difference that would have made in the Cold War and history overall.

Um, is there a meme for America related to ‘Godwin’s Law’ about the Vietnam conflict? If not, I not so humbly suggest an “El Cajon corollary,” which states that all battles about the US’s international ethics, especially concerning military engagement, are eventually fought in Vietnam?

Kyle Blank #361 — Please give a link showing the place or (perhaps a direct quote) where Hayek pointed out how far to the left fascist systems were.

Watson Ladd #348 — How does any of that prove, or even give a real indication, that the U.S. has “given up on that goal” (#331)?

As for fascism, pointing out that it is of the left is not some “pop” history view on the right invented by Jonah Goldberg or anything, it’s something that’s been known for many years, just not to the general public so much. …[blah blah blah]… But by our modern concepts of left and right, fascism resides on the left.

Well that’s a hot mess.

A tip for poor departed Kyle: Liberal/Anti-liberal is not the same as Left/Right.

I would sooner write in “The Cockroach That Scurried Under My Floorboards Earlier Today” than vote for Obombus or Robmey.

After this election season, with one last parting shot against the establishment candidates, I am done with politics forever. Harry Browne was right. ‘Indirect Alternatives’ are a complete waste of time. It’s time to sit back and laugh as this shit show falls off a cliff into the oblivion it so richly deserves.